Legend of Ransera

The sky above the river was the color of steel, or the gunmetal dullness of a clockwork artifact.

“My mind is clear,” protested a voice nearby, too young, too frantic, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Hellshouse, though its sign read Sister Ava’s Home for Wayward Girls. “It’s as though my body is…” But the door shut behind him and he didn’t hear the addict’s philosophical meanderings any longer. The Hellshouse was a bar for professional villains; they kept most of the rabble out unless the rabble had money.

Maus was tending bar, deft despite the hook that had replaced one hand as though he were the caricature of a pirate. It worked well enough to tug down the handle of the draft to pour a round of beer. He saw Oren and smiled, his teeth a webwork of buttery gold and brown decay. Oren found himself a place at the bar, between the tan, spice-sharp skin of one of Nadi’s whores and the once-crisp naval uniform of a tall Zaichaeri whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of scars. There was a story there. Everyone here had a story.

“Dett was in here early,” Maus said, shoving a pint across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Oren?”

Oren shrugged. The girl with the intoxicating scent giggled and nudged him. The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In a place that often bought and sold beauty, there was something about his distinct lack of it. The antique clockwork involved with his seemingly simple hook whined as he reached for a mug.

“You are too much the artist, Master Oren.” Maus grunted. It was what passed for laughter with him. He scratched his overhanging belly with his hook. “You are the artist of the slightly… funny… deal.”

“Sure,” Oren said, and sipped his beer. “Someone has to be funny here. Sure as fuck isn’t you.”

Maus was quick, but the blade was subtle and a short beat passed between the jab and the pair of them smirking at each other. The whore’s giggle went up an octave.

“Isn’t you either, little sister. Vanish, all right? Nadi, she’s a close personal friend of mine.”

There was something that passed for gentleness in his dismissal. Gentle had no place in the Hellshouse, but Oren was a child of places like this. His father was a boss. His mother was an assassin. The thieves and killers, whores and con artists — they were his family.

The girl looked Oren in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.

“Mists,” he said. “What kind of a place are you running here? A man can’t have a drink.”

“Ha,” Maus said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag. Nadi shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.”

As Oren was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria.

Maus grunted. “Someone walked over my grave.”

“The Galerians,” bellowed a drunken, half-elf, “Galerians bloody invented clockwork. Give me the Imperium for a fake limb any day. Fix you right, mate…”

“Now that,” Oren said to his glass, not even having to look to see Maus’ irritation rising up in him like bile, “that is so much bullshit.”

The Clockwork Wastes likely held caches of undiscovered clockwork wonders that the Galerians had never dreamed of. And anyway, the black market here in Cathena brought together clockwork, magic, and surgery enough to equip a man like Maus with a surprisingly effective appendage. But Oren doubted all of that could fix what was wrong with him.

It had been a year since he fucked up.

“I saw your girl last night,” Maus said, passing Oren his second drink.

“I don’t have one,” he said, and drank.

Maus grunted. Oren shook his head.

“No girl? Nothing? Only business, my artist friend? Dedication to commerce?” The bartender’s small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. “I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic; you wind up in the river.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Maus.” He finished his beer, paid, and left, shoulders hunched higher and narrower than normal when he walked out into the rain. Or his hackles were up. Or he felt eyes fixed between his shoulders. Threading his way through the crowds, he could smell his own sweat.

Oren was young. A year younger and he had been a rising star in Cathena’s underground. A pedigree was one thing, but he had had to work harder to be taken seriously for all that. Anything he said or did, they glanced askance, wondering if he was trying some funny business. There was an art to it, though, knowing when to use the name and reputation of one of the people who fucked him into being, and when not to — a tool like anything else; a weapon like anything else; a shield like anything else.

A year ago, he had made the classic mistake, the one he had sworn he would never make. He stole from his employer. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence whose ship was bound down the river and along the coast to Silfanore. He still wasn’t sure how he had been discovered, not that it mattered now. He had expected to die, then, but his father had only smiled. Of course, he was welcome, he told him, to the money. And he was going to need it. Because — still smiling; o villain, villain, smiling, damned villain — he was going to need it if he survived what was about to happen long enough to reach a healer.

Strapped to a bed in a dilapidated hotel, worked over by artists with sharp steel and vicious potions, he had hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. It was his great fall. His body had been a weapon, but the true weapon was the mind. For months, then, his body was meat and his mind was a prisoner of his own flesh.

He was a shadow of himself now, though growing stronger. He wondered how long it would be until his head rose too high and taller people removed it from his shoulders.



Aurin was old. A decade older than Oren had been in that bar on the other side of the world. Now he was at a bar in the Commons, nowhere near the theater whose business had brought him here.

A pretty little bird had tweeted in his ear about the lady sitting at a table nearby, looking nervous, looking perplexed, and the man sitting across from her not drinking what he had ordered. Though the bird was only parroting back what he had heard and seen, Aurin knew things. He knew the theater, the Cabaret’s neighbor, and he knew the people who owned it. Thankfully, they didn’t know him well enough that she would likely recognize him here, far from the Jeweled Arches, especially with his coppery hair covered by a scarf and a jaunty hat.

He knew she was a gambler, though she didn’t slum it at Madame Lunaria’s establishment. Probably wise, as Lunaria would be sitting opposite her at her table right now, the threat of disgrace being used as leverage in the negotiations.

If he hadn’t had the context, though, their conversation would have made no sense. He did have context, though, and so it was all quite interesting to follow. She owed this man, and he didn’t want part ownership of the theater as collateral. He wanted coin. But he was patient; Aurin could see that. She was defeated; Aurin could see that too.

“Don’t look at me as though I’ve shit in your wine, Celisa,” he said, amused.

“But you have,” she complained bitterly.

“It’s only business, love.”

She sighed.

Nothing was determined nor likely to be by this meeting. Aurin deduced he had some time to make his own play to take advantage of the situation, but something was off. The theater was run by a triumvirate: a noble whose reputation gave the theater some standing among the elite, an artist whose reputation gave the theater some standing among the aesthetes and literati, and Celisa herself, who was the partner who managed the financial affairs. That she would be so foolish as to gamble away her own stakes in a solid money-making enterprise seemed odd if she was successful enough to get to that point in the first place.

She wasn’t a noble and she wasn’t an artist, but she was failing at the financial affairs despite her supposed acumen. Perhaps she was acting as a fiduciary for silent partners. Perhaps she had developed other addictions that had weakened her mental faculties. Aurin had certainly seen several successful business owners become too fond of snorting magical powders to maintain their commercial success.

He would investigate.