by Eddie Han
As night fell, his coach arrived in Hoche—a quaint village just outside of the main city where the Shawls lived. From a distance, Dale’s uncle’s cottage looked like something out of a painting, softly glowing against the backdrop of lush rolling hills. Smoke rose weightlessly from the chimney into the cool autumn air. Dale took it all in, overwhelmed by the feeling of childhood—the feeling of holiday and home.
CH 10
CARNAVAL CITY
Dale could not reopen the breaker for a couple weeks. Upon his initial survey, it was apparent to him that he had to first figure out the business. He started with trying to understand the shop’s set up—what went where and why? His father’s idea of a filing system was stacks of paper on desks, and more stacks in boxes. But after two days of investigative work, Dale began to see that there was an organization to the chaos. A hidden system. Once he could see it, he began to understand what his father was doing. Those two weeks, Dale was in early; he left late. With the daylight, he made slight adjustments to the yard—placement of certain containers with specific types of scrap. Nights were spent in the office poring over the books, receipts, and records of business dealings. It gave him a sense of the business, a business built largely around salvaged scrap parts.
Organizing inventory and pushing papers at a desk was quite a departure from his former life. At first, being “your own boss” was a welcome change from the regimented life of a soldier. But once he got past the challenge of getting the shop operational, Dale grew quickly bored. It didn’t take long for him to realize that he lacked that certain penchant for business; namely, he lacked the love of money. Without proper motivation, Dale spent hours at a time swiveling in his father’s leather chair, wondering how his life had become an aimless routine of disassembling ships and selling their salvageable parts for scrap.
After closing shop one evening, Dale wandered along the docks. Under fading light, the still surface of the Amaranthian Sea beyond the bay looked like a sheet of glass. Along the harbor were anchored ships—an entire community of seafarers with their laundry hanging on cables across obsolete masts, smoke stacks rising from the galleys above deck. The scene brought to mind his childhood fantasies of setting sail toward an endless horizon into the unknown beyond, free and elsewhere. A life at sea that ended drearily in a stinking bay. He had grown so far from that boy for whom it was so normal to dream.
Dale walked beyond the boardwalk and into the streets of the waterfront. There, he stopped at the overpass, the one he and Sparrow crouched under after the fight with Marcus.
Then he made his way along the main streets of the Central District toward the Southside, toward Azuretown.
Although most of the residents of Azuretown were still Azuric, it was no longer uncommon to see hip, young urbanites patronizing businesses for an exotic experience. Where there were once herbal apothecaries and merchants selling live chickens, there were now trendy nightclubs and fusion restaurants. The unthinkable a decade ago—seeing a non-Azuric sitting among the locals, shoveling mouthfuls of noodles with a pair of chopsticks and drinking rice liquor around smoky food stalls—was so common now that it went unnoticed. Even the signs and menus had been changed to accommodate the outside world.
Dale barely recognized the place Sparrow had shared with his mother. Like the rest of the block, the yellow building had been renovated. It was no longer yellow, nor was it a housing complex for the underprivileged. It had been converted into some high-end bathhouse. Venturing further into the neighborhood, Dale came to an entire fenced-off block full of dirt mounds and broken slabs of mortar and brick. There was a construction site where the forge used to be. Azuric men covered in dirt and dried sweat shuffled out with their pickaxes slung over their shoulders.
“What’re you doing here, peach?” asked the foreman, “peach” being the pejorative for people of fair skinned ethnicities. Namely, the Grovish and the Silven.
“There used to be a forge here,” Dale said.
“There used to be a lot of things here.”
“What’re you building?”
“A glue factory, not that it’s any of your business. Now, move along. The suits don’t like outsiders snooping around. Especially on Rogue turf.”
“The Rogues? The Carousel Rogues?”
“Yeah, the Carousel Rogues. What’s the matter with you?”
“In Azuretown?”
The foreman chuckled.
“Listen, you better get going. Curious people are even less welcome.”
Dale turned and took a few steps. He stopped and walked back to the foreman. “You wouldn’t happen to know where the nearest brothel is, would you?”
“Ah. So that’s what this is about. Damn peaches, always looking for some exotic flesh to poke. The only brothel we’ve ever had in Azuretown was the Lotus House. And ever since the massacre, they shut it down. Now you have to go to Central’s Red Light District. They’ve got whatever you’re looking for over there, if you can afford it.” Then he leaned in with his shifty, narrow black eyes and a change in tone. “But if you’re interested, I can point you to some massage parlors, if you know what I mean. Easier on the wallet too.”
“Thanks,” said Dale. “But I’ll pass.”
“Suit yourself.”
Dale walked back toward the waterfront. Along the boardwalk, just a few blocks from his house, he noticed a soft glow coming from within the windows of an old shop, a shop he hadn’t noticed before. The sign with the image of a grinning pig read, “The Broken Cistern.” He poked his head in to discover a desolate tavern. He was greeted warmly by the barkeep.
“Welcome, friend. We’ve got seats if you’ve got a bottom.”
Dale approached the bar. There were three fishermen huddled around a table going on their sixth or seventh round. And another two men sat in the back commiserating over a bottle of whiskey. None took notice of him.
“What’ll it be?”
“Bourbon on the rocks,” Dale replied.
“You got it.”
The barkeep was a short round man with a red face, bulbous cheeks, and a twinkle in his eyes. His thin lips stretched into a permanent smile and his voice possessed a cheer in it that seemed inconsistent with the setting.
“You from around here?” he asked, sliding Dale his glass.
“Born and raised. Never seen this place before, though.”
“Yeah, we don’t get much traffic down here anymore, what with all them fancy pubs sprouting up everywhere ‘round the Central District.”
“Interesting sign you got out front.”
“Eh?”
“The sign with the pig.”
“Oh, right! We’ve been meaning to change that. And by ‘we,’ I mean ‘me.’ The place used to be called the ‘Happy Ham’ until recently.”
“So you the new owner?”
“I’m the old owner. Been here since—well, since it used to be called the ‘Blue Turnip.’ And the ‘Fishbowl’ before that. I like to change the name every few years when business slows down. Brings in new customers.”
He winked.
Dale couldn’t help but smile. He sipped his bourbon and took another look around.
“It’s quiet.”
“Real quiet. Feels more like a monastery than a bar,” the barkeep said with a hearty laugh. “But what we lack in revelry, we make up with longevity. Thirty years we’ve been open.”
“That’s a long time.”
“You bet it is. We’ve had our ups and downs so I don’t fret the slow seasons. Those old sods there were about your age when they started coming here.”
Dale looked back at the fishermen.
“Anyway, business will pick up, what with all this talk of coming war,” the barkeep added. “Nothing like anxiety to make a man thirsty.”
He laughed at himself again.
“Hey you wouldn’t know anything about a massacre in Azuretown, would you?” Dale then asked. “About ten years ago, maybe?”
“The Lotus House Massacre?
” The barkeep scoffed. “Sure I do. Lost two of my regulars in it. Why?”
“What happened?”
The barkeep leaned over and propped his arms on the bar. He brimmed with enthusiasm as he started to tell the story.
“Well, it all started when the Grim Fox was killed in a freak accident,” he began. “That’s the old guild master of the Carousel Rogues. He ate eggplants that had been accidentally slipped into his lunch or something. Apparently, he was hyper allergic to eggplants. Can you imagine? You’re the most powerful underworld boss, and an eggplant gets you. I just think that’s so funny. Anyway, his three sons started fighting over who would take over. The second-born killed the oldest, which upset the youngest because he was closer to the oldest. So he had one of his guys kill his only living brother to avenge the murder of his other brother. Being the only living son of the Grim Fox, he took over. They called him the Little Fox. But he was still young and didn’t really know what he was doing. So you had some other guys trying to muscle their way in. Meanwhile, the Azuretown gang started making a name for themselves.”
“The Kangozen.”
“Yeah, that’s right. So you’ve heard of them. Well, they raised their own little army, every one of them armed with swords, you know, the Omeijian type. Katanas. Next thing, they’re moving in on the black market, expanding their business and such. No one wanted to mess with them at first. Not even the Rogues. Not with all the in-fighting. But once the Kangozen started taking over territory outside of Azuretown, that’s when things got real ugly. That’s when the turf war began. Now, everyone thought that was the end of the Rogues. I mean, no one thought they’d survive a turf war, right? How could they? But then some underboss comes along and just takes over. Cleans house. I’m talking about Felix ‘the Fat Fox’ Eglon, of course. You heard of him, right?”
“No.”
“Well, you better get familiar with the name. He runs the show now. So one morning, Felix takes some of his men and marches into Azuretown. They walk into the Lotus House and just started killing everyone in sight. And I mean everyone. Yeah, most of ‘em were Kangozen. Thugs and smugglers. But there were some regular, ordinary folks in there too. Like I said, a couple of my customers. You know, just looking for some fun. All of them, the clerk at the desk, everybody, murdered. Over twenty killed. It was all over the papers for awhile.”
“Damn.”
“‘Damn’ is right. Now with the Kangozen out of the picture, Felix got to work on his own house. See, Little Fox didn’t sign off on the killings. On one hand, the Kangozen was gone. On the other hand, you can’t have somebody doing things like that without approval. So one night, the Little Fox invites Felix over for dinner. He tells him that they’re celebrating. But he was going to kill him. Everybody knew this. Even Felix. And he wasn’t about to roll over. So Felix gets his guys outside the restaurant and tells them to listen for a scream. When they hear the scream, they go in and kill everybody. Well, the story goes, during dinner Felix lunged across the table and shoved a fork in the guild master’s eye. There was a scream all right, and everyone got killed. And that’s how the Fat Fox single-handedly saved the Carousel Rogues and became the guild master.”
Dale was rendered speechless.
“That’s not someone you want to cross. You want another?”
“Sure.”
“You know,” the barkeep continued, pouring the bourbon. “When I was young, the old folk used to say that the times have changed. That the world was becoming a crueler place. But old folk have been talking like that forever, haven’t they? So I just figured nothing’s really changed at all. I thought people only say things like that because they become more aware of how it really is. You get jaded as you age, right?” Then he shook his head. “But, son, I was wrong. Times have changed. And take it from me. The world sure as hell ain’t getting any kinder. I dread the thought of what it’ll be like when it’s your turn to start talking like that.”
The barkeep then draped his shoulder with the dishrag he’d been wiping the counter with. “Be right back.”
He left the bar to clear some tables and exchanged a few words with the other regulars. Dale quietly nursed his second round. He was staring into his glass, brows furrowed when the barkeep returned.
“What you thinking so hard about?”
“Huh? Oh, nothing.”
“That’s pretty hard for nothing.”
“Well, for one, I was thinking it makes sense, why you changed the name of this place.”
“How’s that?”
“This, and you—nothing really happy about this ham.”
The barkeep burst into laughter. He walked around the bar laughing, unable to contain himself. He stopped in front of Dale, coughing, chuckling, and wiping his tears. When he finally managed to collect himself, he let out a winded sigh. Still grinning, he looked up to say something to Dale, but his eyes were diverted to a man standing at the door wearing a suit.
“Come in. Come in, friend. Take a seat. You’ll have to go somewhere else if you want anything other than the city’s finest ale.”
Dale glanced over his shoulder. He thought nothing of the man.
CH 11
FIXER AT THE BROKEN CISTERN
The thin man in the suit pulled up a stool at the bar. His face was pasty white, his cheeks were gaunt, and his hair—what there was left of it—was scraggly and oily. His eyes, however, were bright and alert.
“What can I get you?” asked the barkeep.
“Whatever you got on tap,” the thin man replied. He turned his gaze toward Dale, holding it until he got Dale’s attention.
“How’s it going?” asked Dale.
“I’m sorry,” said the thin man. “It’s just that you look so familiar. Your name wouldn’t happen to be Dale, would it? Dale Sunday?”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“It is you!” The thin man grabbed his mug of ale and moved over to the stool next to Dale. “I knew it! Arturo Lucien.” He held out his bony hand. “We went to the same school when we were kids, remember?”
Dale recognized him by the nervous energy more than his face. “Arturo. Yeah, how you been, Art?”
He looked nothing like Dale remembered. And he spoke fast.
“Better than I deserve. Gosh, it’s been what? Twelve years or something?” Arturo swilled his drink and wiped the foam from his lips with the sleeve of his shirt. “How strange to randomly bump into you here like this. Look at you. You look good. Last I heard you were with the Republican Guard or something. That true?”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“That was the rumor after you left. So you a soldier now or what?”
“I was. Not anymore.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“I decided it wasn’t for me.”
Arturo waited for Dale to elaborate. And when it was apparent he wasn’t going to, Arturo was quick to fill the silence.
“Sure, sure. It’s a good thing too. Word on the street is we might go to war with Bale. Can you imagine? Probably just posturing, but still. Duke Thalian can’t be that dumb—going up against the Ancile. You ever seen it? The Ancile?”
“Only in pictures. My brother recently got transferred there.”
“No shit! That’s kind of a big deal, isn’t it?”
Dale shrugged. “I guess.”
Arturo suddenly sat up and took inventory of his surroundings as if it had only just occurred to him where he was. His head darted back and forth in short rapid bursts like a perching bird just before it takes flight. His eyes finally settled on the old fishermen quietly imbibing at their lonely tables. He didn’t recognize any of them. Satisfied, he slumped back into his seat, took out his smokes and offered one to Dale.
“Thanks.”
After lighting them, Arturo seemed to ease with his first pull. He released a thick plume with a sigh and shook his head. “Imagine, the last time I saw you we were just kids. Now look at us. Seems like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?”
&
nbsp; “It was.”
“You remember Marcus Addy, right?”
“Yeah, I do,” Dale replied with a chuckle.
“Of course you do. Boy, I still remember when you beat him up real good. Everyone at school was talking about it for weeks.” Arturo smiled, his eyes fixed on the memory. “Anyway, he became some sort of a corporate big shot a while back before he sold his company. Bought a few mines and now he heads the trade commission in Pharundelle. I heard he works directly with the prime minister.”
“Good for him.”
“And you remember Beryl Davies?”
“No.”
“She’s the one that sat behind Gordon Hemlock in science.”
“The blonde?”
“Yeah! That’s the one. You think she was a looker back then—” he sucked air through his teeth before continuing. “She grew into one fine woman. It’s a shame that one got away. And not for the lack of effort on my part. But that’s another story. Anyway, she ran around with some famous bard or playwright or something like that for a few years, then separated, and then became a physician’s assistant. She finally settled down, if you can call it that, with a humanitarian.” Arturo paused to track the barkeep making his rounds. “Last I heard, she’s somewhere in Loreland running an orphanage or hospital or something. A beautiful girl with a golden heart. Who would’ve thought? Right up there with unicorns and flying pigs.”
Dale drank and nodded as if he were disinterested. But he was attentive in the same way one would carefully listen to unpleasant news. His peers had gone on to greater things and greater successes while he was back where he’d started. Stagnant.
“So anyway, what’re you up to if not soldiering? You back for good?”
