Luckily he didn’t seem to have anything sinister in mind and just led me back to this place.
It was dimly lit, in the way Chinese restaurants tend to be, and I tried to point out my light, worried my belly’d cause a disturbance—the dining room looked pretty full.
He shook his head and chattered at me a bit more as he led me to a seat in the corner overlooking the whole room.
I had no idea it was supposed to be this cold out tonight—I didn’t have anything warm on at all. It was a mercy that there was no wind, at least.
Only a few steps from the door my whole body was numb and stiff with cold.
There was no way I’d make it home like this. I made it as far as the corner… I had a kind of idea it’d be easier to catch a taxi.
I didn’t get as far as trying to flag one down, though, before I was overcome with a massive coughing fit.
It didn’t start out that bad—just a tickle at the throat—but very quickly it got to the point where I felt I was going to be sick just from the force of it.
And then it felt like I was retching for real, and then I coughed up—a spray of confetti, glittering in the night air.
What the hell?
I stayed working late, as usual, trying to get the week’s screw-ups sorted out for payroll.
The pile of confetti at my desk got deeper, hour by hour—I didn’t think I’d had so much fall into my mane… But it was a lot of hair, and I was always finding random stuff in it. This just would happen on the day I leave my brush at home.
It was already dark outside. I squinted at my monitor—it took a couple of seconds before my eyes focused on the numbers. “Um… definitely time to go home and sleep,†I said. I clocked out, logged out, and swept the pile of confetti from my desk into the trash bin, which gave me an all-too-clear experience of how stiff from typing my fingers were. Dang, I thought. I’m really going to have to quit doing these late nights. I gave my head one last shake over the wastebasket—at least a dozen scraps of orange and yellow paper fell out of my mane. Dammit, Stevens, I thought, as I stepped out the front door.
It was frickin’ cold outside.
I’d only found out about it by accident—I’d been wandering across town again, when a muscular Chinese man with a scruffy beard came up to me and started chattering away in his language.
I’d looked around a bit worriedly to see if I was about to be swarmed or something—I really didn’t feel like being ganged up on again.
“Hey, who’s there?â€
Someone was behind me, on the bridge.
Sucks to be them.
No, that’s not good at all. Bodies would be worse than witnesses. But the fuse was still going and I was too far away now to stop it.
Nothing to do but keep running, now.
The sky lit up behind me a split second before I heard the blast.
The damage was done. I only hoped there would be nothing left of the man to find; they’d look a lot harder for a murderer than a saboteur.
But I wasn’t ready to be a murderer.
The temple of Aiol at Aleksandreï is the largest structure in the city these days. Regardless of how important I became, though, I still felt like the smallest thing in it.
Not that I ever managed to become very important. From my first year in the service of the god, when it became clear I had no aptitude for the divine engineering, I was relegated to a clerical position. That, though, I was good at, and soon enough I was managing most of the temple’s secular affairs.
Then the railroads came—a perpetual headache.
It seemed simple enough in principle—Aiol, the god of winds, had handed down the principles of harnessing wind and steam and smoke to do the work of men. And, certainly, carrying trains of wagons to all parts of the world was work the divine engineering could handle, but it hardly seemed worth the expense.
After all, the trains would only run if the rails were perfect.
In the cities, that was easy. But even along the rail from Aleksandreï to Bousantie there was quite a bit of countryside—opportunities for thieves and peasants to steal the iron, for trees to fall, for lands to flood—delays and repairs, delays and repairs.
And now they want a railroad built all the way to Tianan in the country of the Sers—did they never learn ambition is a vice?—but with the support of a god, many things are ventured.
I had only met the god Aiol once. I was still, at the time, trying to understand the principles of steam-powered machines, when he came into the classroom where I was studying.
For those who have never seen a god, I should say they are very like their pictures—like a hornless satyr from the waist up, but with feet almost like an ape, though without the thumbs they have. He looked young; but the gods are young when they choose to be.
Ironic that Seran work would keep the road to the Seran country from being built.
He checked the station, just to be sure. Empty; good. No witnesses. Outside of the station, nobody would be around for a good mile or so.
He went back down the rails to the Coudn bridge. It wasn’t the most impressive bridge the Aleksandreïans had built for their railroads, but like all of them it was built at great expense.
And after tonight, it would be no more.
He set up the bomb on one of the bridge’s foundations, unrolled the fuse a comfortable distance, lit it, and took off running downstream.
I’ll admit I only have a vague direction on this so far.
I took a taxi to Rico’s where I figured Blake’d already be waiting for me. But when I gave my name to the maître d’—Green, reservations for two—I found he’d been held up as well; he came to my table about five minutes after I sat down, and he was soaked even wetter than I had been.
He didn’t apologize. “Quite a day out, isn’t it?†he said, and grinned.
Blake is one of those people who tend to look a little different every time you see them. Today, I was sure he was quite a bit fatter than the last time I saw him… but he wore it well, so I wasn’t going to complain.
He sat down across from me, picking up a menu. “So, did you order yet?â€
“Nah,†I said, “I just got here. Missed my bus, had to call a taxi.â€
“I missed the bus, too. I think they’re running ahead of schedule today. But I figured I’d walk, since it’s only a couple of blocks.â€
Most of you have probably heard of NaNoWriMo, a project where one tries to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. Â I’ve tried it a couple of times; the next Ralph story, which I haven’t posted yet because I don’t think it’ll really make sense until the current one is finished and posted, was my attempt last year. Â This year, I managed a whopping 688 words. Â I’m posting them as scraps because they’re too disjoint to fit with each other, but I’ll be working on trying to continue the story from here on out. Â It is set in Terce, but there are no satyriffic shenanigans, so.
Ainlouk waited outside the rail station at Tars, waiting for everyone to leave as night fell. His hand moved to check the bomb in his pack: still there, ready.
The last train to Aleksandreï churned out of the station, and the slaves and the Aiolan priests who manned the station filed out, heading back to their quarters.
He forced himself to count to a hundred before moving. The street was silent and dark with the lamps extinguished; it was a clear, hot night.
Ainlouk went around the back of the station, walking the rails through the yard where the merchants loaded and unloaded their goods, to the platform where the rich men who rode trains disembarked, and opened up his pack.
The bomb lay wrapped in heavy cloth.
Nov 28
Tags: body control, Frank, furry, Ralph, tigers, Turia, writing
Previous | First(ish)
Almost done with this story’s first draft, then I’ll get the full first draft posted. Also, I’ve decided I’ll be calling Ralph and Shine’s world Turia.
We worked out for a good half hour, till I was good and sweaty, even with the big fan going full blast.
I felt better. Endorphins’ll do that, Ralph thought.
And that’s why you’re always on the weights, eh?
He didn’t have to answer.
I got up, wiped down the equipment and took a good long shower in the guest bathroom, thinking of Ralph while the sweat rinsed from my fur.
Of course the monster was on me before I could prepare any further. I held up the spear, hoping it’d impale itself, though at the last second I realized this was probably not something I wanted to happen—it’d probably still knock us down and I’d be trampled.
Instead, it knocked the spear aside with its horns.
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