Foreign Devils by John Hornor Jacobs Read Free Book Online Page A

from the springs in the foothills of the Whites. New Damnation’s air was filled with the noise and spice of industry: the bustle of tradesmen and the dusky slave-teams chanting work hollers as they pulled sledges through packed-dirt streets, the constant banging of hammers on wood as carpenters built arrogant houses for merchant kings, equites rising, the steaming tenements and insulae near the river teeming with street vendors, the scents of their foreign foods and fragrant worship of obscure gods filling the air, the stink of sewage spilling into the Big Rill along with the chaff of millers and the dross of the smelting forges, the drunken laughter of theatre-goers and the chants and incense of the pious visiting the temples to Ia and the older gods.
    Of course, it wasn’t named New Damnation to begin with. Its original name was Novo Dacia – founded by Hellenes – but that was a century ago, before the Ruman occupation and then outright ownership of the territories. A wooden town, built from gambel and pine timbers harvested from the skirts of the White Mountains. A tinderbox.
    One poorly drawn ward, one ill-guarded lantern and New Damnation would live up to its name, blossoming into inferno.
    We crossed the Big Rill upstream at the Miller’s Crook ferry and reached the town on 6 Ides, and the whole place was in a tizzy. Vigiles patrolled the streets, wary and watchful – never straying too far from fountains or water wagons. The lanes were full of pistoleros loitering on the planks in front of stores, shops, and the larger homes while the legionaries kept to the campus martius and, mostly, inside its walls.
    I picked up a copy of the Cornicen as we rode into town from a newsie-lad for a copper denarius. The headline read Harbour Town On War Footing – All Able Bodied Men Needed. When I showed it to Fisk he shrugged, as if he expected it.
    We made our way through the streets, avoiding the homeless wanton-boys, the slave workers bearing palanquins over the muddy streets, past the shit-slicks and refuse piles near insulae, up the hill to the better appointed neighbourhoods with paved streets lined with white, soft, quarried stone until we came to the campus martius plateau, and showed our papers to the legionnaires posted at the gates. The dead vaettir on the back of Fisk’s horse drew attention, causing a small commotion, and we led a processional to the stables, where my partner tasked the saucer-eyed stable boys to guard the body until he could figure out some way to dispense with it.
    What was once a camp of the Ruman army on the march had, over time, become a permanent encampment. Timber walls were replaced with stone, tents with housing and barracks. The command tent was now a three-storied office complex, adorned with daemon-light fixtures allowing worklight at all times. Yet all of the buildings were still plain, devoid of all but the barest adornments. Simple functional buildings crafted of stone harvested from the Whites and brought here on the backs of countless slaves – most of those dvergar , but also Numidian, Aegyptian, and wherever else they came from. But above the command centre a great flag pole stood flying the emblems of V Occidentalia. There was a fifth back in Latinum, but the emperor Ingenuus saw fit to reset the legion counter, as it were, with the discovery of the Imperial Protectorate and the Hardscrabble Territories. The fact that this fifth was the second fifth caused some consternation when officers who had served with the Latinum V Prima were assigned. The Prima galled them, over here.
    But it didn’t keep them from being proud. The brag-rags whipped in the fresh wind coming down from the Whites and showed holly and silver, cannon and ships, and a curious flame emblem I could only take to mean Hellfire.
    We stabled our mounts and made our way to the command.
    If there’s one thing that Rumans love above all else, it’s bureaucracy. It was hard to tell the difference between