by Jem I Kelley
Granddad Todd left the room.
“Don’t you find it odd that the Wall knew about it already?” said Bliss, as she pulled her shirt on and tucked it into her trousers.
Aden did find it odd, in light of the friends knowledge of how the Wall worked. His overriding suspicion was someone had deliberately put the information there.
“Yeah. The night watchmen might have carried on his rounds after finding the body, but I can’t see him talking about Arple’s body in two parks, not late at night. In fact at that time of day, who would be chatting in a park?”
Bliss pulled a face.
“Who ever did, went to those parks purposely, to make sure it got on the Wall fast.”
“Sardohan?”
“Maybe. Or how about Grimus?”
“I don't think Grimus would, if he even knows how the Wall works, which I doubt.”
Bliss slipped on her shoes.
“Well, Alicia knows about the Wall. I can’t see her or her sisters killing Arple.”
She chuckled as she said it, and looked up from where she tied her shoe laces. Her eyes met Aden’s and her smile faltered.
“Could she?”
“No. No, I don’t think so,” said Aden. He realised his voice lacked certainty.
Bliss pulled her bed covers up and tucked them in. “Three… four… people murdered in weeks - whose going to be next?”
When the friends went downstairs, Martha Todd put her knitting down and called them over. She pulled back their eyelids to check their eyes, she looked in their ears, and she felt their foreheads.
She looked at them suspiciously.
“Feeling better? Illness gone?”
Bliss struggled in her grasp.
“Yes, thanks mum.”
“Yes Mrs. Todd,” said Aden.
Martha’s eyes narrowed. “Neither of you look as if you’ve had a wink of sleep.”
Aden felt himself rooted to the floor. Did she suspect they had a disc? Perhaps she’d heard the slight ‘pop’ of the artefact as it was activated last night?
“I didn’t get much, to be honest,” said Bliss unfazed. “I don’t think Aden did either...”
Aden followed his friend’s lead. He shook his head, yawned, and stretched his hands over his head. “But we’re feeling much better.”
Martha still stood in their way and held onto Bliss’s arm.
“Your hair’s dank and your faces are smudged as if you sweated buckets last night.”
“We’re okay mum, honest,” said Bliss patting her on the shoulder. “We ran a bit of a fever but now we’re okay. We’ll get some fresh air and wake ourselves up a bit.”
She reluctantly let go of Bliss’s arm.
“All right. But, if you start to feel ill again you come right back.”
“We will mum, I promise.”
The friends went through to the kitchen.
Granddad Todd was there. He winked at them.
“I got your dinner ready and waiting. Heard what you had to say about fresh air. Why not start by eating yer dinner up on the roof. It’s a nice day.”
He spoke loudly. Loudly enough, Aden realized, for Mrs. Todd to hear.
Bliss turned her mouth back to where Martha stood.
“Thanks gramps.”
“I’ll come up with yer,” said Granddad Todd. “Warm the old bones. Warm autumn day like this shouldn’t be wasted.”
“Right,” he said peering at them through his rheumy eyes, “What happened last night.”
Bliss tucked into her cod and chips and spoke between mouthfuls. Luckily Granddad Todd’d had years of practice listening to Bliss speak through her food and so understood every word.
“It wasn’t night for a start.”
“What do you mean, weren’t night?”
Bliss had another mouthful of cod.
“I mean they don’t have night over there.”
Granddad Todd turned his head at the friends so as to look at them with his best eye.
“You gotta have night. It’s one of those things which gotta happen. The sun rises in the day. The sun sinks at night.”
“Only they’ve got two,” said Aden. “The big one you’ve seen, and another one.”
“But yer had coats and mittens on!”
“We took them off. We didn’t have to walk all the way to the alien’s town, either. Ab’n Mere took us.”
Aden was about to put a chip into his mouth, Granddad Todd held his arm.
“Who?”
“Ab’n Mere. That’s the first alien we met, he was waiting for us in the rooms by the stone circle.”
“I think you’d better tell me everything, children. Start at the start and go on until you reach the end.”
Aden explained, between mouthfuls of food; Bliss filled in the gaps.
Afterwards, Granddad Todd sat back, and mulled over what he’d heard. He didn’t seem too happy, especially that the Duggiral seemed self-sufficient.
“It’s a bit different than all the other worlds found so far. Queer folk if you ask me. No night, towns with Amari magic and people that don’t need anything.”
Aden put his empty plate on the wood decking near his feet, and then sipped at his tea. “When we get to know them better we could borrow Ab’n Mere’s artefact and take you to the dwarven caverns.”
“I’d like that.”
“As long as you think up something we can trade,” said Bliss.
Granddad Todd frowned and put his fist to his chin in thought.
“Quid pro quo, eh? The problem as I see it is that these Duggiral got pretty much everything they need.”
Aden frowned. “They don’t want to upset the system they got, either. If we bring in timber, they say the village that grows wood will have nothing to sell; same for fruit, carpets or anything else.”
Granddad Todd rolled his eyes. “Pretty poor show when one town worries about how another will cope.”
“The Duggiral are a bit different,” admitted Aden.
Bliss made a face.
“Boring is the word.”
Aden finished his cup of tea and leant back. “I wonder what Kurt would make of them.”
Granddad Todd laughed.
“Find ‘em boring too I expect. Old Kurt liked adventure: not carrot munching softies. Sally would get on with them better I expect.”
Bliss put one of her ‘brave’ faces on and Aden guessed the gist of what would come next.
“Still, we’ve got a working disc, which is more than most. Even Lord Kesskran and Sardohan don’t have a working disc, do they? I ain’t complaining. We’ve had a good expedition, found some weird aliens and even though we haven’t got any treasure out of it, I wouldn’t have missed any of it for the world, honest. We’re proper out and out Disc-Men now and not many can say that. Even if we can’t trade anything, I reckon we did well. Grandfather Eavis would be proud of us.”
Granddad Todd gripped Bliss’s knee and smiled.
“He would at that. So am I. Who’d have thought it, eh? Me own granddaughter a Disc-Man, and her best friend too.”
Which was all very well, thought Aden; but, how much better it would have been if the friends could have traded something for the glass sheets? Okay a working artefact was good. A working artefact with a world that wanted to trade would have been the icing on the cake. Oh well… he thought… as Granddad Todd continued to talk.
“Course, even if they’re ain’t anything these aliens want to trade and so you don’t need a building in the Disc-Man Centre, the museum’ll want to know about Blissaden. They’ll want to do an exhibit; they always do for populated worlds. Probably get your pictures on the wall and a gold piece or two for that.”
Aden sat up straight.
“What did you just say?”
“… they’d probably put yer pictures on the wall.”
“Before that.”
“I said it don’t matter if you ain’t got anything to trade. What is this? Testing me memory? I ain't that old th
at I forget what I say just after I say it.”
Aden could feel himself buzzing. Ideas were rushing around his head. Perhaps the Duggiral would want something from them after all.
“Is there a Duggiral museum?” he asked.
Bliss shrugged. “I didn’t see one. But who gives a stuff?”
Granddad Todd’s eyes lit up: “I see where you’re coming from. If they’re as clever as you make out, they might want to have a collection of things from our world to look at; and from the other artefact worlds, too.”
Aden felt the excitement build.
“Yes. They might be self-sufficient in things, but not in objects which don’t exist on their world: a painting, or a butterfly or even a pebble from a beach.”
Bliss wasn’t smiling yet.
“They don’t want to upset their trade.”
“They haven’t got too. They can have one museum for their whole world; let the council decide where it’ll go and how it’ll operate. They can work out how to adjust their internal trade balances so they can pay us with the glass panes.”
Granddad Todd rubbed his chin.
“You know, it might work. Sound them out on yer next visit.”
Aden’s mind was racing. Because the Duggiral world was so bare and empty, it would give them even more reason to be interested in the other worlds that were out there. Yes, a museum might be the way. There would be custom regulations to deal with between here and Blissaden; but…
A thought occurred to him and he groaned.
“Hacknor. What’s the point of having something to trade with the Duggiral if Hacknor doesn’t give us a stall?”
Bliss’s face, which had just tugged into a smile, dropped again.
“After the ‘giant cod in the lake’ business he’s been itching to kick us off the market. We won’t be stallholders if he’s got any choice in the matter, neither this year nor the next.”
Granddad Todd looked thoughtful.
“Don’t you be sure.”
Bliss snorted.
“Oh, I’m sure, all right. I’m totally – sure.”
Granddad Todd pursed his lips as if trying to decide how to frame what he was going to say next.
“Hacknor used to be in the army…”
“We know,” said Bliss.
“He used to have two sons, too.”
“We know…”
“An army patrol was taking them to the border fer a treat, down in the mountains of South Haverland. It was a safe time of year, the summer. No-one expected a renegade tribe of ogres to appear; ogres tend to cross the border in winter, when they’re hungry. Anyway… them ogres ambushed the troop; killed six men and Hacknor’s sons too.”
“I heard they got killed,” said Bliss, her eyes like saucers. “I didn’t know how though. Is this why Hacknor left the army?”
Granddad Todd nodded, solemnly.
“In a way it was, yes; but, not for the reason you think. You see, he was the N.C.O leading the patrol that day.”
It took a second to sink in; then both friends faces showed shock. Aden’s head swam as he realised the enormity of the tragedy Hacknor had faced.
“Oh, Gabriel!”
Granddad Todd continued...
“They were both about the same age as you were when Hacknor gave the okay for you to go to Dazarian. Do you understand now?”
Suddenly, Aden did. It must have been like history repeating itself, for Hacknor. His own sons died after his decision to take them for a trip, then he gave permission for two market friends to have a voyage, and that led to their imprisonment in a Dazarian jail.
Every time he sees us now, he’s reminded of the mistakes he’s made, thought Aden.
“Why hasn’t anyone ever said anything,” said Bliss.
“As you get older, you’ll learn events happen that are so painful, no one really likes to talk about them. Time goes by and it’s almost as if the event ain’t happened. But it did and deep down the memory of it churns away stirring up nasty feelings.”
He patted Bliss on the head.
“People haven’t talked about Hacknor’s loss for a long time. But, I think the boil needs lancing. I’ll go and have a word with him tomorrow and see what he can do about easing up on you a bit. Now, you’d better hurry on and see how your Novogoradian friend is doing.”
Chapter 59: Marti Confesses
When they said at the Police station reception desk that they wanted to visit the Novogoradian, Plumbert appeared. He stood there looking down at the friends, almost as if he was trying to think up some excuse for not allowing them to visit Marti.
“Not worried that he might strangle you or anything?”
Bliss unconsciously trailed her finger along her neck and gulped.
“That’s not funny.”
Aden’s mouth drew into a line.
“Marti didn’t murderer Arple, Plumbert.”
“Got evidence, have you?”
“Can we just see him, please?”
Plumbert took them on a strange route, which definitely wasn’t to the prison’s normal cells. He stopped at a panelled door and opened it. The room within looked more like a posh person’s drawing room than anything one would expect of a prison.
True, there was a simple bunk on one side of it; but on the other, there was a roaring fire full of logs, which crackled and spit. On the mantelpiece above the fire there sat a complex clock whose gears could be seen twirling behind a glass case. An oak table the size of raft dominated the room with a cloth stretched across its surface; the cloth had flags set in corks dotted upon it. To one side of the cloth cuts of meat and fruit shared space upon a silver platter.
Marti was in an animated discussion with one of the men he’d met in the alley by the museum a few days back: the one with the wide face, hair in plaits and beard like a forest. The same man who’d been in Candelmaker’s Lane during the night Aden and Bliss had sneaked out of the house. The one called Wulf.
Aden heard a click and turned to see Plumbert had locked the door. He put the key in his pocket, and remaining at the door, turned to face into the room. He crossed his arms in front of his chest.
Marti looked up from the padded leather chair he reclined on.
“Ha, my trusty Haverlander friends, no? You have come to visit me? Please, take seat.”
Aden glanced at Bliss and saw his friend appeared as nervous as he felt.
“I know what it must feel like,” said Aden as he moved over to one of the leather chairs and lowered into it. “When everyone looks at you like you’re a murderer. I had it after Munter was killed.”
Marti frowned and shook his head.
“No. Not nice. I think in this case they put body down by my door in deliberate way, you think?”
Aden glanced back to where Plumbert stood by the door. Plumbert’s face was tense.
Aden turned back to Marti.
“Why would the murderer want to frame you?”
“I do not know.”
Bliss exchanged glances with Aden, and sighed.
“Are you sure you don’t know? There’s something about you that’s not right, Marti. You have got secrets. Aden and I know a few things about you that don’t add up. Like for instance the strange house you go to in the rich district or the fact that you can disarm people of their swords like a soldier might, or that this big friend of yours with the beard and plaits sneaked up Candlemaker alley the day Munter got murdered…” Bliss paused and glanced at Plumbert. “Now you’ve got the Sergeant guarding a locked door too. Perhaps you haven’t been framed. Perhaps you did kill Arple and Plumbert’s in it with you! I don’t care who you are or what you’re up to but I can shout pretty bloody loud and I know damn well there are a few decent coppers in this station. Try anything and I’ll bring the lot of them down on you, locked door or no locked door.”
With that the wind seemed to go out of Bliss’s sails, but she added. “I just thought you’d better know I’m not scared of you.”
Plumbert gav
e her a dry look.
“Thank you for your contribution, Bliss. You’re right; Marti does have a secret or two. We doubt the murderer knows them. More likely whoever’s behind this, heard about Marti’s trouble with the market and the skeletons and decided it was too good an opportunity to shift blame. Dodgy foreigners are always good suspects, eh children?”
Aden smiled weakly at the reference to their accusations of Saib, and then paused as he comprehended fully what Plumbert had said.
“You know what Marti’s secret is?”
“You should be a detective,” said Plumbert. “Sharp as knife.”
Aden felt his mouth go dry. He noticed Marti and the giant warrior were smiling.
Bliss asked the obvious question.
“If you’re not the murderer, it’d help if you tell us who you really are?”
Marti stood, walked to the fireplace, and put his hands to the flames as he collected his thoughts. He stared at burning logs as he spoke.
“I am sorry that I mislead you. It not done from, what is the word, malicious. Almost everyone here think I am merchant from Novogorad. I only prove to Plumbert today that I am not. In fact my friend, Wulf Siggorson, he come with document to show to Plumbert and Inspector Thomas.”
Aden noticed the warrior with plaited hair smiled a ferocious smile and Plumbert chuckled.
“After seeing the document Thomas thought we’d better upgrade Marti’s prison accommodation to having use of the Inspector's own room',” said the Sergeant. “Before that he’d been in a normal cell.”
Marti turned from the fire and touched his hand towards Plumbert, in thanks.
“For last couple of years I have been wandering around countries of world in guise. Sometime farmer, sometime fisherman, sometime sailor: many different guise. In Haverland I have been a merchant, though not good one, for sure.”
Bliss was staring at Wulf, but she addressed Marti.
“That doesn’t leave much, what are you really then, a soldier?”
Marti spread his spade like hands.
