Boss
Man didn’t bother watching the car leave, taking Freya back to Kapla Furnace Village. There was risk in this action, but he
was no stranger to risk. But he needed forward momentum. This was a revolution,
albeit a secret one against an organization most people didn’t think existed.
His
circumstances were not ideal, but they were necessary. They would leave the
desert eventually, but he had only just started to plant his seeds. They might
not bear fruit for some time.
The
camp was oddly friendly, the people oddly warm. He had not intended that, and
in fact it made him suspicious. Still, he would adapt. That was the key. The
House planned. It planned extraordinarily well. But he adapted, and up until
this point, it had kept him alive and free.
Chaffi
was an early recruit. When Boss Man had been in the House, he was high enough
to understand that they had not had much luck recruiting among the djinn. Boss
Man knew of Mr. Flow, but he was a rarity – a djinni who preferred living among
the “jengu.”
He
had given the House’s pitch many times before, but with Chaffi, he had favored
a different approach. He told him a story. The story of Boss Man. A man whose
real name was Jac Epping.
The
camp they were in was really within the borders of Arizradna – even though the
cities and towns didn’t reach this far into the desert, the borders of the
world’s oldest country encompassed them. That was by design, actually, to take
advantage of the defensive magic that kept the Arizi from needing a real
military.
But
if you went a couple thousand miles east, you’d get into the Grimelands. Great
metal structures rose from the ground as if they had grown from seeds, and the
air was full of dust and smoke. In the Grimelands, if you spent much time near
these structures, you’d start to get an oily residue on your skin. People
avoided it, but a place that people avoid becomes very attractive to someone
who wants to avoid people. Over centuries, the Grimelands became something of a
country in and of itself, though no one could tell you where the capital was or
who was in charge. And it was there that Jac Epping was born.
He
hadn’t really known his father. Ky Epping worked for the Imperial Rail Company,
shoveling coal because back in the Grimelands, they still used that. IRC was a
relic from a far earlier era, and its tracks were the skeletal remains of the
Red Empire that had died centuries ago.
Ky
had been up at the engine when bandits blew the track. Forty men, women, and
children died, including Jac’s father. It was barely considered news.
So
Jac and his mother Hope moved to a town called Bitter. She had been harsh and
drank a lot, but she also made sure he learned his letters and math. She wanted
good things for him, even if she was a difficult woman to live with.
Jac
helped on the Namrys’ farm to supplement the family income. The IRC barely gave
Hope any compensation for Ky’s death, and they cheated her out of his pension.
He
was just a couple days from turning twelve when the Folstom Brothers came
calling on Hope Epping. Jac was too young to understand what they wanted from
her, though he suspected later it might have been something about debts.
When
Vin Folstom suggested that she could pay those debts through alternative means,
she declined with vigor. Unfortunately, Vin had little compunction about taking
with force that which he could not procure through other means.
It
was unfortunate for Vin because he had ignored the hand-cannon Hope Epping had
in her kitchen, and when he made his advance, he was left with a fist-sized
hole in his chest. It was unfortunate for Hope Gepper because there was more
than one Folstom, and when Sal saw what she had made of Vin, murder filled his
heart, and this time she was not quick enough on the draw. Jac Epping was
orphaned.
And
he knew that this was what had happened because he had seen it. When the
Folstoms came, his mother had instructed him to hide beneath the floorboards.
He
left Bitter and made his way to Smokestack, taking up his own job with the IRC.
However, thanks to his mother’s lessons, he was able to get a better job at a
desk, working out timetables and keeping the ledgers.
It
was during this time that a man Jac would only ever know as “Sootgrin” came to
talk to him about scheduling. Sootgrin – a name Jac would never understand,
given the man’s pearly whites – told him to change the schedule of two trains,
ensuring that one coming into Smokestack would leave before the other arrived.
At
the time, Jac assumed that Sootgrin was an important person at the company. He
had seen him on occasion, and he believed that Sootgrin matched the description
of the company president – an older man, tall and thin with long white hair and
a long white mustache.
Jac
figured out a way to change the schedules of the trains without upsetting all
the other schedules and eagerly made it to impress this Sootgrin. It was only
after he had submitted the new schedules that Sootgrin informed him that he did
not, in fact, work for the company. And if Jac didn’t want his bosses finding
out what he had done, he would have to do more tasks for Sootgrin.
Jac
was only thirteen at the time. He naturally did what Sootgrin told him to do.
But Sootgrin did not simply make demands. He also instructed Jac. He taught Jac
to forge a signature. He taught him how to lie convincingly. In spite of the
fact that he was being blackmailed, Jac came to like the old man. In fact, it
no longer felt like he was being blackmailed. Sootgrin started to feel like a
grandfather.
When
Jac turned sixteen, Sootgrin gave the pitch. He was an Agent of the House. And
regardless of the House’s agenda for trains in the Grimelands, Sootgrin’s main
task was the training of a new recruit. In effect, he had already been a House
Agent for three years, but now Sootgrin felt it was time to make it official.
Jac got the codename Mr. Key.
And
for a time, life was pretty similar. Then, one day, Sootgrin abruptly announced
that it was time to quit. The House was no longer interested in trains, or at
least these particular trains that came out of Smokestack. So they left and
traveled east to Gessan Province in the Redlands.
Jac’s
work for the House got more interesting, but also more dangerous. He remembered
in particular a time when he and Sootgrin had assisted in a bank robbery. They
weren’t there at the time of course – the House preferred to keep its Agents
somewhat removed from such overt acts. Still, they provided logistical support.
They put the gang in touch with a safecracker and taught the robbers about the
way that the bank’s security cameras could be bypassed. Then, when the day
came, Mr. Key found out that the robbery had turned into a bloodbath, and that
the robbers were all dead.
To
Jac’s shock, Sootgrin did not seem shocked at all. He indicated that this had,
in fact, been the intended outcome of the robbery. Jac demanded to know what
the purpose of such a thing was, but Sootgrin managed to explain it without
explaining it in such a way that it was not until years later that Jac would
think to question what they had done again. Essentially, Sootgrin reasoned, the
House knew what it was doing. Did he know the specifics? No. But the House always
thought thirty steps ahead. They had reasons, and Sootgrin had faith that they
were good ones.
Jac
became more comfortable with their activities over time. His protests died down
and he began to simply do his job. And apparently he and Sootgrin were showing
a level of competence that was rare even within the House, because before too
long, Jac found himself traveling the world, participating in delicate and
important operations. He saw the installation of a House Agent to the Arizradna
High Council. He helped to thwart a potentially disastrous Vistani invasion of
the Wastes by leaking their invasion plans. He had the son of a general in
Sarso committed to a mental institution, despite the fact that the young man
was perfectly sane.
The
House was built on compartmentalization, and so it was difficult to trace its
actions to motivations and causes. But as Mr. Key became more prominent within
the organization, the silhouette of its larger form had begun to reveal itself
to him. The chains – wholly separate and distinct at the House’s lowest levels,
became tangled and interconnected the closer one got to the top. And looking down
some of the chains that led back to the Grimelands, he made a fateful
discovery.
Sal
and Vin Folstom were both House Agents.
Jac
thought it had to be a coincidence, and that their actions were probably not
much more complicated than they had seemed. Though Mr. Key had become an
exemplary Agent, the House was not devoid of ineffective brutes at its lower
levels.
When
he approached Sootgrin with what he had discovered, however, he did not get the
reaction that he expected. It was not surprise. It was not skepticism. It was
not even worry that Jac had been looking in places he shouldn’t have been
looking.
No,
it was guilt.
Sootgrin
was a talented liar. But Sootgrin was also the person who had taught Mr. Key
how to lie, and also how to recognize one. The more he attempted to deny it,
the more he attempted to divert the conversation, the harder Jac pressed, until
finally, Sootgrin confessed.
The
House had sent the Folstom Brothers there. The Folstom Brothers had killed
Jac’s mother on orders. And it was because of Jac. They had seen in Jac the
potential to be a remarkable Agent. A potential, Sootgrin informed him, that
Jac was fulfilling – exceeding every expectation. The House sought to create
the ideal environment in which Jac could be recruited.
All
this, when Jac was not yet even twelve.
He
let Sootgrin live, though he felt now that that had been a mistake. But he cast
off his allegiance to the House. He saw now just how deep its callous cruelty
ran. Jac had his own subordinates, but he knew to be careful around them. The
House had a practice called “Breaking the Chain,” in which an unsatisfactory
Agent might be cut off from the House in varyingly severe manners. If an Agent
was cut off, their subordinates might share their fate, but alternatively, the
higher-ups might instead have one of those subordinates eliminate the Agent in
question and take their place.
In
Jac’s case, it was a woman he had recruited designated “Sieve.” After leaving
Sootgrin, he quickly called up his immediate subordinates (he was a prominent
enough Agent that each of his subordinates had their own, and some of them had
their own as well.) When he arrived in the basement of an Omlos grocery store
to speak with them, he found that two of the five were on the ground with their
throats slit, and a third, Sieve, was there with a bloody knife.
He
discovered Sieve’s presence when her knife slashed him along the face. They
fought, but in the end he prevailed, leaving the knife embedded in her chest.
He
decided at that point that Omlos, and indeed all of Narcia, was no longer a
safe place for him. So he smuggled himself out of the country on an airship
bound for Damana. Then he traveled back to his homeland where he would begin to
recruit this small force he had managed to put together. And in time, if things
went well, he would destroy the House.
Mr.
Key had learned a great deal while under the House’s employ. He did not condone
their ethics, but he could not deny the effectiveness of their methods. And so,
Mr. Key became Boss Man, and he began recruiting his own Agents. But his Agents
would get to know the story of Jac Epping. He would ensure that they understood
the stakes of what they were doing here.
But
Boss Man had a secret. It was a secret he could not tell anyone, and in fact he
tried not to avoid thinking about it himself. Compartmentalization was crucial
in the world of cloak and dagger. It was a challenge, though not impossible, to
do so within his own mind.
The
secret?
There
never was a man named Jac Epping. There was never an Agent called Sootgrin.
There was never an Agent named Mr. Key. And Boss Man had never set foot in the
Grimelands before the previous summer.
Boss
Man had his reasons for doing what he was doing, but for now, he would keep
them to himself.
(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2016)
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