Part 1 (1/2)
Midnight in New Promise.
Lon Prater.
Dedication:
This story is dedicated to Angie. Thank you for always believing in me, and for cleaning up more than your share of my messes.
Grevien Derleth lay in an aching, sopping heap at the end of a rain soaked New Promise alley. U'buru, the swarthy ogress, had done some of her best work on his ribs and chest. Just breathing was reminder enough not to get involved in politics of any sort, particularly where Governor Shadwell didn't want you.
Politics. Gang warfare by another name. Grevien snorted into the mud without thinking. He felt it speckle the only clean part of his face. Why shouldn't he be dirty? Everything and everyone in New Promise was. That's the way it had always been and that's the way it needed to be.
Dirt was his bread and b.u.t.ter. There was always someone willing to buy good dirt, and Grevien made a decent living finding little secrets out and then selling them off to the highest bidder.
He forced his body into a wobbly crouch. Nothing broken at least. He straightened up, grunting involuntarily. Maybe a cracked rib or two. He'd lived through worse: the island province had a bottomless supply of worse.
New Promise rarely lived up to its name for the hordes of settlers still arriving every week by steamboat, clipper, and zeppelin. All speaking races were welcome, according to the late Duke of Phrydd's charter: humans, elves, orcs, ogres, gnomes and their goblin relations, dwarvesa”any race touched by the Undying Spark of Awareness. Which basically meant any member of a speaking race who would pledge to renounce the old G.o.ds and embrace the enlightened philosophy of the Undying Spark instead.
The problems began when the settlers got to New Promise, forgot their pledge, and unpacked their old prejudices and pagan G.o.ds along with their bags. G.o.d wors.h.i.+p was the only crime punishable by exile from the province. Naturally, hidden chapels and shrines thrived in New Promise, secreted behind legitimate businesses like rats in the walls.
It was strange the way it worked out. Being illegal had forced the pagan churches to ally themselves with local crime families for protection. The gangs also had their grubby fingers in every level of the province's government.
When the Sages of the Undying Spark tried to get this pagan banished or that chapel closed down, the deciding factor was often which crime boss was the church's patron. And of course, which official down at the Magistrate's Hall that boss happened to have in his or her back pocket.
But corruption was just the beginning of the problems in New Promise. The Enlightened Duke's open immigration policy had the city overcrowded; full of hungry people with little hope of finding work. There were rumors of a slave trade, folks going missing and ending their days chained in the coalmines of the savage Kresht. The Industry Council rarely met anymore because of the threat of a.s.sa.s.sination by One Wagers and their union cronies.
Factory chimneys hadn't stopped filling the skies with noxious ga.s.ses and soot, though. Every day a thick haze lay over most of New Promise from mid-morning till late in the night.
It was nearly midnight now. The rain had left the muggy air as clean as it would ever be. Grevien didn't bother pulling the mud soaked facecloth up over his nose and mouth.
Walking more steadily now, the stocky man made his way to the open end of the alleyway. A motorcar splashed him as it pa.s.sed. Sighing, Grevien composed himself as best he could. He sauntered toward Piglet's, adopting a street-tough strut that gave no indication of his pain. He hoped it would keep away the muggers and young thugs common to Eastside.
Piglet was a greasy undersized gnoll, replete with matted gray fur and dry blue-black scabrous skin on his face, hands, and protruding pouchbelly. He ran a grimy workman's bar at the edge of town near the slaughterhouse. On the best of days, his patrons brought in with them all the smells of their work: the stink of livestock, the cloying odors of blood, urine and feces, and over it all, the sweat of a hard day's work.
On the worst of days, a table full of goblins would order klg thut, a strong smelling ca.s.serole of mixed organ meats, rotten eggs, and spoiled cabbages, making the bar's air d.a.m.n near unbreathable.
Tonight there were no goblins in evidence. Four gnomes, bulb nosed and warty, were playing a complicated game of Queens with a gap-toothed ogre. Gnomes were almost universally One Wagers, adherents of the newly fas.h.i.+onable idea that all workers should get the same pay regardless of what they did for a living. Something about that concept appealed to the gnomish need for uniformity and combined efforts. It was a safe bet they were working together to swindle as much as possible from the unsuspecting ogre.
Besides the card game, there were only a few other customers, regulars hard at work pickling their innards with the house version of Pinsar black ale. Traditionally, the drink calls for the seed of Pinsar black gra.s.s and other hard to get ingredients.
Piglet saw no need to serve the real thing. He bought regular tallgra.s.s seed from the mill. After brewing it with a random selection of other common ingredients, he dyed the concoction with cheap boroba tar until it as black as an orc's tongue.
Grevien couldn't stand the taste of it, but that didn't stop him from indulging. It had a strong enough kick that after a gulp or two you couldn't taste it anyway. Besides, Piglet was a good friend, one with good connections. That went a long way in New Promise.
Piglet greeted him boisterously, going against the subdued grain of the little crowd's mood. One of the gnomes looked up muttering then tossed another Dwarven Trust note into the pile of bills and coins in the center of the table.
”Who invited the mud golem?” Piglet asked, eyeballing Grevien's filthy duds. For a gnoll, he was pretty easy to understand. Most gnolls sounded like dogs lapping up water when they tried to speak in the Trader's Tongue. Maybe he was easier to understand because his pug muzzle was so much shorter than the norm for his race. Thata”along with the two triangular peaks of ear-shaped hair on the top of his heada”contributed to the piggish appearance that had earned him his nickname.
Grevien ignored Piglet's attempt at humor. He maneuvered himself gingerly onto a stool at the lonely end of the bar and reached his empty hand out as if there were already a drink there for him. Piglet got the message and fetched him a wooden mug full of foul black ale.
After a pull long enough to numb the ache in his ribs, Grevien wiped a few stray droplets from his chin with the cleanest part of his sleeve he could find. He looked straight into Piglet's little round eyes. ”The governor's ogre sends her love,” he said softly.
Piglet's muzzle twitched. His round eyes narrowed to crescent shaped slivers. Across the room, voices rose as the ogre lost yet another hand. All four gnomes appeared to be genuinely mystified at his run of bad luck.
Piglet looked around the bar for eavesdroppers before leaning in so close that Grevien could smell the sour beetles on his breath. ”What'd you find out?” the gnoll whispered.
Grevien took another long pull on his drink before explaining in clipped sentences how he had followed Del Feyklin, the gnomish leader of the One Wagers, from his ritzy Northside apartment (complete with a new lifting platform for those too well off to use stairs) out to the meeting at the boot factory with Hyrannia su'Dresil, the matron of the elfin su'Dresil crime organization. He had been jumped by Shadwell's eight foot enforcer, U'buru, while he was trying to find a window with better acoustics. Not satisfied with just a good clunk on the head, she had apparently continued drubbing his unconscious body, then left him there in the mud like yesterday's lunch.
Piglet made the sound gnolls make when they are astonished, a kind of tongue rolling sigh. ”If that big mophandler was there, you know the governor wasn't far away,” he said.
Grevien nodded in agreement. ”I didn't see him. Don't think he was there to kiss babies. My bet is no one was supposed to know he was even there.”
Piglet considered that for a moment. ”So what do the governor, Hyrannia su'Dresil, and the One Wagers have to talk about?”
Grevien noted Piglet's unconscious s.h.i.+ver at the mention of Hyrannia su'Dresil. It hadn't been smart to try spying on her in the first place. If even half the stories of her coldhearted fierceness were true, Grevien was lucky that the governor's ogre had found him first. But he had learned a thing or two as a wide-eyed Sparker initiate, before he dropped out. In Sage Waidlai's Movement of Value cla.s.s he had picked up this jewel: the greater the risk, the greater the reward.
Grevien tossed back the last of his black ale and shrugged. ”I don't know, but I bet one of the Sages would open me an expense account at the Dwarven Trust to find out.”
Piglet hissed, pulling his blue-black lips back in what pa.s.sed for a gnollish scowl. ”More likely, they'll just torture you until they find out what they want. You can't trust a Sage, Derleth, you should know that.”
”You gotta know how to talk to them, my friend,” he replied. Or know the right one to talk to.
”You'll never catch me talking to those G.o.dless red-robed b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!” Piglet said, loud enough to momentarily turn a few heads. On the Eastside, outbursts like his were much more regulara”and usually more explicita”than they ever were over in the merchant's district.
Under the letter of the law, making a statement hostile to the Undying Spark was enough to earn a fine or have your business license revoked. But none of the Enlightened ever visited Piglet's establishment.
Grevien chuckled. ”Their money spends as well as anyone's.” He inclined his head, gesturing as the wide-faced ogre stalked out of the bar, broke and angry. Piglet scurried over to collect from the gnomes before they disappeared as well. He dropped the coins they grudgingly offered into the flap of his pouchbelly.
Grevien fished in his coin purse, thankful U'buru hadn't robbed him as well. He pulled out the smallest of his remaining coins, a silver ducat. He left it on the bar, waved at Piglet, and shambled out into the murky New Promise night.
How good it would feel to remove his dirty clothes and clean himself up, he thought, walking briskly to the attic room he rented from Widow Dunnich. He'd filch another one of her healing tonics tonight, and after a few hours of rest his body would show no trace of U'buru's handiwork.
Grevien had slept till past midday, as was his custom, and didn't make it into the merchant's district until the clock tower (sponsored by the One Wagers, so that all workers would know when they were being worked too long) had struck five bells. He'd already polished off a warm beer and an apple purchased from a vendor's cart. With any luck, Sage Waidlai might treat him to dinner while he made his proposition.
As he turned onto the street that would lead him to the Rationarium, headquarters of the Undying Spark clergy, he nearly ran into three initiates, their scarlet trimmed white robes reminding Grevien of himself more than a few years ago. They were talking excitedly to each other and holding a newspaper between them.
He raised a bushy eyebrow at the headline and waited.
He knew it wouldn't be long. Sure enough, five minutes later a harried orc in bookkeeper's spectacles dropped his yellow sheet to the cobbled road. Grevien s.n.a.t.c.hed it up. You could always count on an orc to leave their trash wherever they were when they were done with it.
He parked himself on one of the green painted benches scattered throughout the center of town. Don't find these over on Eastside. The headline read: GUV TO SPARKERS: PAGANS DESERVE TOLERANCE. It went on to describe Shadwell's historic departure from the late Duke of Phryyd's charter by legalizing all forms of wors.h.i.+p. There was the predictable negative response from the spiritual leader of the Undying Spark, Wisdom Errisi, and other information about when the new laws would become effective.
Grevien chewed on a thumbnail while he read and reread the article, sure there had to be a connection with the governor's presence at the warehouse last night. But what was it, and how could he profit from it?
Del and Hyrannia were supposedly meeting to discuss an important shared interest. That was the wisp of rumor that had started him following the gnome nearly a week ago. He knew better than to try following the Hyrannia. The Age of Mages might be over, but no doubt her fertile, predatory imagination would come up with something that would leave him wis.h.i.+ng for an old fas.h.i.+oned curse instead.
Something big was going down; maybe something big enough that a guy who knew a little about it could sc.r.a.pe a few crumbs of the pie into his pocket. And what a dirt pie this would be: start with One Wagers and elfin black marketeers. Toss in the Governor and mix well. It practically made itself.