Foreign Devils (5 page)

The sound, at first, rose like a cough, dry and wracking. And then Fisk laughed. It was a short, brutal sound.

‘That’s what all this is about? You’ll have to chase down my father, I’m afraid. I don’t have Tamberlaine’s money.’

Andrae’s smile became brittle. ‘I had already surmised that, judging from your garb and …’ He sniffed and glanced at me, ‘your companions.’

Well, this fella was definitely wanting some perforations. A hole right there, above his heart, would look quite fine.

‘But that does not mean you do not have information that could be helpful locating it.’

‘I haven’t seen my father since I was twelve and living on the eastern coast. Last I heard, he was living in Chiba working for the Medierans.’

‘Twelve?’ Andrae said incredulously. ‘That seems hard to believe.’

‘I don’t give a frog’s fat ass what you believe; I left with one hundred aureus and a bundle of clothes.’

‘And headed west? Into the brand new world?’ He smiled again, the lush flesh of his lips curling with some mockery. ‘How clichéd. “The promise of the shoal grasses”.’

A half century ago, the Lex Manciana was passed to encourage settlers to move west and Rumanize the Hardscrabble Territories – and counter the growing Medieran presence in Passasuego – allowing any settler who could keep and hold a farmstead west of Fort Brust for ten years to own it. He would be free from Imperial taxation during that time, and only subject to lessened taxation for the next five. All of the papers in the east touted the ‘promise’ of the west.

‘That’s right, Mr Andrae. The lure of the shoals,’ Fisk said. ‘Anything was better than staying at home.’

‘We all have sob stories, Mr Fisk,’ Andrae said, taking a drink from his wine. ‘My mother was a whore and my father a sot. And now I’m stuck in this shithole of a place, sniffing out little secrets of settlers and common folk and natives.’ His smile fulfilled its promise. It bloomed into a full-grown sneer.

‘My condolences,’ Fisk said.

The secretary returned, looking very nervous and scratching at his arm. He held a sheaf of parchments covered in a neat, orderly script.

‘Ah,’ Andrae said, and there was a little disappointment in the tone of his voice. ‘Here are the files.’ He took the papers and ruffled through them. ‘A fortnight ago an agent in Hot Springs said one of the junior engineers working there in the rebuilding efforts—’ He paused, raising an articulate eyebrow and glancing at Fisk, ‘was found murdered in his lab, and his reserves of silver taken. A man by the name of Labadon and matching Beleth’s description had been seen entering the premises.’

‘That old devil,’ I said, voice hushed.

Andrae glanced at me, lips pursed. ‘You recognize this alias?’

‘Yes,’ I said. Fisk looked at me and waved his hand in an out-with-it sort of gesture. He’d had his fill of this spymaster and was happy to let me take over the palaver, if only for a little while. ‘The name of a
daemon
. Ebru Labadon is the devil that drives the Cornelian’s paddlewheels.’

‘I see.’ He made a notation on the file. ‘We will see what other
daemons
Beleth has bound in vessels or engines of war. If he used that alias once, he will have used another. This is a boon.’

A strange sort of satisfaction suffused the man: I realized that whatever else our spymaster was, he was suited to his work, a strange amalgam of gossip and archivist. And if he was the eyes and ears of Rume, possibly murderer.

‘Any other details on his whereabouts?’ Fisk asked.

‘My agent lost contact. But he did not remain in the town. And I can say with certainty he’s not here in New Damnation. My contacts in Breentown and Panem have reported nothing and both would be hard to reach in the time since the murder. So that leaves either Passasuego or Harbour Town.’

Fisk looked at me, his eyebrows raised. ‘The Medieran Embassy is in Passasuego.’

‘That’s right. He’s got some silver now, too. He’s probably trying to find a new patron.’

‘I imagine old Diegal would love to know Beleth’s secrets,’ Fisk said.

‘He was privy to Cornelius’ counsels for a long while,’ I agreed. ‘And Samantha mentioned he was arch level member of the college of engineers. That means he’s on the council, and what I know of Beleth, he wouldn’t be content just being a member of a council.’ I picked up the settler’s cup of wine and drank it. ‘He’d want to be in control.’

‘So,’ Andrae said, slowly. ‘You believe he’s in Passasuego, trying to gain new patronage. And deliver all Rume’s secrets of engineer and leadership to a new master.’

‘That sounds about right,’ Fisk replied.

‘This is not good,’ Andrae said.

Fisk pushed his chair from the table and stood. ‘Can’t say it’s been a pleasure,’ he said in the drawl that I knew and not the wary, guarded tones of the legate, the son-in-law of Cornelius and the husband and equal of patricians. Not Fiscelion Iulii. Just Fisk. My old partner. ‘But it’s been educational.’

Andrae stood as well. The sneer and the smile were gone. Standing, he looked gangly and slightly unkempt. He extended his hand.

‘My job,’ he said, slowly, ‘necessitates some subterfuge and a level of mendacity that has …’ He shrugged, slightly, as if searching for the right phrase. ‘Coarsened me. And my superiors … are at the highest level.’

Fisk looked at his hand for a long while. Finally, he took the other man’s wrist and they clasped forearms.

‘Might I invite you to dinner?’

If Fisk was surprised, he did not show it. ‘Many thanks, but my partner and I have to tend our horses, grab supplies from the quartermaster, and then light out early for Passasuego in the morning.’

The spymaster nodded once, abruptly, as if he expected the rebuff. ‘Of course. I’ll have the list of Beleth’s possible aliases delivered to you there by one of my agents.’

‘How will we know him?’

He smiled, and this time it was genuine. ‘You won’t. But the list will be delivered all the same.’

‘Many thanks,’ Fisk said.

‘I’ll have Stefan lead you out,’ he said.

‘Much obliged.’

When we’d emerged from the praetorium centre, blinking in the light of the afternoon sun, I said, ‘What fascinates me is how we got out of there without you killing that man.’

‘You’d never want to visit Novorum or Felix Sulla, Shoe. Every person you meet is just like him.’ He rubbed the stubble on his chin and then spat into the dust. ‘He takes his orders directly from Tamberlaine. I’m very lucky I was able to leave at all.’

He turned and walked off, his hand resting lightly on his six-gun.

SIX

5 Ides, Quintilius, 2653 ex Ruma Immortalis

‘We’ll take a boat upriver to Bear Leg,’ Fisk said that night, after we’d found lodging in a dingy hotel with livery near the docks. He’d removed the legate insignia pin soon after leaving Andrae.

After a dinner of greasy soup and stale bread in the common room, we bunked down in the stable – as is our wont on the trail. Bales of hay might be prickly and uncomfortable, but they’re an honest sort of bunk and not prone to bedbugs or the peculiar sort of human stain that often goes with rented rooms. ‘Give the horses a rest. From there we’ll see what we can see. Beleth might’ve passed through.’

‘Sad the
Cornelian
won’t still be there?’

‘Sad?’ Fisk said. ‘I guess so. There’s good memories, and bad, tied up with that boat.’

‘True.’

In the morning, we found the only barge going up river with room for our mounts that didn’t look as if she’d sink the first league away from the wharf. Her name was the
Quiberon
and she was a
daemon-
less slave-driven paddle-barge. Slow, ugly, and low-slung. She carried livestock and casks of salt-pork and piled sacks of hominy and was home to a large glaring of semi-wild cats and captained by a brusque woman, quite young and of a matter-of-fact demeanour, named Maskelyne. There were also a couple of other paying passengers, who looked a bit put out when we clambered aboard. Especially at me.

Maskelyne bit our coins when we gave them over, and looked us up and down. ‘You two should be good in a pinch if them stretchers come a’leapin. Clear?’

‘I imagine we’ll hold our own, ma’am,’ Fisk said.

‘Don’t ma’am me, braw, I was shitting me diapers when you were full grown,’ she said. But she handed back a couple of coins. ‘You’ll use them little devils in the
Quibby
’s defence else there’ll be a reckoning come Bear Leg.’

‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘How long is the journey?’

She was an intense-looking woman, bright blue eyes, and a compact muscular form. She wore simple garb, dungarees and a fitted shirt with numerous pockets brimming with styluses and a Hellfire pistol on her waist. ‘Water’s high and the paddle-teams are rested, braw. Shouldn’t be more than five days, barring stretchers or shoal beastie,’ she said.

‘Much troubles with the
vaettir
lately?’

‘Not too much since winter. Very quiet, really, braw, but better safe than slitted or scalped, me mam always said.’ She laughed, showing a mouthful of white, snaggly teeth. ‘Anywho, if you two gents would be so kind as to get your arses out of the way of my slaves, there you go—’ she said as we clambered onto the barge’s roof – an area that served as a wide, open-aired berth – away from the workers and livestock. Maskelyne then bellowed at the slaves in the river patois called
Craulia
by the speakers of it but
Brawley
by those who were not. A mixture of Medieran, Gallish, Tueton, and some other indistinct, indefinable linguistic spice that had yet to be determined.

Once the hold was loaded and the stevedores skulked back to the shady confines of the nearest saloon and the slaves returned to the hold of the ship, Captain Maskelyne bellowed once more and one of her burly freemen attendants withdrew a snare drum and two sticks and began a rolling beat. From somewhere inside the hold there was a chanting,
lè a vini nan ranje ranje ti gason,
over and over again in a rhythmic churning and then deep inside the ship a chorus of rich masculine voices answered not in Craulish but in common speech,
roll boys roll
, and the paddle-wheels began to turn slowly and build speed. Maskelyne gave a bright, echoing yawp as her freemen lascar threw off the hawsers and the
Quiberon
moved into the waters of the Big Rill and began churning upstream.

‘We are away! We are away, braws!’ she called and yawped again.

That we were.

That evening, with New Damnation miles downriver, Maskelyn had her off-team of slaves come up-deck for air. Some were dusky skinned, some fair, but all wore torcs and rippled with muscles. They were lean, but it took a lot of chow and a lot of tugging oars and lifting cargo to sculpt physiques like that. They found seats on gunwales and some joined us on the flat, wooden expanse of the roof while other slaves moved among them with jugs of water or stronger drink and others passed out hardtack or dry corncakes or dried aurouch. They lolled about, lying down, sitting cross-legged, speaking in soft voices to each other.

‘Fascinating,’ the woman in the brown tweed suit said to her companion in a slightly accented voice that I could not place. ‘I don’t understand why they don’t just jump in the river and swim for it.’

‘Winfried, I can think of two reasons, off-hand,’ her companion said, removing a small tin snuffbox from his jacket and pinching himself a measure. ‘First, they’re all wearing collars.’ He brought his index finger and thumb to his nose and huffed the dark powder deep into his nasal passages. ‘Second, where would they go? We’re in the middle of nowhere.’

Some of the slaves watched us from where they took their rest, murmuring to each other. Maskelyne climbed onto the roof, clutching a bladder skin. She approached one of the older slaves, a bald, dark-skinned man with a rangy physique and wooden plates in his earlobes – an Aegyptian possibly, or Numidian – and presented him with the bladder. He smiled at her and nodded in a queer ceremonial fashion and then took the bladder and drank from it. He handed it back to her and she drank, nodding her head. He took it once more, drank deeply and then spat the liquid into a fine spray in the four directions. Finally, he passed the bladder to the other slaves who then drank as well.

Fisk, who had been silent for a long while, said so that Winfried and her companion could hear, ‘They don’t run because they know, someday, they’ll be free.’

‘Yes, we are aware of the Lex Parens Parialis, even in Malfena Protectorate. However, that hardly seems a reason to stay enslaved, thralls to a simple riverboat queen.’

Fisk shrugged and turned to look at the odd pair. ‘We’re all slaves to something, or someone. Sometimes to masters we don’t even know.’ He pointed to the slaves with his chin. ‘At least they know who they serve.’

The man stood from his chair and approached us, extending his hand toward Fisk.

‘Well met, good sir,’ he said. ‘I am Wasler Lomax and this is—’ He gestured toward his companion. ‘My sisterwife, Winfried.’

Fisk nodded his head in acknowledgement and slowly clasped the man’s forearm and then the woman with the manly name.

‘My name’s Shoestring,’ I said, brusquely grasping their forearms in turn. ‘I mean, Dveng Illys.’

‘Ah, you are
dvergar
!’ Wasler said, pleasure and excitement spreading across his face. ‘While I’ve seen many of your kind in … shall we say … functional capacities, I’ve never yet had the opportunity to converse!’

‘I would continue speaking on the subject that was broached regarding slavery,’ Winfried said. ‘It seems you approve of this custom of owning human beings,’ she said to Fisk.

‘No, ma’am,’ Fisk said, slowly, as if thinking over what he was to say next. ‘I don’t approve of it, nor the bitter cold. Nor the bloodthirsty
vaettir
. I concern myself mainly with what
is
and what I can affect.’

‘So,’ she said, eyes brightening, ‘You see yourself as powerless to affect loathsome customs?’

Fisk stilled. His eyes narrowed and he looked at her closely. ‘I choose to fight where I may yield the best results. There are some that say the Malfena tradition of incest should be abolished.’

The Malfena Protectorate is a small island nation off the coast of Tueton. I know of it only through camp talk about their sexual practices. Because of the limited resources on the island, only certain members of each family, chosen by lottery, are allowed to marry and breed. The others are made sterile. And so, over the millennium, the taboo of incest has faded there for the sterile ones, and unions between siblings and cousins are, if not commonplace, then accepted. And Rume, with its love for all things
other
, especially loved that which seemed forbidden and hinted at perversion.

‘Ah, that old logical fallacy. Should a sisterwife or brothermate get in some sort of lively discussion, out come the cries of
incest!
It is, in essence, admitting a weakness of argument.’

Wasler coughed into his hand and said, ‘Please pardon Winfried. We’ve had a long journey with only each other to engage in conversation.’ He had a precise accent, reminiscent of the Tuetonic speech yet not having all the hard edges and ugliness of that language. Winfried turned to him, delivering a withering stare. He continued: ‘We are here on a grant from the Malfena governor to document the indigenous life of the Imperial Protectorate and the Occidentalis Territories.’

‘Ah, so you’re journalists!’ I said, understanding. ‘What paper do you write for?’

Wasler bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘Journalists, of a sort. Our endeavours are funded by a private grant and the results will be our patron’s to do with as he pleases. I hope he chooses to publish, in some form.’ He looked worried for a moment and then waved the thought away. ‘But yes. We are journalists in that we record. We are infernographists.’

‘Infernogra—’ I began.

‘The capturing of portraits through
daemonwork
engineering. It is, in essence, an anthropological exercise.’

‘How does that work? The capturing of portraits?’

Wasler smiled, showing brilliantly white teeth. Apparently, in addition to having no problem with inter-familial sex, Malfenese people have exceptional dental hygiene. ‘We were hoping to be able to show you the process, Mr Ilys, if you agree to it, since you’d be the first native Occidentalian recorded.’ He was like a pup, quivering with excitement. If the man had a tail, its wagging would have thrown him off-balance.

‘Only half
dvergar,
myself,’ I said. ‘My pap was a Ruman soldier.’

If possible, the man’s excitement grew. ‘Wonderful! Even better. We’ll take your name, age, a short biography.’

Thinking of the Quotidian, I said, ‘And have a
daemon
commit my likeness to paper?’

‘That’s the idea!’

I looked at Fisk, who shrugged in response. I wear Hellfire now. My former reticence to involve myself or use the infernal machines all around me no longer had any grounds to stand on. Ia is not some benevolent God but some sort of jumped-up yet meaningless
daemon
and if the Pater Dis was there to judge the sully I’d done my soul in life, he didn’t take into account Hellfire, however it made me feel. Yet it still didn’t feel right to me, this reliance upon the dynamos of devils.

However, I was curious to see how this process differed from the Quotidian.

‘How much blood?’

‘Ah, so you have experience with infernography?’

‘A tad,’ I said, holding up my hand and exposing the cut still healing there.

‘Not too much. A cupful, possibly,’ he said. ‘But we’ll replenish your sanguine humours with strong drink and companionship!’ Wasler said, beaming. A nice fellow, this Wasler. His sisterwife Winfried, while pleasant enough, was not nearly as ebullient. ‘Please sit.’

I sat cross-legged on the far side of their small chest while Fisk sat and then leaned back on his hands, his booted feet crossed and stretched out in front of him, watching now as Maskelyne rousted the slaves and made ready for the night’s mooring. Other boats –
daemon-
driven, equipped with
daemonlights
– might travel upriver at night, but not this one. A slow boat is faster than none at all and the horses needed rest after crossing the Hardscrabble back from Dvergar Spur.

After a few barked commands at the slaves, a group disappeared in the hold and then re-emerged, grunting and straining, carrying two large canvas-wrapped objects. They brought them onto the hold’s roof, setting them down on the rough wood, and unfurled them, revealing wooden struts, ropes, and more canvas. Tents. Speaking to each other softly, the last bits of sunlight failing, they set up the tents on the barge’s roof and returned with folding cots while the freemen hung oil lanterns along the perimeter of the boat.

Maskelyne approached, carrying two lanterns. She handed one to me and then placed one near Wasler and Winfried. ‘Braws, I hope this will make you comfortable. I’d offer statesrooms if I had them but I don’t.’

‘This is just fine, ma’am,’ I said, opening the tent flap. ‘Better board than we’d have on the trail.’

‘Figured as much,’ she said, nodding her head. I got the feeling it wasn’t us she was addressing, though. Fisk and I are pretty rough and tumble.

Winfried stood and moved to the lantern, picked it up, and entered the tent. With the lantern inside of it, the light-dun fabric yellowed and brightened, becoming a squat, faintly glowing obelisk in the darkness. She returned shortly without the lantern.

‘It will do,’ Winfried said simply.

‘It’s all part of the experience!’ Wasler exclaimed in his clipped, precise accent. He glanced at Winfried as if checking a clock or barometer. ‘This is the Hardscrabble Territories!’

‘It is that, my
canvelet
,’ Maskelyne said, not bothering to explain the unfamiliar phrase. She turned to Fisk and me. ‘Moment or two, one of my boys will be cooking some fish and hoecakes near the paddlewheel, braw.’

Fisk nodded. My stomach rumbled. It had been a while since my last meal.

‘There’ll be guards set,
cherkme
, but if you hear some sort of alarum – bells, a’whooping and a’hollering – that Hellfire will be needed.’

‘Understood,’ Fisk said and I echoed that sentiment.

Maskelyne, seemingly satisfied, gave a little half-bow and departed.

‘She seems especially worried with the guards,’ Winfried said.

‘Nope,’ Fisk replied, slowly standing up and stretching out the kinks in his long frame. ‘Like your brother, er, husband …’ He paused, putting both his hands at the small of his back and bending backwards. ‘Like he said, this is the Hardscrabble Territories. Always the chance of stretchers.’