by Ben Galley
‘Here,’ said the clerk, sliding an envelope across the counter. ‘Write it yourself. That’ll cost you a copper dime by the way,’ he sniffed, as Merion pulled a bronze penny from his pocket. ‘Don’t send many letters over the Iron Ocean.’
Merion looked the man square in the eye. ‘Well, from now on it will be a regular occurrence,’ he told him, and then glanced back at the desk. ‘That pen needs more ink.’
The clerk gave him a look that seemed to suggest Merion had just asked for a pouch of gold nuggets instead of a pot of ink. He shook his head, tutted, and produced a fresh bottle from underneath the counter. ‘Don’t be using it all up now.’
Merion had half a mind to spill the ink on the floor as he made his way back to the desk. He scratched out the address as quick as he could, and then pressed the letter into the clerk’s palm, along with another copper coin. ‘So it gets there a little faster,’ said Merion, puffing out his chest.
‘Hmph,’ replied the clerk, and as Merion gingerly slid through the swinging doors, he added, ‘You’ll be lucky.’
But Merion did not hear him. He was too focused on his next task: he had business at the train station.
*
‘How much?’ Merion shouted over the deafening hissing of the locomotive. A fresh batch of workers had just arrived, adding to the chaos that gripped the town. ‘It sounded like you said fifty gold florins!’
‘That’s right, sixty gold florins!’
‘Sixty?’
The driver, whose name badge said ‘Eldrew’, was a big pile of lard topped off with a big black beard that was thicker than a hedge. His face, what little of it could be seen, was smeared with engine grease and coal dust. His eyes twinkled in the sun as he gazed at his beast of a machine. He could have been staring at one of the street whores, the way he eyed her up and down. Taking a grubby hand from his pocket, he flashed five fingers, then one. ‘Sixty!’ he shouted again.
Merion’s heart sank. Sixty gold florins.
‘Somebody has paid a lot of money for me to be here,’ he whispered to himself, his words lost in the hissing of the engine. People milled around him. There was the occasional shove, or casual elbow. Merion didn’t feel a thing. He just stared at the great big jets of steam erupting from the locomotive’s jagged vents and wondered how he could ever gather together such a large amount of money. His mind tumbled over a wandering path of logic, aching for a plan, a scheme, anything that could get him all the way to the ocean and beyond. All the while he thumbed the few coins he had in his pockets.
How did people make such vast sums of money?
Business!
But what do businesses depend on? His mind wandered back to his lessons with Lord Danker Crumb, and his fabulously boring lectures on the commercial structure of the Empire.
Product!
But what could he sell? All he had was his luggage.
Luggage!
Merion’s fingers flashed in front of him as he mentally totted up the worth of his personal effects, his only earthly possessions save for the clothes on his back. He soon became irritated. Not enough.
What else could he sell? What else was there, aside from products?
Skills!
But wait just one moment. He couldn’t bake worth a damn. He couldn’t hammer a nail or tend a garden. He couldn’t work a railroad. He couldn’t sing, nor play any instrument besides a smattering of the celloine, and he couldn’t imagine the wild west being very tolerant of such a thing. He couldn’t paint. He couldn’t write, and besides, he found authors to be whinging, pompous creatures, their heads far too full of nonsense. All in all, his list of skills was wearing pretty thin.
There was one thing he was good at, however, and that was sneaking. Merion’s thoughts progressed from sneaking to burglary, as all desperate minds are wanton to do. He did know a certain faerie who could turn invisible, after all. Then he heard his father’s voice in the hall, and remembered watching from behind the banister as his father berated a police constable for letting a notorious art thief escape. Thieves, he had bellowed, are the scum of this society, sir. A blight not to be taken lightly! They thieve not because they are unskilled, sir, but because they are simply too lazy! They feed off the very men that might have employed them in the first place, and gnaw at the foundations of this great Empire!
It was then that Merion realised the locomotive had run out of spit and vigour, and was now squatting contentedly on the tracks. He also noticed that the driver was now staring at him, as he had been for the last few minutes. A pair of grubby fingers clicked in front of his nose, and he shook himself out of his daze.
‘I said, you alright, sonny?’
Merion nodded vigorously, more to shake the cobwebs from his eyes than anything. ‘Yes. perfectly fine, thank you.’
‘Looked like you’d been cursed for a moment there. Done near scared me to hell.’
Merion bowed. ‘My apologies. I wonder if I could ask you one more question, if I may?’
The driver went right back to staring at his beloved locomotive. ‘Shoot.’
Merion put on one of his best smiles, one that said, ‘I’m a very hard worker’, as well as screaming ‘Please, please help me’.
‘You wouldn’t happen to be looking for any more staff, would you?’ he asked.
Some of you, whether once upon a time or very recently, might have had the pleasure of meeting a man of the girth similar to our good locomotive driver. A man of, and let’s try to be polite here, gargantuan proportions. If you’ve met such a man, you may also be aware of a certain phrase: ‘The bigger the man, the bigger the laugh’.
So it was that the driver’s braying roars of laughter followed Merion all the way down the steps of the platform, and all the way to the next street. But Merion was not deterred.
Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. He scanned every window and doorway as he swerved his way through the milling crowds. The addition of another fifty or so workers had done wonders for the level of conversation. The rushing noise of gossip and chatter was now so loud that it gave Merion a headache. No blacksmith, bank, or apothecary wanted a young lordling fresh from the Empire. Some laughed like the driver. Others just grumbled rudely. He refused to try the post office, and couldn’t even get near the taverns. And if that wasn’t hopeless enough, the owner of the only general store he found didn’t speak the common, and every single one of the stables played havoc with his sinuses.
And so, after a truly dejecting morning, Merion found himself trudging up the hill into the Runnels. He found his aunt’s house where he had left it, but it was what he found on her sun-bleached porch that made him jump.
‘Mornin’,’ grunted the stranger, tipping his wide-brimmed hat, and then dragging it even lower over his grizzled face. He was sat on the only bench available, lounging against one of its rickety arms. The man was dark-skinned, and seemingly made of scars and leather. Merion followed the winding lines through his stubble, wandering down to his neck. The rest of the man was covered in brown, desert-worn leather. From his thick gloves to his spurred boots, to his hat and necklace of lizard’s teeth, only his neck and his face braved the hot air. Most curious of all, however, was the company he kept.
A small magpie perched on his left shoulder. It stared at Merion with its one good eye, the one that was still jet-black and bottomless, rather than shrivelled and misty. The bird clacked his beak together once, twice, three times.
The man lifted a gloved hand to stroke the magpie’s chest. ‘Easy there,’ he rumbled in a low voice. ‘He don’t like new people.’
Merion climbed the last few steps onto the porch. He could see more of the stranger’s face from there. A once-broken nose, an ear sporting more than a few notches, and a cheek spread thick with salt and pepper stubble. ‘I think I am beginning to feel the same,’ murmured the boy.
‘Everyone’s new at some point or other.’ The man shrugged, and went back to stroking his magpie, which still had its beady eye fixed on Merion, as the boy lingered by th
e front door.
It was then that the man began to sniff. It was gentle at first; Merion barely noticed it. Then he saw the man’s nostrils moving faster, wider, until he was snorting loudly. Merion was just about to ask whether he was having sort of fit when the man suddenly fell still. His lip began to curl.
‘Empire.’
Merion rolled his eyes. ‘Half the town could tell that from my accent.’
‘London.’
‘Again, it’s not a hard guess.’
‘West of the Palace.’
Merion opened his mouth to say something, but the words died on his tongue. Was this a little taste of magic? He could not help but wonder. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘You had pines where you lived. Big old place too, I bet. By the dust in you.’
Merion was too spellbound to talk. He just urged the stranger on with his eyes.
‘Come on a train, and via the sea too. Can tell you only been here a day too. You ain’t got the stink for it. You will though.’ The man took another quick sniff. ‘Got another smell on you too … though one I’ll be damned if I recognise …’ The stranger bent almost imperceptibly forwards from the old bench.
Merion quickly put an end to the trick. ‘So can I help you with anything at all?’ he asked.
‘Just fine here, thank you.’ The stranger leant back, and even had the audacity to put his boots up on the porch’s creaking railing. ‘Your aunt should be back soon. She knows me.’
‘How well?’
The stranger tipped his hat again. ‘Well enough,’ he said. His magpie squawked in agreement.
‘What a comforting answer,’ Merion grumbled. ‘Where is my aunt, anyway?’
The man pointed a leather finger back down into town, and then west, towards the brown hills in the distance, where the view shivered in the roasting heat of the desert. ‘Halfway down the rail, so I hear. Tending to a body. Latest in a long line.’
‘With that Eugin fellow?’
The stranger slapped his knee and cackled, making Merion jump. ‘That fat tub of lard. He’s slower than a mule. She ought to get a fresher understudy, that’s for sure.’
Had the stranger been looking, he might have seen Merion’s ears prick up. An idea slowly crawled out into the open of his mind. It wasn’t the finest idea mankind had ever witnessed, but it was better than some of the worst. Merion made his excuses and started down the wooden steps. ‘I trust you will not burgle the house while I’m gone. You and your magpie?’
The stranger tipped his hat once more. ‘You got my word, son,’ he said.
‘I wonder how much that is worth,’ Merion whispered to himself as he trudged back down the trail.
Chapter IX
OF MAGICK WITH A K
‘Leg’s opened up again. Found some pine sap to bind it, though I don’t know how long it’ll last. I think I’ve lost them for now. Need to disappear, need to keep moving. It’s getting heavier, I swear. And colder. Damn winter. There’s a house ahead.’
7th May, 1867
‘Hand me that short shovel, Eugin. No, the shovel, not the pickaxe, you lump,’ Lilain scolded as Eugin bumbled about. ‘Go stand over there. See if the sheriffsmen want a hand with the rail-bones.’ Lilain pointed to where a group of blue-coated men stood in a tight circle around a ball of crushed iron that resembled a wide grinning skull. She shivered momentarily.
Eugin shook his head. ‘No chance of that, Lilain,’ he replied. ‘None’ll touch ’em. Bad luck, they’re sayin’.’
Lilain pulled a face. ‘Nothing wrong with rail-bones. They’re just bits of dead iron now,’ she asserted. Lilain had found the shovel, and she was now digging it into the space between a knuckle of bent iron rail and the dead man’s hip. ‘Now get over there and stay away from this body.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Suitably scolded, Eugin bobbed his head and then scuttled away towards the sheriffsmen.
Lilain mumbled to herself as she prized the knuckle of rail free of the corpse’s crushed pelvis. With her knee, she manoeuvred the body a little to the right, and then let the rail fall back into the sand. ‘Maker, is it hot today! How and ow!’ she hissed suddenly, catching her finger on the sharp edge of the rail. She ripped a little gauze from the roll she kept in her pocket and wound it around her finger until she couldn’t see blood.
‘Never lose a drop,’ she whispered, then shook her head and smiled.
‘Are you hurt?’ said a young, foreign voice.
Lilain whirled around to face him. ‘Merion,’ she stated flatly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I came to find you.’
‘You should have stayed at the house.’ She sounded annoyed, upset even. Merion was a little surprised to say the least. ‘It’s dangerous on the railroad.’
‘But there are so many people …’ Merion turned to look at the tangled clumps of people stretching from the bloody spot on the rails all the way back to the station, the squat blotch in the distance. ‘The workers seem furious.’
Lilain rubbed her chin. Like any Hark, she didn’t like to be proved wrong, however trivial the matter. ‘Hmm, you’re right, I suppose. Besides, you might be more useful than my current assistant.’
Merion turned around to look at Eugin, and found the young man staring right back at him. He thought about waving, but tried an awkward smile instead. ‘As long as I don’t have to touch any blood,’ he said to his aunt.
Lilain raised her eyebrows at that. Merion tried to gauge what she was thinking. She was surprised, that was for sure, but she soon blinked the expression away, and shrugged. ‘Well, I can’t promise you that. As you can see, the deceased is rather … beside himself.’ Lilain pointed to both halves of the dead man. This one had been severed at the waist, and the two halves had come to rest several feet apart, trailing Almighty knows what across the sand. Merion wished he hadn’t looked. His eyes had been avoiding the carnage until now.
Gulp.
There it was, the bile, that old friend, rising up to burn his throat and make his chest heave.
‘Close your eyes and swallow hard,’ Lilain wagged an advisory finger. ‘And if that don’t work, make sure to spew somewhere other than here.’
Merion did as he was told, scrunching his eyes up tight and pushing back the bile as hard as he could. ‘It worked,’ he gasped, as the urge to vomit slowly faded. ‘Where were you on the Tamarassie?’
‘The what?’
Merion pointed back east, as if the ocean lay just over the rolling hills. ‘The ship I sailed on to get here.’
‘Ah. You’ll have to tell me all about that. How about tonight? Over my famous pork chops. That is, if you’re not leaving us just yet?’
Merion bit the inside of his lip. ‘The train was delayed.’ The excuse sounded stupid, but it was all he had. Lilain nodded, and a warm smile spread across her cheeks.
‘Well I’m glad it was,’ she replied, then quickly got to her feet. ‘Now then, let’s get this poor old fellow onto the cart, agreed?’
Merion sighed. ‘I am assuming I don’t have a choice.’
Lilain chuckled and rested a hand on his shoulder. ‘If you’re to be my helper, then no.’
‘Do I get paid?’
‘Just like your father. Tell you what, let’s call this a trial run. You do a good job, I’ll see what I can rustle up.’
Merion beamed, but then crumbled as he remembered something. ‘Oh. There’s a man on your porch.’
Lilain had moved to the lower half of the man, and was reaching for his ankles. ‘Did he have a magpie on his shoulder? Here, give me a hand,’ she asked, as casually as though she were asking for a match.
Merion took a look at the man’s bloodied and booted feet and felt that bile rising. Eyes. Swallow. He repeated it over and over until he felt almost normal again. At least as normal as you can be, whilst grabbing at the blood-encrusted jeans of half a rail worker. He could smell fear on the man, as well as the dank, soiled smell of a messy death.
‘Yes he did. However did
you know?’ Merion grunted as he tried not to take in too much of the foul air. The body lurched as they pulled on it. It left in its wake things that Merion dearly hoped he would never have to see again. The pay better be good.
Lilain chuckled. ‘Oh, that’s just Lurker. He’s a friend.’
‘Lurker? What an odd name.’
‘Well, he does have a tendency to lurk, as you’ve probably seen. He looks mean but he’s a big pushover really.’
Eugin hovered around them as they dragged the half-corpse to the sun-bleached bed of the cart, angled as it was like a ramp.
‘Eugin, the cart.’
‘Yes ma’am.’ Eugin scuttled forward, eager to be of use again. Merion could have sworn that he muttered something as he hurried past, but he could not be sure.
Once both halves of the worker were securely in position and a blanket had been spread over the cart, Lilain pushed a shovel into Eugin’s sweaty palms.
‘Would you look after the mess, Eugin? Merion and I will take Mr Gowl here to the table. Thank you. And remember to get those three sil’erbits from the sheriffsmen too. I won’t let ’em forget that I don’t do this out of the kindness of my own heart.’
Eugin worked his gums for a while, and then finally just nodded.
‘Good,’ she said, and then gestured for Merion to take one of the cart’s handles. ‘We’ve got an appointment in the basement, haven’t we Mr Gowl?’ she remarked jovially to the blank face of the corpse. With a grunt and a shove, the cart bumbled out of its rut and began to follow them across the baked dirt and sand towards the heart of town.
Merion was already sweating buckets. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t be so …’
‘So what?’
‘… casual about the dead.’
Lilain pulled that face of hers again, the one she had mocked him with at the station the night before, her feigned lady of the court. ‘One has to be casual around the dead, Merion, so that one can avoid succumbing to the dreadful melancholy,’ she chuckled. ‘You’d do well to remember that one, trust me.’
