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I
Blackwood Pool watched from the forward lounge as the thin sliver of green on the western horizon drew closer. Below, beneath the wine-dark waves, shadows of fatal beasts shot along seeking prey, a shoal of monstrous squid—mariners have their various names, ghigantes, OMeara’s Lurker, Isencraft’s Mollusc, or more commonly, Kraken. Larger ones were a hundred meters long. There were rumors, fearful whispers of enormous reptilians as well, even ones that were able to pull themselves onto land for short periods. This is why we travel by dirigible, he thought. The great Atlantic Ocean was a difficult and dangerous journey at sea level beyond the safety of the continental shelf.
He was an ocean and half a continent away from gun smoke and intrigue. This is what he told himself. Still participating in the baroness’s blighted “mission”, but hopefully away from the drama. This is what he told himself, at the same time admitting to himself that the chaos and adventure the baroness bestowed upon him was invigorating.
The days-long voyage west was relaxing for him. Drifting along, he couldn’t hear the propellers that were half a kilometer away at the aft end of the HMSS Royal Mistress. The forward lounge was comfortably decked out. He was equally comfortably released from his duties in the Londbridge Metropolitan Constabulary—now a “Constable at Large”. The baroness had seen to that. She had more important things in store for him, she assured him. Head west, my dear Constable. There are rumors of those things we dare not speak of in public, she encouraged.
Pool thought of his mission, his never-ending mission. Find the secrets. Reveal them. He could not help thinking of himself as the baroness’s dog, though. She didn’t treat Miss Tagore like this, ordering her about, to the far ends of civilization. You’ll benefit from the travel, she said, unconvincingly.
Still, the view was breathtaking. And he enjoyed it. The adventure.
Londbridge and the daily routine had been growing stale, not to mention the ever-present billowing smog. The baroness had opened doors to experiences that he never could have imagined. Stomping around as a beat-cop, whacking hoodlums with his billy…that got old.
He had been back in Londbridge for only a few months after a whirlwind year, having seen and done things he could not speak of, things that he could not have imagined when he set off a year ago, in the drear January of 1885.
Pool had boarded the Royal Mistress at the Londbridge airfield nearly a week ago. Then only a few months after disembarking Baroness Kekszemu’s own unique dirigible Baba Yaga’s Hut.
Over the last several days, he watched the grey winter waves below take on a warmer hue as the airship approached first the tropics, then the equator.
Their destination was the independent city-state Nova Aurelia, locally rendered N’Aurelia, but known by other names in the disparate languages, dialects and pidgins of the region: Crescent City in Brethmanic, Ain Beygia in Nuland Scandian, An Beja/Nabeja in the Lofka pidgins of the docks and wharfs.
The city, along with its sister city, Raudh Eik, a hundred kilometers up River were founded as Vesterland by Scandian colonists and resource profiteers on the borders of Lok’eb K’ak’al (rendered Lokeb Kakal, or more commonly, Lokekakal) in the equatorial waist of the small, hourglass shaped continent of Nuland.
Later, settlers from Frankia, Pruss and Pannonia and other regions of Europa, followed by Sinese workers and a healthy pool of indigenous Lokekakalian stock filled the new western cities on the fringe of the jungles.
Aside from a several week foray into Muskovy last year (in the bitter cold of winter, no less) Pool hadn’t before ventured out of the borders of the Brethmanic Empire.
Though the Empire eyed the overseas colonies in Nuland hungrily, the city states along the eastern seaboard for the most part remained independent. Ties to the settlers’ original Scandian homelands had waned as well, but the descendants of the original ruling families remained in charge, ruling as aldermen, with a council of the twelve most prominent and rich for each of the two cities.
The wine-dark sea had transitioned to a vivid aquamarine as the airship passed the terminus of the continental shelf yesterday. Pool noted that it was similar to the color of Baroness Kekszemu’s eyes (while lit by gaslight flame, for her eyes changed color with the mode of light).
Etelka, he thought, pronouncing the name in his mind the way Miss Tagore speaks it so brazenly out loud. Damn this formality and this society. It had been months since he had been in her presence directly. This venture to Nuland had been arranged for him by telegram. Baroness Etelka Kekszemu remained ensconced, he believed, in her house on the outskirts of Buda through the winter, although there was a chance that she had gone south to the Mediterranean. She had mentioned in passing the thought of purchasing a villa in a warmer winter climate.
The airship had passed nearby a small archipelago not long after crossing the boundary over relatively shallow water. They were collectively called the Caliban Isles, and there was only one large town, Pool remembered, New Bayreuth. He found that ironic. A small town on a flat island was nothing like the city in northern Europa.
The majority of the species of oceanic leviathans stuck to the depths of the ocean, allowing for smaller surface vessels to ply the waves with a modicum of safety they would not get further out. Pool could see the sails of one such ship below. He wondered absently if it was a fishing boat or if it was transporting some other cargo, perhaps between New Bayreuth and Nova Aurelia. The airship was cruising about a kilometer or a kilometer and a half above the gentle waves, Pool thought, although it was hard to tell altitude over the sea with nothing to render scale. The sea-going vessel’s wake was to the east. He shuddered momentarily when he saw the submerged shape of some sea creature, longer than the sailing ship itself, pass directly beneath it.
I’ll stick to airships, he thought, remembering his travels with the baroness and Miss Tagore aboard, first, Captain Gordon’s perversely named Jolly Poker and Baroness Kekszemu’s Baba Yaga’s Hut. Pool missed both of them, his companions in adventure, his companions in danger. Unconsciously, his hand brushed over the gun hidden under the tweed of his frock coat. Miss Tagore had given him a shoulder holster that she had brought back. She had said she was tired of watching him carry his revolver in his pocket. She knew her guns.
The Royal Mistress passed first over the expansive delta of the River as it was called. Its main channel was over two kilometers wide and flanked with verdant swamps and wetlands as far as the eye could see.
After an hour, following the course of the River, Pool spotted two forts, one on either side, each built on raised beds. These forts had guarded the mouth from sea-borne incursions, in the days when such things were likely. Since the advent of human flight, however, the antique forts were superfluous.
As the city of Nova Aurelia drew closer, Pool noticed familiar signs of civilization. Miss Tagore would, of course, rule them—what did she call them?—pollution. She had used the word, or more likely the concept with a tone of visceral disgust. To Pool, however, the smoke from chimneys, despite the detrimental affects on one’s lungs and, of course, the facades of buildings, was to be weighed against the upward struggle of humanity against the press of nature and humanity’s own brute, brutal failings.
The pillars of smoke, the cloying haze over the still distant Nova Aurelia—N’Aurelia as rendered by the locals—represents progress.
Constable Pool withdrew his journal from an inside pocket of his frock coat. He noticed with disdain the nearly blunt pencil stub. There wasn’t much to chronicle as the days of the last week had been spent sitting and reading, each day bleeding into the next with the monotony of the scenery.
He jotted some notes on the nature of the coastline along with a clumsy sketch of the forts and (for him) a cartoonish and speculative drawing of the shark-like fish that had passed beneath the boat.
The airfield in N’Aurelia was literally a swamp. Trees had been cleared adjacent to a bend in the river, across from the crescent-shaped city. For kilometers, brown water surrounded a dozen morning masts. Far enough apart that multiple airships could dock. Pool thought it looked like raw sewage. There were thousands, millions of stumps of some hydrophilic tree or trees, looking like stubble. He imagined that the lumber either built the city or was burned as fuel for the pumps keeping the river at bay.
Three airships, giant dirigibles—Pool couldn’t make out their names at this distance—hung from mooring masts, all trailing in the coastal wind, tails pointing inland, over a sea of green behind them.
The Royal Mistress docked and slowly swung around so that it, too, was pointing into the wind, its nose anchored to the mast. Cargo would be offloaded and lowered onto waiting boats. Passengers, with their portable baggage would disembark via a nerverackingly high gangway, lowered from the nose to a platform on the mooring mast, below the anchorage point.
Pool returned to his cabin and gathered his belongings. It didn’t take long, he had one battered case containing a couple changes of clothes and a paper bag of shells for the revolver under his left arm. And several pencils and a virgin journal, should he finish the one in his coat pocket.
Case packed and locked—the damned thing had gone to Muskovy with him and was showing its wear. Pool scanned the small cabin for any remaining belongings. The cabin had been nice compared to the rail cars and especially the very small berths, if they could be called that, of the baroness’s Baba Yaga’s Hut. She spoils me, he thought. Sending me to Nuland first class.
Pool, Constable at Large, had no other baggage, so the disembarkation was fairly simple, or so he thought at first.
He approached the forward gangway without a thought. At the opening of the portal, or door—the airship terminology was unfamiliar to him—and the increased anxiety of his fellow passengers in front of him, Pool himself became a little unnerved.
There were about 40 fellow passengers in queue in front of him. One unfortunate bloke had a puke over the thin rail a second after setting foot on the the steel mesh of the walk. The gangway was comprised of mesh steel panels strung on and hanging by steel cables from the massive nose of the airship. The lower end of it rested on a circular nest-like platform surrounding the upper reaches of the mooring mast.
He was confronted by a blast of humid, stagnant heat.
The precipitous walk way, with its see-through floor, was too much for a lot of his fellow passengers. Some turned around, foolishly thinking they would find a different way to the surface. Pool didn’t relish the rather short walk over the quivering gangway, but braced himself for the psychological discomfort. He thought of Miss Tagore, his debauched, chaotic, trouble-making friend, and when it was his turn he stepped out onto the swaying, vibrating, hundred meter high, metal walkway and kept his eyes forward toward the mast.
In seconds he was on the mast, which discomfortingly, lacked any sort of rail to accommodate the rotation of the docked airships. It was swaying slightly, too, pulled at by the considerable mass of the behemoth above. He stifled some resurgent, motion induced nausea and quickly stepped forward toward the tower of the mast itself and the awaiting semi-enclosed stairwell leading down. The white-gloved hands of the brave crewmen helping the airship passengers were of little comfort and barely noticed.
The spiraling stairwell echoed and rang with a hundred footsteps, both above and below. Pool could feel the vibrations of their collective descent beneath his feet and in the rail under his right hand. The towers rang with a cacophony of heels on metal, clattering all the way down. The texture of the peeling yellow paint of the rail slid under his left fingertips.
In no time he passed through an opening in a riveted steel dome, just above the surface of the brown-watered lake, if it could be called that. The air field.
Pool’s initial assessment, as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the interior, was that the chamber was a waiting room, or a reception hall. It smelled of wet metal and, what he would later come to know as the smell of decaying vegetation, typical of a swamp. Earthy and fetid. An engine could be heard running, somewhere, outside probably.
The interior circumference of the dome was, in fact, a staircase, having gentle, low-grade descent into the darkness below.
Pool looked around. There were increasing numbers of passengers, many standing, eyes still adjusting to the relative darkness, as was he. Interspersed among them were buskers and porters, all shouting in a really disorienting way, in their native tongue. Presumably they were offering their services as carriers of things or guides or sellers of knickknacks, but Pool couldn’t understand one word. There was no sign of any sort of of customs or passport control.
He needed to contact one Baroness Guinfred von Limonpecht, an expatriate citizen of the Empire, an acquaintance, it was said, of Countess Isenberg and Baroness Kekszemu. Another of their strange group, he thought. Etelka (again savoring her name) projected a forced politeness when speaking of her. They were not friends, not like Miss Nila Tagore and the Baroness, Etelka, or even myself and those two. Pool decided to forgo the incomprehensible guides and porters. He had only his single case anyway. He descended into the depths, following the crowd.
II
The tunnel that Pool descended into was below the surface of the water. His fellow passengers walked on a raised platform which was suspended several centimeters above the lower curve of the cylindrical tube they all walked through.
There were glass portholes surrounded by riveted frames looking out. The tunnel itself was comprised of riveted sections of steel tube approximately two and a half meters in diameter, with seemingly random portholes in the upper half, letting in a muddy half-light.
He wasn’t sure why the builders or designers of the tube network had chosen to place it under water as opposed to placing the passage above on a bridge. Certainly, a tunnel was at least at some risk of flooding. It didn’t seem to leak much, however, though there were rivulets of water issuing like sweat from some of the seams. The majority of the water trickling down seemed to be from condensation as the humid air of the tunnel contacted the slightly cooler walls of the tunnel. The metal walls of the tube transmitted strange distorted sounds from outside to the interior. Some sounded like dull echoes of machinery, others like alien howling.
Pool stood to the side to let the other disembarking passengers pass by helped along by porters they had somehow managed to hire. He pulled out his notebook and thumbed through the pages to the one where he had recorded the address of his contact.
Countess von Isenberg had met with him in Londbridge two weeks ago. The Countess was the most prominent member of a kind of secret society that he had met. Normally, in the limited matters he had been involved with, he worked with, received his orders from Baroness Kekszemu. (The latter was both far more appealing and a much greater pleasure to work alongside than the dour countess.)
The nameless secret society, if it could be called that—it was after all, both a society of sorts, however informal and unstructured, and secret—the secret society had as it’s principle objectives to investigate or find evidence of mysterious, even unbelievable wonders. Myths proven true and strange alien science.
Pool and his companions, the Baroness Kekszemu and the wonderful self-styled miscreant and troublemaker, Miss Tagore had witnessed many events that the man or woman on the street would laugh at as fantasy.
There, thought Pool, finding the page in his journal where he had scribbled the name and address of his contact in Nova Aurelia, N’Aurelia as the locals have it. Baroness Guinfred von Limonpecht, expatriate of the Brethmanic Empire 420 Tre Gøtu in the Garden District of the city.
The tunnels led beneath the River. The locals didn’t call it by any other name. They got food out of it, they swam in it and they dumped their waste in it. So did the potentially millions of people up stream. Pool found the whole thing disgusting, especially the bottom feeding fish.
Fish was far from Pool’s favorite.
Even ten meters below the River, the humid, stifling damp heat was oppressive. The River itself must be like a warm bath. Pool cringed at the thought, imagining himself sitting in a tub of it.
The tunnel system deposited him and the jostling crowd of former fellow passengers that he was following (hoping they knew something he did not), after another spiraling up point in the system.
At first, Pool thought he was hearing more of the grinding echoes from below, but the pitch was much higher. He crested the final, above water semi-circle of stairs into the open, under a hazy, deeply leaden sky—and gods, the humidity was worse than the heat—to find himself face to face with a aft-wheeled paddle boat, moored at the very location he ascended from. There was an awful mechanical piping sound issuing from its upper decks that would have embarrassed the baroness’s own mechanical musical device. A badly-tuned, overly-loud player-piano.
The artificial island at the River’s edge was connected to the shore by a short causeway, arching slightly in rust-hued wrought iron. Thousands of boats plied the waters. The River was vast. Huge. Pool’s primary comparison was the confluence the Rivers Lond and Themis, the former being the source of his home city’s name. This one was magnitudes wider, deeper at its center by two times. This River drained a continent.
The Riverside was foul-smelling. He was met by slightly more eager buskers and porters and prostitutes than below. He didn’t so much as need someone to carry his case or give him Riverfront diseases as he needed someone with a basic sense of direction and a functioning ability to navigate the streets and waterways.
Pool sweated profusely under his coat. Mosquitos swarmed around his face. At least the coat prevented his Londbridge-pale flesh from exposure to their feminine charms. (The females of the species are the primary consumers of their victims’ blood.)
He looked at the slightly less uncomfortable laborers working the docks. Naked to the waist and barefoot. They looked cooler than he felt, though sweat beaded on their backs and chests and ran in rivulets dripping off their bodies. The laborers were entirely male, and the males of the region, whether by import or by innovation wore what is known in the Sint as a lungi, a kind of tube of cloth that is tucked into itself and which can be hoisted up or down, appropriate to the circumstances.
The laborers were quite a bit darker than Pool’s Londbridge skin-tone and were a mix of Farad and Sinese populations, over a substrate of Scandian and Pruss and Frank.
“You need help man? You look lost.” Pool looked around and then realized a small, almost elderly man (or so he thought) was squatting, flat-footed in a narrow flat-bottomed boat that Pool had neither seen nor heard approach along the River’s edge, below the walk. The man and the boat were down an artificial embankment. Levees, they call them.
The water was as murky brown as it was through the portholes beneath the surface.
“You speak my language? Brethmanic, as in, of the Empire?” Pool asked awkwardly in response.
“There is no Empire here, straeker. Do you require transport?” Said the wiry old man, clutching the end of a long paddle, the likes of which stir the water behind the boat to propel it forward.
Pool looked around, vaguely wishing Nila, or Etelka…the baroness was with him.
“Yes, sir, I should like transportation,” Pool gave the scrawny old guy, who was wearing only a soiled, red lungi, the address the Countess had given him for the house of Baroness Limonpecht.
With relief he found that it could be reached entirely by waterways, so no foot travel would be necessary. It was extremely hot. How do they survive here, he wondered as he stepped shakily into the boat, steadied by the pilot. Pool took his hat off and ran his fingers through his sweaty, brown hair. His hand came away thoroughly wet. He shook it at the water to his right and noticed, with a sudden shock the reptilian eye staring at him from the waterline. He pulled his hand back quickly, having seen pictures of the teeth of these relatives of crocodiles, alley-gators. Frightening.
Etelka, Pool thought, again savoring her given name, would be terrified of these beasts, but then again she has a determination that he couldn’t grasp, couldn’t imagine. Nila would simply shoot them.
Pool composed himself. The small boat was 8 meters long, flat-bottomed and piloted solely by the small bare man with the pole. They did not exchange words and Pool silently considered that the small, bare man did not want conversation.
They plied the squalid waterways of N’Aurelia. It was true that the city was beneath sea-level. Waterways, raised canals passed over them, or rather, they passed beneath them. When necessary locks were used to raise or lower water craft. The lower water level was kept constant by means of great, steam driven pumps arranged throughout the city. The press of humanity was not really different than it was in Londbridge, Pool thought, though the level of sophistication was.
First, after leaving the airfield and adjacent River crossing, Pool and his erstwhile pilot passed through the submerged streets, rather, canals of the Frankish Quarter. Colonial buildings laid down two centuries past now stood knee-deep in the encroaching River. The high water mark from previous floods discoloring the walls was two meters above his current level. Richly decorated balconies hung out two and three stories over the canals, ornately formed cast iron railings on almost all of them. Pungent flowers growing from vines hung down from pots in a downpour of color. He wondered if the pungent scent was meant to cover the stench of the water.
After that, the buildings became more drab, less water-laden and much more landed. The Garden District was an island. A large island in a large lake, cut off from the course of the River for centuries, the island was, at it’s peak, a full 5 meters above the regular surface of the lake.
Fancy houses ringed it in concentric circles up the hill. The most notable citizens of N’Aurelia held the perimeter of the Garden District. Nine of the twelve Aldermen of N’Aurelia had houses here, and the word “houses” was an indistinct term; Pool could see that the majority, if not the whole of them, were comprised of vast manor houses not unlike his beloved baroness’s hereditary estate on the outskirts of Buda.
They arrived. He paid the bare pilot in a handful of Brethmanic scrip. He overpaid, but he didn’t care. The pilot accepted the foreign currency without comment.
The house was impressive architecturally. Six black Corinthian columns (of wood) supported the overhanging roof, above a kind of porch or portico facing the lake. The plan was simple and rectangular, with wings set back on each side, but it was surrounded by an exquisite garden. He would later learn that two additional wings extended from the core of the house at 45 degrees into the garden behind the house.
Trees not native to the region thrived, many sculpted into topiaries. He glanced for an extra long time at one trying to figure out what animal looked so much like a woman’s heeled boot. An island of green on an island of green in the greenest place Pool had ever been. Greener than Londbridge. Sweat dripped down his arm and around the wet handle of his case. Gods it is hot here.
He knocked at the door. Waited. Knocked again.
The door opened and Pool was faced with the sculpted face of an Adonis of a man who looked like he should have been carved from the whitest marble of Achaea and then set propping up the throne of Deus Pater in one of the larger surviving Attican Cathedrals. Pool didn’t lean that way, but but could appreciate the evident aesthetic qualities: the man was handsome, bare-chested and wearing light beige pants that came to his knees.
“You are expected. The mistress is waiting,” the door keeper said with unexpectedly forced politeness. Pool thought on that.
The facade of the House of Expatriate Limonpecht was a beautiful arrangement of white and black contrasts against a very green (and humid) backdrop. The door, once opened, invited him into a cool, high-ceilinged atrium. The walls were a yellow-tan color. The floor was comprised of panels of wood, the water-resistant cypress of the region. It smelled of bread and herbs.
Pool became suddenly very self-conscious of his stifled hunger.
There was no furniture in the atrium save for two similar but not identical tables on either side, to the left and right of the entrance. Two lazy ceiling fans spun slow circles on their axes hanging from the white plaster of the ceiling.
A figure in vivid, satin red, who Pool was almost positive was not there when he crossed the threshold, was there before him. Worn, but poised and beautiful. She had relatively short, black hair with moderately tight curls and an attitude to match.
Pool resisted the urge to find her intimidating, for that was the effect she was going for, instead he puffed himself up, drawing upon the spirit of Etelka…or was it Miss Tagore.
“I am Constable Blackwood Aristophanes Pool, of the Londbridge Metropolitan Constabulary, on special assignment, sent by Countess Is….”
She cut him off. Pool bristled. “I know who you are. We spoke. Do you not remember?”
He did remember, but the Everittite panels—those strange devices that allow long distance communications—have the most appalling effect on the users, in that they make them look like corpses. Pool could not possibly have recognized the Baroness von Limonpecht from a conversation of mere minutes in Countess von Isenberg’s lounge. Even the voice was distorted.
Before him was a short—shorter than Pool—woman. Pool absently wondered whether this woman was shorter than Baroness Kekszemu or not. Limonpecht was perched on ten centimeter heels, but Etelka’s boots were often such. Miss Tagore was short; he had seen her barefoot and never in more than three centimeter heeled boots. All three women were quite a bit shorter than he was.
Distractions, Pool. Return to the matters at hand.
“Baroness Lim…,” Pool began.
“Don’t let me interrupt you, Constable,” she interrupted, “but welcome to the fair city of Nova Aurelia, or as the Scandian natives sometimes render it, ‘N’Aurelia’ but we can forgive them their illiteracy and blending of Classican and Scandian, can we not?”
“I know who you are, so introductions are unnecessary,” she said curtly. The bare-chested manservant disappeared down a brachial corridor.
“Come in. Refreshments will be brought to the dining room in a few moments. Is this your first time in Nova Aurelia?” She asked without waiting for an answer. She turned mid-sentence toward a hallway across from the entrance an began walking with purposeful, hard, cloppy footsteps.
Pool followed as intended. He didn’t bother responding to the question. His case was left standing alone in the atrium.
The dining room was modestly sized and outfitted. Again, ceiling fans spun above and the room’s two large windows were widely open. A breeze moved the edges of the curtains, which were pulled to the side.
The table had already been set with a large glass urn containing what Pool guessed was lemonade. Indeed, there were lemon slices bobbing around in the slightly swirling, cloudy liquid, along with impossible cubes of ice.
The Baroness gestured at a chair and Pool sat.
She began. “Constable Pool…” her words dripped out and she looked at her painted fingernails, “as you know, our…group has interests in the activities of the species that are commonly called rakshasa, that most people believe are myths, but that you and I both are firmly aware actually were…are real.”
This opening did not surprise Pool. He had seen, witnessed, evaded and fought such an alien beast. He was somewhat unnerved by the Baroness’s dry delivery, though.
“I know the Countess von Isenberg informed you that there were hints of such things here, rakshasa lurking in the jungles of the Lokeb Kakal, inland. I hear it’s both hot and humid inland.” Pool had been told of the rumors of extant—still living rakshasa—not the carcass that he and his friend Nila had stolen from an archeological dig site in frigid Muskovy. Somewhere west of the ruins of Macuiltochtli there was rumored to be a place, hidden in the jungle ruled by a living rakshasa. Pool cringed at the thought of a living rakshasa, tiger-demons that had wreaked havoc on the world and brought about a demise of the antique civilization in a literally mythic battle during the Dark Ages.
He and Miss Tagore and the Baroness Kekszemu had encountered one such beast and had nearly perished combatting it. To hear of one living in the jungle, here in equatorial Nuland was both intriguing and terrifying. Still it’s better than walking a beat in Londbridge, he thought.
“Up the River,” she said. “You can stay here in the house until we hear from the questionable man who I’m told knows the way. He was exiled for some grievous crime years ago. Have some lemonade, Constable. You look parched.”
Pool was feeling nearly delirious from the heat and hunger. He looked at the vat of lemonade with its glass walls beading condensation. He reached for a glass by the base of the cylinder. There was a twist-spout that filled the glass. He quickly drained it and refilled his glass.
Feeling slightly refreshed but thoroughly exhausted by the heat and oppressing humidity, Pool looked up at his host. He could feel sweat beading on his face, which threatened to break and run in lines to his chin, and his mustache was beginning to droop. Pool would have to wax it back up into its proper form when he had a moment alone. He wondered how this Baroness Limonpecht could retain her composure.
For her part, Baroness Limonpecht considered her guest to be a brute. She internally scoffed at his clothing which was suited for damp winters in Londbridge, in the northwest of Europa, not here in equatorial hell. Who wears that coat, or even that shirt, in this climate. Fool. Limonpecht poured herself a glass of lemonade, her eyes on her guest.
“Constable, you are, I’m told, quite capable and come highly regarded,” she said, “…Baroness Kekszemu has always been a blind optimist, though, despite her mechanical and scientific gifts. The wool is not so easily pulled over my eyes. You will find your baggage has made its way to a room down that hallway, second on the right. We dine around sunset. I will see you then.” She stood quickly, pushing back the chair with a loud scrape against the wood of the floorboards, finished the last drops of her lemonade and walked out. Her footsteps reverberated noisily, well after she had disappeared from view.
Pool sat in the dining room, wondering why he was here. How do these people survive here? He questioned. It’s winter.
What was there to do before the evening meal was served? Going for a stroll to get a feel for the city was a diminished option considering the location on the rim of an island. He was brought to it by a boat and the house itself seemed to be surrounded by a wall, with only the front facing outward over the water. Clues to his actual mission were scarce as will. Limonpecht had told him nothing and had been, frankly, almost rude. Arrogant more than rude. What does it even mean to be titled gentry of the Empire and to live in a foreign city-state outside of the Imperial boundaries. Maybe the Crown had a view to expansion? He wondered. Curiously pondering this idea, Constable Pool had a third glass of lemonade while twisting the right tip of his mustache between his fingers.
#steampunk
#cyberpunk
#fantasy
#sci-fi #science fiction
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#ion fyr
Ion Fyr 