Romani Standard

            Jack knocked his fist on the table. His hand was awful – if he was lucky, he might have some arcane combination, but generally the rule of thumb when it came to Marker was that if you got a hand full of Grands you were probably better off getting it over with and calling rather than raising. When he played back in college, the rule had been to treat the Grands – cards with no particular number or suit, but with unique names – as wild cards. In Jack’s experience, this had been the norm, or they would simply play without the Grands in the deck, and only a handful of combinations would actually win, like the straight, or the flush, or the three-of-a-kind. The version of the game he knew was called “Gensdon Poker.”

            He had not actually known anyone who played by the traditional “Romani Standard” rules until coming to the DFO. There were many twists on the rules, beyond the inclusion of the Grands. One drew seven cards instead of five, and you only played the cards that made up the combination you wanted – spare cards were kept in hand to be used in later plays.

            “Gods and Men in two suits,” said Freya, with the twelve and one of Moons and Keys. She seemed quite pleased with herself.

            Azjar only played three of his cards. “Just The Beast and a couple of twos,” he said, putting them on the table. The stakes were a mere seven tolls at this point.

            “Whatcha got, Jack?” asked Freya. “Show ‘em!”

            “Oh, I’ve got quite the hand, let me tell you,” he said, jokingly. He put all seven of his cards on the table – The River, The Thief, The Magician, The Mountain, the one (or, as the pros called it, “man”) of keys, the four of locks, and the seven of suns.

            Azjar and Freya both looked at the cards. “Holy crap,” said Azjar.

            “What?” said Jack. Freya looked over at Azjar and then down at the cards, and realization dawned on her face as well.

            “That’s the Queen’s Gambit,” said Azjar. “I mean, if you take back these,” he said, pushing the Mountain, Magician, River, and seven of suns back to him. “That’s a good hand. A really good one.”

            Jack looked down at them. “Well cool. Guess this is mine,” he said, and dragged the modest pot to his side of the table.

            “You ever been to Retrein?” asked Azjar.

            “No,” said Jack. “Why do you ask?”

            “The Queen’s Gambit. It’s about the Queen of Retrein.”

            “The card combination is?”

            Freya took a swig from the bottle of beer in front of her. “Now you’ve got him started. It’ll be an hour before the next hand, if we’re lucky, that is.”

            Azjar dismissed her with a flapping hand gesture. “You know of the Gods of Narcia, right?”

            Jack smiled, humoring him. “Yeah. I have heard of them on occasion, given my nationality.”

            Azjar shook his head with an apologetic frown. “Ok, so the story is that three gods came to help King Jarsa unite the people of Ganlea to fight off the wild spirits. Kerahn, Miru, Torem. But there’s a story – apocryphal, probably - that there was a fourth god. A dark god – not evil, but more… cynical, or really just pragmatic, I guess you could say. No one knows his name, but supposedly this god traveled to Retrein, and he was the one who made Queen Elona immortal.”

            “Uh huh,” said Jack.

            “Obviously, I wasn’t there or anything, so I couldn’t say,” said Azjar.

            “So he says,” said Freya, and then she looked at him and gave a disappointed shake of the head.

            “Damn it! I keep telling you I’m not immortal!” Azjar laughed.

            Reacting to the confused look on Jack’s face, Freya smiled at him. “It’s a stupid running joke we have… just… when we found out Azjar is like three years younger than me and Tessa and we were… you had to be there.”

            Jack chuckled. “Yes, I think so.”

            “I totally set you up that time,” said Azjar.

            “We’re kind of weird that way,” Freya told Jack as she put an arm around Azjar’s shoulder.

            Tessa walked into the room in a bathrobe, her hair wet from the shower. “Azjar trying to claim he’s not immortal again?” she asked.

            “I was this close to a confession,” said Freya.

            Tessa pointed a mock-accusatory finger at Azjar. “One day, Azjar. One day.”

            “Ok then,” said Jack. “Shall we continue?”

            Freya nodded up to Tessa. “Want us to deal you in?”

            Tessa shook her head. “Not right now. I want to get a new image compilation going.”

            “Ok, enjoy,” said Freya.

            Tessa touched Jack’s shoulder – he noticed that she was quite good at playing up these little physical touches to reinforce the notion that they were a couple. “I should be down in a couple hours. You’re fine here?”

            “He’ll be fine as long as we win back all our money,” said Freya. “And all of his.”

            Tessa went into her room to change. After Azjar had walked in on them, she decided it would be better if Jack were to sleep in the bed next to her. It was perhaps not inconceivable that she would make a boyfriend sleep on the floor – Redlanders were infamously touchy about this sort of thing - but she decided that, being true to her own character, if Jack really were her boyfriend, he would be in the bed.

            When Azjar had stumbled into her room, Tessa was surprised to find herself embarrassed. Not because he had seen her in bed – the guy was gay (which was unfortunate for Freya, who had once confessed to Tessa on a long and drunken night how she wished to “conquer” him.)  No, she had felt embarrassed at being seen with Jack there. Even if there was no reason for Azjar to be surprised to see Jack in her room, she nevertheless felt uncomfortable, as if her privacy had been momentarily and accidentally exposed.

            Tessa put on some clothes – comfortable, soft cotton sweatpants and a similar sweatshirt, and tied her hair back. She looked in her mirror, seeing how tensed up her face was. She was probably just on edge because of the note Tall Man had slipped her. She still had not heard from him since then, nearly two weeks ago now. She had never been this closely connected to anything violent. Well, at least not since she was a little girl. She had not gotten any information about why the Flatfoot had been killed – for all she knew, his death hadn’t had anything to do with the House.

            Even in a country like Arizradna, there was still the occasional crime, and people did have an undeniable history of hurting each other.

            The DFO was safe, though. Tall Man had assured her of that. Her job was just to gather data. He had explained to her that the House had thousands of people throughout the world simply reading newspapers or browsing online, watching films or television shows, and just sending in what they had seen. She was a conduit for that information, a purveyor of raw material.

            Tessa knew the House was not all like that, and that sometimes, it would act in a forceful and even brutal way, but the world was still there, so they must have been doing something right.

            She owed the House her life. Had it not been for them, she… it was hard even to think what her life would have been like with the monster that had driven her mother to kill herself. In time, Tessa – and she would not have been named Tessa had it not been for the House – might have become a killer herself, or perhaps a victim. Instead, she had been allowed to grow up with Aunt Ellie and Uncle Hank, up in Arkos Province, with the safe towns and the decent schools.

            There had been scares before. Once, when she was sixteen, Uncle Hank went missing for a couple days, but it turned out that he had simply missed the airship at the Ciczan docks and was under instruction to make no communications while he was on his mission. A month after Tessa had become an Agent proper, when she was twenty, an intimidating man in a dark suit had approached her and said some very confusing things in what seemed to be code, but when she told Tall Man about it he reassured her that it was not a problem, and Tessa had not seen the man since.

            Tessa walked out of the lodge and down the path that lead to the observatory. Azjar would likely be along in an hour or so to check on his new adjustments, but for now she would have the cavernous building to herself.

            As she walked along the path, she made a slight detour to the old Redwood stump near the overlook. She reached down into the hole made by the roots, where Tall Man’s notes would often arrive – how he got them there she could never figure out.

            She scraped around, making sure that the wind had not blown the paper into a corner, but no. There was nothing.

            He has gone silent, she reminded herself.

            She exhaled. It was chilly, and she could see her breath.

            She hugged herself, rubbing her arms, and made her way up to the observatory.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)

The Fall of Far Watch

            Lisenrush had scrambled to her command post, with Ana trailing behind her, slower because of her lack of shoes, the pain in the wound that was still just barely held shut by thick black thread, and the fact that frankly, the Ranger-Captain was in far better shape than she was.

            The faceless man had not followed them. As far as Ana could tell, it would not need to follow them to be where they were. She had seen it appear in many places, but it always seemed to just be there and then not.

            The path from the building in which she had been held to the command post was paved – a sort of sidewalk without a road that ran down the length of Far Watch. It was nearly covered with snow, except for a few spots where salt had been spread to keep the snow from building up. Whoever had had the job to spread the salt had done a terrible job, though. Ana felt herself slipping on more than one patch of black ice – the biting cold sending spikes of pain up her legs.

            Just as she was running up the ramp that led to the command post’s door, Ana heard Lisenrush’s voice over the PA. “Alert, alert. This is the Captain. We have an intruder. Hostile code Torem. Repeat, Hostile code Torem. All personnel, report to…” and then there was a screech of feedback and the sound cut out.

            Ana ran through the door. The interior of the command center was not that different from the enforcement station in town, but she realized then that she had no idea where in the building Lisenrush might be.

            She ran down the relatively wide hallway that the door opened into and found herself in a large room – what appeared to be the mess, with tables and benches and a kitchen in the back.

            “Captain?” she called. No response. Ana’s stomach groaned. It was a very odd thought to come at this moment, but she was suddenly aware again of how hungry she had become. Ana ran toward the kitchen – a few slices of white bread would be perfect, and if she could find some cold meat in the iceboxes, all the better.

            Is this the time for that? thought her more rational side. Yet as her stomach churned and groaned again, she shut out such thoughts and went into the kitchen.

            It was so cold inside. The whole building seemed to have had the heat turned off, and the tile floors were almost as bad as the ice outside. Ana flung the door of the largest icebox open. Indeed, there was a lot of meat – sausages, jerky, sliced roast beef. She pulled out a package and stuffed several slices into her mouth.

            Ok, now you move.

            It was enough – she would use the energy to continue her flight. It occurred to her that in the long run, this might have been a far better idea than just fleeing into the woods right away.

            And that was when she saw the dead men on the ground.

            There were three of them. One had been shot in the head. An other had been slashed viciously across the shoulder and throat. The last, lying facedown on top of the other two, seemed to have been beaten with some blunt object.

            The food nearly came all the way back out. Ana leapt backward, smashing her back into the door of the icebox. She winced in pain, but then turned to run back out through the dining area of the mess.

            She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw that there was someone standing there. It was one of the militia, a corporal, Ana thought. He stared at her with a blank expression.

            “Where’s Lisenrush?” asked Ana.

            The man just looked back at her, his mouth half-open, his eyes unmoving. He was pale – ghostly pale, with snow-white skin and jet-black hair.

            He was dripping something that had formed almost a pool around him. There was a strange, sharp smell to it. It took her only a moment for her to realize that it was the coffee from those strange dreams.

            As if her recognition was all that was needed, the man opened his mouth and the coffee began to flow freely from it, as if he were a fountain. The liquid filled his eyes, and soon he was covered in inky blackness.

            He would be able to intercept her either way she ran, and as far as she knew, the kitchen had no back exit. The man groaned loudly – a pained and whistling sound.

            Ana’s eyes shot around, hoping to find a butcher’s knife or a rolling pin or anything she might use, but she was relatively isolated on that side of the kitchen. Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw movement among the pile of bodies.

            The dripping man lurched forward, faster than she had ever seen someone do so. She tried to slide to the left to dodge him, but he was too fast. The man took hold of her hand and gripped it hard, the slick liquid that was now oozing from every orifice doing nothing to mitigate his vice-like grip.

            She pulled back, hoping to break his balance, desperately trying to remember any of the unarmed combat skills she had learned in basic training years ago. She kicked up at his crotch, but even when she connected, the man did not flinch.

            He opened his mouth wide now – wider than a human mouth should be able to open. His teeth had transformed into something like a metal beak. There was nothing fleshy inside the mouth – it was as if the human shape she had seen was a mere disguise – a shell over something utterly non-human.

            BLAM!

            The man’s head rocked to the side as a bullet ripped through it, nearly a quarter of it showering outward across the room. There was no true gore – simply more of that dark liquid Ana instantly decided to no longer refer to as coffee, and some shards of what looked like dark metal.

            The man still held his grip, the beak of teeth gnashing as she pulled away from it.

            BLAM!

            Another shot, this time lower, removing the head altogether. Finally, the claw released, and Ana ran all the way to the other side of the mess.

            “Are you ok?” asked Lisenrush, as she chambered another round in her bolt-action rifle.

            “Not even remotely, but I’m intact,” said Ana.

            Lisenrush looked over the dead man – or really, the dead thing. Ana was not even sure if what had attacked her had ever been a man.

            “Jorgensen,” said Lisenrush.

            “What?”

            “That was Jorgensen. Decent soldier. He seemed fine an hour ago.”

            Ana looked to the kitchen. “There’s more in there,” she said, pointing.

            Lisenrush walked in. She fired three times, apparently one into each body, but thankfully Ana could not see, her view blocked by the kitchen counter.

            “This scare you, Sweeney?” she said. Ana realized she was shivering, though it felt more like the effects of adrenaline and the cold than fear. Fear was making her stomach feel like a ball of lead. “The draugr’s the one who’s scared. Right,” she said as she put another magazine into the rifle.

            “We need to get back to town. We need to warn everyone.”

            “And tell them what? What is happening to my men?”

            “How should I know?”

            “They’re coming back as draugar, but Jorgensen wasn’t even dead. I didn’t think the Icelord could turn living people.”

            “Captain, I don’t think these are draugar.”

            “What do you mean?”

            Ana tried to point to Jorgensen, but without a head, he would not prove her point. “Their eyes. They aren’t blue.”

            “So?”

            “The Icelord’s draugar have glowing blue eyes. The thing that attacked me didn’t.”

            “You don’t have glowing blue eyes,” said Lisenrush.

            Ana sighed. “Exactly.”

            Lisenrush looked around, checking the doors. “So what are we dealing with, then? That was one of my men, but if he’s not a draugr, then…”

            There was a loud sparking sound, and then an explosive blast outside. The lights went out. The room was suddenly dark, except for the blue light reflected off the snow outside and in through the windows.

            “They got the generator,” said Lisenrush. “We need to get moving. Get outside and make for the trees. Head east until you hit the road, then follow it south to town.”

            “Right,” she said, trying not to imagine the hours of hiking through snowy woods with no shoes. “Where are you going to be?”

            “Best case scenario, right next to you,” she said. “But just in case I’m not, I want you going that way.”

            They quickly made their way back to the door Ana had entered the building through. Lisenrush gestured for Ana to take cover by the side of the door. Ana did so, and Lisenrush kicked it open.

            Only minutes had passed, but the scene that met them was utterly unlike the base that Ana had run through.

            The ground was flat, almost like sandstone but grey and colorless. The air was exactly room temperature, and the only sound was the patter of a light rain – one that smelled dirty, somehow, as if it had caught foul chemicals on the way from the clouds to the ground.

            Rising up on either side of this central road were immense buildings – perfectly rectangular, with evenly spaced dark windows. Beyond, she could see the wintery forest, but it stopped suddenly, as if someone had painted over the reality of Far Watch with this new, strange fragment of a city, leaving a seam along the edge where the world she had known ended and this new one began.

            And the faceless man was standing in the center of the road.

            “Give me the rifle,” said Sweeney.

            Lisenrush shot her a skeptical look. “Absolutely not. I’m not arming…”

            “GIVE IT TO ME NOW!” roared Ana, and rather than waiting she pried the rifle out of the Ranger-Captain’s hands. She had no time to process how easily she had removed the gun from the other woman’s grip, and instead aimed and fired.

            The faceless man simply ceased to be there, and she even heard the bullet ricochet off the ground.

            “Sweeney,” said Lisenrush, reaching for the rifle. Ana hushed her with a gesture. She scanned the road, trying to see if the faceless man had simply moved too fast. She poked her head out of the door, checking both sides. Satisfied that she did not see anything to threaten them, she stepped out.

            “Sweeney, give me the rifle back now,” said Lisenrush. But Ana ignored her. It was silent. The rain was falling, but she could not hear it as it touched the ground. “I’m warning you, Sweeney…”

            She turned back to Lisenrush, who had stepped out of the command center. “You can’t see them. Not consistently at least. The rifle’s useless for you. Now… Oh fuck me,” she said, as she looked at the skyscraper that now stood where the command center had been literally seconds earlier, not two feet from where they were standing.

            Every single window, stretching up the dozens of stories that the building rose to, every single one had a faceless man standing there.

            Lisenrush followed Ana’s gaze up at the building. “How the hell…?”

            “Run, now!” yelled Ana, and the two of them did. They sprinted out toward the trees, the ground suddenly growing soft and textured as they leapt over the seam between where they had been and the real world.

            After they had been running for nearly fifteen minutes, Ana risked a look back. They had gone too far to see the buildings, and now all she could see were trees, snow, and rocks. But she knew Far Watch was gone – eradicated. Lisenrush slowed her pace and turned. “Sweeney, keep moving, or I’ll leave you behind.”

            “Yes, sir,” she responded, and they made their way farther into the forest.

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)

Corridors of the House

            Nascine rode back to her flat immediately. She would file away Tartin’s strange actions – how he had broken into that strange tinker shop by the Finger’s Market - and deal with that when she could. For now, she wished only to process what Harren had told her.

            One thing of which she was certain was that the notion of Elona as an Agent of the House was impossible. Even in her most paranoid imaginings, Elona could not be a deep-cover Agent. If anything, Elona was probably the House’s greatest adversary.

            You think that fairly confidently for someone who did not believe the House existed until recently.

            Nascine hurriedly made for the lift, nearly forgetting to put the cord in her bike’s cable-plug.

            Harren had come to her. He knew she was investigating. The man was Thiefmaster of the Rookery, a position that was hardly low-clearance, or one to be given to a man who could, even within the slightest realm of possibility, be an enemy, or so she had thought. Could Harren himself be the Agent that Yasik had warned her about? Or perhaps he had been deceived – fed false information in order to foment chaos that might throw the Rookery off the real Agent’s scent. Either way, when it was his word against that of a woman who had ruled Retrein for almost three thousand years, Nascine felt it was Elona who deserved greater trust.

            She would have to be decisive. Every moment she held on to this meeting with Harren, she was declaring herself in his camp. Even staying home for the night could be unwise.

            The Queen seemed to prefer setting up their meetings herself. Nascine had never been the one to initiate. She would need to call upon the queen. She knew not to fret about judgment and interpretation – a good scout would tell only what he or she saw. She would tell Elona what Harren had said, and where, and when.

            A cup of tea. She needed one. Nascine went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. She stood there for several minutes. She passed the time by looking at the photos magnetically attached to the icebox. One of them was the old picture of her grandmother meeting the queen. It was a strange thing, to see this weathered and faded photograph portraying a woman that looked exactly as she did today. There was something unsettling about it. Those eyes that had seen so much – far more than any other human alive, Nascine was sure – and yet they looked just as clear and white as a healthy young woman’s.

            What are you, Elona? she thought.

            The kettle began to whistle. That seemed fast. There had not been much water in there, so perhaps she had merely overestimated how long it would take. The real point was that tea would be there soon.

            She tossed a bag of Terely Tea into a mug and poured the boiling water over it. The steam rose up, and for a moment she felt a calm wash over her. She stirred the tea to cool it – she required no milk or sugar this time – and finally took a sip.

            As if the tea were a potion, Nascine felt every muscle in her body suddenly relax, She smiled, rejoicing in the relief and allowed her mind to drift to less worrying thoughts.

            She put the mug down on the counter. It slipped and fell on the floor, shattering.

            What…?

            She stumbled backward, her eyelids growing leaden. The feeling rushing through her was pleasant. It was shockingly pleasant, like the moment that one feels as one truly drifts away into sleep.

            When she hit the ground, it didn’t even hurt. Or rather, it hurt distantly, a mere memory of pain.

            The world flowed around her, as if everything she could see was a projection on a fountain’s spray. She seemed to be sitting in a chair upholstered with fake leather. Everything was totally silent – it was as if her mind had simply shut off the notion of sound.

            She stood, feeling totally weightless, and drifted down the corridor in which she had found herself, her bare toes occasionally brushing the black and white tiles on the floor.

            The corridor opened up, and she found herself floating above a still, cold lake high above the tree line on some cold mountain. The sky was marbled with grey and white clouds.

            There was a cacophonous howl of wind, so intense that she felt tears streaming from her eyes. She suddenly felt as if she were in a different place, below the mountains, in a forest. She did not know the place.

            She was walking now – her feet touched the ground – but she still felt that this could not be real, that she was still having some sort of dream.

            They (and she was not alone now, was she?) came to a small clearing in the woods. There was a thatched-roof hut, very small, that she felt pushed toward. The entrance was perfectly dark, and she felt trepidation well up inside her like a rushing river of frigid water.

            “Easy now,” said the man standing over her. “Just try to breathe.” The room was very dark, and she could barely see the man’s face, just enough to note that he wore a pair of spectacles. The only illumination seemed to be an oil lamp on the other side of the room.

            She was soaking wet. Her hair was saturated with water. She had been wrapped in a thick wool blanket, and, she realized, she was naked underneath it.

            She tried to sit up, but found that her muscles refused to do the job.

            “It’s only been about twelve hours. You’ll have to give yourself a little more time,” said the man. He had a Narcian accent, and spoke with a confident quickness that made her think he might be a military officer, or at least someone who considered himself very powerful.

            “Where am I?” she tried to say, though it came out more as “Ere m’I?”

            “We’ll have to talk about that when you’re more fully recovered. Suffice it to say that we just pulled you out of the Lockey River.” Nascine’s vision was growing clearer. She could see that he was an older man, perhaps in his late fifties. “My name is Barclay,” he said.

            Nascine blinked. She could now see that they were in a small room, with a doorway that led off to the rest of the building she was in. It was similarly dark in there, also dimly illuminated by lanterns.

            She could make out a few figures there. They were bustling around, but beyond the movement and the impression that they were probably men rather than women, she could not tell anything else.

            “Who?” she managed to get out in a decently audible manner.

            “We’re friends. You drowned. You’re very lucky we’re the ones who found you. Someone slipped you a powerful drug - something most people wouldn’t look for, wouldn’t know how to treat.”

            Nascine tried to stretch her vocal muscles internally. They felt stuck, as if someone had allowed a layer of paint to dry over them. “I’m… gracious.” The words came out weak, and it felt as if something was scratching her throat as she said them. “But who are you?”

            Barclay smiled awkwardly – an odd expression on his weathered veteran’s face. “Well, technically speaking, we’re the House.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)

Sweet Clara

            Sweet Clara is what they called her.

            Up above the maze of crooked streets that made up the frankly rather small and insignificant city of Errister, the clouds were threatening like chained dogs. The air had grown humid, and everything felt filthy. It was not yet hot – along the northern coast of Retrein, it rarely got truly hot – but the snows had melted and everything that had been caught up in them over the winter was now unleashed, forming a miasma of putridity.

            It wasn’t that Sweet Clara had ever had an easy life. Father got killed by the Barrow Gang, and mother threw her out when she was fourteen. But there was a time when she made do well enough, plying her trade. When she was seventeen she went to work in Madam Harlan’s place. It was not a proper street-temple – the old buggers in parliament outlawed that decades ago – but Harlan kept it safe, and he didn’t take more than he needed. He had been a street-priest himself, which Clara figured gave him a degree of humanity that others in his line might not have. Madam Harlan, they called him, which he seemed to prefer over “Monsieur.” He was a strange kind of dragger that kept his masculine name. He was actually quite manly, and did not attempt any sort of impersonation, other than the clothes, but he did have a motherly instinct toward his “flock,” as he called them. Things worked out, and the enforcers turned a blind eye – probably happy that Harlan ran things clean: no drugs, no violence.

            But when the fog rolled in five years back, things dried up. People did not have the money to spend on luxuries, and for most, that meant they had given up a good weekly hook. Some of the regulars kept up, and some of the out-of-towners, but business pretty much ground to a halt.

            Harlan had gotten old, and took a bullet when a couple bloody robbers tried to take his Cold Iron safe. He survived, bless the gods, but the business didn’t.

            Sweet Clara had stayed with Esmi for a spell after that. Esmi wanted to give up the trade. She wanted to clean her life up a bit, but she didn’t mind Clara bringing clients in. Clara wished she had minded, because on a slow, boring day in the late winter, a man who’d had too much to drink and was a proper bastard to boot decided he’d get more than what he paid for. The enforcers had to be called, and they dragged the man off in chains, but Esmi was in no shape to live there anymore. The social services people took her away, kept her safe, Clara hoped, but the flat was gone after that.

            And now Clara was on the street. She had thought about going back into the trade, maybe seeing if things had picked up in Ravenfort or Wolfsmouth – the big cities might have recovered a bit quicker after the fog – but she had no way to get there. In Errister, even after the fog was gone, the shelters were overflowing. Clara had heard the stories – the fights that broke out, the crowding. There were stories of abuse, like a woman who was running one of them getting her thrills from beating up the residents. She didn’t want that – figured she’d do better on her own.

            She slept in the day. The nights weren’t a good time to be unaware. She was on the sidewalk, looking down the crooked alleyway that passed for a street here. There had been stories floating around about some sort of demon haunting the city, preying on the beggars, but she suspected it was just the usual sort of spooked rumor that seemed to spread through the city like a plague. Some poor sot must have read a book of myths about Ripper Jack or Whispering Jim and started imagining things. Still, demon or no, you kept your eyes open when the sun went down.

            The night was growing colder, and now there were tiny, timid droplets of rain falling – just barely too thick to be considered a mist. Sweet Clara tried to keep her eyes open. The sun would rise in just five hours, and then she would be free to let them close, but for now, she huddled under her blanket, her knife held tight.

            And suddenly there was blinding light. Clara squinted at it, shielding her eyes. When she could finally bear to look at the light’s source, she saw that it was a limousine.

            The limousine had pulled right up in front of her, though with such a long car, she could not be sure how its driver had managed to get it down the twisting street. The vehicle was black, and appeared strangely matte from the condensation that had collected on it.

            The strangest thing about the limousine was that there was a pipe sticking out of the back of it. Some sort of foul smoke was puffing from the pipe, cascading up into the air. And on the side, behind the passenger cab’s door, instead of a cable-plug, there was a small square door. As the limousine sat in front of her, there was a low rumbling from the engine.

            The front door opened, and the driver hopped out. He was a slightly chubby man, with a bizarrely cheerful smile on his face, which was red around the cheeks and forehead and especially the nose.

            “Ms. Clara? Sweet Clara?” said the driver with a Canwick accent. Then he grinned again. “Of course it is. Wouldn’t be here if it was anyone else. Ms. Clara, would you be so kind as to step inside?”

            The driver opened the door and stood there, waiting. Clara did not move.

            “He’s got a business proposal for you,” said the driver. “And he says he’ll buy you dinner.”

            She had not eaten that day.  She knew it was the last thing you’d do, getting in a vehicle with a client, but with no food today and nothing she expected tomorrow… And there was something inviting about the limousine, even if she could not be sure what it was.

            “At least let us get you out of the rain, Ms. Clara,” said the driver. At that moment, the rain truly began to fall. Sheets of water seemed to be splashing down over everything, and the filth on the streets was quickly being swept up in a rising tide.

            She stood and entered the limousine. As she did, she transformed herself, the way she had learned to do with a client. Posture, movement, and expression could mean a world of difference in how men saw a woman.

            The seats were cool, smooth leather, and the windows were tinted so that they seemed entirely cut off from the foul city around them. She could hardly see outside.

            Across the cavern of a space inside the vehicle sat a strange young man.

            He looked to be around twenty, a man who was only just beginning to look like an adult. He was dressed very well – an immaculate black suit and shoes polished to a mirror sheen.

            He was very pale – so pale he seemed to be truly white, and his hair was similarly bleached of all color. Even his eyes were steely grey. The only point of color on him was an emerald on a ring he wore on the left hand.

            “Sweet Clara,” said the man. “I am in need of certain services, and I believe you can provide them.”

            Clara nodded, taking care not to display her apprehension at touching this ghostly young man. “I understand.” She looked around. It had been months, but she had not forgotten how to get into character. She hadn’t bathed in three days, though, since an old Narcian priest had let her use his tiny temple’s bath. But she had learned long ago that there were men and women of every taste, and her current state could be what this one was interested in. Besides, if this meant a hot meal and a few coins to rub together, she would do what she could. “Would you like me to begin in here?”

            The man smiled knowingly. “No, Clara, I don’t think you do understand. I do not want a prostitute. I don’t need that sort of service.” The man crossed his legs and pulled out a pocket watch. She could not be sure – she only saw the watch’s face for a moment – but she thought it had only one hand and no numbers. “I will pay you a discretionary salary of forty-thousand tolls. You will be provided with housing, a cook, a maid, and clothing. You will be representing me, you understand, and I want you to act the part. I don’t think we’ll need to see a speech coach about your accent, but I would like to impress upon you that you will no longer be living on the streets, and I do not want your voice to give the impression that you still do.”

            Clara could not pick a word to respond with.

            “You’re overwhelmed,” said the man. “Let me explain what the job will entail, and you can decide if it would suit you better than your current lifestyle.” The man began to wind the watch. “You will be my voice among those to whom I do not wish to speak. You will be my ears among those to whom I do not wish to listen. You will be my eyes among those whom I do not wish to see.”

            The man leaned forward. “I will be a rumor that resides in your shadow. Your actions will, in fact, be my actions. You will be the face I show in the mortal world. I require complete obedience. If I receive that, you will want for nothing. If I do not, I will return you exactly here, to live out this facsimile of a life you have now.”

            “I don’t know who you are,” said Clara.

            “I am a man with great influence and power,” said the man.

            “Why have you chosen me? I mean, I can use the work, I don’ t mind saying, but what makes you think I can do this?”

            The man nodded, though he seemed somehow frustrated with her all of a sudden. “You are an actress. You’ve never been on stage or film, but I know of some of your best performances. Men loyal to my cause have auditioned you for years at Madam Harlan’s. Had it not been for recent events, I imagine we might be having this conversation there instead. I need someone who can portray an extension of my will – to show neither fear nor doubt, even though I know you will be filled with both. Does that answer your question?”

            Feigning confidence, she said “Yes, it does.”

            “Do I have your answer?” he asked.

            “I don’t rightly think I can refuse,” she said.

            He smiled. “Good. I knew you were a sensible woman.” He leaned forward, opening a mini-bar in the car’s wall. From there he retrieved a thermos. Slowly, he unscrewed the lid and poured a cup.

            “Sweet Clara,” he said. “My business will require you to know certain things about the world that most people do not. Before we can begin, I’d ask that you drink some of this.”

            He handed the cup to her. Inside, there was a black liquid that splashed up with only the slightest movement of her hand. The smell of it was awful – it reminded her of the smoke coming from that odd pipe at the back of the limousine.

            The man smiled. “It’s not poison. I know what you are thinking. It is unfair that prostitutes are so often targeted by the deranged. Their lives are rarely happy to begin with. But rest assured, I am no Ripper Jack. I see no reason that a woman of your professional experience is any more deserving of cruelty than another.”

            Clara looked back down at the beverage. “I can’t.”

            He frowned. “That is most unfortunate. I will be unable to employ you if you do not drink.”

            Clara inhaled some of the fumes. There was an underlying scent that was strangely pleasant – like some kind of coffee. Yet it was twisted, as if all of the flavor had been squeezed out of it and only the bitterness remained.

            She thought about that sad patch of pavement she’d made her home, thought about Esmi, who had only been given a proper home after a brute had broken half her bones.

            So what if it is poison?

            She downed the cup. The drinking was just as unpleasant as she had feared, and for a moment she thought that it really had been poison, and that her insides were about to be torn up, and the pain would end her life.

            But that moment did not come. After a few seconds, the flavor of the foul liquid evaporated away. Yet this was followed by a thudding headache. What few lights there were in the limousine grew blindingly bright, but this, too, passed.

            And then Sweet Clara realized that she and the strange man were not alone in the limousine’s cab. On either side of him were two other men, staring at her without faces.

            She screamed in shock, but quickly quieted herself. Henry smiled.

            “Sweet Clara, allow me to introduce you to our clients. We will be working very closely with them.”

            She stared at the one that sat to his left. Even as she saw the strange being before her, she felt as if she was looking through it.

            “Do they frighten you?” asked the man.

            “I don’t know what to make of them.”

            “You cannot make anything of them. I suggest you do not attempt to do so.”

            Sweet Clara swallowed. She narrowed her vision, focusing only on the odd man and trying to act as if the faceless beings were not there. “Tell me what to do.”

            The man leaned on his elbow. “Once we’ve taken you to your home, gotten you cleaned up and dressed, and I daresay once you’ve had a decent night’s sleep, I would like you to travel to Ravenfort to speak with an old school friend of mine. His name is Richard Airbright, and I wanted to give him notice that I’ll be coming to town myself shortly and that he should be prepared.”

            “Sir,” Clara began. One of the faceless men had somehow gotten closer to her, such that he was nearly seated next to her, even though she had not seen him make the move. She took a breath, remembering the part that this man had assigned her. “What name should I give this Mr. Airbright?”

            “The name is Henry Thall.”

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)

A Good Arizradna Boy

            Azjar tapped out a command on the keyboard, and the projective sigil shifted by just a hair. The moon had come again – the second time this month – and its properties seemed to interfere with the xenogravity field holding up the telescope. The spell keeping the telescope aligned was a form of glyphic magic, using the sigil to substitute the underlying gravitational field of another universe within a set space, thus allowing the enormous instrument to float miles up above. Azjar had always had a better knack for invocative magic, but after a little training, he had learned to maintain the observatory’s key asset.

            Most observatories tended to have a number of astronomers rotate through, and while there were a few people within the community who would come to make their own observations at the DFO, the Sinret Project insisted that they have a presence at the observatory at all times.

            Azjar liked it there. It was far enough from the city that one could feel a degree of privacy without being so far that one could not go into town on a whim. He had grown up in Damana, the capital of Arizradna, and though he loved his hometown and appreciated how lucky he had been to be born there, he was happy to be living outside the city.

            Freya had made her great big stew, and while Azjar typically did not eat meat, he was satisfied that she had acquired the beef from a reputable institution that treated its animals as humanely as one could.

            The Deep Field Observatory had been built at the instruction of the Sinret Project, thousands of miles away in Arkos Province in the Redlands. Azjar had never been to the Redlands, but it was said that most of it was a fairly dangerous place, thanks to the wars that came in and out like the tide near the coast or the general lawlessness as one got farther inland. Azjar did not like to look down on another culture, but he found it strangely poetic that Arizradna and the Redlands were almost mirror images of each other, his homeland spread along the west coast of Sarona and the Redlands occupying much of the east coat six thousand miles away.

            He had once made an offhand comment, carelessly denigrating the Redlands in front of Tessa, and begged her forgiveness for his insensitivity, but she had only laughed and mentioned that there was a reason she never intended to return to the country of her birth.

            Still, Arkos province, where the Sinret Project was based, was said to be stable and even pleasant, at least in the cities. He imagined one would have to have some semblance of order to attempt a project of such magnitude, and truthfully he was glad the people of Arkos had entrusted his country with the construction and maintenance of the observatory. Not only was Arizradna a far safer place to invest the millions that the DFO cost to build, but historically it was believed that that position on the planet would give the best angle to stand a chance at finding Arashka.

            The people of the Redlands - or at least most of them, as of course there had inevitably been some racial mixing after living so long on Sarona - were originally refugees from an entirely different planet called Arashka. There was some myth passed down among the Redlanders that Arashka had been beset by a terribly calamity, marked by the arrival of an entity called the White King.

            The Gods of Arashka all had dual-identities – a day aspect and a night aspect. The most powerful among them was called Ternis – the God of Time. Ternis represented ambition for the future, and the promise of a better day to come, with new opportunities, growth, and the limitless potential in what had not yet happened.

            Ternis’ night aspect was Sinret, who represented nostalgia, history, and the striving for what had been lost. Depending on who you asked, Sinret could be a sorrowful being, or a seductive one, or potentially destructive and dangerous.

            There were many nuances that were lost on Azjar, but he suspected the legends and myths of the Pantheon of Arashka had mutated and been rewritten a hundred times in the ages that had passed since the exodus.

            The only member of the pantheon still known to exist was the night aspect of Sirca, the warrior god, who was named Ashtor. After the White King’s arrival, Ashtor flew through the heavens toward Sarona-Ki, leaving behind a wake of red flame that came to be known as “Ashtor’s Bleed.” For whatever reason, even when the Arashkans landed on the planet, he chose to shun them and instead found worshippers among the Sardok.

            For this reason, Azjar felt oddly out of place. Both Tessa and Freya had a connection to the project – one was searching for the land of her ancestors and the other was searching for the land of her god. Meanwhile Azjar, a good Arizradna boy, was less interested in the mystical or romantic side of things. Instead, he was drawn to the project primarily because of the puzzle of the technical logistics.

            When he was satisfied with the adjustments, Azjar made his way to the lodge. He was not yet sure what to make of Tessa’s boyfriend. For one, he did not remember her mentioning him before, and there was something… off about him. They had only interacted twice, first when Tessa brought Jack to his station and introduced him and again when Azjar had gone to the kitchen for breakfast.

            Oh hey, you’ve only eaten a bowl of cereal today, Azjar thought. Once again, he’d allowed himself to get lost in his work.

            But his thoughts remained on Jack Cart, Tessa’s sudden boyfriend from Narcia. He seemed friendly enough, though oddly thin. The man looked as if he had recently kicked a drug habit or been through months of torture, yet his manner and tone were lighthearted and friendly. Admittedly, Azjar was used to people being a little more rotund – thanks to what he had once heard a comedian call “The Arizradna Padding.” Yet Jack, well, he did not look unhealthy exactly, just strange.

            When they had sat at the dinner table, Freya handed him a very large stein of beer. “Drink up, witch. It’s not Varhall unless you’re stumbling drunk at the end of the night.”

            Azjar took a sip. The beer was thick and rich and very bitter. Azjar usually preferred bluewine, but he also recognized the need to get into the spirit of the holiday.

            “So how long have you been working at the DFO, Azjar?” asked Jack.

            “I came in with Freya. We had met in undergrad at Al-Akthi University up in Tevali. That was about four years ago.”

            “So you guys were here a year before Tessa?”

            Freya nodded. “Yeah. We’re the old-timers around here.” Freya then proceeded to grill Jack on his life: where he grew up, how he and Tessa met, what he did for a living. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, but still Azjar thought that Jack seemed uncomfortable, despite his confident answers to this impromptu interrogation.

            Azjar reasoned to himself that it was possible he was simply projecting his own discomfort over having a stranger there.

            They feasted for nearly three hours, and soon Freya was nearly unable to stand. Tessa left to help walk her to her room, leaving Jack and Azjar alone.

            They sat there, quietly, until finally Azjar felt he needed to break the silence. “So what do you think of Arizradna?” he asked, grasping for something to talk about.

            “It’s very nice,” replied Jack. He did not elaborate. Again, Azjar thought he could sense some discomfort underneath Jack’s friendly attitude.

            More silence.
           "Well, we made it to the couch," said Tessa as she reappeared. "Jack, you coming?"
           "Sure," he said, and they left the dining room. Azjar went to the kitchen and put his plate in the dishwasher, then began to make his way to his room. The beer had hit him harder than he expected. Much harder.

            He walked down the hallway, nearly tripping over his own foot. He supposed Freya would be happy with him, but she was already passed out, draped over the sofa in the enormous living room, absolutely reeking of beer and whiskey. Azjar opened the door in front of him.

            “Azjar!” Tessa nearly cried. He looked into the room. The room was dark, illuminated only from the lights in the hallway. Tessa was in bed, in her bedclothes. On the floor to the side of her bed, Jack was stretched out on a comforter, his bony chest uncovered. “What are you doing?” she asked.

            Azjar paused for a moment.

            What am I doing?

            He turned around. “I think I took hold of the wrong door.”

            Tessa nodded. “Yeah.”

            “I have a theory… bear with me here. I have a theory, that I may have ingested greater quantities of alcohol than I realized I was… doing.”

            Tessa laughed. “Yeah, that beer Freya brought is something like fifty proof.”

            Azjar nodded sagely. “Yes, that might account for it.” He looked around the room and nodded. “Right, well, carry on. Carry on.”

            He closed the door and walked toward what he now realized was his own door.

            That would have been pretty embarrassing if you were sober, he thought. Funny that Jack was sleeping on the floor.

            He went into his room and collapsed on the bed. It was amazingly soft and warm. He didn’t even mind that his face was pressed down against the mattress. It was still wonderfully comfortable.

            It was odd, though. Tessa was hardly a prudish woman – living with her and Freya for so long, he was privy to all of their “girl-talk.”

            Why would she make him sleep on the floor?

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)

A Mote of Dust in the Air

            Lydia Lisenrush awoke at five. She sat up out of bed, did a set of push-ups, and went to the shower. The water was very hot. She got dressed, tied her hair back, and went on her way to the office.

            It was well into spring now, with summer just around the corner. The snow should have melted by now, but it was still there, black and dirty from the mud it had soaked up over the months.

            The faceless man was walking behind her, and part of her knew that he was there. The part of her that understood made her walk faster. Yet there was a disconnect – some gulf between the part of her mind that saw the faceless men and the part of her brain that saw nothing out of the ordinary other than a discouragingly shrunken ranger corps.
            Actually, it had been a long time since they had lost a ranger. Lisenrush suspected that they were not trekking quite so far into the woods. Yet the rangers who had returned from their journeys seemed very hesitant to set out again. After Vymer came back as a draugr, Lisenrush had become conservative with the rangers' assignments. She's gotten word - top secret information - from the forensics team back in town - Vymer was not a typical draugr. His flesh had not rotted or mortified, rather it had somehow fused together, such that each muscle transitioned smoothly into other parts of his anatomy, and the internal organs had become so undifferentiated that it was almost as if he'd been replaced with a man made of plastic. He was hardly "undead," as much as he had been turned into something quite unlike a human being.
            He was on his way to becoming like the faceless men.

            There was dissonance, and both halves of her thoughts recognized this. She blamed the numbness on it, even if she had still not come up with a satisfying theory to explain how they could be connected.

            It would be troubling enough to feel that she was losing her mind, but she noticed it in the men as well. Perkins had even come to her, volunteering that he may not be fit for service, given his current mental distress. She admired that he had the courage to speak up about it. So many of the men were in denial, even when they were clearly just as affected. Still, there weren’t enough men to rotate people in and out. She had sent Perkins back to his post.

            There was only one person in all of Far Watch Outpost who seemed normal – one person who seemed to have a cohesive mind, who was not distracted or spacey. It was Ana Sweeney.

            Lisenrush had begun to entertain a very dangerous notion. Part of her, the rational part that knew that there were no invisible men stalking her, considered that Sweeney could even be the cause of this strange malaise, and that it was foolish for them to keep her here. Yet even that side had been forced to consider that Sweeney could be telling the truth.

            Once or twice, a thought from her mind connected with her brain, like sparks jumping between two wires held just close enough together. Sweeney had been going on about some sort of hidden presence at the Outpost, a man that was everywhere.

            You can see them. There is one next to you right now.

            Lisenrush felt her heart begin to race. Only now, after walking across the entire compound, did she realize she had walked to Sweeney’s cell. She looked to the man guarding the door, whose name was Andersen. He seemed hardly there, as if he were catatonic.

            The door opened, and she went inside.

            “Ranger-Captain. What answers would you like to ignore today?”

            Lisenrush crossed the cell and sat down on the bed. Ana backed away, eyeing her as if a lion had just wandered into the room.

            You’re not the thing she’s looking at. Her eyes are not watching you, they are focused on the air in front of you – as if there were a mote of dust floating there.

            “Ana,” said Lisenrush – that was unusual, she usually stuck with “Sweeney,” or “draugr.” “Tell me about the faceless men.”

            Ana swallowed. She looked up at the faceless man, standing mere feet from her. The thing seemed to be focused on Lisenrush, rather than her, but it was still deeply unsettling to be in such close proximity. There was a strange kind of pull in the air, like from a vacuum, toward it.

            “You won’t believe me,” said Ana. “You haven’t yet.”

            “I want to know everything you can tell me about them. I’ll decide if I believe you.”

            Ana was very still. “I started seeing them in my dreams. I don’t know when it started. In my dreams, they weren’t as dangerous. I started seeing them for real after I was shot.”

            “What do they do?”

            Ana was now against the wall entirely. Lisenrush was better at hiding her fear, but she had the same instinct – to straighten and stiffen, to remain motionless until the danger had passed. “They stand there. Sometimes they touch someone. It’s… it’s like they are sucking the feeling out of the air. I don’t… Captain Lisenrush, I… I don’t know much else.”

            Lisenrush looked up at her. “Something horrible is happening here, right now, all over the compound. But I cannot say what it is. I think you can.”

            Ana took another step back. “Captain Lisenrush, there’s a faceless man standing right in front of you, right now.”

            Lisenrush looked up, and for a split second, she saw it. Right there, less than a foot away, staring without eyes right down at her.

            For the first time since she was a child, she screamed in terror. She climbed backward, scrambling over the cot and to the floor. She could not see the faceless man anymore, but she knew that it was there.

            And it was now that she realized she had been seeing them for months. At Far Watch, in town, even on a trip to Port Sang. She had been seeing them everywhere. Why had she never noticed?

            “Sweeney, we’re both leaving here right now.”

            Ana did not need to be told again. The two of them ran out of the room, down the corridor and out into the open.

           

(Copyright Daniel Szolovits 2013)