Exiles by Watson Miles

Author:Watson, Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: One Nine Books
Published: 2023-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

“Yes,” Marguerite said. “Yes, my little spider, it is.”

We arrived. I am sure a woman of the world such as yourself is familiar with architecture in the Nihon Noir style, but one must see it on a scale as it exists there to appreciate it. From the moment we arrived, I felt as if I were moving within a neon-lighted dream, full of ghostly faces half-seen beneath dripping hat brims, and I suppose that is what gave me the confidence to do what I did.

I found a bar—a thronged workingman’s bar, where I knew anger and resentment at the Order would be running high, the liquor flowing freely, and the jimsonweed smoke as thick as fog. After somewhat mournfully fingering the thick bundle of empiras in my pocket, I slammed them down on the wet zinc bar and shouted, “A round on me!”

If one wishes to stop a room, that is as effective a means as any.

I delivered my speech. I would be lying if I said it was as effective as the one before, even by half: I was heckled, pelted with empty bottles, almost shouted down by the drunken mob, but between the pugilistic hulk of Degrelle and the jeering Karram, who gave every impression of taking orgiastic joy in killing, I was not further assailed, and there were many who pounded their tables in agreement, who fought with those who hissed and catcalled and begged to hear more. We passed the quite literal hat, and some of the coins even made it up to my hands before, at last, the police arrived.

In retrospect, I suppose it was this, more than what I had done in City by the Sea, which finalized the credibility of the Solution. The sicarii themselves had begun the process, when—no doubt acting on the breathless exaggerations of one of their many Watchmen—they had slaughtered Fernsby’s pathetic little band of would-be revolutionists. It had gathered momentum when Bohannon had mistaken me for a member of that band, had accepted me by lies and my pantomime as the genuine article. And now, with the boots of the police kicking in the doors, a legend was born, or perhaps a myth—at any rate‚ a story, which was to spread all the further, all the faster, the more the Order tried to suppress it.

We fled the bar, and soon enough, the city, coins clanking in our pockets and jangling upon the pavements behind us, for we had managed to collect almost as much as I had spent, and if we lacked a single recruit…well, when you are hunted by the police in the Order, infamy precedes you.

In the months that followed‚ I visited a dozen cities across Europe, and only God knows how many towns, setting up new cells—franchises would perhaps be the more accurate term, though they did not know they were franchises—of revolutionaries. Sometimes we were greeted openly as heroes and left in the same fashion, carrying pawnshop suitcases full of banknotes; other times we

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