cover

The Wonder 1: Blood Red

Contents

Map

Part 1

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Part 2

Prologue

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Glossary

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Part 1

Keys to the
Kingdom

Prologue.

Chinsey,
Capital of The Gramarye region
Grand Quillia

June 1856

Geraldine Bunce did not like lifts. She had no idea when it had been decided that walking up stairs was too arduous, but that was not the main reason for her feelings.

She definitely didn’t trust them. The magic needed to build a bridge across a deep chasm, now you know somebody had paid proper attention to that. The slideways that enabled ice yachts to skate around the Empire, ditto. But a small room required to move up four or five floors of a building? Why apply yourself? Why expend any Wonder to alleviate the need to walk upstairs? Why help the lazy? Corporal Bunce had exercised before she’d joined the army – she’d had to. She’d been left to fend for herself at a young age in a rough part of the Empire. But it wasn’t her disdain for the slovenly that caused her to hate lifts. Or heights. In her main role in the squad, she was required to climb great heights, to find the higher ground, the highest tree and pick off all those she surveyed. Snipers did not need lifts.

No. The main reason Corporal Geraldine Bunce did not like lifts was because if there was a problem and it were to plummet from a great height, she did not want her crushed body to be ground into mince together with the other people in the lift with her.

Especially this lift.

Take Aaron Tork. He smells of wet dog, he looks like a mean walrus with a moustache and he can only speak in a growl or a whimper. Bunce has eaten mutton curry with more style, panache and intelligence.

Spicer, their commanding officer, a foot shorter than the bear-like Tork next to him, may have once had some charm, some modicum of manners, but all that had been burned away at around the same time his face was burnt off, leaving stubs for ears and nose. If the lift were to fall, if its magic were to fail, Spicer would be the crunchy burnt bits in the meatloaf they’d find at the bottom of the lift shaft.

And then the Squad’s own hyperphysicist, an ex-army dabbler, Conway. God knows where he studied magic – some grubby college in some failing military centre in the Empire’s back alleys. This was probably the first lift Conway had ever been in.

Bunce felt another shiver of trepidation. Imagine if some reprobate hyperphys like Conway had designed the lift, his bony digits poking out of the fingerless gloves, melding the magic into whatever Wonder this lift needed to drag people up the inside of the building, his rodent eyes squinting into the workings as he pulled the required enchantments into being.

Magic spooked Bunce. She didn’t understand it – she could see why people called it the Wonder. It was a wonder what some people had managed to do with it, even Conway occasionally. She also completely sympathised with those that called it the dabble. Mankind had found something buried deep in the earth. Some people said it came from the bones of long dead dragons, others that it was pitch from the roof of Hell itself. Whatever it was, it was useful. Useful for weapons, useful for energy, useful for speeding up everything, shrinking the whole wide world. Useful for transporting people who don’t like to take the stairs.

But mankind was dabbling. It didn’t really know what this new-found power could do. It didn’t know how long it would last. It didn’t know what long-lasting effect it had on those around it.

It was the great unknown.

Some people said that other civilisations had used the Wonder before and it had ruined them, changed them until they were no longer human, sucked them into the ground from whence the magic came. There were the remains of these people all over the world. Archaeologists were digging them up all the time, even in the capital of the Great Quillian Empire, but most had been found nearby, in the remote colony of The Gramarye. Super powers clung to this lost knowledge as much as they battled to unearth important artefacts and their power source, the Wonder. The People of the Ditch apparently threatened Great Quillia at every turn, always hoping to steal some new piece of the Wonder that might make their lifts ascend that little bit faster than the Empire’s.

The only thing separating the Ditch from the Empire were the Attar Mountains, and if the Ditch ever dared cross the natural barrier the first place they would hit would be The Gramarye. Although there had been no incursions in living memory, nobody who had ever entered the Attar Mountains had ever returned, and rumours of Ditch spies insinuating themselves into the Empire were rife.

Bunce couldn’t complain. All this paranoia meant there was a lot of work for freelancers – for privateers. Privateers such as herself and Tork and Spice and Conway.

They had been employed by the Trade, a commercial entity that ran much of the Great Quillian Empire’s remote interests, to scour The Gramarye for a specific ancient magical device that could lead to a new source of Wonder. Another piece of dabble. None of them knew why the Trade wanted it so badly, and none of them, including Bunce, really cared. They’d acquired it and brought it back to Chinsey, the Trade’s capital in The Gramarye.

And so here they were, in a lift in the Trade’s regional headquarters, with a priceless chunk of ancient Wonder in a hessian sack slung over Tork’s shoulder.

“I don’t like lifts,” said Bunce, to nobody in particular.

As soon as the lift ground to a halt, Sergeant Major Pendle hauled open the iron grate doors, his slender frame and pristine uniform hiding considerable brute force.

“You must be the Reclaimers,” he said, taking in the four privateers.

He could feel the eyes of the clerks in the office behind him as the tip-tapping on their typewriters and clunking of their adding devices slowed. Pendle would have to reprimand them once this rabble had left.

Pendle looked the visitors up and down. They looked like the usual privateer scum found in this part of the Empire. Rough, ready, lacking in manners, etiquette, lacking in anything that would allow them to live respectable lives back in the heartland. If the regular populace of Great Quillia knew the sort of people their fortune was built on, they would shudder with shame. But then regular people probably hadn’t heard of The Gramarye, except as a primitive, far off place that some of the Wonder came from, that same Wonder that made the slideways that transported them to work every morning, that powered the mills that spun the cotton they wore. The Wonder that forged the guns that built an Empire.

“I’m Lieutenant Spicer,” said the man with the horrific face, pronouncing it the Imperial way – ‘Leftenant’.

Pendle regarded him with interest. His uniform was filthy, with some buttons missing and a torn epaulette; enough to put any of Pendle’s clerks on punishment detail for two months. His weapons, however, were well oiled, some with sights and other attachments not of regular issue. Spicer’s Twirler pistol crackled as the Wonder pulsed through its six barrels, its safety catch removed. Pendle found himself missing the old days of the battlefield, sabre in one hand, Twirler in the other, sending the natives packing. However, the mess of Spicer’s face was enough to remind the sergeant major why Mrs Pendle had insisted he take a desk job.

Spicer wore his hair long – it touched the bottom of his collar; like many of the privateers who were keen to show they were a band apart from the regular army. But Pendle suspected this was a wig, albeit a good one, with real hair, probably from the Imperial capital. The lieutenant obviously wore it to cover as much of his scarred head as possible, for it resembled a walnut with a mouth and thick-lidded eyes. Even for a veteran like Sergeant Major Pendle, it was quite a battle to look Spicer in the eye, and he could hear the sharp intakes of breath from the clerks as Spicer stepped into the light.

He was followed by Conway, a grubby, wiry man who seemed to exude grease, a man obviously more comfortable surrounded by the devices of dabble and sources of Wonder. As with most hyperphysicists, he was not in uniform, preferring a long leather coat, cut like the hyperphysicist’s lab coat, a leather hat that covered his ears, cracked goggles and grotty fingerless gloves.

The woman, Bunce, was wrapped in ammo belts and bandoliers, her uniform almost entirely obscured by ammunition for the long slender rifle that hung from her back. Her hair was short, her eyes dark, although she looked more like a swarthy boy than a lady, despite the curves she tried to hide. She did, however, smell marginally better than the men, especially the last out of the lift.

Private Aaron Tork was enormous, his body built for bullying, his scarred hands always fists, his jaw always grinding. He was the sort of pack animal Empire was built on, Pendle caught himself thinking, not just the Great Quillian Empire, but all of them. Tork’s uniform was modified to terrify; the sleeves removed to reveal arms like skinless hare carcasses, and covered in primitive tattoos, some faded with age, some throbbingly fresh. He wore bearskin over his shoulders, and sheepskin chaps, anything to make him appear as a beast from the woods. Tork smirked as he looked at Pendle’s glistening buttons, ironed tunic and shiny boots. Pendle was more interested in the hessian sack over Tork’s shoulder.

“Do you have the device?” Pendle asked.

“Would we be here if we didn’t?” Tork replied, watching Pendle as he checked out the sack.

Pendle was unfazed. He’d dealt with privateer insolence many times before.

“Major Franks has asked that I confirm the device is in your possession before I show you in.”

“Anyone would think this Major Franks wasn’t keen to see us,” Tork sneered.

Spicer nodded acquiescence and Tork opened the sack in Pendle’s direction. Pendle could make out the eerie blue glow of Wonder, and a dark ebony casing, resembling the underside of a fat cockroach. It certainly looked like the illustrations from the briefing, so he indicated for the squad to advance past the rows of clerk’s desks to the door marked, “Mjr. R. Franks – Regional Enchantment Auditor”.

Tork didn’t like offices, he didn’t like people who have offices, he didn’t like being in offices and he didn’t like meeting the people in them. He looked down on office workers because he was tall and they were stupid. If they weren’t stupid, they were probably weak. Spicer wasn’t weak and he wasn’t stupid, unlike most of Tork’s previous commanding officers. Spicer got him. He understood. Spicer didn’t fit in either. People looked at Spicer the same way they looked at Tork. With horror. With disdain. Never with respect. Until they saw them fight.

Tork had never met someone like Spicer. He knew what everyone on his side should do in a fight, and he knew what everyone on the other side would do. It was like he had a sixth sense. Tork was not the same in this respect. Point Tork in one direction, just tell him where to get to, no need to tell him why, and Tork would get there. Never mind what was in the way, he would get through it and get to where he was told to get. He was no good with a Twirler pistol. He thought it resembled some effeminate pepper grinder, not a real man’s weapon. So he was no quick draw, but he could fire a sawn-off blat gun and he could punch, hack and club all night long if need be.

Bunce could pop off the individuals, Conway could send up some dabbled fog or whatever, but leave it to Tork and Spicer to take care of the real thing, the fighting. The killing.

There was only one downside to being good at this stuff and that was meeting the pathetic squits too scared to do it themselves.

Tork nodded thanks at the sergeant major as he held the door open into the major’s office, ducking his head to avoid the doorframe and squeezing himself into the tiny space with the others. The office had one shelf holding a few books. Your majors and suchlike always have a few books hanging around to show grunts like Tork that they’re busy while he’s out doing all the work. Above the shelf was a small window showing the dusky sky as the sunset filtered through the red industrial smoke from Chinsey’s few factories. Tork supposed some people would think it pretty. Others would be impressed that somewhere so provincial actually had a factory.

“Don’t you people salute a senior officer?”

Tork blinked himself back into the room. He glanced over at the rest of the squad. None of them saluted. Tork turned to Spicer.

“Shall I show him the device now?” he asked.

“I don’t want to see the damned device!” the major snapped, pushing himself back from his tiny desk. The major was a short man, shorter than most, which was unfortunate for him as it meant more people saw his bald spot, a palm-sized area on his head that he was desperately trying to conceal with a comb-over. It was a constant battle, exacerbated, he thought, by this pathetic back of beyond posting manned by a sorry bunch of ignorant provincials and visited by violent thugs, such as these disgusting Reclaimers. The only thing worse than them, their attitude and their stench was the ungodly device they had “reclaimed” and brought into his office.

The Gargoyle Key. An ancient artefact made of pure Blue Wonder by God knew who, God knew how.

Normally, as Regional Enchantment Auditor, Major Rupert Franks had to check the safety of industrial manufacturing centres that used Red Wonder, the source of energy for the Empire’s lighting, the slideways, weaponry, normal stuff. Very occasionally he had come into contact with Green Wonder, very rare in most parts of the Empire. It was rumoured that the Ditch had mastered Green Wonder, using it to lengthen their lives and raise entire armies from the dead. Only a few specialist hyperphysicists in the Empire were able to use it, including Doctor Axelrod, whose office was a few doors down the hall. Too few doors down the hall, in Franks’ opinion.

Franks didn’t like Green Wonder and he didn’t like Doctor Axelrod.

But the Gargoyle Key. That was different. That was Blue Wonder, the real scary stuff. Banned around the world, hardly anyone knew how to use it, although there was evidence it was used in the past. Blue Wonder was the miraculous stuff, turning water into wine, letting people swim on the land, transforming music into monsters.

Everybody was scared of Blue Wonder. And there was a lot of the deep Blue found in The Gramarye.

“Go on, have a quick look,” Tork smirked, opening the sack to let the pale blue glow leak into the room.

“No!” Franks squealed.

“It can’t hurt you,” reasoned Conway.

“How do you know? Nobody knows,” Franks demanded of the hyperphysicist.

“He has a point,” nodded Bunce.

“Look,” grumbled Tork, losing interest and pulling the sack closed, “I haven’t been in a city with a bawdy house for six whole weeks and my rifle needs oiling. Can you sign for this or whatever it is you have to do so we can get out of here?”

Franks was in full agreement with the large man with the big arms who seemed to be the custodian of the Gargoyle Key, but there was nothing he could do. He felt himself stutter as he replied.

“We have to wait for the Echo.”

“Wossat?”

“The E.C.O.,” Spicer said, resting his hand on Franks’ desk, “Enchantment and Chicanery Operative. The man who needs to check our prize and make sure it’s the real thing.”

“That’s why I hate dealing with the blue dabble. Half the people are scared of it; the other half don’t even believe in it,” Tork huffed, putting the sack on the table. Franks’ face registered alarm and he physically jumped at the rap at the door. Pendle’s head poked in.

“Colonel Quine and his guests would like to see the Reclaimers, Major.”

Franks bit his lip, attempting to withhold his unbridled joy at being able to relieve himself of these terrible people and their terrifying cargo.

“The colonel has requested your presence too, Major.”

Franks felt his face twitch.

Lieutenant Spicer followed the rest of his squad up the corridor towards the colonel’s office. He was tired. He knew that he’d let Tork get away with too much cheek. Normally he would slam the big man down, but there was something bothering Spicer. He felt like he’d forgotten to do something important. Or that something was on the tip of his tongue. Or he’d just woken from a deep sleep but couldn’t discern the reason. He got this feeling occasionally and it never led to anything positive. He tried to put it down to his tiredness. He also had a creeping suspicion it was the Blue Wonder getting to him. His parents had warned him about the Deep Blue. Don’t get too close to it. It’s dangerous. For everything good it seems to do for you, it will always make you pay twofold. Perhaps they were fairy tales they’d heard. Spicer had been brought up near a fairy colony and the little people certainly did like to talk and tell tales. Some people called it the dabble babble. At first, when he’d been very young, he’d been happy to listen, although nobody else seemed to take any heed except his parents. His few childhood friends had always scorned the fairies and Spicer didn’t want to be any more different than he already was – his burns were the result of an accident when he was a baby – he couldn’t remember a time without them. So Spicer turned his back on the fairies, just like everybody else.

As Pendle held the door open into Colonel Quine’s office, Spicer’s unease grew with an oppressive sense of déjà-vu. One hand was already resting on his sword, and his other moved towards his Twirler pistol. As the Red Wonder of his gun tickled his fingertips, he entered the room.

“Major Franks, how good of you to join us. Which one of you is Lieutenant Spicer?”

Colonel Quine sat behind a desk the size of Franks’ office in front of an expansive window, Doctor Axelrod at his side. Seated on a couch by the wall reclined an old man clinging to a walking stick, a gnarly individual Spicer recognised as Ambrose Willis, the Viceroy of The Gramarye.

“I’m Spicer.”

He looked at the pot-bellied Quine crammed into his chair, his oiled hair glistening and his moustache sharpened to points, and at the ECO, Axelrod, a stick insect of a man, almost as tall as Tork but stooped, with a natural sneer beneath his hook nose. They looked like a natural double act, especially framed as they were by the broad window. The Viceroy was a different kettle of fish, lurking in the shadows, his eyes glinting with belligerence. He was no behind-the-scenes bureaucrat. This old man looked like he did nothing through the books. He regarded Bunce’s feminine form and licked his thin lips through his yellowing teeth.

Beyond the glass, Chinsey, Grand Quillia’s regional capital in The Gramarye, lay below them. On the outskirts, a few small factories and a mill, belching out red smoke as the Wonder kept things churning on into the evening. Many of the houses around the factories were tenements with small shared yards backing onto dark alleyways. Slicing through the middle from beyond the city, a slideway, the ice glistening, leading all the way into Chinsey’s central station, close to where they were now, the Regional Headquarters. Also discernible, the Trade barracks and the Viceroy’s palace, imposing themselves over the rest of the provincial colonial town. In the palace’s gardens, Spicer could make out a few ruins, from whatever town stood here before the Trade took over The Gramarye for the Empire forty years previously.

“May we see the Gargoyle Key, Lieutenant?” asked Axelrod, already drooling over the prospect of getting his hyperphysicist’s hands on some real Blue Wonder.

“Of course.”

Tork stepped forward, opening the sack.

“Perhaps Major Franks would pass it to us,” Quine suggested.

Tork glanced at Spicer, unwilling to get involved in one senior officer bullying another, but Spicer’s mind was elsewhere. Spicer felt like someone had just called to him from far away, and he had no idea who it was or what they had said. His hand tightened on his pistol.

“Here you go, Major,” grinned Tork, removing the key from the sack and ramming it into Franks’ quaking hand.

Franks walked towards the desk, holding the sack at arm’s length, his face twitching, the auditor desperately attempting to retain some dignity in front of the Viceroy.

Spicer’s gaze out of the window sharpened and he found himself focussing on a wallet-sized patch attached to the outside of the glass. Then he realised what he had been feeling all day. Impending doom. And at that exact moment, Spicer felt his ears pop.

He pulled the Twirler pistol from its holster and span the chamber to charge the Red Wonder’s projectile force.

“Lieutenant?” Axelrod said.

Tork reached for the blat gun hanging from his shoulder.

“Explos...” Spicer heard himself begin before the window blew in at them, glass peppering them all. Spicer’s ringing ears managed to pick out the whirring of other Twirler pistols as the glass showered onto the floor. Two figures in goggles and earmuffs, wearing lumberjack harnesses clipped to ropes swung in through the open window from the room above, red flashes thumping from their guns. One threw a long dark tube, like a documents holder, and as it span through the air, Spicer heard Conway shout two words.

“White out!”

As Spicer pulled his Twirler’s trigger, everything flashed to pure matt white, as though a sudden snowstorm had buried them all at once, and then he couldn’t make out a thing, like he had been struck by an avalanche. For a second he could feel the kick in his hand as the Twirler fired, then that feeling faded and there was no sound. He lowered the gun, worried he would hit the colonel or the ECO who had been caught in the crossfire. His brain told his mouth to order Conway to bring up counter measures but he couldn’t feel his jaw or tongue move. He’d been the victim of white out attacks before. It was Green Wonder, affecting the brain. There was no snow, it was not deathly quiet but he had lost all sensation. None of his senses were functioning. The tube grenade had unleashed Green Wonder treated to enter through the eyes and ears, hence the goggles and earmuffs on their attackers. He had known people who had suffered a fatal white out, unable to swallow food, imbibe water, or say goodbye to their loved ones. But this was already fading. Whoever had used the grenade didn’t have the money for the good stuff so they obviously weren’t military. These were freelancers, like Spicer’s own Reclaimers.

The lieutenant slowly lowered himself to the floor, deciding to sit down and wait it out. With the combination of the white out and his uniform, he couldn’t feel any of the glass he was undoubtedly sitting on.

When they’d first started looking for the Gargoyle Key, Spicer had heard there were others after it. He went down the list in his mind. Harcourt’s group had been decimated by a Hump attack in the Glasslands. Goring’s team had drowned when their chartered vessel went down off the coast of Livesey Island. The Albrecht gang had turned on each other in the dungeons of Kahleel, with no survivors. That left one crew with the audacity to embark on a raid in the Trade’s own regional headquarters.

The wall of white clouding Spicer’s vision retreated suddenly, as if someone had pulled a plug in the far wall and the pure white milky blanket had been sucked away. His hearing came back as though somebody had opened a heavy door to a loud party.

“...od’s sake, Major. All you had to do was keep hold of it,” Quine was snarling.

Spicer saw Tork shake his head clear, as though he was discouraging a bee from flying in his ear, while Bunce stared irritably at her boots as her sight returned. She rounded on Conway.

“What the Hell happened to you? I thought you knew how to deal with this sort of thing,” she hissed, leaving Conway to shrug in reply.

Suddenly the door was kicked open and Pendle stood at the door, his shoulders draped with ammo and a blat gun in each hand. Quine didn’t even look at him as he waved him away.

“I’ll get the caretaker, Sir,” Pendle said as he closed the door behind him.

Tork helped Spicer to his feet and the two of them moved to look out of the shattered window, the glass crunching under their boots. They looked at the hooks above where the ropes had been attached and down into the streets below.

Axelrod and Quine joined Spicer and Tork at the window, Axelrod with a pair of binoculars, which he used to scour the streets below.

“I take it this doesn’t affect our fee, Colonel,” Spicer said, not bothering to look him in the eye.

“Of course not, Lieutenant Spicer. You will receive your fee as promised,” Quine licked his lips, savouring the moment, “once the Gargoyle Key is safely in my possession.”

Spicer rolled his eyes in Tork’s direction.

“Anything, Axelrod?”

Axelrod shook his head.

“The perpetrators would need to know exactly where the key would be taken, on this occasion, to you, Colonel. They would need to know how to gain access to a Trade building. And they would also need to be able to get their hands on weapon grade Green Wonder and know what to do with it once they had it,” Axelrod surmised.

“It can only be Rickenbacker,” Quine spat, “Rickenbacker and that gaggle of fools led by Sir Evan Mandell. But why would they want the Gargoyle Key? They would never work for the People of The Ditch. Why would they steal it from us?”

“To stop us having it,” said the Viceroy, picking glass from his lap as he remained in his spot on the couch, “You know how difficult Rickenbacker likes to be.”

“We should have killed him all those years ago,” said Quine, “when he was still working with us.”

“Colonel,” said the Viceroy, tapping his stick on the floor, “Send the lieutenant and his Reclaimers with an Immolator Squad to get the key back. They found it once and they will find it again.”

He raised his stick and pointed it directly at Spicer. “Rickenbacker cannot be allowed to use that key.”

“Rick who?” Tork asked, surprised he was interested.

Axelrod answered, “Professor Hilary Rickenbacker, once one of our own but his hyperphysical studies sent him crazy. Too much Wonder, Green or Blue, who knows? Now he can only be described as...”

“...a terrorist,” Quine interrupted, “A terrorist, Mr... whoever you are,” looking Tork up and down.

“Where is he heading with the key? What does the key open?” Spicer asked.

Axelrod moved to a large, newly torn map of The Gramarye across the wall, “The Cathedral of Tales”,” he said, his thin finger tapping at the location, in the middle of the Glasslands”

“An extra twenty per cent if you bring the terrorist back with the key,” the Viceroy offered.

“Dead?” Tork asked.

“I don’t care in the slightest.”

Spicer had something on Rickenbacker and Mandell’s crew. Something that would prove to be very useful.

“Fine. Let’s go,” Spicer shrugged and headed for the door.

“One last thing before your bring Rickenbacker to us on his knees, Lieutenant,” Quine said, looking up at Tork.

“Sir?”

“Make the big one salute me before you leave,” said Quine with a coy smile.

Chapter 1

The Glasslands
The Gramarye Region
Grand Quillia

June 1856

As Professor Hilary Rickenbacker steered his pony through the Glasslands in the sunlight, the Gargoyle Key in a pouch on his belt, he felt like he was riding in starlight, through constellations in daytime. Each tree had been turned to quartz, each leaf to glass, every blade of grass to amber. The sound of the leaves recalled xylophones playing a gentle ode to delicacy. It was indeed magical.

He looked up at the spire of the Cathedral of Tales rising high above the treetops of the Glasslands and wondered what the Gargoyle Key would reveal to them on their arrival, should they survive the journey. One road cut through the glacial forest, Aspic Lane, now deserted since the Trade had built a slideway bypassing the entire Godforsaken area.

The transformation of the forest had occurred hundreds of years before, and to this day academics argued as to how it had happened. Most concurred it was caused by deep Blue Wonder, but nobody agreed why. One school of thought explained it away as an act of war, which having obliterated the city that had originally housed the Cathedral of the Tales an evil force had deprived the survivors of fuel for their fires, meat and security. Some said it was punishment by God on a city of sin. The more fanciful speculators blamed dragons, hunted to extinction, laying waste to the beautiful woodlands as a final dying act of spite.

Both hyperphysicists and the opponents of dabbling had agreed it could be an accident, the result of mutation through the overspill of deep Blue, too powerful for the fools who thought they could control it.

Professor Hilary Rickenbacker considered himself a romantic and a gentleman, and so he preferred to believe the Glasslands had been created as a memorial to a greater time, to a people who had embraced the Blue Wonder as a force for good. As an academic and historian, he could find nothing to disprove his theory.

It was a pinnacle of what the Wonder could be, and he felt a flutter of excitement as he thought about the potential answers offered by the Gargoyle Key finally in their possession, snatched from the hands of mercenaries under the noses of the Trade.

He was sure they would be pursued by the Trade, but their enemies would have to face the same danger as his own group. Although no predatory wildlife could survive on a land made up entirely of minerals, there were the bloodthirsty Humps to look out for. Like camels, the large humps on the Humps’ backs were both a burden, full as they were with cumbersome moisture to keep them alive, and something that gave them real freedom. They could go anywhere, live for months without water touching their lips. And they were happy eating raw flesh, so didn’t need a fire. Their Neanderthal brains believed they absorbed the power of those they consumed, so their favourite diet consisted of humanity. Eat a bird; you gain the soul of a sparrow. Banquet on man, you get the power of the most vicious two legged beast of them all. The exact source of the Humps was another academic argument that continued to rage in the gentlemen’s clubs of the Grand Quillia. Some said they were mankind’s ancestors, left behind by progress when we started to create our homes nearer rivers and wetlands. Others said they had lost some great war and been ostracised by society, so they then adapted with the growth of their humps and the loss of civilised behaviour.

Whatever they were, everybody agreed they were best avoided.

They were not native to the Glasslands but they had thrived, just as they did anywhere that was inhospitable to man. Deserts, salt flats, volcanic areas – places where man clung to life by their fingernails, the Humps were there to make it harder, to snatch hope away.

Rickenbacker felt a chill and kicked the flanks of his pony to get closer to his comrades. He looked over his shoulder to check Teddy was right behind him. He had familiar pang of guilt about dragging the boy into this. Unlike the others, Teddy wouldn’t be able to defend himself against Humps, against anyone. Teddy would have trouble against a feral kitten, Rickenbacker admitted to himself. Teddy was the nephew of Rickenbacker’s landlady in Fairport, when he was lecturing, and had come to work for the professor as his manservant. When Rickenbacker discovered the existence of the Gargoyle Key and decided to pursue it, Teddy had stayed by his side. He had warned the boy that his decision to pursue something that may bring them up against The Trade could lead them into choppy waters, but the boy, never demonstrative at the best of times, had shrugged his shoulders and packed his things into the same leather case that hung incongruously from his saddle amongst the pack bags.

Teddy’s eyes swept the forest and Rickenbacker could see his slender knuckles were white as he gripped hard to the reigns. The professor really didn’t need anybody to make his tea or lay out his clothes any more. He carried no teapot and had just one change of clothes. Once they got back to civilisation, Rickenbacker would make the boy redundant, with as generous a payoff as he could manage, of course.

As Rickenbacker made his decision, he noticed that the man named Pinkerton had slowed down to ride alongside the boy.

“All alright there, Teddy, my boy?” Pinkerton asked in his lilting accent from the Western Isles.

“Yes, sir, thank you, Sir, Mr Pinkerton, Sir,” Teddy replied, his lips trembling.

Teddy seemed just as scared of the enormous boxer as he was of the forest and Humps. He avoided looking into Pinkerton’s battered face framed by the man’s cauliflower eyes, heavy bridge of a brow and awesomely plush sideburns meandering down his face to skirt the edge of his mouth. His eyes got as far as Pinkerton’s battle-scarred hands and went no further. He had seen the handbills and posters the man carried around like business cards. Everybody had. Whenever the beer started to flow or wine glasses were filled, which they would be all the time if Pinkerton had his way, the man would unfurl the posters and tell his stories.

The posters called him Ten Fingers Pinkerton the Gentleman Pugilist, and his most famous fight had been a bout that lasted eight hours and twenty-four minutes, bare-knuckled on Langtry Common. His opponent, Bill Edlington, the East Country Masher had broken Pinkerton’s arm in two places, but still Pinkerton battled on, finally knocking Edlington spark out with an uppercut to the jaw after a quick one-two, as the sun turned blood orange red over the Great Quillian capital.

Occasionally they would meet people who had heard of Pinkerton, and once they met a drunk who claimed to have been at the Langtry Common fight, but that same drunk had also claimed to have once dined on his own ear, an assertion disputed by both ears being healthily in place either side of his head.

Pinkerton had already been riding with Sir Evan Mandell when Rickenbacker had first met them. Rickenbacker and Teddy had been fleeing The Trade’s militia through the back streets of Allenbridge and had stumbled into a dead end behind a pub. Mandell later recalled he had seen the militia, weapons drawn, advancing on the professor and his manservant and had been in the process of flipping a coin to ascertain whether he should finish his meal, a rabbit and bean stew with potatoes and leaks and a fine specimen of it at that, or head straight out and intervene. His decision had been made for him when Rickenbacker had used a burst of Red Wonder to deter his attackers, accidentally smashing every window on that side of the pub and showering all the occupants, as well as Mandell’s stew, with slivers of glass.

It was when the pub’s regulars joined the militia in demanding their pound of flesh from the professor that Pinkerton had reminded Mandell of their decision to become gentleman adventurers, and the two men had joined the fray, taking the underdog’s side, naturally.

Sir Evan and Pinkerton had been riding with the professor for the three months since, and had seen many sights to provide stories their grandchildren would become rich reciting. They had seen the professor wield magic like a weapon straight from pure unmediated Wonder, both Red and Green, and had broken into a Trade Headquarters, (albeit a regional one, but not all parts of the story need be stressed) to steal a prize from the renowned Reclaimers commanded by the unscrupulous Lieutenant Spicer, a privateer ruffian and all round bad egg.

The final member of the group advancing through the Glasslands was the fair Lady Elena Melody. The rest of them knew little about her, except for Sir Evan, who had managed to see her naked twice, and had seen her breasts a total of five times. Unfortunately the last time he had been spotted ogling said chest, which had been a fearsome embarrassment that could only be salved with copious amounts of alcohol, this time a fulsome brandy from a roadside inn on the other side of Chinsey.

Lady Melody explained she was a widow, although this made her no more susceptible to Mandell’s attempt at seductive charm. Her husband Lord Runciman Drew Hynes Melody was from the respected Drew Hynes Melodys who, four generations ago, had sponsored the Drew Hynes Melody Wing at the University of Fairport, where Rickenbacker had lectured in a History of The Wonder. Although he had never met Lady Melody, Rickenbacker had met Runciman fleetingly when the ruddy-faced Lord had twice visited the University for a Founders Day or some other black tie boozy bash. Despite the few rushed introductions, the professor had apparently made quite an impression. Elena told the story that on his death bed, Runciman told his darling wife to seek the professor out and study with him, help him in any way she could and that is what Elena had dedicated herself to for the last month. She had discovered Rickenbacker at a provincial records office, when he had started planning the raid on The Trade’s Chinsey headquarters, and hadn’t let the professor out of her sight since.

She proved to be quite the tomboy, able to ride with the best of the men and fire dual Twirlers from the hip, something she put down to her background as the only daughter in a family with thirteen brothers.

Elena was the first in the group to hear the Humps’ approach. She pulled her pony up and tilted her head to listen. Mandell had seen enough of Elena’s skills to trust her instincts better than his own, and drew his pistol. It was an antiquated pre-Twirler one-shot Spinner pistol, the heirloom of a military family. He spun the chamber on his thigh to charge the single shot, looking over at Pinkerton, who was pulling his blat gun from its saddle holster.

“What’s happening?” Teddy asked.

“Humps,” Elena hissed, before pointing to the side of the road, “coming from that direction.”

“Professor,” Mandell called, squinting into the woods, “Any tricks up your sleeve?”

The ponies started to spook, as did Teddy. It was then the rest of the group heard the approach. Like the sound of grit being shaken in thousands of glass bottles simultaneously echoing in a tunnel full of wind chimes, the Humps crashed through the Glasslands, unable to surprise the party on pony back. They knew their prey’s ponies would get skittish and that would only help them.

“Throw me the bag,” Rickenbacker demanded from Teddy, whose pony twisted as he reached round the saddlebags desperately searching for what Mandell called the professor’s bag of tricks. Elena’s Twirlers hit their optimum spin, a noise akin to a swarm of mosquitoes and she was the first to fire, pulling the triggers on her guns three times each. The bright red shots of Wonder carrying the projectiles lit up the crystal trees around them as they hurtled through the woods. Teddy’s young eyes could make out the dark shapes of the Humps thundering towards them, seeing two in the front fall to the ground leaving arks of blood as the shots hit their targets.

“Teddy!” Rickenbacker shouted over the gunfire, desperate for his tools.