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

by M. A. Wisniewski

  She was all set to go, was scraping the flare against the strike paper, when she remembered she’d forgotten to re-seal her satchel. She was carrying paper goods in there. She fumbled with the cap and dropped it. It bounced off and rolled off in the darkness somewhere. Joy managed to stop herself from cursing. Just slow down and think. She had three flares total. Each had a cap. She stuck the flares under her armpit while she re-sealed her satchel, secured it, took another long breath, and lit the first flare.

  The light from it seared her eyes, forced her to squint and look away as she ran to her first target and flung the blazing rod, end over end, to land at the base of the first cargo pile. Joy watched it do its thing. Oh wow. That was really effective. That blaze was really going up there. Joy's stomach flip-flopped as she readied the next flare and ran to the second target while shouts of alarm went up all around the docks. The second flare did its job even better than the first, and Joy retreated back to the main cargo maze while lighting the third flare. She reminded herself that for her plan to work, her distraction needed to be really big. She had to draw all of the guards, or as many as she possibly could, to give the girls their chance to run.

  "DOWN WITH THE TRIADS!" She screamed, in Anyan Xiaish, waving the blazing flare overhead. "DOWN WITH CORRUPTION! DOWN WITH SLAVERY!"

  The answering yells were an indistinguishable melange of tongues, as she repeated her tirade in Wuyu Xiaish, then Kallish. From the corner of her eye, she saw a swarm of figures rushing out of the darkness into the light of her bonfires. One of them spotted her, roared at her to stop.

  "I'll NEVER STOP! JUSTICE FOR THE MASSES! JUSTICE FOR—" a series of loud pops cut her off, just as she was ducking back towards cover, rounding the first corner of the maze. Something swatted her wet ponytail so it whipped about and slapped the side of her jaw, while shards of wood sliced across the back of her neck. Oh. They were shooting at her. Wonderful.

  Joy gulped and kept running. "BENNY THE SHARK IS A BASTARD! HE SUCKS. HE... HE... SMELLS BAD! HE... Uhhh... Um..." Insults weren’t Joy’s strong suit. She was running out of material fast.

  "HE'S REALLY NOT—Yeowch! Fuck!" A white-hot pain lanced through the back of her hand, and she dropped the flare. For a second she thought she'd been shot, but she realized it had actually been a hot ember from her signal flare. Waving it around wildly while running around like a maniac were definitely violations of the safety warnings, to be sure.

  Joy sucked at the burn, looked for the flare, and found it in the middle of a spreading blaze. It had hit a wall of cargo. Oh. She hadn't meant to do that. She’d intended to toss the third flare into the harbor. This... this was not planned. More shouts came from behind her, getting closer, and Joy sprinted away. That was probably enough of a distraction for the girls. More than enough. She should get out of here. Now, which way was out?

  Joy remembered her plan. Up. Up was out. She spotted a stack of cargo that made a perfect climbing wall, and scurried right up, using all her Caliburn course mojo. She reached the top and spotted a clear, straight lane to the water. She also spotted a few Triad men who'd climbed up the stacks at other points in the maze. She scrambled her way over the uneven surface, getting maybe halfway before she was spotted in turn, more yells rang out over the docks, followed by gunshots.

  Joy just gritted her teeth and kept going, hoping for the smoke and the shadows to help her as she ran as fast as she could, bent over at the waist to minimize her profile, until the last few yards, where she sprinted full out, leapt out into space in a long swan dive, aiming for the safety of the water. She had a moment of pure terror when she realized that the edge of the dock was further away from the cargo stack than she’d guessed, and she got to watch hard wood planks rush up to meet her, almost in slow motion, and then she'd cleared them by inches, into the cool, calm darkness of the harbor below.

  She let the momentum of her dive take her deep. She needed to hide, to get away, get to safety. Officer Adachi had told her about how the ocean affected gunfire. A few feet of water would stop most regular bullets, or even cause them to ricochet or shatter at the surface. But she needed to dive to get that few feet of water for protection. Unfortunately, she also needed air.

  Joy could never be sure how long she spent floundering in the harbor. If anything, it was even worse than the journey here. Her swim fins were gone, so she'd lost a ton of speed. Her snorkel was gone, so she had to stick her whole head above water to breathe, to hear a chorus of shouts from the men on the dock, and more gunshots. She made her way as best she could, blundering around beneath the huge black hulls of the boats above. She'd neglected to fix her diving-mask into place before her last dive, so it was gone, and now, she could barely see. She kept going, hoping that the next time she surfaced, the shouts of alarm would be gone, only to be disappointed each time. Of course, they could run along the docks faster than she could swim. She considered heading out to open water, but she was terrified of losing her bearings and drowning. She was so tired. Plus, they could get in a boat and chase her down.

  She kept going until she reached a different section of the harbor, filled with smaller, privately-owned yachts and fishing boats. Here the piers were smaller, with multiple branches going out in different directions. Now she could surface directly beneath the pier, wait there, then double back, try to throw them off. She kept it up as long as she could, but each time she went under was harder than the last. Her lungs burned. Her arms and legs felt like lead. But the shouts were getting less frequent as well. It felt like her plan was working. She just had to keep it up a little longer. Just one more dive, she lied to herself, several times, before she'd finally had enough. She surfaced, and her desperate, frenzied gasping was the loudest thing around.

  Had she finally lost them? Really, it didn't matter anymore. She was at her limit either way. She didn't bother diving again. She used a gentle breast-stroke to reach a ladder she'd spotted. Climbing it was way harder than it should've been. It took every ounce of her remaining strength to drag her sorry carcass up over the pier.

  She lay on her back, sucking in long, ragged gulps of air, vaguely reminded that she should probably find someplace to hide. In a second. Just another second or two.

  It didn't matter. A figure entered Joy's field of view from the top, looming over her. It was wearing armor.

  "Look what I caught," said Shiori, leering down at her. The butt of her halberd twitched, and Joy's world plunged into darkness.

  Part VIII

  The Perils of Joy

  Chapter 44

  Shark Bait

  The next thing Joy became aware of was a cracking, crunching sound, followed by a dull ache across the right side of her skull, around the temple. It took a while for her vision to come into focus. She tried to rub her face but she couldn't.

  Her hands were bound behind her back. She was sitting in a chair, her wrists were tied together around the back of the chair, and her ankles were tied to the chair legs. Wonderful. A big part of her wanted to just go back to sleep. She was still so tired. Another part of her called out alarm. She'd just hit her head, and sleep was very much the wrong thing for her right now. That part of her was weak, and she probably would've nodded off again, if not for that persistent cracking noise. What was that? It was so annoying.

  Irritated, Joy shook off the fog in her brain and tried to get her bearings. She was in some kind of warehouse. Pretty big. Pretty modern, too. Electric lights. As her vision came into focus, she realized that she wasn't alone. Actually, there was quite a crowd. Big, tough-looking guys in suits, surrounding her in a wide semi-circle, standing around at attention. Not proper military attention—more like a Triad knockoff. As she scanned their faces, she found one she recognized. Yang leered at her, or tried to, but he had kind of a splint for his nose, secured in place with a white bandage going across his face and around the back of his head. So his grin turn into a grimace, and he seemed to have a hard time baring his teeth at her without hurting his face. He tried anyway.<
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  Joy would've laughed, if she hadn't realized what an awful position she was in. Part of her did feel a surge of pride. She'd tagged him pretty good.

  She looked for Chen to see if she'd bruised him up as well, but he was nowhere to be found. Instead she saw Shiori, leaning back against one of the looming industrial shelving units that stretched up to the ceiling. Next to her was another woman, one Joy hadn't seen before. She had a no-nonsense manner to her, peering over the tops of her wire-frame glasses as she scribbled away at something on her ornately-decorated clipboard. Must be far-sighted. Her hair was up in a bun, she wore a long, form-fitting, sleek green dress, in a distinctly Xia style, and she looked more composed and put-together than Joy had ever felt in her entire life.

  But she was nothing compared to the man she stood behind.

  He was sitting in an intricately-carved wooden chair. The seat, arms, and back were padded with plush red velvet with gold trim and tassels. She could barely see that much, because of the man's bulk. He wasn't fat, just broad, wearing a pristine, immaculately-tailored light grey suit, with a shiny satin finish. Joy spotted flashes of polished gold at his cuffs, buttons, pockets, earlobes, and collar. It stopped just shy of being gaudy. He had one of those heads that seemed to sprout directly from his shoulders. You knew the neck existed, but only by inference, because it vanished right into his jawline. And what a jawline it was. He had one of the biggest mouths Joy had ever seen on a person. It went out to the furthest corners of his skull, and opened wide, too. Growing up, Joy remembered one kid whose proudest achievement was his ability to fit his entire fist in his mouth. The man before her could probably triple that kid’s record, but sticking a fist in this guy’s mouth looked like a great way to lose a hand. He'd had some work done on his teeth.

  When he opened his mouth, his lips pulled back to reveal two rows of polished gold triangles with razor-sharp steel edges. This was the source of the cracking sound that had woken her up. Joy watched in disbelief as the jaws closed around a large bone and bit down, breaking it in two. He then caught each end of the severed bone, and sucked on each broken end, before tossing them back onto a wide porcelain plate full of them, on a nearby wooden serving-table, in the same ornate style as his chair, looking completely out-of-place in this dingy warehouse.

  He repeated the process with the two unbroken bones remaining on the plate, and then he was finished, carefully dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a cloth napkin. In retrospect, Joy had to be impressed that he'd done all that without spattering any juices on his expensive suit. He turned to her with a razor smile.

  "Hey, you. Ever been to Narbonen?"

  Joy felt ice water creeping along her spine. This was the most dangerous man in Dodona, the head of the local Triad group. Ben Li Fang, AKA "Benny the Shark." She did not like having this man paying any type of attention to her. Even if she hadn't known who he was, even if he hadn't gotten those horrible teeth, he’d still be terrifying. There was something about his manner, his presence. It set off something at the base of her primal mind. It made her want to run, want to burrow in a hole and hide. Even speaking seemed dangerous, though she knew she had no choice but to answer. Cautiously, she shook her head.

  "Well, I have," said the man. "Used to be a sailor. Seen the whole world. Well, in Narbonen, they have some real fancy restaurants—too fancy to let sea scum like me inside. Didn't meet their dress code, back then."

  He tugged at one of his lapels and smiled even wider, in case she hadn't noticed that he was decked out in a suit that probably cost more than the Fan family’s entire net worth. He had an oddly precise manner of speaking. It didn't match up well with any accent Joy was familiar with.

  "Not a problem for me nowadays," he continued. "So, last time I was there... Hmm... How long ago was that again? Hey, Daphne."

  The woman in the green dress paused in her note-taking, adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose, and let her eyes go unfocused for a second. "Your last trip to Narbonen was the last three weeks of September, the year before last, so that's roughly one-and-three-quarter years ago, Mr. Fang."

  "Hah! You hear that? 'Roughly one-and-three-quarters, she says. The head on this girl. I'd be lost without her," said Benny, before directing a scornful glance at the rest of his crew. "I swear, if even half of you idiots had a quarter of her brains, I'd be mayor of this city by now."

  Daphne's expression didn't change. She inclined her head in gracious acknowledgment of the praise and went right back to her note-taking. Joy got the feeling this was a fairly common occurrence and tried not to be jealous. She never got that kind of positive reinforcement at her workplace.

  "So, like I was saying," continued Benny, and paused, brow furrowed in concentration. "What was I on about, again?"

  "Fancy Narbonen restaurants," said Daphne, without looking up from her clipboard.

  "Goose liver!" said Benny. "That was my point. They had that at the restaurants in Narbonen, and, well—you just wouldn't believe it. It's the most buttery, fluffy, melt-in-your-mouth... Mmm!"

  Benny smacked his lips, and the motion had an exaggerated quality to them. "I think I had that goose liver every night I was there, for the rest of the trip."

  "You did, Mr. Fang," said Daphne.

  "So I get back, and—I swear—first thing I do, is I summon my chef and tell him to fix up some Narbonen goose liver or find someone to teach him how. So he goes and comes back, and when he does, he's got this nervous expression on his face. And I know this type of face—when someone is going to tell me something that is going to make me unhappy. People don't like to make me unhappy."

  He favored her with another serrated smile. Joy noticed a few small flecks of purplish crust on his lower lips—scabs. Benny had a head full of monster teeth. He could cut his own mouth with them if he wasn't careful. But the Kallisian language had a few consonants, like 'f' and 'v', that required you to touch your lower lips with your teeth, and to make the 'th' sound, you had to bite your own tongue. Benny wasn't avoiding any of those sounds when he talked, he was just taking extra care when he did—though he must have the occasional slip up.

  Was there some way she could use this information to her advantage? Well, it helped take her mind off of just how fucked she was now, just a bit. Though Benny hadn’t gotten around to threatening her yet. He was still going on about food.

  "So, I ask him what's up, and he says, all apologetic-like, 'I'm sorry, Mr. Fang—I can't make the Narbonen goose liver like you asked. It's illegal here.' It's because of all the Kovidhians. Apparently, they don't like it—because it's mean to the geese. Can you believe that shit?"

  Silence followed that question, stretching until Joy realized it had been directed at her, and wasn't rhetorical.

  "Oh! Um... No?" She sputtered. The official teachings of Kovidh spoke against cruelty to animals, but vegetarianism was only a requirement for the priesthood. Lay practitioners ate meat all the time.

  "I mean... It is kind of weird," she continued. "Isn't eating any kind of meat mean to the animal?"

  "Exactly!" Said Bennie. "But apparently, the Narbonens force-feed their geese to get their livers to come out right, and that's just beyond the pale. So I'm not very happy, but I'm not going to take it out on my chef. Illegal is illegal, and, hey—I certainly couldn't go breaking the law, right?"

  Benny flashed his gold smile at his men, who all chuckled dutifully. Joy tried to manage a polite smile that she hoped didn't look too terrified. Daphne just went on taking notes, and Shiori continued to slouch off to the side and glower.

  "But two weeks later, my chef came back with a special announcement, and this time, he's looking real pleased with himself," Bennie continued. "So I ask him what's up, and he says he's found a new recipe—something that can stand in for the goose liver. In fact, he says it's even better. I tell him that's hard to believe, but he serves it up, and, sure enough, he's right. If there's one thing I know, it's how to get good people. And do you know what it was, what he found
to replace the goose liver?"

  Joy shook her head.

  "Bone marrow," said Benny. "It's great. I've had him serving it at all my business functions, my little get-togethers. Everybody loves it. In fact, it's touched off quite the culinary fad of late. There's a whole bunch of fancy restaurants serving it now. You heard of that?"

  "No," said Joy. Why did he have to go on about food? Now she was terrified and hungry. "Sorry. As far as food trends go, if it isn't in a tin, I'm out of the loop."

  "Too bad," said Benny. "You're missing out. This city is a great place to eat"

  Yeah, it really was. When she'd first come here, she'd been able to spring for a night out with friends every so often. She’d been in loop, just a little bit. But now….

  Joy stared at the pile of discarded bones on the fine porcelain plate, and she couldn't resist asking, "Um... do they normally... cook the marrow at the restaurants?"

  Benny thought that was funny. He threw his head back and roared. "Hah! Yeah, that's right. If this was a proper sit-down meal, they'd be roasted up nice. But, you see, this isn't a proper sit-down meal. It's a late-night snack. You see, there've been a whole bunch of incidents. Requiring my personal attention. But that doesn't mean I've got to keep my poor chef up all hours, too. What kind of boss would that make me?"

  Joy smiled nervously. She didn't like where this conversation was going. Saying as little as possible seemed to be the safest option.