Chapter 21: The Hearse Right Here

In the mirror, I watched a wagon covered in a dusty white tarp wind itself down the cracked clay road. My viewpoint would overfly the wagon before looping back around. The commanding view was only cut by the thick canopy of green flanking the raised berm of the roadway.

“Now I finally know what it feels like to be the United States of America,” I said.

Electra pulled her head back into the cart. “You already made a drone joke,” she said. “Still, I can’t believe the thing is invisible.”

“How else would it survive Hell?” I waved a hand. “They’re the magical equivalent of herbivores, so their best defense is not to get caught at all.”

“So they just eat magic?” Electra asked.

“Well, it is Hell, so they also eat smaller demons that happen to wander into their jaws.” I smirked. “Never turn down a free lunch.”

“I thought there was no such thing as a free lunch?” Electra asked.

“Sure there is,” I said. “Just make something else pay the price.”

“Like what?”

“Here.” I waved a hand, summoning a little off-white ball of fluff and pushing it over towards Electra. “I have no idea what this demon is called; it’s basically a floating cotton swab.”

“Pruuuuu…” The barely-sentient ball of cotton warbled as it bounced off of Electra’s stomach. It started to float towards the back of the cart as its momentum wore off, before Electra scooped it up.

“Aww, isn’t it just the cutest?” She hugged it to her chest. “This thing isn’t secretly going to give me demon cancer or something, right, Em?”

“No, it’s basically a magical piece of plankton,” I said. “They float around on the mana currents in Hell, subsisting on… hot takes and bad vibes, or something equally asinine, until something with a mouth comes by and gobbles them up. They’re a favorite food of the invisible sky whales.”

“Is that what we’re calling them now?” Electra smooshed the little cotton ball in her hands, then began stretching it. It continued to squeak in her grip without expressing anything approaching distress.

“I mean, do you have a better name?”

“I liked space whale,” she replied. “Slick, evocative, a real A plus, like my PR team would have told me.” She gave a laugh. “I didn’t get a lot of A pluses, you know?”

“Make the corporate drones earn their salary,” I replied. “They were the ones who signed up to manage super heroes.”

She giggled again. “And I guess you felt the same way back when you were a corporate drone working for Aegis?”

I shook my head. “I was in accounting.”

“Gotta use that big brain for something.”

“Yeah.” I leaned back on my bench. “Like figuring out how much the CEO was underpaying me to afford her second Yacht.”

“Oof.” Electra gave a sympathetic wince. “Is that why you went all evil?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” I waved off her concern. “They were actually paying over market rate, their dividends were just better. It took more than the communist manifesto and some back of the napkin math to push me over the deep end.”

Electra sat down on her bench, still holding the cotton ball to her chest. “You never did mention why you quit.”

“I got canned, actually, towards the end of the whole Cipher incident.”

She blinked once, before her eyes widened. “Oh!”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “Not to say I wasn’t getting into some trouble before that; I had family problems that I thought were unrelated, but it turned out…”

“Am I about to get the whole scoop?” Electra leaned forward. “They say your file is so classified that only Wonderman has access to the unredacted version!”

I shoved her. “Stop treating my tragic backstory like a corny prequel movie.”

“Right, sorry.”

“Literally the worst.” I rolled my eyes. “My younger brother got caught up in the whole Red Diamonds mess, and I had to do some things to bail him out.”

“And that’s when you found out that…”

“I’d rather not talk about the rest, if it’s all the same.” I tried for a laid back smile, but the old wounds still stung, even after all this time. “Gotta save some material for my memoires.”

Electra laughed, but the unanswered question continued to hang in the air between us, stifling any further conversation until we made it to the final stretch of road before Silverwall. When the sound of the wheels switched to cobble, that was out cue to hop into the coffins.

The inside of the simple wooden boxes was unfurnished except for the lacquer—and they weren’t pine either—but hopefully the stack of unalive boxes would be our ticket past the outer gate.

“See you on the other side!” Electra said. Then she pulled the lid of her coffin shut, and I did the same. In the darkness, I heard the sound of wood on wood as Dee hopped into the wagon to stack some of the other coffins on top of our own. Given that the guards could see our classes if they could get a look at us, this type of subterfuge was necessary, even if it wouldn’t stand up to a thorough inspection.

“‘Ey there, Loncio!” I heard Dee call.

“Never thought I’d see the day when you boneheads went straight,” came the answering reply.

How fortunate, I thought, that we weren’t going to have a thorough inspection.

I let out a breath as the cart slowed to a stop. Dee and Dum exchanged a few words with the gate guards before their ‘friend’ in the guard, Eloncio, hopped into the back of the wagon to check the ‘merchandise’. From what the boys had told me, Eloncio was another one of Mama’s orphans. The matron had apparently helped raise half the street rats in Silverwall, and she did her best to get them into some kind of paying work, on either side of the law.

Eloncio made a show of shuffling through the coffins as he checked them; I could tell by the sounds he made. Before long though, he hopped out of the cart with a “looks good enough to me,” and the rest of the guards waved us through without another word.

“When you get off your shift, Loncio?” Dum asked. “I’ll buy you a pint, for old time’s sake!”

“Eh, long day today,” came the reply. “Check in at the Winking Rodent, usually go there when I’m feeling like slumming it.”

“That shithole didn’t burn down?”

“Not yet!”

And then we were through the gate.

Past the thick wall, the sounds of the city rose up around us. It sounded much the same as it had before we left. Were the people more worried? How the hell was I supposed to tell? The only time a crowd sounded different was when they started chanting in unison, and at that point, you usually had bigger problems.

The cart slowly trundled down the main thoroughfare of the city in fits and starts. Silverwall still utterly dwarfed Lady’s Port in size. If the shadowy Seneschal mobilized the population—hell, even if he just turned out the guard—he could easily march to Lady’s Port in two days, perhaps only one if he pushed it, and overrun us with pure numbers.

In that regard, the jungle worked to our advantage rather than our opponents. The road was wide enough for two wagons to squeak past each other, if you were wary of the slope, but mustering a thousand men and marching them down that road? It would not be particularly quick going, and as I’d just discovered, you’d be surrounded by the jungle on all sides, with who knows what waiting out of sight. More and more, I was beginning to realize why the northern part of Vecorvia was so isolated. It was just simply easier for the capital to leave Silverwall to its own affairs, unless things grew so out of control that they needed to march an army north through the dense, monster filled jungle.

No wonder one of those ever distant continental powers never managed to conquer this little tropical ‘paradise’.

I was drawn from my thoughts as we pulled off the main road and away from the crowd and voices. The ride grew progressively bumpier as we took twists and turns deeper into the city, until I found myself bracing my arms against the walls of the coffin. Fortunately, I wouldn’t have to ride the stupid box out of Silverwall.

At least, not if I was alive.

I let out a breath of relief as the wagon came to a final stop. I heard voices, some money changing hands, and then finally—finally—Dee and Dum pulled the rest of the coffins off of mine and let Electra and I out of our erstwhile ride.

“Finally.” I sucked in a breath of… slightly fresher air as I hopped out of the cart into the stables. “Felt like I was riding to my own funeral.”

“I’m surprised you never pulled that trick off, actually,” Electra said. She mussed her hair, but it was getting a bit long to spring back into its usual spikes. “The funeral thing, I mean.”

I smirked. “It’s on my bucket list.” I glanced around the dingy set of stalls we found ourselves in. “So where are we, anyway?”

“The Winkin’ Rodent,” Dee said. “Figured we’d meet Loncio here and talk about our next move.”

I eyed him. “You really trust Eloncio, huh?”

Dum shrugged. “He’s one ‘a Mama’s. We do right by each other.”

Dee chuckled. “When we can.”

“When we can.”

I shrugged. “I’ve trusted worse people for worse reasons,” I said. “Lets go inside, though…” I glanced at the rest of the Winking Rodent inn, “maybe we should stick away from the food and drink.”

“Awww.” Dum shuffled his feet, trying his best to look like a petulant child despite his hulking 6 foot 5 frame. “Why not? I heard they dun even put rats in the stills no more.”

I pinched my nose. “On second thought, it’s an order. We’re going somewhere else for food.”

“Thank god for that,” Electra said.

Dee and Dum grumbled, but followed the two of us dutifully into the inn itself.

They say never judge a book by its cover, but in this case, the cover really did tell the whole story. The inside of the inn was just as ratty and rundown as the outside, with uneven floorboards and rickety, splintering tables. Electra stumbled when her foot caught a buckled timber.

I grabbed her by the arm before she ate a mouthful of splinters. “Try not to make a fool of us before you even open your mouth.”

She pushed herself to her feet. “Knew you cared, Em.”

“That’s not—” I shook my head. “Whatever, let’s just grab a table.”

There was a surfeit to choose from, as the only patrons of the Winking Rodent were a drunk snoring over by a battered bar and a mangy dog snoring even louder from next to a cold stone hearth set into the far wall.

“On second thought,” I said, “Dee, Dum, see if you can’t find some chairs that will hold you up first, then we can all take a seat.”

It took some doing, and some shuffling around, but eventually we were all seated at a table near the bar. I would have argued for closer to the dog, but I was clearly outvoted in this instance. Sometime during that, the innkeeper wandered out of the back room.

He sized us up with two beady eyes. “Drinks?”

Dee and Dum turned their most ferocious pouts on me again.

“Ugh, fine.” I waved a hand. “One round for each of you, and pay for it yourself. I’m not covering beer expenses.”

Lady’s Port was… solvent, but only because internally I controlled all the resources, and up until I left, I’d been essentially paying people in company scrip.

At least one good thing would come of setting up a bureaucracy.

Dee and Dum settled down with their big pints of beer—a dive like this had to have some selling point—and eventually Electra and I caved and bought some bread and cheese. It wasn’t the worst meal I’d ever eaten, and that was about all I could say for it.

From time to time, I would check my mirror, taking in the flow of people on the streets of Silverwall. My ‘space whale’ was gliding high enough above that I couldn’t pick out individuals anymore, but it gave me what I needed most: an overview.

If I looked closely enough, I could even see where my old, burned-out warehouse still sat, alone and abandoned, right in the middle of the old docks.

I smiled. It was always nice to come back to an old friend.

At length, Eloncio finally showed up, sharing a quick round of greetings with the boys and grabbing a beer of his own before taking a seat.

He took a massive gulp of the frothy brew, before pulling a face. “Ain’t the same since they started fishin’ the rats out.”

I saw why they got along.