Distopia (Land of Dis) Page 11

  Wyngalf nodded.

  “I like him,” said Tobalt.

  Ten

  They awoke early the next morning and managed to smuggle Tobalt out of the inn while it was still dark. They streets were mostly deserted, but they tried to avoid the major arteries through the city to be on the safe side, taking narrow streets that wound through a seemingly random configuration of slums and tradesmen’s shops. They relied on Tobalt, who could see better in the dim light, to guide them. Unfortunately his sense of direction did not seem to be on par with his vision.

  “Knowledge of our precise whereabouts seems to have eluded me,” said Tobalt, coming to a halt in the middle of the street.

  “You mean we’re lost,” said Evena.

  “There’s someone up ahead on that corner,” said Wyngalf. “I’ll ask him how to get to the harbor. Wait here.” Tobalt and Evena remained behind as Wyngalf went to speak to the man, who was standing so still that Wyngalf wasn’t entirely certain it wasn’t some kind of dummy dressed up in a cloak. But as Wyngalf approached, the man threw back his hood and turned to face him, his completely bald head shining in the moonlight. The man was thin and gaunt, but his age was impossible to determine. A smile seemed to be playing at the corners of his mouth.

  “Uh, hello,” said Wyngalf uncertainly. Stopping a few feet from the man, he noticed the man had a prominent marking on his forehead: a vertically oriented oval. “I was hoping you could tell me the way to the harbor.”

  “Fleeing the city, are you?” said the man. “My name is Arbliss. Your accent is strange, sir. Are you perhaps from across the sea?”

  Wyngalf wasn’t keen on revealing the details of their situation to a stranger, but if satisfying the man’s curiosity was the price of getting to the harbor, then so be it. “My friend and I are from the Jagged Coast, yes,” he said. “We need to get her on a ship home.”

  “Your friend, eh?” said the man, peering down the street behind Wyngalf. “A young woman, yes? And a goblin!”

  “Look,” said Wyngalf, growing impatient, “can you tell me the way to the harbor or not?”

  “Oh, yes,” said the man with a wink. “I can give you directions to the harbor.” The man was now speaking with unnecessary volume, and enunciating in a way that made Wyngalf think of a dramatic performer on a stage.

  “Okay, then,” said Wyngalf, when the man didn’t elaborate. “Any time now would be fine.”

  The man took a step toward Wyngalf, and Wyngalf’s hand went to the hilt of his sword. But the man simply leaned forward and said into Wyngalf’s ear, “We’ve been waiting for you. My name is Arbliss. I am keeping it safe.” He pulled back a few inches and winked at Wyngalf.

  “Simply Wyngalf,” said Wyngalf, mimicking the man’s whisper despite himself. He shook the man’s outstretched hand. “You’re keeping what safe?”

  Arbliss chuckled softly. “That’s it,” he whispered, then pantomimed locking his lips with a key. He slid the imaginary key into a pocket inside his cloak.

  “So,” said Wyngalf impatiently, “the harbor?”

  The man slapped himself on the O on his forehead, then held up his index finger. With his other hand, he reached inside his cloak, pulled out the imaginary key, and pantomimed unlocking his lips. “The harbor,” he announced, reverting to his loud, theatrical manner, “is that way.”

  “Thank you,” said Wyngalf, turning to leave. But the man’s hand shot out, gripping him by the shoulder. He pulled Wyngalf close and whispered into his ear, “I will tell the others. We will be ready when you return.” He gave Wyngalf’s shoulder a squeeze, relocked his lips, and then turned and walked away without another word.

  Wyngalf shook his head and walked back down the street to where Tobalt and Evena waited.

  “What was all that about?” asked Evena.

  “No idea,” said Wyngalf. “But he says the harbor is over there.” He indicated the direction the man had pointed.

  “It’s as good a direction as any,” said Evena. Wyngalf and Tobalt agreed. They set out down the road, and it soon became evident that the strange bald man had been telling the truth: the streets began to slope gradually downward, approaching sea level. After a few minutes, they could smell the sea air and hear gulls crying in the distance.

  The sun was just coming up when they arrived at the harbor, but already the docks were aflutter with activity: large men were grunting and sweating as they carried crates and barrels up a ramp to a ship about twice the size of the Erdis Evena. There seemed to be a great deal of bickering and confusion on and around the ramp, and Wyngalf realized after a moment that some men were loading the ship while others were simultaneously unloading it. Occasionally a collision would occur and work would cease while the two parties swore and shook their fists at each other. It seemed only a matter of time before a full-on brawl broke out.

  Tobalt pointed out a weathered sign reading “Shipping Guild Office,” with an arrow underneath the text that seemed to point directly out to sea. After a moment, Wyngalf realized the sign was directing them to a tiny shack near the end of the dock, just past the ship that was the center of all the commotion. “You’d better wait here,” Wyngalf said to Tobalt. Tobalt nodded and slinked away some distance down the road, where he wouldn’t draw attention. Not that anyone was looking their way; everyone in the vicinity seemed to be involved in the drama unfolding around the ship. Wyngalf and Evena continued down the dock toward the office.

  The office was a tiny, square building resting atop a wooden framework that raised its floor a couple feet above the surrounding dock, presumably to give its occupant a good view of the goings-on around it. There was a window facing each side of the dock, and through a small window in the door they could see right out to the bay through the window in the far side of building. Entering the office, Wyngalf and Evena found a little balding clerk furiously shuffling through papers on a small desk. They waited for some time to finish what he was doing and acknowledge their presence, but after a few minutes they began to think he was either deliberately ignoring them or simply shuffling papers recreationally. Wyngalf amused himself by watching the chaos unfolding around the ship just outside the north-facing window, but he could tell Evena was rapidly losing her patience, and he feared she was going to make a scene and spoil her chances of getting on a ship. Wyngalf cleared his throat loudly, but this also had no effect. “Good sir,” Wyngalf said at last. “My friend seeks passage to Skuldred.”

  The little man stared for a moment at the papers as if trying to determine where the sound had come from, then eventually looked up at Wyngalf and Evena, who tried to smile inoffensively.

  “Skuldred?” the man asked, as if mildly offended. “Where’s that?”

  “It’s on the Jagged Coast,” said Evena, but the man continued to stare obliviously.

  “Across the Sea of Dis,” Wyngalf offered.

  “Across the Sea?” said the man absently. “Nobody goes across the Sea.”

  “I wasn’t figuring on going directly,” said Evena. “I thought if I could to one of the ports in the North, I could travel across the sea from there.”

  “Not going to be cheap,” said the man.

  “My father has money,” Evena replied. “He’s the richest man in Skuldred.”

  The man cocked an eyebrow at her. “Where?”

  “Skuldred. That’s where I want to go.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so?” the man asked irritably. “You can’t get there directly. You’ll have to take a ship to one of the ports up north first.”

  “What a splendid idea,” Evena said. “I wish I had thought of that.”

  “Yes, well, I’ve been doing this for quite a while, Miss,” said the man. “Where did you want to go again?”

  “Skul-dred,” Evena said, through gritted teeth. Wyngalf put his hand gently on her shoulder in an attempt to calm her.

  “Skuldred,” the man said uncertainly, and his eyes fell to the papers on his desk again. He lifted one stack to peer at o
ne of the sheets, ran his finger down a column of text, and then tapped his finger on a line about halfway down. “Here we go!” he exclaimed.

  Wyngalf smiled at Evena. For all the appearance of chaos, it appeared that the clerk had a very precise system after all.

  But then a scowl came over the clerk’s face. He clutched the paper in his hand and suddenly ran past them out the door, slamming it behind him. Sheaves of papers fluttered across the room in his wake.

  “I wish people would stop leaving in the middle of conversations like that,” Wyngalf said. They watched out the window as the little man ran down to a ship farther down the docks, waving the paper in the air.

  Evena sighed. “I’m thinking about trying the barrel trick again. There was a lot less paperwork involved.”

  Wyngalf nodded, not entirely certain whether Evena was joking. “It might come to that,” he said. Even if they could get the clerk to acknowledge them and agree to let them on a ship, there was no telling where they might end up.

  While they waited for the clerk to return, Evena began picking up the papers that had fallen to the floor. As she did, she sorted them into separate stacks according to some criteria that were unknown to Wyngalf.

  “Do you think that’s a good idea?” Wyngalf asked. “The clerk might not take kindly to you disturbing his system.”

  “System!” Evena snorted. “He has no system. That man is an idiot. My guess is that his only qualifications for this job were the ability to read and perform simple arithmetic.” She picked up a page from the floor, glanced at a column of figures and sighed. “Scratch the arithmetic part. My father wouldn’t have hired this guy to dispose of fish heads.”

  Wyngalf looked on nervously as Evena went through the papers on the desk, arranging them in well-ordered stacks. “I know you think you’re helping,” he said, “but that clerk, idiot though he may be, is our only chance to get you on a ship back home. Upsetting him probably isn’t the best… oh boy.” Through the window he saw the clerk jogging back toward the office, muttering to himself.

  Wyngalf turned to face the door and braced himself for the clerk’s entry. The door swung up, and the little man walked in, still muttering to himself. He stopped short, apparently surprised to find someone inside his office. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, glaring at Wyngalf. “You can’t be in here.”

  “We were here when you left,” said Wyngalf. “Remember? We were asking about passage to—”

  “What in Dis do you think you’re doing?” the clerk exclaimed, peering around Wyngalf to see Evena straightening the stacks of paper on his desk. “You’ve upset my whole configuration!”

  “Configuration?” Evena scoffed. “More like catastrophe. You had your outgoing mixed with your incoming, your accounts payable shuffled with your accounts receivable, your bills of lading filed with your customs declarations…. It’s a miracle any ships ever get out of this port with their proper cargo.” As if to punctuate her point, there was a loud crash outside as a rope snapped and a crate slammed into the dock, smashing to pieces. The contents—some kind of large green melons—hit the deck and began to roll in every direction. Several men tripped over the melons, dropping their own cargo, and soon the entire dock was an impassable bottleneck of crates, sacks and angry men yelling at each other.

  “Look what you’ve done!” cried the clerk. “That ship is due in Brobdingdon in three days, and now it will never get there in time!”

  “What I did?” said Evena. “If I’d been running this place, you wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place!”

  “Okay, let’s all take a deep breath,” said Wyngalf, trying to sound reasonable. “Sir, my friend meant no harm. She was only trying to help, and in her youthful enthusiasm she made the mistake of thinking—”

  “I didn’t make any mistake!” Evena cried. “He’s the one making the mistakes!”

  “Evena,” Wyngalf chided. “It isn’t your place to—”

  “Just get out,” moaned the clerk, staring hopelessly at the neatly arranged papers on his desk.

  “Please, sir,” said Wyngalf. “We can make it up to you. We’re young and strong. We can help you get the ship loaded.” He glanced out the window at the commotion on the dock. Several fistfights had broken out, and anyone who wasn’t involved in the fracas was either egging on the combatants or standing around in slack-jawed befuddlement. The ship’s cargo seemed to have been forgotten completely. “Or unloaded, whichever.”

  “It will take me the rest of the day just to clean up this mess!” cried the clerk, indicating the impeccable stacks of paper. “I don’t know what’s coming and what’s going!”

  “Don’t be silly,” said Evena. “It’s perfectly clear. This stack is—”

  “Grovlik have mercy,” the clerk moaned. “The guildmaster is coming!”

  Wyngalf and Evena followed the man’s gaze out the window in door, which faced the shore. A very well-dressed, aristocratic-looking gentleman was walking pertly up the dock toward the office.

  “I’m sacked for sure,” the clerk lamented, then ducked under the desk. For a moment, they thought he was attempting to hide, but he appeared a few seconds later with a metal strongbox in his arms. He thunked it down on the desk, pulled a key from his pocket, and opened the lid. Inside were several hundred gold and silver coins. The clerk shoveled these into his coat pockets and, before Wyngalf and Evena realized what he was doing, threw open the window opposite the door. “Good luck!” he yelled as he climbed out the window, and ran away down the dock. He seemed to be headed for a small rowboat at the end of the dock.

  “Our helpful clerk seems to have planned his escape,” Wyngalf noted.

  “If he’d applied that level of attention to his job,” said Evena, “he might not need to escape.”

  They watched as the man unwound a rope from a post, tossed it in the boat, and then leaped into the boat. The weight of the coins in his coat pockets put him off balance, though, and after rocking precariously several times, the boat capsized and he disappeared with a splash into the dark water. They continued to watch for several seconds. He didn’t come up again.

  “Or not,” said Evena.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Wyngalf. Having given up on the clerk resurfacing, he had turned to watch the guildmaster approaching through the opposite window. He was almost to the office.

  “Follow my lead,” said Evena. “And hide that box.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” said Wyngalf, but he grabbed the box and put it back under the desk. As he stood up, the door opened and the guildmaster stepped inside. Wyngalf hadn’t noticed before that the man wore a rapier at his belt. Furrowing his brow, the guildmaster looked from Wyngalf to Evena and then back again.

  “Who the devil are you?” he asked Wyngalf. Wyngalf opened his mouth but couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “New clerk,” said Evena. “You’re the local guildmaster, I take it?”

  “Of course,” said the man, turning to face Evena. “Lord Otten Popper. I oversee this branch. What’s become of Halbert?”

  “Had to let him go,” said Evena. “You just missed him, in fact. He was released with a small severance package. This is the new clerk, Fedric.” Popper turned back to Wyngalf, who smiled weakly and nodded at him.

  “Nice to meet you, sir,” said Wyngalf, holding out his hand. But Popper simply stood there, regarding Wyngalf coldly. Wyngalf let his hand fall to his side, and as the man continued to stare, Wyngalf began to feel some pressure to effect a more convincing impression of a clerk. He picked up one of the stacks of paper and begun to thumb through it, as if his work was too pressing to be halted for more than a moment. He pretended to lose himself in the minutiae of one of the documents, and finally he felt the guildmaster’s glare switch back to Evena.

  “And who might you be, lass?” he asked.

  “Lady Evena Herringbone. I came down from Central this morning to oversee the installation of the new clerk. You
may know my father, the notoriously reclusive Count Herringbone.”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Popper. His right hand moved toward the hilt of his rapier.

  “Understandable,” said Evena. “He is, after all, notoriously reclusive.”

  “I know nothing of any new clerk,” said Popper.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” said Evena. “Halbert has been losing bulletins left and right. Fortunately, Fedric has already made significant progress in addressing the organizational failings of this office.”

  Popper again regarded Wyngalf, who was running his fingers along an indecipherable line of text and muttering to himself. The guildmaster’s eyes fell to the neat stacks of papers on the desk. “It does look more organized,” he mused quietly. “Halbert always insisted that he had a system, though.”

  “That he did,” said Evena. “Unfortunately, his system was designed to make it impossible for anyone but Halbert to understand what was going on in this branch, and at that it was quite effective. Central is instituting a system based on the Tabaka protocols, to standardize the flow of information between branches.”

  “The Tabaka…” Popper began.

  “You’d know all about it if Halbert had been doing his job,” Evena said. “I don’t mean to accuse him of anything, you understand. Other than incompetence, of course, which he possessed in spades.”

  Shouts could be heard outside, and the guildmaster turned to look out the window. Another crate crashed to the dock, splintering to pieces and spilling its cargo. “What is going on out there?” he asked.

  “More of Halbert’s doing,” said Evena. “We’re still hoping to get the Numinda Fae to Brobdington on schedule, but Halbert really made a hash of the logistics, I’m afraid. Fedric has been working on it all morning.”

  The guildmaster scowled at the chaos outside and then turned back to Evena. Doubt came over his face. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Old enough to resent the question,” said Evena, with a touch of patrician annoyance. Wyngalf had to hand it to her, she made a pretty convincing aristocrat. But Popper seemed dubious.