by Max Anthony
Doris Grumps looked up from her desk at the sound of a forthright knocking upon her door.
“Come in,” she said, her voice as sweet as a mountain of sugar. The door opened and in walked a gentleman who introduced himself as Captain Tan Skulks of the Chamber Building guard, though his dress suggested he was nobody of note. Next to him was a lady who didn’t need to introduce herself as Captain Jives Honey, commander of the army of Hardened, for she was Doris Grumps’ daughter.
“Dockmaster Grumps, I’ve heard a lot about you,” said Skulks giving her a wink. Captain Honey simply nodded a greeting. Although she was very fond of her mother, she felt it best to maintain an air of aloofness when dealing with her on matters pertaining to their work.
“Mostly from the names of the dockside taverns, I’m sure,” responded Grumps with her curiosity piqued by the gentleman before her.
Skulks studied the dockmaster. She was approximately Heathen Spout’s age, hair cropped short but not severely so. Her clothing was drab, with practical trousers and tunic being just about smart enough to appear professional in case she had to speak to anyone of importance. As he sized her up, her hand thudded down on the table with a bang. She lifted up the hand and Skulks saw the flattened remains of a small flying insect upon her desk.
“Got the little bastard!” she announced, wiping her hand on her trousers. “Now then, Captain Skulks, what can I do for you?”
“We are here, good dockmaster, for your assistance! The city is in grave danger and men of ill-intent crowd us from both within and without!” Grumps flashed a look over at Captain Honey, her pride and joy. She didn’t know Skulks, but she certainly knew her daughter. Captain Honey nodded, which was all Grumps needed to know.
“What can I, a lowly dockmaster do to help the city of Hardened?” she enquired.
Twenty minutes later, Dockmaster Grumps was observed undertaking her daily duties along the Downriver Docks. Accompanied by her two usual assistants she shambled along with a clipboard, casting her eyes expertly over the five ships which were docked. Anyone who had felt the weight of her foot in their testicles or who had received the brunt of her forehead across the bridge of their nose wouldn’t have been fooled by the clumsy shuffle which Grumps effected. Every so often, she would stop and hail a known face, waving and exchanging a snippet of earthy dockside banter.
She stopped alongside the Meughvian Beauty which had finished docking only a few minutes before and awaited the dockmaster’s approval that it could begin unloading. Signalling for her assistants to wait on the dockside, Grumps trundled across the boarding plank and asked to speak to the captain, a man who came forth and identified himself as Hallmouth Quinn whom Grumps vaguely recalled speaking to on occasion.
“Captain Quinn,” she greeted him.
“Dockmaster Grumps,” he responded with a Rhultian twang.
“I have here your manifest. Everything looks to be in order and duties paid. Fourteen hundred bolts of cloth. Six thousand bottles of Cradle to Grave ale. Thirty-nine barrels of pickled goat’s cheek.” Captain Quinn nodded.
“However!” said Grumps. “I see you have declared a total of fifteen additional passengers. Hardened welcomes visitors, but we’ve had reports that an outbreak of Treadsian Lung Fly has been found in Casks recently.” The captain looked blank.
“Not that I’ve heard Dockmaster Grumps. And I only came from there two weeks ago.”
“Nevertheless, our information is up-to-date. I need to see your passengers in order to check for the signs.”
The captain shrugged. “Get the passengers up on deck,” he shouted. Minutes later these passengers trooped up and were instructed to form a line. There were fifteen of them, all men and all looking distinctly hale and hearty. Grumps walked along the row, squinting suspiciously upwards at each, for she was hardly five feet tall. Occasionally she stopped and asked a man to cough, listening intently to the sound. She peered into one man’s ears and up his nose, wherein she observed a few wiry hairs. Eventually she finished her inspection and proclaimed herself certain that the men were free from Treadsian Lung Fly and signed off the Meughvian Beauty’s manifest, clearing them to unload.
Re-joining her assistants, she made her way back to her office at a more rapid pace.
“Soldiers,” she told the waiting Captains Skulks and Honey. “They’re definitely soldiers.”
Wasting no time, Skulks and Honey vacated the dockmaster’s office and walked along the edge of the docks, loitering unobtrusively near the Meughvian Beauty. They were in good time and saw the passengers disembark. The men leaving the ship definitely hadn’t been trained in the arts of disguising their movements, for though the soldiers tried to disperse naturally into the streets, all they did was meander about before drifting off in the same general direction.
Skulks looked down at Captain Honey. She was short like Dockmaster Grumps and very attractive, though not attractive enough to draw too much attention to them. She’d been trained well by her mother and could win a tavern brawl against the best of them. Combined with her martial training, she was enormously competent and exceptionally dangerous. She also looked as sweet and innocent as a sleeping baby, so was often overlooked and underestimated by her opponents, until they found her punching them in the throat.
Jives Honey was also a natural at stealth, and followed the men from the ship whilst managing to look like she was doing nothing more than taking a trip out for some air or to choose a loaf for the evening’s dinner. On a crowded street, Skulks was no more able to disappear than she, so he was pleased that he didn’t have to provide any guidance. In fact, he was delighted to observe a particularly excellent segue Captain Honey performed, where she switched from looking at a display of table cloths to taking five paces forward and stooping to attend to an untied shoelace, just as one of the passengers turned in her direction.
The men they were following made a stuttering journey further into Hardened. It was obvious that they’d either never visited the city before or had done so a long time ago and were relying on the earlier study of a map to navigate. Such was their obvious foreignness that several attracted a swarm of urchins.
“Mister, mister, spare us a Sliver, would you?” Skulks heard one child say as another two rifled the soldier’s pockets. The urchins maintained a pretence of rough and tumble, shoving each other and stumbling into the man. Eventually he drove them off with a well-placed boot to their rears, showing himself to be possessed of little patience.
Eventually, the men converged on a house. It was a large house placed not two hundred yards from the Chamber Building and ensured of its privacy by having shutters covering the windows. Though an enterprising baker had set up his shop on the top floor, the lower three floors of the building looked amply spacious to house quite a number of men.
Signalling for Captain Honey to wait, Skulks walked brazenly up to the front door and knocked. After a third barrage of knocking, the door was pulled ajar, suspicion oozing out through the opening.
“I say, can you tell me how to get to the baker’s above? I’m told he produces a fabulous Fluffy Fondant! Have you ever had one?” To an outsider it would have appeared unusual to have a stranger knocking upon one’s door, demanding to know about Fluffy Fondants, but in Hardened it wasn’t strange at all. Often one would have to go through the lower property to reach the upper property and it was not unknown for friendships to form as people searched for the most efficient route to their destination.
“Never had one,” came the grunted reply in a not-unexpected Rhultian accent.
“Oh I do hope you get to try one soon,” said Skulks. “Would you mind letting me through so that I might get to the shop?” At this he gave the door a forceful shove, toppling the man away from it. Turning around, Skulks waved to an imaginary friend on the street and called out “I won’t be long Hamples, I’m just popping up for those Fondants!”
Skulks was quickly hustled out, with a gruff voice telling him he needed to go across the street
and up to reach the baker’s shop, but not before Skulks had counted seventy-two pairs of shoes lined up in the entrance hall. It was considered good manners in many parts of Rhult to leave one’s shoes at the door, in order to avoid trailing mud over the host’s twelve-thousand Scroat hand-woven rug.
“Thank you, dear sir,” Skulks said to the slamming door, before heading back to Captain Honey.
An hour later, there was something of a commotion on Gambler’s Street as two hundred and fifty soldiers, led by Captain Jives Honey of the Hardened army appeared and surrounded the building. A short burst of sword play was heard from within as Captain Honey disarmed three of the occupants and knocked a fourth unconscious with a kick to the temple. With their hands bound, the men were led towards the Hardened prison cells to be questioned further. Skulks saw that Bren and Tybot Underman were amongst the captured, their heads hung low and sullen.
“They didn’t have much fight in them,” said Skulks to Captain Honey.
“None at all. They’re too far from their command. I just told them the game was up and that we’d killed Lunder. They surrendered easily enough.”
Taking his leave from Captain Honey, Skulks headed back to the Upriver Docks and within the hour was reunited with his erstwhile rescuers and taking a fast barge to High Domes. A very fast barge as it happened, for his crew were eager to assist. As he helped them punt the Whimsical Ballerina up the Ten Dams, Skulks ran things through in his head. With the escape of Spout and Skulks, Tiopan Lunder must have been aware that the element of surprise was no longer his. However, he’d evidently not been able to communicate this to the squads of men he’d smuggled into Hardened, allowing them to be disarmed without much in the way of bloodshed. Captain Honey intended to leave some of her own people in the now cleared out building on Gambler’s Street to intercept any communications intended for that house.
King Meugh was thought to have six thousand men, but he certainly couldn’t deploy all of them in Ko-Chak without leaving his own kingdom open to attack by one of his neighbours. Even three thousand men with siege machinery wouldn’t make much of a dent in Hardened. If they somehow managed to get through one of the mighty gates, which was improbable, they’d more likely be met by a spatula in the face than the welcoming arms of a ‘liberated’ population. All-in-all, Meugh’s resources made him nothing but a minnow in the face of Hardened’s economic might. As Skulks made his way up river, ten thousand reservists were getting a surprise call-up, under the guise of a military exercise and the long-sealed doors of Hardened’s armouries were being opened to reveal an extensive collection of surprisingly brutal weapons and devices designed to convert the living into the dead.
This had been the kick that the Chamber Council had needed. Already Granulis was talking about increasing the army to five thousand and trebling the number of reservists. The thought that a tiddler like Meugh could have toppled hundreds of years of self-rule was more than they could bear.
So, Meugh’s plans were effectively foiled and Skulks was sure that Hardened would find an appropriate way to deal with him in the future. For now, Tiopan Lunder was at large and could not be permitted to go unpunished. After all, he’d been responsible for numerous murders in the city (albeit at the command of King Meugh), as well as starting the strikes which had been rather less successful than he’d hoped. Lunder’s hopes of converting the population into an army of Plumpus-loving zealots had also been dashed, betrayed by his failure to hire the right man and by the natural cynicism of Hardened’s people.
Still, Skulks was worried. The natural order of things went: wizard explodes soldier, soldier biffs thief and thief stabs bumbling wizard in the back. So in theory, he was holding the stronger hand, using the natural superiority of the thief over the wizard. In practise he’d seen that Lunder was so scrupulous in his defences that it was going to be quite difficult to get to him. He also had to face Ufflot Rumple, who Skulks didn’t want popping up behind him as he was sneaking up on Lunder. Skulks would have paid half of his fee in an instant to get Ten Hands or Warp and Weft on the barge with him, though he might have lied and told them his fee was only ten thousand Solids.
The journey to High Domes took just under seven days, with a slight delay as Skulks stopped off at Lunder’s camp firstly to ascertain that he wasn’t there and secondly for Skulks to recover his favourite set of clothing, replete with fat spiders and wood beetles.
High Domes was a magnificent city. Not quite as large as Hardened in terms of population, it was nevertheless prosperous. It was much less chaotic and much more sprawling, founded as it was in a natural basin through which the Ten Dams ran. While the people of Hardened had built upwards, the people of High Domes had built outwards. The latter city got its name from a series of cathedrals, some of which were over three thousand years old, yet still standing in defiance of time. Eschewing spires, the early architects had mastered the dome, believing through their prowess they could show their depth of love and devotion to whichever god they served, for not all cathedrals were dedicated to the same god. In Ko-Chak’s mighty pantheon, there were many gods remembered by these vast earthly monuments. Remembered they might be, but many were no longer worshipped, their cathedrals now maintained by civic grants to sustain the past glories of High Domes’ celebrated architects, some of whom were now revered more than the gods for whom they had built their dedications.
With the bargemen bade to wait and given coin for lodgings, Skulks left the moorings at which the Whimsical Ballerina was tied. He had shed his Cow’s Skirt back in Hardened, after Spout had spoken with him about it and the dark roots of his hair were already showing through on his scalp. His disguise would be no use now anyway, since Tiopan Lunder and Rumple had seen him both with and without it.
Hardened had furnished Skulks with a most generous expenses allowance for his visit to High Domes. Since he had arguably stopped the murders some days ago and could therefore claim his twenty-three thousand Solids, they didn’t want to quibble over the cost of having him stay in a decent hotel room. And decent it was, for Skulks had checked into the Domes Grand, just across a wide plaza from the Cathedral of H’Goj the Bold, which was thought of as one of the more illustrious examples of Domesian architecture.
The building of this cathedral had started nearly eighteen hundred years ago and taken over two hundred to complete, thoroughly emptying the coffers of the Merciful Watchers of H’Goj and nearly bankrupting the Fifteenth Bank of Domes money house, which had lent most generously and foolishly to the project at below market rates. Though the cathedral itself was magnificent enough, both church and architects had got carried away with the optional extras. The windows couldn’t just be made from a local glass, they had to be commissioned and imported overseas from the city of Slaughterness in Rhult, where the greatest glass-makers in the known world were based. The seating couldn’t be made locally either, which would have supported the local economy, but had to be brought downriver from Corpus, each pew made from its own distinct Granular Humpwood and each so unique that the craftsman who carved it also left his own initials upon it. And so it went on, the behemoth of a cathedral becoming several times more expensive than the initial estimates had predicted. For a period after its completion, H’Goj was fondly referred to as the Breaker of Banks.
As he munched on a plate of room service sandwiches, Skulks sat on a wonderfully large six-poster bed and looked out of his window. He’d chosen the Domes Grand not entirely for the comfort it offered, though that comfort was splendid, but because it allowed him a view of Number 6 H’Goj Promenade, albeit at an acute angle. Lunder may have thought this house to be a secret bolthole, but he had underestimated Hardened’s capacity to record the innocuous. It had taken ten clerks a number of hours to locate, but there was hiding in a crate a piece of paper showing the approval for a forward transit of goods landed in the Downriver Docks upriver to No. 6 H’Goj Promenade.
The house was a huge and stupendously expensive terrace, fronted in white marble. Lunder oft
en referred to it as his ‘little bolthole’ that he had ‘picked up for a song’, though no one ever laughed when he said it. Even after they’d heard it the tenth or twentieth time it didn’t become funny. In fact, a number of listeners, such as his faithful assistants Ufflot Rumple and Ryanda Tremble thought it made him look like a bit of an arse. Which of course, he was.
The house was clearly occupied, though only a few people were coming and going, some of whom looked like they were hired to keep the place spick and span, rather than to aid and abet the devious machinations of a foreign king. Skulks had made a few unseen passes of the property and found it to be thoroughly warded against unwanted entry. After all, Lunder knew Skulks had escaped and though he surely hoped he’d be safe in his ‘little bolthole’, he’d shown himself to be a careful man.
As he was musing, uncomfortable with the notion that he might just be a little bit uncertain on what to do, Skulks saw a figure in the plaza below. It carried a crate and wore robes. As he watched, the figure upended the crate onto the paving, stood on it and started jerking around in an animated fashion, from which Skulks imagined a haranguing was being delivered to the people in the vicinity.
Leaving the comfort of his bed, Skulks left the Domes Grand and made his way over to where the figure, now in front of a small crowd, was standing. The mouths of the onlookers were slightly agape for the citizens of High Domes were known to be more amenable to the words of would-be prophets than those of Hardened. The speaker was a woman, though not a lady by her language.
“Who amongst you lot can say that you truly believe in Plumpus? Look at the state of you! Not fit to lick the shit off his shoes!”
In High Domes they liked a bit of fire and brimstone. No one objected to the posited notion that a Rat God might wear shoes.
“He’s going to come here and he’s going to kill anyone who doesn’t believe in him! Anyone who doesn’t swear allegiance to him and join his holy horde! And if any one of you gets burned by his wrath than you’ve only got yourselves to blame!”