by Deck Davis
When he saw me, he bolted up to his feet. He waved wildly. “Hi, ho, Harry Wollenstein!” he bellowed so loudly that a few passing folks turned their heads toward him. He whipped the reins in a gentle way, and the horses picked up their pace. It was only then that I heard the blare of a horn, followed by another. It spread into a contagion of them. Behind the horse and carriage, crawling at five miles per hour, were a row of s-cars, with some increasingly irate drivers.
The carriage stopped in front of me. Eddie jerked his thumb toward the cars. Now that the road was clear, the drivers sped up, but they made sure to give Eddie dagger-like looks.
“I’ve got an s-car at home,” he said. “I could have picked you up in that, but it’s rush hour so I figured, why not piss a few people off by clogging up the roads?” He said this with such an infectious grin I couldn’t help smiling back.
“What are their names?” I asked, looking at the horses.
“Bennie and Torsvig.”
“Bennie? Coincidence. I have a Razta wolfhound called Bennie.”
“You have a Razta? That settles it. Next meeting is at your place. Hop on, Har.” Eddie held out his hand. I grabbed it, not even caring that he’d called me ‘Har.’ There was something different about Eddie Hazzard, just something agreeable. My old team had been a closed book; Sera kept everything to herself, Clyde only cared about his own advancement, and Vorm was friendly enough, but his mind was, rightly, always on his family, whereas Eddie seemed like a genuinely open guy—a little goofy maybe, but open.
“Eddie!” called a voice. Two children, a boy in grease-covered overalls and a girl carrying a battered textbook, sprinted down the street. When they stopped at the carriage, they started petting the horses.
“Sup, Ed?” said the boy. His hands were cracked and covered in oil.
“How do, Short Wrench,” said Ed. “How’s the apprenticeship going? Is Olly sick of you yet?”
Short Wrench pinched his index and middle fingers together and rubbed them against his thumb, in the way people ask for money without saying it. “Time to pay up,” he told Eddie.
Eddie looked aghast. “Pay up? I bet that we’d qualify, and we did.”
Short Wrench shook his head. The expression on his face was all too adult for what must have been a ten- or eleven-year-old boy.
“You said you’d win the qualifiers, Ed. And you placed a hundredth out of 300. If that’s winning, I’d hate to see you lose.”
Eddie sighed. “Fine. Let me sort my new friend here out, and then you’ll get your bits.”
“Seventy-five,” said the boy, in a stern voice.
“Is this man on your team?” asked the girl.
Eddie nodded. “Harry Wollenstein. He’s an aberdorph.”
“Abermorph,” I corrected. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t heard of an abermorph until now.
“What’s that?” asked the girl.
I shrugged. “No idea.”
I settled into the seat of the carriage next to Eddie. He looked at me and raised his eyebrow. It was if he was asking me something.
“I have no idea what you want,” I said.
“You ready?” he whispered.
“I guess.”
He turned to Short Wrench. “Want your bits?”
Short Wrench held out his wrist, showing his connector.
Eddie stood up, lashed the reigns of his horse, and bellowed “Yeeeee ha!”
The horses started moving, with their heads leaned low, steam rising with each grunt, their hooves click-clacking on the road. The shouts of Short Wrench were loud behind us, but they trailed off and off the further away we got.
“Conning a little kid?” I said. “Nice.”
“Short Wrench is, lacking a better word, a little bastard. If I win a bet against him, he tells his Dad that I’m making him gamble. If he wins, I don’t pay him. It’s a little game we play.”
I settled back into the seat. “You said I needed to meet the town elders?”
“It’s elder. Just one. And yeah. We just need to convince him that the team’s still on track so that the town can keep funding us. People are a little anxious about this whole enterprise. Qualifying for New Eden settled them a bit, but they’re concerned that we only placed a hundredth.”
I couldn’t blame them, personally. It sounded like the town of Perlshaw had something riding on Eddie and his team’s success and placing a hundredth didn’t inspire confidence. It had been enough to qualify, as the New Eden team VBR would have 120 teams in it. Out of the 300 teams who had tried to qualify, Eddie and company had placed in the top third. Looking at it that way, it wasn’t too bad, I supposed.
Still, with my experience, I knew I’d be able to get them into shape, just as long as Eddie wasn’t the kind of captain who didn’t like getting advice. I’d fought under a few of those before Vorm and I started Team Wolfhound, and it wasn’t nice.
“So,” said Eddie, “We’ll be having dinner this fine evening with Arin, the elder. He’ll probably ask a few general questions about VBR. He doesn’t know much about it, so just humor him. He won’t go into much detail.”
~
“And how would you work wind speed into the equation?” asked the stern old man across the table. “I know there are elemental-resistant armors, but would you factor anything else into it? Of course, a bowman would be quite stuck if the gust picked up. I imagine a twenty-two per cent drop in accuracy or less would be a reasonable estimate.”
I looked across the table as Eddie, giving him the sharpest dagger eyes that I could. Eddie looked down at his plate and became fascinated with a sausage.
Next to him was Glora Laura, with her ice-pale face and long pig tails. I hadn’t heard her sing since getting to Perlshaw, but I was hoping she’d belt out a few bars before I left. Every so often, Glora would smirk when elder Arin asked me a highly involved, incredibly-technical VBR question. She seemed to find it funny to watch the old man grill me.
Beside Glora was Wolfy, the hulking brute of a man who looked too large to be sat around a dinner table. He wore a well-ironed shirt and a straightened tie. He looked like he should have been throwing giant monster-truck wheels around in the World’s Strongest Man competition. Yet for all his size, he’d been the most refined person at the table. It was Wolfy who had gone down into Elder Arin’s cellar and chosen the right wine to accompany roasted rabbit and ale pie, and it was Wolfy who’d selected some classical music and set it playing on a small gel-stereo on the wall behind him.
Elder Arin Edison rounded off our small dinner contingent. On the way to Perlshaw, as his horses dragged us up the impossibly sloping hill that the town was built on, Eddie had told me about him. Arin Edison was the oldest man in the village. Some people would have believed that this was the reason he was the Perlshaw town elder, but it wasn’t so. Edison claimed that he came from an academic family tree, with each branch of it boasting scientists and inventors. It stretched all the way back to the fossil-fuel days and even beyond that a little. He was always tinkering with stuff, always trying to improve things.
That’s when Eddie told me something that I found amazing. He told me that Perlshaw wasn’t government-sponsored, and that even the Expanse Charter had never come here. Perlshaw’s prot-layer hadn’t been supplied or installed by the government. Instead, Arin Edison had made it.
I was floored. Prot-layers were an intricate and highly dangerous technology to play around with. Without the proper materials, you could really hurt yourself trying to make one. The fact that elder Arin had cobbled one together himself, without a sanctioned blueprint, was incredible.
That was why I didn’t mind him peppering me with VBR questions, even though Eddie had promised that I wouldn’t get a grilling.
Now, we were sitting in Arin’s house, in his living room that also served as a dining room. He lived in a small cottage, even though he’d been offered somewhere bigger loads of times. He could have had his pick of real estate in Perlshaw, such was his hero
status, but he always declined. He was happy where he was. He didn’t need much materially, he just needed things to keep his brain occupied.
As the meal wore on, Arin asked me question after question. He exhausted me of all my VBR knowledge, as if he were some kind of information vampire. I was shattered by the time we reached desert. It was only when Wolfy went into Arin’s kitchen and came out with the desserts that Arin eased up a little.
“Well, that’s enough questions for now,” he said. “I’m sorry to grill you, Harry, but it’s quite important that we get this right. There is a lot at stake for Perlshaw in the Eden battle.”
“Eddie hinted as much earlier.”
“Well, tell me about yourself, Harry. Where are you from? Tell me a little about your family.”
I sensed that the conversation was about to turn down an avenue I never talked about; my parents. Even years after the accident, I still hadn’t really spoken to anyone about it properly. Not even Dylan. I just couldn’t. Thinking about them made me tense up and made my head throb.
“How about you tell me about Team Perlshaw?” I said. “I never heard of a whole town having a team before. I mean, there’s the Eden Tronix, but that’s a city, and they’re a little different. What’s the deal here?”
“Soon,” said Arin, then folded his arms as if that was the end of the conversation. “tell me, Harry, why do you fight?”
I guessed that Elder Arin was a perceptive man, since he didn’t poke into my family life any further. I liked him for that, and I liked his question even more. ‘Why do you fight?’ It was an interesting question. One that I’d never been asked before.
“I need bits. And I guess I’ve always been around VBRs, so it made sense.”
“Exactly,” said Wolfy. “Bits. It’s a job.”
Eddie sat upright, rapt with attention. “VBR isn’t a job. It’s an art. The smell of fresh loot, the noise a blade makes when you swipe it…”
Elder Arin eyed me with concentration. He had strong stare. “And what do you need bits for, may I ask?”
Everything he asked me felt like a test. “I need a new prot-generator for my ranch,” I said.
Arin nodded. He seemed satisfied with this answer.
“Hey Harry,” said Glora Laura, with a mischievous tone to her voice. “Why don’t you tell Arin what happened in Bernli?”
I was beginning to think that Glora took delight in putting people in situations where they’d squirm.
“Arin doesn’t want to hear about that,” I said. But then I caught the look in Arin’s eyes. One that said ‘yes, I do want to know about that.’ I shot Glora a set of poison-dripped dagger eyes, and reluctantly told Arin what had happened.
The rest of the meal came and went in this way. Eddie had already explained to me how important it was to keep Elder Arin’s favor, so that he’d agree to keep funding the team. It was my job, apparently, as the newest, yet most experienced, VBR fighter on the team, to restore Arin’s confidence in the project. Since I was already starting to like Eddie, Glora, and Wolfy, I did my best.
When dessert was gone and the after-dinner coffees had been drunk, the party started getting sleepy. With a full belly and my head slightly woozy from the brandies Elder Arin kept plying me with, I felt warm inside.
As I watched Eddie pick food from his teeth with a cocktail stick, Wolfy gulp down half a glass of beer in one swallow, and Glora stretch her arms over her head and squint her eyes in a cute way, I got the strangest feeling. I realized that this whole time, it hadn’t felt like I was getting to know a group of strangers. In a way, it seemed like I’d just spent an enjoyable evening with old friends.
Eddie seemed to be reading my mind. “Y’know what, Harry? You might talk about wolfhounds a little too much, but I’m glad to have ya on the team.”
“Same here,” said Wolfy, and slammed his empty glass on the table. “You can hold your liquor, too. I’ve seen Arin loading you up with his stomach burners. It’s a little game he plays when someone new comes to stay. He tries to get them drunk so he can laugh at them.”
I nodded. “Thanks everyone. It’s been great, really. I can’t remember the last time I had food this good. Arin, if you wanted to get me drunk, vodka would have done it. Stuff knocks me out flat.”
Elder Arin smiled. “Call me immature, but it was a game I used to play at college, and it never left me. We all have our little immaturities, don’t we? You don’t seem worse for wear, unfortunately.”
After that, Glora Laura was the first to say her goodnights.
“Lemme walk you home,” said Wolfy.
“Such a gent,” replied Glora.
That left Eddie, Arin and me. It was at about this time, that I realized a different expression had taken hold on Eddie’s face. He’d lost a little bit of his goofy, smiley charm. He looked tired. Serious.
“This has been great,” I said. “The food, the company, the welcome. My last team didn’t even buy me a beer in the five years we were fighting.”
“There is a reason we asked you here so soon,” said Arin.
I wondered how old the elder really was. He didn’t look ancient, that was for sure. He had a thick head of hair that sprouted in all directions, making it look like the mane of a lion. It would have been the envy of a lot of balding-guys thirty years younger than him. As well as that, he wore a carefully groomed beard that looked so silky that he must have conditioned it. It was the color of his hair that gave some indication as to his age; both his lion mane and beard were pure white. His face, too, had taken a battering in the ageing process, evident by the well-worn wrinkles in his face that gave him a stern look, even when he smiled.
Serious expressions aside, during the meal I found that Arin was generous with his smiles. Especially when I told him something about VBRs that he didn’t already know. New knowledge seemed to make him happy, and he smacked his lips whenever he heard something new, almost as if he could taste it.
Arin stood up.
Eddie joined him. “Is it time?”
Arin nodded.
I started to get a cultish-vibe from them. I wondered if they’d called me all the way to Perlshaw to sacrifice me to some god, or something.
“We have something to show you,” said Arin.
“Oh?”
Eddie nodded. His smile was back. “You’ll love it, Har.”
Arin and Eddie led me out of the elder’s house and onto the streets of Perlshaw. When Eddie had first brought me here in his carriage, I had been amazed. Perlshaw station was set a few miles away, on even land. It looked quite normal—a little run-down maybe, but normal. The town of Perlshaw itself, however, was something different. Perlshaw was built on the summit of a gigantic hill. The hill sloped upwards at a gentle angle at first, so that it didn’t seem particularly high when you initially set foot on it. The problem was that the slope went on and on, always at an angle, and eventually, when you reached the top of it, you were high enough up to invite vertigo. Houses were built all along the hill, with Elder Arin’s being near the peak. Before going into his house, I’d walked to the edge of the hill and looked down, only to lurch back when I realized we were almost a hundred feet high. It was at that point that I became keenly aware of the wind lashing round me and how, with one big effort, it could probably blow me off the hill.
I’m not great with heights. While Dad hated flying, I have a strained relationship with high places, and Perlshaw was a high place. Its placement atop a high hill in the south of the country meant that there was an ever-present wind in Perlshaw. Their cobbled-together prot-layer was built well enough to withstand the sun, but it lacked the newer weather-control features of places like New Eden and Kinohelm.
The houses were mostly built from stone, with timber beams crisscrossing here and there. They looked like they belonged in the far distant past. In fact, were it not for the solar-paneled street lamps, which were fueled by the filtered sunlight that the prot-layer allowed through, and the s-cars, it would have looked like a t
own from the Middle Ages.
This was what I liked about it, the old-fashioned feel, the flicker of fires in hearths that could be seen through open living room windows, the gentle glow of street lamps, the cheers and laughter from the Thirsty Rat tavern. The whole thing was like stepping through a time portal into a more wholesome, tech-free place (not that I wanted to get away from prot-layers and gel-tech, as they had saved millions of lives, but it was nice to shake it off for a little while).
