But now, here she is again—his corpse-y sister, glaring at him with flattened eyes, her hair a snarl of braids, her mouth a thorny rosebud scowl in her blackened face. In her blackened hands she holds a mass of moonlit shadow, which for one stomach lurching moment he takes to be someone’s entrails, before realizing it is his Alacrán wig.
“Surprise!” she says.
“What do you want?” he demands. Sidonia’s fetch had been quite demanding. He does not want to go down that murderous road again. He disposed of everyone who injured her; what more can she ask of him?
“I want to be the secret that sits in the middle and knows,” the Apparition answers.
“What?”
“I want what you have stolen from me, you bastard.”
“What?!”
“I want to be on the front page of the Califa Police Gazette.”
And then Hardhands looks at the Apparition again and realizes in horror: not his dead sister but his oh-so-alive wife, her daughter. The mistake is understandable: Tiny Doom has her mother’s eyes, her mother’s mouth, her mother’s hair, and, thanks to a liberal application of black camouflage greasepaint, her drowned mother’s complexion, too. She stinks of magick; a residual rime of the Current fairly coats her.
Hardhands opens his mouth to demand—what the hell is she doing here, with his wig, when she should be out looking for a scalp—oh. The events earlier at the Redlegs’ Regimental Ball snap into sudden understanding. The coincidence that was not a coincidence at all. Oh bloody hell, oh blasted bloody hell.
Hardhands leans into a grab, which is going to turn into a smack, but Tiny Doom has anticipated his reaction. She dances out of his way, scrambling up onto a rock, out of his reach unless he will chance his tender feet upon the rough stone. Before he risks tender feet, Hardhands tries a command:
“Get back down here immediately!”
She tosses the wig up in the air, catches it and places it upon her own head. The wig is too big for her; it drops over her head like a hairy hood, the scalp lock flapping.
“It doesn’t really suit me, does it? Red is not my color, or so my horoscope says.”
“What are you up to, you moronic girl?”
“I’m only out fulfilling the charge upon me.”
“We called for murder, not thievery.”
“Isn’t murder a kind of theft—surely the man you kill feels robbed.”
“You be-spoil the Ordeal—”
“Not my Ordeal—yours!”
“Is that my gun—how the hell did you get Bedb?! Get down here this instant, that’s an order—”
“Ya!” Tiny Doom jeers. “Your order! Ya!”
That’s it! Now careless of his tender feet, Hardhands scrabbles up the rock after her, but she is too high above him, and the rock is indeed rough, particularly on his more sensitive parts, which are still unprotected by clothing. He does not give in to pain, but the rock is also slick and wet; he can’t get a good grip. He starts to fall back; then feels a sudden pressure on his skull, a tightness that turns into a painful pull—she’s got a handful of his hair! Hardhands roars, reaches up with one waving arm, trying to break Tiny Doom’s hold.
Something metallic and cold skims against his scalp, and he is released. He drops back to the sand, now oblivious to the rough rocks, the sandpaper sand. In horror he gropes at his head, expecting blood, but instead feeling a patch of stubble the size of his hand. He was sheared, not scalped. The distinction is of little consolation.
Hardhands says a word so hot it could ignite ice. Tiny Doom laughs. The knife glitters in her hand, and she flutters the sheaf of hair at him—his hair! His hair! He says another word, a word so nasty that all the soap in the world would not be able to wash his mouth clean.
Tiny Doom says: “That’s mean! I only took a lovelock. A token for my affection. I could have had your entire topper. You should thank me for my restraint!”
Now Hardhands opens his mouth to roar a Gramatica Word that is going to make Tiny Doom sorry she ever messed with him, oh yes, indeed—and is arrested by a sudden beam of light playing across the beach, blinding him. From behind the light comes shouting, and the crunching sound of wheels, and bellow of a mule, and the blistering blue sound of swearing, and the anxious cries of Eos Espada, his ADC.
“Get that out of my eyes!” shouts Hardhands, and the beam falters downward, defusing on the sand. Eos skitters out of the darkness, and he’s not alone. Right behind him are Hardhands’ outriders, a couple of still-standing Redlegs, and, oh hell, the entire Califa press corps.
Eos sputters: “Are you . . . all right . . . Colonel? A boy . . . came . . . said you were drowning . . . hurry quick . . .”
“Pigface Psychopomp!” Hardhands shouts. “I am not drowning, get off, Eos—” He shakes off the ADC, who is trying vainly to throw his own blouse over Hardhands’ shoulders, a gesture not working out too well because Eos is narrow where Hardhands is broad.
A camera crew skids down the dune and plants the boxy camera firmly on the sand. The photographer disappears behind the cloth to prepare the plate, and the flashman is already filling his flash pan. Normally there is nothing more that Hardhands loves than getting his image in the paper, and his lack of clothing disturbs him not a wit, because he’s super-secure in his own manly beauty (take that, Florian!), but this doesn’t seem quite like the right moment to immortalize—
“Did your life pass before your eyes?” the stringer for the Califa Police Gazette shouts, his pencil at the ready.
“Was the water cold?” The stringer for the Alta Califa pushes up behind the first, and they tussle, pencils clicking, pads whacking.
“Did your lungs burn?” The stringer for the Warlord’s Wear Weekly takes advantage of the tussle to get his own question in.
“Get the colonel a blanket!” Eos shouts at the bodyguards, who look at each other helplessly: where are they supposed to get a blanket from? They are gunmen, not picnickers.
“Hey!” Tiny Doom shouts from her rocky perch, for no one is paying attention to her, and she wants to be the real attraction. After all, that’s the whole point of this setup, isn’t it? She hollers again. “Hey!”
Heads, pencils, pads, cameras and that beam of light turn towards her, and she waves. She takes Hardhands’ wig off and shakes it like a tambourine. “HEY HO!”
“It’s the Scalper!” The cry goes up and hands spring to heads, clutch at coiffures. The outriders rush to form a line between Hardhands and the Scalper, an admirable action but a little late. The Redlegs howl, hands reaching for pistols, sabres, long knives, batons, and hairpins. The reporters fairly leap with excitement; this beats the hell out of a not-drowned colonel. Hardhands quivers with indignation and shouts more orders:
To his outriders: “Get out of my way, blast it!”
To the Redlegs: “Stand down, blast it!”
To Eos: “Get those reporters out of here, blast it!”
To Tiny Doom: “Give me my wig, blast it!”
None of these orders are obeyed. The Redlegs press forward, scrabbling at the bottom of the rock, but the tide is running in, splashing it slippery, and they can’t get a good grip. Eos flaps his hands at the reporters, who ignore him, busily scribbling notes: the camera’s almost ready. Tiny Doom dances, hops higher, out of their grasp, laughing.
“You dance around in a ring and suppose,” she sings. “I am the secret who sits in the middle and knows!”
Hardhands is stuck—he could blast Tiny Doom and the Redlegs to the Abyss with a single word, but dares not breach his military vow never to practice magick, not before such an audience. No escaping a board of inquiry then. And what if the press recognize her? Hardhands does not want to lose his wig, but he doesn’t want her caught, either, to face the Redlegs’ ire (of the Warlord’s ire, he’s still happily ignorant.) And what if the press notice his now-asymmetrical coiffure? So far he’s managed to keep that side of his head away from inquisitive newspaper eyes, but for how much longer?
&nbs
p; “Give me my wig,” Hardhands bellows, demanding instead of blasting. He pushes the outriders aside and advances menacingly.
Tiny Doom laughs, wiggles the wig. “This? I think it’s my wig now . . . And you, pressmen—you had better make sure to give credit where credit is due—I’ll not have my laurels rest on a dollymop’s head!”
“Why’d you do it?” shouts the Califa Police Gazette.
“How’d you do it?” shouts the Alta Califa.
“Wig styles: long bob or the hedgehog—any comment?” shouts the Warlord’s Wear Weekly.
Hardhands begins to puff. The Gramatica is trying to claw its way up his throat; he can barely hold it down. Hardhands is used to being obeyed, and he doesn’t take disobedience easily. In a second, he will explode or implode; which one will depend on his control, or lack thereof.
But before he can do either, a voice cries: “Smile and freeze! Hold the wig up higher!” The camera man dives beneath the camera’s cover. The flash man plants the flash pole firmly in the ground and prepares to ignite.
Tiny Doom, who has been cavorting like a matinee idol, freezes. She obligingly holds Hardhands’ wig up higher, and in doing so, manages to obscure most of her face. There’s a low ear-buzzing grumble, and then with a huge puff of smoke and an arcing spray of sparks, the flashpan explodes. Waves of stinky yellowness billow upward, engulfing the entire farcical scene in choking acrid smoke. The shouts of surprise and alarm quickly devolve into coughing choking coughing. The beach has vanished in coils of foul smoke, which might not all be from the camera flash, but might just have had a little bit of magickal help from an ally currently disguised as the Warlord’s Wear Weekly.
When the air clears of shouting, screaming, and smoke, the newspapers are clutching at their stomachs, now sore from hacking; the outriders have covered their faces with hankies and hit the sand; Eos’s eyes are as red as two wine-poached pears; and the Redlegs have scarpered.
Only Hardhands stands, still vibrating angrily, unaffected.
The rock is empty. Tiny Doom is gone.
IX. Scars
A few days later. Tiny Doom, a cadet no more, once again stands in the pisser at the Mono Real. There’s new graffiti on the mirror—when you take the dæmon on board, you must row him ashore—but otherwise the room is unchanged. Not so Tiny Doom: she glares at her reflection, at the livid cuts which now mar her cheeks. The marks are thin, but they throb. She pats her hair, trying to smooth the frizz down; the tri-coloured braids have been unbraided and her hair is riotous. It will take some time for the dye to grow out, and until then her hair will look terrible. But she refuses to wear a wig.
Kanacheta and the dollymop sit at a table in the back room. They are playing backgammon and drinking xocolattes, and when Tiny Doom approaches, they both look up and smile. Lying before Tiny Doom’s empty abandoned Cheery Cherry Slurp glass is a copy of the Califa Police Gazette. The cover image is dark and blurry, but Hardhands’ wig is easily identified, if you squint a bit and know what you are looking for. In case you don’t, the image’s inscription will help you out: The Scalper Strikes Again!
“It’s not a very good likeness,” Kanacheta observes.
“All the better for me,” replies Tiny Doom.
“There’s a one thousand diva reward on your head. You should be proud. Springheel Jack is only valued at five hundred.”
“I’m worth every coin.”
“Don’t scratch, honey,” says the dollymop. “They’ll only scar worse.”
Tiny Doom puts her hands in her lap, fiddling instead with the silver-blonde braided cord wrapped around her wrist. She won the skirmish, but Hardhands won the battle. (The war is not over yet.) The Skinners should have puffed up in indignation at her joke and then tossed her out on her well-boxed ear. And they would have, too, if Hardhands with barely contained fury (he’d forgotten that he ever found the joke funny) had not argued quite persuasively that the Ordeal was about blood, not hair. (Hardhands’ own hair was hidden under a replacement wig; Tiny Doom is pretty sure that she and he alone know he lost more than his wig that night.)
It’s the blood, Hardhands had said. It’s about the blood.
The colonel had then produced evidence that, during her first heist, the feigned swipe of Tiny Doom’s not-so-feigned knife when she had feigned to scalp Colonel Melacton’s wig had drawn two drops of blood. Tiny Doom, furious, had sworn that the knife had not slipped one bit—is she a baby that she can’t control her own blade?— but Hardhands had a bloody hankie provided by an internal Redlegs’ spy to back up his claim, and her angry swearing was disregarded. And anyway, he is the colonel of the regiment and if he wants to bend the rules no junior officer will oppose him. So Tiny Doom’s Ordeal was voted a success, and her induction into the Alacráns unavoidable.
(But don’t think she’s finished yet.)
“You may not be a ranger, but you acted like one,” Kanacheta says, consolingly. “And Nyana Keegan always said it’s the action that counts.”
“And, I for one, am glad of that action,” says the dollymop. She’s decided to overlook the fact that Tiny Doom got her into the mess that almost saw her head on a pike and her pretty limbs nailed to various Califa landmarks before Tiny Doom rescued her from the same. For professional reasons, the dolly has always made it a policy to look forward, not backwards. Florian’s attempts to make amends for his ire have proved quite lavish, so the dollymop’s future is looking rosy indeed. From street-girl to the Warlord’s leman; in the end, by doing her a disservice, Tiny Doom did her a favor, indeed.
Tiny Doom picks up the paper and reads through it again, her scowl curving into a tiny smile. She may have (for the moment) lost, but she got her licks in first. And those licks were mighty sweet. She still has to face Hardhands privately, but she anticipates that audience with equanimity now that she has a card to play. (Surely Hardhands would prefer some details of his heist remain off the CPG’s front page?) Tiny Doom tri-folds the paper and stuffs it inside her redingote, to relish later, again tugs on the hairy bracelet around her wrist. She looks longingly at the dollymop’s coiffure, a heavy crown of braids on top, corkscrew lovelocks spilling below, the whole gorgeous edifice surmounted by a cerulean blue wagon-wheel hat affixed with a sapphire hat pin.
“Odelie,” Tiny Doom says to the dollymop, “will you help me fix my hair?”
Afterword to “Lovelocks”
Little is known about the inner workings of the dreaded Alacrán Regiment, but it seems unlikely that an official branch of the Army of Califa would sanction murder as a form of induction. In fact, this historian was skeptical that any of the events described in this story could possibly be rooted in truth, and was astounded when a search of the Califa Police Gazette’s morgue (now residing in the newsprint collection at the Universidad de Coyolzauhqui in Cuidad Anahuatl) turned up the very picture referenced in this story![1]
The paper was faded, but the image of the wig quite clear: it was in the style called the Rumpty Skink, very popular in the years 11 & 12 Xochitl-156.[2] The person waving this wig was indistinct, but clearly small and possibly female. The accompanying article contained a breathlessly overwrought account of the Redleg party, Colonel Melacton’s scalping, General Hardhands’s almost drowning, the Scalper’s sudden advance, and the indemnification of Odelie de Godervya (the dollymop).[3]
(Which then begs the question: who authored this accounting? After a great deal of research, this historian believes she has uncovered this person’s identity. This bombshell—for bombshell it is—shall be revealed in an upcoming article to appear in the Journal of the Eschatanomicon and will forever change our understanding of Califa history.) [4]
Note that Odelie de Godervya became the official leman of Florian Abenfaráx until her death five years later, attributed to poison at the hands of the Warlady Eliade Axacaya y Abenfaráx.[5] Her namesake and granddaughter Odelie Abenfaráx ov Kanacheta (fondly called The Zu-Zu) was well-known as the lead singer of the infamous band Califa’s Lip Rouge
and the partner of the privateer El Calavera.
As an aside, this historian cautions against recreation of the Redleg Regimental punch.
[1] “Colonel Flips Lid, General Flips Wig & Curly Wolves Howl.” The Califa Police Gazette, date missing.
[2] Fyrdraaca, Valefor. Wolf-tails, Hedgehogs & the Naked Mole Rat: My Life in Wigs. Inverfarigag, Elsewhere: Bilskinir Press.
[3] “Scorpion Stung!” and “Redleg Colonel Red-faced!” The Califa Police Gazette, 31 Calabasas, Año Abenfaráx 5.
[4] A Lady of Quality. “An Exploration into Authorial Possibilities of Mss. Fragments in the Collection of the Duqesa de Xipe Totec Segunda.” The Journal of the Eschatanomicon. Pumpkinville: Ariviapa, upcoming.
[5] Letter from Azucarina Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca to Banastre Haðraaða ov Brakespeare, dated 9 Sol, Año Abenfaráx 10.
Hand in Glove
I. The Police
Like bees to honey, they cluster around him, Anibal Aguille y Wilkins, the golden boy of the Califa Police Department, thrice decorated, always decorative. Eyes like honey, skin as rich as molasses, a jaw square enough to serve as a cornerstone. He’s a dish, is Detective Wilkins, but that is only half of his charm. More than just ornamental, he gets the job done. When he is on the dog, no criminal is safe. He’s taken stealie boys and jackers, cagers and rum padders, sweeteners and dollymops. He’s arrested mashers and moochers, b-boys and bully rocks. He’s a real hero. Everyone adores him.
Prophecies, Libels & Dreams Page 18
