Foreign Devils (23 page)

TWENTY

4 Ides of Sextilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis

Only Cornelius’ papers kept them from hanging me. If I’d told them I was shooting at the stretcher and accidentally hit the guard, they’d have broken my hands so that I’d never hold a gun again, or worse, what with my lesser, native blood. The Tempus Union was its own militia operating by Imperial Charter within the Hardscrabble Territories and once the
Gemina
docked at New Damnation they were bloody and perfunctorily brutal. Under their own charter, they had licence to be. They frog-marched me to their nearest outpost and threw me in a cell, not without a little physical reprimand for killing one of their own. I was there five days before they started with the questions.

The lieutenant in charge of the outpost, a beefy, blond, genial-looking man by the name of Decimus Brassus, stopped the Tempus guards before they killed me, but not before I lost a couple of teeth and my nose was broken for the twentieth time in this life. Ribs cracked again like they’d never heal until the sun burnt out. But Brassus, he even gave me an anodyne – in the form of a white powder I would snort into my blood-clotted nostrils – and beer.

One day, after my nose and mouth had healed enough for talking, Brassus joined me for a little chat. It was a small cell in a small, stone hallway alongside two similar cells. As for amenities, there was a wooden chair and a ceramic chamber pot that was emptied once a day by a sour Tempus employee.

Brassus pulled the chair to him and sat down, leisurely, in general pleased with himself and the world that held him.

‘A stretcher killed him, you said to the officer who apprehended you,’ Brassus stated, his legs crossed, pulling a machine-rolled cigarette from a packet and tapping it on his wrist to tamp the loose tabac down. I sat on the lower bunk, watching him. He thumbed a match and drew on it heavily, inhaling, then blew smoke toward the ceiling. ‘A stretcher leapt onboard the
Gemina
and then committed grave bodily harm on the late Mister Bennett? Was this before or after you shot him?’

‘Before, but the man was
daemon
possessed.’

‘Yes, you’ve said that already,’ Brassus said, raising an eyebrow. ‘And
that
was why you shot him.’

‘There should be some marks on his body. Glyphs, wards, whatnot. That should prove I’m telling the truth!’

‘Mister Ilys, it’s high summer and we don’t allow corpses to bloat. His body was interred in a Tempus Union cemetery not a day after the
Gemina
docked in New Damnation.’ Brassus put his cigarette in his mouth and stood, walked out of the cell area and returned with a sheaf of papers. He ashed on the floor and sat back down. ‘This report by his commanding officer says there were markings on his body, evidence of a new tattoo.’

‘See?’

‘One moment. You said that the stretcher came aboard the
Gemina—’
Here his lips gave a wry little twist. ‘And the creature ran
across the surface of the river
.’

‘That’s right. This is the Hardscrabble Territories. You ever seen a stretcher, sir?’

He ignored that. ‘And then he leapt aboard at the moment you encountered Mister Bennett.’

I nodded, fearful of how this was all coming together. I’d have a hard time buying this barrel of fish pickle myself.

‘Why, then, did the stretcher not kill you?’

‘Maybe it thought Mister Bennett was the greater threat?’ I thought for a while. It wouldn’t do to tell him the truth – and especially that I
conversed
with the damned thing – unless he and the rest of the Tempus bully-boys were going to string me up. And judging by his humane treatment of me – he wasn’t party to the beating the Tempus guards gave me – I didn’t think that was going to happen. ‘It didn’t really have a chance. Before I knew what was happening, I was caught between your Mister Bennett and the
vaettir
.’

He looked at me for a long while, face blank, smoking his cigarette.

‘I’m not lying, sir,’ said I.

‘Mister Ilys, my problem with you isn’t that I believe you’re lying. Or believe you’re not lying. My problem is discovering why you did what you did and who was your accomplice.’

‘I had no accomplice, I’m telling you,’ I said. There was a familiar buckskin portfolio tied with leather strands on the table. ‘You’ve got my papers there from the Governor himself. Contact Marcellus. Even better, contact his spymaster, Andrae. He’ll confirm some of the things I’m telling you.’

Brassus shook his head. ‘Mister Ilys, were you and Mister Bennett planning on robbing Tempus Union?’

That’s what this was all about. As always. As it is in Rume, so it is in Occidentalia. Money drives the gears of the world.

‘As all the old gods and new as my witness, I’d never set eyes or had any contact with Mister Bennett until that day.’

He stared for a long while. Finally he said, ‘I believe you, Mister Ilys, which is why you are not dead.’ He dropped the tail-end of his smoke on the stone floor and ground it out with his boot. ‘However, that leads to other questions.’

‘What are those?’ I asked.

‘Why were you on that boat?’

‘Heading downstream to meet my partner.’

‘A man named Fisk?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why do you carry a near carte blanche endorsement from the governor?’

‘I can’t tell you that, sir,’ I said, bowing my head.

‘Were you on the
Gemina
to interfere with the delivery of the silver to New Damnation?’

I looked at the man. He was well-fed, though not fat, and very clean and manicured. Pink fingernails and hair that’d seen soap recently. A city man. A soft man, used to the comforts of the plate and bed and market.

‘Sir, respectfully, you are interfering with something that goes beyond your little band of message-boys and delivery men,’ I said. His face darkened in response.

‘You are an ill-kempt half-breed who murdered one of my men,’ he said, in a clipped cadence. ‘It would behove you to remember that the gallows stands right outside this building.’

‘I am a freeman and a member of the fifth’s auxiliaries, an agent of Cornelius himself – you hold my bona fides right there – and should you hang me, you’ll have to cover up your crime, because my partner – a
godsdamned legate
– will make sure Tempus Union and you personally fall out of favour with the fifth and no God old or new will be able to salvage your career after that.’

His eyes narrowed, lips pursed. ‘I think we’re done here, Mister Ilys.’ He stood and brushed his crisp black uniform’s trousers to make sure the lines were straight and there was no ash on them. ‘I have tried to make you comfortable and will continue to do so, but you’ll remain here until you are willing to tell us why you were on the
Gemina
and what reason you had for murdering a Tempus man. Good day.’

He walked from the cells, leaving me alone.

Dvergar
live long and have even longer memories. And while I’m not full-blooded, I’ve been told I’m more dwarf than man. I’ve lived more than a century and a half, so far, and while I can feel my age, especially now, I am in no danger of re-joining the numinous spirits of my ancestors any time soon.

So the time Brassus kept me on ice was damnably boring, but it wasn’t maddening. My face and ribs healed slowly. I spent my time lost in memory. At that point I had more than a century of experiences to turn over as if I were a child wading upstream against the current of personal history and picking up stones in a creek to turn over in my hands.

We
dvergar
are built for time. We come from the earth and to the earth we will return and we take to solitude like a duck to swimming. Maybe that is why we are here. To wait. For what? Maybe that is what we wait for. To find out.

If there was any discomfort in those days I was incarcerated there, it was by thoughts of Beleth.

I was tortured by the thought of the engineer making his merry way through the Hardscrabble, unmolested. At night I had dreams of the man, and in them, he would perform
lingchi
on Agrippina – even though I knew she was dead: mine was the hand that slew her – but with each cut in the
vaettir’s
flesh, there was not blood, but fire. The fire of war.

It was morning, maybe the thirtieth day in the cell – and those days were
long
when I knew Beleth was loose and war on the wind – when Brassus entered and said, ‘Well, this might be your lucky day, Mister Ilys. It seems someone aboard the
Gemina
that night has been talking. A sweetboy, of all people.’

He extended a rolled newspaper through the bars, then, unlocking my door, he came within. It was a familiarity he allowed himself and I did not mind. We had reached some sort of unspoken agreement: I was not going to cause him any real trouble and he wasn’t going to treat me like I was an idiot. However, he did not wear a pistol when he joined me in my cell.

Sitting down on the stool they provided me, he withdrew two cigarettes, lit them and offered me one which I took, gratefully. I unrolled the newspaper – a copy of the
New Damnation Cornicen
– and began to read.

Dwarf kills
Tempus
Guard, Captured on Barge to Novo Dacia
the headline read. In a more salacious type, it read
DVERGAR GUNNED HIM DOWN.
And in smaller type below it
An Eyewitness Account of His Capture By
Tempus
Union Employees
.

I looked at Brassus who, having crossed his legs and looked supremely at ease, gestured with the hand holding the cigarette, making the smoke form eddies and whorls in the still cell air. ‘It seems you are famous, Mister Ilys.’

‘Hardly.’

Brassus smiled. ‘True. A better way to put it is that the “witness” wishes to be.’

I turned back to the article. It read:

New Damnation – 6 Nones Geminus –
Menæ Pallius

An Awful Crime

Violent as were the early days of frontier Occidentalia, nothing in recent memory equals the depravity of the events of 6 Ides Sexitilius, where a
dvergar
pistolero gunned down a Tempus Union guard escorting cargo from Hot Springs to New Damnation. Since the planting of the Fifth Occidentalia brag-rags in New Damnation, our stretch of the Big Rill has become known for its peace and prosperity. The damnable
vaettir
are scarcer and scarcer with every passing day. Yet violent incidents away from our larger urban centres – Harbour Town, New Damnation, Hot Springs and Passasuego – are occurring with more and more frequency, sullying the good name of our land with the rumour of wildness and outlawry.

A Hard-Bit, Scrappy Little Man

Not much is known about the murderer, an itinerant tinker
dvergar
who booked his passage under the name Dveng Ilys, but who is also known as Shoestring. One of the passengers of the
Gemina
, Sacchine Duplass, a male ‘entertainer’ from Passaseugo, was a witness to the crime and described the culprit thus: ‘He was a hard-bit, scrappy little man with a face like a walnut and just as brown. He had a bad look to him and he avoided all of the other passengers. We berthed in tents on the roof of the cargo hold and he made sure to place his as far away from everyone else’s as possible.’

Of the event itself, Sacchine Duplass was a direct witness. He described the murder thusly: ‘I heard voices, rough voices, arguing. About what I don’t know, but there was a lot of gambling and drinking going on the boat. I exited my tent and saw the dwarf pointing his gun at the guard. They spoke to each other again and then the dwarf shot him in the chest. It was a big sound, waking everyone on the barge. Then the little man just walked over to the guard and looked at him. The Tempus guardsmen tackled him and put him in chains.’

Lieutenant Brassus, the highest Tempus Union officer in New Damnation, told this reporter that the culprit was incarcerated in the New Damnation Tempus Union building and that ‘under the Imperial Charter granted to Tempus in 2603, Tempus Union, its landholdings and personnel, operates as a sovereign protectorate and has the authority to try and execute the prisoner if we deem it necessary.’

An Abrogation of Legal Rights?

While this reporter is glad that our beloved Hardscrabble Territories are a little safer with each successful apprehension of criminal elements, I cannot help but wonder if justice would not be better served in our Ruman courts, open to the public and with impartial advocates for each party. I am suspicious of any person, collective, or business entity who might act with impunity and separate to our lauded Ruman courts and forums, the most enlightened form of governance and jurisprudence in the known world.

The moral to this sad tale might be that you should not cross paths with Tempus Union if you want to retain your given rights as freemen under the Ruman Empire. I, for one, will be watching this issue most assiduously in the coming months. In the interim, it might be time for local advocates and magistrates to consider whether Tempus Union’s charter is for the best of the citizens of Occidentalia and the Hardscrabble Territories.

When I was finished reading, I folded the paper and handed it back to Brassus, who took it and looked at me.

‘So, what now?’ I asked. ‘Seems like it’s time to shit or get off the pot.’

He smiled in response. ‘Colourful, Mr Ilys. And why is that?’

‘They’ll be coming for me.’

Brassus’ brow furrowed. ‘Understand me, I would have strung you up by your neck and dragged your body through the streets except for your orders from Cornelius. Without compunction or regret. It is my task to protect Tempus Union’s profits, integrity, and future.’

‘Bully for you,’ I said.

‘Again, I wish to know why you were on that boat and what intentions you had.’

‘Either I tell you and Cornelius crucifies me, or I don’t and you string me up by the neck. I’ll take the hanging. I hear crucifixion is mighty painful.’

‘I understand your position, Mr Ilys. I wish you could understand mine.’