The Misrule series Box Set

by Andy Graham

  “Probably not.” She placed her fingers on her lap, one tiny movement in a room that was deathly still. “I am appalled at what happened to Rose.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Bad news travels more quickly than good news and” — she trailed a finger down the front of her coat — “looking like I do, though distasteful to some, has advantages. Did you know that Bethina’s and my DNA, even our retina scans, are virtually identical?”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  She paused, ghosting a hand in front of her face. “Maybe I want you to understand the madness we find ourselves in. Maybe I want to understand. I’m not sure. We made changes to the central computer, inserted a custom-made virus to ensure that the slight differences between us were never picked up on, but even so—”

  There was a clatter. A thump of feet on wood. Stella burst into the room, eyes wide and hair dishevelled. In one hand, she clutched a portable radio. “She’s dead! Bethina Laudanum committed suicide.”

  “She did what?” Ray asked.

  Vena’s face went pale.

  “Reports say she hung herself off a tree in her tower.”

  “He hung her?” Vena’s voice exploded around the room.

  Stella appeared to see Vena for the first time and her hand went to her mouth. “I’m so sorry, Vena, I didn’t see you there.”

  “He hung her?” Vena whispered. One hand drifted up to pick at the mole on the end of her nose. The other pressed into her belly as if she were trying to hold it down.

  Stella held out the radio. “Bethina was found hanging off a tree in her tower by the VP’s men. Her dogs killed a man before they were shot.”

  “They killed the dogs, too?” Vena whispered. Her fingers bunched up the material of her coat into folds. When she looked at them her eyes were red. “That bastard killed my sister and my dogs?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Stella said. She glanced up at Ray. “We all seem to be saying that today.”

  The red lights from the jukebox flashed off Vena’s face, hanging shadows from her cheekbones. “Dead?” she repeated the word over and over, fading into nothing.

  As her voice trailed off, Ray stood and laid a hand on her shoulder. It was a weak, ineffective gesture, but surely something was better than nothing? Vena Laudanum may look like the woman who was behind so many of his family’s problems, but loss was loss. “We need to get out of here,” he said to Stella. “How’s Em?”

  “Good. Asleep. Real sleep, not the fake sleep adults get.” Stella seemed relieved to have something else to deal with than Vena’s sudden grief.

  “And the medical kit?”

  “My kids have a better doctors-and-nurses kit. I really should have sent Dan back to the towers on the chopper. Problem with being a control-freak doctor is that no one can care for your own better than you can.” A burst of static from the radio made her flinch. “Martinez reckons there may be some supplies hidden somewhere. He’s—”

  “Found them.” Martinez’s voice cut in. “I found a sleepy little girl, too.”

  “Mummy,” Emily mumbled. Stella hoisted her up into her arms. The little girl buried her head in her mother’s neck as Martinez unzipped the green bag in his other hand. It had a white cross on one side that was flecked and worn away to almost nothing.

  “Got you some broad-spectrums, a scalpel, bandages.” Martinez sniffed them. His nose wrinkled. “Some of which haven’t been used too often. Let’s see. What else? Some Eat-Me-Drink-Me.”

  “Meds with no label,” Ray said, seeing Stella’s puzzled expression. “Kind of like playing Rushyan Roulette. Will it, won’t it, fix me or fell me?” He spread his palms as if to say the reason why was obvious. “The legions are massively underfunded and we don’t always get much in the way of meds.” His voice faltered. “C’mon, Stella. You said it’s all placebo anyway.”

  She sniffed and stroked her daughter’s hair. “I never said it was only placebo. Not sure placebo would work on Dan now.”

  “Different when it’s someone you love in trouble, isn’t it? Different when it’s your son, brother or mother on the hospital gurney, when you hope they get transferred to a hospital bed rather than a steel tray in a morgue. When you run out of science, where do you turn? Hope, hokey remedies and prayer?” The words he wanted to say wouldn’t come. Instead, he took in Dan’s twitching, moaning body, Stella’s restless daughter and put a rein on his anger and his tongue. “No,” he said, with a weak smile. “Guess you didn’t say it was all placebo.”

  Martinez cleared his throat. “Then we got standard Resistance-issue fare: needles, blunt; scissors, left-handed; thread, broken; and geese.”

  “What?”

  “Geese. Legion slang for painkillers.”

  Stella fixed him with a flat stare. “Explain, Martinez.”

  “Analgesic. Gesic. Geese.”

  “That’s lame.” Her eyes drifted down to Martinez’s leg. “Sorry, Tino. I didn’t mean any offence.”

  “No offence taken, ma’am. Facts are facts. I am lame.” The shiny skin of his face stretched into a smile. “Damn good looking, though, and a better dancer than the lot of you put together. I could show you, if you want.” He gestured to the jukebox. His skin flashed red and orange in the lights that flickered from behind the broken glass. To Ray, the colours were the same as when Martinez’s skin had burnt in the fires from the roadside bomb that had taken his leg.

  “Don’t let my crutch put you off,” Martinez said to Stella. “I can move for two with less than one. No way I can be accused of having two left feet. I haven’t got one left foot.”

  “Facts are facts.” The tension in Stella’s face eased. The hand clutching the tangled mess of her daughter’s blonde locks relaxed.

  “Damn right, ma’am.”

  The exchange felt odd: telling jokes while the city burnt and people were being lynched, while Ray bottled up what had happened to his mother and Vena fought back tears. The clouds outside lifted. Bright moonlight spilled into the room, soaking them in a light that was almost surgical. A plume of black smoke rose in the distance. It drove a wedge between the two moons of Ailan.

  Vena interlaced her fingers in her lap, her body statue-still. There was sorrow and regret in her blue eyes. Martinez stopped midstride, not sure whether to head for the jukebox or not. And in the midst of the frozen picture, Stella crooned something wordless to her daughter, rocking from side to side. It was utterly alien to their predicament, but perfect. The movement was so normal. Stella wore it like Orr wore his scowl and Nascimento his permanent half-grin: easy, natural. Did this nurturing come easy to all parents? How would he and Brooke handle their child?

  “It’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do,” Stella had once said. “There is no manual. There are plenty of people with opinions on how it should be done. But the people with the easy answers are often childless or have endless nannies, cooks and cleaners to help out. The reality is there isn’t one definitive way of raising kids.”

  Ray shivered and stared out the window. Shadows flicked along the bottom edge. The sirens from earlier had stopped their wailing. Even the rumble of the ground as the curfew patrols passed had stopped.

  “I’m thirsty, Mummy.”

  Ray didn’t hear Stella’s reply. Dan twitched in his half-dead sleep, heels scuffing lines in the dust under the bench. Ray, ignoring the painful grinding in his back, squatted next to him and whispered, “Let you into a secret, Mr Swann. Seeing as you’re too out of it to understand what I’m saying. I’m more terrified of having kids than anything else. Bringing up good kids — most important thing in the world, hardest thing in the world. Reckon you can spot me some advice when we get out of here? I could do with a few jokes, too, if you’ve got some spare. Humour’s not really my thing.”

  His nickname of Fervent Franklin had stuck on the first day of training and he’d not shaken it off since. Neither had Reliable Ray — the man that could be counted on not to tell the joke that needs telling. Ray h
oped for his unborn kid’s sake that humour could be taught, otherwise his and Brooke’s child would either never get any jokes or deck anyone who tried to tell them. Probably both.

  “Where am I?” Dan’s voice crackled through dry lips.

  “The Kickshaw.” The bar where your wife made a pass at me without her wedding band on. Ray left that bit out. “Stella’s here. Emily, too.”

  “Jake. Where’s Jake?”

  The knot of emotions in Ray’s stomach tightened. “He’s—”

  A shadow, round and hard, blocked out the purple gleam in Dan’s eyes for a second. Ray’s eyes flicked back to the window. Whatever had cast the shadow was gone. The street was quiet. Too quiet. There was a clatter, as if a can had been knocked into the gutter.

  “Fuck.”

  Martinez’s head snapped round.

  “Get them out of here, Tino! They’ve found us.”

  There was a clang of metal on metal. Ray flinched as a dent appeared in the metal door. Shouts rang down the street.

  “No time!” Ray yelled. “Hide.”

  With an explosion that tore at his eardrums, the front door of the Kickshaw was ripped from its frame.

  12

  Corporal Orr's Obedience

  A voice, slurred and thick, shouted through the acrid cloud that cloaked the Kickshaw. “Where is he?”

  Martinez, scars washed red by the light from the jukebox, faced down the black-clad legionnaires who had burst through the door. He’d found a dustpan and brush from somewhere. “Baris Orr and Jamerson Nascimento. I’d been wondering when you two would show up.”

  “Miss us?” Nascimento lowered his rifle and grinned, his huge frame blocking out the armoured vehicle beyond the door.

  “You, yes.”

  “I asked you a question, Martinez,” Orr said.

  “Him, less so.”

  From his hiding place, Ray saw the rest of the Unsung barrel into the room. They jostled Martinez out of the way and hurled chairs at walls and windows purely because they were there. Less a bull in a china shop than china in a bull shop. Martinez tossed the dustpan and brush away and sighed. “I just cleaned up.”

  Orr, sweat dripping off his widow’s peak onto a nose that had been broken one too many times, grabbed a fistful of Martinez’s jacket. “I said—”

  “Heard you the first time. I don’t know who you mean.”

  “Don’t get pretty with me, Tino, or I’ll take you out the back and knock some manliness into that sweet little face of yours.”

  “The bomb beat you to it.”

  Martinez’s crutch clattered across the floor. Baris Orr, Ray’s one time colleague and not-quite friend, had never been the calmest of legionnaires but there was a heat in his voice that went beyond anger. Someone grunted. Dust burst from the floor as Martinez collapsed in a heap.

  “Now look what you made me do.” Orr squatted next to Martinez. He had a pair of gunslinger’s revolvers holstered at his waist. Ray pushed himself back up against the wall under one of the benches. In front of him, the waxed table he’d overturned limited his vision to Orr’s dusty black combats and Martinez’s crutch. The rest of Ray’s view was blocked by the back of Dan’s head. Stella Swann’s husband fidgeted. Sweat dripped over Ray’s hand, the one he was using to muffle the man’s moans.

  “I’m going easy on you, Tino, ‘cos you’re a vet,” Orr said. “But I get a sniff of you holding out on me, or a hint of anything . . . I don’t know, anything resistance-ish, and the next boot’s in your balls. Then I’ll work my way down the bones of your good leg.”

  “Easy, easy, easy.” Nascimento’s bass rumble eased the tension. “Let’s back off a touch, shall we? Tino was one of us: a Riverman. He’d done time in the 10th before any of us were even rooks. ’Cept for Captain Aalok maybe.”

  “Aalok’s dead,” Orr snapped. “Same as Hamid and Brooke, and Skovsky and too many others.”

  “That’s life in the legions. You know that, “ Nascimento said.

  As the men bickered, Ray suppressed a cough. Lynn, the manager of the Kickshaw, had been house proud, bar proud was probably a better term, but the underneath of this bench hadn’t seen a broom in weeks. The dust was crawling its way up Ray’s nose, tickling the back of his mouth.

  Orr shuffled round so his back was to Ray. The flashing light from the jukebox was a crimson sheen on the sweat coating the back of his neck. “So, former range-sergeant Martinez, you gonna tell me where Franklin’s at?”

  “Not seen him.”

  “You’re lying.” There was a wet thud of flesh on flesh and Martinez groaned.

  “I said easy, Orr!” Nascimento shouted. Scuffed boots, dusty and large, stood in front of Ray’s hiding place. Dan squirmed under Ray’s grip.

  “I’ve not seen him,” Martinez said with a groan.

  “I think you’re lying to me, Martinez. Not nice to lie to old friends. Did you know Franklin’s unleashed nine shades of hell over the river in Tye or are you gonna pretend not to know that, too?” Orr asked.

  “I heard.”

  “How d’you hear that?”

  The dust was scratching at Ray’s throat, demanding to be coughed out, to be spat up. How many legionnaires were here? Orr, Nascimento, one had disappeared behind the bar and maybe two more? Too many to take on his own.

  “Clear!” A shout from the back.

  Where was Stella? Just before the door had been blown off its hinges Martinez had bundled Stella and Vena — though Ray was sure they had seen it as allowing themselves to be bundled — into the back room as Ray had dragged Dan to their hiding place. A legionnaire said something Ray didn’t catch. More boots flashed past his line of sight and something made of metal and plastic crashed into the floor. The dust was in Ray’s nose now, tickling, scratching.

  “Well look at this — a radio.” With slow, deliberate movements, Orr picked it up and fiddled with one of the dials. A burst of static cut through the air as Ray sneezed into the back of Dan’s head. The static was replaced with the garble of commands, information and code words, all of which had hidden his sneeze. The government of Ailan might have been able to ban religion, but so far, they hadn’t been able to outlaw good luck.

  “A radio tuned to police and military channels. This is a punishable offence,” Orr said.

  “’Course it’s a punishable offence. It wouldn’t be punishable if it wasn’t an offence,” Nascimento muttered.

  “Don’t be a dick, Nasc. People have done time for much less than this.”

  “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me? Just wait a few more years and being poor will be a punishable offence. How will you and your family like that?”

  “I got no family left. The Legions saw to that. Remember?”

  “Beats me why you’d join up when it was the military that destroyed your town.”

  Orr’s sneer didn’t falter. “The government pay me to hurt people. Then there’s the food, shelter—”

  Dan thrashed in Ray’s grip. His boot lashed out and hit a wall. A dull thud sounded across the bar.

  Orr’s head whipped round. “What was that?”

  “Rat?” Nascimento suggested. “One of those big fuckers they got over the river, maybe it chased us here?”

  “Don’t make jokes.”

  “Since when is Baris Orr, the man who would wrestle a mountain and probably beat it, scared of a little, furry rat?”

  “Not scared of them, just don’t like them. And a rat the size of a sheep is not small.”

  “Sheep’s like a goat, right?” Nascimento asked.

  “Like we’ve never had that convo before.” Orr stood, flicked the safety off his rifle and started towards Ray’s hiding place. Dan must have been in one of his more lucid moments. He went as rigid as a corpse. His breath came in short, rapid gasps. Hot on Ray’s fingers.

  Martinez scrambled upright. “Orr.”

  “What do you want, Hop-Foot?” Orr stopped less than a metre away from Ray. There were dull splashes on the leather of his
boots: blood from the men Orr had gunned down in cold blood not twenty-four hours ago.

  “Why are you here? We’ve been searched once tonight.”

  “We just got word Franklin was seen headed this way. Orders come from Major Henndrik himself.” The splinter of wood and crash of glass filled the room as the Unsung started their search of the kitchens. Someone was laughing, the hooting laugh of pack animals at play. “And all you need to know is that we got told to shoot to kill.”

  Martinez’s hand paled on the crutch Nascimento had passed him. “But seeing as it’s an open-ended, sloppy order,” the big man said, “I’m not sure we’ll be needing any shooting. Will we, Baris?”

  Orr’s rifle swung to his shoulder. The safety was off. His finger rested along the side of the trigger guard. The end of his nail was blackened and split.

  “You really gonna shoot me?” Martinez asked.

  “If you don’t stop lying to me. Where is he? Fervent Franklin, where’s he at?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Don’t be a dick now.” Orr’s finger curled around the trigger.

  “Least let me put the jukebox on. Let me die with music in my ears.”

  “Seriously?” Orr spat on the floor. The gob of phlegm congealed into a ball of dust inches from Ray’s nose. “You lose that leg of yours ‘cos you got so soft it fell off in the rain?”

  “No, Baris,” Nascimento said quietly. “He lost the leg when an IED took out his patrol. Ray Franklin patched him up and kept him alive till the medevac arrived. Remember?”

  More boots shuffled into Ray’s field of vision. Martinez was surrounded. Three more men. The smell of sweat, fear and anticipation was palpable. Dan’s body was starting to tremble. He was frothing at the mouth, nipping at Ray’s fingers with his teeth. The lucid moment was, apparently, over.

  Martinez’s crutch thudded on the floor. “A last song for a dying man?”

  “No one’s doing any dying tonight,” Nascimento said. “We’ve already had a bucketload of bullets, haven’t we, Happy Pants?”