CHAPTER TWO - AND SO MISERY ACQUAINTS A MAN WITH STRANGE BEDFELLOWS


Wesley Deighton, Keruwark

The man in the weathered frock coat dipped a hand into a pocket to fish out a battered carton of cigarettes, raised it to his mouth and drew one out with his teeth. The movement, like the cheaply bought soldiers' cigarette brand (Conrad's Smokes was printed in a lurid purple type above a line drawing of a jungle scene, beneath which a slogan read Never face the horror of the New World without your packet of Conrad's Smokes!) and the dirtied and thread-bare suit he wore spoke of an ill-paid man's confidence, and everything he did he did with a jovial certainty only the truly down-trodden can muster.

Flicking a lazy salute to a company of crisp white uniformed men marching past - the latest addition to the Empyrean Trading Company's military assets in the New World, come fresh off a floating steam-runner - the man, whose documentation named him as Wesley Deighton, looked the grand construction before him up and down before giving a low whistle.

Tall beyond comprehendable perspective and wrought of great mossy granite blocks and dazzling gold-plated frames the golden dome of Keruwark stood glistening as a second sun surrounded by the Company's absurd city of mish-mash native architecture (be it angular and of stone, for the older dwellings long since abandoned when the Company arrived to the world, or be it squat and of clay and wood, for the meek natives drawn in from around the settlement to aid the running of the settlers' head-quarters) and Company buildings (refined wooden mansions and brick barracks to name a few).

It was stunning, and it was awe-some. Alien and impossible. But there it was. A great golden dome held aloft by over-large stone staircases coming up from every direction, seemingly at random. And all ascending within the vast dazzling globe itself.

Wesley Deighton lit his cigarette with a tinder-box, and took a slow and thoughtful drag. Those who hustled and bustled about him might have stopped to notice him, but it was unlikely. Wesley Deighton looked like a down-and-out former soldier, still wearing the remnants of some mercenary dress uniform, long since faded out of recognition. The three stripes on the arm of his frock coat could have been any colour in the past, and everywhere were signs of repair and restitching.
There were plenty of ex-soldiers in the city of Keruwark, hiring themselves out as caravan guards to the civilian settlers arriving and looking to set up along the coast. Or perhaps looking to set up a place of their own, somewhere in the vicious jungle to the north.

What Wesley Deighton was doing in Keruwark, however, was not nearly so unremarkable. Wesley Deighton was a spy. A good one, at that. Coming close to his fifties, he was a swarthy and uncouth veteran of the game, and all the more dangerous than the pasty youth that had started off playing espionage all those years ago in the Araby Gulf.

He had worked for the Crown (much as his travelling partner pupported to), some time back, but had since taken up a more freelance approach.
The Empyrean Trading Company had taken a stranglehold on the economy with the iron grasp of a vast private army. The chief investor commanded priority access to the ear of the Crown itself, and outside the Empire its personal iron-clad armadas of the skies ensured no other trading company came close to competition.
Wesley had been employed by the coalition of rival merchants during the pitched battles of the air over America some years prior, when the Company flushed out the colonist-traders who had begun to settle there.
Now that the Company had found a New World entirely, ripe for harvesting, it made sense that the Coalition would send its agents along to try and push for a downfall in a world the Company could barely control.

Wesley Deighton blew a mushroom cloud of smoke above his head, looking up at the mauve sky.

His partner - a man of fealty to the Crown who had not been cheap to buy over to their cause - was somewhere up in that alien sky. Known only as the 'Detective', he carried a dossier with the directions needed to tear the Company asunder. An occult rite that would eat up the Company's new base in this world from its very core...

Wesley Deighton looked from the sky back to the golden dome.

An altar to an old, savage god of this world...

Deighton's contract was high for this mission. To have the Detective fail to meet him here would be tantamount to professional suicide. There was honour and money involved.

And the Detective was late. Deighton did not like this.


Aaron Clark and Arthur Radley and Isaac D. Locke and Jack Heflin and Orlando d'Ariel and Missy Stream and Paul Garcia, Landingpoint

They stood apart once again now, all with hand-cuffs unlocked and all with red raw wrists.

"There," Aaron Clark grunted. "Not so difficult. Nice and calm and you all got unlocked."

The survivors began to spread out, slowly. Some stayed in pairs, but others drifted and scavenged through the debris of the Naufragium.
Jack Heflin - who had slipped neatly away from the group once the sturdy black man had freed his bonds - fished through what seemed to be the splintered remains of the captain's quarters. Strewn here and there were what was left of a fine oak chest of drawers, and Jack busied himself with retrieving a near complete uniform. The slate blue jacket he found felt tight around his shoulders, but he guessed the badges of rank sewn into it would pass him off as part of the naval fleet were he to encounter the Company once more. He also found fine black gaiters, which were notably better suited to the jungle ground than his convict's cloth foot-wear, as well as a strong leather belt with a (only partially bent) sabre attached.
About to dart for the treeline, his eyes ever flashing back to where the others were trawling through the wreckage, Jack hesitated to stoop for a paper folder wedged between two planks jutting from the dirt.

Reading what he could of it with a stumbling grasp of the written word, he found an illustrated map that he checked against the sun for direction before turning and running south into the jungle.

Elsewhere amongst the shipwreck Missy Stream edged about, furtively casting glances to where the guard - Paul Garcia - stood idly, her eyes ever moving to the rifle on his shoulder and the knife in his belt. He seemed to have little interest in provoking the aggression of his former prisoners, and when the only other man carrying a firearm - Isaac D. Locke - stopped to say a few words with him, he did little but peaceably agree.

Finding a rough sack-cloth bag, Missy began collecting what she could of the fallen ship. A hunt for medicines came up with nothing more than a bundle of cocaine sachets for anesthesia. For clothes she managed to drag an unspoilt loose sweater from the broken body of a deck-hand (whose head was nowhere in sight, yet not a drop of dark crimson touched the striped clothing itself). This she pulled over her own head and rolled the sleeves up, before pulling the heavy boots from the deck-hand's feet and sizing them favourably to her own. Taking a mottled water skin and adding it to her bag, she moved on to what had to have been the remains of the ship's armoury.
Stacks of revolving rifles lay scattered about the ground. Gleaming bullets were about in card cartons or else strewn loose. Taking a rifle and filling the rest of her bag with ammunition, Missy Stream stood over the rifle haul and contemplated telling the others that went unarmed.

The main grouping of the survivors, Aaron, Paul, Orlando and Arthur, stood about listlessly. The guard held his rifle lightly on his shoulder, careful not to look as though he were making a threat.
Aaron cast an eye about for his book, without much thought. Orlando retrieved a revolver from the bodies about them, and slipped it into a belt. A long, ill-fitting coat was found and he pulled it about his shoulders.
Arthur did nothing more than watch, as though intrigued by the situation and potential for conflict that had unfolded around him but uninterested by the apparent calm that had fallen over the wreckage and its orphans.

Isaac stopped by Paul briefly and said a few words as to working together. Paul made an agreeable noise that seemed to satisfy Isaac.
Isaac nodded, and began to say that he was moving out into the surrounding jungle to find some firewood or shelter.

He was cut off by the roar that shook the trees all about them. An animalistic bellow, that seemed to echo in the sudden rush of birds screeching as they flapped upwards in great clouds and waves from the tree-tops.
Something coming from the north. Something close and something big.

Those still in the wreckage of the clearing - Missy, Paul, Arthur, Aaron, Isaac and Orlando - stood stock still for a beat.

Something coming. The pulp fantasies passed around London train station libraries of weird and terrible creatures of the New World suddenly seemed less absurd.

They were standing in a clearing of iron-clad debris. A rag-tag band, some armed, some not, put to fight or flight, together or alone.

The jungle was welcoming its guests.


Jack Heflin, The Jungle (Just South of Landingpoint)

Jack stopped, taking a moment to breath. The jungle felt tight and fetid all around him. Trees loomed and undergrowth snared. He staggered through a blurry mess of an environ, all browns and greens and exotically coloured flowers that snapped or spat as he trekked onwards.

Behind him, back towards Landingpoint, he heard a roar. Some giant, lumbering animal was closing in on the others from the north.

But before him there was a yell. A gunshot. Not far ahead. He thought he spied smoke somewhere ahead, but the canopy overhead bewildered and confused him.

Roaring to the north. Gunshots to the south.


Dean Caliban, The Jungle (Somewhere)

The man spattered in thick, gloopy lashings of red red blood smiled manically and all too wide a smile as he wrote, his hands moving fast in great swings and stabs of the pen all across his tattered, loose-leaf journal.

o jungle jungle jungle i will defeat you in the end