Matabar (Stubbing October 30th)

Book II. Chapter 76 - New thoughts

Chapter 76“Give me the wrench,” Ardi said, extending his hand.

“Which one?” Arkar’s thunderous, rolling bass replied.

“Arkar, We’ve fixed this spawn of industrial folly and slipshod engineering a dozen times by now,” Ardan nearly howled. “The number eight one, Arkar.”

“Last time, it was a twelve,” the half-orc grumbled and, judging by the jangling sound, began rummaging through the toolbox.

Ardan was lying on a wooden board fitted with makeshift “wheels” fashioned from automobile bearings. This was his own handiwork since he really didn’t want to scrub the floor with his back every time he had to crawl under the old generator in “Bruce’s” utility room. At last, the clattering subsided, and from the direction of Ardan’s feet, an oil-smeared, time-darkened iron wrench came into view.

“Here you go,” Arkar said.

“Thanks,” Ardan replied, reaching out to take the tool. Making sure not to shear any bolts, he carefully started unscrewing the little access panel to the rotating heads—the components responsible for the vibration of the blades that would strike the accumulator to produce sparks. It was a rather vexing malfunction, since all the inspection ports were absurdly small.

Relatively speaking, of course.

Perhaps an ordinary person with an average-sized hand might’ve found it reasonably comfortable to fiddle with this mad contraption. But Ard kept banging his knuckles, scraping his skin, and more than once, he found himself groping about almost blindly inside the machine.

“So, what’s the deal with getting a new one?” Ardan asked, if only to distract himself as his nerves began to fray due to the generator’s frustrating design.

By sound alone—since Ardan could see nothing but the scuffed underside of the generator—he guessed that Arkar had just offered a dismissive wave of his hand and braced himself against the wall while taking a swig of gin. It was rather strange, really—Arkar rarely drank in the mornings. And it didn’t matter that, given his orcish physiology, not even a full bottle of gin, or even several liters of it, would be enough to get him drunk. That was why orcs drank an entirely different kind of alcohol—one that was outright deadly to most other races—purely for the sake of intoxication itself.

“Things didn’t quite work out, Matabar,” Arkar muttered.

“What do you mean, they ‘didn’t work out’— Ardi cursed as the wrench slipped off the last, particularly stubborn bolt and his hand brushed hot metal. Blood dripped onto his face, and he had to literally lick a small flap of abraded skin back into place. “That guy came to you... what’s his name...”

“Mister Banier,” Arkar supplied.

“Exactly! Banier.” Ardan pressed his wrist against a rough, ungalvanized sheet of metal—one that was clearly about to surrender in its unfair battle against the encroaching rust. “From Billinder. They offered to sell you a generator.”

“Yeah, and their contraptions—generators, I mean—cost so much dough—exes, I mean—that it’s downright unbelievable!” Arkar exclaimed in frustration. “Why, twenty-five years ago, for that kind of money, you could’ve bought one of the first ‘Derks.’ And those would chug along faithfully for another dozen years... They really kept working, they did.”

“Inflation,” Ardan said simply.

“Infl...?” Arkar attempted to repeat the word but tripped over the first syllable. “Is that some kind of shameful, whor— bedroom disease?”

“It’s when money loses value,” Ardan explained. Finally wresting the little panel free, he inspected the rotating heads. “Hand me the box marked ‘heads,’ please. We need to replace the third and fourth ones. They’re numbered in there.”

Arkar set his bottle on the counter and dug around among the tools until he passed Ard the needed parts. And so began the long, awkward, and very tedious process of replacing the worn out components.

“I I know,” the half-orc snorted, clearly circling back to their prior conversation. “But it usually happens slowly, Ard. Chits—exes, I mean—are worth a bit less over time, but not by much. For instance, when I first came to the Metropolis almost thirty years ago, half a kilo of bread cost six kso. And five years ago, it was eight. Not such a big difference.”

Although Arkar might not have known the big, fancy words, he certainly knew how to count money. He both knew how to and loved doing it. Otherwise, he could never have managed to pocket so much money on the side for so many years and still remain unnoticed by the Orcish Jackets. And if some hired bookkeeper ever spotted an error and decided that blackmailing the Overseer of one of the Six was a very clever, perceptive, and completely safe idea… Well, Arkar always managed to arrange things so that the one found guilty in the end was that daring but foolish accountant.

In fact, Arkar only ever hired those accountants who were dirty from the start and didn’t mind working with “gray ledgers.” So, it was probably well-deserved when they ended up behind bars or in labor camps, felling timber, mining ore, or laying yet more kilometers of railroad.

“But lately, with each passing year… something strange is happening with these… fences… prices, I mean, Ard,” Arkar said, pulling out some jingling tool and tapping it against the bottle’s bottom. “That same loaf of bread is twelve kso now. In just five years… And do you know what bothers me even more than the dough?”

Arkar had grown so pensive that he didn’t even bother to correct his own slang. Of course, after a year and a half, Ardan had learned the gangsters’ unique slang and the professional jargon of the investigators. But Arkar didn’t correct himself out of a concern that Ardan wouldn’t understand him, but simply out of habit, for his own sake. It was a strange little linguistic quirk of his.

“What?” Ard croaked, concentrating on fitting a replacement head onto the spindle without bending anything or slicing open his palm.

“The old folks say that the same thing happened before the Mercenaries’ War,” Arkar replied, a little more quietly than the situation required. “Back then, a year before the front opened and the draft began, something weird was going on with the prices as well. Everything got more expensive. And then, bam—war. A fuc— a real mess of a war it was.”

The Mercenaries’ War happened on the Taian Peninsula. It was a bloodbath that started in the year 441 and lasted until the end of 444. It earned its name because the Principality of Taia was supported by the Republic of Castilia and the League of Selkado. Granted, the latter had had no political ambitions for said war and, for a very hefty sum of money, had provided Castilia with their ships. The Castilians, after loading their “mercenaries” onto those ships, had secured the backing of the N’gians, who’d naturally fought alongside the Tazidahians. As a result of this, for three years, the Empire had battled not only Taia’s military, but countless mercenaries of every creed and nationality.

In the end, that war became the Empire’s last territorial acquisition to date. The Principality of Taia lost nearly forty percent of its land territories and a staggering ninety-six percent of its water territories. In the peace accord that was signed in a besieged Ezmir, Taia renounced all claims to maritime territory, both beneath the waves and above them.

Ezmir itself did not fall only because Castilia, Selkado and the Confederation of Free Cities declared that if Ezmir were taken, they would cut off the Empire’s access to the eastern shores of the Shallow Seas.

Why?

Because an unconquered Ezmir was like a splinter in the boot of an Empire marching across the pages of history. Which, of course, made it advantageous to everyone else.

It was nothing personal—if another country is weaker, then yours is stronger. That was the simple logic that even the Metropolis itself followed. Even the Empire’s closest allies—the Island Union comprised of Foria, Olikzasia and Lintelar—were not permitted to trade freely on Imperial territory, their largest importer. Conversely, the Empire paid the island capitals for the privilege of using their sea lanes.

That’s just how politics works.

At any rate, this was what Ardi had been taught in his lectures at the Grand.

As for the Mercenaries’ War, which ended more than half a century ago, it was the last large-scale conflict not only in the western hemisphere, but in the entire world. The last and the most horrific. According to the latest estimates made by historians, there were about two million and one hundred thousand casualties, civilian and military alike.

That was nearly as many as the combined casualties of the bloodiest wars in history: the War of the Empire’s Founding between Ectassus and Gales; the War of the Three Mountains, in which Castilia had fought Lan’Duo’Ha and Kargaam, all three of them warring over the same mountain pass; the War of Anakhreon, where Selkado had clashed with Castilia; and the Northern War, which, after Urdavan’s defeat at the hands of Scaidavin, resulted in the creation of the famous Scaidavin Enclave.

These four major wars () had, over the past half a millennium, claimed two million lives altogether. And the Mercenaries’ War alone had reaped a hundred thousand more than that.

Compared to that, what was the Fatian Massacre, where only mere tens of thousands had suffered…

“Everyone’s afraid of a big war, orc,” Ardan said a bit evasively, keeping the conversation going.

“And more so with each passing year,” Arkar agreed. “But before, it was just fiery headlines in the rags… newspapers, I mean. Now…” The orc exhaled and tapped the bottle’s base very loudly. “Believe me, Ard, you wouldn’t be talking about it so calmly if you’d seen what I saw on the Armondo border when the nomads broke through to Shangrad.”

“You’re likely right,” Ard said, not about to argue with the obvious. “But I didn’t see it, Arkar. And, to be honest, I wouldn’t want to.”

“And rightly so,” Arkar nodded—he did it so vigorously that he almost sloshed his gin around. “No one ought to see such things, Ard. Doesn’t matter if you’re human or Firstborn.”

Ardan, satisfied that the rotating heads were firmly in place and the mechanism had been restored to working order, tightened the bolts on the panel cover and rolled out from under the generator—which was by now practically falling apart before their very eyes.

Arkar, standing by the door, was rocking an almost empty bottle of gin in his right hand and a screwdriver in his left. He looked tired, rather unshaven, and slightly downcast. Pensive, even.

In the past week, he and Ard had barely crossed paths. Ardan had hurried out at dawn to catch the trams in time for his first lecture at the Grand, and spent his evenings holed up at the “Stables” or—when their schedules had aligned—with Tess. And Arkar, naturally, hadn’t been sitting idle either, keeping busy with his gang’s affairs.

“What happened, Arkar?” Ardi asked, rising to his feet and brushing the dust from his clothes.

The half-orc looked at him askance and snorted, baring his fangs and poking out his short tusks a little.

“Arseny’s being buried.”

Ardan, who had been closing the tool chest, whirled toward his companion. “Not the…?”

Arkar nodded.

“The Hammers’ Overseer,” he said heavily. “You had dealings with him at the start of the year.”

Arseny Enlikhov had been the retired sergeant of an independent unit of the Sixth Assault Brigade in the Second Corps of the Shangrad Army.

Together with the Fanged Division—in which Arkar had served alongside other Firstborn and half-bloods—he and Arseny had liberated Shangrad from foreign invaders, and afterward, they’d even crossed the border into Armondo. They’d guarded the engineers who had been fortifying the barricades and, by Arkar’s account, had mostly dug the trenches and heaped up the earthen ramparts themselves.

Despite understanding that he was imitating his older colleagues, Ardan still asked tersely:

“Natural death or..?”

“Natural,” Arkar confirmed with a nod, lifting the bottle toward his lips, though he didn’t end up taking a drink. “He was no young pup—pushing fifty. And out there on the border, in those flooded trenches, he froze his brown beans… his kidneys, I mean. He was forever plagued by stones or some such. Well, now his suffering’s over.”

Ard didn’t really know what sort of relationship the former comrades-in-arms who had become Overseers of rival gangs in the capital had had. Arseny and Arkar hadn’t been friends, hadn’t even been pals, but at the same time, it didn’t feel right to call them strangers, either.

Ardan didn’t quite understand that sort of feeling. Not in his gut. Intellectually, of course, he could imagine that when you repeatedly saved and took responsibility for the life of the person beside you in a trench, something in your head was bound to .

Something that, at the start of the year, had allowed him and Arkar not only to keep themselves alive, but also to thwart the Puppeteers’ plan to pit the gangs against one another.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from NovelFire. Please report it.

“You don’t believe it,” Ardan said softly, matching Arkar’s subdued tone from moments ago. “You don’t believe he died his own death.”

Arkar smirked crookedly and raised the bottle in a little salute.

“Investigator,” the half-orc rasped, practically mimicking the tone of all the others whose true motives Ardan had been able to guess in the past. “I don’t know, Ard… I don’t know.” Arkar sighed and rested the back of his head against the peeling doorframe. “Tell me it doesn’t all seem a little too tied up with a bow… too convenient, I mean. Less than a year ago, someone tried to start beef—to —the gangs against each other, and they mostly failed because of Arseny.”

Ard watched Arkar and couldn’t tell what exactly was troubling the half-orc. Was it that the man who’d been neither his friend nor his foe—nor even something in between—had died? Or was it that something was happening in the city that was dragging the gangster’s thoughts back to that period of his life which he almost never talked about? And even when he did, it was no more than a couple of words.

Like all soldiers…

“And his kidneys?” Ard prompted.

“Kidneys?” Arkar rumbled, then continued, “His kidneys… He’d been battling them for nearly thirty years, Ard. And then just like that, with a snap of the fingers, they’re Internal bleeding. The white coats… the doctors, I mean, didn’t get there in time. They brought a cold body to the hospital. Supposedly, it all happened during the night.”

“Arkar…”

“I know, I know,” the half-orc interrupted him, waving a hand to cut him off. “It’s just stupid… stupid and strange. And you know why it’s strange, Ard?”

Ardan didn’t bother to point out that perhaps the should have been mentioned first, not halfway through the conversation.

“Why?” The young man asked curtly instead.

Arkar sighed and gave the bottle a little swing, as if gesturing at something unseen—perhaps at his own memories of the past that were visible only to him.

“I remember Arseny as a pious man,” Arkar said, taking another pull from the bottle. “Not as fanatical, maybe, as some Northerners, but pious enough to be a real pain in the ass. And do you know what the Face of Light’s commandments say about paid love?”

Ard did.

“‘He who sells the body, sells the soul as well, for mortals have no authority over souls to dispose of them, since they are born of the Light and to Him alone do they belong,’” the young man recited from the catechism. “Though, technically, that’s about slave trading, Arkar, not prostitution—the practice was thriving in the sands of Al’Zafir when the Scripture first appeared. The interpretation regarding prostitution came about due to translation quirks, and not every branch of the Light even forbids…”

Ard broke off, catching the somewhat mocking and faintly reproachful look in Arkar’s eyes.

“Thank you, Ard, for your verbal Arkar had clearly meant to say “diarrhea,” but out of respect for their agreement, Ard held his tongue and didn’t correct the half-orc. “What I’m getting at, you clever little shit, is that nobody ever saw Arseny with whores. Neither the kind you pay for, nor the kind who can’t keep their skirts at their ankles. He was married. Once. Until his wife died of consumption—by then, we were both already running with the gangs. Since then, he led the life of a veritable… well, a eunuch, so to speak.”

“Any children?”

Arkar shook his head.

“Then what exactly is strange about it, Arkar?” Ardi finally couldn’t hold back.

“The strange thing is that they found his body in the Black Lotus,” the half-orc answered sharply. “And anyone who knew Arseny before he came to the Metropolis will tell you it’s all bullshit… fairy tales, y’see.”

Ardan stepped closer and stood facing his… friend? His landlord? His useful ticket into the Metropolis underworld? It was hard to say… Sometimes, Ardan wanted to believe it was the first option. But more often than not, he reminded himself it was probably the last one.

“People change, Arkar.”

Arkar gave the young man a small, knowing smile—the kind born not of arrogance, but of the simple difference in years lived.

“People don’t change, Ard,” the half-orc countered. “It’s just that as the years pass, all the shit we get tired of hiding from everyone else starts crawling out of us.”

“Well, maybe-”

“Maybe,” the half-orc interrupted him again. “Maybe something finally came crawling out of Arseny… I don’t know. But I intend to find out, Ard. I want to make sure he really decided to celebrate his fiftieth birthday in the company of a high-priced whore. Maybe he felt like his pecker was about to quit on him for good and so he went out for one last hurrah. Maybe… I hope so… but I’ll make sure.”

Ardan knew he would regret what he said next, but he couldn’t say it.

“How can I help?”

Arkar looked him in the eye and, lifting his free hand, gripped Ard’s shoulder. Arkar’s hand covered it as completely as a small cloak. Sometimes, despite their close camaraderie, Ari forgot that he and Arkar came from different worlds.

Kind of ironic, considering they were both half-bloods.

this job is going to be filthy, Ard. Filthy and drawn-out,” Arkar said, clearing his throat. He drained the last of the gin and tossed the bottle into the air, catching it smartly by the neck as if he were about to brain someone with it. “My tusks… the rest of the Orcish Jackets gang, that is, won’t be happy about me poking around—doing something, that is—for the Hammers. Not to mention the Northerners themselves. By the Sleeping Spirits, I can’t even go to his funeral…” Arkar sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “This shitty city, Ard. We’re like spiders in a jar here. Or rats up an ass. An ass full of shit. Or maybe I’m just getting old.”

Ardan flinched slightly. For a second, he felt like he was hearing Milar’s words in Arkar’s voice, even though Arkar was almost twenty years older than Captain Pnev.

“So as not to raise suspicion from either side, I’ll have to dig into this at the slowest possible pace. So no, Ard, I don’t need…” Arkar paused, then let out a short, wry laugh and lifted the bottle in a mock toast. “If you drank, we’d be better off getting smashed on our own brew. Getting so drunk we’d be howling like swine by morning.”

“Arkar.”

“What?”

“It’s possible that if I were to, as you put it, ‘get smashed on your brew,’ I would end up wandering the paths of the Sleeping Spirits in the morning.”

Arkar burst out laughing. Loudly. That slightly barking, rolling, booming laugh of his seemed to escape him without him even noticing.

“That’s true, Ard… that’s true. By the way, why do you keep looking at the ticker… the clock, I mean?”

Ardan—who had in fact just been eyeing the clock face yet again—sighed almost more heavily than Arkar had a moment before.

“I have a guest due to arrive in a few hours. And I’m really hoping she actually shows up.”

“A guest? and you’re Arkar nearly stumbled over nothing. “Kid, do I need to start worrying about the ceremony for you and Tess? Because I’ve already, just in case, swiped—er, obtained—a gift.”

Ard only responded with a dour grimace.

***

Ard, stirring a mug of thick cocoa, was sitting at “his” table in “Bruce’s” and reading an article in a very old and highly specialized gazette. As the title made plain, its contents were devoted exclusively to Star Magic and everything connected to it.

“Oh, sorry,” someone bumped Ard’s table in passing and, without waiting for a polite response, dashed off toward his companion.

By nightfall, as always, the bar was packed with guests of all kinds who’d been drawn here like moths to a flame by the jazz bands performing on stage. Over the course of a year and a half, Ardi had heard so many of them that he probably understood jazz almost as well as Peter Oglanov.

He found himself idly wondering how the old detective was doing these days.

Then again, it didn’t matter.

Instead of sitting here waiting for Taisia Shpritz, Ard could have spent his time with Tess, who was off rehearsing for her appearance in or occupied himself with his own research. For that matter, he might have even gone to visit Boris and Elena, whom he’d been seeing less and less often of late due to his packed schedule and the fact that Elena no longer showed up at the university.

“Is this seat taken?” A young girl of about seventeen left her boisterous group () and approached Ardan’s table.

He tore himself away from the paper and looked at the pretty girl, then at the empty chair across from him, and gave her a brief nod.

“You can take it,” Ard said with a wave toward the chair. “But be careful, it’s heavy—better ask someone to help you carry it.”

For some unfathomable reason, the girl spent a few seconds gaping like a fish on dry land, opening and closing her mouth in silence. Then she turned on her heel so abruptly that the hem of her fashionable cocktail dress slapped against Ardi’s legs with a of tiny crystal frills. An instant later, she had rejoined her group, who were now all staring at the young man with obvious disapproval.

Ardan suddenly felt awkward. If not for the fact that Taisia Shpritz was already half an hour late (), Ardan would have helped with the chair, but right now, he was in no mood for gallantry.

Still, why did he feel like Skusty would have burst out laughing at a moment like this?

Those were thoughts for another day.

The headline in the newspaper had blared: “Hunters’ Guild vs. the Government of Ral Province.” Below was an equally heated, possibly even borderline hysterical article.

do

Ard set down the newspaper and took a sip of cocoa. Taisia Shpritz suspected that the Hunters Guild had had a hand in her father’s unusual death, and so for many years, she had periodically turned her shark-like journalist’s gaze in their direction.

Not only in the Empire, but worldwide, history had proven time and again that organizations connected to Star Magic were the fewest in number… and among the most powerful. Initially, this had been the case because they’d formed the backbone of their nations’ military might, and now it was because they and their achievements defined the pace of progress and the general field of play.

Of course, this was all knowledge Ardan had gleaned from his General Studies lectures at the Grand. One would need to trust them in order to believe it, and there seemed to be no reason not to trust them.

“Could the new mining equipment in Delpas be related to Ertalain?” Ard murmured to himself, all the while studying the twilight scene outside the window—a scene painted in slush, rain, and the flickering streetlights hovering above the canal embankment. “Possibly… So why do I feel like it isn’t?”

The Puppeteers, if they truly had had a hand in the death of Taisia Shpritz’s father and, consequently, in the Hunters’ Guild, had at least fifty years, and possibly nearly three centuries, of a head start. Ardan had already seen at least three of their laboratories and the fiendishly complex apparatus constructed by Lea Morimer—may the Eternal Angels be merciful to her—based on the blueprints of Senior Magister Paarlax—may the Eternal Angels receive him.

And it wasn’t even the mechanical complexity of the apparatus that mattered, but the fact that it hadn’t merely been poised at the cutting edge of global Ley progress. No—the machine Mortimer had built had crossed the very same line at which Edward’s training ground had once stood.

Perhaps it had even gone further still, heading into the wilds of the fantasies recorded in the pages of the pulp literature Tess adored so much.

It was possible that articles like the one Ardi was tapping his fingers on were merely heralds of a wartime economy that the Crown was so diligently hiding behind industrial reforms. Of course, those clever, ominous words hadn’t originated from Ard at all, but Boris Fahtov. The youth hoped that his friend—who was increasingly welcoming members of opposition political parties into his home—had simply soaked up other people’s thoughts and words, but…

Ard remembered his trip to Shamtur with Tess perfectly. After what he’d seen on the Fatian border, war had, in one way or another, been visiting the young man’s thoughts far more often than back when he’d sat at a school desk, listening to lessons on the History of the Empire and the World.

“How tiresome,” Ardan whispered quietly, summing it all up.

Ardan sat at the table, reading the paper, sipping his viscous, bittersweet cocoa, listening to the performance of yet another jazz band, gazing out the window and… noting the crawl of the minute hand.

Taisia’s lateness stretched from fifteen minutes to thirty, then to an hour, then to two, and by the end—when a second group of musicians had already taken the stage—Ardan was forced to acknowledge the obvious.

If Madam Shpritz hadn’t appeared four hours past the time she herself had set, then waiting any longer was simply foolish.

The young man pulled Milar’s signal medallion from his pocket.

Ard thought, pressing an inconspicuous stud.