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I’d arrived at my sister’s with a box of sweets and I’d left there empty handed—save for the money in my coin pouch. That led me to my next order of business: heading to the bank to exchange my great big coins for something more practical.
There was ten fifty-Crowns on my person. Well, there had been that morning, but I’d given one to Therese, so now there was only nine. I hadn’t carried all my winnings with me, because what’s a man gonna do walking around with four-thousand Crowns, anyway? There ain’t nothing you can buy at a shop for that kind of coin.
The man at the bank found my four-hundred-fifty Crowns mighty suspicious enough, anyhow. If I’d come in with a few thousand, he might’ve called for the cops right then and there. But he was polite enough and exchanged them for smaller coins like I asked, and I left the bank with a fatter but far more manageable pouch.
After I concluded my bank errand, I stopped over at Jerry’s for lunch. Let me tell y’all, there ain’t nobody in this city that can fry a bird like Jerry. His restaurant’s still there too, over on Killian Avenue. Y’all should try it out if you haven’t. Anyway, after that it was down over to Lowery Road for me, and to the lovely home of the Etterna family.
There ain’t many mansions in the Muck Quarter, which makes Etterna Manor stand out all the more. It’s like someone plucked a White Quarter home out from where it belongs and slapped it down into the Muck. There’s pillars and staircases and one of them real fancy cooling units—the unobtrusive kind that Lonnie would’ve never been able to save up enough coin to afford—and even a driveway for carriages that was wider than my whole apartment twice over.
Yes sir, the Etternas don’t just live in the Muck Quarter; they own the Muck Quarter, and they want everyone to know it.
I didn’t go up the driveway, on account I didn’t have a carriage. Besides, the Etternas always preferred their business not be done so openly where any lawman or Cerenite could see it. No, they prefer their employees and contractors take the service entrance round the side of the building, so that’s where I headed.
“Afternoon, Maggie,” I greeted the woman lounging at the door there. Maggie wasn’t much to look at—she was kind of plain, and kind of scrawny, and her hair’s the kind that’s always greasy even when it’s just been washed—but she’s damn fast, and I ain’t never seen anyone else use a knife the way she can. Nobody ever fucked around when Maggie was about.
“Jackson,” she greeted me. “Eric’s been looking for you.” She took a sip of the bottle she was nursing and didn’t bother getting up out of her chair.
“He awake?”
Maggie nodded. “Parlor, unless he’s finished his tea. Then you’ll find him in the gallery.”
Turned out he was in the gallery. Eric spent most of his time in the gallery when he was home. He always told me that he couldn’t help but be inspired by all the paintings his father collected. Used to say that he envied artists, cuz they use their hands to create beauty. He could get awfully maudlin, Eric could. One time I caught him reading poetry and crying, which I reckon is a sign of a beautiful soul. I’d certainly never cried reading poetry. Honestly I never got what all the fuss was about.
But his morose habits always made his smiles all the nicer. Eric was a fella of big emotions, and it was always damn near impossible not to get swept up in whatever he was feeling.
At that particular moment, he was gazing at his favorite painting, “The Carpenter.” I relaxed to see that, cuz Eric only ever studied “The Carpenter” when he was in a good mood. It depicts a man holding a hammer, looking up over a dense forest, and over the trees you can sort of make out the image of a house, kind of transparent and ghostly, like you’re envisioning what’s gonna be built there along with the fella with the hammer. I was always impressed by how realistic it looked. Can’t imagine how many hours it must’ve taken to paint the thing.
I stood there, feeling awkward as a priest in Perdition, like I always felt whenever I was in that room full of fine art, and I waited for Eric to acknowledge me. He never much liked getting interrupted while he appreciated his art, you see. Put him in a right nasty mood. So I was quiet and well-behaved, and I just stood without saying anything and watched his blond head and his broad shoulders and his remarkably well-tailored clothes, and I waited for him to finish pondering whatever it was he was pondering.
It ended up taking a few minutes for him to look away from the painting and see me standing there. When he did finally notice me, he smiled, and I quickly felt myself smiling back.
“Jackson,” he said. “It’s been too long. I understand you did some good work for Reverend Crane recently.”
Now, I may not be the smartest fella in the world, but I can put two and two together in a pinch, and besides any old fool could’ve figured out he was referring to my last client. “You knew about that?”
“I was the one who recommended you,” Eric told me. “He asked me for the finest thief in our employ. I told him the finest thief in the city was an outside contractor.”
Well, I just had to laugh at that! “So that’s where he got that notion from! Should’ve known it was you filling his head with all that talk! Well, I sure do appreciate you sending him my way.”
“Of course.” Eric started walking to the door. That was his way of doing things—he never said anything like “let’s talk elsewhere” or “come with me” or anything like that. He just started walking, and if y’all were having a conversation, he expected you to follow and keep at it. It was a habit he picked up while I was working in his crew, and he’d kept at it even ten years after the crew disbanded.
So I followed him, as was expected of me. I never did like to disappoint Eric. We were out in the hallway, walking down the green carpet his family imported from Gran-Liora, when he started talking again: “It so happens that I have need of your talents. There’s rumors that the Cerenites are preparing to receive a big shipment of arcblaster parts and schematics from Cerendan, so they can start constructing the weapons down here.”
“And you want me to steal them? Not sure how I’d get a shipment like that out of the trainyard.”
Eric shook his head. “No, I want you to get in and obtain a copy of the shipping manifest. I want to know exactly where and when these items will arrive. Ordinarily a few greased palms would buy me that information, but you know how the Cerenites are.”
“That Reverend Crane fella didn’t seem to mind doing business with you. Or me.”
“True, but the business he wanted to do never involved revealing Church secrets to outsiders. Once I know when the shipment is due to arrive, I can put a crew together, get the schematics copied, and carry off a few pieces for study.”
It was then that I realized what exactly Eric was hoping to do. “You want to build your own arcblasters?”
“Of course I do.” Eric flashed a cocky grin at me. We’d arrived at his study, and he opened up the door and let me in. It was one of the smaller rooms in the mansion, which meant it was only about the size of my apartment. His desk was carved from the finest oak his family’s money could buy, and his walls were covered in all manner of letters and news bulletins and maps. If I’d ever had the time and the luxury, I probably could’ve spent hours studying his walls and come away only understanding a tiny fraction of his criminal enterprise.
“Arcblasters are the future of weaponry,” Eric explained as he sat down. “Marvelous machines. To think that viarc energy can be channeled through something so small—or made to be so destructive.”
“It is impressive,” I agreed. “Most viarc machines I see are these big bulky things. But I guess the lamps are becoming more common.”
“Indeed, but even those are all attached to a larger control device.” Eric gestured for me to sit down across from him, and I was all too glad to do so. “The Cerenites guard the secrets of viarc technology well. No one outside the Church is even sure how it’s generated. I’ve been looking into it for some time, and I still have no idea where it comes from!”
“The Soulwell.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard those words. It was like someone whispered them directly into my ear, except there weren’t nobody at my ear, and Eric didn’t seem to have heard nothing neither. So I was a mite concerned to have apparently been hearing things, as I’m sure y’all can understand.
“Are you alright?” Eric asked. He may not have heard any freaky voices whispering nonsense, but he noticed me getting all jumpy and distracted for sure.
“Yeah, sorry,” I told him. “Just suddenly remembered an errand I forgot to run is all.”
From the smile on his face, I guess that amused him. Eric leaned back in his chair. “It is my intention to create my own market of arcblasters, or at the very least a functional facsimile of the weapons. With the right materials and dealings, I may be able to undercut the official channels quite a bit. But to do it—to even figure out if it’s possible—I’ll need that manifest. So, how does twenty Crowns sound?”
That sounded like just about what I’d usually charge for a job like that. But given the big payout I’d just earned, twenty Crowns just wasn’t all that exciting anymore.
“Seems a little low for the finest thief in New Alms,” I said, flashing him the most dashing smile I could manage. I’ll admit, I was a bit worried he’d take offense and I’d have to play my negotiations off as a joke.
Turns out I didn’t need to worry none though. Eric laughed, and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t a look of pride in his eyes when he smiled back at me. “Of course. Fifty, then? That’s your rent, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I told him. Didn’t seem too long ago when charging fifty for a copying job would’ve seemed absurd to me, but now it honestly felt a little low. I reckon four-thousand Crowns changes a man’s outlook on the world. Still, I wasn’t about to push things. “It’s agreed then.”
We stood and shook hands. “It’s about time you started charging your worth,” Eric told me. “We’ll make something of you yet.”
I kept on grinning at him—and my grin was wider now that he’d praised me. Then after a few more pleasantries, I took my leave, feeling particularly pleased with myself as I did so. I was in such a good mood, I didn’t think anything of it when I noticed that birds were perched all over the roofs lining Miss Nora’s street, and each of them seemed to be watching me with their beady little black eyes.
Alright, I did think something of it. I thought “what in Perdition is that all about?” and I got mighty scared. But then I thought “surely a bunch of crows and blackbirds and bluejays ain’t gonna be sitting around and watching me for no reason,” and I assured myself I was definitely overthinking things and they was all just normal birds going about their normal bird business. I might’ve even believed it, I assured myself so well.
Once I was back home, I made preparations to do the job for Eric that very night. Usually, it was a few days between jobs, but sometimes I got a burst of them back to back. This one was a busy week, but at the very least breaking into the trainyard to rifle through shipping manifests ain’t nothing compared to sneaking into a noble’s manor.
Honestly, y’all’d be shocked to learn just how lax security at the trainyard can be. That place is half the city’s economy right there, and they’ll just let any man sneak into it with no fuss at all! Why, I hardly even had to try to avoid the guards—one of them was even sleeping, for goodness’ sake!
I won’t be boring y’all with the details of how I got into the office. Trying to tell those would just bore me to sleep too. But I’ll skip ahead to where things got interesting, and that’s around when I found the manifest.
I’d brought a paper and pen with me to copy the information over to, and copy is exactly what I did. Thing is, it weren’t too long before I started noticing some odd details about the shipment Eric was so interested in.
First of all, it was scheduled to arrive in three day’s time, and it’d only be in the trainyard for one day before it got sent by boat over to the Manufactory the Cerenites had just built out on the bayou. If Eric planned to rob it, he’d only have a small window to get together a crew and pull off the heist.
But the real weird thing was just how big that shipment was. There were over two dozen crates full of parts coming in, which seemed a tad excessive to me. Far as I knew, arcblasters weren’t even all that common in the northern cities yet, except maybe in Cerendan, and I couldn’t imagine why the Church would feel the need to send down enough munitions for a small army to New Alms.
Still, I didn’t really have the head for logistics, so I figured I must’ve been missing something. Maybe the parts needed lots of space cuz they was volatile before being put together. ’Course, that just raised the question of why the Cerenites wouldn’t just ship an order of completed arcblasters, but again, I reckoned I was missing something.
I copied over the manifest by lanternlight, crouched under a table so the light wouldn’t be too obvious to anyone outside the office. I needn’t have worried—like I said, the guards at the trainyard weren’t exactly the best or the brightest. Better to be safe than sorry though. Once I was done, I rolled up my paper, replaced the manifest, and extinguished the lantern. Then I was up on my feet and ready to leave.
Least I would’ve been, and then another weird thing happened, and believe me when I tell y’all that this one was a doozy.
There I was, thinking the job was basically over, that all I had to do was leave and return to Eric so he could pay me and then puzzle over the manifest himself. I just needed to head on out the office door, right? But I couldn’t, on account of it was blocked. And the reason it was blocked was because a fella was standing there.
Nah, that’s not quite right. A fella is a someone. And I sure didn’t see someone standing there. I saw something standing there.
It was human-shaped, broadly speaking. The face was what looked most like a man’s. But he had curved horns like a ram’s got growing out of his head, and there was all these leaves and flowers coming out of his hair, and roots hung from his chin like a beard.
Dark fur was growing up and down his arms, and white fur covered his legs. His fingers ended in sharp claws, and his feet were bird talons. Feathers sprouted from his shoulders and moss covered his chest. Up and down his neck were these little holes, and I saw a bee buzz its way over to him and crawl into one. He had mushrooms growing out of his back, and a scale-covered brown tail was swaying back and forth behind him.
All that was plenty frightening as is, but it was his eyes that shocked me to my core. They was eyes I had seen before, in that dream I’d had—golden reptilian eyes, with black slitted pupils. Those eyes bored into me, and his lips peeled back in a smile that revealed rows of sharp, serrated teeth.
I knew who he was, of course. I knew what he was. His was an image I had seen before. And it turns out he knew who I was too, because when he spoke, what he said was: “You’re an interesting man, Jackson Balor.”
Now I don’t know what any of y’all’d’ve done in this situation. Turning around to find the Wild God himself standing before you and addressing you by name is not a circumstance I reckon most of us are ever prepared to face. All I can tell y’all is what I did when it happened to me, and what I did was nothing. My brain just plum shut down. It took one look at what was happening, said “absolutely not,” and proceeded to stop functioning for a bit. I was frozen in place, scared out of my wits, with my eyes wide as saucers and my mouth hanging open cuz I’d forgotten how to close it.
“If I know your species’ social habits, and I do believe I do, then the proper action for me to take now would be to introduce myself,” the Wild God went on, apparently unconcerned with the crisis his presence was causing in me. “My name is Ferengris, but I reckon you already knew that. It is a pleasure to formally meet you, my vessel.”
That word tickled at my brain, and I realized that these weren’t just the same eyes I’d seen in my dream. This was the same voice too, and it was addressing me with the same word.
“Ah yes, there we go,” Ferengris said. “I can see the thoughts swimming round your head now. They reach out their tendrils, grasp each other, and make their connections. You’re no fool, Jackson Balor. Already you know what’s happening, even if everything within you, and everything you’ve ever been taught, wants to deny it.”
The mask, the Wild, the Lugh Manor job... no, I didn’t think of any of that. I very deliberately chose not to think of any of that. I reckon he was right about everything I’d been taught wanting to deny things, cuz at that moment I was trying to make sense of this and not liking the answers my brain threatened me with. So instead I latched onto the safer answer; safer, because it meant this wasn’t really happening.
“You ain’t real,” I told him. “I’m hallucinating.”
Those teeth were so sharp. His grin was wide, and the teeth were damn near all I could see. They was like endless rows of little saws, completely filling a mouth that had no business being as big as it was. My words seemed to amuse the god to no end.
“If that’s the case,” he said, “then I suppose you can go ahead and ignore me. Go about your day, Jackson Balor. Ignore the god before you, and perhaps in time the hallucination will fade.”
Well, I aimed to do just that, though I admit I was a mite suspicious that the hallucination in question was so quick to agree with me. But then again, why wouldn’t a product of my deranged mind agree with me? We’d be the same, wouldn’t we?
With that settled, I prepared to walk past the freaky nightmare man, but I froze. There was a voice out in the hall:
“Hold on. Thought I just heard something in the office.”
I scowled, but I kept my cool. If a guard was coming to investigate, then my first order of business needed to be hiding myself. I ducked under the manager’s desk, pulled his chair over in front of me, and kept my knees ready to spring up and my hand resting on the sword on my belt.
If this night, doing this job that should’ve been the easiest thing in the world, turned out to be the first time I never needed to draw my sword, then I’d never forgive that blasphemous hallucination. My conversation with it was probably the only reason the guard had heard anything at all.
Light poured in from beneath the door behind Ferengris. The Wild God turned to regard it, then looked back at my hiding spot and smiled at me like he was sharing some sort of little joke. Then he stepped aside right as the guard pushed the door open.
It was a young fella. The endless tedium of patrolling the trainyard night after night hadn’t turned him into a jaded cynic yet. He carried a lantern in one hand, and he held it out into the office and peered out into the dark, searching for any sign of an intruder.
Ferengris stood directly in the light, but the young guard’s eyes passed right over him. Far as I was concerned, that was all the proof I needed that I was indeed hallucinating. Then the Wild God reached out his hand and flicked his wrist, and a pair of big-ass rats came scurrying out of the shadows and ran over the guard’s boot as they scampered out into the hallway.
“Aw, Perdition!” The young man jumped back and shook his head, scowling all the while. “It was just rats!”
Someone out in the hallway said something I couldn’t make out, but I was pretty sure they was laughing. The young man glared over his shoulder before closing the door. As the light of lantern receded, Ferengris turned back to me.
“Well, I do believe that was a close one.”
“I do believe it was,” I muttered, then scolded myself to talking to my hallucination. Worse than that: agreeing with it. Clearly I was suffering some sort of mental sickness, probably brought on by that Wild God shrine I’d found in the Lugh estate. I’d been rattled, and it was distracting me during my professional duties.
So I slipped past the alleged god and checked the hallway, refocusing myself on the task at hand. It was clear, so I snuck out and climbed through the window.
Ferengris was waiting for me outside, like he’d never been in the office with me at all. He was smiling a smug little smile full of nasty teeth. I continued to ignore him as I made my exit from the trainyard.
He followed me. I pretended not to notice.