Infernal Machines

by Jacobs, John Hornor

  Riding south, hugging the skirts of the Eldvatch, it grew moist and greener with every step. Grass – real grass, not the lashing, grasping shoal blades in the west by the Big Rill – thickened and blanketed the hillsides. We trudged over streams and through dells and over hills. We forded rivers that had names only in dvergar tongue, and I knew at one time, though they’re lost to me now. Bess hawed and tugged at her reins, looking to forage, and at every rest found lush grass. Gynth, giving a single look to me and chucking his head at the forests covering the skirts of the gunmetal grey Smokeys, bounded off, up the slope. I assumed to hunt, but who knows what desires boiled under the surface of Gynth’s calm demeanour? He was a stretcher, but unlike any stretcher I’d heard of or witnessed. A strange creature, both cruel and kind. Both fearsome and full of life. I would be lying if I said I did not love him some. And fear him some, as well.

  Praeverta’s dogged group kept up – the determination of my kin is remarkable, and even though Praeverta and her men were not my favourites and would win no popularity contest in Passasuego, New Damnation, or the rest of the Hardscrabble cities and towns, I admired their stamina and was proud that they kept up so well with the horses. We dvergar are strong, and formidable. I’ve always known it, and I think Fisk has too.

  But it was time the world discovered how strong we are.

  We passed into a valley, runnelled with a large stream that grew sooty and discoloured. A pall hung over the place, and the grasses and foliage seemed dimmed. Smoke draped the valley, and beyond, where the mountain grew, a rough stone wall half-hid a warren of timber buildings. We stopped to piss and let the horses drink before following the trail down, toward the hamlet.

  Catch Hands came close. He had an anvil jaw, square shoulders. ‘It’s the Grenthvar, they call it. The Breadbasket.’

  ‘What,’ I said. ‘This valley?’

  ‘Yes and no. It is the valley and the mountain beyond and what they both hold between them,’ he said, and cocked his head and looked at me seriously. ‘You’ve been away from your kind too long, Ilys. Your head can only hold one idea at a time, like the advenæ, these foreigners from Rume.’ He put his fist on my shoulder and mimed hammering. Not just mimed: I felt the blows, but they were given in the spirit of camaraderie and brought memories from long ago, when I was just a pup on the mountainside, grasping at my mother’s apron strings. ‘We contain the world, the dvergar, and can hold multitudes within us,’ he said.

  ‘And the Grenthvar,’ I said, trying to bring the conversation back around to the subject. ‘It’s this region, then. It’s not a word I’m familiar with.’

  ‘It is the ore of the world, the blood of dvergar,’ he said.

  ‘Did your mother happen to drop you on your head as a child?’ I said.

  ‘Only a few times,’ he answered, seriously. ‘But the shale softened the fall.’ He rubbed his skull. ‘You can still feel the divots.’ He grabbed my hand. ‘Feel here,’ he said, and brought my hand to his cranium. Sure enough, marked dents in his noggin.

  ‘How old is this village? Grenthvar.’ I could smell the cut pine on the air and hear the sound of hammer-falls and saws.

  ‘New, very new. Last winter,’ he said. He chucked his head at Fisk. ‘When him and that woman came out this way with some other Rumans,’ he said. ‘Soon after, legionnaires showed up. They put up buildings and tried to hire workers from Dvergar,’ he said, and gestured south. Dvergar, the warren city of my people, carved into the bosom of the Smokeys, lay fifteen miles to the south, close enough for this ‘Grenthvar’ find to be named the Dvergar silverlode. ‘That didn’t take,’ he chuckled, and it was not a fully wholesome sound.

  ‘The half-century of Ruman soldiers?’ I said.

  ‘Ah, well, you’ll find patches of ground from here to Dvergar that are especially fertile, this year.’

  As we approached the village, two figures appeared in the road. Both were familiar to me. Winfried and Neruda. Behind them gathered many dwarves, bearing Ruman gladii and home-made cudgels, scythes and spears.

  ‘Mister Fisk! Mister Ilys! We’ve been waiting for you,’ Winfried called. ‘It seems Neruda knew you were coming long before you came into sight.’

  We came closer. Winfried was different, now. There was something looser yet more focused about her. Her hair was longer and it framed her face, softening it. She’d put aside the more masculine suit she was wont to wear when I knew her before and wore leather trousers and a simple tunic and jacket – sodbuster or labourer garb. Her right arm was covered in a sling. Despite her welcoming words, her attention was fixed upon what was trussed and riding behind Fisk. Her countenance was as fierce and raptorial as ever.

  ‘You kept the arm, then,’ Fisk said. ‘I thought you would have lost it.’

  ‘It was a close thing,’ the dwarf standing by Winfried said. Neruda. He was a tight, compact man, with a wispy halo of hair over a speckled pate, a long aquiline nose, and a mouth overfilled with craggy teeth. He, too, was dressed in a workman’s garb unlike the storekeeper’s suit I’d first seen him in, speaking to the working class of Passasuego; now he was clad in a leather apron, patchy with stains, a belt with chisels, hammers, awls, spikes. Powder-rimed blue trousers of thick-weave, heavy fabric, orange stitching. Knee-high workman’s boots.

  He was a man of halves, like me (though old Praeverta would never call him dimidius), and looking at him was like looking in a mirror, though I’ve got a little more fur up top and my teeth don’t look like shattered rocks.

  ‘I managed to stave off the blood burden and now she’s regaining use of her hand,’ he said. ‘Every choice and turning brings us to where we are.’

  ‘That’s a whole lot of nonsense,’ Fisk said. ‘If you’ve ever been subject to powers greater than you, you might understand that.’

  ‘I am dvergar,’ Neruda said. ‘I’ve eaten Ruman bread, and drunk their watered wine. I’ve carved their stones and raised walls while legions stood by with carbines. No breath of air, no stirring of wind, no vista, no brook, no cloud trawling over the sea can make you forget that.’

  Fisk, under his breath and out of the corner of his mouth, said to me, ‘I did not know when I met Ia he’d be so short in stature or so long of tongue.’

  ‘It’s good to see you, Winfried,’ I said, and doffed my hat to her. ‘Been a busy few months and much death and destruction has occurred during them. I was sorry to hear of your arm.’

  ‘Buquo,’ she said, simply. ‘Neruda’s partisans shot him out from under me and I fell, breaking it in so many places they thought they should have to amputate. But, in addition to his stoneworking and sculpture—’ she gestured with her hale hand toward Neruda ‘—our host is a fine mender of bones.’ I saw no moment of sadness there, nor any grief at the death of her horse. She was a pragmatist to the core, and one would not find Winfried weeping for a beast of burden, even one of such stature and nobility; it was not in her character. However, she did not feel the same way about the death of her brother-mate, Wasler.

  Her eyes never left the trussed form of Beleth on the back of Fisk’s mount. I dismounted and unbound the engineer, and let him stand. I checked his bandages, ungagged him. Beleth swayed on his feet and promptly retched in the scrub on the side of the road. He pitched over and lay there for a long while, the moist ground and vomitus discolouring his clothes. Eventually, he sat up and looked around, his face a smeared and disjointed mess. It would be days before he felt whole again, if ever. I gave the man some water, checked his bindings once more, replaced his gag. It wouldn’t do to have the engineer mouthing off now, during our first interview with Neruda.

  ‘Our host?’ Fisk said, in response to Winfried.

  A voice sounded from the rear of our party. ‘The vaettir have taken control of the Breadbasket,’ Praeverta said, crowing. ‘This is our land. We are of this place. Not you Rumans.’

  Fisk shifted in his saddle to look at her. She strode forward, head held high, and came to stand in front of Neruda. She bowed to
the man. He appeared pained at this.

  ‘Get up, get up, Matve,’ he said, and, taking her upper arms, drew her into a standing position. I had come to know the old crank better than I ever thought I would’ve in the last few days since meeting her in that clandestine gathering of the vaettir outside Harbour Town. ‘Events move in the world and you are not privy to all of them.’

  Winfried said, ‘A Ruman emissary came and said he spoke for Marcellus, Cornelius, and Tamberlaine.’

  ‘Who?’ Fisk asked.

  ‘His name was Flavius Vegetius Marcellus, the general’s son,’ she said.

  ‘A legate. I know the man,’ Fisk said. ‘Not a bad fellow. He’s come up through the ranks. His hands have got dirty before.’

  ‘And what did he offer? It was an offer, was it not?’ I asked, directing my question to my mirror, Neruda. In him, had all the various turnings and twists my life had taken been different, I saw a man – a leader – that I might have been: I, a speaker for the vaettir and dvergar – one just an affiliation and the other a race – and he a man dispossessed, accepted in no society, not his race, nor his employers.

  ‘It was. He came alone to speak with me—’ Neruda said.

  ‘He was not alone,’ Fisk said. ‘He had a cohort behind him, at least.’

  Neruda shook his head, looking at Fisk. Raising two fingers to his mouth, he gave two sharp, piercing whistles. The forests and fields around us, on the road just outside of Breadbasket, began to teem and move. Hundreds of forms appeared out of the pall and mist, their garb woolly and indistinct from the flora around them. I’d heard Reeve – Reeve who saved me from the Tempus Union – call them ‘suits of ghillie’ used for hunting and ambush in wetter climes than the Hardscrabble, where I’d spent most of my life.

  Neruda said, ‘He was alone, or he was by the time he started talking.’

  ‘You killed them?’ Fisk said, frowning. ‘Not an auspicious way to start a negotiation.’

  ‘No,’ Neruda said. ‘I am no beast of the shoals.’ He grinned and many of those around him grinned as well. Even Winfried allowed a half-smile to creep up on her. ‘They were stripped nude, and all of their clothing – minus their Hellfire, of course – was placed on Frieda the Flighty, a horse of uneven temperament. She, of course, bolted at first wind of the legionnaires.’

  Even I had to smile at this. It is a small thing to strip a legionnaire – most legionnaires I knew would drop trousers at the barest hesitation – but to set them chasing their clothes on a fleeing horse approached on high comedy.

  But Fisk grimaced.

  ‘Did you allow them their boots?’ he said.

  Neruda blinked, and glanced at Winfried. Winfried shook her head.

  ‘Then you killed them.’ He looked around at all the dvergar in ghillie suits, bearing swords and Hellfire. ‘This might be the edges of Hardscrabble, but leaving someone naked and defenceless is tantamount to murder. You should’ve known that.’

  He was right.

  ‘And I imagine this was Winfried’s idea,’ Fisk said, the expression on his face becoming more grim with every moment. ‘I had heard you, Mister Neruda, are a great leader of men, but no general. And so, I must think, did you come up with this idea, Winfried?’

  She said nothing. The half-smile was gone.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve found something, Winfried, since your loss. But this.’ He spat. ‘No blooded soldier will go into war anew without giving some respect to his enemy.’

  ‘Yes, the Rumans are renowned for this, are they not?’ Praeverta said. Neruda shushed her.

  ‘Be silent, Matve, until you are needed,’ Neruda said.

  Fisk dismounted and approached Neruda and Winfried. Praeverta moved to stand behind Neruda, a glare of outrage and righteousness informing every sinew of her being.

  ‘You’re tight as ticks, I see,’ Fisk said. ‘That’s fine. That’s just fine.’ A dog barked in Breadbasket; a hoarse, desperate sound. Fisk put his hand on his hip and narrowed his eyes, looking at the odd pair – the dwarf and the Malfenian woman. ‘It’s Ia-damned easy to wage guerrilla war when you have the whole of the Hardscrabble and its outlying regions to disappear into. But once you’re fixed, once you’ve got a location you’ve got to protect, ambush and sneak attacks and these Ia-damned games you’re playing cease to work.’ I hadn’t ever seen Fisk so outraged. ‘And spending time and effort to humiliate the enemy, even if it is a company of Rume, is just wasting life.’

  There was silence then. Of all of them, he was the only one who had spent time in command of men in a military capacity, and that wasn’t much. Cornelius made him his legate, but none of Cornelius’ legionnaires had taken to the governor’s son-in-law. Fisk was a hard man, and opaque. He was a killer, as sure as any man was. He was of noble family, raised in Rume, and like any patrician boy must’ve studied strategy and tactics as he took watered wine and bread. He was hellacious with any Hellfire, and mean with a knife. There was very little mercy in him, for anything or anyone.

  ‘You would do well to listen to my partner,’ I said to Neruda. ‘He is a man of Occidentalia and the Hardscrabble, despite his Ruman descent.’

  Neruda turned his brown eyes to me. He gave a small nod.

  ‘The Medierans did not waste time mocking us, did they?’ Fisk said, ignoring my aside. ‘No, they did not, though their minions might’ve.’ He gestured to Beleth. ‘This engineer you wanted so badly, this man who would give you Hellfire, he destroyed Harbour Town by sacrificing a child to the infernal. He killed thousands – thousands of Rumans, thousands of dvergar, thousands of settlers – under orders from Mediera.’

  A hush fell over the road leading into Breadbasket, broken only by the far-off barking dogs and the squelching of the horses’ hooves in the mud.

  ‘This is how Mediera wages war! You might’ve defeated a half-century of legionnaires. You might’ve stripped a cohort of men naked, running after their clothes. But there is silver here. And the whole world is looking at it, with hunger in their eyes. Rume is coming. Mediera is coming. The world wars on silver,’ he said, pitching his voice upwards. It rang out. A flight of dark birds erupted from the treeline. ‘The Medierans will find another engineer willing to sully his soul and kill an infant and lay waste to this entire valley, soon enough. Whatever evils you think Rume capable of, do you think them capable of that?’

  Praeverta opened her mouth, but Neruda placed a hand on her arm, and she said nothing.

  ‘Keep your woolly suits. Keep your ambush tactics. But if this valley isn’t going to fall into the hands of mass-murdering filth with souls so heavy they will never float, it will need fortifications and an army. And only Rume can give you that.’

  ‘The lesser evil,’ Neruda said.

  Fisk’s face soured. ‘The only way,’ he said. ‘They will come and take it. At least right now, you can work a deal where you keep what you think is yours.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Bring me a plough and horse,’ Neruda said. Two dvergar men trotted off and returned in moments with a draught horse pulling a wagon. They unharnessed the wagon and from its bed withdrew a hand-plough and harnessed it to the horse.

  ‘I will sow the seeds of treaty, then, and strike bargain with you, right now,’ Neruda said, looking at Fisk. ‘You are a legate, are you not? And high in the empire’s favour?’

  Fisk glanced at me. He was not well regarded by Tamberlaine at the moment, quite the opposite, but he was married to Livia, who had the ears of her father, wherever in the world she might be. And her father was, as far as I knew, still governor of Occidentalia. Fisk remained quiet.

  Neruda said, ‘With this furrow I will mark where Rume is welcome, and where Rume is not.’

  He slapped the reins against the horse’s arse and moved the plough into the field, turning over great burls of dirt to either side of the blade. Fisk came to me and said, ‘You got a cigarette? We’re gonna be here all day, thanks to the dramatics.’

  I withdrew my tabac pouch
and papers and twisted two. Fisk and I remained there, smoking and watching as Neruda ploughed the field all the way into the forest. He returned and ploughed the other side of the road, effectively walling off the valley and the Grenthvar silverlode from us, as long as we respected the furrow.

  ‘You will supply us with Hellfire, to protect ourselves. You will write laws to protect the rights of dvergar, our homes and land. Will you do this?’

  Fisk bowed his head. ‘I will advocate for it. I am but one man.’

  ‘It will have to be enough,’ Neruda said. ‘Here is as far as we will allow Rume. Come no further. Should you break your bond, we will collapse the silverlode and flee into the Eldvatch, our ancestral home in the cliffs, the bluffs and caves like warrens in the rocks.’ This was no lie: I’d heard Catch Hands and Lina mention the passages to Dvergar itself, some fifteen miles distant, and beyond, east through the Smokeys to the hills by the Mammon River. He withdrew a small paring knife and cut his forearm. ‘Have we an agreement?’

  ‘The engineer stays with us, then,’ Fisk said. ‘He has some deeds to answer for and you’ll get your Hellfire soon enough.’

  ‘He looks only half-useful to us, anyway,’ Neruda said. ‘He is missing a hand?’

  Fisk nodded and withdrew his own knife. He cut his arm and they clasped forearms, mingling blood. ‘First thing on the morrow, I will ride to Marcellus in Fort Brust and inform him. More than likely I’ll return with an army at my back.’ He looked to the field. Dvergar men and women already moved, hauling rocks and driving posts into the ground, marking the furrow.

  ‘We have a treaty, then!’ Neruda said loudly. ‘Offer these men service and honour them with food. Prepare a camp for them to rest.’

  Neruda walked back into the village, leaving us standing in the road. Praeverta followed him, and, after a moment, so did Winfried.

  ‘Shifting allegiances,’ I said, watching Winfried go.

  ‘Her allegiance is the same as it’s always been,’ Fisk said, drawing on his cigarette and then, looking at it, tossing it onto the road. ‘It is to herself.’