The Ballad of Azron Bezron Read online

  The Ballad

  of

  Azron Bezron

  A Doomsayer Tale

  Steve Wetherell

  Copyright © 2014 Steven Wetherell

  All rights reserved.

  “Wetherell writes like a modern Douglas Adams with a darker, more fantastical bent. The Doomsayer Journeys is stiff upper lip, prim and proper madness – like a nice cup of tea spiked with malicious nanobots and mescaline.”

  – Robert Brockway, RX: A Tale of Electronegativity

  “There’s far too little good comic fantasy out there. Wetherell’s Doomsayer series is not only consistently funny all the way through, but it’s a fast-paced, world-is-at-stake adventure too. Any fan of the genre will want to read this.”

  - Robert Bevan, Critical Failures

  “I’m just going to say I gave this novel five stars. Why? If my wife has to ask me to stop reading because my laughing is disturbing her Candy Crush game, congrats, your book just earned five stars.“

  - Underground Book Reviews

  “The thing I really like about editing Steve is I don’t have to. He’s naturally funny, concise, and maniacal. The thing I don’t like about editing Steve is that I go home, and visions of his twisted imagination haunt my fevered dreams all through the night. So, you know, life is all about trade-offs.”

  - Brendan McGinley, Man Cave Daily

  Of all the cities of Bersch, Port Town was the ugliest. With barely a straight line to be found, its buildings staggered and leaned together like valiant drunks at the coming of dawn. The streets were mortared with filth, the roads paved with vague disappointment, and the pathways almost certainly up to no good. Don’t even mention the alleys.

  Port Town was ugly, but honest. The special kind of honest you get when everybody lies, and expects to be lied to. If there was any truth in the city, it wisely kept its mouth shut.

  It was a city of thieves, of swindlers, of down-and-outs. Of hired muscle and freelance thuggery. Of bent coppers, crooked magistrates, con men, hoodlums, jackers and jokers, and too many tarts to count.

  It was ugly. It was villainous. It was treacherous.

  It was home.

  Azron Bezron breathed deeply, cool night air jetting through his narrow nostrils, his eyes closed against the stars and moonlight, his crooked grin straightened by a rare satisfaction. Reaching into his long, midnight-coloured coat, he retrieved a pre-rolled cigarette, brought it to his lips and lit it from a tinderbox. Puffing like a gentle locomotive, he looked out across the city.

  Perched as he was upon a rooftop, he could see all around him the street lamps lit against the darkling sky, hear the shouts of drunken altercations, the laughter of whores, the sudden bark of a maddened tramp. Against the low light a thousand shadows flittered this way and that, as the citizens of Port Town rallied hard against the concept of making an honest living.

  Azron scanned the streets below with a practised eye. He noted two ruffians fresh from a night of mugging, purses and pockets full as they stepped into a tavern. It’d be the work of a moment to lighten their load. So too, the chubby merchant riding in a hired cab, far too besotted with a gaudy strumpet to notice a man with light feet and talented fingers. Azron shook his head. These were tempting opportunities, but beneath his station. He was, after all, the Hero Thief.

  He’d never really set out to be a Hero Thief, he had always been more than happy as just a thief. Well, not just any thief. Port Town might have appeared as a chaotic hell to the casual observer, but really the economy was based entirely on theft, and needed structure just as much as any system of government. Azron had always been a high flyer in the Union of Cutthroats, Thieves and Mischief-makers, and had the certificate to prove it. Admittedly, he had stolen the certificate from somebody else, but whether that made him a better or worse thief was up for debate.

  His promotion to hero had come quite by accident, after a chance encounter with a strange young man who claimed he had magic powers, and was on a quest to stop the planet from being exploded by space rocks. Azron, realising that the mad were probably easier to rob than the sane, had gone along with the ploy. He had been as surprised as anyone when the boy had turned out to be right.

  And now after crossing continents, facing peril, and confronting an insane emperor, Azron was a hero.

  Heroism wasn’t too bad, on the face of things. He’d been rewarded, obviously, but had politely requested a cash equivalent of any medals or titles he might have been offered. He’d ended up with a sack of money so big that he’d had to hire a cart to carry it. All well and good, but money came, and money went, and Azron had always been more interested in procuring finances rather than actually spending them.

  And so he had returned to Port Town, but found it a different place. People kept on giving him things, for a start. Food, drink, clothes—people lined up to offer him a hearty handshake and a gift. He remembered the first time he had been clapped on the back by a stranger. It had been okay at first, until he checked his wallet and realised that it was still there. He’d come over all dizzy after that. If somebody bumped into you in Port Town without taking your wallet, then the world had gone topsy-turvy.

  And, of course, when people kept giving you things, stealing from them became very awkward indeed.

  Tonight would be different, though. Tonight there was a score worthy of his attention.

  He’d fallen back into the habit of eavesdropping at his usual haunts, keeping an ear pricked for anything which might inspire him, and it had taken hours of careful nonchalance and saint-like patience before he overheard a couple of dockers talking about a shipment of bumblewine being held overnight.

  Bumblewine was only brewed in Regalious, and popularly believed to be an aphrodisiac. A mere bottle of the stuff was worth its weight in gold in the Free Countries, especially to a man whose spirit was at odds with his flesh. It would be well guarded, highly sought after, and the perfect heist for a man who had a reputation to live up to.

  Azron pulled his peakless woolen cap down over his ears, and began to step over the rooftops of Port Town, making his way as easily across the jumble of mossy slate, wonky scaffolding and rickety plank bridges as most people would across their bedroom carpet.

  He headed to the docks, so big they might as well have been a city unto themselves. Port Town sat upon the convergence of three rivers as they led out to sea. Called the Filter since before anyone could remember, the large stretch of water was an optimum trade route for anyone with a barge or boat, and Port Town had sprung up around it like weeds around a pond. It hadn’t taken long for the slew of docks and jetties to conjoin and form streets of their own, and much of the Filter was taken up by wooden walkways secured firmly to deeply entrenched posts, or else tied loosely to floating barrels. Ships of every size and description inched slowly along in the business of coming and going. Some of them remained stationary, having long since decided that acting as prime real-estate on the Filter was more profitable than taking to the water. Hence there were boats that were bars, boats that were stores, boats that were theaters and, just occasionally, boats where boats were built.

  It was to one of these barges long since converted into a floating warehouse that Azron made his way. The barge had been called River Goddess, and had once sailed up and down the many canals of the Free Countries, shipping goods from town to town. Now its carefully painted name had long since faded, and it sat peeling and sad, the deck given over to an ugly rectangle of wooden plank and corrugated iron.

  Azron stood on a nearby pier and smoked another roll-up, assessing the situation from a distance. He retrieved a small telescope from within his coat and began to search the shadows with a beady eye. There were two guardsman on p
atrol, big and obvious, their pikes and helmets shining in the lamplight. They were the usual kind of hired muscle that a merchant would procure to help keep hold of his merchandise, and they built their reputation basically by administering a swift and brutal kicking to anybody they didn’t like the look of. In this case, though, the guardsmen were merely a distraction. More of a concern was the beggar, huddled under a moth-eaten blanket and hunched in just such a way as to suggest, to those who knew how to look, that he was holding a crossbow between his legs. So too the aging whore, who paid not a jot of attention to the drunken sailors who ambled past, but stood in a manner that would make it easy to retrieve a dagger hidden under her bustle. Finally, there was the man hidden from sight on the rooftop, armed with either a longbow or a smuggled pistola. Azron only knew he was there because that was exactly where he would put a guard if he wanted to catch someone like himself.

  The thief thought for a moment, scratching at his pointed sideburns. Then he turned around and quite casually dropped off the edge of the pier.

  He landed with barely a thump in the small canoe waiting below. A grizzled little face peered up at him, looking like a cross between a tortoise and a hare. An unattractive tortoise and an unattractive hare. It was dressed in a badly tailored sack held at the waist by a length of rope.

  ‘Hallo, Baby,’ said Azron.

  ‘Salutations, pointed weasel man,’ replied Baby, voice rasping against buck teeth. The creature held out a claw and Azron slipped two sponduliks into it with a smooth and practised motion.

  ‘Ahem,’ said Baby, which is not to say that he cleared his throat, but that he actually said “ahem”. ‘This is two of the coins that you are putting in my front foot, when what I said in the past that once was is, that I would like double this amount for almost certain-death suicide mission.’

  It was widely thought that kobolds were stupid. This wasn’t true. They were almost incapable of creative thought, certainly, and had all the imagination of a particularly unambitious rock, but they also had near-flawless recall.

  ‘You’ll get the other two coins when I get back out.’ Azron said.

  ‘Pointed weasel man cannot make good on promised coins for foot insertion when he is filled with holes from angry stabbings,’ said Baby. ‘Pay now or forever hold your face.’

  Nobody knew why the kobolds had such an odd manner of speaking. Scholars speculated that they did it just to be annoying.

  Azron sighed and handed over the other coins with obvious reluctance. It wasn’t that he couldn’t afford the payment, but he harbored a deep spiritual resentment when it came to giving people money.

  Baby smiled and placed the coins into his purse, which was another smaller sack. ‘Let us go and be killed like idiots,’ he said brightly.

  Azron shook his head. ‘Nobody’s getting killed today, Baby, just as long as you remember what I told you.’

  ‘Baby remembers everything,’ said the kobold. He began to row the boat under a boardwalk, the black and boding water barely breaking before the little vessel’s prow. They kept silent as the planks above them creaked and thumped with someone’s passing.

  Eventually, they were near to the water line of the River Goddess. Azron put his finger to his lips and winked at Baby, who merely blinked slowly in return. The thief pulled a double-headed hook attached to a thin length of rope from his coat, smothered with soot to appear a dull black. It looked as if somebody had flattened a small anchor. He stretched up to the jetty above him and squeezed the hook through a crack between the planks, turning it so that it held fast. He then attached the rope to a snap-ring on his belt buckle and, with barely a wobble, he rotated in mid-air, spread-eagling himself like an unfortunate rabbit on a busy road. He turned to Baby and winked again. Baby nodded and rowed the boat away.

  Azron hung above the dark water for a moment, looking at the wooden hull of the River Goddess. It had certainly seen better days. The portholes had all been boarded up on the inside. Azron began to rock forwards and back until he was able to swing toward a porthole and cling on. He took a handle-like contraption from one of his pockets and slowly screwed it into the hull, then attached another rope between it and the snap-ring on his belt. Held in place, he pulled yet another device from his coat, this one looking like a cross between a plunger and a pair of compasses. He suckered the thingy onto the porthole, made a quick circular motion and pulled away a perfect sphere of window glass. Now he waited for Baby’s distraction.

  He pricked his ears as he heard the kobold’s reedy voice. ‘Hey! Hey you tubby guards. I am distracting you, do you see? Behold my distraction.’

  Azron groaned softly and began to work quickly. He tied a kerchief around his face and produced a phial, which he uncorked and splashed against the planks on the inner side of the portal. The wood began to smoke and blacken, and Azron prayed that the eyes of the guards above him were on Baby rather than the rising plume caused by the reacting chemicals.

  ‘You are indeed overweight,’ came Baby’s voice. ‘Is it that you are fond of pies? Perhaps you are emotional problems? Arrgh! Take your fat hands away from me!’

  There came the noise of a struggle, and Azron hoped that Baby’s payment was sufficient for the kicking he was about to receive. Taking a dagger from a sheath hidden in his boot, Azron prodded the smoking wood and, finding it weakened, began to pry it through the portal towards him, where it plopped harmlessly into the water.

  It had taken a little luck and a lot of preparation, but Azron had made a way into the River Goddess. He took a tub from under his hat and smothered a lardy substance around the rim of the porthole. After some inelegant struggling, he took off his long coat and threw it into the boat ahead of him. Without his coat, weighed down as it was by all manner of dubious tools and devices, Azron was feather-light and, spindly thin but even so he had trouble squeezing through the porthole.

  He rolled gracefully as he hit the deck, picking up his coat and putting it on as he stood up. He paused, arms and legs splayed as though ready to move in both directions at once. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. When they did, he wished he hadn’t bothered.

  The hold was empty save for a table and a couple of chairs.

  You didn’t get to be a thief for as long as Azron had without developing some finely honed instincts when it came to walking away from a job, and Azron’s instincts were telling him that this job had turned as sour as a bag of lemons. His suspicions were confirmed when he heard the unmistakable click of a flintlock pistola being readied behind his head.

  ‘Dear me, I seem to have the wrong house,’ Azron said, quickly. ‘What a humorous misunderstanding. One that I’m sure we’ll have a jolly old laugh about later. I’ll just be on my way, if it’s all the same to you?’

  He felt the barrel of the pistola jab into the back of his head.

  ‘Oh.’

  The room suddenly brightened as a door was opened. Several men filed into the hold, their way lit by oil lamps. Azron’s heart sank. There was no mistaking the tasteful cut and stylish rendering of the chic black leather armor, nor the black masks that covered their entire faces. These were the guards of Tony Topman, Port Town’s most fashionable criminal maniac. A final figure entered the room and Azron’s heart sank so much that he considered buying it shoes. Tony himself was on the barge.

  Everything about Tony Topman suggested elegance; his thin frame, sharp cheekbones, oiled hair and a mustache so carefully groomed that it might as well have been painted onto his face. His clothes were so understated that you couldn’t help but notice their extravagance. Every stitch, every cut, every fold of his outfit was so tasteful a hungry man would have eaten it without a second thought. The way he moved suggested he was dancing to an elegant waltz that the rest of us were too badly-dressed to hear. He folded himself into the chair and motioned for Azron to sit. Seeing little choice, Azron did so.

  Tony snapped his fingers and a small glass of fizzy wine was instantaneously placed into his hand. He sipped at i
t, his eyes never leaving Azron’s face. When he spoke, it was with an accent carefully tailored to appear vaguely foreign no matter where he was.

  ‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Azron Bezron.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Azron, his eyes darting from side to side, desperately seeking an escape route and finding none.

  ‘Oh, yes. It is not often that one is able to meet the fabled Hero Thief.’

  Azron shrugged. ‘Is that what they’re calling me these days? I hadn’t heard.’

  Topman snapped his fingers again. A guard stepped forward and, with frightening speed, ran a knife through the buttons on Azron’s coat. The coat fell open to reveal a knitted jumper bearing the legend “Hero Theef!”

  Topman raised an eyebrow.

  ‘My landlady knitted it for me,’ Azron mumbled. ‘It’d be rude not to wear it.’

  Topman waved a hand impatiently. ‘Your clothes are awful and I do not wish to discuss them,’ he said. ‘I have invited you here for quite another matter.’

  ‘Invited?’

  ‘Oh yes, this was all a clever ploy. There is no bumblewine.’

  ‘What about the guards outside?’

  ‘For show! I could not have you getting suspicious.’

  ‘They put on a good enough show when they were beating up Baby,’ Azron snapped.

  Topman blinked slowly. ‘Who is beating a baby?’

  ‘Baby! The kobold. The little hairy lizard…thing.’

  ‘Oh, that? It has been released unharmed. I do not believe in cruelty to animals.’ Topman took another sip of his wine. ‘Cruelty to humans, of course, is a very different matter.’

  Azron swallowed hard. ‘What’s all this about then, guv?’

  Topman leaned back in his chair. ‘It was some time ago that some precious cargo of mine was intercepted and diverted to another personage. It did not take me long to find out who was behind the charade—that being you—but by the time I had dreamed up a suitable punishment you had fled beyond my reach.’

  ‘Suitable punishment?’

  ‘I was going to have your face sewn onto a live pig’s bottom.’