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

by M. A. Wisniewski

"I... He was wearing foreign clothes. But not like those uniforms. I... I think I would know him if I saw him. I could try to remember..."

  "Don't worry too much. It's not critical. But if there is something else you remember, make sure to tell me, okay?"

  Hsiu Mei nodded, but Joy doubted there'd be much else to come out of this. Of course the Sleywie Anden wouldn't be wearing their guard uniforms while engaged in illegal human trafficking. But now there was a whole new element to this story. Jewel smuggling on top of everything else. One was a cover for the other. But why do that? The Sleywie trusted the Triads to transport illegal weapons and slave girls, but not these jewels. These, they had to hide.

  "Joy?"

  "What? Oh—"

  "I do not like that jewel in my house," said Mrs. Jakuba. "And I do not think you should have it either. It is bad luck, I think."

  "Well, I'm not going to keep it. It was being smuggled into the city, so it's probably stolen or something," she said. “I have to find out who it really belongs to, and of course I can’t turn it in to the City Guard.”

  The mention of the corrupt Guardsmen set Joy’s thoughts into a whirl. The law in Dodona was being enforced by criminal fanatics. How was she going to deal with this?

  She caught Tishka’s concerned look. Well, the last thing she wanted was to worry her friend and host.

  "Don’t worry, though,” said Joy. “I'm going to take care of it. I haven't worked out exactly how, but—"

  "You are going to be taking care of it?" Mrs. Jakuba put her hands on her hips and stared at her. "Whole City Guard versus you, and you will take care of them. Who are you now, the Red Specter?"

  "Tishka, you've heard of the Red Specter?"

  "Of course. Is in funny pages and also lantern show. Everybody knows this. You think old people are so out-of-touch with new things, eh?"

  "Oh, you're not old, Tishka—"

  "Ah, enough of this. No changing subject. You are not fighting whole City Guard department now. You are both filthy and tired, and have you eaten anything? You—" she said, pointing at Joy. "You go take shower, and hide that jewel somewhere, if you insist on keeping it. While you—" pointing at Hsiu Mei "—are getting hot bath, which I think has been a long time for you. Then we are going to sit down and have a proper dinner, and then we figure out what next on full stomachs, so we can think straight, yes?"

  Well, that did sound like a good idea, so Joy left Hsiu Mei in her care, after giving her a quick rundown on the situation, and a super-fast lesson on the Kallish words for "Yes," "No," "Please," "Thank you," and "What is this called?" which she hoped would be sufficient for the time it took to clean up and get back.

  Chapter 37

  I Do My Best Thinking In The Shower

  Absentmindedly, she rolled the weird blue gem between her fingers as she climbed back up to her apartment. Why hide contraband in contraband? Surely, that had to be more trouble than it was worth. Joy went back to the most obvious reason--they didn't trust their couriers enough to let them know. That was weird when you considered all the things the Sleywie had trusted the Triads with, but if you accepted that premise, the rest sort of made sense.

  Hide the gems in symbols of your faith on girls selected to be bride-captives. If anyone questions it, say it's part of your religion, which is obscure and hated, but still feared. Both the girls and the jewels would get a degree of “protection” from a creepy symbol sanctified by some bizarre ritual. Superstitious sailors would be wary of invoking a deep sea-god’s curse and stay away from them. The girls would unwittingly guard the gems twenty-four-seven. If anyone tried to tamper with the symbol, the girls would know about it. And the girls themselves would be guarded closely because their buyers would be expecting them to be delivered “intact,” because patriarchal scumbags had a thing for purity. So she supposed the plan did make sense, as long as the captive girls didn’t try to flee, like Hsiu Mei had. And even that had been a freak occurrence, with her guards panicking over a…

  …“Red Face Ghost.”

  Joy thought about that. And thought some more. Was she really going to consider this? It felt weird. Every other supposed miracle she’d been sent to investigate always turned out to be delusions and nonsense, though sometimes they seemed impressive at first. That statue really did weep, and it did have her wondering if she’d found a miracle for a few hours before the contrary evidence began to pile up, culminating in the leaky drainpipe.

  But she also remembered what she’d said to Shiori, about how there must be a third party acting against them, the Sleywie and the Triad. Everything she’d blurted out then still felt true, and obviously someone had been operating the crane golem when it dropped a herd of cattle on them. But could that golem pilot really have been the Red Specter?

  Joy was so busy mulling it over that she nearly walked right past her apartment door—which was easy enough to do, as it looked just like every other one on this floor—and then tried the wrong key twice before finally getting in. Stripping out of her clothes brought her back to the present. Her outfit really was ruined. Well, the skirt could maybe be salvaged. The rips there were on the smallish side, and maybe those stains would come out. Maybe. But her blouse? And her stockings? Total casualties. And that had been her really nice professional outfit. And it hadn’t been all that nice. But it was something she could put on and feel confident as a serious, professional newspaper reporter, even if she wasn’t one. How was she supposed to do her job now? And if she couldn’t do her job, she couldn’t get the money for new clothes. She needed a brand-new ensemble to afford a brand-new ensemble. Arrgh!

  Disgusted, she tossed her skirt on her bed and chucked her blouse in her trash can as she trudged off to her tiny bathroom for a shower. At least she had running water and a functioning shower head. Granted, it consisted of little more than a curtain and a drain in the stained tile floor—but it did work. And, given the weather and how overheated she was, she didn’t require the water to be much above lukewarm. She relaxed as the jets of water scoured her skin, washing away all the nasty she’d accumulated from her day of insanity.

  It was nice to have one thing go right for her today. It was a little thing, but she decided to be inspired by it, and turn her mind to the big puzzle at hand—the mystery of the Red Specter. As the rivulets of grime disappeared into the drain she engaged in a thought experiment. Her entire day had been spent collecting stories about a mythical hero called “The Red Specter.” The stories came from various sources: Garai, the comic strip, Madame Zenovia, Kanda Soler, Professor Gelfland, the dock workers, Chen the Triad goon, and even Hsiu Mei, indirectly.

  Taken individually, nothing she’d seen or heard was conclusive evidence of a real Red Specter. In each individual case, there was a more plausible explanation than a ghost hero in a gas mask. But all of it, together? What if she was letting her experiences reporting on fake nonsense bias her against the simpler explanation—that everyone had been telling the truth about a person who really existed and who they’d actually seen? Was that even possible? It didn’t seem so—if for no other reason than that some of the things she’d heard were mutually contradictory. Still, she felt like she was on to something.

  Suppose the Red Specter was a real person, one who went to great pains to keep his existence secret, but acted directly enough to make the creation of at least a few eyewitnesses inevitable. But those eyewitnesses only got brief glimpses under high-stress events. Wouldn’t that create the exact situation that she now found herself in? Sure, that was possible, but it didn’t exactly help her separate truth from fiction. Any of the wild stories she’d heard about him could be true, or none of them might be. That left her no better off than from when she’d started in Garai’s office this morning.

  So, forget everyone else’s account—what had she seen? She’d definitely seen an unknown person drop a herd of cows on her. That had definitely happened. And… when she and Hsiu Mei had been running from Yang and Chen in the cargo maze, she’d caught a flicker of
movement right before a huge stack of crates and junk fell over to slow up her pursuers. Why did that happen? You’d think the dock workers would know their jobs well enough to stack boxes so they didn’t tip over—not without some other force acting on it, and with such convenient timing to slow up Yang, and to make Chen… Wait—Chen had outright disappeared! He’d never turned up for the showdown with the Guards. He’d vanished, just like he’d said others in the Triad were vanishing, and then it had happened to him.

  Well, she couldn’t be sure he’d really vanished. He could have just decided enough was enough and deserted, though Joy had a hard time picturing the proud Albion veteran running from a fight, and at such an odd time. Maybe he could, if he realized what his conscience had been telling him….

  That was still assuming the “oppressive feeling” Chen had complained of actually was his conscience, and not what he’d claimed it to be: the gaze of the real Red Specter, always watching, always judging. Joy had felt it too, she realized—a feeling she’d been having all day, ever since… since when? Madame Zenovia’s, that was right. She’d been feeling weird ever since then. Had the Red Specter been tailing her this whole time?

  Aiyah—now she was getting paranoid. But that could be by design, part of the Specter’s plan. Get the Triad paranoid, so they’d start making mistakes… and then what? She still had no good information—was it one man, a Jagdkommando like Professor Gelfland said, or a whole unit of them? Was he/they working under government sanction or had he/they gone rogue? Were they the source of the myth or were they copying the myth? So many questions and no good answers.

  Well, put the Specter to the side for now. There were two evil factions at loggerheads in Dodona, and they both had reason to find her and shut her up permanently. But Joy was sure she’d lost them in the chaos of the stampede. There was no way they’d been followed home, she was sure of it. But could they track her down eventually? They knew her first name and what she looked like, and what else? What else had she let slip? Had she told them her middle or last name?

  Joy ran the day’s events back through her head. She couldn’t remember giving out her last name—but she’d told everyone that she’d freelanced for the Gazette! All they had to do was swing by the office and they’d know where she lived. They could be on their way right now. Either the Triads or the guard—or that vicious Rosewing woman. They could come busting down the door any minute. She had to warn Tishka and Hsiu-Mei. They had to run!

  Joy's stomach flipped over, and she shut off the water, grabbed a towel and began scrubbing herself dry in a near-panic before her logical self had a chance to reassert control. Logical Joy reminded her that since she was a freelancer, the Gazette didn’t have her tax information. She was expected to track and pay that herself. Did the Gazette even have her address? He never sent her paychecks by mail. She always had to pick them up in person and wait for him to write them out by hand. But Garai must have her address somewhere. She was sure of that, but could the bad guys find it?

  Joy remembered hearing his secretary kvetching about it. Garai’s system for written records consisted of grabbing whatever scrap of paper was handy and scribbling on it, resulting in multiple unrelated bits of information on a single sheet of paper, with bits of text going in different directions, often in different languages, all organized by date and shoved into a huge filing cabinet.

  It actually functioned better than you’d think, because Garai kept so much organized in his head. He could remember the date when he’d encountered any important info to within a few days, so he could find what he needed… mostly. But without him, his records were worse than useless.

  Joy checked her clock, surprised to see that it was nearly nine PM. So much had happened today. The Gazette offices would be open, the paper being readied for the presses, to make sure the latest bogus news would arrive at the stands the next morning. But Garai wouldn’t be there. He worked long hours, starting in the early morning and ending by early evening, usually between six or seven o’clock. She was safe for now. She let out a long sigh of relief and allowed herself some time for self-care.

  She’d been walking and running so much in the wrong shoes that she’d rubbed both her heels raw, so she took the time to wrap some clean gauze around her feet and bandage up her skinned knees. She grabbed the first presentable thing she could out of her closet, which happened to be the blue-grey skirt and blouse to her old Kallistrate military uniform, which hung a bit loose on her, threw on a pair of comfy cloth sandals, and was about to head back down to rejoin Mrs. Jakuba when she remembered the glittering blue jewel lying on the top of her small dresser.

  Yet one more thing to make a complicated situation even more complicated. A huge gem like that, and somehow she’d never heard of it. Well, the Sidhe nobility had ruled a vast empire for over a thousand years, so that was plenty of time to amass hoards of riches in their various palaces, to get dumped into the black market when those palaces got sacked by Kallistrate, Zipang, or emboldened insurgents. Still, this jewel was something else. It seemed to glow a faint azure in the dim light of her apartment, though it might just be collecting and refracting the available light—she couldn’t be sure either way.

  And there were a bunch of these gems being smuggled using the girls as cover—or were they? Joy realized she didn’t know for sure that the other shackles contained hidden gems—the other ones might be decoys. But what were the odds of Joy rescuing the only girl with a gem? What were the odds on any of this?

  Enough. Joy was keeping Mrs. Jakuba waiting. She grabbed the jewel and stuffed it into the middle of her sack of potatoes, which seemed like the best hiding-place for it at the moment. She felt a weird electric thrill as her skin made contact with the cool, smooth surface. It made her hesitate, reluctant to part with it. She shook it off and headed downstairs for dinner.

  Chapter 38

  Chowtime

  Joy found Hsiu-Mei chowing down at the kitchen table. Mrs. Jakuba had one of those open kitchens that was big enough to fit a dinner table, so it served both as a kitchen and a dining room. Mrs. Jakuba declared this to be the best idea ever, since it cut down on the time it took to transport the food to hungry people, plus everyone got to see for themselves just how hard their cook worked. Hsiu Mei looked worlds better. Her skin had a nice rosy glow from being scrubbed, and her jet-black hair had been shampooed, de-tangled, and brushed straight. Joy recognized some of Mrs. Jakuba's hair clips keeping her locks out of her face while she ate. She was also wearing one of Mrs. Jakuba's nightgowns, which hung on her like a tent.

  Hsiu-Mei beamed at her when she came in, and Joy was taken aback a second. This girl was going to break some hearts when she got older. Then Joy remembered that there were people out there right now who weren't bothering to wait for Hsiu-Mei to age properly before trying to marry her off. Looking at the poor fugitive swimming in Tishka’s nightgown, with the sleeves rolled up five or six times just to keep them out of her stew, it was apparent how much of a child she still was, and Joy had to fight back her fury, to keep from ruining dinner.

  And Joy wouldn't dream of ruining one of Tishka’s dinners. Even though their host kept apologizing for how simple their fare was, as she wasn't expecting company. But of course this was ridiculous, as the hearty, rich beef stew that had been simmering all day was enough of a meal for everyone, what with all the peas, carrots, potato chunks, thick short noodles, and fatty hunks of tender beef in it. Hsiu Mei certainly wasn't complaining--she was slurping it down like there was no tomorrow, and that worried Joy. The girl was going to make herself sick gorging like that on rich food after barely eating for several days. Joy had to step in and force her to start taking breaks. And besides which, in Kallistrate it was bad manners to pick your bowl off the table like that, so Joy started to teach Hsiu Mei proper etiquette--use the spoon for everything. It forced her to slow down, and she needed to learn that anyway for future dinners. She got so focused on it that Tishka had to chide her for not touching her own food. Joy
complied--oh, man, did that hit the spot right now--and for a few minutes the kitchen got quiet, with everyone’s attention fully occupied by eating a warm, savory, delicious meal.

  It couldn’t last forever. Hsiu Mei reached the bottom of her bowl and began to bawl, prompting Tishka to wrap her up in a hug, while Joy hovered over her, trying to pick out something intelligible through the sobs. Eventually it came out.

  “She’s feeling guilty about enjoying such a wonderful meal while her little sister and the other girls are still being held captive in a cage,” said Joy.

  "Agh, such a shame," said Tishka, rocking Hsiu Mei. "Not your fault, child. All the bad men’s fault. A disgrace, our City Guard is. Something must be done.”

  "We'll have to expose them," said Joy, who'd been able to sort her thoughts out during dinner. “All the local authorities are either corrupt or suspect, so we'll have to contact the national ones." Joy repeated this in Xiaish, so Hsiu Mei could follow her.

  "National—like your Intelligence friends from when you worked there," said Mrs. Jakuba. "They even have office in Dodona. Perhaps we could go after dinner. That would be safest, yes?"

  "They're not open right now. Nobody will be there." said Joy, and then had to alternate between translation and forestalling Mrs. Jakuba's indignant rant. "An intelligence bureau is all about actively looking for emergencies before they happen. They're not set up to go rushing out fighting crime at all hours of the night. It's not their normal job. I think they will help us, once I explain the situation, but it might take some time for them to figure out how to deal with this. Probably they'll have to coordinate with the army. They might even have to call troops from other cities. At any rate, there's no way I'll be able to contact anyone until their office opens at nine o'clock the day after tomorrow, because of the holiday."