by Jasmine Walt
Sweat popped out on his forehead. “I want the war to end, as soon as possible,” he said. “Should this sound weapon be developed, it will only delay the inevitable. I think ... in the end, if the war is prolonged ... even more will die.”
“And if certain information were passed on to Octung, and Octung was able to build a defense against the weapon? Or if the efforts here were simply sabotaged?”
He shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “Octung would prevail that much quicker, and peace would be restored to the world. I may hate Octung, but I hate the war more.”
“But the purgings ... You’re against them.”
“The purgings are inevitable. Octung will win, that much is certain. The only thing that remains in doubt is how many die between now and then. I mean to see that as many survive the war as possible. I want peace, no matter what.”
“And the man that helped Octung achieve that peace would be rewarded, I suppose. And spared from any purgings.”
“Or woman.”
“Hmph.”
“And yes, that is an interesting point,” he said. “But that should not be a primary motivator. And I am, of course, simply thinking out loud here. I don’t mean anything by it.”
“Of course,” she said. “Neither do I.”
A long silence passed. She stared at him, then her sword. At last she let out a breath, and he could see the tension leaving her.
They exchanged a look. For a moment she almost appraised him with warmth. And Janx said he couldn’t bluff!
She flicked the blood off the end of her blade, placed the sword back on the wall, and said, “I’ll think on it. Meanwhile, would you like a drink?”
He laughed. “After you, of course.”
She smiled grimly and poured. “Wise man.”
8
Two days later he found Janx’s message. It had become Avery’s habit to return to the Headless Drake every few days for fresh clothes, supplies, and to make sure no squatters had moved in. Just as importantly, he felt it necessary to tend to his expensive bottle of Valyankan bourbon.
But there was another reason.
He and Janx had arranged a drop-spot behind a loose brick near his door, and he checked it every visit. Generally either Janx or one of his cronies would leave a crumpled slip of paper, usually saying that there was nothing to report. Avery had just been on the cusp of thinking the whaler wasn’t taking this as seriously as he should; Janx had agreed to have Sheridan tailed, yes, but so far neither he nor any of his agents had turned up anything.
This time was different. The note ran: Intercepted message from S to handlers. Read and replaced. S requests meeting Vruth Eve. Will try n eavesdrop.
Elation filled Avery. Finally! Sheridan had left a message at her own drop-spot, and either Janx or his people had found it. Now Sheridan was going to meet with her handler, surely to relate the information Avery had let slip regarding Dr. Wasnair’s theoretical device. He grinned.
“I’ll make a spy of you yet,” he told himself.
He tossed the note in the fireplace and helped himself to an extra finger of bourbon. Now all he had to do was sit back and wait.
He settled in and read a book for a time, one of his many historical adventures, this one about the Ysstral-Ghenisa War, while the fire crackled in the background. Spiders wove their webs in the darkness above, and the night wind howled outside.
In his book, a Ghenisan princess had been captured by a ruthless Ysstral lord in the Borghese Mountains, where most of the War of the Severance had taken place hundreds of years ago. The Ysstral lord held the princess captive in a high tower of the infamous Maar Keep. Little did Lord Hyssmyr know that the rival Ysstral prince he had walled up alive in the catacombs still lived, subsisting on rats and vermin and scuttling about like those he preyed on behind the walls and in secret passages of the Maar. Naturally the handsome Prince Cort found and rescued the beautiful Princess Syra, but as they fled through the secret passages she informed him that in order to make it to the carriages, they would need to pass through the masked ball taking place even then in the ballroom below. They could waylay a couple of guests, disguise themselves—
Avery sat up.
Vruth Eve, he thought. Shit.
He stood, threw on his jacket and left his apartment, but not before one last sip of Valyankan.
Outside, cold wind shivered through the city streets. It didn’t seem to deter Avery’s fellow Ghenisans, however, and his blood was warm enough from the drink. The streets thronged with natives and refugees alike. Brightly-colored lamps hung from icy stone walls. Glowing alchemical orbs had been shoved into gargoyles’ mouths, and strings of lights hung from the horns of serpentine dragons. People wandered the sidewalks, tramping from tavern to tavern, from vaudeville theater to picture show, some festively costumed over their coats and jackets. They dressed as the Three Sisters themselves, the Sun King, or the innumerable Star-Lords whose stories populated myth and fable.
This was the traditional three-day holiday of Vruthaen, when two of the Sisters eclipsed. Looking up past the clouds, Avery could see all three moons wheeling through the stars between long ribbons of cloud. The eclipse was to be tomorrow, Vruth Eve, when the Mother passed over the Waif. It was supposed to be a symbol of birth and rebirth for those who belonged to the Trinity faith. Massive orgies and drunken revelries during the time of the Drakes had helped popularize the holiday and now it was officially celebrated every eclipse, though these days with less debauchery. That had been one good thing about the Drakes, Avery supposed. They had known how to celebrate.
Huddling in a cab with a broken heater, he watched the gaily-costumed revelers totter through the streets, and he thought their red, laughing faces and ribald calls showed a certain strain. After all, they had been forced to endure rations, blackouts and general declarations of coming doom for months, years. The holiday was a time when they could release their tensions, but it seemed to Avery that it only expressed their fears more nakedly. Their laughter was too shrill, their dancing too frantic, their passion too obsessive.
Still, it was hard not to be moved by all the men singing drunkenly on street corners, children eating candied apples (however old and shrunken), women strutting in slinky, furred costumes, and bright lights blazing everywhere.
The revelry grew even more raucous in the direction Avery went: the Tangle. In the Tangle, heaping tenements stacked up like fungi, some huge, some listing dangerously, many mashed up against each other. Tiny hovels squeezed between monoliths, permanently in shadow. Streets wove nearly at random through the mad buildings: winding, dead-ending, doubling back, merging with tiny tributaries that wove and forked and ended in sinister cul-de-sacs. Factories belched smoke into the sky over the crumbling roofs of tenements, blocking out the stars. It was a seedy labyrinth, known for danger and seduction.
Avery disembarked briefly at several pubs and street corners, asking the whereabouts of Janx. The whaler was a well-known figure in the community and it wasn’t long before someone told Avery where to find him. Avery thanked the prostitute with a few coins and was on his way once more.
The cabbie dropped him off at the Blazing Tiger. Once the building had been a small factory that made ship parts, and its chimney stacks could still be seen rearing above, but competition with larger companies had closed it down long ago. Now a huge neon sign over the doorway depicted a flaming tiger leaping through the air. The lights flashed in such a way that the tiger, Kaugen, seemed to move, flames crackling off him. Kaugen was an ancient god of war and sex, belonging to a cult from Laisha. Appropriate to the building, naturally.
Avery waited in the short line and paid the bouncer the cover. As he stepped through the huge metal doors, Avery entered a bastion of warmth and noise, and he smiled gratefully. Spice and grease and ale and cigarette smoke and roasting meat filled the air, but they had to compete with the stench of thousands of people and the sweat of the men they watched. Sailors and roustabouts and criminals and factory w
orkers and a myriad of others pressed close against each other, shouting and jostling, placing bets, laughing and cursing. Vendors sold hot dogs and fried, mutton-filled peppers, flatbread and mushrooms, boiled turtle on a stick. And beer. Lots of beer. Everything was drastically overpriced, of course—food was still rationed, and much of this was black market stuff—and the victuals’ presence alone seemed opulent in these meager days. But there were evidently plenty here with money to spend, which was encouraging.
Avery, not as flush as he would like, ignored the vendors that besieged him as he shoved his way through the crowd. He wished some of the patrons had washed more thoroughly. Their layered clothing didn’t help, especially now that they were indoors. He felt more than one weasely denizen of the Tangle brush up against him and was glad he’d hidden his wallet in an inside pocket of his jacket. The thieves wouldn’t have gotten much, but these days even a little was a lot. He walked through a cloud of cigar smoke, then a pocket of spice.
At last he reached the periphery of the ring and stared up in awe at the bare-chested titans battling it out on the boxing platform. The crowd roared, and the huge, awesome form of the taller one smashed his bare-knuckled fist into the face of his opponent, who grunted and staggered back.
Sweating and fighting for breath after delivering the blow, Janx looked like something Kaugen would approve of, covered in scars, tattoos and blood, a great primal creature built of slabs of muscle and steely sinews. Hard eyes, one half closed under a bruise, glared out to either side of the leather patch that covered his nasal cavity, and spittle sprayed from his broken lips.
His opponent, a man nearly as tall as he and possibly even more muscular, with a livid tattoo of a winged serpent coiling across his back and disappearing under his red trunks, recovered from the blow and launched himself at Janx. He ducked Janx’s swing and pummeled the whaler in the abdomen, one hit after another, driving him back. Avery could hear the slap of fists on flesh even over the screaming crowd. Janx’s opponent forced him up against the ropes. His fists beat against the whaler in a flurry, a meaty slap-slap-slap that reminded Avery of something he might hear in a butcher shop.
At last Janx, almost leisurely, shoved his opponent away with one hand and smashed him under the jaw with the other. The vicious uppercut actually lifted the man off the ground, sweat flying, and flung him to the mat with a thud. The crowd roared. Janx prodded the man’s ribs with a foot, but the man didn’t move, save to breathe in and out. The referee counted to ten, then raised Janx’s arm, with Janx’s help. Bells rang. The crowd roared louder. Janx grinned a bloody grin at his worshippers.
While the audience members collected on their bets and ordered more food and beer, Avery pushed his way into the clearing around the ring. Two bouncers moved to stop him, but he flashed his medical ID. “I’m Janx’s doctor!” he called. That seemed to confuse them, since Janx’s doctor was busy patching up the big man’s eye.
Fortunately Janx saw the activity. Avery heard his booming laugh over the murmur of the crowd. “Let ‘im through!” Janx demanded, spitting out his mouthpiece, then slumped back in his chair. The doctor swabbed at his bad eye.
Grateful, Avery approached. “That was quite a fight,” he said, staring up at the mountain of blood and muscle and ink that was Janx. He supposed it shouldn’t surprise him that the whaler would prizefight when he wasn’t whaling. He was a man of action, of violence, and if he did nothing between voyages but drink and whore he would likely go mad. Of course, Avery was sure there was plenty of drinking and whoring, too.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Doc,” Janx said, wincing as the other doctor taped up his eyebrow.
“Don’t tell me you’re fighting again.”
Janx chuckled. “Fight till ya drop. That’s the game. Ya get paid by the round as well as the win.”
Avery eyed the whaler’s mass of bruises and cuts. Fighting bare-knuckled had obviously taken a lot out of him. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“I don’t think that’s what it’s about, Doc.”
“I’d like to talk to you about that other matter. About that note you left. You see, I’ve been thinking, and—well this should probably be done behind closed doors—”
The bells rang.
The attention of the crowd returned to the ring. The announcer, clad in a gaudy tuxedo and flanked by two half-naked women, strode across the stage bellowing: “AND NOW FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I BRING YOU OUR NEXT CHALLENGER, ONE OF YOUR FAVORITES AND MINE, THE TITAN OF TERROR, THE FANTASY OF FREAKISHNESS, THE REIGNING SULTAN OF THE UNHOLY, THE UNMATCHABLE HORROR OF ...” Somewhere there was a drum roll “... MUIRBLAAG THE MON-STERRR!!”
On the other side of the ring the crowd parted and a huge form emerged draped in a shiny black robe. Large bouncers escorted him, but he dwarfed them in comparison. Avery had to stop his jaw from falling open. The next challenger was not simply big but inhuman.
Pulling himself up with a half-claw, half-flipper, Muirblaag the Monster climbed into the ring.
He was not poorly named. However, at first Avery wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. There were certainly non-human intelligent life-forms in the world—the amphibians of Talis, the goat-people of Naderhorn, the lizard men of Qerwig—though members of these races tended to stay among their own cultures. Avery had only met a few humans who’d even claimed to have encountered one. Muirblaag didn’t seem to fall into any of these racial categories, however. He was, Avery realized belatedly, a mutant human, someone infected from contact with the Atomic Sea. It was the only explanation, unless—
But no. Avery wouldn’t think of it. None of them would dare descend down here.
Still ... most infected victims’ deformations were ragged, incomplete, unfinished, like the refugees he’d seen on the way to the cemetery. They did not look like whole beings.
Muirblaag looked whole. From universally scaly skin to two fully-formed webbed hands, to the straight crest that adorned his hairless head and ran down his broad back, he looked all of a piece, a complete and perfect specimen of ... well, he was undeniably piscine. His eyes shown completely black, with no whites or visible irises, his lips bulged, he had nearly as little nose as Janx. A glittering silver earring that looked suspiciously like a fish hook dangled from the bony ear hole on the right side of his thick head. His scales glistened blue-gray. The suggestion of gills quivered on his neck immediately below his jaws.
Muirblaag may have been human once—or perhaps not if Avery’s suspicion was correct—but in any case he wasn’t human now. Poisoned food or possibly even birth (from infected parents, as Avery suspected) had transformed him into a fish-man of monstrous dimensions. His shoulders were broad and powerful, his arms thick and knotted as tree trunks. Scars criss-crossed his body. An alchemical tattoo on his bicep glowed in the shape of a reverse mermaid, with her upper half piscine and her lower half a naked woman. A cigarette jutted from her wide lips and, thanks to the alchemy involved, the smoke seemed to writhe about her head.
Wearing only a pair of gray trunks, Muirblaag strode on webbed feet toward the center of the ring, dripping water as he went. He had either come from a bath, shower or dowsing. Perhaps like a fish he must stay moist.
Janx met him at the center of the ring, and Avery saw to his astonishment that the fish-man stood a full head taller than Janx.
Janx glared up at him, and Muirblaag glared down at Janx. Avery sensed the lingering trace of some old animosity. The announcer shouted more inducements to the crowd to get excited—hardly necessary, for they seemed in a rare state of exultation; this was evidently a famous rivalry—and shouted for the fight to begin.
Bells rang. The two titans flew at each other.
Janx struck first. He punched at Muirblaag’s face, but the fish-man wove with surprising speed and sent a scaly fist into Janx’s belly. An explosion of air from Janx’s lips bathed Muirblaag’s face. Janx reeled back, cocked his arm, and sent a mean right hook to the fish-man’s ribs with
an audible slapping of meat. Muirblaag staggered, growled and leapt at him.
It was a colossal battle. Huge fists flew and slammed into glowering faces. Blood sprayed through the air, some red, some inky blue. The titans roared and smashed at each other, and it seemed the ground shook with every impact. The crowd went mad, shrieking at the fighters, waving cash over their heads for bookies to collect, jostling each other for better spots. Vendors sold roasted peanuts and beer by the armload.
Despite himself, Avery found himself enjoying it all, even though he winced every time Janx took a punch. He decided a beer would help, then two, then, why not, a box of peanuts.
At last the fight ended. With one mighty punch in the sixth round, Muirblaag sprawled Janx across the mat. The whaler fell with a terrific thud; Avery could see the mat jump at the impact, see Janx’s cheeks warble.
Bells rang, scantily-clad women strutted, and Muirblaag was declared the winner. After slapping him conscious, Janx’s doctor/trainer led him out of the ring.
Still munching peanuts, Avery followed. “I’m with him,” Avery told the bouncers, and Janx grunted agreement. Staggering, the big man led the way into the dressing room. There he showered, dried off and dressed while a few fans waited outside. Avery finished his peanuts. The dressing room stank of sweat and mold.
When Janx emerged from the shower, he looked like he’d been through a meat grinder. Cuts and bruises covered every bump and curve of his body.
“You should find a better hobby,” Avery said.
Janx grunted and pulled on his pants. “I like this just fine.”
“He’s a star,” growled the doctor/trainer, who had taken out his medical bag and was looking through it. He was a tall man with a flat, broken nose and iron-gray hair. He’d obviously been a fighter in his youth. “Can’t you see that?”
