Vile

by Keith Crawford

  But these days people didn’t stay out much after dark. Haf would have checked the stables after closing the bar, and she hadn’t said anything before coming to bed. The wet grass soaked his slippers. He had snuck out of bed and come downstairs to finish some paperwork. The noise had disturbed him just as he had got the fire going. He could easily turn around, bolt the door, and go back to warming his feet.

  But what if it was someone injured, or in trouble? When had the Black Dog made them all scared of doing good?

  He started to draw the long knife from his belt, then snapped it back with a shake of his head as he shuffled up to the stable door. Probably just cut myself anyway. The door was ajar. He pushed it, but it jammed on loose straw. Something moved inside the stable. Something heavy dragged along the floor. Gwyion pulled his collar up about his throat.

  “Hello?” He called. “Who’s there?”

  What if it was a child?

  Gwyion leaned against the door and shoved it open. The straw came loose, and he stumbled. The dim light from outside did little for the dismal interior. He could only see black shapes; was that the cart out the back?

  “I don’t mean you any harm,” Gwyion said.

  An uncomfortable cough.

  “It’s me, Papa.”

  “Derec? When did you get back from the castle?”

  Gwyion’s grown son stepped out from his hiding place in the far stall. He was wearing his out-of-town clothes, but he had dirt on his face and straw in his hair. He opened his mouth to speak, but whatever he had to say was too big to get out, so he just stood there, gripping his trousers in his fists. Gwyion pushed the door all the way open and stepped steadily inside.

  “What are you doing out here? How can you possibly see in all this dark?” Gwyion had to breath deep to slow down, but his mind didn’t slow; his mind never slowed. “You know, straw isn’t the best place to hide that chest.”

  Don’t be too challenging. He’s scared. Why is he scared? Don’t make him more scared.

  “I’m telling you this as a retired moonshine smuggler, so I’ve failed at hiding with the best of them. I do, however, have a cracking cellar box hidden away out the back. If it’s something you don’t want your mother to see, we should probably put it down there.”

  Derec’s composure crumpled.

  “Oh, Papa, I’ve really messed up.”

  Derec explained: Anton’s instructions, the journey to Durançon, the fight with the Magistrate. When his son told him where the chest came from, Gwyion almost fell over. Instead, he put both his hands on his son’s shoulders.

  “Come inside, Derec.”

  “No.” Derec’s shoulders shivered beneath Gwyion’s hands. It was cold in the stable, and each pant of breath clouded between them. “You shouldn’t be involved in this. I’ll take the chest back in the morning, apologise, and accept responsibility for what I did.”

  Gwyion couldn’t swallow. Was that pride or frustration blocking his throat?

  “You will do no such thing,” Haf said.

  She was in the doorway, a candle in her left hand, her stiletto knife in her right. The blanket from their bed was wrapped around her shoulders; Haf was twice as beautiful in her forties as she had been in her twenties. The wild sixteen-year-old he had married was now just a flash in the corner of her eyes, or in the way she smiled when she sat on his lap and they played the piano together.

  “I broke the law, Mama.”

  “So you want to turn yourself in? Are you an idiot? They’ll kill you.”

  “It could work. There would be a trial.” Gwyion said. Every word felt like treachery, but this was no time to be squeamish. “If he turns himself over straight away, the Magistrate is more likely to show mercy.”

  “It’s the best way I can protect you both,” Derec said.

  “Don’t be so naive! Tannyr Brek has waited years for an opportunity like this. They’ll execute you, then come after us as well.”

  Derec bit his lip. Haf’s voice rose.

  “You did a stupid thing, Derec, but noble bullshit is just a way of making yourself feel better. Own your mistake. Fight to make it right.”

  “How?”

  Haf looked at Gwyion.

  “Massen?”

  “Fyrsil.”

  “Which one do you want to talk to?”

  “I’ll go to the mines. You know what to do here.”

  She nodded, then turned to Derec.

  “Your father’s right. You should put the chest in the cellar then come inside. It’ll be an early start in the morning.”

  And she was gone, the candlelight with her. Derec still shook beneath his father’s hands.

  “I’ve got to…Papa, I can’t. I’ve got to do the right thing.”

  How did I raise a good man? Gwyion took the back of Derec’s head in his hand and pulled him close.

  “You took a chance, Derec, and if you take chances, sometimes you lose. But if you never take a chance, you can never win. It is experience that turns good intentions into good actions.” As he embraced his son, his cheek got wet. “Your intentions were good. Now let our experience sort this out.”

  Chapter 9

  It was Ventros 10th, and Wardens were out in force on the streets of Lutense. Burning warehouses glowed red against the night sky of Trist’s capital. Elianor, shoulders low and hand on the hilt of her rapier, skirted the puddles from the overflowing gutters and ran through the shadows. In two nights, she would begin the long journey to Shadowgate. Tomorrow, she would confront her Pupil-Master Théophile Carada and tell him she should not go. Tonight, she had a life to save.

  This part of town stank of urine and wet dog. Houses stacked on shops stacked on gutters and drains and sewers and stench. The winding alleys condensed and contorted in symmetry with the riverside. The rain fell so thick the sky flowed into the river. Without her uniform jacket, Elianor was just another cloaked figure up to mischief on her way through the Alley of Sighs.

  There was torchlight at the bottom of the hill, guttering brands that struggled against the sheet rain. Elianor took shelter beneath the cornice of one of the many doors into the street and peered at the silhouettes of soldiers at the end of the road. Behind them was the river, beyond the river the burning warehouses. She would have to pass the soldiers to reach the stairs to the waterside. Between the torches, a great figure rose. A man’s scream was cut short.

  It was a Warden checkpoint.

  The Wardens of the Northern Kingdoms hung like vultures over Trist and had done so for a hundred years. The wars of 1643-1648 had briefly driven them out, the same wars that had bankrupted the country and killed the King before last. For almost thirty years, the North had let them be. Then came the revolution. Elianor had been a little girl during the great purges, bloody intrigues, and civil wars that had marked Trist’s struggle for independence. But she remembered when the North had sailed their metal warships up the river into the heart of the capital. They called it liberation, not conquest, when the ships disgorged an army of Royalist exiles. The Republican Guard, last loyal soldiers of the embattled revolution, fought street by street. Northern firepower blew those streets apart.

  The North put the dead King Lascalles’ niece on the throne. Queen Beatrice requested the Northerners stay to support the transition, and their ambassador, his brightly coloured clothes spotlessly clean, suggested legal reform to promote ‘experience’ and limit suffrage to the owners of land: a prettied-up demand the Queen was in no position to refuse. Then the Royalists celebrated their victory with sparkling balls for returned debutantes, and Northerners fluttered about the court, calling it the return of democracy as if saying the words made it true. The Wardens remained to keep the peace.

  This Warden was between Elianor and the river. The Queen’s Guard stood back from it, mean kids hanging around the school bully. Even without their armour, most Northerners stood a good head taller than the average citizen of Trist. Inside their armour, the Wardens were giants, if indeed there was a man wi
thin, and the Wardens were not another of the North’s strange machines. No morsel of flesh could be seen beneath the metal; intersected plates of steel shifted and hissed like gears. The Wardens didn’t use firearms but carried batons that could incapacitate a man with one strike. The best revolutionary minds at the Academy theorised that the North had found some means to release phlogiston—the fire element— via the thick, twisted wires that connected the baton to the Warden’s blue helmet. A black screen masked their face. You couldn’t take their weapon without taking their head.

  Elianor disliked the notion of phlogiston. It was an explanation that did not explain. A mysterious word substituted for fire to make it seem the mystery was solved, hardly better than the common people’s mutterings about Northern witchcraft: calling it phlogiston brought you no closer to reproducing the effect. But without capturing a Warden, without taking one apart, they could never know: man or machine; magic or science. And if anyone killed a Warden, if anyone could kill a Warden, more would come, and more, until the Northern armies sailed back to burn down the homes of anyone they felt was unreasonable or undemocratic.

  The screaming man dangled like a rag doll from the great metal gauntlet of the Warden. A strike from the baton stole his strength to resist. Elianor edged closer. Could she get past, now, quickly, while the Warden was distracted? The torchlight danced from raindrop to raindrop. The Warden leaned forward, the black faceguard glowing blue around its outside. A thin line of light passed down the screen and illuminated the defenceless man’s terrified face.

  “Possible taint,” the baritone Warden boomed. “Extraction requested.”

  Fascination and horror moved Elianor forward. Queen’s edict permitted the Warden’s scan, and vastly unpopular letters of cachet allowed the imprisonment and disappearance of its victims. Elianor had never seen a positive result so close. Possible taint? Taint of what? Extraction to where? She stepped into another doorway, a spear’s throw from where the desperate prisoner had begun to weep. Could she intervene? As a Magistrate, even a pupil, she had the right to pass the checkpoints without inspection. But Elianor was not dressed as a Magistrate. And if she identified herself, her master would know she was away from her post.

  A brief fantasy. Fight it. Kill it. Be the Magistrate who destroyed a Warden. Discover if there was a human face hidden beneath the mask. Rescue the prisoner. Call the North’s bluff and prove they didn’t have the courage for another war. The rioters in the docks would rise on the news. She could ride the wave all the way to the palace. A hero of a third revolution; build a new world free from tyranny, where you could be more than just somebody’s daughter. Her hand was on her sword.

  The door opened behind her. A flood of light lit up her silhouette.

  “Who goes there?” The closest of the Queen’s Guard had spotted the light.

  A hand grabbed her from the doorway. Elianor snatched the hand from her shoulder, ignored the cry of “wait!”, and twisted at the hip. An aproned man fell to the ground before her. She put her rapier to his throat. A hundred metres away, the Queen’s Guard ran up the street towards her. The Warden, slow, implacable, released its prisoner and marched after them.

  “Comrade!” gasped the man who had grabbed her. “Mercy!”

  Elianor lifted her sword. “Talk fast.”

  “She sent us to help.”

  Truth. It was in his voice, as much as in the callouses on his open hands or the heavy footsteps of the charging Queen’s Guard.

  “Move,” Elianor snarled. She drove the man back through the door as he scrambled to his feet. Inside was a public house, a grimy, insect-infested squat. The straw was stacked high towards the thick ceiling beams as if thrust by a stomach contracting to vomit. A cluster of men and women staggered back as Elianor drove their leader amongst them. They carried improvised weapons, rolling pins and kitchen knives, one a spade, not one a real sword. Elianor pushed past them, looking for a back door out. The front door slammed behind her.

  “This way, quick.”

  The aproned man led her into the side room. Another held open a trapdoor, all the while glancing anxiously at the window. The Queen’s Guard banged on the front door and demanded entry. The anxious man pointed down into a cellar, which was lit by a single lantern set on a barrel.

  “Through the sewers. She awaits you beneath the Bridge of Headless Women.”

  Elianor jumped through the trapdoor just as the Queen’s Guard kicked in the main entrance. She rolled as she landed, colliding with a stack of crates but was on her feet before they fell. The trapdoor was thrown closed; it rumbled and vibrated as something was dragged over the top. Elianor grabbed the lantern from the barrel and raised it high, turning 90 degrees at a time to scan the room. Upstairs a woman screamed in rage and pain, followed by a thud and the sound of wood splintering. On the wall was a metal grate, which when removed showed a square hole through to an unpleasant smell and greater darkness.

  “Where is she?” somebody shouted.

  Elianor jumped through the hole in the wall. It took a moment to fix the grate back in place. There was another loud bang upstairs. She raised the lantern. More stairs, down towards the level of the river. How long before the Queen’s Guard found the trapdoor? Before the Warden broke through? The stairs led to a semi-spherical tunnel, its ceiling so low even Elianor had to duck her head. Rainwater pushed a flood of excrement and filth out towards the river, and a steady breeze brought the stink from the water straight back. Moonlight. Elianor blew out the lantern and cast it aside. She could no longer hear people dying.

  Sewer water splashed up the back of her legs as she ran to the end of the tunnel. Thick iron bars were driven into the stone. She pulled as hard as she could. There was no door. There was no gate. There was no way she could slip between the bars. The Warden would make short work of the men and women defending her escape route, and soon the Queen’s Guard searching the pub would find the trapdoor down to the cellar.

  “Elianor.”

  Firm, calm, commanding: Genevieve Grime stepped from behind the wall on the other side of the barrier, her thick cloak wrapped around the grey uniform of a Republican Senator. She hadn’t been there for long. Water still ran from the peak of her hood.

  “You must flee, Senator.” Elianor wrapped her hands tight around the bars. “They raided the printers at Broken Loaf Street. Your name is on a list, and a Warden is close behind me.”

  Genevieve stepped up to the grill. Elianor raised her face to keep looking her in the eyes. In the low light, everything lost its colour. They had never kissed, not even after Elianor had graduated from the Academy and Genevieve was no longer her instructor. What difference a kiss?

  “Théophile wants to send you to Shadowgate.”

  Was that why Elianor had been summoned? Why people had risked their lives to get her here? It didn’t make sense.

  “He wants me out of the capital. I think he knows I work for you.”

  Genevieve laughed. The laughter pirouetted over the smoke from the burning warehouses, which hung low over the river, made thick and languid by the rain. For the first time Elianor noticed the sounds of the riots close by, the roar as protesters smashed whatever they could get their hands on. Genevieve took hold of a bar. Her fingertips brushed Elianor’s.

  “You are not the centre of the world, Elianor Paine. And neither am I.”

  “Genevieve, they will kill you!”

  “The Wardens took Senator Groan’s son last night, on his way back from a meeting of the Club of Thirty.”

  The memory of laughter was finally killed by the rain.

  “Beaufort Groan is a member of the Club of Thirty?”

  “Now the Senate know the Wardens can touch them. Passing this law is proving harder than Théophile expected: the House is split and Shadowgate can be the swing vote. If we win, if the Republicans win, there is only one possible outcome.”

  “A vote of no confidence in Senator Carada.”

  “The government falls and there will b
e a new election. As soon as we have the Presidency, we can pass a resolution for the North to remove their Wardens. If they do, the Queen will be gone by winter; if they don’t, revolution. And that is why Théophile is sending you to Shadowgate.”

  There was an explosion in the sewer tunnel. Gunpowder. The Queen’s Guard had gunpowder. They must have blown their way through the trapdoor. Elianor looked over her shoulder. If her way back was blocked, she wouldn’t see until it was too late. She pressed closer to the bars.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispered. The sounds of the fighting in the dockyards grew louder. Genevieve looked up along the riverbank, out of Elianor’s line of sight. There was the shrieking buzz of a Warden’s baton. Genevieve grimaced, then leaned in close enough that her nose pressed between the bars and her lips nearly touched Elianor’s ear.

  “Senator Vile is a war hero. He could turn the vote on his own. Lord Carada is relying on him to vote for the Queen. But you have a real opportunity to change the outcome.”

  “Why me?”

  “Take this,” Genevieve said. It was a dossier, a file used to store details of a Magistrate’s investigations, bound in a scarlet ribbon. Elianor recognised her father’s looped handwriting on the front.

  “Nathaniel Vile, the senator’s second son, is the key,” Genevieve said. “This is your chance, Elianor. To perfect the revolution.”

  There was an enormous crash from back within the tunnel, followed by the sound of metal falling on stone. The grill. They had found the tunnel into the sewer. Elianor shoved the dossier in her satchel, tight next to her book of law, and tried to grasp Genevieve’s hand. But Genevieve had taken a step backwards and was staring over Elianor’s shoulder.

  “You need to go,” Genevieve said. “Be careful in Shadowgate. You may be expected.”