The Vaen'ka: part 2

Lola flexes her detective muscles

This is my ongoing scifi / fantasy / crime fiction serial. New chapter every week.

The Triverse is
Mid-Earth, an alternate 1980s 1970s London
Max-Earth, a vision of the 26th century
Palinor, where magic is real

Previously: Former detective Lola Styles is investigating the murder of a rebel leader in the city state of Lairn…

Lairn.
3203. Early Verdant.

There was a man on the door, a human. He recognised Krystyan and waved them inside, the noise of the rains lessening somewhat. Lola’s eyes slowly adjusted to the relatively darker interior.

It had once been a home, albeit one repurposed for use as a safe house for the rebels. Now, it was evidence. The walls of the entrance were scratched, as if a knife had been run along the paintwork. Into the next room, a general living space, and it had clearly been the scene of a fight. Furniture had been left overturned, feathers from shredded cushions still drifting about, disturbed by their movements. The wall lanterns were smashed, the walls beneath streaked with oil and wax.

There were no bodies in the room, but Lola could already smell something fetid and rotten emanating from deeper into the house. Blood painted the walls; whatever had happened in that room had been more than a mere scrap.

“How many were here?” she asked.

Krystyan grimaced. “Seven, in addition to Gallen himself. All highly trained.”

She nodded. “Then they were attacked by more opponents, or more skilled opponents.”

“It would not have been easy. I trained some of them myself.” Krystyan looked about the room, clearly dismayed. “Gallen was one of the founders of the modern Owkehu. He was a mentor to me, for a while.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, moving carefully around the room, trying not to disturb anything. They’d sent orders that nothing be touched, but it had taken them nearly two days riding to travel to Lairn. Lola had no doubt that the local rebels would have caused some contamination.

It was just her and Krystyan: there was no point all of them traipsing through the place, and Lykasra had other business to be getting on with in the city. Lola could feel Krystyan’s eyes on her back as she worked, examining the room for a sense of what had happened. She needed a sequence of events, so that they could build a picture and perhaps figure out who had done this.

“Who else would have known about the safe house?”

“In theory, only other cell leaders.”

“Is there a chance it was an inside job? One of our own?”

“It’s not impossible. But the brutality make no sense.”

Lola said nothing, but cast a glance in the man’s direction. Krystyan, and the rebels generally, had a reputation for their own brutality, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that tensions could have driven rival cells against one another.

A path of streaked blood led from the room through a doorway. “Bodies were dragged,” she said, pointing. She took a handkerchief from her pocket and held it to her nose and mouth; she’d worked enough crime scenes to know when it was about to get nasty, and this particular incident had been festering in the Lairn humidity for at least three days.

She moved through to the next room.

More blood and viscera. Scattered lumps of unidentifiable meat that had once belonged inside someone.

Frames still hung on the walls, but the paintings within were shredded or stained beyond recognition. Blood on the floor, the walls, the ceiling, even.

Before arriving, she’d assumed it was a gang incident, or perhaps a targeted assassination from the authorities. The rebels has pissed off enough people in enough places to fill an entire notebook with potential suspects. There had been no survivors, no warning given. The attack had been swift and relentless.

It was already looking like something else, and she hadn’t yet set eyes on the bodies. Whatever had happened was more violent and more primal than an assassination or some local squabble.

Through to the next room. There they were, all the bodies, piled high in the centre, a tangle of limbs and torsos and heads.

She stepped carefully, though there was no avoiding the carpet of congealed blood. “Look at this,” she said, quietly, glancing back to check that Krystyan was following. “There’s something ritualistic about this.”

Forcing herself to look back at the massacre, she tried to discern one victim from another. Their flesh had intermingled and slipped together.

“They weren’t merely killed,” Krystyan said, “they were slaughtered, and their bodies desecrated. Gallen was a great man. We must find those responsible. This cannot stand.”

“Do we know when this happened? What time of day, I mean?”

“I’ve spoken to some of the others in the local cell, who were positioned elsewhere in the city. They had been checking in regularly, so we know it was between dusk and dawn.”

Lola nodded, thinking of the busy streets, which stayed active long after sundown. “Even if it was night, there’s no way anyone involved with this could have walked out the front door without being spotted. They’d have been covered in blood.”

She moved around the outer edge of the room. Turning away from the bodies, she examined the walls. One spot was especially bloodied, as if something had been lifted vertically. Or perhaps had climbed. Looking up, she clocked a skylight in the ceiling. “Up there,” she said, pointing. “They probably went out that way. Wouldn’t have been spotted.”

Krystyan assessed the climb. “That’s not easy. Even I’d struggle to climb up that wall and over to the skylight.”

“Who could? Aen’fa, perhaps?”

He nodded. “If anyone could. Even then, they’d have to be especially athletic. But it wouldn’t be koth - they’d just fly up.”

Lola shook her head. “That skylight looks too small to me for a koth to fit through. So we’re talking someone with magic, or some nimble aen’fa. Perhaps.”

Focusing again on the centre of the room, she paddled over, her shoes squelching unpleasantly. The smell was unbearable, and she wouldn’t be able to linger in there for much longer. She needed a closer look at the bodies before they were taken away.

The dismembered limbs were not severed cleanly. Not a bladed weapon, then. Or, at least, not one competently handled. It looked more like they’d been hacked and slashed at, perhaps with a kitchen knife.

Also, there were bite marks. That, she had not been expecting.

She could feel her insides about to rebel. “It’d be good to get up on that roof.”

In retrospect, going up on the roof during Lairn’s rainy season was not one of Lola’s finest ideas. She squinted against the torrent of water, holding a hand to her forehead in an attempt to keep her eyes clear. She’d become entirely soaked within seconds of climbing up from the courtyard, every layer of clothing feeling as if she had only that moment stepped out of a swimming pool.

Lairn was designed to cope with the deluge, but straying from the designated paths was a fast reminder of how much liquid was pouring down on the city.

One thing for sure was that there would be no evidence left up there on the rooftops, no trail to follow, no handy footsteps. The attackers would have emerged bloodied, but any telltale signs had been washed away days earlier.

Whatever had happened in that safe house was not an ordinary killing. Whether related to rebel activity, or a local incident, or a good, old-fashioned random murder, nothing about the killings made sense. There was no message, no warning. It was more animalistic than anything else, raw and primal, yet the piling of the bodies had seemed like a deliberate act. It was hard to imagine anything other than a large and powerful group pulling it off, given the lack of resistance, but Krystyan insisted there were no organisations that fit the bill. It was hard to see how an individual, a lone attacker, could have pulled it off.

It wasn’t an isolated incident, Lola knew in her gut. Nobody murdered an entire house, sliced up the bodies and stacked them high, without having done it before. Which meant it would likely happen again.

She needed to find a way to talk to the local city guard.

Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash

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Meanwhile.

Thanks for reading.

Some things:

• Tom Cox
  wrote today about the never-ending pressures of just trying to be a writer. It seemingly doesn’t matter what stage of your career you’re at, or your relative level of success: we all have that crushing pressure and need to somehow do more. That awful yo-yo of feeling like you’re doing everything right, and then a day later feeling like you’re doing everything wrong. It’s like the tide, bringing success and failure, and you’re never sure what’s going to be left on shore.

• Vaguely related, Substack co-founder

  Hamish McKenzie
  put this out:

  I’d say it sounds pretty nifty, at least on paper. Practically, it’s hard to see how this works without leaning into the algorithmic shenanigans that have warped and polluted YouTube itself. That said, from the writing standpoint whatever Substack’s doing has absolutely had a transformative effect on my career. My writing has gone from ‘serious hobby’ to ‘part time professional side hustle’ in the last three years. Didn’t expect that to happen, yet here we are.

• T K Hall
  wrote about the positioning of books (on shelves), and how he may have written a YA book by mistake. Or not. I have more thoughts on this, for another time. Shadow of the Wolf is proper amazing, incidentally. Go buy it now.

• I picked up some games in the Steam sale, including Balatro. Surprisingly, I still managed to get today’s chapter out!

• I’ve also been playing Mediterranea Inferno. It’s a visual novel, a style of game I’ve not really played before (to be honest, the few I’ve dipped into have been awful). This one is interesting: it does a lot more than simply add some pictures to the words, and has just enough interactivity to function as a game. It’s visually very aggressive — in a good way — and is one of the first stories I’ve encountered to directly address and deal with the pandemic. It’s funny how at the time, all fiction ignored Covid-19, resulting in a lot of cognitive dissonance every time there was a large group of people in a scene. And post-pandemic, I’ve seen very little fiction grapple with what happened.

• Still on games, I picked up on some excellent podcasts thanks to

  George E. Osborn
  ’s latest newsletter.

• This from

  Ted Gioia
  got me thinking about culture and being an online writer. As does most stuff from him. Incidentally, picked up The History of Jazz by Ted for my dad’s 80th birthday earlier in the month. I knew I wanted to get a jazz book, one that would be nicely nostalgic and cover a lot of ground, and take him back to his teenage years, but obviously there’s an infinite number of books written about jazz. How was I supposed to pick something good? Then I spotted Ted’s name on the shelf, and my immediate response was: Oh, it’s Ted Gioia from the Ted Gioia newsletter! That’ll be good! See, newsletters sell books.

Author notes

I visited Hong Kong in 1999, just before I headed off to university. I’d lived there as a very young child but didn’t really remember it, and my dad wanted to go back to see how it had changed. This was a couple of years after it returned to Chinese jurisdiction.

One of my distinct memories of the trip was how wet everything was, at all times. Even on a clear day, the air held a level of moisture you just don’t get in the UK. I sometimes wear contact lenses, and in Britain my eyes are very dry, which makes wearing them for long periods quite uncomfortable. In Hong Kong that really wasn’t an issue — if anything, my eyes were so absurdly lubricated by the atmosphere itself that it was a challenge keeping the contact lenses in.

While we were exploring one day, the sky opened and dropped an ocean onto the islands. Very sudden, very violent. Raindrops bigger than anything I’ve ever seen in Europe. Walls of water, reducing the draw distance to a few metres. The world becomes nothing more than water: you hear it, see it, feel it, and it blocks out all else. Everyone pauses their day and huddles under bus shelters and in buildings.

And then it abruptly stops, and everyone carries on.

That’s what I’m thinking of when I write about Lairn.

This chapter, despite its grimness, feels somewhat cosy. It’s what Triverse used to be: detective detecting! That’s changed in recent months, as I’ve noted here:

Lola is getting to be her old self here, for a while. She’s not running to catch up, or being protected by others. She’s using her expertise. ‘The Vaen’ka’ storyline is very much a detective storyline, which feels like a bit of a momentary throwback.

There’s also an interesting line in dramatic tension going on here. Given the title of the story, we as readers already know that a vaen’ka is involved. We had the glimpse last week of the hooded, clawed figure. Lola does not have any of that information yet. Playing with point of view and information siloes is one of the aspects I most enjoy about writing.

Right, that’s it for today. See you all next week, and have lovely weekends.