by Luke Arnold
The cuts to my face had been worse than I’d thought. The morning after my trip to the stadium, I’d asked Georgio, the owner of the cafe at the bottom of the building, to put in some stitches. Four days had passed since then. Now, I had four red-brown lines down the right side of my face and was hoping they wouldn’t scar.
I didn’t have my own bathroom. Hence the chamber pot. I picked it up and opened the door to the waiting room and almost bumped into a woman. She was standing there, caught out, like she’d just changed her mind about knocking but hadn’t gotten away fast enough.
It was Linda Rosemary.
She was wrapped up in another set of sensible clothes: red overcoat, hounds-tooth scarf and a black, woolen beret off to one side. She wore thick, black gloves that favored warmth over dexterity, and there was a flush in her cheeks that complemented the mist coming out of her mouth. Her eyes fell on the cold block of ice I was holding out between us.
“You making coffee?”
I lifted up the pot, attempting to hide the contents.
“Yesterday’s. It’d gone bad.”
She wrinkled up her nose.
“Smells like piss.”
My embarrassed smile revealed the truth in her statement. We both stood there for a second with awkward expressions stuck on our faces.
“You… want to come in?”
She took a long, painful beat. Her eyes wandered from my face to the chamber pot to the office behind me. My bed was still down from the wall, unmade. There were dirty glasses on the desk and a trail of ants passing crumbs across the floor. I’m not sure what they’d found because I hadn’t had a meal at home in weeks.
Linda stood rigid with indecision, like when you try to feed a wild animal from your fingers and it has to fight against all its natural instincts if it wants to take the food. Eventually she said “What the hell” to herself and stepped inside.
She limped a little as she entered, then wiped down the clients’ chair with a handkerchief. I ran around behind her, stuffing dirty underwear and tissues into my pockets.
“After the other night,” she said. “I asked around—”
“One moment.”
The Angel door was behind my desk. A remnant of the old days when the world was magic and a few lucky souls might arrive at your house by a set of wings instead of the stairs. I pulled it open and the wind hit me in the face like a hired goon collecting on a loan. I put the chamber pot out on the porch, wiped my hands on my coat and closed the door again. When I turned around, Linda’s face was full of regret.
“Sorry,” I said. “I rarely have guests so early.”
She pulled a pocket watch out of her overcoat.
“But it’s—”
“I’m sure it is. As I said, my apologies. Go on.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes, all reservations were gone. She had relaxed into a resigned determination to deal with the idiot sitting across from her. She removed her gloves as she spoke.
“As you know, I’m a Lycum. Unlike some of the Werecat descendants, my ancestors escaped Perimoor right after they were changed. They went north and found their home in the icy hills of Weir. Over time, we evolved to have thicker coats and tougher claws than most of the Cats you would have seen around the continent. We had our own kingdom. Our own rules. Own lives. The Coda killed that, of course. Which is why I came here.”
I couldn’t stop my eyes from wandering. Her skin was smooth, and every movement she made was graceful. Her teeth, though she barely showed them, all seemed to be accounted for. Her pupils were long, and her irises were an impossible yellow-green. Other than that, she just looked like a Human woman who’d been given an unorthodox manicure.
“If you don’t mind me saying, Miss Rosemary, you came out of the Coda pretty darn well.”
It wasn’t exactly a compliment, and from her expression, she didn’t take it as one.
“I know,” she said. “My sister got stuck halfway through her transformation with her brain trying to be two different sizes at once. She died, screaming, after only a few minutes. My father’s face was almost inside out. He lived for a week, silent, fed through a straw till something in him snapped. There were twenty of us in our house. I cared for all of them, for as long as I could, till I was the only one left. I walked away from my home and eventually ended up here. I know that I’m one of the lucky ones, Mr Phillips, but I’m sorry if you don’t find me jumping for joy.”
There was a long pause as she let her story sink into my thick skull. Outside, the wind picked up. The chamber pot scraped along the porch and slid off. A few seconds later, there was a clang down below and someone shouted a few obscenities to the sky.
Her expression never changed. When all was quiet, she continued.
“After the other night, I asked around about you. Heard some interesting stories.”
She gave me an opportunity to jump in, but I doubted any rumors could be worse than the truth.
“Strange,” I said. “Nobody has ever accused me of being interesting.”
Not exactly true. The story of the Human who escaped the walls of Weatherly to join the Opus does have a few exciting moments. Not quite as juicy as the sequel, when that same kid handed the most prized magical secrets over to the Human Army. Or the story of how the army used those secrets to screw up the world. I suppose that tale might be interesting to some, but I’d had enough of it myself.
“I’ve been trying to work out what your job exactly is,” she said. “You’re not a detective. Not a bodyguard. Then someone told me that you investigate rumors of returning magic.”
“I don’t know who told you that, but they’re wrong.”
Not just wrong. The idea was dangerous. Everybody knew that the magic was over and there wasn’t any way to bring it back. My job might be a strange one, but I certainly didn’t go around selling pipe dreams to dying creatures like she’d tried to do with the Unicorn horn.
“You found a Vampire a few months ago,” she continued. “A professor who managed to find his strength again. Isn’t that right?”
I wanted to lie, but the shock on my face had already given me away. Nobody was supposed to know about Professor Rye, the Vampire who turned himself into a monster, and nobody was supposed to come knocking at my door looking for answers.
“Not exactly.”
“I heard that the Vampire found a way to turn back the clock. He unlocked his old power. I hear you tracked him down and discovered how he did it. You know a secret that the rest of the world would kill for. I want to know what it is.”
My body tensed beneath the desk. The determined look in her eyes had hardened, and I have to admit, she scared me. There was plenty of room in her layered clothes to hide a sharp blade. Even unarmed, her claws were dangerous enough.
“I can’t tell you that.”
We stared each other down, and I hoped I wasn’t going to have to fight her. The wind blew through the cracks in the walls, and I realized that it wasn’t hostility in her eyes. Not quite. It was something closer to desperation.
“I’m not here to cause you problems, Mr Phillips. I’m here to hire you. Whatever you know. Whatever you found out. I want you to use that information to make me strong again.”
I sat back in my chair. Stumped.
“Miss Rosemary. That’s not what I do.”
“Well, why the hell not? What are you saving up all your energy for? Helping little old Elven ladies cross the street? I just want to be whole again, and I don’t know who else I can ask for help.”
I growled into my mouth, shaking my head.
“It wasn’t magic that came back into the Vamp. It was something else. He gave in to the same temptation you’re feeling right now, and it destroyed him. I hate this new world as much as you do, but there’s no going back. I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, but you got out of it better than most. Hold onto that, and be thankful.”
Her full, pink lip jutted out at me as water f
illed the bottoms of her eyes.
“This,” she said, holding a hand under her face, “isn’t me. Your kind killed me. Everything I was and everything I had. I am not this person. In this place.” She looked around, disgusted with where she’d found herself. “What even is this place?” A tear rolled down her cheek and the trail it left behind turned to ice. “You don’t understand anything, Mr Phillips. Not a thing.”
I tried to bite my tongue. You’d think that tear would have stopped me, but I couldn’t help myself.
“I know the magic isn’t coming back, and I know that when people try, it gets them killed. Move on, Miss Rosemary. Find something else to look forward to.”
If she could have ripped out my throat with her teeth, she would have. But that strength was gone. It had vanished the moment the sacred river turned to glass. Instead, she picked up her gloves, got to her feet and walked to the door. For a moment, I thought she was going to let me have the last word.
She looked at the sign that was painted on the window of the door: Man for Hire. She read it out loud to herself, rolling the words around inside her flushed cheeks.
“Man,” she said, wrinkling up her nose. “I see what you’re going for. You’re a Human. You’re male. I’m sure it made sense to you. But look at how you live. Listen to the way your mind works.” She didn’t bother turning to look back at me, she just stared at the pane of glass and tried to break it with her eyes. “You’re a boy, Fetch Phillips. A stupid boy, playing with things that aren’t yours. Put them down before you hurt yourself.”
Then she was gone.
I looked for a bottle to wash her words out of my head. What did she know? She just wanted to be strong again, and she hated me for standing in her way. What did she want me to do? Lie to her? Pretend I could go out on some quest and come back with magic that would make her whole? Impossible. The magic was gone and the sooner we all accepted that, the better.
Ring.
I picked up the phone, and it was the weary voice of Sergeant Richie Kites. There was some kind of commotion happening behind him, but he kept his voice down to a whisper.
“Fetch, can you get over to the Bluebird Lounge, up on Sixteenth Street? Simms wants your opinion on something.”
That was a first. Usually the detective tried to kick me out of crime scenes, not call me over so I could take a peek.
“Sure. But why am I getting an invitation?”
Richie whispered into the receiver.
“We got a dead guy here with a hole in his head, and it wasn’t done with any weapon we know about. I don’t know what to tell you, Fetch. To me, it looks like magic.”
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THE LAST SMILE IN SUNDER CITY
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THE FIFTH WARD: FIRST WATCH
by
Dale Lucas
A watchman of the Yenara city guard has gone missing. The culprit could be any of the usual suspects: drug-dealing orcs, mind-controlling elves, uncooperative mages, or humans being typical humans.
It’s up to two reluctant partners—Rem, a hungover miscreant who joins the Watch to pay off his bail, and Torval, a maul-wielding dwarf who’s highly unimpressed with the untrained and weaponless Rem—to uncover the truth and catch the murderer loose in their fair city.
Chapter One
Rem awoke in a dungeon with a thunderous headache. He knew it was a dungeon because he lay on a thin bed of straw, and because there were iron bars between where he lay and a larger chamber outside. The light was spotty, some of it from torches in sconces outside his cell, some from a few tiny windows high on the stone walls admitting small streams of wan sunlight. Moving nearer the bars, he noted that his cell was one of several, each roomy enough to hold multiple prisoners.
A large pile of straw on the far side of his cell coughed, shifted, then started to snore. Clearly, Rem was not alone.
And just how did I end up here? he wondered. I seem to recall a winning streak at Roll-the-Bones.
He could not remember clearly. But if the lumpy soreness of his face and body were any indication, his dice game had gone awry. If only he could clear his pounding head, or slake his thirst. His tongue and throat felt like sharkskin.
Desperate for a drink, Rem crawled to a nearby bucket, hoping for a little brackish water. To his dismay, he found that it was the piss jar, not a water bucket, and not well rinsed at that. The sight and smell made Rem recoil with a gag. He went sprawling back onto the hay. A few feet away, his cellmate muttered something in the tongue of the Kosterfolk, then resumed snoring.
Somewhere across the chamber, a multitumbler lock clanked and clacked. Rusty hinges squealed as a great door lumbered open. From the other cells Rem heard prisoners roused from their sleep, shuffling forward hurriedly to thrust their arms out through the cage bars. If Rem didn’t misjudge, there were only about four or five other prisoners in all the dungeon cells. A select company, to be sure. Perhaps it was a slow day for the Yenaran city watch?
Four men marched into the dungeon. Well, three marched; the fourth seemed a little more reticent, being dragged by two others behind their leader, a thickset man with black hair, sullen eyes, and a drooping mustache.
“Prefect, sir,” Rem heard from an adjacent cell, “there’s been a terrible mistake…”
From across the chamber: “Prefect, sir, someone must have spiked my ale, because the last thing I remember, I was enjoying an evening out with some mates…”
From off to his left: “Prefect, sir, I’ve a chest of treasure waiting back at my rooms at the Sauntering Mink. A golden cup full of rubies and emeralds is yours, if you’ll just let me out of here…”
Prefect, sir… Prefect, sir… over and over again.
Rem decided that thrusting his own arms out and begging for the prefect’s attention was useless. What would he do? Claim his innocence? Promise riches if they’d let him out? That was quite a tall order when Rem himself couldn’t remember what he’d done to get in here. If he could just clear his thunder-addled, achingly thirsty brain…
The sullen-eyed prefect led the two who dragged the prisoner down a short flight of steps into a shallow sort of operating theater in the center of the dungeon: the interrogation pit, like some shallow bath that someone had let all the water out of. On one side of the pit was a brick oven in which fire and coals glowed. Opposite the oven was a burbling fountain. Rem thought these additions rather ingenious. Whatever elemental need one had—fire to burn with, water to drown with—both were readily provided. The floor of the pit, Rem guessed, probably sported a couple of grates that led right down into the sewers, as well as the tools of the trade: a table full of torturer’s implements, a couple of hot braziers, some chairs and manacles. Rem hadn’t seen the inside of any city dungeons, but he’d seen their private equivalents. Had it been the dungeon of some march lord up north—from his own country—that’s what would have been waiting in the little amphitheater.
“Come on, Ondego, you know me,” the prisoner pleaded. “This isn’t necessary.”
“’Fraid so,” sullen-eyed Ondego said, his low voice easy and without malice. “The chair, lads.”
The two guardsmen flanking the prisoner were a study in contrasts—one a tall, rugged sort, face stony and flecked with stubble, shoulders broad, while the other was lithe and graceful, sporting braided black locks, skin the color of dark-stained wood, and a telltale pair of tapered, pointing ears. Staring, Rem realized that second guardsman was no man at all, but an elf, and female, at that. Here was a puzzle, indeed. Rem had seen elves at a distance before, usually in or around frontier settlements farther north, or simply haunting the bleak crossroads of a woodland highway like pikers who never demanded a toll. But he had never seen one of them up close like this—and certainly not in the middle of one of the largest cities in the Western world, deep underground, in a dingy, shit- and blood-stained dungeon. Nonetheless, the dark-skinned elfmaid seemed quite at home in her surroundings, and perfectly comfortable beside the bigge
r man on the other side of the prisoner.
Together, those two guards thrust the third man’s squirming, wobbly body down into a chair. Heavy manacles were produced and the protester was chained to his seat. He struggled a little, to test his bonds, but seemed to know instinctively that it was no use. Ondego stood at a brazier nearby, stoking its coals, the pile of dark cinders glowing ominously in the oily darkness.
“Oi, that’s right!” one of the other prisoners shouted. “Give that bastard what for, Prefect!”
“You shut your filthy mouth, Foss!” the chained man spat back.
“Eat me, Kevel!” the prisoner countered. “How do you like the chair, eh?”
Huh. Rem moved closer to his cell bars, trying to get a better look. So, this prisoner, Kevel, knew that fellow in the cell, Foss, and vice versa. Part of a conspiracy? Brother marauders, questioned one by one—and in sight of one another—for some vital information?
Then Rem saw it: Kevel, the prisoner in the hot seat, wore a signet pendant around his throat identical to those worn by the prefect and the two guards. It was unmistakable, even in the shoddy light.
“Well, I’ll be,” Rem muttered aloud.
The prisoner was one of the prefect’s own watchmen.
Ex-watchman now, he supposed.
All of a sudden, Rem felt a little sorry for him… but not much. No doubt, Kevel himself had performed the prefect’s present actions a number of times: chaining some poor sap into the hot seat, stoking the brazier, using fire and water and physical distress to intimidate the prisoner into revealing vital information.
The prefect, Ondego, stepped away from the brazier and moved to a table nearby. He studied a number of implements—it was too dark and the angle too awkward for Rem to tell what, exactly—then picked something up. He hefted the object in his hands, testing its weight.