The Nightman (Fiction)

The Nightman
By Mark Lax

He split apart the iron bar. Spanning the revealed distance between the two halves were three links of chain, a match in construction for the bars themselves. With a click of the slide he could extend it another two links, but that wasn’t what he wanted to do right now. Instead, he flicked his wrist and sent one shaft in a fast, tight orbit.

There was a machete showing from the place where his loin cloth split on one of his hips and a bull whip where it did on the other. Draping off his leather belt were a bolo and a sling. Two silver boomerangs stuck out from his bandolier. The bandolier itself hung across a thick, down stuffed, sleeveless sky blue pull over. His arms were thick and grey. The man’s hands were endowed with five thumbs, although in the positions of more supple fingers. He was three feet from shoulder to shoulder and only slightly more narrow from hip to hip.

Hooding his small, light reflecting grey eyes were two porch awning-like bare brows. His nose was a bulbous little grey thing which wasn’t determined enough to be pug, but sensible enough to at least be symmetrical. It was framed by two white ivory tusks which jutted out of his pronounced under bite. What hair he had, a calico confederation of grey, brown and black, was kept very short and neatly razor cut far away from his pointed ears and off the nape of his stumpy neck.

If he were a foot taller, he would be an ogre. If he were a foot shorter and perhaps thinner and wearing less clothes, he would be an orc. At one time he had been a goblin and before that a chatterling. Should you encounter him with fifteen hundred or so similar men and they were all wearing metal armor, he would undoubtedly be a hobgoblin. But he had a manicure. He didn’t think he smelled bad. (He tried not to.) The grey skin simply made him look dirty. Upon his feet were fashionable and well cared for black leather boots.
Domesticated pretensions notwithstanding, he was clearly a person one would be stupid to bother with, especially in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of the night. Both were his natural element.

Perhaps the being approaching through the palm branches had not heard what he said. Or maybe it hadn’t seen him or the metal shaft he had split apart and was now spinning so expertly. At least that’s what he hoped.

So far, all the being seemed to be was movement through the branches. He couldn’t smell anything—and he smelled everything. He hadn’t really seen anything. Despite it being a cloudy and moonless night, he could see as well as day. From what he heard, the creature wasn’t very heavy, but the motion through the branches said it was at least five feet tall.

A large, nocturnal, flightless bird? Birds didn’t move at night, no matter what their size. Not that he had heard of everything.

His tovalds stirred and began shuffling away from him. The tovalds, small, hump-less camels, carefully stepped over the packages which had once been on their backs. If the big guy was swinging into action, they wanted no part of the immediate surroundings. Things had a tendency to fly.

Poking through the palms was now a man’s face. Its eyes were mere blank sockets. The nose was two slits. Dark drown stumps showed from a mouth frozen in an uneven but deep yawn. All of this was covered by skin that seemed to have been breaded and fried. The expression didn’t change.

In another step, it was through the brush. It wasn’t staggering, but its legs were not moving naturally. Instead it was advancing by pivoting from one motionless leg to the other, much in the way little girls make their dolls walk. Bones showed through at the hands and between the tatters it was wearing.

The nightman had seen enough. He stepped forward and unleashed his swinging shaft, smashing the creature across the forehead. It didn’t move. Half of its head exploded backwards, but it otherwise displayed no sign of shock. Something unseen was rooting it to the ground and driving it forward.

He took a step back, only to see what direction the creature was headed—although he was under no illusion that such a thing might just be passing through. It was either going to go after him or the camels.

Not that he was certain of that. This was a new experience for him.
It was going for the packages.

“Just the mail,” the nightman grunted. He then made an attempt to enunciate “It is just the mail.”

It wasn’t really ‘just’ the mail. It was the nightman’s livelihood for the moment. That, in and of itself, made it worth a fight.

What business did this damn thing have going after his packages? What business did this damn thing even have being here? The nightman knew that he was a little lost, but in no place he knew would beings such as this be free to lawfully roam around. He wasn’t really the type to beat on people. On the other hand, this wasn’t a person. That said, had it not bothered him, he would not have bothered it, no matter what it seemingly may have been.
He drew his arms above his head and brought the shaft down swiftly. The creature’s shoulder crunched with a flurry, like a bag of heavy dust. It spun and lashed out a hand, attempting to grab the end of the shaft. He drew the weapon back again and sent its spinning end thudding directly onto its hand. The hand was pulverized the next instant and slapped the ground.

It didn’t stagger. It didn’t shout. It was hard to see if it was discouraged. In two more fast blows, both ending in thuds and dust clouds across the creature’s chest, he gave up on looking for signs of distress, discouragement or surrender. Instead, he beat it to pieces.

At no time did it shout nor attempt to speak. It attempted to scratch. It tried to bite. It kicked him, even after it only had one leg. It never swayed or slowed. After about the twentieth blow from the nightman’s shaft, it simply stopped. All of the disassembled thing fell to the ground, all at one time as if a hand had unclenched and let hold of a pile of twigs.

The nightman kicked at the pile of broken bones and thread. When nothing else happened, he called to his tovalds “I think it’s dead. I think it’s dead-er.”

The two camels grunted back, but kept their distance.

“I guess it’s going to be sun up pretty soon anyway. And we can’t be that far off that road we were supposed to turn onto. So we can just get going,” he said, as if any of them would be able to get back to sleep after that.

He knelt down and placed a hand on the bones. Turning his head to the black, star-less, moon-less sky above, he said “Take care of this guy. Wherever he is. Better than you have so far.”

The camels still weren’t coming back, so he gathered their harnesses and brought the halters to them. Then he shuttled the packages from the piles to the camel’s backs.
Having secured the last treated skin wrapped package on a tovald, he started back down the winding path through the palms that they all had been following for the last three weeks.
His tovalds clung close, following him single file. Unlike the nightman, they could not see so well in the dark. He was a good guy to follow. He was always roaming and knew many comfortable places to lie down. And he always had great snacks. On occasion he did take stupid shortcuts and there sometimes was some hostility here and there, but the snacks were much better than the tovalds could have found on their own. Or perhaps the camels were domesticated.

Within a short time, he had found the place where the seeming deer path they were on dead ended at a broad cobblestone road. He held them up, having become annoyed.

The nightman took ten steps to the right down the path. “Curses. This runs the same way we came from, only straighter. Whatever was that kid thinking? Some shortcut.”

He came back to the camels, saying “I’m mystified. Maybe it’s a toll road back that way? He didn’t say that. Maybe that is what he meant?”

The camels began heading left. He joined them and came to the lead. Dawn was now leaking through the edges of the thick cloud cover. The road went up a mild grade for a mile or so. As it progressed, the palms and sand diminished and were replaced by the sudden appearance of black dirt and shrubs. Land beside the path was rocky and uneven until they came to the grade’s apex.

Displayed before them was a vast fanged valley, in the general shape of a frozen splash from a large rock into a calm pond. The downward sloping land was generally even, treeless and covered in long green grasses. Just before the far edge of the old volcano’s interior lip was a mile wide crescent shaped lake. Dots appeared around the shoreline of the lake. That was the town.

It was an odd thing to see, here in the land where the steppes met the desert. The place was often dismissed as a mirage—so much so that the place’s name had become ‘Not a Mirage.’ He wondered why the land had not been broken up for farms, but that wasn’t entirely his idea. It was a comment made to him before he set out for this place.

Breaking the sod had broken many a man, but given the paucity of the land around here and the value of black dirt, the lack of farms was unusual. Just fifty miles to the west of here was the edge of the continent, an overhanging eighty foot high plateau called Useless Port. Most civilization was to the north of here in places called Middle Port and Springfield and Riverbend. Oxbow, where he had started his trek three weeks ago, was a remote exurb of Riverbend, which itself was somewhat out in the boonies. Useless Port and Not a Mirage, although perhaps nice places, did not really politically, geographically or economically connect to the rest of their country. They had simply been claimed because no one else had held them.

The nightman had never been here before. From what he had been told, there were plots of land between the buildings and in a row across the main street. He was still too far away to see that.

What he had not been told was there was at least one building on the outskirts of the town, nearly two miles away. The rock house and its stone animal pens were right off the road. The entire three acre patch was fenced in by seven foot tall stone wall. The nightman and the tovalds paid it no mind as they passed it.

“Warze,” said a voice from behind them.

‘Warze’ meant ‘pig’ and it was an insult to the kind of person the nightman was. He held up for a moment. The voice had come from the edge of the wall they had just passed.

“Warze, are you the mailman?”

The nightman didn’t detect any hostility in the man’s voice, which was airy and had a sing song lilt to it. Sometimes people were just ignorant.

“I have notices and letters, but no real goods,” the nightman reported.

“Any for Doroval?”

“Doroval? Yes. The kid with the shortcut gave me it just before I left. A book. Told him I shouldn’t take it because it’s not letters, but he showed me it was handwritten, which is sort of skirting the rules.”

“Did you take it?”

“Yes.”

“Two gold? Three gold? Three is all I have.”

In the peculiar postal system of this area, the letter carrier actually bought the mail and then sold it to the recipients. In many places, it was something of a bidding process between stations, with one postman selling his mail to the next until the packages got to their destination. In this case, the mail had been lying around Oxbow for three months, thus any bid to take it was accepted—if nothing else than as a good faith measure that the carrier wouldn’t just up and use it for kindling or outhouse purposes.

Three gold was what the nightman had paid for the whole lot. Breaking even this quick was too tempting. “Three is good,” he said.

A small cloth pouch came lobbing over the wall and landed at his feet. The nightman, unsure of the customs of this area, bent down and opened it.

“They’re not matched, but you’ll see three crowns from it at least,” explained the unseen voice.

One of the coins was a Dove Crown, which was pure gold and worth three crowns on its own. The other two coins the nightman could not identify, but he was fairly sure they were silver alloy. “Good with me,” the nightman said. He undid the leather book from his camel’s harness.

“Just throw it over the wall.”

The nightman did as he was instructed. Just before he was about to get back underway, having scratched ‘Doroval’ off his list, he halted and asked “Do you know where Mister Store is?”

No answer. The nightman went to the fence and peered over it. There was no one there. The book was sitting in an empty courtyard before a boarded up door. The bird pen and sty were empty also, as was the plot of land behind the house, which was just black dirt. Not that any of this was all that unusual, given that it was just spring. He looked up at the dormers, which were also boarded up.

“I am supposed to see a General Store? Mister General? Mister Store? It might not be a mister,” the nightman said.

One of the tovalds grunted.

“No, I am not talking to myself again. I am talking to Doroval. Well, I was talking to him. Come to think of it, I didn’t smell anything. Did you smell anything?”

Both of the tovalds grunted.

“Keep your opinions to yourselves. I’ve been on the road for three weeks.”

The road before them made one last drastic turn, before heading straight into town. From here the nightman could plainly see the plots which ran one right after another on the side of the road across from the lake. At this point the road was covered in a canopy of large bushes. The brush on one side of the road was lined by a short fence of mortared stone. At the center of the fence was a wooden branch-fashioned arch with vines of flowers creeping up its sides.

Just as the nightman passed by the arch, a mushroom splattered across his left temple. He whirled and heard the sound of a sling winding up.

“Nice loincloth! Who’s your mother and why does she dress you that way?” said a high pitched voice. It was coming from the yard inside the arch. The nightman could tell by the tone that it was a chatterling, the type of creature he had once been.

Chatterlings were small, low to the ground, practically all head and arms. The nightman crossed through the arch and had his eyes pealed to the ground. Beyond the arch was an enclosed indented acre. Terraces of mushrooms in various colors aligned a curved stone path which led to a small pointed green brick shack at the back of the plot.

Another mushroom exploded off his right temple. He looked up to the boughs of the red leaf bushes. There he spotted a foot tall grey skinned being, with foot long arms, hanging upside down from six inch legs. Its head was similar to the nightman’s, although the lumps above its brow were not as pronounced and its jaw was pointed and without tusks or under-bite. A sling was in its little black hands.

The nightman drew a hand to his bandolier. He began to retrieve one of his heavy metal boomerangs, saying “You ain’t going to make it.”

“Whatever do you think you are doing?” came a shout from the house. A willowy green skinned woman had come out of the shack’s door. She had large almond shaped red ruby eyes, arched lines for brows, black slim lips and high, pointed cheek bones. The witch was dressed in black, flowing lace and wore a pointed black hat with a wide brim.

The nightman pointed up at the bush and said “Chatterling.”

“And what of it, ogre?” the witch said. “This is private property. I can have what I want here.”

“Suit yourself,” the nightman said, turning around. Another mushroom bounded wetly off the back of his neck.

“Cut it out, Niles,” the witch said. She then projected to the nightman “If you’re a monster, I should warn you that there is a town near about. But if you are a man, I should warn you to have more toleration of children. Especially of your own kind.”

“I am whatever brings the mail from Oxbow,” the nightman said with a backwards glance.

“Vinny the drunk? Ogre or nightman, you’re a clear improvement over that,” the witch said, changing her tone. “Do you have anything for Snawy?”

“Two packages.”

“Four crowns, right? I’ll get them from my house and meet you at your packs,” the witch said, disappearing back into her shack.

The nightman went back through the arch and to his camels. As he was untying the witch’s two parcels, the chatterling scrambled out from the bushes, saying “Hey smell-master, lose the loincloth.”

“Really?” the nightman asked, mournfully.

“Everyone’s gotta wear pants in town. Even me. And they ain’t too keen on weapons, either. Not even pointed sticks. Not that they’re going to bother you, Abomination boy, but it makes you stand out.”

“Great, something new to ‘invest’ in,” the nightman said. He pulled a stubby pair of green sticks out of the camel’s pack and handed them down to the chatterling, saying “Thanks.”

“Ooooh, sweet cane! Ogres got the best snacks!” The chatterling jumped into the bushes and scrambled away.

“What do we say, Niles?” asked the witch’s voice.

“Thank you, ogre,” came the chatterling’s voice from high in the bushes.

“I suppose the ogre has a name,” the witch said, coming through the arch.

“Sixty-Four,” the nightman answered.

“Ah, from The Abomination, are we? You are very far from there now. A completely different world,” she said, handing him the four coins. She then noticed the scratches on the nightman’s arms and asked “Did Niles do that to you, Sixty-Four?”

“Nah. Dead guy up the road,” Sixty-Four said, starting to imitate the creature’s walk.

“The players are not going to like to hear about that. Well, something’s up. There hasn’t been a bit of wildlife in the valley for three days. No sight, even of a bug. You will have to report this to my lovely sheriff in town.”

Sixty-Four asked “Does that road go all the way to Oxbow?”

“Yes. Didn’t you come down it?”

“I was on this stupid shortcut.”

“Never heard of any shortcut. From Oxbow?”

“Is it a toll road down that way?”

“Not since our gorgeous sheriff hung the two highwaymen, no.—You didn’t bring a cart with you?”

“I have Sissy and Spacey, here,” he said, referring to his camels.

“Vinny usually brings the mail with supplies on his cart for the General Store.”

“Where is this Mister Store?”

“It’s a place, dear. The largest shop in town. Pretty much the only shop in town. It’s in the biggest building. On the same side of the road as the plots. You can’t miss it. Right in the middle of town, next to the Player’s hall.”

“Players?”

“Players at. Players with. Brewers, really, the best lot of them. The town is chock full of stills of one kind or another,” the witch explained. “The woman who runs the general store is Hegga, and she’s very nice and very honest. Although she will be honestly disappointed as nicely as she can that you didn’t bring the cart with her supplies. Do you know what happened to Vinny’s cart?”

“He lost it.”

“I swear he could lose his own head.”

“Nah. His head and arms are fine. They are in the stocks in Oxbow.”

“Again? You might want to mention that to Hegga. Do you know what his bail is this time?”

“He vomited on the wife of Prince Oswald’s arms bearer.”

“And in the stocks Vinny will stay! Too rich for Hegga’s blood. Just tell Hegga he’s in the stocks. He’s embarrassed her enough,” the witch said. “Come back in a time and I will get you something for those scratches.”

“Thank you, Mistress Swany.”

Swany opened one of her packages and smiled a perfect white grin. “Ooh, from my sister! I smell a wedding!” With that, she disappeared through her arch and the nightman continued on his way. In twenty minutes he was at the edge of town.

Not a Mirage consisted of one road, a red brick affair, which wound around the shores of a mile long, crescent shaped lake. The lake’s other shore was miles away, at a protruding, drastic mountain which at one time was the lip of a volcano’s flume. On the lakeshore side of the road were stone or wood buildings, generally one story and few more than twenty feet wide. An occasional false second story facade showed on some of the wooden ones. Amidst the shore side buildings were wooden or stone docks, some of which had small row boats moored around them. The stone buildings and docks looked quite old and were fashioned from a high sheen granite not common to the area. They were invariably retrofitted and repaired by new wooden planks and shutters. Even the wood and the bricks would have had to have been carted in, since there was no obvious clay works or stands of trees present.

The only trees that were in town were gigantic and old. All of them had been planted in lines which divided the plots on the other side of the road. The plots themselves seemed new, although they were probably taking advantage of some ancient planning. Each three acre plot slanted down at about ten degrees from the roadway. Many of them had small, stone covered irrigation avenues indented amidst the plantings. The road itself had rises in it, where clay tubes beneath the pavement could be seen through the iron grating plates which adorned the top of each hump.

Before getting into the town proper, the nightman stopped and stowed his various weapons amongst the packs on his camels. He couldn’t imagine that he would need them here, in any case. Even without the weapons, he wasn’t really sure how he would be greeted here.
It was still rather early, although he could see people crossing from the houses on one side of the street to the plots on the other. Which is to say that he could see women crossing the street, each in blousy brown dresses and white puffy linen head coverings. He had yet to see a man doing anything as yet. And no one as yet had seen him.

One hundred feet down the road, he was finally hailed by a woman in a plot with “No animals on the road. You’re going to have to get a pen for those.”

She was a young, fair skinned woman and her tone was in no way hostile. The woman was bent over a ten by ten patch of green, pulling weeds with one hand and clipping at some vines around posts with the other. Like the other women, her brown dress was covered at the front by a thick leather smock with attached apron. She was wearing black leather boots which ran up to her hip. Not that you could tell that at first sight, since the edge of her skirt was just below her knees.

The nightman came to the edge of the road. He wasn’t sure if he should smile, since his sharp canines weren’t always taken as friendly. Instead, he controlled his tone, saying in as chipper a way as he could “Mail call.”

Her bright blue eyes perked up as she said out of the side of her mouth “What? Did you eat Vinny?”

“Nah. Never touch alcohol,” he said.

“I was about to say, you’d probably be too tipsy to deliver the mail if you did. And if you did eat Vinny, it would be the first use anyone has had for him in ages. The mail, you say. I almost forgot we had mail. Do you have anything for Estreya?”

“Mister or miss?”

“Damn. I knew I looked a fright, but—“

“—I have one for both.”

“Miss. My uncle can pay for his own mail. And good luck collecting from him. Crap. I don’t have any money on me. Are you going to be around for a while?”

Was he? “I think so,” he said.

At that moment, the wooden door of the stone building across the street swung open. Coming down its three wooden stairs was a stout man dressed in a long purple coat and a silver stovepipe hat. The fabulous curve of a thick grey mustache engulfed his upper lip. Squinted in place in front of his left eye was a silver fringed monocle. “Mail, did someone say,” the old man said.

“Yes,” Sixty-Four said, turning around to greet him.

The old man halted, looked the nightman up and down, and then proclaimed the obvious “You’re not Vinny.”

“No, I’m not,” Sixty-Four said. “Expecting mail?”

“I am expecting Vinny and his cart with my supplies. Where is he?” the man said.

“Where do you think he is?” the woman from across the street shouted.

“I am not talking to you,” the old man shouted back.

“I’ll put that on the long list of things you’re not doing,” she said.

Ignoring her, the man said to Sixty-Four “Vinny is supposed to be here. Delivering the mail is part of his job.”

“He hasn’t done it for three months. I’m here,” Sixty-Four explained.

“Harner there doesn’t have any money to pay you,” the woman projected.

“I had an agreement with Vinny,” the man explained. “Have you assumed his business?”

Sixty-Four said “The cart was confiscated for debts. I just have the mail.”

“So that’s it? Exploited his misfortune, eh? I’m not sure I’m interested in any scab mail,” the man said.

“Suit yourself,” Sixty-Four said. He was about to head off, when he heard something. And smelled something. Rushing water. A lot of it. Heading this way. He looked around.

“Those camels are nice, though,” the man continued. “Fatten them up a bit and you’ll get a good price for them.”

“Um, don’t say that,” Sixty-Four said.

“Why don’t you and the other players figure out why you scared away the fish instead of making eyes at his pets?” the woman said.

“The hides would be worth quite a bit, too,” the man said.

“I don’t think they’d like that,” Sixty-Four said. His eyes were now on the house the man had come from. The rushing water was there. Under the house.

“So they are pets. You could always fleece them when they get fuzzy,” the man said.

“They don’t get that fuzzy,” Sixty-Four said, a bit distracted by the sounds which only he could hear.

“What do you feed them?” the man asked.

Sixty-Four said “They eat what I eat.”

“Perhaps that’s the problem,” the man said.

A spurt of water suddenly shot out of the road’s grating. Sixty-Four immediately bolted for the plot the woman was in. Just as he vaulted into the plot, a large tube from the road began gushing out an enormous, fast torrent of white. It nearly instantly filled the rows between the plantings. A rather ominous wave swelled, overwhelming the plantings and surging in the woman’s direction.

The nightman swept her up in his vast grey arms just as the water hit. He bounded upwards, the wave having just crested his position. With one deft hop and then another, he circumnavigated the flood and regained the roadway. By that time the field was completely under water.

The woman was muddy and a little damp, but otherwise unscathed. Sixty-Four put her back on her feet on the bricks of the road. She gasped “thank you” and covered her mouth, watching in horror as the water swept her garden under.

The man from the house rushed up to her. “Nellie, are you alright?”

“Thanks to this warse.-- The ogre!-- The nightman!” the woman blurted, trying to correct herself.

The man knelt before her and started straightening out her dress. He explained “Yes, thank you, sir! I don’t know what I would have done if something happened to her!”

“Odds are, he’d mourn me by dinner time,” she said. “Touching me, are you, Harner? What? Is it fall already?”

Harner asked “What is your name, sir?”

“Sixty-Four.”

“That’s a number, dear,” Nellie said.

“It’s all I got,” Sixty-Four said.

“He’s an Abomination sentry,” Harner explained. “Bred by the high druid for his army.”

“Well, he’s very far away from---You are very far away from The Abomination,” Nellie said.

“The large ones are hard to keep. Probably got sick of taking orders and followed a caravan to see where it was going,” Harner said.

“He has a mouth, dear,” Nellie said.

“Got sick of taking orders,” Sixty-Four said. “Followed a caravan at the edge of The Abomination to see where it was going. Two years ago.”

After sticking her tongue out at Harner, she attempted to change the subject by asking Sixty-Four “Do you like pie?”

“I like food,” Sixty-Four said.

“Anything sweet, right?” she asked.

“Yeah. Food,” Sixty-Four answered.

“He probably only eats plants. That’s how the high druid controls their development, by diet and environment. To get one this big, he would have to remove him from his herd and place him in a remote area. Probably near the edge of The Abomination. The idea is that he’ll establish a territory, which would serve as sort of a buffer for the rest of the druid’s empire. I’ve been told about half of them wander off at that point,” Harner said.

“I was wondering where the other guys went,” Sixty-Four said, seemingly recollecting.

“If he had stayed in The Abomination he might have become an ogre, or a troll, or an ettin or a giant. Quite remarkable that he’s picked up the language in two short years. Of course, they do retain the entirety of their father’s memories, at birth. They lose that a little after they’re through being chatterlings. Once they reach goblin, they’re almost speechless, roving in follow the leader masses. After that point they branch into being troglodytes, hobgoblins or orcs, but I am not sure how. All I know is that the mortality rate on goblins is pretty high,” Harner said.

“So worldly, so destitute—and all mine,” Nellie said, patting the top of Harner’s hat. “So smarty pants, what are you going to do about our flooded plot?”

Harner stood, saying “I’ll take care of it. You’ve had enough of a start for the day.”

She said “If he’s so speechless, how come he can read?—Ha! He’s the mail man. Come on, astound me!”

Harner responded “I am stumped. The key to learning is to ask. Observe—“

“—I was taught,” Sixty-Four said. “I was the regional paymaster.”

“Of course. There has to be some trades in The Abomination,” Harner said. “The druid has hundreds of thousands under arms.--Since when do they have a cash economy?”

“Always, as far as I know,” Sixty-Four answered.

Nellie said “As opposed to Sixty-Four, which would be taken as a number, why don’t you call yourself Longjohn?”

“Good grief, Nellie,” Harner said. “What a one track mind.”

“I wasn’t being overly observant,” she said, then turning to Sixty-Four “You come back come supper and I will have a sweet pie something.”

“Yea, baking,” Harner said with a smile.

Nellie then said to Harner “And as for you, gets us some remediation for our loss here. And some form of assurance that it won’t reoccur. Or else.”

“I will have a consult at the Player’s Hall,” Harner said.

“The sheriff!” she snarled.

“Yes, dear,” Harner said, watching her whirl and head for the house across the street.
Once she had slammed the door shut, Harner asked “Was I right about that?”

“Following caravans is a real good way to become one dead ogre,” Sixty-Four explained. “I just got sick of the whole thing, over time, and just sort of left.”

Harner asked “Wanderlust?”

“Our weapons,” Sixty-Four started to say, then remembering that he had disarmed himself. His hands flailed in a circle. “I noticed our weapons, the ones we made ourselves, were mostly cruddy. The good ones came from somewhere.”

“I see. An interest in metallurgy?” Harner commented.

“Blacksmith,” Sixty-Four said.

Harner said “You know, there’s a nightman with a brisk blacksmith business in Oxbow.”

Sixty-Four said in a whisper “I was going to apprentice with him, but he died. Poisoned by something he drank at the tavern. Him and a bunch of folks. And they’re saying the poison came from here,”

“And it did,” Harner whispered back. “Alcohol taxes are so high in Oxbow that it has inspired some here to play with the packaging, disguise the shipments. And not everything that comes out of here is spirits, so sometimes things which should not be consumed are. It’s quite deliberate confusion. Not really our fault, but most distinctly our problem.”

Sixty-Four called to his tovalds, who came lumbering up to them. He asked Harner “Where is the sheriff? I have to tell him something, too.”

“Where he is exactly, none can know. His headquarters is the general store,” Harner said.
Sixty-Four asked “Stables? How are they?”

“Spic and span. You have the only walking meat in town,” Harner said.

“No one is going to eat you,” Sixty-Four said, patting the tovald’s scruffy heads. He asked Harner “Nice big clean lake. What happened to the fish?”

“Yes, the water is nice and clean. The sheriff is perhaps off checking for a fish kill on the mountain shore, but otherwise it’s a mystery. Unless they were all dissolved in some way. We do have gas vents and mineral sprays about. And a tar pit on the far shore, which the sheriff is also to be checking on,” Harner said. “The bugs were damnable, but I do miss the birds.”

“No goundgrouse?” Sixty-Four asked, by which he meant a small domesticated bird kept for meat and eggs.

“Three coops on order with a starter flock,” Harner answered. “Weren’t those with the stock on Vinny’s cart?”

“Maybe. I did see boxes with wire mesh vents,” Sixty-Four said. “Groundgrouse were five to a crown live in Oxbow. I wish I had known, not that that’s my racket.”

“Did you see any fuzzy white stones in the storehouse?” Harner asked.

“From the mines. The salts hearts. Yes,” Sixty-Four said. “Three barrels.”

“Those would be mine. At least they made it that far,” Harner said. “Couldn’t you have bought a cart?”

“It took me two weeks of cleaning stables to afford the mail,” Sixty-Four said. “No one said anything about deliveries.—Maybe the fish are spawning?”

“We’ve been here three years. They weren’t gone at all last seasons. The lake isn’t spring fed, and besides there has to be over a dozen kinds of fish in there. It’s been three days. Even fish would get bored of spawning by now. Not that I am really an expert on either of those subjects,” Harner said. “The morning is moving on, and I suppose we should be, too.”

Harner started down the road, beside the towering nightman and followed by the two laden camels. Once they were past the line of trees, there was another patch, this one completely dry, opposite the buildings.

Sixty-Four wandered to the edge of the road and called out to the two women tending to that patch, again in his most friendly tone “Mail call.”

The two women, who appeared to be a pair of short brunette sisters, stepped up on an elevated terrace patch together. The taller one called back “Honey, I’ll have to look for my money. Humpry? Anything?”

Sixty-Four held up two fingers.

“Four crowns,” the taller one whispered. “Seems a shameful use of money.”

“You’re right,” the shorter one quietly said. “Blessing is that we have it. Him being used for the mail, that’s the waste. That has to be the largest orc I have ever seen.”

“Nightman,” the taller one cautioned. “Remember Nanna’s husband was a nightman.”

“Good farmer, too. Mostly, I remember his ears. We might as well be shouting,” the shorter one said, and then as if to demonstrate, spoke at the twenty feet away Sixty-Four in a hushed voice “Nightman, how are you with a pick?”

Sixty-Four projected back “Good. Stone removal?”

“Exactly,” she said with a smile. “We want to clear another acre. Come back when you’re free and take a look.”

“Will do,” Sixty-Four said, waving and going back to his tovalds.

Harner said “I was about to say, Sixty-Four—that name is rather off-putting—that you shouldn’t have any problem finding work here. Those two girls themselves could employ an army. Sharp as razors, both of them.”

“Cleaning stables is all I could find in Oxbow,” Sixty-Four said.

“That’s the guilds for you. They have it all tied up, down to who laces whose shoes. We have none of that here,” Harner said, somewhat proudly.

“Is that why they’re so mad at you?” Sixty-Four mused. He then lowered his voice and asked “Tick off a wizard?”

“That’s sort of out of the blue,” Harner said. “I suggest you keep what’s behind that between you and the sheriff.”

“Got it,” Sixty-Four said. (He was going to mention the dead guy he had met outside of town. Snawy the witch had not said to keep it a secret, but she had said to tell the sheriff also. At this point, he felt confirmed that the sheriff was the only person he should tell.) “Lot of nice land around here. Why don’t you have more farmers?”

“I suppose it’s splendid. The irrigation system, if we can get it to work right, extends all through the valley. But the farmers came after us. Or because of us players. I would say we are the attraction, but that may be past tense. In any case, we would starve without the farmers. Or go broke and then starve,” Harner explained. “It’s just this past campaign that it’s more than gardens, and even then much of it is still subordinate to the playing.”

Sixty-Four asked “What do you do with the salts hearts?”

“Crushing, really. It would be more, but we can’t get the mill to work. Our mechanic from Useless Port is on that—and I hope he isn’t responsible for the flooding, since that would be the end of him. For the most part, I separate and refine the hearts,” Harner said, rattling off. “When added to water, my powders sooth muscles and boils—or strip the skin right off, if in the wrong concentration. Damnably, people are ingesting it also, which is a disaster. A cascading problem for all of us players, no matter what our precautions. And I ship mine dry with all sorts of horrible symbols on it. Supposedly only to the spas.—You wouldn’t have any mail for me, by the way?”

“Legal notices. Two,” Sixty-Four reported.

“Not to tell you your business, but the sheriff receives those. Then I pay you for the privilege of finding out who’s suing me,” Harner said. “Not to gain any consideration here, but Vinny charges three for the notices, due to special handling.”

“I’m gonna be eating in your kitchen. No charge,” Sixty-Four said.

“It’s Nellie’s kitchen, Nellie’s house, Nellie’s patch, to be honest. I’d be a tenant, but that would involve paying her more than just the occasional attention. I’m more of a prospect than anything else. I swear she’s more of a scientist than I am in that regard. Thanks to her, anyways. Thanks to you, I can keep six of the remaining seven crowns I have to my name,” Harner said.

Sixty-Four laughed “But you look so dignified!”

“The true mark of a pauper in these parts,” Harner said. “It’s a pity we don’t a have blacksmith here for you.”

“You don’t have any wood,” Sixty-Four observed. “Except for the windbreaks between the plots. And it would be nuts to chop those down.”

“They are quite conveniently planted. Nuts or no, there has been talk of chopping them down, but not necessarily for fuel. You see, not all of our farmers are of equal ability. Case in point, the Humpry sisters here. They could use about twice the land they have, whereas Nellie and I barely have use for all of the product of our garden. But the Humpry sisters aren’t raising food crops. They’re players also, distillers of tubers for hard liquor. Quite legitimately and prosperously. But it’s thought that every acre they take is one less for food. So we have come up with the ridiculous idea that they can expand their land back to the end of the valley, but it can only ever be three acres wide. Titles to land here was free, but now we have hit an impasse,” Harner said. “If the Humpry sisters can clear a bit more, they want to establish a winery. Very profitable, indeed.”

“So they want to chop the wood down to make the farms wider?” Sixty-Four asked.

They again started back down the road.

“Not all crops are the same, nor are the methods of tending them. Whoever had this land before us was tending something in ten foot patches, but we have no idea what. The suspicion is a form of rice. It was all one crop of something, which really doesn’t fit our uses. There are places where these lines of trees were a nuisance. And we do have on occasion a need for wood,” Harner said.

“But not for fuel,” Sixty-Four observed.

“Building materials, mostly. Vinny was carting us in coal. Most of Vinny’s runs are for coal,” Harner said.

“There’s a lot of that in Oxbow,” Sixty-Four said. “But Vinny’s been locked in the stocks for three months.”

“The winter was mild this year. And we did stock up last fall. We don’t need the coal for heat. There is a hot spring which is diverted and runs into each of our houses. That’s our heat and cooking. And as of late we’ve had a coal strike, right where the tar patch is. Not actually coal, more of an oil shale. Nasty burning, but it will do for our industry,” Harner said.

“Maybe that’s why the fish left?” Sixty-Four said.

“Interesting point! That is the latest change in the environment. I will say the stuff stinks to heaven, although it doesn’t seem, visibly, as rancid as the coal was,” Harner said. “I will bring that up to the players.”

“Hot springs,” Sixty-Four thought aloud. “Glassworks?”

“It is quite intense at the source,” Harner said. “So much so that we have our central bakery there. Glassworks would be a great idea! Right now we have to import all of our packaging. And we only need to go like five miles for sand. My, you will be a player. And I can say I knew Sixty-Four when!”

“I got huge hauling sand to the glassworks for the gnomes when I was a goblin. Worked all the way up to blowing and framing. A lot depends on the sand, though,” Sixty-Four said, not having examined the sand on his way to here.

Harner asked “The quality of the sand itself or how fine it is?”

“Well, mostly it has to be fine,” Sixty-Four said.

“Then there is no problem at all. In this town there is every manner of cutting, crushing, boiling, sifting and sorting known. It is our industry. It is what we play with,” Harner said.

They passed a line of trees and came to another patch, this one flooded and with water still streaming into it. A woman was on the edge of the road, staring into the patch. She was slight and fair and short. At the moment they spotted her she was sputtering “Damn! Damn! Damn!”

“Mail?” Sixty-Four said weakly.

“Elios,” Harner said. “Anything for her?”

“Damn!” she said, and then glanced at Harner and Sixty-Four. “Since when do we have a diaper wearing golem for a mail man?” And then she turned her attention back to her flooding garden and again cursed “Damn!”

Sixty-Four thought the woman looked extremely familiar. Apparently Harner was extremely familiar with her, since he came up right to her side. Looking at the still spewing pipe, he said “I am sure it will taper off in a few moments.”

“Damn! Pity it isn’t legal for me to use your fat ass to plug that pipe up. Damn!”

Sixty-Four said “I have two letters for you, miss.”

“Damn! I only talk to men who wear pants. Damn!”

Harner said “He has two letters for you, my dear.”

“Damn! Letters from three months ago. Probably from my mother, telling me she’s coming to visit for the spring in a month. Now she can read them to me herself. None of this would be all that bad, since she could have split time living with my sister. But wait, my sister is living with a lump of freeloading well aged nothing. In sin! Damn!”

“And how is Mumsy today?” Harner asked.

“Damn! First I par boil you. And then there is the plucking. Damn!”

“You know, we had the exact same problem at our patch,” Harner offered.

“Damn! You are living in sin. I have done nothing to deserve this. Damn!”

Harner said “I was just off to alert the players—“

“—The players! Damn! Just what we need, players talking about atrocities players are evading being responsible for. Damn! Alert Blackjack!”

“Exactly what I am about doing,” Harner said.

“Damn! Then get to it, you fuzzy lump! Damn!”

Harner nodded at Sixty-Four and they got back under way. Harner said “That shy, retiring flower was—“

“—Nellie’s twin sister. Got it,” Sixty-Four said. “Who is Blackjack?”

“The sheriff.”

All tolled, they passed seven plots which were flooded and fifteen that were not. On the other side of the street, they passed about one hundred buildings. And that was only half of the town.

Sixty-Four was able to deliver about one third of his remaining packages. Some people he had met were due packages, but would catch up with him later, when they “found the money.” About a quarter of what he was packing were legal notices, which were greeted universally with a negative response. That said, most of the people seemed nice. In the case of the legal notices, most were nice enough not to blame the mail man.

But he couldn’t actually deliver the legal notices. Those had to be signed for by the sheriff at the General Store. In the absolute center of town was a two story yellow stone building, which had the aspect of being a fort. That is what it had been, many ages ago. It had been many things. Currently it was the general store.

Sixty-Four followed Harner up to the broad covered porch of the building with his tovalds following closely. No one had said anything about the tovalds since Nellie had, but Sixty-Four had yet to spot any other creatures on the road. The town was bereft of cart traffic or any type of beasts of burden. In a wooden pen on the side of the store were the first two carts he had seen, a pair of uncovered wagons. Penned in with the carts were four wooly swiftoxen, a tall legged cow.

Sixty-Four pointed at the pen and asked Harner “Is that the stables?”

“No. Fire brigade,” Harner said. “Stables are down the road a bit. We used to have a dairy trade here, but that went by the wayside. The barns will be all yours. You can bring the mini camels in. They do have the mail, after all.”

The tovalds were hesitant about entering any building. Sixty-Four had to turn around and back through the door in order to get them to follow. The two wooden doors to the place were oversized, nearly eight feet by ten feet, but small considering the overall size of the building. From what he had seen so far, the building was without windows or any other entrance.

Inside, the building was fifty feet by fifty feet and had a twenty foot ceiling. All of this was structurally an open area, divided up only by broad lacquered wooden beams and round granite columns in strategic places. It didn’t look retrofitted or repaired into something else like many of the other older buildings. This, whatever it was, was the way the building had been intended to be.

It had been a great hall, a castle, a jail and a coal bin at various times. Four years ago, it was the headquarters for the survey team of players who founded the town. The only actual alterations that had been made to it recently were the additions of the front porch and two sets of doors, one of which faced the street and the other of which ran to the back.

As the general store, its fitted granite tile floor was divided up only by the placement of objects. Around the fireplace on the left wall was a stage surrounded by seating. This was a meeting area and sometimes a restaurant. Ten round tables and forty well stuffed chairs were present. Just at the corner of the left wall was a pair of five by five, ten foot tall iron cages, obviously jail cells and obviously new. A large black stone counter ran the length of the back wall. There were several stations here. Behind one part of it was a sunken swirling, steaming bowl with a fireplace, the cooking area. Next to that, an arrangement of pots and pans for use or sale. Beyond that, cases with rolls of fabric. The rest of the room had separated clusters of desks and shelves and racks, all generally facing one and other. It was part store, part meeting room, part library, part post office, part jail. As a store, however, it was fairly barren of merchandise.

At present, there were only two other people in the store. As was the custom for shopkeepers, Hegga was dressed in a red and white striped blouse, with thick red and white piping on the shoulders. Her long, unadorned, skirt and short boots were a match in color for the stripes of her blouse. On her head was a rimless tall hat which was also striped. Long rows of black curls escaped from out of her hat. On the bridge of her nose was a pair of wire frame glasses. None of her clothing was particularly form-fitting. She was a young 30ish, fit and tall. Her face was round, a bit plump and ever so slightly tanned. Her bare lips were as thick as her brows and lashes were thin. Like a good shop keeper, she was at attention and standing when Sixty-Four and Harner came in.

Also standing, but not paying anything any mind, was a man dressed much in the way Harner was, down to the monocle. His grey stovepipe hat was fuzzy and slightly flared at the top. The chinless man’s mutton chops merged into his perfectly black, waxed and parted mustache. His coat was shiny, navy blue and of the same cut that Harner’s was. Everything about him seemed somewhat one step better than Harner, except that every portion of his being was splattered with the remains of vegetables. He was oddly leaning, with one arm propped on one of the jail cell doors.

With a sigh and a smile, Hegga greeted the two new arrivals. “Mr. Harner, lovely day. And you must be the new mail man.”

Sixty-Four nodded.

Harner said “Impresario Hegga, this is Sixty-Four. Sixty-Four, Impresario Hegga.”

Sixty-Four bowed. Hegga curtsied, although her eyes were on the camels. “Ooh, tovalds. I haven’t seen one since I was a girl. Daddy and I had two follow us out of The Abomination when we fled. You don’t mind if I get them some dried and sugared fruit?”

“Only if you want them to follow you around for the rest of your life,” Sixty-Four said.

Harner said “Hegga, you never told me you were from The Abomination.”

“Everyone is from somewhere,” she said. “I can’t imagine it could ever come up.—Sixty-Four? That’s sergeant. No, wait, you’re too big. Paymaster?”

Sixty-Four smiled, then stopped himself and grinned instead.

“I suppose that’s the end of Vinny. And I should be happy,” she said, walking in tight circle. “I don’t suppose you have his cart?”

“Sorry,” Sixty-Four said.

Hegga said, with a sniffle “Nothing for you to be sorry about. You’re just an émigré seeking opportunity, as was I once. You must be thrilled to be away from the druid! Calls for a party, really. I should be very happy. We’ve lost a man without industry and gained one who demonstrably has industry.—Did they seize the cart and the merchandise?”

“Just the cart,” Sixty-Four said. “The warehouse will charge you storage. The houseman was taking bids, pending impoundment.”

“Cart’s replaceable. The seven hundred crown livery license is the real loss,” the man by the jail cell said.

“The livery license is mine,” Hegga said. “Unless Vinny’s got it submerged with a fine. Oxbow is a ‘fine’ city.”

“Ah, Sixty-Four, allow me to introduce you to the best of our number,” Harner said, guiding Sixty-Four in the direction of the man by the cell. “This is the Supreme Player, Darco.”

“D’arco, you vagrant,” the man said. “If you are such pals with this monster, why don’t you buy it some pants? Oh, I mentioned the word ‘buy’. Not in the vocabulary of your abilities, is it Harner?”

“Darco?” Sixty-Four remembered the name from his list. “You have seventeen legal notices.”

Harner said “Your mother’s name was Darco. Your father’s name was Darco. I don’t see how your name has gained any hesitation. So tell me, what’s-your-face, why are you wearing salad today? Is it now the latest fashion?”

D’arco said “My neighbors seem to think I am responsible for this morning’s flood.”

“Are you?” Harner asked.

“I did have the reservoir filled above the line in hopes that it would help our mechanic dislodge a stuck gear in the useless mill. Perhaps this may have triggered some hidden overflow mechanism. All I know is the reservoir dropped two hundred feet in two seconds. Trying to help, at least to refill the reservoir, I opened the gates to the lake. That also seems to have been diverted into this, as yet unknown, overflow system. It’s fine now. And as thanks for my activity, our neighbors have decorated me with clumps of their soggy gardens,” D’arco explained.

“Was this the mechanic’s idea?” Harner asked.

“The mechanic has been here for two weeks, at a charge of twenty-five crowns a day, and the mill hasn’t budged an inch. I did it on my own initiative. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen the mechanic today,” D’arco said.

“Neither the reservoir or mill are yours and you shouldn’t be playing with them. Or anything that you don’t own or know nothing about,” Harner said. “If it wasn’t for Sixty-Four here, something bad might have happened to my Nellie.”

“As for ‘your’ Nellie, I am not sure whom owns whom. I would beat you silly for talking to me that way, if there weren’t any witnesses, and you weren’t friends with this gigantic orc, and if you weren’t also probably absolutely right. I am standing in front of the jail cell, aren’t I?” D’arco said. “It just so happens that I had a previous appointment this morning with the sheriff, so the stars it seems are indeed aligned.”

A voice as thick as oak came from the front door “You! The cell!”

D’arco opened the cell, stepped inside and slammed the door behind him, saying “Good morning, Blackjack.”

Haloed in the morning light at the open front door of the store was a thick man in black chain armor. His protruding bare brow hooded a pair of small grey eyes. The hair on his head, which was streaked unevenly black, grey and brown, was ample and sculpted into a swept back wave which covered the tops of his ears. His nose was tiny and pug. Like Sixty-Four, he had a jutting jaw and obvious under bite, but no tusks. His skin was brown, but it seemed to have been painted that way; so much so that you could see the brush strokes. Plain cloth black gloves sheathed his large hands. The shoulders of the armor were leather and dyed red, a common sign of his office. He wore black boots which were nearly identical to Sixty-Four’s. On his hip was a long scabbard, suitable for a sword, but instead containing an iron shaft. The shaft looked very familiar to Sixty-Four.

The sheriff wasn’t all that tall, but like Sixty-Four, he was three feet across at the shoulders and only slighter at the hips. Despite the rather angry tone of his voice, he didn’t seem to have much of an expression. Further observation revealed that parts of his face might twitch, but never enough to convey anything. When he spoke, he was careful not to show his teeth.

D’arco said “Let’s hypothetically say I plead guilty. What is the fine?”

“Eighty-five crowns,” Blackjack said. “Plus you are going to have to re-hang the ceiling.”

“Oh, not for the flood,” D’arco said. “I thought that was too reasonable…”

“Flood? What flood?” Blackjack asked. “That’s for your miracle wood board, which fell down almost into Hesta’s bassinet.”

“I told them not to use it for roofing,” D’arco said.

Hegga asked Blackjack “How did you miss the flood?”

“I just came straight across from the docks,” Blackjack said to Hegga. He glanced at Sixty-Four and Harner, but turned his conversation back to D’arco, saying “I didn’t hear you touting this paste and bush chip boards of yours as only being suitable during a full moon or anything like that. I heard you saying it was as good as wood—and for the price you charged, it should have been. It seems it’s water soluble. You’re very lucky there was no baby in that bassinet, or I would be pulling out your toe nails.”

D’arco said “I specifically advised Hetsa’s man that the boards were only suitable for interior use. You can ask him.”

“I will,” the sheriff said, coming up to Sixty-Four’s tovalds. He patted one on the top of its head. “The fact that your boards returned to the paste from whence they came will still count very much against you.”

“I might have a process problem,” D’arco conceded. “If I don’t have the eighty-five crowns, what is the… um… duration?”

Blackjack started his way to the cell. His stride was even paced and mannerly. “I seem to recall you own a boat, D’arco.”

“The largest boat in town,” D’arco said. “What of it?”

“While I was out on my little dingy today, I made several interesting discoveries,” the sheriff explained. “First, the reported tar patch is about fifteen hundred feet inland from shore and should pose no problems for the lake. Second, the oil shale, or whatever it is, strike is far deeper and richer than we imagined. Maybe a decade’s worth, even if we grow. Third, I detected no fish kill on the mountain shore. Not that the fish could beach on an eighty-five degree slope, but there were none there nor on any far shore. Finally, you’ll never guess what I spotted, all silvery and flying around in masses, at the center of the lake?”

“Fish?” Sixty-Four guessed.

Blackjack laughed two brief clucks. “Is the high druid missing one of his border sentries or are you the new mail man?”

Harner said “Blackjack, this is Sixty-Four. Sixty-Four, our highness, the sheriff.”

Hegga added “He didn’t bring the cart.”

Blackjack asked “Have Vanah and Neron already settled in?”

No response. No one seemed to know what he was talking about. Harner said “Sixty-Four is our only arrival.”

Blackjack asked Sixty-Four “Did you pass anyone on the road from Oxbow? Actually, they might have passed you. They were probably in a sedan cart.”

Sixty-Four said “I didn’t take the road. I was on a shortcut.”

“Shortcut? You’ll have to show me it,” Blackjack said. “So tell me, did you flee the Druid of The Four Winds and his totalitarian rule due to religious oppression, political differences with his one man, one will way or are you an economic émigré?”

“All of that,” Sixty-Four answered. “Do I have to choose?”

Blackjack said “The wrong answer is that you have left none of The Abomination behind you, that your love of nature equates to a hatred of all civilization and that you have come to proselytize anarchy and wreak destruction on all man made things, to war against the concepts of truth and safety and to destroy the beauty of the artificial.”

Sixty-Four asked “Any money in that?”

“Not unless the druid has raised his rates,” Blackjack said.

“Old Druid of The Four Winds and The Tightly Clenched Crowns? Not likely,” Sixty-Four said.

D’arco said “Isn’t Vanah & Neron a banking house? In Oxbow. I don’t think either of them are still alive.”

“My mistake,” Blackjack said, turning back to D’arco. “Two representatives of the banking house, who sent word to me in via courier that they wanted to meet with ‘the illustrious D’arco’ in private. It seems your distillate of night soil has caused quite a stir. The missive was peppered with such words as ‘interest’, ‘keen’, ‘investment’ and ‘substantial’. One of the most beautiful of artificial things is the magic of banking, which requires demonstration of the rule of law as well as examination of the process to be enabled. As you may recall, you and I were to have a meeting this morning. So you see, I am not all about punishment.”

D’arco said “I never said that you were, our highness.”

“And as far as punishment is concerned, there are as many ways as a man has means,” the sheriff said. “It would have been a considerable boon to me to have a larger boat on my rounds in the lake this morning. I could have taken samples of the tar for you players, to see if there is something in it for you to play. I could have taken a representation of the oil shale, again for your curiosity. And had I a net with long ropes, I might have tried fishing. All things I intend to do at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning. You and your crew will join me, won’t you?”

“I would be delighted,” D’arco said. “How many crew?”

Blackjack said “Someone will have to steer the boat, haul up fish, lug tar, lug oil shale. You or someone like you.”

D’arco said “If it will improve our state, certainly. On me.”

Harner piped up “There is the little matter of a flood he caused.”

D’arco shot back “He’s vagrant!”

“Nellie is not. I would no more arrest Harner here than I would Sixty-Four’s tovalds,” Blackjack said, setting his gaze on Sixty-Four. “As the mail man, you should be advised that all deliveries take place during the day. We have no lamps or lamp lighters. Everyone is off the street at the conclusion of dusk. You will need a hat, or the sun will burn your skin right off.—Hegga, draw against the court’s account to get this man a wide brim straw hat.”

Hegga put a pair of bowls in down front of the tovalds. The two beasts sniffed her hands and then crunched into the fruits within. She looked up and said “Hat. Right. I think I know just the one. And I can give him a pair of Vinny’s pants.”

“Very nice of you,” Blackjack said.

“I was just going to re-throw them in the back yard, anyway,” she said, walking in the direction of the counter.

Blackjack strode from the cell and, with a wave, drew Sixty-Four to follow him. He halted by a desk which had stands of dark wooden shelves on either side of it. He tapped upon the desk and said “This is the mail station. After you have made your rounds today, you will leave all unclaimed mail here. There is a three crown fine per package for not picking up the mail from you today or within three days of your arrival. Sadly, you do not get the fine. That is split between Hegga and the court. Most people will pick up their mail. People will be dropping off mail for you to take for the next three days. You only take it here. The mail to Useless Port, which won’t be much, you just set aside. The mail going to Oxbow or through Oxbow station is free for you to take, when you choose, if you choose. The customary charge to the Oxbow station is one half crown per package. The legal notices are to be kept here. Any not claimed in the next three days, leave here. Vinny has been charging three crowns for legal notices, which is fine. That is all yours—as is any money you collect for the mail. You will also be receiving responses to legal notices. Most of these will be wood cut forms requesting the representation of barristers in Oxbow. You collect one crown per response. If the person making the response does not pay you, accept the response but set it aside. The court will pay you to deliver those to Oxbow when and if you decide to leave for Oxbow.—You did come here for work, right?”

“Yeah,” Sixty-Four said, looking down at the desk.

Blackjack said “Mail is something of a part time job. Right now, we have three months worth here. Vinny coupled this with a livery route. That’s enough to make a good living at. I assume you can drive swiftoxen.”

Sixty-Four glanced at his tovalds.

Blackjack said “Neither the swiftoxen nor cart are all that fast. Your friends could easily keep up—or ride in the cart. But that’s getting ahead a bit. Let’s see how the next three days go. Today, you announce the mail, deliver what you can. The next two, you sit here and take in cash. I normally do not allow weapons in town, mostly because they are dangers to the people who are prone to wearing them here. Certainly you have no such problem, and you are acting as an officer of the court. Bolos, no. Sling, no. Boomerang… wooden or metal?”

“Steel, no edge,” Sixty-Four answered.

“Not a pacifist, I see. Boomerang, no. Bullwhip, yes. Split staff, on you at all times.” Blackjack removed a set of gloves from the back of his belt and put them on the table. “Take these. It will keep your hands from burning up in the sun. The store won’t have our size.” He put a hand to his cheek and wiped off some of the smudge he was wearing and ran it down the bridge of Sixty-Four’s nose. “You might want to get some of this stuff from the apothecary at the edge of town. Her name is Snawy.”

“You mean the witch?” Sixty-Four said.

Blackjack said softly “No, I mean the ‘apothecary’, ‘nightman’. Might I also suggest you take up a new name.”

“Like Niles?” Sixty-Four said, mockingly.

“Or Blackjack,” the sheriff mouthed silently.

“Pants!” Hegga said, holding up a huge set of blue trousers she had produced from behind the counter.

D’arco said “Those aren’t pants. Those are sails.”

Blackjack asked “Those are Vinny’s?”

“They’re over-pants. Something Vinny got when he was all about making deliveries during snow time or something like that, back when he had the fleeting impulse to do something to earn his keep. Or a prop for more empty promises, bought with my money. They might be a little short on our Abomination sentry here, but they should have some use,” She said, weaving around various areas in the shop. She came to a halt near a chair surrounded on three sides by tall cabinets. This is what served as the store’s fitting room. She waved a hand at Sixty-Four.

Blackjack said “We’ll worry about making him fashionable after he has a few crowns in his pocket.”

At that prompting, Sixty-Four fished out two of the coins he had received from Doroval from his pouch. He put them down on the mail desk and gave Blackjack a quizzical look. The sheriff picked them up as Sixty-Four lumbered off in Hegga’s direction.

Hegga threw the large draw string trousers on the high backed chair and stepped out of the area to let Sixty-Four pass. “I hope everyone gets used to the clothes they are in, since it seems it will be a long time before we can get anything store bought.”

Spreading the coins out in his oversized palm, Blackjack said “These are Receding Empire Crowns, about four hundred years old. Nickel plated silver.”

D’arco added “I found some of those in my cellar when I moved in. There’s a jeweler in Oxbow that will buy those off you. They use them for shoe buckles.”

Blackjack said “Actually, they are still used as money in Useless Port. I think they go for about two crowns each.”

D’arco said “The jeweler screwed me…”

Hegga said “We found a lot of Receding Empire stuff when we first moved here.”

Harner said “Horrible people, the Receding Empire. Necromancers. Players with the dead. Hope they are all stumbling blind about in hell.”

Blackjack said “If you’re not going to hang around here Sixty-Four, you could spend them in Useless Port. We do have a run of notices for them that you could take. I doubt you will be able to sell them. Twenty-Five crowns is what I can give you the run, but it’s strictly one way.”

Hegga said in a whisper to Blackjack “He’s not going to get our merchandise from Oxbow?”

Blackjack put a finger in front of his lips and winked at her.

“Sheriff?” Sixty-Four called from the dressing area. His hand flailed up in the air.

Blackjack wove his way to Sixty-Four’s location. Just as he was about to round the shelves, he whispered “You put one leg in at a time.”

Sixty-Four was already in the pants. And he had the hat on. (Which made him look ridiculous.) With a crook of his finger, he urged the sheriff closer and then said quietly “When I just came off the shortcut to the road, I ran into this guy.” He then imitated the creature’s walk.

The sheriff’s expression didn’t change. He answered just as quietly “There’s a small army of them out there. That’s the reason I have people off the streets at night.—That and lamp oil is expensive and we’re running out of it.—I haven’t seen one yet. Just the tracks. Did you see where it went?”

Sixty-Four said “Mine didn’t go anywhere after I was through.”

“No bragging of battle? I’m liking you already,” Blackjack said, still quietly. “I’ve kept them a secret so far. I think I found where they ‘live’ this morning. I suspect they’re what’s scaring away the animals. The militia in Oxbow already wants to burn Not-A-Mirage down. I don’t want to give them another reason. And the players are twitchy types by nature. No need to panic them, but I do need to get on it. What did it smell like?”

“It didn’t smell,” Sixty-Four said. “Nothing at all.”

Blackjack said “That’s rather value-added. What did it want?”

“One of the packages,” Sixty-Four answered.

“Which one?” Blackjack asked.

“I didn’t ask,” Sixty-Four said with his usual guileless inflection. “I did tell the apothecary about it.”

Blackjack said “Apothecary?”

Sixty-Four sighed. “Phase of the moon change? What do you want me to call her? Snawy.”

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about her. Besides, I’ll see her before she’s likely to spread the word,” Blackjack said. “Did you run into anything else you couldn’t smell? Maybe a place?”

“Doroval. I didn’t see him, either,” Sixty-Four said.

Blackjack asked “Where did you run into him?”

Sixty-Four said “House. Three miles outside town.”

“Why did you stop at the house?” Blackjack asked.

“He had a package. He called to me,” Sixty-Four said.

“Interesting,” Blackjack said. “Who sent it to him?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get it from the office. A kid gave it to me. A book. Hand written,” Sixty-Four explained.

“A book. Crap,” Blackjack said.

Sixty-Four asked “Problem with this guy?”

“One I thought I had solved three weeks ago, when I burned his books and hung him,” Blackjack said.

Sixty-Four said “I never actually saw him.”

“By the way, did you get the bail on Vinny?” Blackjack asked.

Sixty-Four whispered what Vinny had done into his ear. Blackjack issued a resigned grunt and shot a brief glance at Hegga. He winked at Sixty-Four and asked “Play along with me?”

“Yeah,” Sixty-Four responded, almost as a reflex.

Stepping out from the dressing area, Blackjack announced “Since our store here is out of business until we get merchandise, I feel compelled to make a run for such immediately. Given that we do not know how much our wares are being held by the houseman for, it would be a good idea for us to show with goods for sale in Oxbow. Therefore, we shall advertise that a shipment is going out after dusk. I hope to con… convince the fire brigade to allow me the use of one of their fine carts and swiftoxen to make this trip. In the mean time—Harner, are you available?”

D’arco said “I believe the correct answer is: yes.”

“Anything to be of service, our lordship,” Harner said, scowling at D’arco. “I did have a bit of scientific inquiry to take up with my fellow players at the hall.”

Blackjack respectfully asked “What, exactly, is the nature of this inquiry?”

“Not that this is my idea,” Harner said. “But it is possible that our switch to burning oil shale may have caused the animals to flee. The time frames are in synch.”

“You’re right. That’s not your idea,” Blackjack said. “Would three crowns be enough for you to delay this curiosity? For a day?”

D’arco said “Day’s a third over, our lordship. And you’ve offered triple what his work is worth, that is if he has ever worked at all.”

“What do you charge for flooding the town?” Harner shot back. He said to Blackjack “The task, our highness?”

Blackjack said “I need you to stop at every place on the way back to your house. Tell them all that if they have goods for town, we will be taking them at the Player’s hall. Only one cart full. If we have overage in materials, there will be bids for cart space. It’s one crown to have the opportunity and we’ll limit it to no more than a stone’s weight of merchandise per person involved in the concern. Make it very clear to all that Sixty-Four and I will be leaving with the wagon at dusk.—Sixty-Four, I need you to do the same thing as you are completing your mail route. In trade for the barn, cane and grain for you and the tovalds. Good?”

“Good,” Sixty-Four said, not sure if this was part of the playing along or not. He really didn’t know how to drive swiftoxen and he wasn’t all that enthusiastic about returning to Oxbow. Moreover, it seemed to conflict with what he was supposed to be doing. Having the good will of the authorities here, however, superseded any other consideration.

Hegga, who was at this point all smiles, asked Blackjack “So you want me to tend the Player’s hall and inventory today?”

“Sorry,” Blackjack said. “Leave the back door open. D’arco will call out if someone comes to the shop. The one crown entry fee is a split between you and the court. Add a crown to the floor price of any merchandise accepted. That hopefully will cover the lien on our goods in Oxbow.”

D’arco said “It’s nice to have so much activity today. But please tell me, our lordship, how am I to meet with you at the crack of dawn upon my boat when you and the other ogre will be on the road to Oxbow?”

“D’arco, there’s a reason you’re in that cell,” Blackjack said. “I am now off to strong arm our fire chief into letting me use the lesser of his wagons and the least of his mares. Blackmail or begging, I’m not sure which. I fear I will spend the rest of the light hours in search of our missing bankers on the road.—“

“—I’m not really in the best of circumstances behind these bars to receive the bankers, if they do show, perhaps not having met you,” D’arco interrupted.

“Then don’t tell them who you are. There. Just shout for Hegga,” Blackjack said. “Come, Sixty-Four, I will show you where the stables are.”

Both the sheriff and Sixty-Four started for the front door. The tovalds lazily picked themselves away from the bowl and followed.

Holding the door open for the tovalds to pass, Blackjack asked “And your mates are?”

“Sissy and Spacey,” Sixty-Four said.

“Mated?”

“Four kids so far. The last doe left us a month ago,” Sixty-Four said, following the sheriff to the center of the road. Harner held up a polite distance behind them.

“Probably smelled a friend in the wind,” Blackjack said, plucking Sixty-Four’s split staff and bullwhip off a camel and handing them to him.

Sixty-Four said “Daisy ran off in the brush around Oxbow. They didn’t go after her, so I didn’t. She was bigger than Sissy already. I probably shouldn’t name the kids.”

The sheriff pointed down the road. “Barn is the third building on the right. The sky blue one. I will have the fire brigade put the bedding down. It should be ready for you by the time you’re done with your route. After that, meet me at the store.”

Harner came up to them and said to Sixty-Four “I’ll bring Nellie and her pie to the shop.”

“Thanks,” Sixty-Four said. Harner went back off down the road the way he came.

“You shouldn’t have a problem making a living here. I’ll title the barn to you if you stay. There’s an apartment above it with a cot room and a little room with a desk and a decent window, if it had glass in it,” Blackjack said.

“Harner said he had seven crowns to his name, as if that was poor,” Sixty-Four said.

“Don’t let these people fool you: most of them are very well off. All of them are so tight they could squeak. Of course, some of their ventures are so speculative that they have to be tight. It rubs off, even on me,” Blackjack said. “And don’t let the people of Oxbow fool you, either. There’s plenty of rich people there, although it is a close club. Here you can make a damn good living without the connections. Even Vinny did.--You know, Prince Oswald is a wonderful guy, but he owes more to his arms bearer than he ever could to me. Vinny, you moron.”

Sixty-Four said “I was told Prince Oswald is a custard stuffed lump.”

“You, my man, were on the wrong side of Oxbow,” Blackjack said. “Although I highly doubt the prince will ever fit in a set of armor again, his best portions were always above his neck—By the way, was the kid who gave you the book also the person who tipped you off to the shortcut?”

“Yeah,” Sixty-Four answered.

The sheriff said “Crap”, turned and walked away. With that, they parted and Sixty-Four continued his mail route.

The rest of the route was through the nicer half of town. Here people weren’t so hesitant about paying for their mail immediately. Some asked how many notices they had, so they could send someone to the General Store with payment. There were more obvious businesses on this side of town and most of the people he was dealing with were hirelings. Quite a few people were interested in sending goods into Oxbow. Everyone he met wanted to know if he would be taking the mail there and when.

The day was pleasant enough, breezy and with an overcast broken up by flickers of pure gold from the heavens. These occasional bursts of golden light colored the lake, changing it from its normal blue and grey. Near the far edge of town the buildings became quite large, with many of them seemingly attendant to giant covered vats or two story metal silos or ceramic tanks. The stills here were huge.

Sixty-Four could tell by the smell and occasional wisps in the air that he was close to the source of the hot springs. He made it a point to note the scattered empty structures he passed, imagining in each the potential set up for his possible glassworks. Beyond this, he was attempting to assess all those things he did not know about the set up of a glassworks. He would need some help on this, he concluded. It would, at the least, give him and Harner something to talk about during dinner.

He halted at what seemed to be the far edge of town. Here, everything appeared industrial. There were no patches of green on the other side of the street, only more stone and wooden structures, some of them towering six stories or more. The road was no longer as well defined and branched off into several avenues, many of which were encroached upon midway by rambling annexes and out structures.

Even the shoreline here was crowded. Hanging a third of the way out into the water was a twenty foot by twenty foot cement troth. It was about three feet high and had something like a ship’s captain’s wheel on its two foot thick shore edge. The left side of it seemed intrinsic to collections of beige buildings which rose out of the shoreline. These buildings to the left were the mill.

The troth itself was the town’s reservoir. This stone lined structure was many hundreds of feet deep and acted as an underground water tower, providing propulsion for the mill as well as irrigation. All of this, along with the General Store, were amongst the buildings the players had found when they first scouted this area.

Sixty-Four had stopped beside the troth, and was trying to determine the entrance to the next business. It was then he noticed that the water in the reservoir was golden, even though the sky had swept grey and the water just off shore was reflecting clouds. He looked up and saw no break in the clouds. Confused, he took off one of his gloves and dipped his hand into the reservoir. Although his hand had clearly gone through the water’s surface, he felt nothing but air.

A stringy thin shadow crossed his form from behind. The spindly man’s outline held a thick book in its hands and started quickly flipping through pages. Suddenly, a lilting high voice sang “You are low and of low standing, a man of nothing, nothing man.”

The next thing Sixty-Four knew, he was wondering why he had removed his glove. He put it back on and stepped away from the cement edge, his eyes again scanning buildings in the opposite direction, looking for offices.

His tovalds brayed. He glanced behind him and saw the wheel on the cement edge budge an inch. Water was now coming into the reservoir. Having forgotten that he had ever seen the troth full, he thought nothing of it filling now.

Again the tovalds sounded. Both of them were peering into the reservoir.

“What of it? Come on,” Sixty-Four said, heading away

The tovalds honked numerous mutters as they swayed to follow him.

He walked twenty feet, seemingly towards a building kitty corner from the troth. As the tovalds joined him, he whispered to them “Zotted, eh?”

With that, the tovalds went immediately silent. Sixty-Four went silent, too—halting his own breathing. Using a trick he had learned during his years as a sentry in the jungle that was The Abomination, he deliberately did not hear the water rushing into the reservoir and focused on everything else.

He heard a pot slide. Something ceramic, in any case. It was fairly wedged in, by the sound. A coin or something small and metal slid out, as if dumped. A moment later a key turned. Then the pot or ceramic thing was wedged back into where it had been. A heavy door opened, and a second later, closed.

He also heard other noises, but they weren’t coming from the reservoir. It was a voice, near but muffled, sequestered in a confined place. Sixty-Four knew the guttural tone of a gnome when he heard one, having worked under them for years at the glassworks. He even knew the nuances of their curses.

There was a specific curse about having to destroy one of one’s own expensive possessions it was repeating. Amidst this it said “Forty crown tool belt and it tastes bad.”

Sixty-Four scanned the about buildings. Gnomes and brownies were small people, a little over two feet high. There wasn’t any difference between brownies and gnomes, except that brownies were exclusively farmers. Although not nocturnal like the nightman, they could operate with little or no light. Therefore, the little being could have been in any of the many crevices of the buildings about.

“Strangled with my own stinking tool belt!”

The voice was so faint he couldn’t gauge the direction. Echoes from the water in the troth and even the lapping of water from shore were drowning it out. He hadn’t seen a gnome in town. In town, gnomes worked as bankers. No banks. They worked as jewelers. No jeweler. They worked as mechanics. The mechanic was at the mill and D’arco hadn’t seen him all day.

As Sixty-Four and the tovalds moved in the direction of shore, it became obvious to him that it was a male’s voice—not that he had ever seen a female gnome. He moved to the edge of the boardwalk and peered down. A darkened, covered doorway was right below them, next to where the mill and the reservoir met the water. Sixty-Four carefully went down the seven makeshift wooden steps he found there. His tovalds stayed behind on the boardwalk.

Inside, the mill was a maze of up and down brick staircases, mostly havens for vast metal cogs and enclosed spaces to service them. He started calling out “Gnome? Gnome?”

Sixty-Four could tell that the gnome was high up, perhaps four stories. Finding a direct path was difficult, due both to Sixty-Four’s size and his complete unfamiliarity with the layout of mills. The gnome spotted him before he spotted the gnome. Or so it seemed.

“Now I’m seeing orges. In straw hats! Can’t even hallucinate correctly…”

Sixty-Four was at the top of a stairway, as high as it seemed he could go. In the open space to his right was a tree of gears and shafts, sprouting rods anchoring it to walls and from far below. Right across from him was a small man, upside down with a thick belt around his neck and partially in his mouth. His long pointed nose protruded under the belt that his white serrated teeth were trying to gnaw through. One arm was bent fully behind him as was one leg; both of which had stretched clothing caught in the fangs of the cogs. His small scarlet cap was dangling off of one pointed ear.

“So this is it, huh? Twenty years away from the jungles and yet—and yet—the Druid of The Four Winds dispatches his paymaster to collect me and stuff me into a hole. Oh shaman, at least say a few words on how I was a good gnome before you spade me to the worms. Let it be known that just this day, I, hero, stopped the waters from flooding the other half of town when some nameless boob moved the wheel I had specifically removed. And that, after that, continued my toil undaunted until another boob triggered the water again, even though I had the wheel not only removed but hidden and disabled. Again, with spry and deft moves, I stopped the water, although the gears sucked me up and mangled me and brought me here to hang. Let them sing of me! Me!—You might also want to mention the loss of a perfectly new forty crown tool belt, whose only flaw is its lack of edibility. Not also to mention the loss and mangling of about two hundred and seventy-five crowns, eight mark and twelve pence of other serviceable tools.—Is there a heaven for those slain by boobs?”

“I don’t know,” Sixty-Four said, both as an answer and as thinking aloud. He really wasn’t sure how to untangle the guy. And wasn’t sure he should try, but the gnome had almost no color.

“Why am I asking a hallucination?—Why can’t you be a hallucination of the fair Elios Estreya? Here she is, her blond hair flowing, her blue eyes swelling with tears at the sight of mangled me, who has loved her but has scampered from her sight at every turn out of fear and shame—but who has loved her with invisible rays of love. She extends her warm, caring hands and cradles her heroic gnome, me, to her milky white, ample, wonderful—“

“—You’re not going to die!—“

“—Yeah, why don’t you try this for a few hours!”

Sixty-Four squatted down, leaned against the wall and extended his arms as far as he could.

“My, what gigantic hands you have, Elios. Heck, these would be gigantic, even for her feet.—Can I make a reincarnation request here? I would like to be reincarnated as something taller and more acceptable to Elios Estreya, who lives with her mother and no suitor in sight. I would also like to be richer. Or as rich but not as prone to working for boobs.”

Sixty-Four removed the gnome’s head from the belt and then latched his hands around the small man’s upside down torso. It was a delicate operation, which forced him to move halfway back off the stair he was perched upon. He tried to jiggle the man’s arm and leg free.

With a slip of his foot, Sixty-Four went tumbling backwards, the sound of ripping material and flailing, yelling gnome accompanying him down ten stairs. He let go of the man, who bounded off the landing.

“Oh yeah, that’s exactly what I needed. Yeah, thanks. Ready to go now.—Tell me, is this because I’m short?”

Sixty-Four struggled to get to his feet, saying “What?”

“You’re the assistant Death, right? Aren’t you people first rank at anything?”

The little man was lying in a pile at Sixty-Four’s feet. Sixty-Four instructed “Try to move everything. You still got everything?”

“Through using my head as a boomerang? There was a lot of blood in there,” the gnome said, starting to sit up. “Brute force. Good idea. I was fresh out. Now about the reincarnation thing—“

“—You’re not dead—“

“—Prove it! You see, this is it: I’m getting gypped out of my reincarnation, aren’t I? Look, I’ve taken this gnome thing as far as I can here. Why just today I completely solved the mystery of this stuck mill. And you know what it was? Petrified cotton seeds. I know what you’re thinking. Cotton seeds? Yes! In fact, the mill is for making cotton seed oil, an odd product to be sure, but not so odd if it is located next to a cotton plantation, which is what this was. No doubt, although I cannot be certain, one of the cotton plantations of the Receding Empire which our master, his most wonderful, august and sagacious, the Druid of the Four Winds, or more exactly a distant predecessor in office, wiped out with one of his plagues. Now that’s a juicy bit of tidbit for a gnome to discover before he goes to happy gnome land, now isn’t it? And having discovered this, I am harkened back to my roots, in The Abomination, thoughts of my home and way of life and—Presto—the paymaster shaman appears to collect me. That’s about as close to a fait accompli as it gets! Now make with the reincarnation!”

“I am not Death.”

“Great, I get the noob Death. Or maybe I have the story wrong? Somehow it should fulfill a vision of the High Druid’s greatness, thus making me repent for ever having turned from the brownie path, which I always found smelly and grubby and pointless and meaningless. Isn’t the fact that my brother is a brownie good enough for you? We sent him to the best schools and yet—and yet—he chose for himself the trade of massaging goat mammary. The freaking shame! You want me to repent having ripped my clothes when he told me of that, eh? Well, no! Well no, hell no! Take me to your hell, ogre!—By the way, nice hat.—Did anyone ever tell you that your pants are about eight inches too short? Expecting a flood?”

“D’arco did cause a flood this morning.”

“D’arco? Wow. He’s got you saying it, too. Look, Darco D’arco may have been playing around with the wheel, but I disabled it. Besides, that’s a boob whose name I know to the tune of twenty-five crowns a day. And he has a problem manipulating the buckles on his shoes. I would say the wheel turned on its own, but that’s just how it looked. I know no one turned the wheel the first time. The second time, I don’t know because that’s when the gears got me. And killed me.”

“You’re not dead.”

“I am not repenting a lick of it, you know. My hands are—were—those of the master mechanic. No goat tittie for me! None of it, never! I reject you and the High Druid! There! I said it! Now be gone, wrath.—By the way, next time wear a hood or something. The hat is just silly.—Furthermore, I am inclined to say that the High Druid was simply credit grabbing and misstating his smiting of this plantation, or any plantations of the Receding Empire. You need no magic to smite a monoculture. One simple blight is enough. Or the market for cotton might have just crashed. And if it’s a cash crop, then you’re gone. These people didn’t starve to death. They weren’t raising food to start with. It was all cash. They trucked in everything because they had money. Money! Pick that off your cherry blossoms! The place did have the look of a mining camp about it. I thought, it might have been a silver mine that had played out. Now these players are here. Good ideas, artificial ideas, city ideas, all of it and all of it great and all of it of the type of life I have led and chosen and am proud of. And I won’t repent it! I choose society! I choose civilization! You, go, follow herds, hunt, gather and be picked apart by vermin or changes in the weather. Leave me and my bones in the city, near farms, where if your cotton crop goes bad you move—you don’t starve, you don’t pray to the druid or Nature, you move. Back to the jungle with you ghost, and take the Nature you so worship back to the filthy cave you call home. Bung hole.”

“Can you move anything other than your mouth?”

“My hands move. And each wonderful finger. But everything else hurts.”

Sixty-Four carefully picked the little man up and placed him on his shoulders. The gnome draped his arms and legs about Six-Four’s head, saying “This would be easier if you had a neck.”

“You do know how to get out of here, right?”

“Me, I can get out easy. Navigating a giant ogre—or actually a giant orc or a dwarf orge—a little challenging. Assuming you got in through conventional means, yes I can get you out. So this is it? Off to hell.”

“I am taking you to the sheriff.”

“If you’re taking me to people--he said, hallucinating--take me to the witch.”

“You mean the apothecary?”

“I mean the sheriff’s wife.”

“They’re married?”

“No, the witch is squatting out chatterlings on her own. Even my hallucinations are slow.”

They got out of the mill in fairly quick order, but not the way Sixty-Four had gone in. Instead, they emerged out of a street level doorway with a hooded blind angle turn about fifteen feet from the wheel of the reservoir.

“The wheel’s moved again. That’s not possible,” the gnome said, in a perhaps too loud tone of voice.

The tovalds appeared out of the shadows, honking softly.

“Zotted?” the gnome whispered. “Tried to zot the paymaster? That’s almost as pointless as trying to zot the tax collector.”

“That’s unthinkable,” Sixty-Four commented.

The gnome said “Tax collector’s an ettin: got two heads. You ain’t gonna get the second zot off.”

Sixty-Four asked quietly “Where do you think the silver mine is?”

“Oh, that was just hypothetical,” the gnome said. “It’s a volcano. Diamond mine, maybe. I haven’t seen any signs of a mine, really.”

“They’ve found oil shale,” Sixty-Four said.

The gnome said, dismissively “That’s not mining. That’s just being mindful of what you’ve stepped in.”

“So what do you think they were mining?”

“I don’t think they were mining anything.”

The tovalds leaned in and grunted at the gnome.

“I am not contradicting the shaman, but I will keep it down,” the gnome said, softly. “If you look at this volcano, such as it is, it did not erupt as much as it exploded. So the diamonds, coal and such could be anywhere within hundreds of miles of here. Judging by some of the rocks which have been found in the fields, which show lines through them as if they were once wood, I would say a forest or a bog was here after that. At no time do I think anyone mined here. I just said it looked like that, at first. Because it looked like that whatever they were after had played out. The analogy still holds, since it is my conjecture, having found cotton seeds in a mill that is set up as a press, that this was a cotton plantation. Back before Useless Port was useless—another brag of the High Druid’s—It probably just fell into the sea—cotton was as valuable as gold. Without a port nearby, the cotton loses its value—all trade being predicated on proximity to market. I mean, the land here is nice and all, but it is nowhere on its way to nowhere. I would say these player fellows have found the only use for here, and then only because their trades are suspicious.”

“People don’t like them, that’s for sure,” Sixty-Four said, gingerly placing the gnome atop of one of his tovalds.

“Don’t underestimate envy,” the gnome said, sprawling face first across the camel’s back. “I came here from Useless Port, which has the same set up—mills and in ground water towers and everything—and they are piss poor. The value here is in the critical mass of machinery the players brought in and the freedom they have to use it as they please. The mill, the water lock, those are just nice touches.”

“You know how to make the water thing work?”

“I would say I am the only one who can, but that’s a lie. I do have the only key,” the gnome said, holding out the key.

Sixty-Four took the key from his small hand and placed it in his bandolier. “Could you tell me how to make the water thing go?”

“I could show you,” the gnome said.

Sixty-Four shook his head. “No. Just tell me.”

“Right. The zotting. Well, the operation is started,” the gnome began. He did explain it, over and over, as they made their slow way back to the General Store.

Sixty-Four did want to give the water troth a wide birth, but mostly he wanted to keep the gnome talking. There was a rumor that gnomes could talk even after they died, but that was more a racial slander than anything else. As shown, the little man could talk and he did keep talking, but he was starting to fade by the time they were in sight of the store.

They had gone around buildings near the troth, trying to keep it out of sight. Once they got past the industrial district, Sixty-Four directed them back to the road. It was just dusk as they came into the store.

The sight of the gnome brought D’arco running. Hegga and he hovered over the little man, whom Sixty-Four set into a chair. Hegga covered him with a blanket.

The gnome mumbled “My tools, Darco. Gone.”

D’arco said “It’s D’arco—Never mind. Never mind the tools, I’ll get you more. What the hell happened, Jank?”

The gnome said “They’re blaming you. But you are too much of a thorough thumb- spawned, dull as knob, mechanically speaking, nitwit to make the troth work. Not merely a boob: an askew nipple nub. The paymaster is far sharper than you and it took me three tries before he got it.”

Harner and Nellie came through the General Store’s door, not seeing anything other than a collection of people from behind, stooped around a chair. Nellie, pie in hands, went up to them with Harner following.

The moment Jank the gnome spotted Nellie, he shouted “My love! My invisible beams have brought you! Come to me, sweetums!”

Sixty-Four stuck his thumb into Nellie’s pie and then shoved the bit into the gnome’s mouth.

In mid chew, the gnome said “A little early in the treatment to be administering solids, don’t you think?”

Sixty-Four said “That’s not Elois. It’s her identical twin sister.”

“Identical twin sister! Ha! You lying sack of crap,” the gnome mumbled.

Sixty-Four looked directly at Nellie and said “He’s delirious.”

“For a moment there I thought I had attracted half of a prosperous handyman to go with my whole freeloader,” Nellie said, with a smile. “Sadly, another lost to dear Elois’ menagerie.”

“Obviously never had a conversation with her,” Harner said, after which his foot was firmly stepped on.

“It’s universal: everyone loves my house maid,” D’arco said, turning to Nellie. “You would never know it. Jank here ran every time your sister was about.—He looks bad. I am going to get the witch.”

“Take a lantern,” Hegga said. “It’s dark out there.”

D’arco went to a counter. As he picked up a gold tin lantern, he asked “Where’s the grease pen? So I can mark how much oil I use.”

“Forget it,” Hegga said, waving him towards the door. “And take the other cart. If the brigade bitches about their swiftoxen, I’ll let them know it’s an emergency.”

The gnome groaned “Two hundred and seventy-five crowns, eight mark and twelve pence of like new tools, gone.”

“On me! Those I can replace. You, master mechanic Jank, I cannot. Hold on! I am getting the witch,” D’arco said, rushing through the front door.

Nellie said to Harner “Go and help him harness the cart.”

Harner backed away, saying “I can’t. For the sheriff--I have to go. Sorry.” And then he too was out the door.

Hegga said “Stunning bit of avoiding work, even for him.”

Nellie asked “Sheriff, he said. Where is the sheriff?”

The sheriff was behind the counter, having come in through the back door a blink ago. He set a large iron case down on the counter, its thud drawing the others’ attention.

“Sixty-Four? Ready?” the sheriff asked.

“Yeah,” Sixty-Four said, as more of a reflex than anything else. Reflecting, he wasn’t sure what he had just affirmed.

Hegga said “We just sent off for your wife.”

Blackjack bent down and disappeared behind the counter. He produced a large black iron shod helmet and placed it on the countertop. “Is there a reason Mr. D’arco is out of his cage?” he asked, slamming a second helmet down.

Hegga said “It was dinner. And the shop was closed. And I was through with inventory. Sorry.”

“Perhaps I wasn’t specific enough,” the sheriff said. “Sixty-Four, try this helmet on, please.”

As Sixty-Four lumbered to the counter, Hegga bit her lip, the words “Vinny’s helmet” escaping under her breath.

“It’s a pity Vinny’s fine magic armor and sword--and even finer sword arm—are elsewhere,” Blackjack said with a sigh. He rounded the corner of the counter, saying “Hegga, please record for the court that there are between seven and nine thousand crowns in this box. Property of Attia Vanah, bank president, and Hark Neron, bank comptroller, who may also be Attia’s husband.”

“Where are they?” Nellie asked.

The sheriff locked eyes with Sixty-Four and then did a two stride imitation of the dead guy’s walk. Breaking his fellow ogre’s gaze and resuming a normal comportment, Blackjack announced to the others “Attia is twenty something years old. Goes by ‘Atty’. She is five feet four inches tall, human, blonde hair, blue eyes. Rather thin, as is Hark. She cakes make up on with a trowel and may be wearing a powdered wig. When last seen she was wearing… pink… I don’t know what to call this.”

He pulled out a blood tinged piece of fabric and laid it on a table. The two women came to the table and glanced over it.

Hegga said “Printed silk.”

Nellie added “Probably part of a sock.”

“Very well, then I don’t know what the hell she’s wearing. As for Hark, he’s also blond, human, blue eyed, has nice taste in top hats. Mrs. Neron or Vanah-Neron brought quite a wardrobe with her. So much so that Hark was riding on top of the sedan. He was driving the swiftoxen team, in any case,” Blackjack said.

Hegga asked “How badly do you think they are hurt?”

Blackjack said “As far as anyone is to know, I did not find them nor any sign of them. Hegga, please record for the court that we also have custody of two swiftoxen, property of Vanah & Neron Bank. They are in the stable, which no one should be going near. Their cart, should it become an issue later, is located at the bend one mile distant from Doroval’s house. Mrs. Vanah-Neron’s quite expensive wardrobe and other items are with it.—You two are to stay here. Anyone who comes to the door, lock in with you. If anyone objects, you have my authority to throw them in the cell. What you are to tell people is that Sixty-Four and I are off to deliver our goods to Oxbow and then return with our merchandise.”

Nellie asked “Aren’t you doing that?”

The sheriff answered “As much as I ever was.” He drew his split staff from its scabbard and clicked the switch on its side. It broke in two, with three links of chain hanging at its middle. He put the helmet on and moved to join Sixty-Four, who was plucking weapons off his tovalds.

Hegga rolled her eyes. She said “Mr. Mystery, I have no intention of lying to your wife. Or locking her up.”

The sheriff said “Cell wouldn’t hold her. She’ll probably be busy tending to Jank.—Still alive, Jank?”

Jank sat up. “I’m definitely not in happy gnome land, yet. The pie’s not bad, though.”

“Can I use this?” the sheriff asked, pulling off a boomerang from one of the tovalds. “Do you have a spare bullwhip?”

Sixty-Four said “No. Bolo?”

“I have no idea even what to do with that,” the sheriff said, looking at the two ball device. “I want everyone inside. Until morning or until I get back. That’s the spirit and the letter of things.”

The sheriff started for the front door, with Sixty-Four behind him. Sixty-Four turned to his tovalds and told them “Stay, please.”

Once he and the sheriff were out on the street, Sixty-Four asked “What are we doing?”

“Looking like we are about to leave.”

“We look like we’re about to mug someone.”

“That’s for later.”

They came to the Player’s hall, which was the two story brown wooden barn-like structure next to the General Store. The sheriff slid the door away, saying “This ruse may be a massive waste of time, what with D’arco roaming about.”

Just inside the barn was one of the fire brigade’s grey painted wooden wagons. A black cloth hood covered the forward riding platform, protecting it from above, behind and the sides. A headless man made of straw and wearing armor was seated on the right. Two shaggy brown, long legged, swiftoxen were harnessed in front of the cart. Behind the riding platform were boxes and tethered bundles which filled the wagon’s ten foot by eight foot bed. The vehicle had four metal rimmed spoke wooden wheels. Its two foot tall side slats were also grey, but the paint was flaking.

The sheriff and Sixty-Four stepped into the hall, which was pitch black and seemingly empty of other beings.

“Niles?” the sheriff asked.

A coil of thick rope dropped to the sheriff’s feet. Blackjack bent down to retrieve it, asking “Did you knot this like I told you?”

“I know everything you do,” came the chatterling’s voice from the rafters.

“Or did at one time. I’m a lot smarter now,” the sheriff said, checking the rope. “In another season or so, you’ll be a gibbering idiot.”

“Promises, promises.” Neither Blackjack nor Sixty-Four could spot where Niles was. And both were actively scanning for him, their heads tilted up.

“What about D’arco?’ the sheriff asked.

“Scratch him off the list, master detective. He picked his nose. He chewed his nails. He sat in his cell and no one came to see him and he didn’t talk to anyone but Hegga,” Niles reported.

The sheriff asked “The kid?”

“No sign of my future brother. None,” Niles said. “But that’s not the whole story.”

“Kid?” Sixty-Four asked.

“Kid the highwaymen were using as a lookout. Probably the same one who gave you the book and the shortcut. Brown hair, bowl cut. Three feet tall. Human. Cut through his left eyebrow,” the sheriff explained.

“Yeah, that’s him,” Sixty-Four said. “I think his name is Scruff.”

“He was too young to hang, so I let him go. Then I mentioned it to my… At any rate, at least he’s smart enough not to come back here,” the sheriff explained.

“Because if he does, mom and dad are going to adopt him. And then the suffering really starts!” Niles said.

Blackjack growled “Get on down here or I’ll—“

“—Learn to scale walls, hobgoblin?” Niles mocked.

“You’ll lose that ability soon enough,” the sheriff said. “Now stop being coy. Down here and tell me the rest.”

Niles’ head popped out of the straw stuffed suit of armor, giving both of the ogres a start. He explained “I kept an eye on Hegga here at the hall, too. Now she didn’t do anything wrong. And the door was closed most of the time when she was out. But every now and then, something moved. Things got poured from one container to another. Things got switched around.”

“How did you do that?” Sixty-Four asked.

“I am half ‘apothecary’,” Niles said.

“How did the objects move?” Blackjack asked, putting his helmet on Niles. With the helmet on, the straw man Niles was in looked almost identical to Blackjack.

“They just did,” Niles said. “And they didn’t make any noise. That’s how you track him. You can’t see him, but everything around him goes silent. The wind was coming through the door, but when he came in, you couldn’t hear it.”

“He has that trick down pat,” the sheriff said, climbing into the bed of the cart. “I was almost run over by the banker’s swiftoxen. That’s the only reason I could find their cart. Even with all of Mrs. Neron’s toiletries, the cart didn’t have any smell. I didn’t know he was invisible, though.”

“Maybe not exactly,” Niles said. “I think I spied a shadow, but I was really up in the rafters so I can’t be sure.”

“Sixty-Four, get in next to Niles,” the sheriff directed. Blackjack was now hunkered down, behind the cart’s riding hood. Sixty-Four climbed in and took his place next to the straw stuffed Niles.

“Now what, your worship,” Niles said. “I don’t think either of us up here can drive swiftoxen.”

“Sixty-Four, make a clicking noise with your mouth and move the reigns to the right,” Blackjack said. “Luckily, these two are old enough to make their way out of town on their own.”

The wagon lurched forward and cut to the left. Soon they were making their way rather slowly down the street and in the direction of Snawy’s house. Right at the start of the arch of the bushes near the witch’s home, Blackjack quietly ordered Sixty-Four to pull back on the reins.

They came to a halt. Out of the bushes stepped Harner, now displaying his bald pate and dressed in a thick poncho. A large blunderbuss was in his arms.

Slipping out of the wagon’s bed, Blackjack ordered “Sixty-Four, out. Give Harner your helmet.”

Niles asked “Does Harner know how to drive?”

“Yes,” Blackjack said, helping Harner into the wagon. He pointed at the blunderbuss and asked, sarcastically “Got enough ‘powder’ in that thing?”

“All I had,” Harner said, settling in next to Niles. He put the helmet on and rearranged his poncho to make the weapon vanish. “If nothing else, it ought to make a loud noise and a flash. If trouble comes, that might give junior and I enough cover to run for it.”

“Let’s hope his confederates are sticking to town. Just make it look like Sixty-Four and I have left. Head about two hours down the road and then circle back,” Blackjack said.

Niles asked Blackjack “What do I do if you-know-who asks me what exactly you are doing and where you are?”

Blackjack said “Avoid having the question asked.”

“That’s a help,” Niles said. “What do I do if you don’t come back at all?”

“Niles, that is entirely your problem,” Blackjack said. “Now head off.”

The wagon pushed off and went down the covered path away from town.

“I’ve inconvenienced you enough, Sixty-Four. Come. I’ll show you where you will be hiding out until morning,” Blackjack said, parting a pair of bushes and waving for him to follow.

Sixty-Four followed, asking “Why am I hiding, again?”

“You’ve been a good sport and I am sure you will be a good addition to the citizenry here, but there is a limit on even my ability to impose. You will have a safe spot for the evening and then hopefully you can carry on your business without any more interference,” Blackjack said. He stood before a round red metal hatch in the ground. Bending over, he twisted the large hoop on the hatch to the left. It popped open. “It’s quite safe. I’ll show you around.”

Just then, they heard something from right beyond the bushes. It seemed as if the cart had come back. Blackjack strode off and took a peek through the bushes. After a glance, he returned to the tube, saying “Just my better half and my prime suspect, coming back in the other cart.”

“Mr. D’arco is your prime suspect?” Sixty-Four asked.

“Or Niles is right,” Blackjack said, setting his feet on a ladder in the tube. He lowered himself down and Sixty-Four followed his lead. They were in a rounded cave, which was tall enough to stand up in. Once they were both down, Blackjack began leading Sixty-Four through the tube, which was headed back in the direction of town. Not that either of the ogres were concerned, but it was absolutely black in the tunnel.

Touching one of the rounded, smooth walls, Sixty-Four asked “What is this?”

“Service tunnel,” Blackjack explained. “Goes parallel with the road and sewer. Pipes above are for the mineral water in our radiators. There are two service doors to the sewers ahead.--”

“--No, I meant what is this?” Sixty-Four said, trying to emphasize that he meant the wall itself.

“Oh yeah, that is kind of unusual,” Blackjack said. “D’arco says it’s a paste that hardens into stone. He’s trying to replicate it.”

“Is there a reason you don’t trust this D’arco guy?”

“It may have evaporated, but my reasoning is that he is an agent of the guilds. I had hoped that things were settled. We are just over having problems with a certain band of highwaymen. I discovered that these men were not criminals at all, but mercenaries in the covert employ of the guilds in Oxbow. Per the mercenaries, they were receiving a bounty on all of the laborers they killed on the road from Oxbow to Not a Mirage. Or at least this is what they were told by Doroval, who confessed to being the hireling of the Oxbow guilds. Doroval also said the town was seeded with guild agents. Which brings me to D’arco, who is the only player to have open contact with the guilds. His mechanic Jank is a guild member, albeit from Useless Port. On the other hand, quite a bit of current circumstances seems to be aligned towards insuring that D’arco is never going to be a rich man. That is if I don’t find our bankers.—The one thing I am sure of is the location of the zombies.—“

“—In the well?” Sixty-Four preempted.

“Well?”

“The big troth thing downtown?”

“You mean the water battery?—“

“—I was zotted by that.”

“Zotted?”

“You know,” Sixty-Four said, undulating his fat fingers “Hibbidy-hibbidy.”

“That, in and of itself, is suspicious, but I have checked the water battery. Not that there is anything to see. Nor is it good for egress, what with it being three hundred feet deep and having shear sides. And filled with water.”

“Did you just look? Or have you been inside?”

“The zombies live in the lake.—“

“--The guys with the funny walks?--”

“--I found their underwater cave this morning, on the far shore. I suspect that there’s an air pocket above the entrance to the cave. Hence my rope, here. I intend to drop in on them this evening. Hopefully that’s where my bankers are.”

“And Jank said he saw the wheel of the water thing move on its own.”

“Ok. Sold. Not really on my way, but given the way my ideas have strayed lately, it might be worth a look. Wait! I would have to get Jank to lower the battery for me.”

“—I know how to do that. He told me. And I have the key.”

“Ahead here is where I will have you camp tonight. After our sidetrack to the water battery is over.”

It was, in fact, about half a mile ahead. If nothing else, the tunnel was quite wide and relatively dry.

“Before the players arrived, this place was a point of exile. Every creep who got run out of a town, wound up here,” Blackjack explained. “Then these alchemists, ‘Players’, who themselves were run out of Useless Port, show up here. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then a witch showed. That was the tipping point. The guilds wanted to march the militia in to burn the place down. Lucky, Prince Oswald has a cool head—and a diminishing tax base. So he sends me here. My orders are to sell the rule of law, watch over the players and neutralize the witch.”

“Is that what you call it? ‘Neutralize’?”

“My agenda changed.—Did you get a load of Harner’s little boom stick?”

“What was that?”

“The players have hundreds of them. Like a crossbow infested with fire. Between their steam engines and their powders, they might have enough to stand up to the militia, should it ever come to that. Something I am very out to prevent,” Blackjack said, holding up. “There’s a little bit of a draft here, if you feel it. Right by the service tunnel to the storm sewers. There should be enough wood about until morning, if you want a fire.”

Strewn about on the curved cement floor where they stood were piles of grey wood, all objects, many of them small wheels. Sixty-Four bent down and picked up one of the wheels.

“Toy wooden wagon wheels?” Blackjack guessed. “There were tons of them around when the players first moved in. That and there were these tall framed things, perhaps harps or some sort of instrument, nearly in every room in every one of the old buildings. The wood’s a little dusty, but it burns well. A little fast, since it is dry as dust.”

“Anyone else know about this place? The tunnels?” Sixty-Four asked.

“I showed it to Jank the other day and he said he wouldn’t tell. I’ve searched it fairly thoroughly. No scents here but mine and Jank’s. Of course, with what I know now, that may mean nothing.—Strike that, there’s only three entrances and I know they haven’t been messed with. It took Jank an hour to unseal the hatch we went through and another two hours to loosen the one I found in the field where the dairyman’s flock was poisoned.”

“Harner mentioned that the dairy guy up and quit.”

“Our ill-fated cow herd. I thought gas might be coming from the hatch, but I discovered the gas had been carted in by the zombies from the lake. I even found the gallon glass containers they smashed to release the gas. D’arco’s distillate is made out of cow poop, of all things. With the cows gone, there are no inputs. Now the investors are gone, just to cap it off.”

“What’s it do?”

“All sorts of things. And makes a fantastic stench. Mostly, if you spray it on crops, it increases the yield by some ridiculous percentage. But that’s just one thing. Even Harner’s thing brings a fortune, when he can do it right. Vinegar. Pickling brine. Varnish. Paint. Explosive compounds of powders. Our little burg spits out wonders, along with the hard spirits.”

“Jank said something about envy.”

“If they’re so envious, they should have let the players play where they were. But I can see why they were exiled. You should see the wave of stink that comes off downtown during summer. Thanks to the hill, we get weird winds. Otherwise the place would be abominable.”

“You know this place is a volcano, right?”

“Hush. Don’t jinx it. The Receding Empire was here for hundreds of years.”

At length, they came to another ladder hanging from the curved ceiling. Sixty-Four could tell by the humidity in the air that they were somewhere downtown. He followed Blackjack up the ladder only to find himself mere feet from the place he and Jank had emerged from the mill. What they had come out of was literally just a hole, right next to the door to the mill.

Upon being helped up by Blackjack, Sixty-Four asked “You sure no one knows about this tunnel? Or at least this hole?”

“Up until yesterday it was plugged by what seemed to be a giant mound of pigeon dung.”

“Petrified cottonseed oil?” Sixty-Four guessed.

“Ask Jank. He was the one trying to dissolve it.”

“That’s what he said it was.”

After both checked left and then right, they came out of the covered area by the mill and up to the wheel of the water battery. Sixty-Four slid the key into the wheel’s center and started to turn it. It was moving freely, almost without tension.

Nothing seemed to be happening. The water in the reservoir was mere inches from the lip and utterly still. Blackjack was wrapping the rope around the wheel’s shaft and around his own midsection.

Sixty-Four shrugged and said “I must be screwing this up.”

“Well, it was worth a shot. I’m not going into a full well. Not in armor,” Blackjack said. He removed one of his gloves and stuck his hand into the water. Although the sheriff’s expression did not change, his voice piped up an octave, conveying “Bingo.”

“What?” Sixty-Four asked.

“The sky is black, but the water is not wet,” Blackjack said, leaning down and putting his entire arm in. “No water here at all. Or within reach. It just looks it.”

“OOOh!” Sixty-Four said. And then he completely forgot what he was about to say.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something is in my head but it won’t come out.”

“Happens to me all the time,” Blackjack said, stepping up to the reservoir’s lip. He leaned back and pulled his tether taut. He put one foot down and then the other, hanging at a drastic angle. Slowly, he started to lower himself. “It’s not wet so far.”

Sixty-Four hung over the lip of the troth and pushed his face through what seemed to be the water’s surface. There was no water there, although it looked like there was. He brought a hand down and flailed it around. His stubby right pinky brushed against something, but when he looked there was nothing there. He then withdrew, deciding to reposition himself further away from the wheel.

Blackjack’s hushed voice came from down the shaft he had disappeared into, saying “I would invite you to join me, so that I can have company being scared witless, but that is a bit more of an imposition than I dare. I might even say pretty please with sugar canes, but it’s none of your business and it is my town and I am the stupid sheriff. And as the sheriff it is my aim to protect citizens, and not endanger them—which I would be doing by playing for your assistance here.”

Sixty-Four was now at the far right edge of the troth. He waved his hand down again, and with the sweep of his palm, detected what he thought to be a rather narrow stone stair. He said “I think I found something.”

“So far, all I have is air colored as water. Astounding in its own right,” Blackjack said. “I thank you for what you have done so far, sir. The rest of it is my gig. I can imagine how hard it would be to re-instill the herd instinct, the blind trust of the goblin horde, once you have broken from it. And it would not be right for me to ask you to do so. Not that I would actually know, given that I spent my goblin time as a farm hand being read the law by brownies.”

Sixty-Four seemingly dipped his feet into the troth. They settled on the first step. In moments, he was walking carefully down the invisible stairs. He said “I spent my goblin time working with gnomes.”

“I am beginning to wonder if the whole goblin horde thing is a myth,” the sheriff said. He then imitated the guttural voice of a brownie “You’re so lucky to be shoveling night soil with us. You could be with the mindless horde and then who knows what will come of you.”

“I got that, too,” Sixty-Four said. He was now at a transparent landing, about twelve feet down. Across from him, Blackjack was repelling; bouncing off the wall. He reached out and grabbed Blackjack by the belt.

“I spoke too soon,” the startled Blackjack said, not sure what was behind him.

“It’s me,” Sixty-Four said, settling the sheriff on the landing.

“I thought you were close, but discounted it as echoes. You are down here with me.”

“Yeah. Why?” Sixty-Four began feeling at the stone wall, his arms upward and at their full extension.

“You know, I think the only difference between you and I is about a hundred hours worth of elocution lessons. And what good does it do me—other than I talk too much. I should just say ‘thank you’ and leave it at that,” Blackjack said. He then noted Sixty-Four’s groping of the wall. “Whatever are you doing?”

“Looking for a pot.”

“That would be a rather odd place for a window box,” Blackjack said. “Although this platform rearranges plausibility itself.”

A ceramic brick materialized in Sixty-Four’s hand. He tilted it and a small metal fork fell into his palm. “Same key as for the wheel.”

“So it is,” Blackjack said. “We have a porch and a key. All we need is the door and the lock.”

Apparently, Sixty-Four had already guessed that. With his next move, he made the key vanish into the wall. There was a click following, which caused Sixty-Four to issue a grunt-laugh.

Blackjack said “You do understand that there isn’t enough money in the world for you to follow me through this door.”

“Yeah,” Sixty-Four said, clicking the switch of his split staff. He extended it out five links.

“As a monster, I consider it a matter of professional pride that I be the only thing going bump in the night,” Blackjack said. He dislocated his jaw and his tusks sprung upward. His hand pushed the round, metal hatch inward. “Come, my brother. This night belongs to the hobgoblin.”

The black area they entered barely cleared their shoulders. Its curved cobblestone ceiling was a mere inch above Sixty-Four’s head. Their boots were on stairs made of iron grating. The sounds of water gurgling and rushing swelled up from beneath them.

At first the steep stairs went up, almost improbably so. They had to be near the surface. Then the stairs turned and went down in a drastic corkscrew. Here and there on the wall were what seemed to be small iron birdcages. These were, at one time, lanterns lit by gas, but the glass and feeder system were long gone.

The sounds of water was now gone. All they heard were their own movements. The air was humid, as if they were somewhere near the hot springs. The stairs made another sixty degree turn and they were at a stone straightaway, heading slightly down.
Here they held up for a moment. Sixty-Four asked quietly “Where are we?”

“Somewhere under the mill. Near our bubbling hearth, I think.”

“Is there anyone else who could come with us?”

“Only if we want to pick buckshot out of our asses,” Blackjack whispered back. “Under circumstances such as this, there is a man I send who moves like the wind and fears nothing. Sadly, he’s in the stocks in Oxbow.”

Suddenly, there was a distant muffled whistle. Or perhaps a gust of air. It came with a billowing release of steam from where the hallway ended.

They advanced through the tingling, mineral infused, cloud of vapors and found it concealed a perfectly square opening. This portal was to a room in the shape of a ball. Its walls were made of curved iron plates, which overlapped and sported an infestation of rivets and screws and nuts and plugs in various sizes.

Unlike the other areas they had passed through, the twenty foot wide, twenty foot tall globular interior was illuminated by a green light emerging from a cage at the center of the ceiling. Directly across the room from them was yet another perfectly square opening, three feet up on the wall, as was the perch they were standing on.

Sitting on shelves mounted scattershot to the walls were faces on sticks, each perched upright as if riding properly aligned on unseen shoulders. They were heads with hats, some caught in mid expression and others with their eyes lolling askew. The sight caused both ogres to hold up.

They smelled of wax and glass and steam—which was somewhat reassuring. Blackjack pointed at one, a man’s face with a long mustache and bat like eyebrows wearing a black top hat. He said “That’s Doroval.”

Blackjack slowly stepped down into the chamber. Aligned on the floor were dozens of gallon sized squat glass jugs, each plugged with cork and each containing a swirling blue cloud. They were arranged in such a way that there was a clear, but narrow path from one of the room’s openings to the other. Once Blackjack had advanced three steps, Sixty-Four stepped down into the room.

Blackjack pointed around the room, whispering “Mr. Aenid. Assessor Pyle. The courier from Vanah & Neron. Do you see Scruff?”

“Nah,” Sixty-Four said. All of the heads seemed to be of middle aged men. “What do you think this guy is?”

“Interchangeable headed hibbidy-hibbidy?” Blackjack guessed. “Brown trouser time, for sure.”

The square portal on the room’s other side was flashing triangular trapezoids of orange light, as if it were a black curtain caught in a breeze obscuring sunset. It made no noise. Once they entered the room proper, they no longer heard the steam sound. The room tangibly dripped with humidity.

There was only one way to go, so they advanced on the square portal. That they could sense nothing beyond it was distracting, to say the least. As they came closer, they heard it seem to peep. With one particular broad flash, they heard words.

“Mrs. Vanah-Neron, I would preserve yourself. None of that will help your husband’s fate. Focus on preparing him with pleadings for his landings in the next place. The happy vault, or wherever you bankers go.”

It was the sing song high voice Sixty-Four had heard before. Blackjack identified it with a whisper: “Doroval.”

Blackjack reconnected his split staff. He poked its end at the blackened, orange flashing portal. He received a brighter flash and more words as a response.

“You are very lucky I am well beyond the flesh, Mrs. Vanah-Neron. I would threaten you with something bloodcurdling, but I can’t remember what. Now that this blade is sharp, your husband should go painlessly. Think of yourself. What miserable hope you have is entirely dependant upon how steely of a prop you can be for me. Ah, I bet that lightens your eyes, doesn’t it?”

They heard light footfalls on the way to the portal. Sixty-Four and Blackjack froze. The jugs were placed in such a way that they had no real room to move off the path.

The portal became entirely orange. Other than that, they saw nothing.

The airy, high pitched voice reverberated through the room. “You’re kidding me, right? It’s a box. A box. It’s in the cart. The cart you got the bankers from. Box! Box! With gold in it. So I can buy more mercenaries and not have to deal with you remnants. Zombies? Zombies?”

The portal became black again. A peep said “Hmm. Not there. Durga the Unapproachable and her stinking thrift. Not that you are ever going to be predisposed to using zombies, Mrs. Vanah-Neron, but if you should be, stifle the urge. It’s a stinking box. The sheriff is out of town. I sent both of them. What else do they need?”

And then the portal was orange again. Again the voice boomed and echoed “Close the door. I order the door closed. --There. Zombies left the door open. Did I lower the water? Back in a few.”

A thin man’s shadow appeared on the floor right before Blackjack. “I must say the tusks don’t go with the pompadour, sheriff.”

Blackjack drew back his split staff. A book appeared in the shadow’s hand. It sang ““You are low and of low standing, a man of nothing, nothing ---”

Sixty-Four pressed his palms over Blackjack’s ears. He cut the shadow off, shouting “Na!-Na!-Na!—You can’t do it twice!”

“Yes, I can! Rather nervy for a mailman. Well, given that it didn’t work, let’s try another page, shall we?”

Blackjack’s split staff fiercely bit through the space the shadow should have been standing. It met no resistance. Instead, the shadow flipped a page of the book and sang “Send in the creature of light and fire. You are creatures of pure desire. Give me a feature of time and space. I am a creature of every place.”

The shadow dissolved. A voice coming from everywhere warned “I would turn your attention to the containers found here. They constitute a bit of a back up plan on my part and a hazard on yours. Each one contains a gas which could more than kill everyone in this chamber and the next. No problem for me, but it might lead to the untimely death of Mrs. Vanah- Neron, whose continued existence is required for my income stream. May I invite you to the next room, wherein you will be the only people with a chance to be of hazard to yourselves?”

“Where is Scruff?” the sheriff asked.

A thin, black figure in a top hat appeared in the portal, framed by orange back light. He said “How would I know? Scruff works for money.” The man withdrew, only his long hand remaining in sight. It crooked a finger. “Come on. Gitchy-goo, monsters.”

Sixty-Four leapt, filling the square portal. He issued an uncharacteristic, loud growl: “I got your monster, right here!”

Other than his voice, it seemed to Blackjack that Sixty-Four had evaporated. He hopped up to the orange portal, saying with a sigh “Oh, yea team…”

Blackjack squinted his eyes, presuming a flash as he went to the other side. Instead, he found the light greenish, although more intense than in the other chamber. Looking to his immediate right, he saw Sixty-Four with his arm cocked backward.

Sixty-Four sprang forward, releasing a spiraling bolo from his hands. Blackjack traced its arc as it nearly glanced the twelve foot ceiling. The two black balls hit a frame on the far side of the room, twenty feet away. These orbs wrapped around the frame of the guillotine, firmly cinching the blade. It wasn’t just a lucky shot, as Sixty-Four proved with a second release. Another bolo whistled across the room, wrapping the blade to the frame a second time a foot from the first set.

Mr. Neron’s blue eyes looked up the frame five feet at the two sets of black balls. The young man was reassured by the sight of the black covering on the bolo’s cords, which he recognized as rubber. He would have been further reassured if he knew that the cords themselves were spun steel. At least for the moment, the blade would not be descending to remove his head.

Blackjack took in the situation for a blink. Seven feet ahead of him, an iterant mail man was growling, unfurling a long bullwhip with one hand and spinning the business end of a split staff with the other. To his immediate right and left were ancient chairs, made of graying wood. The right wall, which was ten feet away, was metal and made of layered plates. It too featured plugs and rivets, but also metal hoops, the types he had seen on hatches. The left wall was stone, similar to the outside walls of the mill. It was fifteen feet away. Arranged at various angles before this wall were a line of desks. Glass tubes, knives, blades, metal beakers and other shiny objects cluttered the tops of these desks.

In the center of the cluster was a foot long oval mirror on a five foot tall silver gilded stand. Just past the last desk, wrapped like a mummy to a bench, face up, was a young man with blond hair. His gagged head was centered at the bottom of a guillotine blade’s frame. Five feet to the right was a young woman in a very bulky but now ruined pink silk dress. She was blindfolded and gagged and also rather comprehensively webbed into a chair. Her wig was tipped forward, with the bangs rudely pinched into her blindfold.

Positioned between the man and the woman were two odd stands. One was simply a pole with a bell shaped ballast. At its top was a half done wax head, similar in visage to Mr. Neron. A straight razor was stuck in its cheek. The other stand was what seemed to be a suspended bird cage, which was covered by a leather tarp.

From the looks of things, it was quite clear that Doroval was in the midst of something before he discovered them. Where the necromancer was, however, was not so apparent.

Sixty-Four had his whip snapping a snake pattern through the air as he advanced. Blackjack was scanning for the wizard’s shadow. The three green domes on the partially vaulted ceiling were casting deep patches of darkness.

A plug on the wall between Sixty-Four and Blackjack popped out, trailing a vast horizontal column of gas. It ignited with a bright glob and wave of heat. Sixty-Four turned and then recoiled. Then Blackjack heard a fuse light.

Flopping to the ground, Blackjack yelled “Drop.”

Buckshot sprayed through the flame. It pelted the chairs. Then Blackjack heard Sixty-Four’s whip crack twice. When he looked up, a smoking blunderbuss flew through the flame at the tip of the whip’s end.

What had been a line of white fire was now a constant ray of blue flame, cutting five feet into the chamber. Blackjack could see that on the other side of the flame his fellow ogre had a hold of something not visible. He wasn’t sure if Sixty-Four had a hold of his arm or leg. And neither was Sixty-Four.

With a harsh tug, the arm separated, becoming visible. It was metal rods wrapped in cotton padding, stuffed into the sleeve of a suit coat. The hand at its end was a curious clockwork of springs and hinges. Sixty-Four let the limb clatter to the ground.

Using his elbows and knees, Blackjack scurried beneath the flame to join Sixty-Four on the other side. Sixty-Four extended one hand down to help Blackjack up, while he slung his staff at emptiness with the other. Other than a burn across his padded pullover, Sixty-Four looked alright—or as alright as a sweaty, drooling, growling ogre could look.

Blackjack pressed his back to Sixty-Four’s. Maybe it was Sixty-Four’s smell, or his growling, but Blackjack wanted to growl too—and he had never done such a thing in his life. Suddenly, it erupted out of him “I want to rip this thing apart with my bare hands!”

“Nah,” Sixty-Four said, calmly. “Use the weapons. The guy’s made of metal.”

Their back to back defensive posture lasted mere seconds. A fusillade of objects from the desks came raining down at them. The throws were coming from two positions. A quick look showed that an invisible something was picking things up and hurling them from one position and a shadow, near the end of the line of desks, was doing the same. What they lacked in accuracy they made up for with speed.

Sixty-Four plucked a boomerang from his vest and sent it rocketing in the direction of the desks. It clattered around the desks, sending fragile objects flying. Blackjack followed his lead and hurled his boomerang blindly in the same direction. His hit something before the desk, causing an unseen form to fall backwards, turning one desk over.

Just then, a man-shaped form leapt from the line of blue flame. It was glowing, burning gas, hovering inches above the floor.

An unseen voice shouted “About time! Answered your damn engraved invitation!”

Blackjack and Sixty-Four found out later that they had been standing frozen at the portal for many moments before they moved. During that interval, Doroval had been jumping up and down, cursing the absence of the “Being of Light and Fire.” Right before they started moving again, Doroval had hastily loaded his blunderbuss.

Blackjack began backing away from the flaming creature. Sixty-Four never saw it. Instead, Sixty-Four charged the desks, his arms outstretched. One of his boots crunched down on the unseen figure as he vaulted at the desks. He scattered three of the desks with his standing landing and then proceeded to overturn the other two. He bounded off the mirror, which for some reason, wouldn’t budge.

His actions, which stopped the throwing of objects, elicited a vocal response. ”No doubt about it: the mail man is a menace.”

At the same moment, Blackjack had retreated to near the two bound people. The flame man was making a floating bee-line advance to him. He knocked the wax head in its direction. It sizzled to nothing at the gas creature’s touch. He hurled the stand. To Blackjack’s knowledge, the throw ended in limbo. Then he grabbed the birdcage and started to swing it with the wide arc of a piker’s mace.

A voice from the birdcage screamed “No!” as it went into the flame man. The leather hood went up in a flash. Revealed inside the cage was a crystal skull on a short shaft, similar to the heads they had seen in the other room.

The flame being pealed like an orange, turning inside out. It cascaded to the floor as glowing mists. Blackjack yanked the cage straight up, holding it aloft. He saw bright red dots in the skull’s eye sockets moving in tandem. The sheriff shouted “Hey. I think I’ve got something.”

Sixty-Four spotted the shadow dart from around a desk. It had something in its hand. Looking up, he spotted a glass sphere floating in air. It cocked back as the shadow cocked his arm back. Sixty-Four latched hold of a toppled desk and sent it skidding in the shadow’s direction.

The shadow scattered, but the ball went flying off. It landed near Blackjack and exploded with a bright flash and a loud report. Blackjack dropped the cage to shield his eyes.

Sixty-Four bolted for the cage. The shadow of a leg crossed his path. He sprawled face down on the floor, having been tripped by nothing. The invisible being he had toppled into the desks returned the favor and stomped on his back and then his head. A moment later, the cage levitated off the floor.

Blackjack chanced it, rushing through the mist with his split staff drawn. Its end crashed into the cage as it came off the floor. The cage’s thin bars dented and spread. He hit it again as it floated up.

For just a moment, the rest of what had been Doroval came into view. A headless one armed man in a black suit outfit was attempting to position the cage on top of its shoulders. The moment it had the cage centered, the shaft of the skull descended through a hole in the cage’s bottom and the head connected to the body. Then, he vanished.

Two more of Blackjack’s blows seemed to hit home, but there was no noise. By the time Sixty-Four joined him, he was swinging at nothing but air. Sixty-Four was swinging his staff in the direction of the metal wall. Blackjack was doing the same in the direction of the desks. While doing so, he spotted a piece of glass being pulverized flat on the floor, but making no noise.

Blackjack immediately lunged in its direction. His finger slid the trigger of his split staff, extending it three more links. Taking a guess, he swung high. The chain caught the creature’s neck, wrapping it as the end bar orbited. “Got it!”

Blackjack caught the other end of his staff and jumped back. Both he and the being toppled to the floor, with Blackjack on top. The sheriff shouted “Aim above the chain.”

Sixty-Four knelt on the sheriff’s back and brought his spit staff down, again and again. His staff was hitting Blackjack in the face, hitting his own face, but mostly striking the cage. The spindly shadow was across all of them, with its arms flying about wildly.

The skull appeared, its cage having been beaten away, and started to speak. “Mahadevah, in whose chambers I was ascended into the ranks of permanent servant. The highest order, though I am a dissident. Fool of me, is what you’ve made. Durga the Unapproachable, who put me to sleep three hundred years ago: you and your stinking prediction as to the price of cotton. No seeds. Details! Port fell in the water. Details! What did the astrologers mean: the value of our place increased? Is it the cotton or the players? Now do tell me. From the past. From where you are!”

The mirror began spinning.

“Calling friends?” Sixty-Four thought aloud.

“Name dropping, at least,” Blackjack grunted. “Keep whacking.”

The floor shook as Sixty-Four’s shaft at last struck the skull. The crystal cracked.

The skull screeched “I demand it! Answer me! I demand it, Tambu-Nagah—you of the empire that never ends. Tell me it is not the end.”

“This is the end. Trust me,” Sixty-Four said, reeling his shaft back with two hands. He brought it down with all his weight.

Glass in the mirror cracked. The glass sprayed. The spinning stopped. Then the mirror suddenly flew as if knocked aside. It fell amidst the sprawled desks and broken instruments.

And the skull was smashed utterly.

Sixty-Four and Blackjack held their positions for many moments. The body underneath them did not move. The shadow was gone. The mist had dissipated. All they could hear, besides their own panting, was the gust of the flame jet, which now seemed much louder.

Dust from the mirror’s glass had formed a cursive pattern on the floor. This was later translated as words.

‘I owe you: nothing.’

Sixty-Four picked himself off Blackjack’s back. Blackjack regained his feet. Then Sixty-Four knelt before the still invisible body. His eyes were looking at the ceiling, but Blackjack knew that he was envisioning the sky.

“Take care of this guy. Wherever he is. Better than you have so far,” Sixty-Four said.

Although the sheriff did not share his sentiment, he remained silent: it may not have been his religion, but it was someone’s.

Blackjack glanced over his shoulder at the two captives. He dislocated his jaw. His tusks retracted. With two hands he smoothed his greasy locks back into some form of order. He turned and started to approach the captives. Sixty-Four followed, but did not stop to groom.

Blackjack pointed at the man and that’s to whom Sixty-Four went. The sheriff stopped before Mrs. Vanah-Neron. He carefully pushed her blindfold up. Her green traced, dull blue eyes went wide. He pulled her gag down.

“Nightmen!” her voice rang.

Both Sixty-Four and Blackjack froze, uncertain of her inflection.

With a swallow of air, she continued “Paragons of society! All praises, all praises. I had only hoped the sounds I heard were nightmen. Praise days!”

With that, Sixty-Four undid Mr. Neron’s gag.

“Prodigious throw, nightman!” Mr. Neron gasped. “I knew civilization wouldn’t let us down. Not with nightmen about! Did Mr. Darco send you?”

Blackjack cut Sixty-Four off with “Yes, Mr. D’arco sent us. Your belongings have also been recovered. As soon as everyone has a chance to become situated, I am certain Mr. D’arco will be thrilled to meet with you.”

***The End***