The Devils Chance
The Commoner
Vesper, Capital of the Covenant
The Commoner
Vesper, Capital of the Covenant
Lights flickered like a cosmic disturbance in Thomas Freeman's eyes. He was face down on the cobble stone streets of Old Vesper, but not entirely sure why. There were pulsing shoots of pain in his joints, and whenever he fought to push himself up from the gathered filth of horse dung and waste all he saw was an unsightly resevoir of blood gathering from thick log of a nose. It was hot, warmer than the Oceanic sun, and the heat was sweltering at his feet as well.
'A fire' he thought in a scattered frenzy of lesser concerns, 'Where's Edwin?', 'Why in God's name does it smell like wine?'. Thomas felt a sharp tug at his brown suitcoat, patched and frayed as the day he inherited it, pulling him up to the sight of smashed wine bottles and throngs of other common folk running or limping away.
Edwin Woodhouse slapped Thomas across the face with his scarred working hand, looking down and through Thomas like he was a stranger. Thomas had not even heard the slap's impact, and it occurred to him that he should hear shouts or sirens from the Officers that descended upon them some minutes ago. "Tommy!" Woodhouse was trying to say, but again Thomas could not hear the words, "Tommy, can you walk?" he asked, looking as desperate as he must have sounded.
"No, I ca . . No, Edwin" Thomas began, but before he was finished the Woodhouse boy was roughly throwing Thomas over his shoulder like a sack of loot. Atop his friend he could see what had thrown him down, or what was left of the illegal pubcrawl he had been in. Smoke poured out from the busted in door and fire from the windows, yet the fragmented body parts of men and women he was familiar with through a drunken gaze was what ruminated in his minds eye even as the scene shrunk.
Earlier in the afternoon he came with Edwin to Molly's Pub as the two of them were known to do since returning from the war in Karoskland, throwing back mugs of Engellex's worst Ale, which tasted as cheap and flat as the cap that he wore, but still double the digits in alcohol content than anything they had been able to find since Lady Constance Varinia's Prohibition Act. The very thought of that over entitled woman made him want to vomit, a wench born as common and poorly as any of those that laid dead or injured today. "A thick Vesper Rifle between her legs would set her right," he said to Edwin's tailcoat that was soaking in his endless flow of crimson goo.
Edwin carried him far down Gloriana Street, around the corner to Charlotte Street, and down an alley that emerged on Hammersmith Boulevard where the wayward natives of Great Engellex proper often took holiday at in small cottages, bearing a traditional pub or market on every corner. Hammersmith Boulevard possessed a market instead of a pub, which was likely why Edwin was taking him here. Woodhouse set Thomas down next to a large black door belonging to an imposing brown house, a wood house if Tommy's senses could be trusted, and kicked in the door as the nameless Police Officers had done to Molly's Pub.
"I think I, I think I can hear Edwin!" he called out to no one, with the young Edwin Woodhouse looking inside to make sure the home's snowbirds had taken flight back to Great Engellex as they did every year after winter passed. His hearing had recovered with a vengeance of dull but steady ringing, accompanied by nightbirds of the feathered variety, tweeting a solemn hymnal tune. Edwin emerged just as Tom began to worry, though not alone as he had entered. A halfcast man with native facial features prodded Edwin out with a heavy caliber revolver that may have been more at home in the gloved hands of a Commonwealth Officer in the twentieth century.
"This is Lord Wilford Malroy's house, gentlemen - this residency is motherfuckin' occupied!" the mullatto skin vagrant said with a harsh prod that sent Edwin an arms length away. "Who the fuck is Lord Malroy?" Edwin spat, not bothering to hide his racial scorn for one he viewed as inferior in his own green eyes. "He's not a man with a busted lip, I'll tell you that much" the armed man replied after making up the distance between Edwin and himself with a crack to the mouth with the ancient revolver. Edwin reeled, letting out a boyish squeal that sent the halfcast in to a fit of laughter that Thomas thought he would never hear the end of until a much taller, sterner, and whiter man appeared in the doorway.
The stern eyed gentleman had the look of a soldier, but his garb was that of some properly Engellexic capitalist. "Well met, boys. I am Wilford Malroy," the man said, offering an outstretched hand to Thomas which pulled him up to his feet, "I'm afraid that I am not the Lord some would say however, but I am indeed the Chief Squatter of Hammersmith Boulevard if you were curious.". Thomas detected a trace of Dulwich in his accent, though it could just as soon been the New Dulwich subsidiary. "I see you've met Fozher over there with the gun, and that you became fast friends with my bomb over at Molly's" he said without the flicker of a smile that Fozher wore. Thomas was in shock. In shock from the blast, and in complete disarray after contemplating that he was standing before either a murderer or a madman.
Tom Freeman gave the man a skeptics squint and clenched his jaw as he expected a man above his station might in this situation, "The Vesper Police bombed Molly's, we were there!" Thomas declared confidently. Lord Malroy of Hammersmith Boulevard shook his head, "Why would the VPD send its precious Prohibition Officers storming in to a pubcrawl they meant to blow up?" Wilford Malroy said with pity. "I hope journalists think just as simply, mind you. It's better for our cause if their gloves appear as crimson as our Lady Queen, Alice".
It occurred to Thomas then that he had no business knowing any of this, and that he would just as soon scamper off back to the bomb struck pub if his feet would take him there. "Of course," the armed halfcast began, "now that you two are privy to Lord Malroy's plot, it would be my prerogative to raise a loaded question" he said with a tap of his revolver up against his tan homburg hat. "Would you gentlemen be for a wet Cantignia, or will you die to keep our Covenant dry?".
Edwin was standing upright again, not taking his eyes off of Wilford Malroy despite the freshly cocked revolver staring across at him right between the eyes. "I'm not about to saddle up with some . ." Edwin fired out before a bullet found his brow as the halfcast man intended. Edwin Woodhouse, or the lifeless thing that remained, staggered for a moment before buckling under its own top heavy weight. Tom's hands reached instinctually to his boot knife, but the moment he motioned to bend the halfcast's revolver was cocked and pointed between his eyes like it had at Edwin.
"I'll take it wet!" Tom shouted, sounding muffled in his own ears, "Shaken, not stirred, if it is alright with Lord Malroy?" he said in attempt to alleviate the tension. Malroy nodded, leaving his goon to chuckle, "Follow us inside to the Malfort, as Fozher likes to call it. In actuality this is the Winter Nest of the Brearton Family, of Hammersmith proper if the pictures on the wall are of any indication" the false Lord said.
The furnishings of the Brearton's brown wood house were as scarce as Edwin's breaths save the pictures Malroy had spoke of, piled up newspapers, firearms, and large unmarked boxes stacked from the floor to the ceiling. The armed man motioned his revolver at an oval shaped ring of bronze colored kegs in the dining room, "Take a seat and tell us your name, Miles will bring you a drink and something to wash down that nose of yours" Malroy said, leaving the room to fetch a drink for himself. The keg was not meant for this purpose, but Tom was glad to rest at least his body while his mind raced to make sense of what was going on.
Having a drink sounded so quaint, so typical, and Thomas was thinking it so when his dead friend Edwin suggested it to him that afternoon at work. "My name is Thomas Freeman, I . . I'm a street cleaner, but I served with the Expeditionary Marines at Karoskland for the Crimson Birth" he said, breaking free from this present underpinning in remembrance of the atrocities he saw and inflicted in Karoskland. Not a day went by that Tom Freeman didn't relive what he did, what Alice did to earn her moniker The Crimson Queen, and what a shadow of his former self he was now.
"So it would not be as far a venture as Karoskland to say that Gloriana was not first Street you've seen run red with blood?" Lord Malroy asked pointedly, facing the door Edwin had kicked in with a tumbler of brandy. A boy that must have been Miles scurried in with a warm mug of honeywine, steaming almost as Tom pulled it up near his gashed nose to smell it through the dried up blood. "I'm not the Mormon I was when I left the friendly confines, and I returned the sorrowful drunk that sits before you today," Thomas said, "You'd be right to venture there, sir. The man laying outside stood shoulder to shoulder with me to stack Karosklander and Cannie alike in piles as high as you've stacked those crates . . Would it be a far venture to say those are brandy crates, Mister Malroy?"
This time Fozher, the halfcast, nodded and said "I'm not a Mormon either, if it helps.". It did not, but Thomas Freeman was neither the saint nor racist his father was. Few halfcasts or properly black Cantigians were Mormons in truth. When the conquering white colonists arrived in Cantignia, in what the natives called Olenasea, Mormons spared few and raped more in the Pioneer Era, all in the name of the pious Joseph Smith Junior. Tom wagered that Fozher was the product of a white mother and black father by the look of his muscular build and generically Olenasean features. Tom's father might refuse to talk to such a man as Fozher, but Thomas had learned not only to talk with blacks and halfcasts, he had also learned to fight beside them as an Expeditionary Marine. Some of the bravest and deadest of his fellow servicemembers bore the dark or less than white skin, and the sight of it gave him little concern nowadays.
Tom saved his scornful eyes for Prohibitionists and the Monarchist Establishment now, though he did not hate Alice entirely. At the executions in Karoskland, Corporal Thomas Freeman observed the Queen of Cantignia in his peripheral on many a sunset. She was beautifal sure, royal of course, but the way she consoled the bright eyed children and received his salute after he pulled the executioners trigger was eerily inspiring. Alcohol prohibition was a mechanism of colonial feminists and the mormons, Tom decided, this was not the work of a high born Engellexic Duchess turned Cantigian Queen.
"We'll fill your cup, your wallet, and your bed Mister Freeman, should you join us" Lord Malroy said, "And together perhaps we can keep these friendly confines as wet as Geneva Heathcote, our dear Lady of the Capital."
The halfcast stood and refilled Tom's cup with a spot of brandy, "Just as he says, Freeman. Find a corner to rest your bloody nose. I'll try to find a job for you in the morning." Fozher ordered with the revolver now tucked in his coatpocket. Thomas followed the trail of newspapers and ammunition all the way to the open doorway. "Don't you think about running either, Freeman. I'm your shadow now until we can trust you, should you live to see that day." swaggered the halfcast with a drunken stupor.
Thomas Freeman sat silently perplexed, it struck him as peculiar that a shadow would follow the shadow of a man that he considered himself to be. Street-cleaning was honest work, but it stunk like horse shit and waste. This life smelled like honeywine and tasted like brandy.