Death of East

by Michael John Grist

  Then entered Arabella.

  Her abrupt appearance in their smoke-filled courtroom, waving a sheaf of dotted telegraphy paper in one hand and a curious map in the other, thoroughly disrupted the collegial mood. Her eyes blazed with anger.

  "A stroke?" she barked at them, contempt plain in her aquiline features. "Must I lead you by the nose to every single discovery?"

  One of the Prime Minister's guard stumbled in after her with blood trickling from his lips, holding her musket-tamping rod.

  "She asked me to hold this, then butted me in the face!"

  The Prime Minister hushed the man, then turned with a generous and expansive sweep of his hand to Arabella.

  "Lady Arabella, what a pleasure! We are all most grateful to you for all you have done, but as can see we are quite in the midst of-"

  "Quite in the midst of making custard of an omelet," she spat. "Did I not tell you it was murder, yet even now the fleet is levying to leave? Are you all quite mad? Do you wish to lose our last chance to hold the Empire together?"

  The Prime Minister smiled broadly. He was handsomely dressed, as befit the importance of the moment, and confident in his top hat and pleated breeches. He was also well-accustomed to steadying the nerves of hysterical women, with a swift slap if need be, followed by a snifter of whiskey.

  "Come, Lady Arabella," he soothed, "even you must see the folly of further alarm. The giant East is dead of a blockaged blood-clot, that is all. Even now our best medicians are lodging to remove it, that we might fetch it back for display in the Londinium Museum. You have done your part, and for that we are thankful. Now, would you excuse us to do ours?"

  "No," replied Arabella.

  The Prime Minister's face quirked with amusement. "I beg your pardon?"

  "I said no, and for the reason why- I entreat you to circle this island once and look upon the rear of East's head. It has been cracked open as though by a blow of God's hammer. Further, you will see a tremendous array of great gouged valleys in the throne's rear face, none of which were present when I last visited this isle 25 years past. The upmost of them are even visible from here, as divots in the shoulder of his throne."

  The Prime Minister looked to the Minister for Trade, who looked back defiantly.

  "Madam, what are you suggesting?" he asked. "I have been assured those 'divots' are quite in keeping with the movement of glacial ice through the ages. Perhaps the same could be said for these gouges?"

  Arabella snorted. "Glacial movement over the last 25 years? That is athletic ice indeed. But very well, sir, I point you to these letters of telegraph, commissioned before our fleet ever set sail." She held up the thin paper covered in dots and dashes. "Do any of you read Morse, or shall I read them for you?"

  The Prime Minister gave her a look of congenial appeasement. A swift slap was not always the best way. On occasion simply riding out the storm brooked the best results. "Very well, please read them. But to what end, Lady?"

  "Listen," and she began to read, an account of numerous and fleeting eclipses witnessed over the Europan continent beginning five years hence and finishing three months ago. When it was done she produced another telegraph that recounted a similar phenomenon, fleeting eclipses sighted over the Ancharcita colony, beginning three months ago and continuing to the present.

  The Prime Minister listened patiently, regarding her as though a puzzle to be solved. "Fleeting eclipses? What are we to make of this, Lady?"

  Arabella strode to his desk and spread the vellum before him. It was the same topographical map of the world she had first shown to the Minister for Trade. Now she stabbed a single column at the far left side.

  "There is your murderer."

  He stooped, studied the map for a long moment. "Is that the cardinal West you're referring to?"

  "It is indeed."

  An awkward silence. "Isn't he rather far from here?"

  The room chuckled at this. Arabella ignored them. "Yes, he is. That is why the gouge marks on the far face of East's throne matter. I believe West is restarting the cardinal war. In that war West was weakest, and so took the least of all poles, and now he is striving to upgrade himself. I believe he has killed East by hurling immense rocks over Armorica, rocks big enough to eclipse the sun, that he might gain in primacy."

  She stepped back from the Prime Minister and turned to address the gaggle of gathered men peering at her through the fug of smoke. "Even now he is aiming for South. The dates of the eclipses confirm it; when he was done with East he turned his aim over Ancharcita, and if his long years of practice have honed his aim at all, we should expect South to die within a year."

  Stunned silence. The Minister for Geomancy stood to give a slow mocking clap, but the Prime Minister silenced him with a gesture. Instead he turned to the Minister for Trade.

  "What make you of this sir?"

  The Minister stood, turning a pocket-square in his hands. "Three months ago I would not have countenanced it. But as has been noted by my esteemed colleagues," he nodded here to the Minister for Geomancy, whose moustaches trembled with ire, "the wrong amount of belief makes fools of us all."

  The Prime Minister chewed upon that a moment, as Arabella calmly gazed at him. "And what then would you recommend, Lady?"

  "War," she answered at once. "Outright, with utmost prejudice. We must kill or disable the giant West, lest he murder next South, then North, and leave us a world wherein the only orientable direction will be his. All naval shipping, except that which proceeds by hugging the coastlines of a landmass, will be rendered impossible. The Empire will be ruptured, and with it all sense of order. The Abindians will return to their caste, the tribals to cannibalism and war. Our names will go down in infamy as the ones who broke the world."

  Silence reigned in the makeshift courtroom.

  "What say you, sirs?" Arabella pressed, "will you fight for your Empire?"

  The Minister for Geomancy rose to his feet, red-faced and clearly no longer able to contain himself. "Nose-candy and unicorns!" he thundered. "The ravings of a mad witch, and that is all. Madam, your day in this court is done."

  Arabella turned on the man with cold steel in her eyes. "Label me either mad or a witch again, sir, and know that your next words will follow absent a tongue." She turned back to the Prime Minister. "Is his a cadre to which you belong?"

  "I will not be so threatened!" fumed the Minister for Geomancy, rounding on the Prime Minister, "and by a bitch like-"

  Afterwards, the Minister for Trade could scarcely say what happened next. While he clearly saw Arabella turn, and her coats ruffle, he saw no evidence of the stiletto blade that ultimately ended up embedded in the Minister for Geomancy's mouth, pinning his tongue through his cheek. Perhaps ejected from her sleeve? Perhaps drawn from a baldric hidden about her waist? In either case, he gasped as the offending Minister fell in his chair, blood flowing over his mustaches.

  Arabella remained still as tempered steel at their midst.

  "Are you of his cadre?" she asked again, gazing at the paling Prime Minister. "Would you save the Empire, and the world?"

  He cleared his throat once, then a second time as though the first had not done the job. Valets raced forward to gather Geomancy away to the medicians. "I will thank you to keep your blades to yourself, Lady," he at last managed.

  "And I your hands," replied Arabella, eyes still smoldering, "or have you forgotten that your wife is my second cousin?"

  The Prime Minister paled ghostly at that. "Very well," he said weakly. "To war it is, then."

  * * *

  The fleet departed at haste, under Arabella's starkly focused eye. The hastily erected courthouse was left as it was, the issue of a flag planted in East's head of no concern. What mattered was the race west.

  In Arabella's chambers as the sun set without, the Minister for Trade sat sweating nervously on a tall stool beside her charting desk, listening as she laid out her plan.

  "East, through the Panamian canal," she explained, "collecting wha
t ordnance and iron ore we can on the way. We have the knack of trigonometric reckoning handily now, so we should lose no days to delay. From there to the isle of West, a place I have never visited, whereupon the war will commence. Minister, are you quite well?"

  He only half-registered the question, as running through his head was their first conversation in her sitting room, when she'd declaimed that should he charge her with fabrication, she would have his head for her wall. After witnessing Geomancy's fate, he could scarce escape the thought of himself decapitated and displayed amongst her other bodiless trophies.

  "I beg your pardon, Lady," he said. "What did you ask?"

  Arabella smiled warmly, as though she knew the image he pictured, but the warmth only made him more nervous. "I spoke of the war, sir, but perhaps there are other matters we ought discuss. I understand that you stood for me in the Cabinet, when none else would."

  He coughed, despite his lack of need to do so, and murmured something affirmative.

  "You need not be afraid on my account," she continued. "Though you were involved in banishing me from Parliament, I do not hold that grudge. In fact you were quite right to do so. What loyal subject withholds her findings? I did it only to protect East, as long as I could. Really, he was a dear man."

  At this, she gazed at the ceiling, and sighed. The Minister for Trade wondered what odd memory she was recalling, perhaps her times learning at the great ear of poor dead East.

  "You are a dear man, too," she said after a time, turning back to face him. "May I call you Charles? I so tire of all these sirs. Charles, I heard well how you never slurred me to your comrades. I value that in a man. Even though your fingers are quite spindlish, and you are indeed quite bald."

  The Minister bit his lip to quit it trembling, and laid his left hand atop his right, as if to hide the fingers she clearly disapproved of. He could not think of a way to cover his bald pate. "How kind," he managed.

  She laughed then, a throaty chuckle which terrified him more than her smile. He bolted at once to his feet.

  "Lady, it is late, I must be going."

  "Please, call me Arabella," she said. "And why must you go? Are you not a confirmed bachelor? There are no children waiting for you below decks. Only cold sheets and solitary rum."

  "It is to the sheets I hasten, after such a long day, not the rum."

  Her voice dropped low. "And if we were to die in this war, Charles, is that what you would tell your maker? What hurt is there in such matters? I swear I will not take your head for my wall."

  He gave a little leap at that. "Really, I-"

  "Shh, Charles," soothed Arabella, rising from her chair, easing towards him. "I'll take off all my knives."

  A squeak emanated from his tightly pressed lips.

  "Very good," said Arabella, "a start," and took him by the spindly hand.

  * * *

  Weeks passed, and the fleet proceeded East by trigonometric reckoning, bypassing the isles of Hawai, chugging on with the Huntswoman at the lead, all mutinous voices squelched by the widely gossiped story of the Minister for Geomancy's predicament. Though the medicians had proved capable of stitching his bisected tongue, it would yet be some months until he regained its full use.

  Not one of the remaining Ministers, at least in polite company, dared label Arabella mad or a witch again. Rather she took on the mantle of leader in their eyes, and with it came a new name: the Steel Lady.

  In time the coast of Armorica came into view. Resupply boats were sent out to apportion victuals, telegraphy directives were sent out to Panamia to prepare the canal, to the Caribby to stockpile ordnance and all the iron ore of Armorica. So the fleet sped onwards down the curve of coast.

  In the gulf of Panamia they formed into the single-file ranks that would take them through the canal; the world's largest engineering effort, completed by the outstretched hand of Empire.

  As they pulled into the outflow of what had been the Miraflores river, they were met by cheering throngs of Mexicoate liverymen, their florid sienna uniforms lining the banks like a roaring bloom of crocuses. As the Huntswoman neared they fired rifles into the skies and called out the name of the Steel Lady.

  The Minister for Trade could only grin at the calls. "They've heard of you, it seems," he said to her. When he saw her dabbing at her eyes with one of his bleached pocket squares, he turned politely away.

  After the week-long passage was completed, the Huntswoman burst from the traces of the canal as though a thoroughbred racehorse from its starting cage. The fleet could scarce keep pace as it tore over the green-frothed Arrantic Ocean, barely slowing to take on huge stacks of ordnance and iron ore from Martinique in the Caribby.

  "Daunting, is it not?" asked Arabella.

  "But is it enough?" replied the Minister. "Can we truly kill West with cannon?"

  Arabella gave him only the ghost of a smile. "We shall certainly get his attention." Then she told him her plan.

  * * *

  It was a fine clear day when the compasses began to spin. Sailors in the riggings declaimed the figure of West on the horizon, and soon enough his head appeared to all, emergent on a field of blue sky.

  He stood atop his throne several miles high, a vast grey man ungodly in height, his face bitter with frustration or rage. At half-hourly intervals he slammed the heel of his foot into his throne with an almighty crunch, splitting great shards of rock free, which he gathered up in his right hand. These he then hurled into the sky at terrible speeds, each chunk as large as St. Saul's square, arcing towards the horizon.

  "South," Arabella murmured.

  Another almighty lob completed, another crunch on the throne, sending waves rushing out towards them.

  "To the Regent," Arabella said, "it is time."

  Tugs gathered them in, and once again Arabella stood before the Cabinet. Geomancy still bore a bandage about his lower jaw. The Prime Minister had set his top hat to the side, sporting now only his thin black locks. The Empire's wisest medicians, philosophers and mathematicians sat about them, hanging on the Steel Lady's every word.

  "Gentlemen," she said, "I volunteer to take the titan West by my own hand."

  A furor of objection rose up from the gathered men. "Nonsense!" cried the Prime Minister, "that is why we have brought the fleet." When they settled again, she continued.

  "Surely you have considered what it might take to kill or subdue West," she reasoned. "I too have seen the calculations of the mathematicians, the charts of our medicians. Each of our cannon shot, even the largest, would be little more than mesquite bites to him. Only a flintlock rifle near his own scale would be apposite to the task, and I do not think we have any such weapon, and even should we, there would be no way to brace it on this ocean. With the recoil, any shot we aimed would be sent awry. Are we in agreement?"

  The lead mathematician stood, a drained expression on his liverworted face. He opened his mouth as though to argue, then visibly sagged. "Yes, Lady," he agreed.

  "Very well," she went on, tapping her musket tamping-rod briskly on the deck as she paced. "We need to engineer a blast as powerful as that provided by a giant flintlock, but from a proximal distance. Medicians, what is the titan's weakest spot?"

  The lead medician stood, a sallow-faced man with drooping moustaches trailing over his protuberant lips. "Any access path to his brain, Lady," he answered. "The depth to his heart is far too dense. No existing explosive could fully penetrate."

  "And of his brain, which of the routes would be most assured?"

  The man too went pale, as he began to understand what she proposed. "The ear, Lady. It leads near direct to the brain."

  A second furore rose, but Arabella simply struck her tamping-rod on the deck until she had silence.

  "Who else amongst us has clambered a titanic man such as this before?" she demanded. "I wager none. I alone have. Who else could hope to accomplish this task on the first attempt, but me? I wager none. If West resembles East at all, I should be the only one to manage
the deed."

  "Lady," answered the Prime Minister hesitantly, "am I to understand that you intend to climb this beast, then buckshot his brain through the ear?"

  Arabella held up a large sackcloth satchel. "Pack this with dynamite, and the blast should be sufficient."

  There was more intermittent rabble.

  "And what of your escape? Can it be expected you will survive this attempt?"

  Her gaze was unrepentant. She looked once to the Minister for Trade, nodded, then turned back. "In the event that a blast is necessary, it should not be expected. I cannot take the risk of the fuses failing. I must be certain the blow is dealt."

  The audience fell silent at that. Shortly the Prime Minister gave a harrumph, stuck out his chest, clearly unwilling to be outmanned. "Out of the question. I cannot send a woman to this task. I volunteer."

  Arabella laughed. "Do you also need a blade through the tongue, Minister? I am plainly best suited. Besides, you will be needed with the fleet. Do you think West will happily allow me to climb into his ear? He will not. Like East, his skin will be sensitive to my clamberings. He must be distracted by the bites of a thousand mesquites. Every cannon in the fleet must be trained upon him. Only then do I stand a chance of slipping up his side."

  No-one said anything for a long moment. The Minister for Trade rose in his chair.

  "Lady Arabella, you also told me of a means to subdue the cardinal. Pray tell them."

  Arabella smiled. "Yes, let us speak of that."

  * * *

  The war began that afternoon.

  Upon the deck of the Regent Arabella approached the Minister for Trade as he stood at the rail. "I hope you shall think of me fondly, should I fail," she said.

  He turned, smiled at her. Though he was yet bald, and slender, he felt different. He was not taller, but perhaps he had unfurled.

  "I don't believe you know how to fail," he said, then dropped to one knee and held up a small box, which he cracked open to reveal a diamond ring. "Arabella, you may be bride to the Empire already, but would you take a second husband?"

  Arabella stared at him, found herself flushing with pride and embarrassment. "Get up, you dolt," she hissed.