Mark Newton - The Broken Isles

Brynd breathed deeply, weighing the investigator’s words in his mind. ‘I’ll let Artemisia finish with him, then I may try to get a few words with him — that is, if Artemisia will let me.’

The blue-skinned woman’s voice was pleading, her words tumbling out of her mouth in a torrent he couldn’t understand. Eventually her sentences faded and Frater Mercury remained impassive to what she said. Artemisia sat back down at the table, and for the first time since he had met her she seemed quite disturbed.

‘Is everything all right?’ Brynd enquired.

She looked up at him. ‘We need to get back to the encampment as soon as possible. I will see to it that the dragons are brought here before nightfall.’

‘Are you taking Frater Mercury with you?’ Brynd asked.

‘Of course!’ she said with irritation. She rose up from her chair petulantly. ‘Unless you wish to return to Villiren via foot, Commander Lathraea, I would urge you to set straight your affairs here as soon as possible. Make what arrangements you will.’ With that, she marched back over to Frater Mercury, muttered something in their own tongue, before they both left the building.

Brynd watched through the windows as they made their way along the edge of the wall and out of sight.

‘They may be from a different world,’ Fulcrom said, ‘but they’re certainly as temperamental as people from ours.’

Brynd laughed, and found the thought vaguely comforting.

Jeza was keen to explore the nature of the Mourning Wasp before she resuscitated it. She had paid to gain access to what was left of the city’s private underground libraries. Knowledge was power, of course, and in Villiren you didn’t get something like that without paying for it.

Information was barricaded within tiny rooms situated mostly in the Ancient Quarter, an area that had remained unaffected by the war, and they had been kept in good condition by either aged cultists or old scholars weighed down by nostalgia. She examined shelf after shelf for information on the Mourning Wasp, thick tomes coming apart at the bindings, all kinds of exotic books written in various languages, though she could only understand a couple of them. Some were in remarkably good condition — facsimile copies or translations made by scholars, and with useful annotations.

Jeza had disregarded unreliable authors, researched others, but slowly began to piece together the origins of the Mourning Wasp.

There were mentions of an enormous Pale Emperor Wasp, Vespa imperator khloros , by a scholar called Vendor Hast, which was the earliest mention of the creature. Hast’s scribblings seemed a little inconsistent, so she did not set great store by his theories.

The most encouraging text was written by an Ysla-based academic called Venghaus, who had written on what he claimed was an encounter with something called the Mourning Wasp. He was more specific in his observations: saying that the creature’s overactive saliva gland secreted a substance that corroded its flesh, thus leaving it with a mostly skull-like appearance. He had suggested the use of ‘heavy clubs and cudgels’ for dealing with the pest — the numbers of people on his expedition had been halved upon contact with the species. Venghaus was the only writer to have made a sketch of the creature, hovering in the air. It looked both macabre and mesmerizing. Of the ability for people to sit on top of the wasps, as depicted in the cave paintings, Venghaus did not mention anything.

Despite the effects of the war, Villiren was still a busy city. The streets had begun to settle back into their old ways: bawdy bars kicked out those who were a couple of drinks the wrong side of the night, only for them to then go and piss their expenditure up against the wall around the back. People in long waxed coats began offering her dubious substances from the shadows, illicit fluids or bark scrapings, which could either heighten your experience of the evening or do absolutely nothing, depending on the dealer you found. There were working girls here, too, though far fewer than before. They stood almost between the moonlight and the shadows, trying to catch the attention of passers-by. Behind them, their pimps loitered, knives tucked into their sleeves, waiting. Land trilobites had returned as well, their strange, shiny shells catching the light from windows as they scuttled into the alleys. Though these waist-high creatures had once found work carrying tools for the stevedores, ever since the presence of the Okun no one really trusted anything with an exoskeleton. Now trilobites could be found drinking from puddles or scouring mounds of rubbish for existence.

The dark economy flourished.

Any hopes Jeza had that the war might have purged such goings-on from the streets of Villiren had vanished. Nothing would stop these discreet forces. Yet despite the dangers, in spite of the rancid smells and questionable people, Jeza did enjoy these evenings. The bitter coastal breeze brought her to her senses after a long day spent cooped up in the factory. It made her feel alive. And there was a definite buzz around the group ever since their first genuine commission from the commander. A downpayment had come through and they were now in possession of the one thing they had craved for years.

Respect.

The manufacture of Imperial armour had not stopped when Brynd left the city on his urgent business. He said he would return promptly once a small matter was seen to, and she took the decision then to industrialize their process further. They opened one of the many unused rooms in the factory, cleared out junk and rubbish, and employed some friends of friends to kit out the place as a vast storage facility so it would become a warehouse for armour. It wasn’t long before they had the better part of a thousand of the new-style breastplates on the racks. The gang tested their work on other sections of body armour until they had enough examples to show Brynd. Then they started their first thorough explorations on the art of raising the Mourning Wasp.

They could do this without having to do shitty conversion jobs for cultists. They now had the luxury of having money. Some of the gang had resisted the urge to buy the first thousand things they saw. Even in a post-war Villiren, they could still get their hands on nice clothes, decent drinks, tasty food. The army paid well, it seemed, and the group couldn’t quite work out what to do with all the money. Jeza decided she would save hers. She would perhaps see if she could get a passage to Ysla, where the cultists lived in some kind of utopia. The weather was warmer there.

Somehow news had got out concerning their manufacture of military gear and there had been a request to meet her, one on one, in a tavern on the far side of the Ancient Quarter, in an area untouched by the war.

The note came from a man called Malum.

She thought to herself, what if the deal with the army collapses? What if the commander had to pull out of the contract? If she was going to be a legitimate businesswoman, she would need another plan, something to fall back on.

So she had decided to go on her own, yet for her own safety was secretly wearing one of her own pieces of armour designed to fit her small frame. I don’t want to get stabbed with all that money sitting there unspent in a bank vault , she thought.

As she headed towards the agreed meeting point, by way of the enormous Citadel, she noticed something strange occurring down one of the side streets. There, amidst the rubbish sacks discarded by the nearest bistro, was a hunched figure rooting around in the darkness.

For some reason, Jeza’s curiosity got the better of her and she sauntered cautiously towards the person: it was a human, a woman and, surprisingly, her black clothes seemed to be well cut, though more fitted for combat than anything else. In fact, everything about the quality of the clothing and neatness of her hair suggested that she was from a good background.