'The Other White Meat' (Tales from the Aether Part Six)

[Prunesquallor]

(Note: To hear this story read by mistercactus, a trained Shakespearean actor, please tune into Episode 10 of our Malifaux podcast: The Aethervox).

This story is part four of an ongoing series:

Part 1: 'The Circus is Coming to Town'

Part 2: 'The Auxiliary'

Part 3: 'The Pocketwatchers'

Part 4: 'The Choir of Babel'

Part 5: 'Faculties'

***

Lynn had always been a whiz with knives. A dozen dangled from her workbelt, like a glittering skirt, and she sang as she sliced through muscle, fat and cartilage with quick, sure strokes. She treated her knives the way some men treated their pistols, keeping each as sharp and clean as sunlight, and she was only happy when they were in use.

Lynn bought her knives from Mr. Anawa in the Little Kingdom. They were sharper, stronger and lighter than anything forged in Malifaux. Mr. Anawa said they were made by an order of monks who had perfected the art of folding the hot steel back on itself as it cooled, patterning the blades with bands of light and dark, imbuing them with toughness, hardness and beauty. Lynn aspired to be like one of those knives.

Lynn was a cutter at Swank & Pugg’s Charcuterie. She had started out working with the fresh carcasses, making what were called the “primal cuts” - separating flank from loin, hocks from trotters - and worked her way up to sous-chef on the strength of her knife-skills. She could chop an onion in a heartbeat, mince a head of garlic as quick as a wink, bone a bayou trout with a flick of the wrist. She worked with a quiet intensity that frightened the other employees, and when she wasn’t working she was sharpening her knives, honing her technique.

Swank & Pugg’s attracted a diverse clientele. It was an expensive joint, but it nonetheless appealed to the baser elements of Malifaux society: crime bosses and fallen aristocrats; thieves, gamblers and prospectors who had struck it lucky; corrupt union organizers and disgraced guild officials. A man could pull up a stool in front of Swank & Pugg’s battered, gouged bar and gorge on a selection the finest meats Malifaux had to offer. Its patrons treated meat like liquor; they forgot their sorrows in the greasy, fragrant darkness; they became intoxicated—meat-drunk—passed out at their tables, started fights. Swank & Pugg’s had a reputation as a dangerous place, a shameful place to be caught dining.

Mr. Swank and Mr. Pugg were never kind to anyone, but they treated Lynn with respect, and appreciated her for her talents. They liked that she wasn’t squeamish. Lynn loved to prepare blood sausage, bulls’ eyeballs, lamb brains and the other exotic offal that the customers lusted after. She loved to slice open a still-warm carcass and cut out the liver, the kidneys, the entrails. Her bosses admired her enthusiasm for the bloody work.

And when the special deliveries started to come in, Lynn didn’t even blink. They were infrequent, at first. The meat was brought in at the special request of a tiny coterie of loyal customers, who were willing to pay a small fortune for it. On those nights Mr. Swank would dismiss the other kitchen staff and Lynn would work alone. She felt a certain pride in Mr. Swank’s trust in her, a certain thrill at the illicit nature of the job.

The carcasses came stuffed into iron cold-chests, already partially butchered, limbs and torso and head packed neatly in ice. Lynn got to work with her cleaver and boning knife. She made steak and stew, rendered the fat and ground the chuck for frying; she made headcheese and sweetbreads; she made soup from the marrow and served the tongue as an amuse bouche on a bed of sorrel. The gristle and tendons and bones she threw to the rats, along with the table scraps, and when she was done there was nothing left but fat rats and ecstatic customers.

Things changed on the day a dozen off-duty Death Marshalls showed up at the end of the evening without a reservation and demanded a table. They were celebrating a promotion and were drunk and surly and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Lynn was already closing up and all the staff had gone home save for Benoit, the senile old dishwasher. Mr. Pugg burst into the kitchen in a panic, sweating even more than usual. “Twelve covers,” he said, “and make it the good stuff. These are guild personnel we’re dealing with.”

“No can do, boss,” Lynn informed him. “I just tossed a case of rotten beef this afternoon. Big delivery coming in on the morrow. Only enough meat left for three or four portions, tops.”

“Then crack open the special stuff,” Mr. Pugg instructed. “Just make sure it looks like pork.”

So Lynn opened the cold-chests and got to work with her blades, carving out a dozen prime steaks. Even without the skin, the meat still had a greenish hue, so she made a thick, dark sauce full of red wine and brown sugar, which she poured generously over everything, and sent it out with a sprig of rosemary and a side-dish of spiced tripe.

An hour later a burly man burst into the kitchen, grinning from ear to ear, and threw his sweaty arms around Lynn, slurring, “Bes’ meal I ev’r had. Yer my hero.” Mr. Pugg entered a moment later, grabbing the man by the collar and shoving him roughly out into the dining room.

“Sorry Lynn,” said Mr. Pugg. “I know how you hate customers in your kitchen.” But then he began to grin himself, and for an awful moment Lynn thought he would hug her too. “Still,” he went on, “they love the stuff. We’ve got to start putting this on the regular menu.”

“Risky, boss,” said Lynn.

“To hell with risk,” said Mr. Pugg. “We’ll be rich.”

#

Every Thursday, Lynn got up at midnight, hitched up the oxcart and loaded it with the previous week’s empty chests. She would drive it through Peakbon Slums to Brackwater Docks to meet Horatio’s barge as it came in. The exchange was always done under cover of darkness.

At first, Horatio had been reluctant when she told him they were increasing their order tenfold. “One or two special deliveries is one thing,” he had told her, in that whispery hiss of his, “that’s why you come to Old Horatio, after all – but if you want this to be a bigger operation we have to get a few things straight. I’m taking too big a risk as it is. The Guild is breathing down my neck. They don’t trust me on account of my past. But I’ll tell you like I told them, that’s over and done with. I’m a legitimate businessman now, and this damn meat is tarnishing my good name.”

But, greedy for the scrip Lynn promised, he had agreed.

#

Swank & Pugg’s was packed every night and Lynn was given a large bonus that she spent on a new meat cleaver, purchased from Mr. Anawa’s shop. It was a thing of beauty. The flat of the blade was dark and highly polished—a black mirror, but its cutting edge seemed to glow, a sliver of translucent blue, as sharp as thought.

The gourmands of Malifaux couldn’t get enough of the unusual meat that Horatio brought in from downriver. But the richer Swank and Pugg got, the more careless they got. They hired new staff, who worked with the special meat every day, and must have guessed what it was. Swank and Pugg dropped broad hints to customers that you couldn’t get the stuff anywhere else, that it might, in fact, not be obtainable by legal means. They were blackmailed regularly by petty criminals who threatened to turn them in to the Guild. Sometimes Swank and Pugg just laughed in their faces: “How you gonna get your fix if they close us down? What are you gonna eat? Vegetables?” Sometimes they hired thugs of their own to remedy the situation.

But Lynn knew it was only a matter of time. In Malifaux, successful businesses attracted trouble like a corpse attracts flies. So when Lynn returned from the storeroom one night to discover a mysterious woman in the kitchen, she hardly batted an eyelid. The restaurant had been closed for hours, all the doors locked, and the only way into the kitchen was through the dining room, where Mr. Swank and Mr. Pugg were busy counting that day’s take. And yet here was an intruder, sitting on the butcher’s block, wearing a garish outfit patterned with harlequin’s motley. Her face was plastered with stage makeup. It was half-red, half-yellow and her eyes were thickly rimmed with khol, making them appear larger than they really were. He hair was cut short, almost to her scalp.

The woman said nothing. She just stared at Lynn with those huge, darkened eyes.

Lynn reached casually for her cleaver and began to sharpen it, without taking her eyes off the woman. It made a pleasing shing-shing sound as she ran the whetstone along the blade. She felt safer with the cleaver in her hand.

“It’s not hygienic to sit there,” said Lynn at last.

The woman laughed. It was a sharp, explosive laugh that was both joyful and cruel. “You’re quite right,” she said. “We wouldn’t want anyone to catch anything nasty from eating your food, would we now?”

“I’m just an employee,” said Lynn. “If you wish to discuss matters related to this business, I suggest you speak to Mr. Swank and Mr. Pugg. They are presently in the dining room.”

The woman laughed again, and then gave a sharp whistle. Three tiny creatures burst through the kitchen door. They wore jesters’ caps and the same motley coats as the woman. Their faces were white with huge red smiles painted on. It took Lynn several moments to realize what they were—to realize that under the makeup was green skin.

The door to the kitchen opened both ways to permit easy access and it swung back and forth on its hinges a few times with energy left over from the gremlins’ sudden entry, affording Lynn a series of glimpses into the dining room beyond. Mr. Swank and Mr. Pugg sat back-to-back in straight-backed chairs, bound and gagged.

“The proprietors of this establishment are indisposed at the moment,” said the woman. “It’s you I want to talk to.” She picked up Lynn’s boning knife, idly and began picking her nails with the blade.

Lynn moved fast and with conviction. She swung her cleaver hard enough to cut through bone, gripping the handle with both hands. It sang as it cut the air, arcing towards the butcher block and the woman’s body.

The woman barely moved—barely, but just enough. She seemed to fold herself around the cleaver’s blade as it descended, moving exactly what was necessary to avoid the attack, but not a muscle more. Lynn’s hands stung as the cleaver bit into the butcher’s block and lodged there. The woman just sat there, the cleaver mere inches from her hip and continued to pick at her nails. With a mighty tug Lynn freed the cleaver from the block and stumbled back, but as she regained her balance the gremlins sprang into action. One jumped on another’s shoulders and they ran at Lynn with astonishing speed.

The topmost gremlin was now almost level with Lynn’s face, and in a moment of adrenaline-drenched lucidity Lynn felt certain the little creature was going use his jagged fingernails to rip her eyes out.

Instead, the gremlin stopped abruptly, inches from Lynn’s nose, and blew a raspberry. Lynn stepped back in shock, only to trip over the third gremlin, who had taken up position on his hand-and-knees directly behind her.

Lynn’s fall was spectacular. As she crashed to the ground she flailed her arms, dislodging pots and pans from their hooks and losing her grip on the cleaver, creating a cacophony of clattering copper and steel. She banged the back of her head against the tile floor and for a moment the throbbing, splintery pain was all she could see. She felt herself lurch towards unconsciousness, but, with a monumental effort of will, fought her way back to the here and now.

She found it very hard to breathe, and as her vision cleared she realized why. A gremlin was standing on her chest, glaring down at her.

“Gremlins dangerous,” he said. His voice was high-pitched and hoarse and he sounded slightly demented. Lynn nodded in frightened agreement.

“I think you misunderstand my colleague,” came the woman’s voice, silky and mocking. “Otis does not mean that gremlins are dangerous, a claim that is readily apparent to even a casual observer. He means gremlin is dangerous—a fact that only becomes apparent over time and with repeated exposure. You see, gremlin meat is known to carry a particularly nasty disease, known colloquially as Bayou Brain Rot.”

Lynn’s eyes darted left and right in search of something she could use as a weapon. She noted the locations of the other two gremlins. They were rummaging around the kitchen, stuffing silverware and other valuables into their comically oversized pockets. There was a heavy cast-iron skillet close to Lynn’s left hand, but when she attempted to move her arm she found her muscles unresponsive and felt her brain filling up with black fuzz, so she just lay there and focused on remaining conscious instead.

“Lynn, I am not here to kill you,” continued the woman. “You are, as you say, just an employee. My colleagues and I are also employees. We have been hired to put an end to the traffic in gremlin meat that seems to be something of a craze in Malifaux these days.”

“We’ll stop,” managed Lynn. “We’ll never serve it again.”

“That’s true,” said the woman. “Your bosses made me the same promise. But it’s not enough. We have to go to the source, Lynn. We want your supplier. Let me tell you what you’re going to do for us…”

#

Lynn was early to Brackwater Docks that night. She was jittery with nerves, glad that the darkness would hide this from Horatio.

“Got a special favour to ask, Horatio,” she said as he tied up his barge. Lynn was a terrible liar, so she had rehearsed what she wanted to say over and over, and now she let her mouth run on autopilot. She told him that she was concerned about the quality of the meat she had been getting and that she wanted to personally oversee the slaughter and butchering to make sure it was being done according to the high standards for which Swank & Pugg’s Charcuterie was famous.

Horatio laughed in her face. “No can do, girl. Mr. Baptiste is a very private man. You want to talk to him, you do it through me.”

“Sorry, Horatio,” said Lynn, “that’s just not good enough. I want to speak with him myself.”

“Not about what you want, honey,” drawled Horatio.

“Oh, but I think it is,” said Lynn, and she produced from her pocket a fat roll of guild scrip. Ruby, the strange harlequin, had persuaded Mr. Swank and Mr. Pugg to lend her this money. She counted off bills, stacking them in piles of a-thousand. Horatio watched her with greedy eyes. “There are other ways of getting gremlin meat, Horatio. You think a bush hunter couldn’t scare up a few gremlin for the right price? You think we couldn’t hire the Ortegas? It’s maggoty with gremlins out in Latigo. I come to you for two things—reliability of service and quality of goods. On the first count you’ve never let me down, but on the second…well, I may as well just take this money elsewhere.” She emphasized her point by shovelling the stacks of cash back into her pocket and climbing back onto her cart.

“Awright, awright,” Horatio called after her. “But I’ll need to blindfold you for the journey.”

“Fine by me,” said Lynn.

#

By midday they were deep into the bayou, and Lynn was beginning to get nervous again. The journey was proving longer than expected. Maybe Horatio was taking a roundabout route to disorient her. The air was close and humid and thick with mosquitoes. Lynn sat blindfolded on a stack of cold-chests. She had told Horatio that they contained samples of bad meat that she wanted to show to Mr. Baptiste. He hadn’t questioned her, hadn’t demanded to look inside, he had just helped her lug them onto the barge along with the usual load of empties.

Now that he was resigned to having Lynn along, Horatio seemed to be enjoying the company. For the last four hours he had been regaling her with stories of his days as a river pirate.

“If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s betrayal,” Horatio was saying. “A captain’s gotta be able to trust his crew, and the crew’s gotta be able to trust each other. Else-wise you’d always have to keep one eye on the man standing next to you, and when you’ve only got one eye that don’t leave too many eyes for looking at where yer shootin’ now does it? Har har. So every now and then I’d have to make an example out of someone. Maybe I’d catch someone stealing, or if it had been a while I might just pick someone at random – just as a reminder, like. Anyway I’d cut ‘em, just enough to make ‘em bleed real good, and then throw ‘em overboard. Let the gators explain what happens to folk who betray old Horatio.”

Lynn smiled and wondered if there were alligators about now. She had butchered and cooked an alligator once and she wondered if it had cousins in these waters who wanted revenge. She prayed Horatio wouldn’t be around when it was time to open the chests.

Lynn took out her cleaver and whetstone from her belt and began to sharpen the blade. This was something relaxing that she could easily do blindfolded.

Another hour and Lynn smelled smoke. Ugly little voices, close-by. The squeal of pigs. A jolt and a bump as the barge stuck in the mud and became unstuck again. And finally, Horatio told Lynn they had arrived.

Horatio guided Lynn’s hands to the rungs of a rotting wooden ladder. “You lot. Bring the empties,” Horatio yelled, and Lynn heard a scrabbling and a babbling, felt small quick forms moving around her. She heard the scrape of the cold-chests being dragged along the barge’s deck, steams of foul-mouthed complaints in those high-pitched, nasty voices. And there were other sounds, sounds she wouldn’t have heard if she hadn’t been listening for them. The click of three cold chests opening and closing. The patter of more pairs of feet on the deck of the barge than there had been a moment ago.

Lynn climbed the ladder, fumblingly, and was led along what she guessed was a swaying, wooden pier. It creaked with every step. Then she felt mud underfoot. Horatio led her by the arm and they trudged for what seemed like hours, the chest carriers following. Then Lynn felt wood under her feet again, and her footsteps echoed, as if she were inside a large building. Some muttering and shouting, the sound of animals squabbling, Horatio’s voice, speaking low and quick. Then, approaching footsteps, and finally: “So this must be the whiny little chef who don’t like my meat.” The man stood very close to Lynn as he spoke and she felt his stinking breath on her face.

Lynn tried to remain cool. She felt claustrophobic and helpless with the blindfold on. She felt like a prisoner. She fingered the handle of the cleaver that hung from her belt and took comfort in the fact that the man had not relieved her of it. “You must be Mr. Baptiste,” she said, trying to sound cool.

“Not mister,” growled the man. “Just Baptiste, s’il vous plait.”

“I’m Lynn.”

“Yes, I know,” said Baptiste. “I also know that the meat that I supply to Swank & Pugg’s has made the place famous throughout Malifaux.”

“It has,” Lynn agreed.

“Then why, may I ask, are you here?”

Lynn hesitated, then reached tentatively for her blindfold, waiting for permission.

“Yeah, go on then,” growled Baptiste.

Lynn blinked in the dim light. She stood at the center of an enormous barn. Lining every wall were high stacks of rickety wooden cages. In each cage sat a fat gremlin. The interior of the cages looked strangely opulent. Each was lined with soft cushions and the gremlins inside were gorging themselves on heaping bowls of food and taking swigs from jars of moonshine. They looked happy in their captivity and more than a little inebriated.

From the rafters hung a dozen butcher’s hooks, with the bodies of freshly killed gremlins dangling from them.

In the far corner was an enormous moonshine still, composed of a dozen bulbous copper vats, with corkscrew condensing tubes sprouting from them.

Before Lynn stood a huge man with a nasty scar across his bald head, and a nasty grimace on his fat face. He wore a blood-spattered apron and heavy gloves. He had a cleaver of his own in his hand, a huge instrument twice the size of Lynn’s. It was—Lynn noted disapprovingly—blunt and chipped and dirty with dried blood.

Horatio stood at the man’s side and shrugged at Lynn, as if to say You asked for it. Around them stood a ring of gremlins, leaning on the chests they had carried from the barge. These ones were not like the ones in the cages. They were wiry and lean and looked angry. They were dressed in sackcloth, scraps of fabric and decaying patchwork dungarees. Each held a crude weapon of some kind. They were all staring at Lynn with hungry, beady eyes—malevolent and utterly inhuman.

But then one of them raised his knife and winked at Lynn.

It was the knife that Lynn recognized. Without his $$$$$$$$$$ makeup the gremlin looked just like all the others—small, green and vicious—but the blade he carried was unmistakable. It was patterned with bands of light and dark steel and its edge was almost translucent. The gremlins on either side of this one were also carrying Lynn’s knives. Bucky, Lucky and Otis—the performers she had met the previous evening.

Lynn looked away quickly, thinking back to the strange conversation in the kitchen the night before: “Won’t they recognize you as an intruder?” she had asked Otis.

“No way,” he told her. “Your average gremlin ain’t too smart. Half the time we don’t recognize ourselves. They’ll think we’re someone’s uncles or brothers or cousins.”

“Maybe all three,” chipped in Lucky.

“Don’t you worry about us,” said Bucky. “Just get us in, and we’ll do the rest.”

Baptiste was staring at Lynn, waiting for a response: “You ask why I’m here,” Lynn said. “I’m here because of the low quality, improperly butchered gremlin you’ve been sending me. It’s essential that you exsanguinate and eviscerate a gremlin during slaughter, otherwise blood will pool in the body cavity and the meat will be ruined, as I’m sure you well know.”

Baptiste glared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment, and then a meaty smile spread across his face: “A woman after my own heart,” he said. “Perhaps I have gotten a little sloppy lately. Maybe you can show me how it’s done.” He leered at Lynn and ran his tongue along his lips.

“Here, let me show you what the problem is.” Lynn beckoned Baptiste close to one of the cold chests, pushing past the gremlins who guarded it. They moved aside without complaint.

She flipped the latches and lifted the lid. Lynn knew what was inside the chest, but what happened next was so impossible that even she was shocked by it. The chest was much too small for a person to fit inside, and yet out of the chest sprang a woman dressed in the bright garb of a harlequin. Lynn had watched her climb into the chest the night before, she had watched the woman fold herself into the small space as if her bones were made of rubber.

“I’m a contortionist,” the woman had told her. “They call me Rubber Ruby. This is what I do. At the circus we call it the Jack-in-the-Box effect, but it’s a useful assassination technique as well. In both cases its effectiveness depends on the element of surprise.”

That was how it seemed now—like a Jack-in-the-Box—as if Ruby were spring-loaded. She exploded out of the chest, a knife in each hand, right into Baptiste’s face. The knives plunged into an eye and a cheek, and before he could even scream in pain Ruby had performed an elegant backflip, landing neatly beyond his reach.

Lucky, Bucky and Otis got to work as well, slitting the throats of the gremlins standing near them and then blending into the general chaos that ensued, pointing fingers and laying blame on other, nearby gremlins. These accusations led to angry denials, counter-accusations, insults and threats, and an all-out brawl quickly broke out. Lucky, Bucky and Otis deftly extricated themselves from the mayhem, and walked away dusting their hands in satisfaction.

“Easy as pie,” said Ruby, stretching out her back.

“We’re not through yet,” said Lynn, and she pointed to where Baptiste should have been lying dead on the ground. Instead, he was standing firmly on his feet, an expression of pure rage on his face, an expression that was only made more terrifying by the knife handles protruding from his eye socket and cheek. Blood was slicking down his chin and dribbling onto his apron. He fixed his one remaining eye on Lynn and hefted his cleaver. With a mighty bellow he charged.

Baptiste moved fast for a man of his stature, and once he was going he commanded considerable momentum. Ruby slid out of his way effortlessly and the three gremlin $$$$$$$$$$$$ ducked behind a pile of cold chests. But it was Lynn that Baptiste was after, and she stood frozen to the spot. The floor of the barn trembled as the huge, bloody man bore down upon her, and as he ran Baptiste raised his cleaver over his head, poised to bring it down on Lynn’s skull.

Except that Lynn knew everything there was to know about swinging a cleaver. She understood the position the wrists had to take during a double-handed swing. She understood the centrifugal forces at work on the blade as it swung through its arc. She understood how much force was required to cut through meat, tendon, bone and cartilage. And so, against all her instincts, she did not attempt to leap backward to avoid the blow; instead, she leapt forward, directly at Baptiste, and she raised her own cleaver as she did so.

Lynn’s blade severed Baptiste’s wrists mid-swing. It sliced through them as though they were butter, the man’s own momentum providing the force needed to make the cut clean. The force of his swing was released at a tangent to its arc, sending the cleaver spinning through the air. It flew over Lynn’s head and embedded itself high in the barn wall. It looked as if the weapon had slipped from his grasp, except that his hands still clutched the handle.

But Lynn did not see any of this. Baptiste’s massive bulk ploughed into her, as unstoppable as a charging bull. She felt ribs crack and the air rush from her lungs. She felt herself propelled backwards through the air and then felt her spine slam hard into the uneven floorboards. Then she felt a huge, heavy, smothering mass of bloody flesh collapse on top of her and after that she felt nothing.

#

Lynn woke spluttering and gasping for breath, with a foul taste in her mouth. A small, green face swam in her vision and someone said, as if from a long way away: “See, I told you she wasn’t dead.”

“Proves nothing,” said another voice. “Moonshine strong enough has the power to revive the dead, and this stuff’s awful strong.”

Bucky was holding a jar of foul-smelling liquor to her lips. Lynn pushed it away and struggled to her feet. All of her bones felt broken, but the fact that she could stand at all reassured her somewhat. “What…” she began and then thought better of speaking. She focused on breathing instead.

“It was a hell of a job rolling that corpse off you,” said Ruby. She was sitting on a cold chest, sipping liquor from a flask. Otis was lying on the ground nearby, snoring loudly. Lucky was chatting happily with the other gremlins who had survived the brawl: “Turns out we’re cousins after all,” he yelled.

Baptiste’s gremlins no longer seemed quite so threatening to Lynn. They seemed happy and somewhat lacking in coordination. One of them had a one-string banjo and someone started up a song. Soon they were all singing loudly and terribly and Lynn wished she were unconscious again.

“They always hated Baptiste,” Ruby explained. “But he controlled the flow of booze. He paid them in moonshine. The still is theirs now. They couldn’t be happier.”

“And Horatio?” asked Lynn.

“He made himself scarce at the first sign of trouble.”

Lynn stared down at Baptiste’s massive corpse. He was still bleeding, despite the huge slick of blood that already covered the floor around him, and Lynn winced as she thought of the blood pooling in his body cavity, contaminating the meat.

#

A week later Lynn met Horatio at Brackwater docks. Her ribs were healing nicely, but it still hurt to lift heavy weights. Fortunately Horatio had brought some of the gremlins along to help load the barrels of moonshine onto the cart.

“How’s business?” Horatio asked with a grin.

“Swank and Pugg are happy as clams,” Lynn reported. “A few of our regulars are in the infirmary with Brain Rot, but this stuff has more than made up for the loss. It’s liquid gold. The punters can’t get enough of it.” She rapped her knuckles on one of the barrels. “How’s the gang?”

“You know, I kind of like working with the little buggers,” said Horatio. “I’m even thinking of going back into piracy, with a gremlin crew. Can you picture that? They would betray me if they got half a chance, but they’re too stupid to work out how to do it.”

“I guess that’s why they worked for Baptiste for so long,” said Lynn.

“That reminds me, how was he in the end?”

“Not bad,” said Lynn, “but I prefer pork.”

[Soundwave]

Listened to it on the Aethervox, and just figured I'd leave a "Good job!" here.

Good job, great read!

[vagen]

The whole thing is fantastic, though I was a little disappointed Lynn didn't join the circus in the end. Still great story, and love the pod cast.

[Cjm1174]

your writing talant always exceeds my expectations

[Mirarii]

Very good, read all six in one sitting, definitely looking forward to the rest.

[Prunesquallor]

Thanks guys! I really enjoy writing 'em. Especially when I know someone will actually be reading them.

[7explorer]

I can't seem to find Part Seven: Mr. Magpie's Act. Was it ever posted on the forum?