[Closed] Stranger

[Tom Cooke]

The One-Legged Garmon • The Soot District

Late Afternoon on the 5th of Roalis, 2719

The One-Legged Garmon – a ramshackle hole of a place tucked into an alleyway on the south side of the Soots, a little too close to Soliloquy for anyone’s comfort (or, perhaps, just close enough). You’d find it where the dust-choked tangle of streets – with their natt and tsat, calloused, bone-weary workers at the factories and the mills, pickpockets missing digits, the greybeard dregs of the AAF clattering their bowls on the cobbles – you’d find it where those crowded streets gave way to back alleys, close, damp places where the teetering upper storeys of the tenements blocked out the sky. You’d find it without a sign, behind an unlabeled door; you’d find it if you were told where to find it.

And you’d want to find it, if you were the sort of kov who didn’t care for prying eyes or piercing questions. For this little rendezvous, Tom’d wanted to avoid the former; the latter, he reckoned, was a given, what with his company. But today, he was prepared.

Just on the cusp of the evening, toddling somewhere past the late afternoon, the Soot District was darkening. Still, the Garmon was near-empty this time of day; even then, it was a cramped space, dark and full of turns, old wood creaking with every breeze. Low candlelight drifted on smoke, picked out motes of dust. There was one kov at the bar, an inked old wick with a shaved head, smoking and laughing in a low voice with the barkeep. A skinny woman with a pox-scarred face and a dirty apron was leaned on the bar nearby, listening intently.

They gave him stray glances, occasionally, but for the most part, they left him alone. Even dressed down, he reckoned they knew him for a golly, and a frazzled, porven field like his was insurance enough. Sitting at a table in the corner, Tom nursed his whisky, watching the entryway for flickers of light – listening for the creak of the door, the creak of the floorboards. Trying to brace himself on the burn of the cheap liquor. Fit the pieces of his head together, as if that’d help.

The Garmon was a place he’d frequented in those months he’d spent living in the Soots. There was something pleasantly familiar about it, in a strange, brutal way. It’d stayed the same; he’d changed. All the same dusty glasses, the same piss-poor whisky, the same furtive faces. He watched the low light flicker over his hands, the veins and the freckles and the delicate bones, uncalloused, indisputably the hands of an Uptown politician.

He remembered when they’d shaken worse than they did now; he remembered when he hadn’t even been able to look at them, so strange as it’d been, looking down at another man’s hands. They still didn’t feel like his – how could they? – but they didn’t shake so badly anymore. Funny, how quick you got used to going through the motions, even if the mind never really adjusted.

He hadn’t been ready to see Oisin again the first time; he didn’t know he was, this time, either.

He reckoned he didn’t have much of a choice. Dze, that wasn’t right: he had a hell of a choice, and that was the problem. That was at the beating heart of all of it. There was a choice, but there weren’t always a lot of options.

When he’d got the summons, right on the heels of all rainy season’s laoso, he’d thought he might go moony; in the first place, he wanted nothing to do with it – it was nothing to do with him – and in the second, he was acutely aware of the danger. It’d driven him right back to the bottle, and it’d taken him a handful of days to get himself together.

It hadn’t taken long for a certain wick reporter, with his haunted eyes and his decade overseas, to drift back to the front of his mind. The irony wasn’t lost on him. Being honest, he hadn’t planned to follow up; the last thing he needed nipping at his (and Ava’s) heels was a pen from the Post. But that one letter with its wax seal and its glistening black ink had changed everything, and once again, Tom Cooke was bringing all his chroveshit to Oisin Ocasta.

You give me a job, he thought to himself, and shut his eyes, and took a long drink, gripping the tumbler white-knuckled tight. When he set his glass down and opened his eyes again, he saw a familiar figure moving through the smoke and candlelight, and he raised his glass with a bitter twist of a smile.

[Oisin Ocasta]

5th of Roalis, 2719

There were more bars, taverns, and public houses in Vienda than Oisin Ocasta could recall the names for. As he trudged through the Soot District towards the One-Legged Garmon, he allowed himself to contemplate whether that was a good thing, or bad. It certainly made it difficult to find one's way to such an establishment based on the name alone, but then perhaps that was a virtue as much as it was an inconvenience. After all, in this part of Vienda, there were certain elements who urgently needed and desired a certain degree of anonymity, and prying eyes could only be in so many places at once. In that regard, the Garmon was the epitome of its ilk, but that was no obstacle for Oisin Ocasta. After all, what kind of reporter would he be, if he couldn't investigate and journalise his way to an anonymous speakeasy?

While such a situation favoured the criminal element most of all, it was almost the opposite that drew Oisin to the seedier side of the city today. When Oisin had first ambushed Incumbent Vauquelin back in Hamis, he'd thought their encounter had gone relatively well, all things considered. Yet, the days had ticked on, and nothing had come of it. Oisin had not been particularly dismayed by this: Vauquelin had not been the only person of import that Oisin had forcibly introduced himself to, and like a target lured into a crossfire, Oisin knew only a few of his quarrels needed to strike in order to get the job done. Yet, something had nagged at him, something that was almost but not quite disappointment. Something had clicked, he felt, as if some sort of understanding was being tentatively drafted in pencil between them. So while he'd entered that tavern not expecting the endeavour to be fruitful, he'd left there hoping it had been. Perhaps that hope had been his mistake.

Yet here he was, a month later, on his way to meet with Vauquelin at the Incumbent's invitation. Perhaps things had worked out for Oisin after all, and progress had merely advanced at the same snail's pace as everything else connected to politics seemed to. Perhaps this was merely a meeting of opportunity, and Vauquelin had found himself in the possession of some scandalous revelation that he hoped Oisin and the Kingsway Post would deploy on his behalf. Perhaps something else was at work here; perhaps Oisin's persistence and inquisitiveness had begun to ruffle feathers, and this summons was merely an opportunity for the galdor to put the upstart wick in his place. It was that last possibility that kept Oisin's head on a swivel, checking the corners and alleyways as he passed, and kept his mind struggling against the persistent urge to surrender to eager taste of monite waiting to dance off the tip of his tongue.

As Oisin stepped inside, he offered a subtle gesture to the woman behind the bar, and a few curt but polite words - for the Soot District, at least - were exchanged, along with a few coins, and a decidedly grubby glass of what was supposed to be whisky. Oisin noted the bottle: clouded glass, and no label. The good stuff, then. It didn't phase him - he'd drunk far worse kinds of rotgut in Mugroba and the Rose; though these days, he cared a little more about how things tasted, and a little less about how quickly it would turn you blind.

Vauquelin proved easier to find than the Garmon itself had been: he was where everyone else conspicuously wasn't. They were opposites, Oisin and he, one a paragon of status and notoriety, trying to learn how to go unnoticed, the other a lifelong nobody forced by circumstance and employment to beg at the table for scraps of attention. He wondered what it must be like, being Vauquelin, and what brought him to places such as this. Did he tire of his wealth and his comfortable surroundings? Was his privilege a troublesome burden? Oisin liked to think that had he been born to a lifestyle like that, he'd be too busy appreciating what he had to ever choose to slum it in a place like this. Then again, he knew full well the reputation that the Kingsway Post painted for the peers of a man like Vauquelin: perhaps if he was surrounded by such people day after day, he'd want to loose himself in some dank shithole too.

He returned the salute as Vauquelin offered it, braving a little of his whisky before he sat. Not as bad as he'd assumed, actually. It had its flaws and its failings, but also more substance than he would have guessed, and enough going for it to feel worth his time. Perhaps the same would turn out to be true of the incumbent as well.

"You do frequent the nicest places, Mr. Vauquelin," he offered in greeting, setting his glass down on the table in a mirror of the incumbent's. "If you're not careful, people might start mistaking you for a man of the people."

[Tom Cooke]

The One-Legged Garmon • The Soot District

Late Afternoon on the 5th of Roalis, 2719

Tom was halfway through a sip of his own chrove’s piss when Oisin spoke. He snorted, hacking a little of the burning stuff, then cleared his throat. Setting his glass back down on the table, he let out a deep, genuine laugh. “We couldn’t have that, could we?” he replied, quieter. He looked up at Oisin, contemplative, a subtle smile drawn in his crow’s feet. “You start picking up a reputation for being a man of the people, you start asking for a knife in the ribs.”

A man of the people. Tom reckoned he could’ve laughed harder at that, if he’d had it in him. He tried to imagine what Anatole might’ve said to that, and he failed; he tried to think what he’d’ve said to it before he died, and that wasn’t much easier. Tom Cooke, a man of the flooding people. A man who broke people’s legs, maybe.

A man, now, who liked to squirrel himself away in the corners of shitholes like this, who liked to play at being not-one-thing-or-the-other. Well, maybe he was a man of the people: he couldn’t think of anything more commonplace than a drunk.

Oisin set his glass down on the table between them; it wobbled on its rat-chewed legs at even that tiny gesture. Tom took another sip, tapping his fingertip on the dirty glass, swirling the whisky round in the bottom. Where the tumbler’d been, a ring of moisture glistened against the old wood.

“I’ve the manners of a kenser. Please, sit. Right off, Mr. Ocasta, I should apologize.” Tom studied the reporter with a slight frown. “I hope rainy the season has kept you as busy as it’s kept me. Not that a whole hell of a lot happened in Hamis.” Like hell, he thought and didn’t say, sucking on a tooth. “Now I invite you here, out of the blue, eh? But I think you may find this worth the trouble,” he went on, sitting up now with a creak, setting his glass more delicately back in the ring of condensation.

When he glanced back up, he met Oisin’s eye. He went on studying the wick’s face, with all its new lines and shadows Tom didn’t remember. He tried to read them like a book, or like a prodigium, maybe; he tried to grab onto something, anything, that might tell him where the kov’s mercenary loyalties lay, or just a whisper of what he’d been doing all these years.

He looked tired, Tom thought, but that wasn’t new. He’d always looked tired. Tom felt a funny twist in his guts, and he knew he shouldn’t’ve, because it was just the way things were – but he reckoned Oisin, tsat and now tabloid-writer as he was, was used to clandestine meetings; he reckoned Oisin wasn’t the sort of kov most gollies met in their benny Uptown parlors. He reckoned Oisin was used to digging for scraps in laoso places, and he felt the gap between them, and it didn’t feel good. But if anything solidified the reason he needed the wick, it was that.

“I need your help with something,” he said after a brief pause, “and if it comes off well enough, you’ll get a damn good story out of it.” He wasn’t smiling, this time; he was watching Oisin intently, dead serious. “But before I tell you any of the details – have you ever been to the Northern Tors?” A flicker of a smile, before he took a drink. “And no, that’s not a threat.”

[Oisin Ocasta]

5th of Roalis, 2719

However Oisin had expected this encounter to go, whatever he might have speculated when he'd received Vauquelin's summons back to Vienda's seedy underbelly, it wasn't this. The galdor seemed different, somehow. Granted, their first encounter had hardly been on amiable terms, and Oisin had essentially held the man at quill-point, swinging his journalistic credentials around as if they were a weapon, but still: Vauquelin then had seemed defensive, reluctant, resigned. Oisin was a stray mutt on the streets, yapping at his heels, that Vauquelin had thrown a scrap of meat to make it shut up and go away. Today he was different. There was a calmness to him. There were apologies. Oisin might even have been forgiven for mistaking some of it as respect: for certainly, Oisin did not feel talked down to, not treated as an inferior, and while perhaps not an equal, there was perhaps something burgeoning on the edge of being a peer. Or perhaps it was more political than that, more careful, more calculated. Perhaps in the time that had passed, Vauquelin had determined that Oisin's status as a reporter gave him a certain power, a certain capacity to damage Vauquelin's all-important reputation. Perhaps then, the respect was not for Oisin as a person, but rather the kind of careful and cautious respect one offered to a man holding you at knife-point.

And yet, here was Vauquelin looking at him, not through him, as if he were a person after all. Oisin hated it instantly, a lifetime of avoiding notice for the sake of survival screaming out inside him. He wanted to retreat to the dark corners of the tavern, mop and bucket in hand, where he was nothing more than the means by which a necessary task was completed. He wanted to retreat to the periphery of Vauquelin's vision, standing sentry with a hand on the hilt of his sword, ignored by all as if he were part of the furniture, a mercenary hired as much to show what an employer could afford as anything else. He wanted to reach out in whispers to the mona, and beg them to swarm around him, a mystical shroud to make him as inconspicuous to others as he could possibly be. But he could not, both in terms of ability and obligation. There was no way for him to hide here, and nor was there a way for them to do his job, to be a reporter, if he gave in to those obsolete instincts.

The discomfort, the reverie, left him unprepared for the words that Vauquelin delivered, like a fist into his gut. I need your help. Oisin could remember and imagine very few situations that began with those words and ended favourably. It wasn't always those words, either - sometimes it was volunteers for a special assignment, sometimes it was a missing wick teenager that no one else cared about, sometimes it was someone's beaten and bleeding brother leaking all over your nicely mopped floor - but it always meant the same thing, and always ended in much the same way: with Oisin up to his eyeballs in trouble he didn't realise he'd signed up for.

But subscribed or not, it didn't matter: it was the way that Oisin's story flowed, and always had. He fought hard against the urge to sigh, a sip of his drink offering a helping hand. "Truth be told," he admitted, "I've been to more places outside of Anaxas than in it. Travel has never has never really been all that much within my means, save for as a means to a specific end." His brow furrowed, a note of curiosity slipping into his words. "I didn't realise the Northern Tors fell under your purview, Mr. Vauquelin. Aren't they a little -" Glass still in hand, Oisin allowed a vague gesture to be drawn in the air between them. "- provincial to warrant the attention of a man such as yourself?"

[Tom Cooke]

The One-Legged Garmon • The Soot District

Late Afternoon on the 5th of Roalis, 2719

More places outside of Anaxas than in it!

Tom tried not to let it touch his face, but he couldn’t help it; he couldn’t help the twitch of his lip when Oisin said that, the subtle tug of a smile. He thought of the Oisin Ocasta he’d known, sweeping the floors of taphouses in Lossey and King’s Court, always keeping his nose out of trouble (when Tom wasn’t dragging it to his doorstep, that was). The tsat that’d learned his voo from such spokes as passed by, never quite trusting him; the lad that’d never set foot out of the Rose, ’til the mercenaries’d come and gone and taken him away over the blue.

He’d always wondered where Oisin’d gone, being honest. He’d wondered what the wick was seeing, what he was doing, while Tom was busting kneecaps and keeping the King’s peace. Tom’d never left the harbor, not ’til death’d ferried him away. He’d always wondered how he’d’ve fared in one of the companies, or in the AAF. He’d never seen himself as the sort of man for a uniform, but on Oisin, it’d made sense. For better or worse.

A means to a specific end, he mused, fingertips perched on the lip of his glass. He turned it round, the glass scraping quietly against the wood.

“You’re right.” He took up his tumbler. The low candlelight glinted through the dusty glass, echoed through the amber. “Usually, the north would be none of my business.” That’s an understatement, he thought, taking a sip. He glanced round the bar, then gazed levelly at Oisin. “The incumbent of Cerolyn, the easternmost mining district, was murdered back in Loshis. Thaddeus Crawley. They’ve been trying to keep it quiet – officially, his heart went out; he’s old as the dirt, and half Anaxas wanted him dead anyway – but here’s a story for you.”

He sat up in his chair, setting his glass back on the table with a ting.

His voice was low. “People are, uh – restless. About conditions in the mines, for the human workers. I’m sure a man of your profession’s heard the grumbling, but what happened in Loshis, it’s got some of us worried. Nobody knows who did it, but there’s talk that it might’ve been an act of protest.” His frown got deeper. “It was decided that a handful of representatives from Vienda would take a trip to the Tors – tour the mines, all that chroveshit. Bring some consoling news back to the capital, about how the workers are well-treated and happy.”

A pause. When he said well-treated, his lip twitched; happy, and it just about curled, a sneering line etched deeply into his cheek. The expression was gone, then, replaced by a wry little twist that wasn’t quite a smile.

“Whatever’s happening, I know what I’m expected to say,” he went on, “and do.” He looked down into his whisky, letting out a tired grunt, shrugging his shoulders. “You already have enough for a decent story, but I’m offering you a better one. Say you were to come north with me. Have a look around. Decide for yourself what’s going on, truth-seeker. Let the Post speak.” His glance flicked up, and he met Oisin’s eye.

Finally, he did smile. He didn’t just smile: he laughed, and he shrugged again, and he sat back with his glass. “And to anyone who asks, you’re my bodyguard. In case one of those big, rough humans,” he added, “decides to lay hands on my terribly important person.”

He took a long drink of that cheap kenser’s piss, and the burn of it fortified him; maybe it made it easier to see the humor in it, maybe it burned some of the awful bitterness out of the irony. Maybe it scrubbed away some of the horror Tom felt, sitting across from Oisin in this toffin politician’s body. He didn’t think so, but maybe – maybe it just made it more bearable, somehow.

“But I’ve gone on long enough. Well, Mr. Ocasta?”