The Vaen'ka: part 3

A map to the end of the world

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.

Lola was angry. It was a relatively novel emotional experience for her, but events had conspired to leave her with no other choice, and she didn’t like it. Anger felt like a disease, like she’d caught it from someone else, that it was something to be ashamed of and it was her responsibility to recover as quickly as possible. Yet the anger remained, which made her all the more angry.

The rain continued to pour. She sipped through a wooden straw at the drink, which had been served in a hollowed-out fruit of some sort. The venue was an outdoor kiosk on one of Lairn’s many market streets, not unlike a noodle bar in Chinatown back in London. It was dry beneath the rain sails, but the hammering sound was always there, day and night. Most of the time it faded into the background, until she tried to sleep.

At all turns, she’d tried to do the right thing. Be a good student, study hard. Be a good citizen, voted the first year she was allowed. Serve society, joined the police. Rise up the ranks, passed the detective exam. Make a difference, got assigned to the Specialist Dimensional Command. Always be ambitious, became the Met’s liaison to Bruglia.

She’d done everything right. Got ahead in a world designed for men, where small, young, blonde haired women didn’t tend to get taken seriously.

And where had it left her? On a wanted list, exiled from her own world, on the run across a continent she did not know, now accompanied by rebels, outcasts and escapees. Lola Styles, the goody-two-shoes who never got into trouble, the teacher’s pet who spent her teenage years studying instead of partying: now a fugitive.

Somewhere along the line, her life had gone wrong.

Meanwhile, the bad guys were happily getting on with whatever it was they were getting on with, Clarke and the others were most likely in prison back home, and the triverse hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong.

She sighed, took another sip. Her contact should have been there already, and it was making her nervous. Lola’s original pitch to Krystyan, Daryla and the others was to have a spell cast that would alter Lola’s appearance, so that she could infiltrate the local city guard garrison, talk to the officers and examine evidence of any similar murders. It was soon pointed out that they didn’t have a visualist on the team, otherwise they’d be in disguise all the time — especially with Lola and Daryla on wanted posters two hundred miles from Bruglia.

It was a fair point. Lykasra had instead suggested they call up one of their informants in the city guard and arrange a meet. Which, in retrospect, did seem like the simpler option.

Lykasra was good at unpicking a plan until it reached it’s least complicated version.

Arriving in Lairn, working the case, was the first time Lola had felt properly useful since leaving Bruglia. Possibly since before even then, factoring in the difficulties of working the Bruglian office, and the sour taste that the railroad case had left. If Palinor was a fantasy, it was no longer hers.

A man sat at the stool next to her and ordered a bowl of something local that Lola didn’t quite catch.

The meal arrived a minute later, the broth steaming. It smelled delicious.

Might as well give the secure greeting a try. “What’s it taste like?”

“Tastes like chicken,” he said, a little stiffly. The correct answer. “How about you?”

“I already ate,” she said. “Left me a little bloated.” She’d objected to that one, but the others had found it amusing.

“OK,” the man said, his accent thick and reminding her a little of Portuguese. “I don’t have much time. I need to start my shift soon. What do you need?”

“I’m investigating several murders. A single mass killing. Bodies piled high in the back room, dismembered. Signs of a fight, but pretty one-sided.” She pulled a small scrap of paper from her pocket and placed it on the counter. “That’s the address.”

He leaned over and made a vaguely disgruntled sound. “It’s not been reported. Don’t know the address.”

“It won’t be reported,” she said. “Private business, you know.”

“Ah,” he nodded, “I got you.”

“The setup sound familiar at all?”

“Familiar?” He was devouring his food like a starving man.

“Right. Any other reports of violent killings? No obvious weapons or motivation. Entire households, no survivors.”

“Oh, yeah.” He mopped at his mouth with a napkin. “Started about six months back. Nothing major to start with. Homeless people ripped up. Nobody cared. Then a couple of months ago it escalated. Like you say, entire families taken out. Or not even families — sometimes just whoever happened to be in a building at the wrong time.” He shivered visibly, took a breath. “Nothing obvious connecting the victims. Sometime it’d be a shop, open late, and was whoever happened to be in the place.”

As she thought, it had been happening for a while. “Similar style of killings? Violent, dismemberment, then everything put into a big pile?”

“That’s the one. I never seen anything like it. Nothing. Thought it was a gang thing, maybe. But that didn’t seem right. Or perhaps some psycho, but there’s no way someone on their own could do it. Nobody normal, anyhow. An animal? I don’t know.”

Lola had gone down a similar trail of thought. “You said there were no connections at all?”

“Totally random. These were people from all walks of life, all levels of society. At least, that’s what we thought at first.”

“At first?”

“Yeah,” he took his time, working through his food. “I get hungry when I think about this shit,” he said, as if offering an explanation. “Here’s the thing. The victims were always a mix. Male, female, human, aen’fa, some other minorities. No koth. It took us a while to realise that there were always humans involved. Sometimes aen’fa as well, but never just aen’fa. When we spotted that, we looked a little closer. It wasn’t just that there was always at least one human — they were always wielders. Magic capable.”

“You think magic wielders are being targeted?”

“Perhaps.” He waved a hand dismissively. “It’s just a theory. Could as easily be something else. There’s a lot of wielders in Lairn, even compared to other city states. The climate means there’s always work to be had.”

“What about the locations of the murders? Anything there?”

“Take a look yourself.” He pulled a crumpled map from a pocket and slid it across to her. “Keep it. Look at it once I’m gone. One other thing, I heard someone else was asking around about this. Don’t know who. But it’s catching people’s attention. That’s all I’ve got.”

He stood and walked away without saying another word.

The chef hurried over. “You with him? You paying?”

Lola sighed and slid some money across the counter.

The map was sketchy at best. She’d expected a professional map of the city marked with the attack locations; instead, it was very much pursuing a back-of-a-napkin vibe. Hand-drawn, with key landmarks depicted in a cartoon style, circles marking he murders.

“Here,” Pylpo said, unfolding a somewhat more convincing tourist map and spreading it out on the table in their room.

“I’m surprised tourist maps are a thing here,” Lola said.

“Why?”

“I don’t imagine tourism being a big industry on Palinor.”

Pylpo looked mockingly through her eyebrows at Lola. “There are always rich people happy and able to travel the world. Even here.”

“Fair enough.” Lola had already moved on, rotating the sketch to match the orientation of the larger map. She grabbed a pencil from her bag and started copying the locations across. “And here’s our one,” she said, circling the building where Gallen and the other bodies had been found.

“Seems pretty random,” Pylpo said, leaning on her elbows. “How about we go to bed and think about it in the morning?”

“It’s barely past late afternoon.”

“I know.”

Lola stared at the circles on the map, spread over an area that must have been about two to three kilometres across. “They’re clustered into this district of the city. Big area, but very much not straying anywhere further afield.”

“Sure,” Pylpo said, sliding around behind where Lola was sat and wrapping her legs around her.

“Maybe we can figure something out from their positions.”

“Maybe I can figure something out from our positions?” Pylpo kissed her neck, making Lola shiver involuntarily.

With the pencil, Lola started drawing lines between the crime scenes. There was no discernible shape at first, then a clear circle began to form. Rough, for sure, but there was an outer edge to the attacks, if one imagined a central pivot, and each of the locations on a spoke of a wheel.

Pylpo’s hands crept around her waist. “Come on.”

“Look,” Lola said, tapping the map with the pencil. “It’s a circle. It could mean that whoever is doing this, whether it’s a person or people or a gang of whatever, it could mean that they’re striking out from somewhere in the middle. Never going further. Always under cover of darkness, knowing they have enough time to get back.”

“Back where?” Pylpo lifted Lola’s shirt and her hands stroked her skin, the aen’fa’s fingers gentle and enticing, walking up her stomach like tiny feet.

She drew more lines, through the centre of the circle, and pointed. “Maybe there? Or thereabouts. We need to look in that area.” It was a little tenuous, to be sure, and wouldn’t have been as obvious without having the location of Gallen’s murder. “We need to go and have a look around.”

“What, now? It’ll be dark soon.”

“Yes, now! This could be it.” Lola could taste it, feel the impending success. An accomplishment that would justify her place on the team. Earn her keep. Stop her from being a hanger-on.

“No,” Pylpo said. “It’ll be nearly dark by the time we get there, and hunting for a crazed serial killer at night isn’t my idea of fun.” She shifted, moving gracefully around Lola until she was sat on her lap, her legs now wrapped around to her back. “We’ll get the others together in the morning. More feet on the ground will speed things up. And be safer.”

So close to an answer, but Pylpo was right. Part of Lola wanted the discovery to be all hers, and bringing in the others felt like a dissolution of that: it would no longer be Lola’s achievement.

Pylpo pulled at her own shirt, lifting it over her head and off her arms, discarding it to the floor. Her body seemed almost to glow, the colour of freshly cut grass. Lola knew she should say no, that it was unfair to Daryla, but that particular threshold was long busted. She put down the pencil and shifted her attention to the beautiful non-human, ears pointed at the tips, her chest mottled with flecks of purple just below the surface.

They had a plan. They would find whomever was responsible and Krystyan could exact his justice. Lola would prove her worth. The morning would change everything.

Leaning forward, she allowed herself to be enveloped in the warm embrace of another. The morning could wait.

Photo by Nick Karvounis on Unsplash

---

Meanwhile.

It’s December, which means as a family we’re into the double-whammy of birthday and Christmas. Lots of present wrapping, cake making and excited pre-teens.

Some things, then:

• I finished reading Shadow of the Wolf by

  T K Hall
  . It is very, very good. Next time you’re looking for a dark, moving, exciting and weird¹ retelling of Robin Hood, go grab yourself a copy. Tim also just published some useful tips about going pro over on
  David McIlroy
  ’s newsletter.

• About a year ago, with my 11 year old son, we become aware of It’s Jeff. Jeff is a land shark, see, who exists in the Marvel comics universe and goes about his snuffly days being generally adorable. It’s quite hard to get hold of Jeff in print, so when I heard about an issue connected to the big Venom War crossover event² I had to grab it. It’s very good.

• Related, back in the glory days³ of Twitter there was a feeling that you could have a direct connection with creators. That was often an illusion, and Twitter was almost always more of a broadcast platform than a place to have actual conversations. It’s interesting to see that vibe returning in a few places, though, on Bluesky and on Substack. For example, Jeff’s creator

  Kelly Thompson
  is on Substack, and I think there’s something special to being able to thank a creator for having made something wonderful:

• I am on Bluesky, for my sins.

• Kieron Gillen might be my favourite writer. He’s certainly my favourite comics writer. His latest, The Power Fantasy, has been consistently startling in all the best ways. Much more importantly, he has reviewed a bunch of Cbeebies shows in his latest newsletter.

  “When the out of control train of the Ninky Nonk passes, only silence. Why is the Ninky Nonk greeted with a cry of “Oh no! Not the Ninky Nonk!” when it arrives? What has the Ninky Nonk done? Does its unnamed sins have anything to do with its lack of soul?” Kieron Gillen

• Citizen Sleeper 2 is out in January. This is exciting.

• Eleanor Anstruther
  has an article in The Bookseller about the practicalities of a quality mark for indie books. Eleanor has noted before that books are the only artform where ‘indie’ is seen as a negative:

  “In every other creative field, independent artists are celebrated. Book publishing is the outlier. We’re being left behind so this is a starting point, an opening of the conversation to bring the industry into the 21st century…” Eleanor Anstruther

Author notes

I listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack while writing most of this. The first scene, at the food kiosk, was absolutely me riffing on that general vibe — although Lairn isn’t as dark and grimy, it does have a perpetual dampness, not to mention a looming threat just out of sight.

Leaning in to the ‘show how they eat’ theory of world building. Once you understand how a society feeds itself, it feels more real, right?

There’s a bit of shorthand at work here, with the city guard informant serving to slightly accelerate the plot. Hopefully that doesn’t undermine Lola’s own investigative instincts, and it shaves off probably a couple of chapters from the storyline. I’m very conscious that we’re still inside what is essentially a super-extended flashback, which is extremely indulgent of me.

Another thing that’s a quirk of the structure here: ostensibly Lola is telling the others about all of this, bringing them up to speed on what she’s been doing for five years. It’s not quite that simple, though: you can be fairly certain she’s not including all the details relating to Pylpo while retelling her story to her SDC colleagues (especially Holland). The flashback style here is Lola’s direct experience, and the assumption is that the colleagues are getting a much truncated and edited version.

The bit with Lola’s original plan, of putting on a magical disguise and infiltrating the garrison? That was actually my first concept for this chapter, which I played with for several days before switching to this simpler setup. I thought it’d be fun to directly reference the abandoned plot as being Lola’s own abandoned plan.

OK, see you next week. BRACE BRACE BRACE

1. In the best way.

2. Nope, I’ve absolutely no idea either.

3. Yes, this is a bit of a stretch.