Dead Man in a Ditch

by Luke Arnold

  29

  I handed over the machine. That convinced Victor, for the moment, to give me the benefit of the doubt. He cut me down and I refilled my pockets, then we went and got Frankie so we could trek down the cliffs together.

  Night was falling but the light on Victor’s helmet lit our way. We had to walk farther south to get to a bigger path that would accommodate the horse and I asked Victor if he wanted to jump on her back.

  “That’s nice of you, but no thanks. Heights and me don’t mix. To tell you the truth, I’ll be happy when we’re back at the bottom of the valley with a roof over our heads.”

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Same place I bet you came from. Sunder is sucking in everyone like it’s made of quicksand. We could’ve made this place work on our own terms. Adapted. But a couple of my kind got all excited, saying there was money to be made in the big city. They all followed each other out there and now I’m the only one left.”

  We walked the long way down to the bottom of the valley on dirt paths, avoiding the bridges and stairs. I thanked Victor for taking the extra time so we could bring the horse, but he shrugged it off.

  “Better for me, anyway: the leg don’t like stairs. Not rickety bridges much either. So it don’t bother me to—” He held up a hand and we all stopped. Up ahead, on the path, the lantern light caught the outline of a large hare.

  Victor pulled the machine out of his belt and held it in front of him. He closed one eye, grimaced, and pressed the button.

  It clicked. But nothing happened.

  Victor swore.

  “I see you’ve been busy.”

  The hare ran away, but not far. Victor handed me the machine, less possessive of it than he’d been a minute ago, and pulled the crossbow from his side.

  He walked ahead, which gave me a chance to check out his metal leg in action. I’d seen peg-legs before but this was a far more impressive piece of engineering. The movement was so smooth that if he’d been wearing full trousers I wouldn’t have guessed that he was an amputee.

  Thump.

  The bolt hit its mark and Victor made a satisfied noise.

  “It seems I’m able to offer you some hospitality after all.”

  The clay hut had a forge in the corner, an anvil, a huge wooden tub of black water and a workbench. One corner was a living space. It had a low bed and a little fireplace with a black pot hanging over it.

  There were wires wrapped around everything and pieces of metal scattered across the floor. Cogs of every size were kept on poles and in wooden containers. Hinges, screws and plugs had been tucked into containers or came tumbling out of open drawers. Leaning against the walls were half-finished versions of other contraptions: more legs, more weapons and more tools whose purpose I couldn’t imagine.

  Victor explained that he’d made his own leg, as well as the lightweight crossbow, the trap, and, of course, the killing machine. We gave Frankie a hut of her own and put the hare in the pot while I gave Victor a brief rundown of my history: grew up in Weatherly, moved to Sunder, joined the Opus. He listened with only passing curiosity and didn’t ask any questions. Then, once the stew was cooking, he dropped the killing machine onto his bench.

  “I tell you, for all the trouble this thing had caused, it ain’t even that complicated. Nothing compared to the other inventions I’ve made in my time.”

  “Then why hasn’t anybody made one before?”

  “Because everyone else is trying to replace what was already there. You can’t just shove some non-magical material into an old magic contraption and hope it works. You gotta go back to the beginning and look at it like we never had magic in the first place.”

  Victor cracked the machine open, bending it on a hinge. He turned it upside down and banged it against the bench so that three copper cylinders dropped out. They looked like the caps of expensive pens but each of them had a black ring around the tip.

  “It’s simpler than the old weapons. More unstable, too. But at least I can do this on my own. I needed a Wizard’s help for the old ones. Then a Fae willing to do a little enchanting.” Victor removed his goggles and turned off the lamp that was hanging above us. “You ever use one?”

  “A magical firearm? No. I saw others carrying them in the Opus, though.”

  “You know how they work?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “Well, Wizards were able to summon energy from some far-off place to the space between their hands. But only for a moment. We Goblins found a way to hold it there. A tiny portal could be contained in an instrument and opened and closed with the push of a button. It was an expensive but common technique for a while. They even used it to upgrade the lamps in Sunder. They put portals in the pipes to bring the fires up from below. Much safer than running mechanical tubes down into the pits.”

  That was news to me. I’d always assumed that the fires had been right beneath our feet. I suppose it made sense to keep as much distance and technology between the city and the pits as possible.

  “Anyway, those magical weapons could shoot out fire or ice or whatever you wanted. They had a shelf life and they were damn expensive but they worked. Of course, when the Coda happened, that all went to shite. Since then, my kind and yours and everyone else have been working on ways to make those weapons again. But it’s impossible. The only way to go forward is to go right back to the start and make something new.”

  He went over to the corner of the room and pulled a canvas sheet off a silver chest.

  “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m messing round with this, all right? It’s dangerous.”

  He opened the lid. Whatever was inside must have been delicate because the walls of the chest were thick and padded. Victor picked a silver mug up from the floor, dipped it into the box and filled it with fine, red sand. Then he closed it all up and brought the mug back to his desk.

  “You know about the Ragged Plains?”

  “Only that they’re inhospitable.”

  “Mostly inhospitable. Well, they were, anyway. A lot of things got worse with the Coda but some things became easier to manage, like this sand from the northern desert. I took a trip up there last year, did some experiments, and came back with these babies.”

  He poured a small amount of the red sand into each of the copper caps. His movements were slow and deliberate, taking special care not to spill a single grain. Then he reached into the drawer of the desk and pulled out three metal balls the size of peas.

  “Can I look at those?” I asked.

  He handed me one of the slugs and picked another out of the drawer. I rolled it around in my hand. It was heavy for its size. Dull gray. The same as the piece of metal that was lodged in my office floor.

  “Now, don’t startle me or nothing while I do this. I’m coming to the delicate part.”

  He placed a metal ball on each of the cylinders, resting at the opening. Then he took a tiny gold hammer from his belt and gently tapped the first ball until it stuck fast in the cap. When all three were done, he replaced the hammer and turned my attention to the machine itself.

  He opened the hinge right up and pointed to two metal circles, pressed up against each other.

  “When you press the trigger, these two rings spin against each other, creating sparks and a shiteload of heat.” He took the three full caps, slid them inside the machine and cracked it back together. “When they do that at the base of one of these caps, it sets off the desert dust and shoots a metal ball out the end. If any poor fucker is standing in front of it when it goes off – he won’t be there for much longer. So, with that in mind,” he pointed the hollow end of the pipe at my chest, “take yourself over to that wall.”

  I thought it was part of the show but Victor Stricken’s scowling face was even more serious than it had been all night.

  “You’ll find a set of cuffs on the end of that chain. Get them round your wrist.”

  I did as I was told. The cuffs were connected to a thick black chain and there was alre
ady some dried blood around the rim of the manacles.

  “You could have done the same thing with the crossbow,” I said.

  “No, I couldn’t have. You might’ve taken your chances with the bow. But this? This is something else, ain’t it, stranger? You’ve seen its power, just like I have. While I’m holding this, we both know you’re gonna do exactly as I say.”

  He was right. There was no running from the machine. No chance worth taking. I’d seen how it had blown apart Lance Niles’s head, ripping the life out of him before he could blink. I closed the cuffs around my wrists until they snapped shut.

  “Good lad. Now, get comfortable. You’re gonna tell me why you’re really here and if I don’t like it or I don’t believe it, then I’ll give you a demonstration of how my machine works, and there will be a lot more stew for me.”

  30

  I found a way to sit against the wall that wasn’t completely uncomfortable while I took Victor Stricken through my last few days: the dead body in the Bluebird Lounge, the mistaken arrest of Rick Tippity and the mysterious package containing the machine.

  There was no point lying to him. If I wanted him to fill in the gaps of my story, he needed to know where they were. Besides, he was so brutally blunt in the way he spoke that I couldn’t help but trust him. He held all the cards and all the chips. All I had to offer was the truth.

  His face was bunched up, acting like he didn’t believe anything I was saying. But he listened. He didn’t interrupt. When I was done, he didn’t say anything. He just passed the machine from one hand to the other and licked his lips.

  Finally, he took a single key from his belt and threw it into my lap.

  “That’ll unlock one of them. Not the other. The stew’s ready.”

  While we ate, he asked a couple of follow-up questions. My answers must have done something to ease his mind because after he licked the last bit of stew from his bowl, he decided to share some of his story with me.

  Just like the Goblin back in Sunder had told me, Victor was a renowned inventor and an even more famous pain in the ass. Before the Coda, he was a prolific creator of magical weapons. Not magical enhancers like staffs or wands that only work in combination with the powers of the spell-caster; Victor built equipment that granted magical power to those who would otherwise be unable to wield it.

  Most Goblins gave up on invention after the Coda. They’d spent their lives making ingenious creations that would never work again so they moved on to other professions and tried to forget what was lost.

  Victor had a different point of view. The world had been reset and everything could be rediscovered. For an engineering genius who had already mastered so many disciplines, being able to write the rulebooks from the very beginning was a gift, like forgetting the end of your favorite story so you can read it as if for the first time.

  The killing machine wasn’t supposed to be so important. It was a prototype: the simplest application of how the powers of post-Coda desert dust could be harnessed. To Victor, it was a toy. It helped him hunt on his journey home from the Ragged Plains and it gave him something fun to show his fellow Goblins when he returned. It wasn’t created as an end in itself. Victor was passionate about new modes of transport, automated farming, and industrial equipment that could revive the workforce. A little pellet-shooting piece of metal wasn’t supposed to be anything to sing about.

  But someone did sing. A few months after Victor returned to Aaron Valley, a Human arrived. The stranger knew about the machine and he wanted to pay Victor to build another one. A lot of other ones.

  “The whole world is hungry now. Hungry for things we lost that won’t come back. But this man had a mad kind of hunger in his eyes. The hunger for power. I told him that he was never going to get the weapon but that I would feed him a couple of bullets if he didn’t leave me alone.”

  The man went away. A month later, he came back with friends.

  “Luckily, I’d already put up a bunch of those traps. You stumbled into one of the nicer ones. Some of them aren’t so forgiving.”

  I didn’t prod Victor on the details. The dried blood around my wrist let me know that he wasn’t a man of idle threats.

  “The next person who arrived was an old friend. Another Goblin who told me she was returning from Sunder after realizing that I’d been right all along.” He smiled bitterly. “I’m a smart fellow, I tell you true, but flattery works on me as well as anyone. She spent a week assisting me, always at my side. I showed her where the traps were and we even made some more. She told me that more Goblins would be coming home soon because they’d all realized that I was right. How easy it is to believe the things you most want to hear. Then, one morning, she was gone and the weapon was gone with her.”

  We sat in silence for a while, both thinking about the gap between our stories. How had the machine gone from a Goblin thief to being wrapped up on my desk like a gift?

  “I should kill you,” he said, so casually that it took me a moment to process the words.

  “Uh… why?”

  “I told you how I made this. When I did that, I already thought I’d be using it on you so I didn’t worry too much. Now, I think I might’ve made a mistake.”

  He shrugged apologetically, like it was no big thing. As if he’d forgotten to water my houseplants or eaten the last piece of cake.

  “I appreciate the fact you’re torn up about it, Victor, but is there anything I can do to change your mind?”

  He scratched his head, thinking it over.

  “I’ll sleep on it and tell you in the morning. Let me get you a blanket.”

  He got me more covers and a sack stuffed with padding to use as a pillow.

  “Thanks, Vic. I have to say, out of all the people who’ve wanted to kill me, nobody has ever been quite so nice about it.”

  I slept better than I had in years. Peaceful. It’s funny what a death sentence can do.

  Around midnight, the screaming started.

  31

  I was pulled from dreamless sleep by the echoes of a man wailing somewhere up above. From the sound of his unbridled screams, he had stumbled into one of Victor’s more devilish traps. His cries were full of shock and fear and disbelief. The ringing bell returned to cheer him on.

  The door to the hut flew open and Victor pointed his killing machine at my face. I flinched. I don’t think I’ll ever become accustomed to staring that thing down.

  “I thought you said you work alone.”

  “I do.”

  “So that ain’t one of your friends up there?”

  “I don’t have friends, Victor.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “But I have been thinking. Whoever stole your toy likely didn’t choose to hand it over to me. Somebody must have taken it from them.”

  “You think they’re here to get it back?”

  “More likely, having lost the original, they decided to track down the one guy who would be able to make them a new one.”

  Victor wanted to argue but my logic was too sound.

  “Stay there. I’ll go ask our visitor a few questions. He don’t sound like he’s in much of a state to spin a good yarn, so you better hope his story matches yours.”

  He tucked the machine into his belt and picked up his crossbow.

  “How many were there?” I asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “How many men? The last time they came here?”

  Victor sucked his teeth, already angry that I was thinking clearer than he was.

  “Half a dozen. Or thereabouts. A couple of them ran off.”

  He’d already worked out what I was getting at.

  “What are the chances that they’d come back with fewer men this time?”

  Of course, there were other possibilities. Maybe some hunter had stumbled into a trap by mistake. Maybe it was a returning Goblin who hadn’t got the memo about watching his feet. It didn’t have to be an angry army coming for his secrets. Of course it didn’t. But,
we both knew, it probably was.

  “Sit tight,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He marched out into the night. The screaming continued. Then, it was joined by another noise. A thumping, rumbling rhythm. First, up above. Then closer. And closer again.

  BANG!

  The sound of cracking beams and splintering wood.

  “You bastards!” screamed Victor. Frankie was making all kinds of noises. I hoped she wasn’t hurt. More rumbles and more crashes came from all sides. I had no idea what was happening.

  Then, the room exploded.

  A boulder came through the wall on the other side of the room, shattering wood and scattering tools. It went through the fireplace and spread hot coals everywhere. One wall collapsed. The roof followed, and I was left tied to half a house, covered in shards of broken clay.

  There was no way of breaking the chain. No way of snapping the thick wooden beam it was connected to. But the clay around the beam was already cracked. I pulled back as far as the cuffs would let me, then jumped forward and rammed my shoulder into the wood. It didn’t go down, but there was just enough movement to encourage me to do it again. It took three more cracks before the beam started tipping.

  I tried to slow the fall but the beam was too heavy. It slammed against the ground pulling me with it, and the side of my head hit the wood so hard it could have driven in a nail.

  I shook the stars from my vision, spraying specks of blood like a wet dog, trying to identify that strange sound.

  It was Victor and Frankie. They were screaming.

  I dragged the chain beneath the wooden beam as the hot coals set alight the debris at my feet. The attackers must have been running out of rocks because the crashes only came once every ten seconds and they were smaller but still deadly. I stood up, chain dangling from my wrists, and found Victor pinned beneath a boulder, on his back, with blood coming out of his mouth. He wasn’t moving and his eyes were pointing in different directions.

  The boulder wouldn’t move, even when I put my whole weight against it.