The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  “Whoa, Brannock,” said MacInroy, stepping in between them. “It’s not her, now. In fact, I’d say her Gazette is the most honest of all the papers. Better to tell a tall tale so outrageous that nobody but a fool would believe it, than a lie clever enough to cross the ocean before the truth has finished tying its shoes.”

  “Uh, thanks,” said Joy, though she wasn’t thrilled with that defense. “But I was surprised they were calling you foreign. I thought you were all Kallisians.”

  “We were all born in this country,” said Chief Gallach. “But our parents or our grandparents came over from the Vannin Isles, and a lot of us joined the City Guard—turned into something of a family tradition, and now the papers are trying to make it sound like some sort of takeover, like it’s only Vannish people allowed, which simply isn’t so.”

  “Oh, so you’re Vannish. Ethnically, I mean,” said Joy, but something from earlier nagged at her. “Wait, didn’t you say you were something else, earlier? Sley-something?”

  Brannock started to say something, but a gesture from the chief silenced him. All the guardsmen kept their eyes on Chief Gallach and his stony expression. Had she said something wrong? Been unintentionally insulting, like the Knittelfeld citizens complimenting her on her Kallish? She wondered if she should apologize, but the chief spoke first.

  “Sleywie Anden,” he said. At least, that was as best as she could make out. She’d studied enough languages to recognize when she heard something that followed a different set of phonetic rules, to the point where her brain just wasn’t geared to hear it properly. She’d seen it when her Kallish-speaking friends tried to get her to teach them Xiaish words and phrases. They always mangled the tones.

  “Sleywie Anden,” Joy repeated, though she was certain she’d botched the pronunciation somehow. She fished her notebook out of her purse. “Could you spell that for me? I’m sure I’ll get it wrong otherwise.”

  “I’m afraid I must decline,” said the Chief. “Those words describe our faith, and it’s part of our beliefs to avoid public declarations of faith. True piety is a matter between the individual, the church, and God. And it doesn’t have anything to do with your ghost story, does it?”

  “Oh! Well, no,” said Joy. “I was just asking for myself, really. Linguistics are an interest of mine, and I hadn’t heard that language before. I don’t want to disrespect your religion or anything.”

  “The Journal should follow your example, Miss,” said MacInroy.

  “Call me Joy,” she said, “And, if you don’t mind, I really could use the pier number where I can find the Joanne Spaulding. I promise I’ll be careful.”

  This earned her some wary looks, but, after a couple more rounds of back-and-forth, she managed to wheedle them into revealing that the Joanne Spaulding was a large paddle-wheel steamship with a red hull, berthed by Pier 25. They also handed her a “safety whistle” on a lanyard, which she should use to signal them if she got into trouble. Joy thanked them and tucked it into her purse as she readied to go, but MacInroy wanted her to wait a second while he pulled his chief aside and had a hushed conversation with him.

  Joy didn’t catch any of it until the end, when the chief nodded and said, "Yeah--that's not a bad idea."

  "What's not a bad idea?" said Joy, hoping this wasn’t something else that would get in her way, like an official escort.

  Chief Gallach produced a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal a pen-and-ink sketch of a girl with straight black hair and almond-shaped eyes. "We've been looking for a runaway. Name's Sue May. She was last seen in this area about three nights ago. Her family's real worried, and, you know, a young girl like that in a place like this—it'd be real easy for her to get mixed up with a bad crowd. Like, maybe the type that wouldn't let her get away so easy."

  Joy examined the picture, wondering at what would make this girl run away from her family. "How old is she?"

  "About fifteen, we think. Anyway, we've been scouring the docks with no luck, but maybe you might do better. The uniform makes us stick out. It could be spooking her into hiding when we come around.”

  “I could see that,” said Joy. All that jet-black leather did make for a rather frightening presence. “Do you really need all that armor? Aren’t you roasting in there?”

  “More like steam-cooking, Miss Joy, like one your Xia dumplings,” said MacInroy. “Except we don’t smell so nice, as my wife would tell you. Can’t get so much as a peck on the cheek from her until my leathers are in the basement. But it’s regulations. Part of the job.”

  MacInroy was married? So young. And she’d thought that he’d been acting a bit flirty… well, whatever. She wasn’t looking to start a relationship either. “Well, every job has it downsides. I’d be happy to help you look for this girl. I can ask around while—”

  Joy tried to take the picture, but found that the Chief wouldn’t let go of it. “This is our last copy,” he said. “Handed out the rest of them already.”

  “Oh, I see,” she said, though that seemed like poor planning on the Guards’ part. And wouldn’t it make more sense to post these fliers up where everyone could see them, rather than handing them to individuals?

  Well, whatever. Joy had her own problems to worry about. She settled for an intent examination of the artist’s sketch, trying to burn the image into her brain. “I’ll just keep an eye out for lost girls in addition to comic strip ghosts.”

  “Still say you’re wasting your time,” said Brannock. “You won’t get so much as a peep out of anyone here. There’s no-one in the world more superstitious than sailors, and it bleeds over into all the dock-men like you wouldn’t believe. Add that so many of them are Xia, and that only triples the effect. No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Joy, making sure not to let her smile waver. Brannock had tossed off his perfunctory “no offense” in a manner that made it clear that it would be ridiculous for her to actually take offense. While he wasn’t exactly wrong about a lot of the Xia dockmen being superstitious, she found it richly ironic that he could be so cavalier about other people’s beliefs, while he flew off the handle at any perceived insult to his precious Sleywie Whatever.

  “Well, good luck with your story, Miss Joy,” said MacInroy. “And, if you could, it’d be great if you could mention how helpful the City Guard were to you. We could use some good press somewhere.”

  “I’ll try to fit it in,” said Joy, “But I’m not sure if it’ll help much. If it’s printed in the Gazette, nobody will believe it.”

  That earned her some chuckles as she headed off to Pier 25. Finally! That had been a lot of effort for a tiny bit of information. All she’d needed was the pier number for the Joanne Spaulding, and maybe some solid information about exactly what had happened here three nights ago. The pier number was all she’d gotten, and that was only after several minutes of haggling, trying to convince them that she could handle herself like an adult.

  And that was only after she’d convinced them she wasn’t from a serious paper, trying to “smear” them. Actually, the more she thought about that, the more troublesome it became. Even if it was true that the Journal and Chronicle were libeling the Guard, that didn’t excuse the Guard’s initial behavior. They shouldn’t be using their authority to try to intimidate reporters just because they didn’t like their coverage. And it wasn’t like these were just low-level Guardsmen acting on their own—Chief Gallach had been with them.

  Joy wondered exactly what the major papers had been printing about the Guard. Something about foreign Vannish cultists? That was odd. From looking at them, she didn’t see any obvious physical markers to separate them from ethnic Kallisians, although MacInroy had a reddish tinge to his hair, which you didn’t see very often. Maybe they could tell the difference? But Joy didn’t expect that any of the Vannish guardsmen would feel the need to walk around Knittelfeld with a sign explaining how they were born in Kallistrate.

  She supposed it must be their religion that set them apart. Joy ha
d never heard of the Sleywie Anden, but she knew very little about the cultures of the Dagan Sea. It was such a remote area—she hadn’t even realized that so many immigrants from that region had made it to the Kallis Coast.

  Could that be the source of the hysteria? Joy remembered Brannock’s accusation about journalists—that their claim to objectivity was a self-delusion that made them blind to their own biases. Well, she’d seen that firsthand with Flynn, so maybe the Journal really was smearing the City Guard in their coverage. And why should she care if the Guard was retaliating against the major Dodona papers? Those papers had done nothing to defend her when she’d needed it. Why should she stick her neck out for them? They could take care of themselves. She already had more than enough to deal with just making rent. And it was time to get on that.

  Joy picked up her stride and headed off for Pier 25, heels clicking across the pavement, hoping to finally find something she could use to build a decent story.

  Chapter 28

  The Triad Ship

  Joy had barely walked for a minute before she found Pier 25 and the Joanne Spaulding, but both were overshadowed by the titanic creature that attended them: a huge, steam-powered monstrosity rearranging stacks of cargo along the docks like a giant infant playing with blocks: a crane golem. Kallistrate had spent decades developing steam golem technology in secret, but as the project neared completion, they’d needed a way to test their technology in the real world, and to build huge factories capable of mass-producing the gigantic war machines without alerting the Albion Empire what they were up to. Just as the technology for the steam golems’ feet had been adapted to create the Iron Crawlers, the tech for the arms had been used to create crane golems.

  Of course, they hadn’t been called that when they’d first come out. They’d been given some boring moniker, like claw-arm cranes or something. But everyone called them crane golems now. Compared to the later military steam golems, which looked roughly like knights in plate armor, the crane golem cut a bizarre figure. Instead of a broad, armored prow of a chest, the crane golem had a narrow one-person cab encased in planes of glass, with the bulky, powerful shoulder mechanism protruding out behind, seemingly disembodied as it all got perched atop a skeletal steel pylon that was mostly empty space, a crisscrossing triangular framework stretching down to the ground, next to the steam engine that ran everything, sending all power up to the shoulders through a heavy central drive shaft.

  The crane golems’ arms were unnaturally long—almost spindly, but the three-fingered claws at their ends were thick steel that radiated power and strength. Joy watched the golem work, pivoting in place and picking at the various cargo containers strewn about the docks. She found something about it deeply unsettling. Maybe it was the way the arms were bent, with their elbows pointed up to the sky. It didn’t look human. It was like a cross between an ape and a praying mantis, or some kind of spider. The glass panes of the cab windows definitely lent it a bug-eye sort of feel.

  Wait a minute, hadn’t Madame Zenovia mentioned something like that; a spider-monster sticking its head and arms through a dimensional portal? As hallucinations went, that wasn’t too far from reality. Joy watched it reach for the deck of the Joanne Spaulding. The claws inched down in fits and starts, pausing when a cry rang out and sailors swarmed on the ship’s back, bearing ropes and hooks that they threaded through the massive steel fingers, tugging and yanking to make sure everything was secure. Then came another cry, and the sailors scrambled back to whence they came.

  One sailor waved up at the golem cab, yelling something she couldn’t make out, and the spider arms began to rise, so carefully that Joy might have called it dainty, as the ropes all stretched taut, and all the barrels and crates left the steamship deck in one great mass, caught up in the web of a huge cargo net.

  The whole thing swayed back and forth as the crane golem swung it about to an empty space on the docks and began lower it down. Again the crane became hesitant as it neared the ground, as another mass of sailors converged on that spot, waving and shouting at the pilot. Joy saw him pulling the control sticks inside the cockpit as he safely deposited the cargo bundle on the docks, and the sailors disentangled the carry ropes from the claws.

  Well, that was something you didn’t see every day. Joy strolled over to see if any of the dock workers might have noticed anything odd three nights ago. But unfortunately, none of them had any time for her. They were heads-down in their work, and Joy overheard enough to gather that they were behind schedule. As soon as she got close they started barking about how she was in the way and needed to clear the area, and no amount of eyelash-batting would compensate for it.

  Joy wandered off to the very edge of the dock, where she was out of everyone’s way. Maybe if she hung around long enough, she could catch a brief interview with some of the workers when they went on break. She leaned up against a tall mooring post and took this chance to get a good look at the Joanne Spaulding. It was really a pretty ship, though it had seen better days. The hull was a rich red with a wide black stripe just below the first deck, trimmed with gold, though that trim had faded quite a bit.

  The ship’s name was up at the prow, faded red-and-gold letters in an ornate style. Joy wondered if the ship’s owner had intended to be patriotic, in addition to being an opera fan. Joy let her gaze trail aft, along the nice, elegant lines and a neat feminine curve where the deck of the ship flared outwards to cover the side-mounted paddle-wheels. The ship designer hadn’t covered the top half of the paddle-wheels entirely. There were some ornate cut-out sections on the sides that left the spokes of the wheel partially visible. She wondered if that was purely for aesthetics of if there was some practical reason for it. She wondered how it would look when the wheels started turning.

  Joy studied the paddle wheel, with its slats and spokes dipping into the water. Paddle-wheels always made her think of ladders. She’d always wanted to try climbing one—to swim up to it and ascend to the deck. It really looked like you could do it. The trickiest part was where the cowling formed a barrier between the wheel and the deck, but Joy bet she could squeeze through some of those ornamental cutouts on the outside and grab the railing. If only she was a kid again and could get away with climbing over everything like she used to. Combine that with a nice dip in the water, and it’d be the perfect break. Too bad she was a grown-up now.

  Well, even when she was a kid, she was too chicken to try something like that—not that she was frightened of the climb. It was getting yelled at for messing around with a dangerous machine where she wasn’t supposed to. Messing around in dangerous areas was one of the few places where she might try disobeying her parents.

  Joy still felt her cheeks burn with shame remembering the last time. She’d been fifteen, walking Hugh home from school, when she’d decided to check out the new rows of houses going up next to Perun Lake. She was supposed to be watching Hugh, but he was eight frickin’ years old already. She’d had a rough day, her homework load was light, and she wanted to blow off some steam—do something just for herself for once. Hugh could look after himself. She’d been able to do way more than that at his age. She’d told him that in no uncertain terms—just stay put and he’d be fine.

  And maybe she was a bit old to be climbing around like a monkey—certainly she was too old for the Caliburn courses, but she still had an itch to climb. Joy tried channeling her energy into gymnastics, but she couldn’t stand her school’s coach, Mrs. Sun, whose only method of instruction was a relentless drilling of poise and posture fundamentals, to be mastered before the student did so much as a forward roll. Oh, that and an unhealthy focus on her charges’ weight, which she checked weekly, in front of the entire team.

  Joy didn’t need that aggravation, so she quit, but kept doing a lot of the stretching and calisthenics on her own. She’d been at it for a month before the day she’d told Hugh to stay home while she went to explore the construction site at Perun Lake.

  She felt the results as she set herself betw
een two vertical beams that made the unfinished skeleton of one of the new houses and pressed out in both directions with her hands and feet, just like one of the wall-climbing sections of the Caliburn courses. This was easier than it had ever been, as she ascended to the second floor, finding cross beams to practice pull-overs, going up to the rafters and back down again, running along the apex ridge-beams, stopping to enjoy the view from the top, looking down over Perun Lake and the rest of Gortyn, feeling happier and freer than she’d had in years.

  It didn’t last long. A crash and a scream broke her reverie. Hugh hadn’t stayed put like she’d told him to. He’d shadowed her from a distance, and tried to keep following her into the unfinished houses, except somehow he’d fallen into the “moat” that surrounded the foundations, and he’d landed on a spike long enough to pierce his calf and come out the other side.

  Joy had to carry him on her back into the nearest neighborhood until she found someone who could call a doctor. Then her parents came, and she was in the worst trouble she’d ever been in her entire life. Her dad slapped her. That was the only time she could remember him doing that. Because of course this was all her fault, never mind Hugh was the one who didn’t stay home like he’d been told to. No, it was all her fault for setting a bad example. Hugh got waited on hand-and-foot while he recovered, and of course, most of his chores had fallen to her in the three months she’d been grounded.

  Some days that was easier than others. He really had hurt himself, and she felt bad about that. And sometimes she did feel guilty about what happened, before she remembered to be mad over the lack of sympathy she was getting. No-one understood why she’d been climbing around a construction site, no matter how she tried to explain it, because nobody bothered to really listen. She got zero credit for figuring out how to rescue her injured brother from the bottom of a six-foot ditch, by using a spare wooden plank as a ramp while carrying him on her back. No, anything that ever went wrong was her fault, and she just had to endure it. That’s how it always was.