The Great Restoration (A Tale of the Verin Empire Book 2)

by William Ray

  When the cab pulled up outside of Gus’s office, he stepped out and thanked Parland again for the ride, to which the petitioner only replied, “Find me that sword, Mister Baston!”

  Gus grinned and promised, as always, that he was close, to which Parland gave a disbelieving wave of dismissal and knocked on the cab’s side to tell the cabbie to go onwards. He knew Parland had already checked anyone he could find from Gus’s regiment, but if any of them had any idea where Claude’s sword had gone, they’d have sold that secret long ago. Only an idiot would keep a valuable treasure like that stashed in an unlocked desk drawer.

  Upstairs, Emily was sitting at her desk, sipping tea and reading the paper. She hurriedly tried to put the paper away when she heard someone approach but gave up any attempt at pretense once she saw who it was. Gus tossed his hat onto the rack, grimacing at how battered it now looked after an evening of being pulled tightly down for warmth and then uneasily slept upon.

  Emily looked him over a moment before announcing, “You look terrible.” She poured him a cup of tea and held it out in offer, but he waved it off and stepped past into his office. “You’re not sick, are you?”

  “Just a bad night’s sleep; they don’t serve alcohol in jail,” he replied, while opening the top drawer of the filing cabinet in his office to pull out the carpet bag he kept there, along with a small mandolin in its case and another hat, which was now the less battered of his two hats. Emily looked entirely sympathetic, but Gus ignored her as he hung up the second hat and set the mandolin down by the rack. He checked the contents of his bag, then went over to his desk to search for his revolver. “Thanks for sending Parland though. How did you find out so fast?”

  “Just good luck really. I was looking into the case and happened to run into one of Clarke’s men who boasted about arresting you.”

  Gus paused his search and frowned up at her, not liking the idea of having her do his job for him. People hated a snoop, and he’d been subject to violence more than once as a result. Emily could probably handle herself if something like that happened, but that ‘probably’ always gnawed at him. Rather than risk insulting her with that worry, he said, “What if someone had come by the office with work and no one was here?”

  She snorted and replied, “If they were the sort that had any money to hire us, then they’d have left their card. Aren’t you curious about what I found?”

  Gus rolled his eyes and resumed his search, which she apparently took as an affirmative, since she said, “Well, a witness said one of them was a woman, so I think it’s probably our false Alice Phand.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “And I asked around about the costume. Their robes were each a particular dark green that’s hard to do in custom batches and wasn’t sold in Gemmen any time recently. It was the same green the Elves used. They also had iron knives but in an Elven style that’s not common.” She paused a bit, then added, “I think they might have been real.”

  Gus chuckled and shook his head. “Emily, they’re gone. Every elf in the world disappeared nearly forty years ago. I’ve been to Aelfua before; they even took their buildings with them. Cities, farms, crops, livestock, and Elves, all gone overnight. If any were left, someone would have noticed. Besides why would they go after an engineer? Somehow this is about money.”

  “How does dressing up like Wardens make anyone any money?”

  “Well, if I had that figured out, you’d already be counting the reward.”

  Emily sighed and dropped the subject. Watching him a moment more, she said, “Are you looking for your pistol? It’s on the left, in that second drawer. Did you get anything to eat?”

  Gus snorted and replied, “I checked there first,” but then checked again and pulled out the revolver and a handful of bullets. He dumped them all into his bag atop the rumpled clothes he had kept packed for just such an occasion.

  He was pleased to discover a promisingly weighty flask in the bag as well and, after shaking it to make sure it still contained something, tucked it into his jacket. “They picked me up late, and you got me sprung fairly early; prisoners only get lunch. If it was anything like the sleeping arrangements they offered, missing out may have been a blessing. I’ll eat on the train.”

  Ever the voice of reason, Emily sat the tea down on her desk and reached out to touch his arm, trying to make him stop and pay attention. “They arrested you for the kidnapping, right? That means you can’t go anywhere! If they think you might be part of it, and you leave town, they’ll think you’re running away.”

  Gus shrugged and smiled at her as if that were a trivial concern, even though he had few doubts Clarke would find some way to get at him, even if he returned Phand alive and unharmed. Patting down his pocket, he realized he’d need more money, so he pulled up the strongbox he kept under his desk and unlocked it.

  The false Alice Phand’s two-fifty was still there, along with a bit under twenty in petty cash. With what he hoped was a charming smile, Gus looked up to Emily and said, “This will take a few days. I’ll need to borrow from your share. Well, and I may need to cover his fare back too. How much do you have on you now?”

  The first sentence earned him a look of indignation, but his question left her looking worried and somewhat alarmed. Gus upended their cash box into his carpet bag and looked pointedly down at the chatelaine that hung in front of Emily’s skirt.

  After a bit of hesitation, she reached in and produced two gold peis and a small stack of silver, which she began counting. Deciding the silver would probably be enough to get her through the day, he snatched the two gold coins and tossed them in with the others. She sputtered her outrage at his prodigious loan, but he just closed his bag and limped with it back towards the door.

  Emily followed after and said, “Well, at least tell me where you’re going!”

  Standing beside the rack, Gus slapped the bottom of his second hat, sending it flipping into the air and catching it on his head. It landed at an awkward angle, but it was a gimmick that never failed to impress. Sure enough, Emily snickered a little at the trick, and he grinned at her with all the confident swagger he could muster. “The answers to this case are in Khanom, which means Phand probably is too. Just try to keep them from tossing the office while I’m gone, alright? You’ll get all your money back and more when I claim the reward.”

  “Khanom? You don’t know anything about Khanom! You’ll be lucky if you don’t lose all our money getting rolled right after you step off the train!”

  “It’s a frontier town! It’ll be easy. Besides, I heard Dolly Dench ran out that way. If he’s been able to make it out there, then I’ll probably come back as their king.”

  Emily’s nose wrinkled in disgust at that particular name. Gus had introduced them on a prior case, and she’d immediately disliked the man. Dolly was a snooty sort for a criminal and considered himself well enough above his fellow ne’er do wells that he was easy to persuade to turn on them. Until he’d been chased out of town, Dolly had been consistently useful but unpleasant, so it wasn’t an acquaintance he was eager to resume.

  Gus reached down to pick up his mandolin, then leaned over to give Emily a quick peck on the cheek. He’d hoped that gesture would startle her out of whatever objection she might offer next and was quite pleased to see it have the intended effect. Before she could recover from the surprise and try to talk sense into him, he hurried out the door. This wasn’t the time for sensible suggestions.

  She called after him as he bumped down the stairs as quickly as his bad leg would allow, but she didn’t give chase.

  From Gus’s recollection of the train schedule that he’d looked at when asking after Miss Aliyah Gale, he had just enough time to get down to the hub to catch the next one rolling out east all the way to Khanom. If he missed it, the next direct wasn’t until tomorrow, and he was too tired to try to work out the hub switches necessary to make an indirect trip.

  If his guess was right and the kidnappers we
re headed to Khanom, then he was already days behind them. From Clarke’s questioning, Gus was confident that they still hadn’t made any ransom demands. They went to quite a bit of trouble to capture him alive, even down to meticulously dressing the part of Wardens; if it wasn’t for ransom, what would a captured Phand do for them that a free one would not?

  Gus hailed a cab, feeling a fresh twinge of angry sorrow over Louis’s murder. The conspirators weren’t above murder when it suited them, so it must be something a dead Phand was equally useless for.

  If he left this up to Chandler’s Crossing, they might get their men, or they might not. Despite their personal and professional antipathy, Clarke had an impressive record for catching lawbreakers, but the cold, careful, considered wheels of justice moved too slowly. Even if they hanged the one who wielded the knife, whatever the conspiracy had planned for Phand might still be accomplished. That didn’t satisfy Gus’s sense of personal outrage. Whatever they wanted, he would see it fail.

  Winning the real Alice Phand’s proffered reward wouldn’t hurt his feelings either. He had to make a conscious effort not to cling conspicuously tight to his cash-heavy carpet bag. Travelers were always carrying plenty of cash, and he had worked enough cases to know they were prime targets for crime. Potter District’s rail hub wasn’t far, and Gus felt bad spending even some fractional portion of Emily’s money on the trip, but after a cold night of poor sleep, he didn’t trust his bad leg with the additional burden of his carpet bag.

  As the cab rolled on, he wondered what things cost in Khanom; it was Aelfua’s largest city, but he wasn’t sure that would amount to much. The last time he had been there was eight years back, when he was still in the army and Aelfua still a barely settled frontier. A few monuments still stood here or there, abandoned for reasons known only to the Elves, but it had been a country of empty lanes connecting vacant lots.

  The tiled roads of the Elves had made the land easy to settle, and from what he understood, Verin colonies there were developing at an incredible pace. The leading men of Khanom he had met at Phand’s office had seemed quite proud of the place.

  His cab pulled to a stop, and Gus paid the man, then lurched outside with his things. The train he was expecting had just arrived, so the rail hub was crowded with people pushing on and off of it all at once.

  Plenty of others loitered around as well, and not all were passengers. As always, there were several begging alms for their fare, some even looking entirely genuine about it. Potter District was also just nice enough for people to make decent money lifting wallets off unwary travelers.

  Gus spent the full sixty peis on a third-class roundtrip, although he left the return unreserved. Thinking back to Miss Aliyah Gale’s departure, he looked over the board and saw that a palace car ran one hundred forty-five peis per compartment. Having never ridden that way, he wasn’t sure how many compartments there were, but he was betting at least ten.

  The train was mostly loaded by the time he limped his way carefully through the gauntlet of sticky fingers. Boarding his car, he forced himself to look unconcerned as he tossed his carpet bag up into the storage rack over the seats, then chose a seat just across the aisle from which he could discretely keep an eye on it.

  As he sat down, a suspicious young man in a stiff black suit approached and said, “I’m sorry to bother you sir, but are you going to Khanom? We’re asking passengers to Khanom to move back into the next car for ease of loading. Please come with me.”

  Gus looked him over and tried to remember if he’d seen him on the platform. The man wasn’t wearing a steward’s cap, so he wasn’t working on the train. He could be a ticket agent, but why would they send a ticket agent from the booth to shuffle passengers on the train when that was the steward’s job?

  With a grin, Gus settled back in his seat and shook his head. Slipping the mandolin from its case, he plucked at the strings a little and said, “Nah, I already sat down. Sorry.”

  The young man shook his head as if to clear it and asked again, “Sir, if you’ll please come with me. I’ll carry your bag back for you, so all you need to do is just change seats. It’ll only be a moment.”

  Gus just smiled at him. A man across the aisle interjected, however, and said, “I’m going to Khanom. Do I need to be in the next car too?”

  Looking back at him, the young man hesitated and asked, “Can I see your ticket?” The fellow obligingly opened his jacket to pull it out, and there in his inside pocket, Gus could see the fat outline of his wallet bulge beneath the fabric. No doubt the young man saw it too, for he quickly glanced over the ticket and nodded. “Oh, yes, let’s move you back one. Please come with me. Do you have a bag?”

  The other passenger pointed it out, and the young man obligingly lifted it from the cart as he led the man out onto the platform and out of view. Gus knew what would come next: it would be crowded, and the young man would guide his mark through the press back onto the next car. Somewhere along the way, he would signal to his compatriots in the crowd, one of whom would bump into the man while another hooked out the wallet. The passenger would reach Khanom and wonder where on the trip he had lost it.

  A minute or so after they left, the train jerked slightly as the engine began to engage. Setting the mandolin aside, Gus leaned back in his seat, pulled the flask from his jacket, and took a deep draught. He sighed as he felt the familiar burn of lahvu wash down his throat. It was sour, with a bitter grassy aftertaste; the original Elven recipe intended it as medicine rather than a recreational intoxicant. Unlike other liquors, somehow it grew fouler as it aged, and it had been awhile since he’d originally filled this flask.

  Gus had often sworn that once he was out of the army, he would never take another sip of the foul stuff; but once he had his freedom, he found he occasionally still craved it. The Elven liquor seemed like an appropriate drink to lubricate a trip into Aelfua, so he quickly drained the remainder of the flask.

  The train slowly accelerated from the hub, and a real steward came through, hat and all, shutting the doors and checking tickets. Despite Gus’s fears for his bag, the lack of sleep worked with the lahvu, and the gentle rocking motion of the train to lull him asleep.

  He woke again several hours later, and by the only passingly familiar landscape beyond the windows, he knew he had slept through several hubs along the way. His eyes darted towards his luggage, but the cheap carpet bag appeared undisturbed amid the pile of others on the rack. The money was not the only thing of importance in it: he expected to have a use for the revolver as well.

  Looking outside, it was a dreary spring afternoon, with a light rain pattering across the countryside. The comforting walls of the big city had fallen away, and the train sped through wide open fields, racing past the scattered farm houses and towns along the track too small to stop for. With little else to do, he picked his mandolin back up and began quietly strumming whatever songs came to mind. The lingering bitter grassiness of the lahvu still on his tongue inspired his fingers to revisit a few of his old army drinking songs.

  The landscape gradually changed as they travelled; rolling hills became steeper, the houses took on slightly different styles—more stone, less brick—and even the farms seemed to focus on different crops and animals.

  Despite Adelaide’s frequent insistence they take a trip south to visit the Maccian shores, Gus had not left the country since his days in the army. He had imagined he might feel a bit nervous to cross the mountains into the Aelfuan territories again, but as they drew closer, he found himself mostly just interested in the scenery, wondering about the lives of the people who lived out here, so far from everything he considered civilized.

  He was on a different line than the one he once rode into northern Aelfua on the way to Gedlund. At the time, there had been black ribbons everywhere along the way—symbols of a nation in mourning for their fallen prince. Currently no such sentiment bound the nation together. Without gossip about the latest play in the theater or the same
popular songs making the rounds through the pubs, he supposed the countryside was more of a foreign nation to him than a big city like Khanom would be.

  In his army days, this rail didn’t even go all the way to Khanom, which at the time was just one of many hopeful outposts in the emptied Elven nation. It was hard to believe anything in Aelfua was enough of a metropolis to justify anything as grandiose as an exposition. Thinking of Aelfua inspired him to play Easiest War, a favorite marching song of the 37th Regiment. None of his fellow passengers knew it, or at least, none chose to sing along.

  Since they were mostly ignoring him, Gus studied his fellow passengers for a bit as he played. This car was the cheapest set of seats, and there were a few rough-looking men who were probably laborers of some sort, perhaps taking a rare holiday having visited distant family and now on the return. The rest were men of business; their cheaper suits and aura of uneasy impatience marking them as either up-and-comers or those who still struggled to win their fortune in the Empire’s volatile markets.

  A few of the businessmen were well past the usual age of retirement, which meant they had no family to support them into their dotage, or else their family fortunes had been so shattered by recent dips in the stock market that all hands had been called back into service. It was possible, he supposed, that they were a third type: men who were too stubborn to quit because they either enjoyed the hustle or saw themselves as building something with their commercial efforts and did not care to be stopped by old age.

  Looking at one such down the aisle, he could see the telltale signs of finer craftsmanship on his suit and especially his shoes. If Gus were to guess, the man was a first-generation successful entrepreneur, with money for nicer things, but whose stinginess drove him to endure the cheaper seats rather than spend money on frivolities like comfort. It was a character Gus had an easy time recognizing, having endured it in his youth.