Arkhus Lane - Amateur Detective

A Chapter by ColdSpiral

Prologue: Lockham.
Lockham drags his unwilling feet across the filth that engulfs the worn, forgotten cobblestones underneath. His body lurches dramatically past the dishevelled, scrap-built facades of Graf Street, people cowering visibly and ducking out of the way of his gaunt and crumbling features. The great Captain James Lockham is long dead, and this is making simple things, like moving around, awfully difficult for him. His jaw hangs slack, entirely beyond his control, only tightening reflexively along with his withered fingers as he approaches a terrified onlooker. The man screams, flees the grasp of the corpse’s erratic, swinging arms.
Long-unused vertebrae grind noisily into place as Lockham raises his head to stare at the closest ruin, hanging high in the late afternoon smog above a point some few hundred metres away. In what functions now as his mind, the Captain knows that this dangling rock, this aerolith, has a name: floating remnants of the old city, Higher Acheron, the wind-eroded stones are better than any landmark: he knows that, in life, he could recall the names of all of them as easily as the streets around his home. But to his chaotic ghost of consciousness, these memories are now lost.
He shuffles onwards, watching the commoners around him as they hide behind curtains; duck into alleys; creep back as he passes, with a monstrous curiosity. Despite the best efforts of decades underground and enterprising grave-worms, his face seems to bear its old, renowned visage: they are staring, seeing in his features the fierce, angular, familiar face worn by so many statues across the city. His vision is not as it had been: though it is cloudier, the colours not as vivid, he sees the people stretched out in time. Every moment, he can see them where they are, where they were a few moments before, where they would be in a few moments to come, smudged together into truly temporal beings. Lockham notices that he can see this occurrence with objects, too; the houses, and the piles of waste stacked outside - generally indistinguishable from the houses themselves - both paint a light haze in the air around them, although they are tending not to move as much in the fading light.
The Captain is staggering faster now, his stiff feet loosening up, the gaping hole in his chest beginning to knit over, the last threads of his rotted dress uniform falling to the ground, unheeded. With cracked, leather-like skin a blue-black bruise over his entire body, he is already too monstrous a sight for his nudity to cause any real concern to the onlookers, and he walks on, barely noticing his surrounds any more, as the objective lingers, abstractly; somehow illuminated in his awareness with a bright pillar of light.
He knows where he is going, and nothing can stop him. The master’s command drives him onward, out of the slums toward the richer central districts of Lower Acheron.

1: Arkhus Lane, Amateur Detective.
It was nighttime in Lower Acheron, and the city continued to writhe with the pulse of life. In the streets, the hawkers were just as numerous, though their wares were somewhat more dubious than those peddled by their daylight cousins. Even darker transactions were being negotiated and exacted in the warren of twisting, convoluted alleys, their immorality paling only in light of the rumours that constantly circulated of the goings-on in the great houses of the upper class. By now, too, murmurs were beginning to spread of Lockham’s return, though they sounded as though they had been torn from the history of Maynard’s necromantic uprising, centuries before.
Beneath the binary aerolith Mercy’s Bridge, two great stones linked by the skeletal remnants of a rail bridge, the industrial district was also awake, pounding out a steady beat and keeping the rest of the sprawling city on tempo. A quiet warehouse on the eastern fringe was currently home to more important events than its bleak exterior would suggest: crouched in a corner; skin mottled to mimic the play of shadows on the crates around him, Arkhus Lane fought the nagging urge to shift to a more comfortable posture. Years of playful spying and eavesdropping may have honed his strange talent for blending in, but the practise had done little for his patience.
Lane’s quarries were waiting in the centre of the room: a pair of well-dressed mobsters lounged, visibly bored, against a discarded chunk of complex machinery. Arkhus naturally felt inclined to consider them a study in opposites, but this was simply at face value. Their combined appearance, granted, was a remarkable likeness to any number of the rowdy comedic duos that were a common fixture in the bars and taverns of Acheron’s working class: one tall and gaunt, as if stretched by the very rollers he was perched upon, the other not so much short and round as squat and solid. The smoke from their cigars drifted and teased the air above their heads, the smell leaving a pinching reek in Arkhus’ throat.
Both of them were nervous - in Arkhus Lane’s eyes this was distinctly obvious. Whilst the taller was fidgeting uncontrollably, eyes twitching and darting around the room, nimble fingers rolling something in a jacket pocket; his bulky companion was barely moving, staring fixedly at a crack in the cement floor, brooding silently upon a matter obviously of some concern. Arkhus, long past bored, was considering the challenge of getting to a better vantage point, unnoticed, when a badly stifled creak alerted him. At the end of the warehouse, a service door was slowly opening, a group of street thugs creeping in. There were four of them, dressed in ragged, functional clothing, hair hanging lank and unwashed around their faces, which were themselves tattooed and stuck through with splinters of bone. As he studied them further, Arkhus realised that whilst the mobsters were merely nervous, despite their apparent savagery, the thugs were utterly terrified, reeling from some recent shock. As they drew near, the mobsters stood, dusting off their pinstripe coats and stepping onto the edge of a circle of moonlight cast by a hole in the warehouse’s ceiling.

With head inclined, a lowly gesture exaggerated by fear, the established leader of the thugs entered the circle.
‘Tha job’s done,’ he murmured, and Arkhus could hear his voice straining, as if to hold him back from the threshold of screaming lunacy. The two mobsters, however, seemed not to notice.
‘And has the facilitator been, ah, suitably recompensed?’ enquired the taller, between fidgets.
The thug stared at him, bewildered, until the short mobster gave a theatrical groan.
‘Did you kill the mage?’ he said slowly, drawing out each syllable in a condescending, loud voice, as if talking to a small child. As understanding sank in, seemingly snapping the tense restraint of the man’s sanity, the thug jabbered excitedly in response.
‘Oh right, yeah, an we did, yeah. Buried his ed all further away too, like youse wanted. Only… he, ah…’ Suddenly concerned again, the thug stopped, looking anywhere but at the two mobsters, who were now glaring at him.
‘He what?’ prompted the tall one.
‘Well, see, Smart Eric there, e maybe let on how we were gunna doff im, right before the event, like. Just as a bit of fun, yeah, but the skirt, e starts wavin is arms all around an screams the heebie-jeebies at us, only now I fink of it, yeah, I fink peraps e was really talkin to… to the… yknow, the… fing. Wot we dug up for im. Like youse said to. Yeah?’
There was a silence from the mobsters, as the shorter glared furiously, and the taller tried to still his twitching eye and not drum his fingers, occupying them by adjusting his collar.
Growing ever more uncomfortable, the thug continued.
‘But fing is, we checked it out, see? The ugly blue bugger, it’s still walkin an all, job’s still been done, right? You’ll still be givin us our money, on account of that, yeah?’
The glaring mobster cleared his throat and produced a small box from his pocket.
‘Full payment only when Redhand can see some results himself, I’m afraid. For now, I hope that this will be suitable reward for your efforts.’ Flashing an incidental smile, he handed the box over before turning and following his associate out of the warehouse.
The thugs jostled and argued, trying to force the slim, silver box open, but only Arkhus, from his hidden vantage point, realized that the briefcase carried in by the tall mobster had been left in the shadow by the machinery, unnoticed. There was a click as a thug - Smart Eric, Arkhus noticed - managed to open the silver box. The briefcase fell open as if triggered, and the thugs glanced up, noticing it for the first time. From where he crouched, Arkhus could barely see the hands that appeared from the unnatural dark inside the case, or the body that they hauled out, until it was moving forwards in loping steps. Despite having never seen a Green Horror before, Lane knew immediately that this specimen was unnaturally large: all gangly, tapering arms and legs emerging from a small, knobbly and vicious torso and head that looked like nothing more than an angry potato. He also knew, without seeing the great, blade-sharp claws, what was about to occur. With this in mind, Arkhus Lane ducked stealthily behind the crates, kicking at the loose panel that he had plotted as a bolthole, and made his escape into the street even as the thugs began to scream.

Though Arkhus Lane was still by many standards a newcomer to Lower Acheron, he had less trouble finding his way around than he’d been expecting. His hometown, Eke, was only a tiny, rural village but Lane had quickly found that he could easily navigate the city by the looming, rust-brown, smog-wreathed aeroliths. Of course, most of the formations were still unfamiliar to him, but he could at least count on the larger and denser clusters as being above the city centre, and it was towards them that he was now heading, darting from shadow to shadow with familiar ease. When he neared the docks, Lane paused beneath an isolated gas-lamp and plucked a leather notebook from one of the many roomy pockets that were stitched into his greatcoat - which was precisely two-point-five sizes too big - and quickly scrawled the details of the recent meeting in unintelligible shorthand; more from a sense of dramatic obligation than concern they might be forgotten. As the first serious solo assignment his master had presented to him, Arkhus was making sure to do things accurately. Checking his new pocket-watch, reassured he was not running too late, Arkhus ventured further into the docks for the evening’s final rendezvous.

The city of Lower Acheron squats bestially on the coast, clawing its smoky tendrils into the earth around the broken mouth of Hobbs’ Wake - a winding river that ploughs through the continent from the mountainous east of the Acheric Kingdom - it exists, also, cast across the plains and valleys as a scattered collection of towns and minor cities that pay homage to this sprawling temple to industry. One of these settlements, lodged upon a tributary of Hobbs’, is the simple township of Eke.
A rural village, Eke is wholly unremarkable, and so the lack of stimulus that confronted a young Arkhus Lane can easily be understood. Simply under-challenged, Lane had a notorious habit of getting himself into all manner of trouble as he flexed and developed his burgeoning abilities. His tendency to quietly fade into the background: to be unnoticed, rather than invisible, was often exploited by eavesdropping and benign, playful acts of property relocation.
In conversation, the people of Eke found Arkhus unnerving as he cheerfully overlooked any falsities they mentioned, seeing straight through to the very truth they wished to conceal, and mildly making reference to it, just enough to suggest they’d been caught out.
It was with great relief, then, that Anton Lane, mayor of Eke and Arkhus’ father, decreed the boy, on his sixteenth birthday, old enough to ‘learn a trade, seek his fortune, see the world, and such’. Calling in a number of favours from his well-connected friends, a network of whom spread along river and rail all the way to Lower Acheron itself, Anton secured for his son an apprenticeship perfectly suited to Lane’s wayward, meddlesome nature: in the service of the infamous Stoffholder’s Investigative Institute. Often referred to as the Acheric Inquisition, Stoffholder’s was, and remains, the agency responsible for Lower Acheron’s moral wellbeing.
Arkhus’ mentor, he was surprised to learn upon arrival, was the illustrious sleuth, Sebastian Grey. Once an almost legendary figure, Grey had fallen out of practice since the mysterious absence of his wife a few years earlier, her whereabouts the subject of malicious rumours amongst the city’s aristocracy: ranging from kidnapping, elopement and illness to murder most foul, Louisa Grey had experienced countless fates in the active imaginations of Lower Acheron’s idle rich.
Grey, for his own part, was a once-dashing figure now leisurely turning to fat, sporting a salubriously flared walrus moustache and an ubiquitous wooden pipe, though Arkhus never once saw Grey actually smoke or even light it. Whilst his master was regarded as an aloof and often blunt character, Arkhus found him to be a thoughtful, capable teacher, instructing him not only in the fashion that other detectives at Stoffholder’s would deliver, but also in innumerable tips and pointers borne from years of Grey’s own experience, almost as vast as the man himself was in danger of becoming.
Under Sebastian’s skilful tuition, Arkhus Lane learnt quickly how to not only see but also perceive: to notice trivial details and draw logical – or sometimes valuably illogical - conclusions from them: the fraying of a shirtsleeve, ink-stains smudged across a wrinkled brow. A natural extension of his unique skills, Grey needed only to show Arkhus how this knowledge could be implemented. So impressed was Grey by his charge’s innate ability that he had presented the boy, only two weeks into his training, with the task of trailing, alone, a pair of mobsters who they noticed acting suspiciously in Acksley Street. He had also given Lane the name and predictable whereabouts of a reliable sneak, from whom the boy was to gather any appropriate information, should he find the time.

Along the industrialized strip of Lauder Street, Arkhus observed the tavern where his informant, one Seamus Overture, was supposedly waiting. Huddled on the corner of a storage yard, boxed in by shipping containers, the sturdy façade of the Gorgon & Musket seemed entirely out of place. Two storeys of fine modern architecture, complete with ornamental columns and arched lintels, somehow dumped ungraciously opposite the ocean; surrounded by ramshackle sheds and warehouses; severed from the city by a hem of overbearing chimneys from nearby factories. Despite its apparent displacement, the noise and sense of motion that ebbed from the building assured Arkhus of its popularity with the local dock-workers.
Shrugging his overcoat tighter around his shoulders and brushing a wayward fringe of jet from behind his glasses, Lane casually flicked a coin into the air and pushed open the tavern door, not pausing to watch the silver curve in a precise arc, landing at the feet of a young beggar dozing against the tavern wall. Hearing the clink of metal, predicting more easy money, the boy half-opened a wary eye before grabbing the coin and slipping through the door as it closed behind the newcomer.
Inside the Gorgon & Musket, somewhat uncertain of his first move, Arkhus peered at the murky scene, wanting desperately to blend into the wall and avoid the stares that had confronted him as he entered. Instead, carrying himself a little too loftily, he examined each of them in return, paying closer attention to the few workers who had barely offered him a glance before ignoring him entirely. It seemed that a well-dressed teenager was an uncommon sight in these parts. Slightly uncomfortable, Lane loosened his cravat; there was nobody in the tavern who matched the description of Overture that Grey had given him, and he was lost for ideas. Arkhus had resigned himself to the coarse tactic of asking the barman, when on an impulse he glanced at the door behind him. The beggar from outside, trying very hard to appear casual and inconspicuous, was watching him and in the light, Arkhus could see how his face was overlaid with white scars, or perhaps tattoos.
Lane had seen markings like these before, on an old blacksmith in Eke, and they were no mere fashion statement, like the faces of the thugs in the warehouse, but a matter of life and death. These markings, called gravings, declared the boy as a survivor of a kill-or-cure magical healing, and more importantly, as Seamus Overture.