Chaos Trims My Beard: A Fantasy Noir Read online

  Chaos Trims My Beard

  A fantasy noir

  by

  Brett Herman

  ©Brett Herman, 2017. All rights reserved

  www.brettherman.net

  Cover illustration by Patrick Beavers

  www.patrickbeavers.com

  Cover design by Kelly Beiksha

  www.kellybeedesign.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either product of the author's imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  To Mallory, for always sitting in the audience.

  Table of Contents

  Title

  Copyright

  Prologue: For the Record

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  A note from the author

  Edwayn's Personal Glossary

  Other Books

  Contact Information

  Acknowledgements

  FOR THE RECORD

  Buried in a box that sits inside a dusty stone shack near the desert’s western edge is a recording of a dwarf and a ratman. The dwarf is short with a long black beard, and the rat is shorter with a green blazer and complementary hat. In this recording they sit across the table from one another in the same desert shack, and there is no box for it has not yet arrived. This is what they said.

  “The girl’s gone, and the city went with her. This is stupid,” says the dwarf.

  The ratman mutters out a low series of clicks from deep within his throat. When he speaks, his voice is both grating and musical. “This one understands his friend’s position. Still, history has a way with disasters. Accurate record must be kept, protocols followed.”

  “You pick now to get enthusiastic about procedure?” the dwarf asks.

  “This one is ostensibly the last of the New Sketlin Police Bureau. Feels he owes it to his former colleagues,” the ratman replies. He pulls out two bundles of floating crystals from inside his blazer. One he places to hover above the middle of the table and it flashes red when he taps it with his claws. The ratman looks at the dwarf and motions to the recording device. “Interview has begun. Please describe your name.”

  The dwarf shakes his head and stares at his former partner. “How do I describe…” he trails off when the ratman’s gaze remains impassive. The dwarf reasserts himself and starts over. “Fine. Edwayn, spoken like a guy named Ed and a girl named Wayne had a kid. And then Sattler, like a settler found a chair.”

  “Good,” the ratman says with a nod. He moves towards the dwarf with the other crystal device in his claws. “If Edwayn would wear this on his head, please.”

  “What is it?” Edwayn asks. “It looks sharp.”

  The ratman taps at the device and it separates into the vague shape of a crown and spins lazily in the air. He places it over Edwayn’s brow too quickly for the dwarf to protest. “New thing from PRIMELE. Allows for more vivid recall. This one is a prototype. It probably works,” the ratman says.

  Edwayn taps at the crystals as they pass in front of his eyebrows. “So you ask me questions and I, what, relive the answers? This feels illegal.”

  “Only illegal if this one has to force Edwayn to wear it.” The ratman opens his blazer and taps the butt of a gun. “Still, there is no one esle around to do the enforcing.”

  “Yeah, whatever buddy. I’ve got the other one right here,” Edwayn says, patting his own jacket. “So what, my memory isn’t good enough for this ‘accurate account’?” he asks, making dismissive marks with his fingers around the term.

  The ratman takes his seat on the other side of the table. “Memory too, has a way with disaster.”

  “Some of that stuff isn’t particularly good for remembering,” Edwayn says. His eyes wander from the ratman to stare at the yellow stone wall. There is silence for a moment. “Where should I start? The day the city dissolved? Or when the urudaen went to war? What about the afternoon where I was president?”

  There are more clicks from the ratman. “Let us save that. The weekend of fire, maybe, when we met the girl and you ruined all of those parties. And when we found the flying silver pig.”

  “I ruined one, maybe two, parties. And I still have the pig. Fine, from the top, and don’t interrupt me.”

  1

  My name is Edwayn Sattler and I have a beard. With me since the day I was born, the thick, oiled hairs growing out of my face made for enough of an identity as I cared to have. From the thick roots on my cheeks and chin down to its terminus, between my gut and waist, my whole beard is black. It’s not an obsidian black or anything flashy or glossy like that. The color is closer to the inside of a tuxedo’s lapel. A classy, understated black. Some of it hangs thick in wide braids punctuated by metal rings and beads that clink when I move too fast. A lot of it flows freely to tangle and blow in the wind. My beard is a sturdy thing—enduring, unlike friendships or wealth—and only truly threatened by bad or drunken decisions in the presence of razors and flame.

  It would make for a good conversation piece if anybody cared to talk about it.

  Even after years of working in and around crowds, I never could light up a room: I didn't have the charm for it. The guy at the other end of the bar though, he was on fire, and sent a bit of it in my direction. The shock of the passing ball of magic pressed in against my shoulders and made my ears thud. Pressure gave way to heat and my beard stank. Fire and me, we’ve got a thing. It’s a long, ugly thing that stretches all the way back to my beginning.

  The half-empty drinks rattled on my tray, but the party around me continued unabated. A good number of people laughed and the guy who'd thrown the fireball slapped a few outstretched hands. Tiny orange arcs raced across his palm and forearm in a showy display of just how much magic this guy had.

  My heart lurched into a heavy beat and my mind sparked. Getting put on the back foot by some mage's show of alcohol-fueled ego usually didn't rattle me, but fire's a damned thing. The worst aromas of nutmeg and tar stung at my nose. He'd gotten a spark into my beard. It was a fine smell to me but others would get offended and that would cause problems. My tray clattered with empty mugs and red-stained stemware as I shoved it onto the bar top. One of my thicker beard-braids was giving off smoke and my most prized hair, was threatened with the fate of kindling. The hot spot smoldered a few inches above the braid's dangling tip, just above the metal ring woven into the strands, and I crushed it in my fist until the heat radiated into my palm and died.

  It didn't hurt. You can't get burned by your own beardfire, that's what the books said. When I let go, the smell had stopped and the only other person who took notice was the bartender.

  I stood about as tall as a full human's shoulder. The bartender was a two-headed slab of ogre that dwarfed everyone. His job was to yell a lot and stiff me on my tip out at the end of the night. Mine was to collect empties and get him whatever he needed while imitating a smile. Most nights I found work as a bar runner, short-order cook, or whatever other job I was paid for. My level of ambition matche
d well with the foot-pounding drudgery of catering, sometimes literally, to the city's rich and famous. Some nights I got compensated well. Other nights a playboy threw fire at my head. There was other work, too. Jobs for the viscount or his seedy friends: ones that paid well enough to cover less profitable, more socially acceptable endeavors. I kept my head down, mouth shut, and could take a punch pretty well. It all coalesced to keep my financials straight and my conscience only moderately burdened. My parents probably had larger notions in their eyes when someone pulled the already-bearded, half-dwarf, half-man lump that I was from womb to world.

  I looked up and found the sky polished like the blue-green-yellow slice of gift-shop geode while the city's spellsteel towers stood sentinel. Their chrome skin was dulled to the colors of cobalt and wrought iron in the post-twilight. My free hand waved off the last wisps of beardsmoke while the party simmered and swirled around me.

  Viscount Aglowe threw one of these things every month or so. He was big in with politicians and law enforcement and just about anyone else with enough coin or dust. The host himself was in the middle of the dance floor, clomping around the fat piece of ebony that served as the centerpiece for his favorite social habit. Aglowe didn't like to be overlooked in a crowd, and his hair, skin, and eyes had all been smothered in some special paste to ensure he was the most incandescent of the bobbing revelers.

  It was an impressive feat, given the natural luminescence any elf brought with them. Uniformly tall and lithe, elves were fit for fashion runways across the entirety of their incredibly long—potentially indefinite—lives. If one entered a room of lesser species the entire social hierarchy would upend to refocus around him or her, and the presence of two or more muted every conversation into quiet verbal genuflection.

  There were dozens of elves enjoying drinks and dancing at Aglowe's estate tonight and the rest of the guests were managing to enjoy themselves only through the boldness afforded by their own alcohol, fancy titles, and overstuffed bank accounts. It said something about Viscount Aglowe that amongst so many members of the New Sketlin upper crust, he still had to lather himself in magical paste just so no one could claim that they hadn't seen him at his own party. A few months back, I'd helped Aglowe with his shiny cosmetics and touched up a spot on his cheek after one of his more energetic fits of dancing. The tip of my finger had glowed bright enough to read by for a week.

  Not satisfied with only the attention of his guests' eyes, the viscount's music poured out of four giant shells, each a ridiculously oversized pink-and-blue imitation of something better suited to the back of a crab. The songs on offer sounded like lightning crashing against breaking waves, undercut with a smoky, throbbing bass. The generous circles that had formed around each shell and the way guests scrunched up their faces or brushed their ears when they got too close said that Aglowe was in the minority with his aural tastes.

  The rest of the décor followed a similarly chic-cliché nautical theme. When you live in a city that's long on beautiful coastline and short on taste in design, then all of the parties tend to take on the same ultramarine hue. The linens ranged from aquamarine to sapphire, the tables and chairs all had the look of wood carved into waves and sand dunes. As a centerpiece, a giant basin half the width of the dance floor floated above the festivities, its rim crowded with glass-blown fish and birds all spitting bolts of colored water into the bowl. The aesthetic would have been impressive were it not some five-minute hodgepodge of magical fakery.

  For my part, I'd been running bright blue and red concoctions in curly glasses complete with fruit and tiny umbrella. Most of the drinks shot off little magical sparks of dust. A few hours inside the cloud of sugar and alcohol that hung over my tray had given me a headache. Our betters didn't care much for telling us what these shindigs were in honor of. Given the setup, Aglowe might have been hosting a fundraiser for some bay conservation movement or paying tribute to some friend he'd backroom-dealed into a high-up port position. Or maybe he was just honoring some overly watery great-uncle. Elves were fanatical in lavishing expense and spectacle on their ancestors. It didn't help that they never died and those forebears were usually around to demand more and more of their progeny. A few decades serving the same, unchanging crowd made me glad for mortality.

  I picked up my collection of dead drinks and looked around the party again. The guy who'd shot a fireball at me stood near the shell speaker closest to the bar. He was human, and the flames still danced across his fingertips. A woman, elven and arrayed in a dark blue dress with silver lines that fluttered, smiled and laughed with him. That didn’t do much for my mood.

  Something about the shape of her stuck in my eye. Where most elves were long and slender in every aspect of their bodies, this woman's face was almost squat. She was still striking though—no one has ever accused Edwayn Sattler of being too good to appreciate the way an elven matron looks in an evening gown—and I found myself staring.

  A rough grunt followed by a pounding shudder shook me out of my distracted gaze. The two-headed bartender, Urg'Thwack or Urg'Thunk, depending on which face was doing the talking, stared at me with one head while taking some guest's order with the other. A fist like a beef haunch quivered against the copper. Before he could say anything, I balanced my tray of abandoned drinks against my arm and moved towards the bins full of dirty glassware. Urg'Thwack-Thunk didn't make any effort to get out of my way in the cramped space behind the bar and I gave up, dropping the tray on an open spot. It would get me yelled at later, but with the ogre counting the coin I wouldn't be getting tips anyway.

  Out from behind the bar, I stole another glance at the elf. She kept laughing at the jerk with the fire and traced a pale finger along the sleeve of his enflamed arm. Her features struck me again. This time it was her hair. It might have been the dim party atmosphere, but the pile of curls and strands on top of her head took on a distinctly brown hue. Every other elf I'd seen had hair light and bright enough to confuse it with platinum. Or an obvious color job.

  I felt stupid for staring again and forced my eyes to look somewhere else.

  A smaller elf stood next to her. My mind flared when I noticed he was a he and probably her lifemate or whatever. After a few seconds of glowering, I saw that his features were soft and he wasn't nearly as radiant. A child, maybe. His suit was all sharp aggressive lines and the colors never went very far from red and black. He'd highlighted his expectedly blond hair with purple and blue and cut it so it framed his face. Where she was bubbly, he was brooding.

  I'd worked hundreds of these parties, and New Sketlin was a small city as far as major metropolitan areas went. There were only so many rich people that could filter in and out of overpriced estates. These three were unknown to me, or at least they hadn't been anywhere I'd worked at in the last decade.

  I focused on the guy with the fire, hoping to catch his eye and stare him down. It was immature, schoolyard crap but he'd made me mad when he singed my beard and I really didn't care. As it turns out, he was very suddenly preoccupied. The bits of fire circling his hands grew. Flames blossomed from his chest and engulfed his skin and clothing. His mouth widened in a stretched out scream as the fire ran up his chin and over his tongue. The rest of his face was burning before I could get a good look.

  Just as the spreading lines of fire connected and overtook him fully the light coming off of him flared. The flash was overwhelming and I clenched my eyes shut. With gasps of surprise and clatter of skittering feet, the other partygoers had clearly begun to take notice.

  The pain in my eyes dulled, I chanced a look back at the guy on fire. Little sparks of blue shot off from the orange wavering mass that had recently been a human body but he didn't give off any smoke. He'd been playing with this bit of magic long enough that charring his robe wouldn't have surprised anyone, but this was different.

  In a world where most people could lob a ball of flame wherever and whenever they felt like it, setting a body or two alight could be construed as inevitable. Alcohol and the
notion of invincibility that the hyper rich carried around with them played their part in the occasional accident, but this guy was torching up too fast and too completely for it to be a party trick gone foul. My stomach clenched into a rock. The guy who brought and cleared drinks wasn't supposed to be security, and dealing with a pile of flames that used to be a person was far beyond my pay, but my body started moving before my mind decided to stop it. Like I said, fire and I had a history.

  The immolating partygoer stumbled and screamed. The elf woman grabbed her sullen companion and hustled away from her former object of flirtation. The fire guy screamed again and started running. He had plenty of places to go.

  Viscount Aglowe was hosting in the main courtyard of his estate. The sunken dance floor, large as it was, only took up a small part of the total floor space and the higher tier of the party was crowded with people in flammable clothes and tables covered in burnable finery. Statuary and fountains dotted each corner of the space with dry shrubbery in between. For all the kitschy aquatic décor on display, it did nothing to alleviate the notion that all of Aglowe's expensive stuff faced imminent burning. I wouldn't get too hung up on the things the viscount lost, but the people—blank-eyed socialites with too much money and too little class as they were—still deserved better.

  The layout of the party had one thing working for it. Aglowe's real display of wealth stood in the surrounding walls. Fifteen feet of smooth white stone shot with blue luminescent veins stood guard around the viscount and his guests. People called it magerock, or mana-marble or a handful of other uninspired names. It was artificial and to someone even partially dwarven it was an abomination. Uncountable tons of rock slept underfoot waiting to be cut and set, yet flighty mages dumped a fortune's worth of magic-enabling dust into pulling an imitation out of thin air.

  Magerock had one almost-practical use aside from signaling its owner's offensive level of wealth. Any magic missiles or other mage-like acts of aggression loosed near the walls would be stopped dead, sucked up by whatever enchantment made the whole thing glow like blue marble. Nobody could walk under a magerock arch looking like somebody else and still keep their glamour up on the other side. It was all well and good, and made the people at parties like this feel protected from the scary specter that was anything outside of their bubble. However, magerock didn’t offer any protection when something happened inside its perimeter as evidenced by the guy on fire's previous joke of trying to burn my face off.