Gregor The Cripple

Mildred had known that trains were quick, but there was evidently a great deal of difference between the idea of speed and the experience of speed.

Outside the nicotine-yellowed glass of the window, the world was a blur. She’d never seen it so quick. Her eyes wanted to follow the scenery, but she didn’t let them for fear that they might try to follow too far and get dragged along with it.

Instead, she contented herself with the interior experience, and with contemplation of the thing as a whole, which didn’t really accord with her expectations. Although, she admittedly wasn’t quite sure what those expectations precisely were.

It was such an alien thing that her imagination hadn’t known where to begin, so she had nothing distinct, just a faceless general sense for the nature of the experience which she now felt was distinctly off the mark.

The seats were thinly upholstered boards, the windows were grimy and rimmed by dust-cornered sills, mud hung about in clods on the floor, and thunk-thunk went the wheels with regularity. The noise of the place was loud, but not nearly so loud as she had imagined. It would be a sleepable volume if you were tired, she thought, and even if you weren’t, it was probably still more manageable than sleeping on a horse, thunk-thunk.

None of this really bothered Mildred though, being that she hadn’t been expecting luxury, and that the mechanical reality of the vehicle was undeniable.

It was still a building that moved.

In fact, the actual reality was more… accommodating than expectation had predicted.

She was in a room constructed with some consideration given to the comfort of the occupant, which rather conflicted with her fanciful picture of a factory on wheels. Really, it wasn’t a factory at all. It was a machine that pulled boxes filled with people and rocks and other things that could easily be put into boxes.

All the interesting mechanical stuff happened at the front, in the locomotive, and not anywhere near the passenger compartments where Mildred found herself sitting. She known this beforehand, of course, but her imagination had apparently not cared so much for reality, which was probably typical of imaginations, and she had thoughtlessly been led into having vague and useless expectations which were doomed to inevitable inaccuracy.

She wasn’t disappointed, not at all, but she certainly wasn’t the opposite of disappointed either. Appointed? No, that didn’t seem right.

Wondering if the interesting things were open to spectators, Mildred looked to Gregor, who was telekinetically drafting the runes for his eye on magic-steady parchment.

Perhaps he knew.

“Gregor?” He looked up, the brim of his hat bobbing slightly from the rocking of vehicle. “Is it possible for us to go to the front and see the locomotive being operated?” She asked. “Is that allowed?”

Poofing away his papers, he responded. “I am here. You do not need to consider permission. Come, they shall let you watch either way.” And he grasped his new staff to stand.

Seeing this, Mildred hesitated at his readiness. Was this really alright?

“No door is closed in my presence.” He remarked with an anticipatory sneer. “Let them try to deny you.”

Gregor was a rather big deal, as she had come to understand; the product of a master who half of the word feared and the other half hated, and he was himself powerful to no small degree. So having him throw his weight around to earn her some special little privileges felt like a petty misuse of his talents – like bringing a sword to cut cheese (which was also terribly unsanitary).

However, below her fears of improper instrumentation ran an undercurrent of guilt.

Simply put, he was risking life and limb on her behalf for almost nothing, and he had already suffered for it.

She understood how he felt about payment as a concept, and about the relationship between employer and employee, but that didn’t mean that she was fine with using him to obtain something so small as this.

Gregor, though unfamiliar with the workings of regular minds and the compunctions they might at times possess, understood in his own strange way the concerns of propriety that she suffered.

“Mildred,” he offered, noting her hesitation, “you can be greedy.”

“Huh?” She blinked. In her experience this was atypical advice. Gregor had a special talent for inspiring dumbfoundedness.

“Be selfish. Get what you want, and use me to do it. I enjoy being an asset.” With the surety of a man who had never been concerned that his words would go unheeded, he began hobbling locomotive-ways, leaving her little choice but to get up and follow. “See as much of the world as you wish.”

Well, she wasn’t opposed to that.

“Maybe I will. I think I just might, so don’t accuse me of misuse. You shouldn’t be walking on that leg, by the way.”

“I am unreasonable.”

Thunk-thunk went the wheels as the pair of protector and protectee made their way from car to car on their quest to find the mechanical guts of the beast, which was occasionally a sphincter-clenching experience for Mildred.

There existed a brief moment between every car when only two thin plates of steel separated her from the tracks below, with one connected to each car, overlapping in the middle. When she stood on both, she could feel them jostling against each other, and occasionally a gap would form between them to reveal the linkage below.

The spine of the train, she thought, and with wind rushing up from the breach and down from above and from the left and right, she could imagine very clearly some poor unsteady fool being knocked from his feet in surprise and flopping over the little chain cordons that were strung up to give crossing passengers something to hold, which seemed to her all the more plausible an occurrence once she remembered that the train had bottle service.

Wandering from this thought, she grew distracted by realising that, in walking in the direction of the train’s acceleration, she ended up going faster than it was, despite feeling completely ordinary. That was quite a swell thing, she thought. Thunk-thunk.

Eventually, they arrived at the front-most passenger car, which was empty due to the horrible noise, and found with some surprise that there wasn’t anywhere else to go.

Instead of the expected door to the locomotive, where all the interesting things lived, there was only a wall. Adjacent to this wall on either side of the train were chain-cordoned doorless apertures for boarding and deboarding. Gregor stuck his head out of the starboard of these, and his hat somehow clung to his head despite the wind.

He saw before him a big bin of coal, and spied behind that the cab of the locomotive where two scruffy men sat. The distance was workable.

Pulling his head back inside, he found Mildred exhibiting symptoms of early-onset disappointment. Knowing this to be an ugly condition, he acted fast in obtaining the cure.

“Wait here.” He shouted over he din, as loud as his ribs would allow, and teleported almost inaudibly against the cacophonous backdrop.

With a guess toward his destination, Mildred popped her own head out into the blast and the tail of her scarf whipped about leeward. She briefly noted her wizard conversing with the engineers, who acted somehow both scared and agreeable, terror-pleasing, she coined, before being hopelessly distracted by the great steaming behemoth and the hypnotising reciprocation of its wheels.

With a squawk, her wonder was quashed by some rude invisible force cocooning her and lifting her out of the train.

Frowning heavily at Gregor, she passed over the rapidly rushing trackside below, and he had the gall to look nonchalant despite the considerable magical strain she knew he must be enduring.

He sent her up and over the coal bin, which was by far preferable to being over unobstructed death, and into the open back of the cab. There, she was offered some cotton for her ears, and a seat on a cramped little bench beside Gregor.

Mollified, though not forgetful, Mildred sat and stowed away this little injustice, intending for once to try out vindictiveness later and see if it suited her.

Near-instantly, the glorious array of gauges and levers of mysterious purpose entrapped her, and she almost forgot about it anyway, though only almost.

Here, it was far louder and windier and bumpier and hotter but somehow also colder than in the passenger car, but to her it was also far better. There was more to see.

***

Three short hours of travel saw them slowing to a chug as they entered Harsdorf, which Mildred realised was to be her first modern city, and what a city it was.

Every building stood tall, which was something Gregor had told her to expect, and they were all either neat-cut stone or smartly plastered brick. Even when accounting for the seventy-year difference in perspective, it was clear to her that this was a wealthy place, which made sense. After all, this was where the sorcerers of the continent congregated.

Gradually, they drew into line with an association of parallel tracks, and a passing engine waved to them as it headed down the lines in the opposite direction. Then, they pulled into the station.

It was palatial – almost stupidly luxuriant.

There were potted plants and gold-gilt colonnades which probably weren’t structurally important, and marble floors and painted frescoes set into marble walls of pastel pink and clean white with tasteful blacks and greens and browns throughout, with several great glass-and-steel skylights looking down to illuminate the cavernous space, which must have had a ludicrously expensive footprint, being so strategically located right in the middle of such a wealthy city.

As much as she was fond of trains and appreciated them living in a nice home, and even having grown up between actual piles of gold and jewels, Mildred still thought the level of ostentation here was a bit silly.

Really, this was a transportation hub, people came here to leave, so why spend so much effort and money on the decor? It didn’t make much sense. It seemed to her that excess was even more popular in modernity than in her own time.

These thoughts in her head, they made their way out of the train and the platform without much bother – though Mildred did stop to gawk at the few other trains present – and passed into the lobby of the place, which was similarly grand without discernible reason.

“This place is a bit much.” She remarked.

Gregor made for a newspaper stand and she followed along, noting the presence of a few mages in the station who were all very definitely casting glances at her wizard.

“It’s mostly an illusion.” He responded.

“This whole place? …Wouldn’t that make it more expensive than it looks?”

“Yes. It certainly would. Mages are stupid as a hobby, you see.”

Newspaper obtained, they walked out into Harsdorf.

The buildings had already seemed tall from the train, but out on the street, it seemed as if Mildred had shrunk down and was looking up at the sky through the blocky teeth of a gap-toothed skeleton. Under the escort of her aunt, she had been to building-crowded cities like this; the capital of the Golden Empire and the capital of the Republic (which had also been an empire) being notable examples, but this somehow seemed different. The streets hadn’t been so neat then, or as wide, and the buildings weren’t so uniformly tall and pretty. Shabbiness, it seemed, had been eliminated from architecture in those seventy years.

She couldn’t quite identify the precise difference, but things struck her as being more… mature in conception.

Mildred blinked to find that Gregor had called a cab from the waiting pool of hansoms outside the station, and she climbed up into it, still unsure of the new nature of cities and gazing about in distraction to find it.

He requested then that their driver find them ‘Somewhere expensive to stay’, and off they went.

“You’re new in town then, Mister Wizard?” Came the matter-of-course small talk from the man, as is an honour-bound custom for people of his profession.

“Drive without speaking.” Gregor instructed with a brusqueness common to his own profession, smothering the brief interaction like an inconvenient child.

At this, Mildred’s eyes drew away from the strangeness of the future-city to fall upon the sightless right side of Gregor the Cripple.

This wizard of hers was not a nice man. Definitely not. And most people would probably agree that he was a bad person too, himself included, but she was fine with that.

He could be a rude and bad if he wanted, because he was indomitable, and to her alone he was nice, and accommodating and careful, which she rather liked. She liked the exclusivity in particular, which she felt like she should feel guilty for, but apparently her greed was encouraged.

After a period of minutes, they arrived at the nicest hotel she had ever seen, and upon entering, Mildred felt the need to ask, “Is this an illusion too?”

Gregor looked around appraisingly, quirked his brow at a few seemingly innocuous things, and pronounced at length, “…No. Not really.” Before proceeding to secure accommodation for the few days he expected to need it.

The world was still sunlit, so they then went back out into uncommonly gorgeous Harsdorf, university-bound. Mildred was to be a passenger here, and so she fully intended to enjoy the scenery.