Anyway, this one originally appeared in [...]]]> Not a new story this week, I’m sorry to say. I’ve been working on one, but I couldn’t get it finished in time. So this is an inventory piece, awaiting another draft – I like it, but I haven’t got it quite right. There’s something off in the rhythm.

Anyway, this one originally appeared in my Your Dead Mate LiveJournal under the title of “Peter’s Story,” so some of you may recognise it.

Peter found the knife beneath the altar in the ruined chapel. Some priest had hidden it there against the coming of the White Ravens, no doubt. Peter supposed that when the White Ravens came, they had found the priest somewhere other than the chapel, for here was the knife still, and the chapel they had destroyed.

He took it home, and slept with it under the sack filled with old rags he used as a pillow. He experienced no special dreams from doing this, was vouchsafed no visions and granted no powers. Although one night, he did nick his ear.

Sometimes, he would take it out and look at it, wondering where it had come from, and how it had fallen into the hands of the priests of the old god of suns and blood. It was nothing special to see, perhaps eight inches long, its flat, roughly triangular blade possessing a great number of irregularities, the whole thing made from a single piece of some dull metal. Peter knew little about metalwork, and could not identify the metal it was made of, save only that he knew it had no particular value.

Life went on, and Peter forgot about the knife for the most part. His parents, seeing little other option in their sleepy village, prenticed him to a hunter, and Peter applied himself to learning his assigned trade. But he had no talent for it. His master Lukas, patient though he mostly was, would not allow Peter to use the blades and snares that were his tools except under the closest of supervision.

One night, impatient of the old man, Peter took his knife out, and decided not to wait for the morrow to skin the rabbits they had snared that day. He knew that his master would be angry with him – and justifiably so – for ruining the pelts, but he also knew that it was the sharpness of his master’s gaze that made him so clumsy. Perhaps alone, he would do better.

That was why, when the hooded man came a sneaking in through the window, intending to steal what little Lukas and Peter owned, Peter was able to stab the man in the leg and pin him to the ground. Stealthy the burglar might have been, but he was also overconfident, and did not expect anyone other than himself to be awake in the hours that the wolves howled at the moon. That was how, even as he admired the stealth of the man, Peter was able to surprise and entrap him.

The next day, Peter was a hero to Lukas and to the others who lived nearby. No one recognized the face of the hooded thief, but they knew him by his deeds, and he had made no friends in the district. The man was kept in stocks for six weeks, until he could be sold into slavery, and the money thus raised be distributed among his victims as restitution for his thefts. Such was the law of Grennaton in those days.

The following day, Peter found that hunting came more easily to him. Perhaps all he had needed was a little confidence in himself. Perhaps he had needed to be blooded and think himself a man now. Perhaps it was something else again.

In time Peter became a master hunter, still keeping with him at all times the knife he now considered to be his luck. When Lukas died, Peter took in an apprentice of his own, a lad named Gerald. But Peter was still a young man, much younger than Lukas had been when Peter himself had been prenticed. He did not have the patience of his old teacher.

So it was that one day, when the never-ending questions of his apprentice had enraged him, he struck out, slicing a scar across the chest of Gerald with his knife. From that day onwards, Gerald never asked Peter another question. But then, he scarcely needed to. Peter himself now over-flowed with answers. Gerald suspected that it was guilt that drove his master, and took that as apology enough. Peter’s fellows merely thought that he gone mad. Nevertheless, despite their scorn, Peter learned how to read, and sat up late many nights reading the books he would barter off travelers.

In this way, Peter became much more knowledgeable, although no more wise than ever he had been. Still, he tried. When Gerald married a woodcutter’s daughter, Peter stood by his side at the wedding, and made no secret of his pride in the lad, who was now a master hunter himself. As a wedding gift, Peter gave the couple his cottage, and took to the road.

He told anyone who asked that he was going to visit his sister, but in truth, Peter had no sister. He had simply grown restless with life in a small village, and sought wider horizons. Besides, he was getting old now, and as much as he preferred to spend his days inside with a good book, out of the wind and rain, there was a part of him that rebelled against this. A part of him that wanted more.

Peter used the knife on a human being for the third time on the night before he reached the capital. He struck down a shirtless young highwayman with the same methodical skill he had learned in his years with Lukas. So calm and detached was Peter that he was able to envy the would-be robber’s youthful ability to withstand the elements even as he plotted the moves necessary to bury his knife in his opponent’s chest.

After that, his blood ran hotter, and the cold scarcely bothered him at all on the last day of his journey. Peter arrived in the capital, but he was no mere tourist, content to gawk at the wonders of Plassal. He wasted no time in seeking directions to the city’s famous university. Old though he was, and mocked though he knew he would be, Peter was determined to become a proper student.

It took some talking to persuade the rectors to allow a man as old as Peter to study at the university. At the last, it was only the promise that the professor of metallurgy could examine Peter’s knife that secured the hunter’s admission.

To Peter, the day he joined the university was like a second birth. He gave himself over utterly to his studies, never missing a class and spending long hours in the library reading for pleasure after his actual work was done. Often, he fell asleep there, to be found by the porters the following morning.

It was here that he first saw the ghost of the highwayman. The dead youth appeared to him one night, glowing with a sickly blue radiance that did not illuminate, but which rather seemed to age anything its light fell upon.
“Give it back,” moaned the ghost. “Give it back.”

Peter began studying exorcism, seeking some way to rid himself of this unwelcome visitor, but it was no use. The ghost came every night, and always it said the same thing, although sometimes it spoke with anger, others with sadness, or pleading, or cajolery. Peter did his best to ignore it while he searched for a more permanent solution.

After exorcism, he studied ghosts, and learned that many scholars believed that the spirits of the dead sometimes could not pass on to the next world if they had left things unfinished in this world. Peter pondered this in the light of the ghost’s words, but saving one thing only, he could see nothing he had taken from the haunt – and that was not in his gift to return in any case.

Abandoning this fruitless search, Peter became disenchanted with books for a time. One day, gazing out the window, it occurred to him that he had scarcely left the grounds of the university since he arrived there, and that spread out around it was the largest city in the land. After his classes that day, he went a walking through the streets.

Exploration became his new passion. Peter still attended his classes, but his attentions were elsewhere now. Each day that he studied, he longed for the class to end, that he could once more tread the byways of the city. At first, he simply wandered as the mood took him, following a scent on the breeze or the strains of a troubadour’s music. But this could only satisfy him for so long. Soon enough, he was spending his evenings in the university’s map room, and each day systematically exploring the city.

The markets were one of the last places he explored. Peter had no gift for haggling, and knew it. As such, he avoided the markets as best he could, and wherever possible, dealt with the same shopkeepers each time, hoping that the men and women in question were trustworthy.

One day, as he walked through the market, Peter had a flash of déjà vu. He saw a familiar face, although it took him some time to place it. The next day, he went back, seeking to confirm what he already knew. And he did. The man he had seen was the same thief he had captured so many years earlier, now bent with age and ill use, and still a slave.

The man recognized Peter, too. As soon as he saw him, the ex-thief leapt at Peter, trying to strangle him with his bare hands. His owner’s other slaves pulled the man off Peter, but it was too late for the slave already. To attack a freeman, no matter how slight the resulting injuries might be, was death for any slave. The man was strangled to death with his own chains by city watchmen as Peter looked on, and his owner was fined for his chattel’s unruliness.

That night, Peter was visited two ghosts. As always, the young highwayman was there, but now the slave had joined him. Together, they chanted the now familiar refrain: give it back, give it back. One ghost Peter had learned to ignore, but two were much harder. From that time onwards, Peter slept much less, and each night he grew angrier.

He threw himself back into his studies with a will. Peter was a logical man, and he knew that there were only two common factors in the lives of the two men who now haunted him. There was himself – and he had known himself his entire life, and felt that he contained few surprises now – and there was the knife. And so Peter began to research the knife.

Every smith Peter consulted agreed that the metal was all one piece, although they disagreed over how it might have been worked into its current shape. The professors of metallurgy still could not tell him what sort of metal the knife had been made from. One of them suggested that he consult an astrologer, since a metal unknown to science was almost certainly a sky-metal, fallen from the heavens in some thunderstorm or such. Superstition held that sky-metals were chips from the arms and armour of the gods, but modern science believed that they were merely the ejecta of volcanoes, thrust far but not forever into the sky.

Peter wasn’t really sure where he stood on the subject of gods, or of science versus superstition, but he remembered where he had found the knife. And so he began to dig into the histories and dogmas of the cult of the god of suns and blood and their enemy, the White Ravens.

The god of suns and blood had a name, Peter was astonished to learn. He was the creator, Vanshli, who had mutilated himself that the world might have warmth and light and life. The suns, Peter read with some disgust, were his three testicles. And the redness of the sky at dusk was his blood, showing through the light of day that turned the sky blue as the sun’s radiance diminished in its setting.

The White Ravens were a holdover from the time before sunlight, and every cloud in the sky was a feather fallen from their wings, slowly drifting down to kiss the grass, rock or sea. They hated Vanshli, whom they blamed for stealing this world from them, and for burning their children black at the first sunrise. Twenty-seven in number, the White Ravens were the brightest of stars, moving each in their orbits and creating the constellations that marked the seasons as they shifted across the sky.

But none of this brought him any closer to understanding the knife, or how it had tied these ghosts to him. In desperation, Peter turned to first to meditation, and then to drugs, hoping that they might bring him insights – or at least make it easier to ignore the haunts. He succeeded only in the latter, but that was such a blessed release that he had no reluctance to keep trying both practices.

In his meditations, he often used the knife as a focus. The metal was dull, but it would reflect firelight, and so he would sit alone his room for hours, his back to the fireplace and the knife held to catch the light. He would focus all his powers of imagination and will upon it, and if doing so yielded no insights, it at least served to keep the ghosts at bay.

It was at around this time that war came to the land. The neighbouring realm of Dolhemur had decided to act in an un-neighbourly fashion. No longer willing merely to covet the resources of their neighbours, the foreigners now sought to simply take them.

Every able-bodied man was called upon to serve, and Peter was no exception. When it came to the attention of his commanders that he was no mere scholar but a skilled hunter, he was re-assigned from the infantry. Instead of holding the lines of battle, Peter and those like him were sent behind enemy lines, there to reconnoiter and return, preferably undetected.

Peter was not greatly enamoured of this work. He had spent years of his life already stalking game of all sorts, exposed to wind and weather, and was heartily sick of it. But he was also, in his way, a patriot. And he understood that this was the task he was best suited to, so he kept his complaints to himself.

His commanders would not let him take his own weapons with him. Instead, he was issued with knives forged from jetiron, a night-black steel that reflected no light at all. Many times in those dangerous weeks he was glad of his new weapons. A few times, when the enemy got too close, he was forced to use his blades, and he was grateful for the additional stealth they allowed.

But his own knife called to him. When night fell, he was still troubled by his phantoms, although it did seem to him that they were less potent, less disturbing these days. He wondered if it was simply that his entire being was focused on the business of survival, or if it was the distance from the knife. If he returned to the capitol, Peter promised himself that he would experiment with the latter idea.

On his last night out, as he made his way back to the lines of his own army, Peter was assailed with greater force than ever before by his phantoms. They were three, now. The thief and the highwayman were now joined by Gerald. From his former apprentice’s manner of dress, Peter supposed that Gerald had been conscripted and sent on a similar mission to himself. He wondered what it was that he had failed to teach Gerald, that the younger man had died while he had lived.

The three phantoms did little more than implore Peter. “Give it back,” said the highwayman. “Return it to me,” pleaded Gerald. “I must have it,” cried the thief. Their words were the worst. Their sickly skin and eyes as black as the spaces between stars were bad enough, but it was the horrible discordance of their voices, all clashing, all out of time with one another, that most bothered Peter.

Peter’s commanders were pleased with the information he brought back, both from captured documents and his own observations of the enemy. There was talk of sending him back out, but it was decided to wait until more of the other huntsmen returned. Peter, already knowing Gerald’s fate, decided to keep quiet about it. No one would believe him if he told them in any case.

The next day, Peter bullied the quartermaster into returning his knife to him. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be without it, but rather that if he left it behind he had less chance of lifting his curse. And besides, he didn’t know how he’d live with himself if it fell into the hands of someone else, bringing the curse to them as well.

Peter was given a week’s leave, and he decided to spend that time in returning to his rooms at the university, to relax and study. As he rode back from the front, Peter happened upon a woman who had just given birth. With all the men gone, she had been forced to bring her goods to market alone despite her condition. Her infant was healthy and so was she, but the newborn was still attached to his mother. The strain of the birth had left her too tired to reach her pack, and she had been unable to cut the umbilical cord as a result. She begged Peter for his help, and he could not refuse her.

But the woman would not let him bite through the cord, as he had seen the midwives do in his village. Not when she could readily see the knife on his belt. Cursing himself silently for not hiding the knife better, Peter used the cursed blade instead. He wondered if he should tell the woman, but she was tired enough already. Peter helped her and her baby onto his horse, carefully making sure that all her goods were safely stowed.

Peter walked alongside the horse, leading it slowly down the road until they reached the next town. The woman was so thankful for his help that she insisted on naming the boy Peter in his honour, although he tried to dissuade her from it. He felt that, in some obscure way, naming the boy for him would place him under obligation.

It took Peter only a day and a half to travel from the front, even with the delays his companions had imposed on him. Once back to the university, he decided to spend more time in the library. The busy scurrying and politicking that took place within the institution’s walls seemed petty and pointless after his experiences of war, and if nothing else, burying himself in research would insulate him from that.

With no more promising leads to turn to, Peter returned to his studies of Vanshli and the White Ravens.

In the time before sunlight (Peter read), men and gods were not separate orders of being. They dwelt with each other and married among each other’s kin. There was no light in those days except that of the distant stars. Ketla, mother of Vanshli, was the first to realize that the stars were living entities themselves. She sang to them, and they came closer to the world, assuming the form of great and beautiful birds. They cast their light upon everything around them, and for the first time the plants grew and flowers bloomed.

These stars that came to the world were called the Ravens. In those days, there was no need to call them White Ravens, for they were the only Ravens. With the blessing of their light, men thrived, and Ketla became known as the goddess of song and insight. The Ravens lived among men, and like the gods before them, intermarried with men, giving birth to the first of the world’s ravens, who were much smaller than their starry forebears.

But the Ravens were inconstant. They withheld their light on whims, and forced men to grovel before them for light. They fought amongst themselves, and drew men and gods into their intrigues, and even into warfare. When Ketla tried to reason with them, they struck her down and cursed her line. Vanshli, her son, was among those worst affected by all this. He had been cursed, although not severely – a third testicle is awkward but hardly life-threatening. But his own son, Ussas, had been born under a more deadly curse than he, and withered away slowly throughout his infancy, prophesied to die on his first birthday.

Finally, Vanshli could stand no more. He took counsel of the wisest, and learned the secret arts of light and fire. And he sacrificed his future and that of his line to the goal of letting no other father or mother suffer as he had. He carved off his testicles, enchanted them, and cast them into the sky, where they burst into flame.

The Ravens were caught unprepared by this. Afraid of the new light that came not from them, they fled back to the farthest reaches of the skies. Their children, the lesser ravens, tried to follow them, but could fly neither so fast nor so far. They were caught in the heat and light of the new suns, and those who were not consumed were burned black as night, as all ravens are today.

Vanshli walked to the ocean, where he sat and watched the first sunset as he bled to death. He is accounted the god of suns and blood even so. And the son of Vanshli, Ussas, was purged of his curse by the suns’ light. When he grew to adulthood, he went in search of his father, and found Vanshli’s remains by the sea. Ussas also found the knife that Vanshli had used to mutilate himself, which he took to a forge and remade into many smaller blades. These he would distribute, now and then, to men and women who understood compassion and sacrifice. When all the knives had been given out, Ussas took himself into the heavens, where he was reunited with his father and his grandmother. Together, they and the other gods stand guard against the return of the White Ravens, even to this day.

Peter put down the book he had read this from with shaking hands. Could it be true? Was it possible that his knife, the knife he saw as cursed, was in truth among the holiest of relics?

He didn’t want to believe it. But neither could he see how it could be otherwise. And he wondered if, far from wanting to use the knife in their defence, the long-ago priests had hidden the knife because of its sacred purpose. Had he mis-used the knife? Profaned it? It was not a knife for killing or wounding, but a knife for healing.

Peter was unsure how a knife could be used to heal, unless it was in the fashion of a surgeon’s scalpel. True, this was a holy knife, blessed with some power he did not understand, but it had dealt pain and death as readily as any other knife in his hands. Was it, he asked himself, his use of the knife that brought down this curse upon him? Peter did not know what to think.

That night, his sleep was troubled by four phantoms. The three he was long accustomed to were there, but so was the woman from the road. She must have died, Peter realized, and wondered how. Had the front shifted so dramatically, and the township where he had left her been overrun and set to the torch? Or had he simply found her too late for the saving, bled out too far from her difficult labour?

Unlike the other ghosts, she did not entreat or beg or threaten him. She thanked him for the life of her son, for what he had done to save the boy – for without Peter, the child would have died as well.

Somehow, that was even harder to bear. It was a mercy – of sorts – when her voice faded a little into the din of the others, and their words lost clarity and form in all the noise.

Peter researched more, but there was little more to be found. The best he managed was to find a map showing the locations of the temples to the old god in his own land, and the lands about it. He took the map back to the front with him.

No sooner had he returned than he was sent out once more, again assigned to infiltrate the enemy’s positions. This time, however, Peter would be not a spy, but a saboteur. His mission, more than anything else, was to wreak mayhem on the enemy’s supplies and morale, and to sow chaos in their ranks.

Perhaps Peter had been given too much time to brood, or perhaps it was simply the ghosts who drove him, but he set to his task with a will. He struck in the night like an assassin, killing soldiers in their sleep, watchmen at their posts. He struck without mercy or remorse, despising those he killed for their blind obedience to duty, their youthful naiveté. To him, it was more like slaughtering sheep than hunting game.

He stayed on the move, never allowing the enemy to find him. He struck without pattern or plan. Sometimes he slew only the guardsmen, sometimes he would sneak past these sentinels and kill the officers they guarded.

And with every killing, the size of his ghostly entourage grew. Peter no longer slept at all now, although he no longer seemed to need to, either. His energy was boundless, exceeded only by his devotion to his mission. Although if asked, Peter could no longer have said what his mission was. The killing had become an end in itself, and the closest Peter could come to thinking beyond it was a territoriality like that of the beasts he once stalked. They had crossed his borders, and they would die. It was that simple.

One night, Peter came across a place he recognized from his stolen map. A temple of Vanshli, ruined and decayed, but not entirely abandoned. When Peter entered the building, an old man stood praying within the circle of the three fires that burned in the chancel. He drew his knife and stepped forward for the kill, but then he hesitated. This old man was no threat, he realized. The knife suddenly felt heavy in his hand, weighed down with all the blood he had spilled with it. He dropped it to the floor.

At the sound, the old man stood and turned to look at him.
“I have felt you,” he said softly, “all about this land. You and your weapon.” Peter fell to his knees, his eyes filling with tears.
“What am I?” he asked. “Please! What am I? What have I become?” The old man walked over to him. Placing a hand on Peter’s shoulder, he spoke in a kindly tone.
“You are a poor, ignorant fool, my son. Although for that, you cannot entirely be blamed. The knife should never have been allowed to fall into your hands.”
“I read that the knife heals, but I cannot make it do so,” said Peter. “I can only harm with it.”
“You misunderstand the nature of the knife,” said the old man. “Take it up, and gaze into it, and I will explain.” Peter complied, and the old man cleared his throat. “The knives of Ussas are neither good nor evil of themselves. They no more decide whether to hurt or help than does a fire or a wind. But when used with a conscious thought, they allow the bearer to take on certain aspects of the person they cut. That is how they were used to heal. The priests of Vanshli would use them to cut diseases or injuries from those who came to them for aid. And the blessings of Ussas would allow them to be healed of these things themselves. The pain and pestilence would be sent into the skies, to add man’s pain to that of Vanshli, to fuel the burning of the suns.”
“But I have never used the knife in such a way,” Peter began. But then he wondered. Wherefore had he acquired his stealth and cunning, if not from the burglar? His curiosity, it not from Gerald? From the woman and her son, he realized, he had taken separation, literally cutting himself off from other humans. And from a thousand or more enemy soldiers, he had taken youth and duty.
“There is no way to take this burden from you, my son,” said the priest, reading the question forming in Peter’s eyes. “That is why these knives were kept to the priesthood, to forestall just such ill chance.”

Peter looked from the priest to the knife and back again. Rising, he stabbed the priest through the heart. And from him he took the knowledge of his curse, and the fact that nothing the knife took could ever be given back. And he went out into the night once more, and returned to the business of guarding his territory. And some say he does so still.

The wind begins far to the south.

Out beyond the coast of Mertlund, at the point where the icebergs that calve from the Frost King’s Maw each spring melt, the wind rises, [...]]]> A fragment, part of a larger work (which is, in itself, part of a larger series of works). Hope you like it.

The wind begins far to the south.

Out beyond the coast of Mertlund, at the point where the icebergs that calve from the Frost King’s Maw each spring melt, the wind rises, a thing of vapour, and begins its long journey north.

It crosses the sullen land of Mertlund, where fanatics endlessly devise reasons to burn each other alive in shows of piety, and follows the long, slow course of the river Gyernys northward, gaining heat and vehemence from the pyres of the faithful and cruel.

It blows over Abilene, the ever-shifting City of Women, where no man can set foot save by invitation, and the cookfires and forges of that place add their smoke and independence to the wind as it passes.

In the foothills of the Milwena, the mountains that separate Mertlund from the rest of Teleran, the wind piles up, slowly building in height until it can dare the peaks. Always, it leaks northward through the Pass of Durac, where that once-great god, who either killed himself or begged a friend to kill him (accounts vary), is buried in his fitful sleep, not truly alive, not able to die. The smoke vents and lava streams of the pass add their passion and sadness to the miasma.

And still the wind blows north, carrying this horrid fog with it, until it reaches Talicaeda itself.

In the City of Dreaming Architects, few will venture out of doors on the nights when this wind blows. For the wind and the fog have a strange effect on that great city, and it is not Dreaming Architects that it is named for at such times.

It is called the Home of Regret, the Unchosen, the ending of all paths not taken.

It is the City of Abandoned Dreams.

High on a place balcony, Jarryn watches the fog below, and the wind toys with what remains of his hair. Jarryn is an old man now, and the triumphs of his youth are long behind him. His reward for a great service has been a lifetime of still more service, although as Prince-Consort and King in all but name, this service has had its compensations. For three years now, he has been making slow progress in his campaign to persuade his strong-willed wife to yield her throne to their oldest daughter.

Tonight, that all seems like a mockery.

Tonight, Jarryn can see the map of all his forgotten hopes and dreams, all the choices he did not take, laid out before him. And he wonders, not for the first time, what it is that makes his city like this. What it is that makes the glorious City of Dreaming Architects turn into this hideous and mocking shadow of itself.

Most say it is the wind, and all it carries north, but Jarryn has long since satisfied himself that this is not the case. Unfortunately, that satisfaction has been his only progress in solving this mystery of what afflicts his city.

For those who wonder: yes, I do know what the story of Jarryn’s great triumphs is, and I fully intend to write it someday soon. This is just a little more congenial to my mood right now.

Way too early in the morning. Two men stand on a rooftop above an apartment above a Vietnamese restaurant, waiting for the pre-dawn light.Below them, Brunswick Street seems to hold its breath, but the snoring that [...]]]> Okay, here’s chapter one of yet another new story – as always, let me know what you think:

Way too early in the morning. Two men stand on a rooftop above an apartment above a Vietnamese restaurant, waiting for the pre-dawn light.Below them, Brunswick Street seems to hold its breath, but the snoring that can be heard from one nearby window is closer to the truth: the street merely sleeps. It’s too early for there to be trams or waste collections. It’s too early for anything but the keenest of joggers and dog walkers to be out – and Fitzroy isn’t home to them in any case. In fact, the only living beings the two men have seen for more than an hour now have been cats and possums.

Drysdale turns to McEwan and says “We’re wasting our fucking time.”
“And freezing our arses off,” agrees McEwan. But neither man leaves his post. They have a job to do.

For months now, the Brunswick Street shopping strip, from Gertrude in the south to Alexandra Avenue in the north, has been terrorized – well, if you were a sensationalist headline writer, that’s the word you’d use – by a reign of vandalism unparalleled in the history of this city in both scope and variety.

Aside from the spray-paint cans so customary of graffiti all over the world, there’s a distinctly Melbourne feel to the vandalism – but then, Melbourne’s the stencil art capital of the southern hemisphere, so that’s no surprise. Of course there are going to be stencil artists, ranging from furtive boys with simple designs they’ve cut into A4 pages up to the huge, elaborate and as-yet unfinished multi-coloured design on the wall of one of the buildings opposite the Running Dog restaurant, upon whose roof the two men stand and watch.

But there’s more. There’s posters, and stickers, and one time, the pages of that unpublished novel neatly taped, one after another, along shop fronts in careful numerical order. There was even, briefly, a massive art installation that blocked traffic for three days until it could be removed. But these are less common if more newsworthy and a bigger fucking headache for anyone stuck dealing with them.

Of course, one person’s vandalism is another’s free expression and yet another’s artistic masterpiece, so the battle lines have been drawn along the same old cultural fault lines of age, class and politics. Detectives Rufus Drysdale and Grant McEwen are studiously neutral on the subject in their conversations with each other.

The Brunswick Street Irregulars, as they have been dubbed, have become heroes to some and villains to others, but one thing that everyone has to agree on is that they’re criminals. Even if several shopkeepers have refused to press charges.

“I’m going for a smoke,” said McEwan. The two policemen were forbidden to smoke at the street end of the rooftop, in case a glowing ember alerted someone to their presence, but the back end of the roof overlooks nothing but a small balcony of the apartment beneath it. Drysdale grunted an acknowledgement, his attention still riveted to the street below. Internally, he knew full well that he was most likely in the wrong part of the street. The Irregulars had a knack for appearing where the police weren’t – it was one of the reasons they were called irregular, in fact. But the unfinished design was too obvious a provocation. They had to be planning to come back to it, sooner or later. It was worth watching, even if that did mean that other crimes took place elsewhere. There are only so many eyes in the force, after all. Better to have them where they could do some good.

At long last, light was starting to appear on the eastern horizon. Against the yellow and pink undersides of the clouds somewhere over Gippsland, Drysdale could make out the outline of Studley Park hill against the sky in the background, although it was still too dark to see much else. In a few minutes, the sun would be high enough to reach over the hilltop, and it would be light enough to see how they’d been made fools of tonight.

*   *   *

Tommy ran as fast he could along the dew-slicked cobbles of Napier Street.

He wanted to look back, but he didn’t dare. He couldn’t spare the time. His pursuer would gain on him if he slowed down to look back at them. As it was, he knew that his time was limited.

He still couldn’t believe it, the horror that he’d discovered by accident, but Tommy knew it was true. He had all the proof anyone could ever want. And as much as he didn’t know what to do about it, Tommy knew exactly who to tell. Rag would know what to do – he always did. Rag was the one who’d figured out how to find all the Irregulars and bring them together, to make them a true collective, all without tipping off the cops to what he was doing. If he couldn’t sort this out, no one could.

Tommy kept telling himself that if he could just make it to Rag’s place before it got too much lighter, he’d be okay. They’d know where Tommy was, but it would be too late to stop him then. He could get the word out to the other Irregulars. But it was getting a little brighter every second, and the early morning fog was burning off much quicker than he’d hoped it would.

At least he could now see Rag’s place in front of him. Only another few houses to run past now – maybe 30 metres. He was going to make it!

The first shot sparked off the stones next to his left foot. He stumbled, but caught himself and kept running.

He barely heard the next shot before he felt the horrible burning impact of it in the middle of his back. As he fell to the ground, Tommy’s last thoughts were not of Rag, nor of his killer. His dying thought was that he would never finish the stencil design he’d been putting on the front of the old Punter’s Club.

*   *   *

“Did you hear that?” said McEwen. Drysdale was about to reply when they both heard the second shot.
“Which directi0n?” asked Drysdale.
“Towards Smith, probably over Johnston. Beyond that, you got me,” replied McEwen. He radioed the news in, while Drysdale descended to street level to start the car.

*   *   *

Rag awoke from his sleep with the clear sense that something was wrong, but no idea what. It wasn’t until he heard the second gun shot that he realized that the first shot must have been what had awoken him. A split-second later, he heard the cry, and the uncomfortable thudding of a body falling down in a way it was never meant to.

He sat up and swung his feet onto the floor, looking for his clothes, heedless of the effect his sudden movements had on the mattress. Sally rolled over into the gap he’d left in the bed, and woke up almost as fast as he had.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Gunshots, outside,” Rag said, pulling on his shoes and looking for his coat. Sally reached for the cordless.
“Police?” she asked.
“Call ‘em,” said Rag with a nod.
“Ambulance?”
“I think so, but I’m going down to check.”
“Yell back,” she said, dialing emergency. He nodded. “And be careful.”
“I’m always careful,” he said as he left the bedroom. She watched him go, and couldn’t help but smile.
“You’re never careful, love,” she said softly.
“Pardon?” said the voice on the phone.

*   *   *

McEwen got the word just as Drysdale was crossing Napier. The emergency call was relayed to them over the car’s radio, Drysdale hit the anchors and pulled a fast u-turn. The car rocked on its axles, but all four wheels stayed in touch with the road. He steered it around the corner more carefully, and they made their way to the location they’d been given.

*   *   *

When Rag raced out the door, it didn’t take long to see where to go. There was blood splattered all over the windows of one of the cars parked just a few metres down the street. He could see the back of a head poking above the front of one car, and for a second he hoped that meant they weren’t too badly hurt. But when he looked around the car, he saw that the head belonged to a young woman who knelt by Tommy’s body. And Rag knew right then that Tommy was dead. You didn’t walk away from a bullet hole placed neatly between your shoulder blades.

He turned and called back through the open door: “Sally – Ambulance. But they don’t need to hurry.” Then, more quietly, he added, “Fuck.” The girl looked up at him, and he saw that she was crying. It was only then that Rag realized that tears were falling from his own eyes.
“He’s dead, isn’t he,” said the girl. It was phrased like a question, but it had the finality of a statement.
“Yeah, he is,” said Rag, sinking to his knees on the other side of Tommy’s corpse from the girl.
“Did you know him?” she asked, but Rag’s answer was lost in the scream of brakes as a non-descript car with a flashing blue light sitting on its dashboard pulled up.

*   *   *

McEwen was out of the car practically before it stopped, pulling his gun and covering the three people in front of it.
“Okay, hands up people,” he said with a calm he didn’t entirely feel. The man and woman stood up and stepped away from the body, reaching for the sky. Another woman ran up with a phone in her hand, took one look at the body, and threw herself into the arms of the man, weeping.

The man gave McEwen a look that was equal parts pleading and sheepishness, and lowered his arms to put them around the woman at McEwen’s reluctant nod. Drysdale stepped up next to his partner.
“Who wants to talk first?” he asked. The weeping woman turned angrily to face them, waving the phone at them.
“I called you,” she spat.

Chapter Two

The business of giving a statement was always a lengthy one in Rag’s experience, especially when the cops had nothing to go on.

When [...]]]> Here’s a much belated addition to that first chapter I put up here some weeks back – I’ll try to keep them coming a little more frequently.

Chapter Two

The business of giving a statement was always a lengthy one in Rag’s experience, especially when the cops had nothing to go on.

When they had you, they knew it and you knew it, and the whole statement thing was pretty much a formality. When you were clearly an innocent witness, it was usually even simpler – not to mention that the cop taking your words down would be a lot nicer to you about it. But when they didn’t know what to do next, they just tried to keep you talking, hoping you’d say something – anything – that would give them something to work with.

He’d repeated his story a number of times, despite a fair amount of hassling about his record. It was a colourful one – Rag would be the first to admit that – but he’d never even been sought in connection with a violent crime, let alone any of the work he’d done with the Irregulars. In fact, it was amusing that the cops didn’t even have Rag down as a known alias, just his actual name.

There should be nothing to tie this to the Irregulars. Sure, he, Sally and Tommy were all members, but the cops didn’t know that. Tommy hadn’t been doing anything tonight, so there shouldn’t be anything linking him either.

So sooner or later, the cops would have to let them go. Long experience had made both Sally and he deft hands at the art of giving matching statements, although it was relatively unusual for the statements to be true. The phone records bore them out too, as did the complete absence of any weapon.

In the meantime, Rag just sat in his uncomfortable chair and thought about Tommy.

Tommy…

Tommy was like a younger brother to Rag, although Sally liked to describe him as being both the child and pet they’d never had. He was just a kid, still wet behind the ears in many ways. He was a little naïve and a lot nice, and that was just fine with Rag.

But not so fine with someone else, apparently.

Jesus, who’d even want to hurt Tommy, let alone kill him?

Surely it was a case of wrong place, wrong time? Just plain old bad luck – fatally bad, but still, just luck. Surely.

Rag didn’t believe in violence. Oh, he accepted the reality of it, but it was like the Bible – sure, the thing existed, but that didn’t mean it had the answers. So when he promised himself that he’d do everything he could to catch Tommy’s killer, it wasn’t about finding the bastard and delivering a punitive beating (or worse). It meant, as strange as it sounded for a man who was one of Melbourne’s most notorious (if least dangerous) criminal masterminds, helping the police in any way he could.

* * *

“What have we got?” asked McEwen with a sigh. It had already been a long cold night, and it showed no signs of getting any shorter. Nor any warmer.
“Victim’s name is Thomas Richard Harrison, aged 22, of Northcote,” Drysdale began.
“If he lives in Northcote, what was he doing in Fitzroy at this time of morning?” McEwen objected.
“Two of the witnesses claimed he was a friend, and speculated that he might be on his way to see them.”
“Leave that for when we get to their statements.”
“Two shots fired – everyone agrees on that except for one of the witnesses who was asleep. But we’ve got emergency calls from up and down the street that all agree on that point.”
“Only two?”
“Yeah. So I’m leaning towards this being deliberate. Harrison wasn’t just unlucky, someone wanted him dead in particular.”
“Okay,” said McEwen. “Why?”
“Well,” said Drysdale, drawing out the syllable and enjoying doing so, “there was nothing remarkable in his pockets except for a Dictaphone.”
“What’s one of those?” McEwen asked.
“A kind of tape recorder,” replied his partner. “Interestingly, it was open, as if a tape had just been removed from it.”
“We would have noticed that, surely, when we patted them down for weapons?” asked McEwen. Drysdale shook his head.
“Not these tapes. Small enough to fit into an empty matchbox.”
“So you’re saying someone took it?”
“One of the witnesses – the first two, presumably.”
“Or it was just empty.”
“It was warm to the touch.”
“So it had just been used,” said McEwen, “and it’s useless without a tape”
“Exactly.”
“Then who has it?”
“I don’t know. We can ask them to submit to searches, but at this point, we can’t compel them. They’re only witnesses.”
“Alright. What else?” asked McEwen. Drysdale smiled.
“You’re gonna love this bit. Harrison’s clothes have a variety of paint stains on them, especially around the cuffs of his shirt and jacket.”
“He might be one of them.”
“Better than that. If these other two were friends of his who think it’s nothing out of the ordinary for him to visit them at first light, they might be in on it too.”
“A break.”
“Yup.”

* * *

Drysdale took a long pull from his coffee cup. It tasted like crap, but after a night on that rooftop, he was drinking it more for the heat than anything else. Even the caffeine was a secondary consideration.
“Now,” he said, “the witnesses.”
“Yeah?” prompted McEwen.
“Okay, the happy couple are Gareth Andrew Rogers and Sally Heloise McShane. Unmarried, but lived together for about five years now. We’ve seen them both before, but never been able to pin much on them. They’ve both proved themselves to be useful witnesses in the past with various stuff.”
“Such as?”
“Uh, smack dealers and thugs, generally.”
“So, reasonably solid citizens, just with a different sense of what’s legal?”
“Something like that.”
“Does this mean we have to worry about them going vigilante?” For all that they’d been partners for nearly a decade now, Drysdale still didn’t understand his partner’s obsession with vigilantes. There hadn’t been one in Melbourne since they were both constables more than two decades ago, years before they’d even met, let alone partnered. But he let it pass.
“They’re neither of them violent, as far as we can tell. Gazza here once let a man beat the crap out of him before staggering into the station and swearing out a complaint against him – I’d say they have the strength of their convictions.”
“Well, that’s something. Are they likely to muddy the waters for us any other way?”
“Regarding the Irregulars stuff? Yeah, I think they’d both lie without hesitation to protect their own interests.”
“How well?” asked McEwen. Drysdale grimaced.
“Probably well enough to get away if all we have is circumstantial evidence. We’d need something physical to tie them to.”
“We need that tape.”
“Well, it couldn’t hurt. It might turn out to be irrelevant, though.”
“What else do we have to go on?”
“The other witness, Peta Elizabeth Henderson.”
“Tell me.”
“23 years old, studying journalism at RMIT. Lives a couple of blocks away, and claims she was on her way to the convenience store on Brunswick and Johnston when she heard the shots.”
“We think she has the tape?”
“We don’t know. Her or Rogers, unless the site investigation turns it up.”

* * *

Sally wiped her eyes. Again. It was annoying how hard it was to stop crying. When they’d been down at the station, she’d held it in. But now there was nothing to fight against, no point of force to oppose. It was like being in a tug of war when the other side suddenly lets go of the rope. The tears flowed, and promised more to come in the days after.

There would time enough for tears. It was hard to stop, but she did it. Willpower. It was the thing that had attracted Rag to her in the first place, for all that it was now also his major source of stress in their relationship. She focused it now.

There was work to be done.

Tommy Harrison would not be forgotten soon or easily. Sally would see to that. Every single Brunswick Street Irregular would be out tonight, doing their own thing in memory of their fallen comrade.

Some morning very soon would see the biggest effort yet from the Irregulars. She’d make sure of it.

Be interested to hear what [...]]]> So here’s a short story I wrote recently that didn’t quite come together for me. It also takes place in a new setting, Hell, which is separate from either the Lokiverse or Teleran, but of course, is linked to them both (in some way I haven’t quite figured out yet).

Be interested to hear what you think of it, folks.

The worst thing about Hell is how they let you leave it.

Temporarily, or course. There’s no permanent reprieve from damnation. In fact, there’s no reprieve at all. They let you leave, every so often – but only in order to increase your damnation.

Some of us, anyway. Hell is very big on the whole poetic justice thing, and those of us whose great sin in life was never stopping to help some poor tourist with directions have a special place in the great scheme of really horrible things.

We get sent back to Earth every so often, with no other human company, but with precisely 666 young demons on their first trip to see how the living half lives. It’s our allotted task to take them around and show them the sights. They’re supposed to learn from it, and I suppose maybe the last 66 or so of them actually do each time. A bit, anyway. The tour ends when the last one of them gets discorporated and automagically whisked back to Hell.

Enterprising members of this fraternity of which I am a member – and I say fraternity advisedly, since we are probably 98% of the male persuasion – have found the limits of this. There’s the unlucky slob who took a tour to New Orleans exactly one day before Katrina hit, and at the other end, the cunning bastard who’d taken a tour to the Burning Man festival back in 2003 and still wasn’t back in Hell.

Me, I like to take them to Manhattan. Herding 666 demons down Broadway is surprisingly easy. It’s kind of like herding 666 primary school aged kittens on speed down Broadway, only without the meth. But no one looks out of place in Manhattan. (I’ve heard this said about Burning Man too, but trust me, no one normal-looking belongs there. Manhattan is different.)

Besides, I had a plan.

For my last several visits now – about three years, given how irregularly there are 666 demons ready for the tour, and how many of us there are sentenced to this particular torture at any given time – I’d been laying plans. Each time, I’d managed to smuggle a note to a still-living friend, and each time, I’d gotten my replies. Contacts had been made, arrangements solidified, and a plan agreed upon. And this tour was going to be the one.

Of course, I had to move slowly, at least to begin with. It began with a call I made from phone booth. That was all it took to set it in motion. Then all I had to do was wait and whittle.

So I spent a long afternoon waiting for the first hundred or so demons to get hit by cars. A few more were convinced to try launching themselves off the balcony after the musical was finished. About half of them were persuaded that swimming was a good idea – there’s no water in Hell, only steam and ice, each of them about 200 degrees away from being water – and that the East River was a fine place to try it.

Plus there was the usual attrition from demons getting caught picking pockets, shoplifting or assorted other petty crimes. Most inexperienced demons, when caught doing something that the laws of the living frown upon, will panic and voluntarily discorporate. The ones who don’t invariably fail to survive long in a holding cell. I believe the record is 8 hours, but apparently that was a slow night.

The rest of the day, I just tried to keep them too busy to think much. I kept them out of libraries, galleries and museums, and instead took them to one department store after another. For hours. Until every last one of them was laden down with sample bags and plastered with “Hello my name is” stickers. It slowed them down, and it distracted them. Hell is conspicuously lacking in certain kinds of variety – colors and scents being two notable examples – and I’ve always found that playing human eye for the demon guy (or whatever) will keep them busy for hours. Plus, not a few of them will choose to discorporate after blinding themselves with perfume or hair spray.

In any case, by nightfall, I was down to about 80 demons. These ones were smarter than their more easily departed brethren, sistren and genders-you’d-rather-not-know-about-ren. They were the ones who were able to master their pride enough to ask me questions, like “what’s this gnawing sensation in my belly?” and “you only cross when the light’s green, yeah?” I would, under normal circumstances, have been rejoicing in their intelligence. After all, the longer they stayed, the longer I stayed. But not this time, and not this way.

As we had arranged, I killed some time in a Starbucks, watching from the windows for my friend across the street to signal me. And before too long, it came – the guy in the “The End is Nigh” sandwich board threw his board into the trash. It was time.

I had managed to lose a handful more in Starbucks. Demons have no universal physical characteristics, which means there’s always a few to whom caffeine is either poisonous or just too great a stress on their metabolisms. But I probably still had more than seventy demons following me when we crossed the street to Union Square.

Demons being demons, they had all been pleading with me all day to take them to Ground Zero. But none of them knew a direct route there, so when I suggested we take the subway, no one objected. It was one more part of the New York experience that they had yet to sample.

Now, there’s a rumour that in the seventies and eighties, Hell actually outsourced part of its punitive transit system to the New York subway authorities. I’ve never been able to find out whether it was true or not, but as someone who lived in New York in those years, it’s always felt true to me. I was counting on that. I hoped that standing on a subway platform might feel familiar enough to get demons to let down their guard. At least a little.

The platform was crowded, and the demons needed no encouragement to push as close to the edge of it as possible. They wanted to hear and see the next one before anyone else, to feel the wind of an oncoming train. What they felt instead, each and every one of them, was a sensation of pressure in the area roughly equivalent to what we humans would call a back, a brief sense of vertigo, and finally, the lightning burn sensation of hitting the third rail. This is because my friends, and some of their friends, and some random dudes they met on the way here

Oh, wait, did I say every one? I meant every one but the one that I grabbed hold of. The one that my friends and I took prisoner. The one who now lives in a cell in my house, and has not, in five years, recognized that he is a prisoner. Nor will he ever, I hope, so long as we keep the dvds, console games and junk food coming, although what with how hard I have to work to keep him supplied, I sometimes wonder is this is not Hell after all.

We got it, we got it, we GOT IT!

I’m pleased to announce that the Kliest-Hargraeves Consortium has been awarded a prestigious new contract today. We’re going to be doing the Dristeen Ducal Line project! This is [...]]]> From: Hailey Vincent To: Company Address Book Date: 1, 12:00 Subject: We Got It!

We got it!

We got it, we got it, we GOT IT!

I’m pleased to announce that the Kliest-Hargraeves Consortium has been awarded a prestigious new contract today. We’re going to be doing the Dristeen Ducal Line project! This is worth billions and billions, and the lion’s share of it is going to be ours.

For those of you who haven’t been following the news: Dristeen is a relatively new planet, out towards the spinwise edge of our galactic arm. The people there recently decided that democracy wasn’t working out for them, and have chosen, in a planet-wide plebiscite, to be ruled by a genetically perfect line of Dukes, who we are going to design and create for them.

I hope you can see why I’m so excited about this – my team and I have spent months working on getting this job for us, and at times, it looked like we’d wasted all that effort. I confess, until last night, I was still worrying that those assholes from Blue Sun would snake it out from under us, but in the end, we were just too good for them.

So, three cheers for us, and a big thank you to all the members of the sales team and everyone else who’s consulted for us in putting together the funkspek. Look for the formal announcement and the signed off version of the funkspek sometime tomorrow.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go take some of that holiday leave I’ve been building up in the three years we’ve been putting this together.

Seeya,
Hails.