by Eric Ugland
“I mean—“
“I understand why you believe this. It makes sense. And I appreciate you asking me about who I am.”
“It’s not like you’ve actually told me anything.”
“I am a private person. Or I have been in the past.”
She took a big bite of the meat pie sort of thing we were eating, and then walked a few steps away from me. And, well, everyone else. She gestured for me to come over and stand next to her.
“I prefer talking away from those who might misunderstand all the Carchedon talk,” she said. “No need getting in a fight over a country I have no allegiance to any longer.”
“Did you ever?”
“A bit. Are you looking for my life story?”
“Yeah. If not now, at some point.”
She shrugged, and took another bite.
“I was born to the Landless, and I grew up sailing the Eternal Ocean. That’s where I learned to fight, to sail, and to swim. It is also where I was sold as part of a rival captain’s plunder. He kept me for a spell, but then he ran afoul of the Carchedon Navy. I was taken and brought to Carchedon, where I lied, and said I was a freeperson of their nation. They believed me, or, at least, with some gentle persuasion they believed me, and I was left free to go on my way. Being that I only knew how to live by the waves or my blade, I guarded caravans, then I guarded people. I would chaperone young ladies to events. And I fought duels for my employers. I thought I knew how things worked in Carchedon. That as a free person, I would remain free. But money and power are not always as willing to obey the rules they make, and a young man with a lot of money decided he would have me as his own. I decided I wasn’t willing to give up my freedom to live as a plaything. I thought I might be able to find a path to somewhere new, somewhere far from Carchedon. That is why I went with someone who told me I could make it across the Great Erg.”
“I was wondering how the Erg tied in. The death price, right?”
“Yes. The young man who so wanted me before had found someone else while I was busy nearly dying in the Erg. So I offered myself as a potential member of Tjene. I was brought here. You chose me. And now I am yours.”
“I don’t exactly follow what you’re saying. You didn’t want to be a slave, so you offered yourself up to be a member of a tjene, which sounds a whole lot like slavery.”
“It is not slavery.”
“Seems--“
“It is not. It is more, at least to me, as if I have been paid for all the work I will do in my life, already. Now I am just doing the work I have already been paid for.”
“Oh,” I replied. “That does make a certain amount of sense,. Except, I mean, did you get paid?”
She nodded, popping the last bite of her food into her mouth.
“But--“
“Most of the time, it doesn’t go to the person directly.”
“So it didn’t go to you?”
“No. Like with Mornax, it went to his family. His family will be well off for the rest of their days. Life changing. I believe the same with Nox, but he is more of a mystery to me. Not so keen on talking.”
I had a million questions I wanted to ask her about her life, and about the other members of my tjene. Also about the world at large. If she grew up sailing, she’d likely seen more of the world than anyone else I knew. And what were the Landless? Where was the Eternal Ocean? Why was it named that? So many questions.
“I can tell you have more questions,” she said.
“I mean, I bet you’ve got some about me.”
She shrugged. “I feel confident I will learn your story soon enough. You have plenty of people clamoring for it. Me, you seem to be the only one interested in me.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “I bet everyone would like to know more about you.”
“You are an interesting young elf,” she said with a smile and a shake of her head. “Shall we continue our delve into Imperial bureaucracy?”
“Let’s go,” I said.
Chapter Nineteen
The City Building made more sense once we got there. It definitely wasn’t a hall. It was a big structure; something so big, it would probably be more apt to call it an edifice. Eight stories tall and looking like it took up nearly the entire block, it was, as was the case with most Imperial buildings, made out of light-colored stone. There were several statues out in front, nearly all human, an equal-ish representation of men and women. City guards patrolled out front, but there was no Legion presence at all. Which, to me at least, made it clear this was a city building and not an Imperial one. There were a lot of people around, but no line to get in, which was nice.
We stepped into a large open lobby with polished marble floors. Like the other administrative buildings I’d been in, it had a small information desk over to one side, and a bunch of staircases leading all around. It almost felt like I could be on Earth, just, you know, fewer metal detectors and more swords. After a quick check of the signs, we headed down a corridor. That’s where our luck ran out, and we were forced to stand in a line. It wasn’t a long line, probably twenty or thirty people, nearly all of whom had paperwork of some variety. Mostly rolled up tubes of paper, likely building plans.
“The Eternal Sea,” I said. “why do they call it that?”
Some other people in line looked over at me, trying to figure out if I was speaking to them. But as soon as Klara talked, they went back to ignoring us.
“It’s an immense body of water that doesn’t seem to end,” she said. “There are legends that there is no end, that you can keep sailing forever.”
“Without ever coming across land?”
“There are great stretches where you will see no land whatsoever. I did not even step on land until I was an older child.”
“How is that possible?”
“That is how long we were sailing on the Eternal Sea before we saw a land we wished to stop on.”
“But how do you survive?”
“What do you mean?”
“How do you get water?”
“Urnines.”
“Urine?”
“Urnines.”
“I, uh, what are those?”
“It is a creature that eats salt. Get a vat of saltwater, through a few urnines in there, and you have freshwater in the morning.”
“What does it look like?”
“Freshwater?” she asked, then smiled. “Do you know what an anemone is?”
“I think so?” I replied, a vision of Nemo’s house flashing through my mind.
“Bit like that, just bigger. More tentacles. Bit more grabby.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Only accidentally.”
I would have pressed her for more, but it felt like she wasn’t interested in talking about home any more. She crossed her arms under her chest and leaned against the wall, glaring at the man behind me. I shrugged.
The line moved in fits. Sometimes we would rocket through people, moving like we were at a well-oiled Starbucks in midtown Manhattan. Other times it was clear the person at the counter in the office was engaged in something more complicated. Twice, we heard shouting, and once, guards came to haul a very red-faced man from the room. No one else in line seemed to find this as anything out of the ordinary.
When we finally got to the room itself, I sighed at how much like a DMV the place was. An open area with a few chairs, then a bunch of windows dividing counters staffed by bored-looking bureaucrats. Our line led to a spot where a man sat on a tool issuing slips of paper, a bit like a take a number system, but with more human interaction.
When we got to the man, he looked us over, barely registering a thing.
“Reason for your visit?” he asked.
“Property ownership search,” I replied.
He nodded, and wrote something on a small slip of paper.
“Window four,” he said. “You are after the man with the tricorn hat.”
I looked at the window with a four, then saw another, thankfully shorter, line of
people waiting. The last person in line, naturally, was a man in a tricorn hat.
“Thanks,” I said, and Klara and I took our place in another line.
We waited there a moment. Then a few more. We were in a slow line.
“Balls,” I said.
“Pardon?” Klara asked.
“Just tired of waiting.”
She shrugged.
“You don’t mind it?” I asked.
“I have been in enough ‘exciting’ situations that the boring ones do not grate on me quite as much.”
I stared at the ceiling for a while until Klara poked me.
“You’re up,” she said.
I walked up to the counter. The woman sitting there gave me a wan smile.
“How can I help you today, Master Elf?” she asked. She looked reasonably relaxed, in that comfortable state of confident boredom. Somewhere in the seas of middle-aged, she looked almost painfully average, and I was more than a little curious about her Choice and Level, but I somehow resisted the impulse to ask.
“I’m just looking for who owns a plot of land in the Greens,” I said. “It look—“
She put up her hand to stop me talking.
“I do not need the story,” she replied, “just the address and ten silver coins.”
“Oh, right.” I gave her the cross streets and relative location, then dug out a gold coin and set it on the counter.
She looked at me with an upraised eyebrow, gave me a very long sigh, and slowly counted out my change before putting the gold coin in a little slit. She made a few notes on a rigid card of some smooth material, got up with a sigh, and moved slowly through a door in the wall behind her. She looked at the card, not where she was going.
I leaned on the counter.
“You think this is going to work?” I asked.
“What? Getting the name of the owner of that property?” Klara replied.
“Yeah. I mean, do you think these guys would put their real names on the deed to a place they built a secret torture lair?”
“Are they smart?”
“They have to be reasonably smart.”
“Cocky?”
“Hugely so.”
“Then maybe they will have been dumb enough to do it.”
“Honestly, I’ll be surprised if we get anything useful here.”
“Well then, I am glad we are using our time so constructively.”
Just then, our helpful paper-pusher returned with a folder. She set the folder down, then sat back on her stool with something between a sigh and a grunt.
“Looks like it is currently in the hands of a holding company,” she said, opening the folder, and pointing at the name on the deed. “The Pittsburgh Stealers.”
“I guess they are idiots,” I said, looking over my shoulder at Klara.
“Excuse?” the bureaucrat asked.
“Nothing, we just had a bet on the name we’d find.”
“Ah, well, if that is all?”
“Is there an address on file for this company? I’d like to--“
“I have already written it down for you,” she said, sliding a piece of paper across the counter.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Next,” she replied.
Chapter Twenty
I still couldn’t believe the ‘Pittsburgh Stealers’ had named their company something so easily identifiable as coming from Earth. Granted, they weren’t particularly keen on keeping that secret very secret, but still....
The address on record for the Stealers was in Old Town. Which made sense: they’d been trying to take over Old Town, and why would they try to take over a neighborhood they didn’t already live in? Personally, I’d rather keep my neighborhood as a safe zone, not the money maker. But, tat’s just me, someone who has empathy and actual cares for other people, not the loons from the Iron Silents. Or, apparently as they were known in polite society, the Pittsburg Stealers.
We got back to our neighborhood, just on the other side of it. closer to the original castle that marked the original birthplace of the Empire. Naturally, the building we were heading to was a brothel called The Gilded Garden. Technically I couldn’t tell it was a brothel immediately — it was more like looking at a nice-looking house that had been squished into a group of buildings. Big windows, and upper levels that leaned out over the street. Coming out of those windows were all measure of scantily clad ladies, calling down to the passersby. Red lanterns hung from the rafters above, and the door was big and gilded.
“So, here we are,” I said. “A brothel.”
“I can see that,” Klara said.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be a brothel.”
“You were thinking you’d find a secret hideout?”
“No, but—“
“Bakery?”
“Of course not. I just wasn’t expecting a brothel.”
“Seems like a perfectly reasonable spot to find a criminal headquarters. Brothels, butchers, bars — there are plenty of places that are just as good for gangs.”
“You seem to have a lot of knowledge on the matter.”
“I have lived a life before meeting you,” she said with a bit of a smile. “You would be surprised at the breadth of my experience.”
I gave her a smile in return, but I had to think that that was probably true for nearly everyone.
We walked along the street in front of the brothel, taking a moment to look at the other buildings and shops around us. Like everywhere else in Old Town, it was mixed use — homes above shops and other commercial properties. I saw a relaxed-looking cafe less than half a block away from the Gilded Garden.
“Coffee?” I asked.
Klara shrugged, which, I was learning, was actually equivalent to me nodding.
I sat down outside so I was facing the brothel, and Klara went inside to get us some light refreshment.
Now it was a matter of watching and waiting.
I was immediately grateful to have someone with me. Not only did it make it seem more normal to be taking a leisurely afternoon coffee, but it also meant I could chat and pass the time.
“So did you grow up eating a lot of fish?” I asked.
Klara just gave me a look, then sighed.
“I guess that’s a bit obvious,” I said. “It’s just, I mean, I’m very curious because that’s such a different lifestyle than anything I could imagine. Like, never leaving a boat. That blows my mind.”
“I left the ship.”
“I thought you said you never touched land--“
“I didn’t touch dry-land, but I went swimming a lot. I have been on the back of a dragon turtle, walked through the floating islands of Wilamina, and even danced in the air gusts over the Invisible Islands.”
“That seems like a lot of things I don’t know about.”
She smiled, a genuine smile, that, on her at least, was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a laugh.
“The world is large,” she said. “I would imagine there is a near infinite number of things out there, and it would be impossible to see them all.”
“Some of them I’d like to see,” I said. “I heard about the Emerald Sea—“
“Which is not something I have visited.”
“The Great Erg?”
“Of course,” she said with a slight nod. “You know I have. And iIt borders both my new country and my old.”
“And it’s just sand?”
“I doubt it is only sand,” she said. “But it is mostly sand. I did not get that far into the Erg, merely three days travel. Once you go over the first dune, it is rare you see anything but sand ever again.”
“Or nasty creatures.”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen those?”
“Yes.”
“What kinds?”
“Great worms the length of this road. Beetles the size of dogs. Living pits, lined with teeth, and filled with writhing tentacles ready to snatch any fools who wander too closer. My time in the Erg is a nightmare I
long to forget.”
“I get that. I’ll stop asking about it. What is a dragon turtle like?”
“I only met the one, so it is hard to say what they are like based on that singular experience. But he was big. A living and physical force of nature with a set of morals and beliefs that are somewhat at odds with us. With little people.”
“I guess that makes sense. If he’s so big, he’d probably view the world differently than we do.”
“As far as I know, it is like that with most dragons. And beings of such power. They basically exist in a different world than we do.”
I took a few sips of my coffee, thinking about how dragons were at the top of the food chain on this planet. But it was different than how humans were at the top on Earth. Dragons were still involved in a nearly perpetual fight for survival. They didn’t die as easily as humans, but they weren’t as common. They had vastly more power than any individual human back on Earth. Something came back to me from my first friend in Vuldranni, Etta. Rule number one: this is reality. Trying to compare it to Earth and make sense of it was just an exercise in being wrong.
“Wait,” I said, “have you seen a dragon? Like, not a dragon turtle, but a dragon dragon?”
“Sure,” she said. “Not up close, but I’ve seen more than a few.”
“How many are there?”
She raised an eyebrow, and leaned back in her chair.
“How many pigeons are on the roofs above us right now?” she asked.
“I don’t— oh. No way to really know.”
“There are enough. Have you seen anyone you recognize yet?”
I shook my head.
“How long are we going to sit here?” she asked.
It was probably wise to get going, but I wanted to confirm the Pittsburgh Stealers were in fact connected to the Iron Silents. While it made the most sense to think the two were the same group of people, there was nothing concrete to tie them together, save the secret lair. And if the Iron Silents were smart, which they might not be, they could have just built their torture chamber on land they didn’t own.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I don’t want to get noticed here.”
She nodded, got up, and we headed back to the Heavy Purse.
