Finally, it's here!

This story came about old school RPG style: I came up with a list of 15 potential topics, then I used a random number generator to pick the story.

It delves into some of the history of Taiko whom you may remember as Artanis' landlady. Funnily enough, the 7 pages it took up in OpenOffice didn't seem to be very much, but here on the web, it seems somewhat long.

Hope you enjoy it!

Taiko and The Good Company

American Democracy in the 1800's was a hell of thing (and you might be able to have a long discussion comparing and contrasting Then to Now). It wasn't merely enough to run for an office and campaign with signs and speeches and handshakes if you wanted a realistic chance at having your name on Official State Stationery: to get, hold, and wield power, even the most well-oiled of the machines that operated in City Halls across the nation at that time had to rely on civic-minded and battle-hardened outfits who could go down among the people, get the necessary votes and turn them over to officials who could be trusted to tally the votes properly.

In the late 19th century Bay Area, those who would rule relied on The Good Company...

Part One

Hiram Greene had the neck of most men of his race, which is to say that he had not much of a neck at all. He'd lived a long time. If he'd ever had the skin of a young male ochre in the prime of life, the sun and sea and battle had stripped the gold from it. Taiko, who sat across the table from him in the Democratic Party's headquarters, found it beautiful still, and she let him know.

“Listen, you, cease that prattle. If you insist and persist,” Hiram said, “I will pat your head and say, 'Good girl' while waving a soupbone before your nose.”

You'd do no such thing, Hiram, she thought to him. Or if you did, you know what they say about teasing a hungry dog. You'd draw back a nub. Maybe not all dogs can grin, but most Laikans can, and Taiko's friends in The Good Company had grown used to seeing her lips pull back and upward to reveal strong white teeth when she was in a good humor.

Even a specialist in canines would have found it difficult to tease out the breeds that gave Taiko the shape of her head. It was possible to see some of the husky and at times some of the terrier; perhaps some of the Australian cattle dogs came through in the hint of the spots around her neck. Hiram and the others in her band of enforcers would have advised all but the strongest people to avoid using the word “mongrel” in her presence – and that meant saying it or thinking it given her race's ability to see into minds a little way. In any event, a head such as that on the body of a young woman of excellent health and vigor made for a striking figure. So, when they could help it, most men thought of her in terms that would flatter rather than insult.

Hiram answered Taiko's grin with one of his own and fell back to examining his club for flaws, tracing each rune with care. Some glowed and grew warm at his touch; others flared for a brief moment and faded into a dull silver after his fingers trailed across their loops and arcs. “There is a rule,” he said without looking up at his Laikan companion, “that nearly every soldier in every campaign that has ever taken place has heard. 'Take care of your weapon, and it will take care of you.' I heard it in the Late Unpleasantness--”

One seldom hears people out here call it that. I thought that more of a Southern term, Taiko interrupted.

“More than a few Southerners came out this way, after. I am not a Southerner, and I did not hold with certain of their beliefs, but I fought with their side, for a time. And I found that phrase described that war better than many others. Now, as I was saying, I heard it in the Late Unpleasantness, and I heard it during some of the Indian-Goblin skirmishes in the eighteen hundred and fifties, particularly among the Ch--”

“Oh, Taiko, have you yet not learned to stop him before his tongue wags itself right out of his head, Lord bless him?” said a veiled woman who stomped into the room. This was the famous Miriam Holtz, sometimes called “The Once Lovely.” Her voice and face both did their part to earn the epithet. From beneath the gravel of her timbre, a happier young female tone emerged on occasion. Only a patient eye, however, could, whenever she lifted the veil, see the pretty face that had existed before a net of scars had marked her from crown to chin.

Hiram touched the brim of his hat. “Ma'am. Taiko knows to have patience with an old fighter whose bones and sinews tell him in tones increasingly too loud to ignore that this should be his final campaign.”

“Nonsense. You still pursue each assignment energetically. You hold The Good Company together more than anyone else, even Victoria,” Miriam told him.

With whom we should now rendezvous en route to the polling place, no? Taiko thought to both of her companions. She pulled a pocket-watch from her vest and nodded. We're in fact a little late.

Hiram rose from his chair, and the chair spoke its gratitude at the lifting of the weight with a loud creak. “Miriam, you said I pursue these things we do energetically, but I confess I'm losing the desire to do this particular thing.”

Miriam laughed. “We are only doing our civic duty, dear Mister Rivers. Taiko, grab your pistol and your flail.” She checked her own pistol as she spoke. “All of the soldiers you have spoken to through your many years of battles said the truth, Hiram. No runes on this one, but I have treated it well for some time now, and it has returned the favor.”

Taiko favored a small-caliber black pistol, and she inspected it with a practiced eye. The coloring of her animal and human parts contrasted, and each brought out the best in the hue of the other: dark fur on her canine head, white skin on the woman's body. Long fingers that might have been put to better use on the neck and strings of an instrument carefully holstered the gun on a black leather belt that also bore a variety of tools for the Good Company's trade. She covered it all with a cloak, and the flail went into a rucksack she handed over to Hiram who smiled as he watched her.

“Ladies, I trust you are ready for the evening's misadventures? Yes? Then let us go,” he said.

They made their way to the front door, walking, without deciding to do so, in an order that reflected their years of experience in the field: first Taiko, followed by Miriam, followed by Hiram.




At a tavern in their assigned voting district, they acquired the two other members of their outfit.

Long and lean William Able stood at the bar, placing an empty wooden cup next to his hat. He used a magicked gust of wind to lift the hat into the air, and then he stood beneath it to let it fall onto his head, smiling for the benefit of his imagined admirers.
“It took a fellow some five years to learn that trick. The fakirs of India showed it to me, and byth'Lord, I was the first white man they divulged the secret to, I swear it.” It was true that his actual admirers were outnumbered by those who existed in his head, but only a mean person would have failed to credit him for flashing the occasional charm.

One faithful admirer stood next to him, making no secret of her feelings for him. When she drew herself up to her full height, she could look down at the top of his hat, but at that moment, she leaned into him with her unbound red hair falling across his shoulders and back. She was Victoria, of the race some named “The Elevated”, the financier and strategist for The Good Company.

“William, you have done more with five years than quite a few of my people have done with tenfold that amount. More than I've done, certainly,” she said.

William took her hand and kissed it. “When all's said and done, I will have lived enough for a hundred men or more. And, look now, here are our companions, about to offer me an opportunity to increase the quality of my share of this limited cosmic quantity we call Life.” He gave Hiram a firm and solemn handshake (he would have claimed to have learned the grip and length of it from a forgotten or hidden tribe in South America), and to both Miriam and Taiko he bowed ever so slightly.

Victoria greeted each of the three with a nod. She paid for her gin and William's beer, then stepped out of the bar onto the busy San Francisco street.

Taiko looked around and sniffed the early evening air. Truly, she thought out, this area has begun to come into its own since the completion of the cable car line.

“When we first arrived in this city, I did not think we would stay long enough to see the line completed,” Hiram said. “I preferred it when it was but sand dunes and farms, I have to say.”

William laughed. “You old grumbler.” He said it with affection. “As for me, I like change. I would dearly love to see what becomes of this section of the city as the decades go by.”

“Dear sir, with the nature of the hazards you subject your body to, you might well consider yourself truly blessed to see this decade come to a close, let alone far distant ones,” Miriam chided him. He doffed his cap in reply.

The five companions made their way down the road, and they fit well with the other men and women going about their business. Not too many would have cared to cross paths with them, even had it not been well known for whom they worked and what mission had them plotting a course to the polling place.

Little newspaper boys ran down the street dodging the occasional car, wagon, mule-drawn cart, rickshaw (known to range far from Chinatown on occasion), and they proclaimed that they mayoral race was likely still too close to declare. That brought a bitter snort from Miriam. “Friends, I suppose this is a sign we have been remiss in our duties.”

Yes, Taiko thought, I think we should have been more active in the days leading up to the election, not content merely to retrieving the ballot boxes and taking them to the appropriate counters.

“Oh, nonsense,” William and Victoria said in unison. They laughed at each other, and her hand found hers for a meaningful squeeze. Victoria continued with the opinion they'd both sought to express. “A little bit of excitement about the political process is a good thing, keeps the people occupied. Just imagine if we had busied ourselves before this and seen to it that the outcome was an assured thing far in advance. Why, the good voters would have lost interest, and many would have stayed at home. In a close race, each man can feel as though his vote truly counts.” With that said, she turned on her heel and strode ahead of the others.

Each human male, that is to say, Taiko thought. Then she frowned, realizing she had shared the sentiment with the rest of the Good Company. A not uncommon mistake for young Laikans and Taurans, though they were loathe to admit it.

“Lord, do not give Miriam an excuse to assume her suffragette persona,” William said with a laugh. “As for me, I say 'Patience!' Patience, friends! Soon enough, you four will all be like me and enjoy the privilege of marking a piece of paper that may or may not be counted for a man who may or may not actually serve in the capacity of the office to which you think you may have voted him!”

“If we but had salesmen like you promoting the principle, dear William, suffrage would have been universal long ago,” Victoria said as she walked ahead of them. Like all of her people, she had sharp ears; and her voice carried well when she wished it to.

“Again I say 'Patience.' Most things happen when they are supposed to happen, and not a minute before byth'Lord.”

No sooner had William finished speaking than a man, all a-jumble in clothing and step, approached the five friends. “It's old Bartholomew,” Victoria said. “And what is it, dear man?”

“Lady Victoria, Miss Miriam, all the rest of you, come quick! The ballot boxes is gone!”

The amiable and confiding William disappeared, replaced by a deadly serious man. “What do you mean? They shouldn't have gone anywhere until we got there and escorted them to a friendlier, well-defended counting place.”

“I mean that they's been taken by someone not you. Before we could even finish filling out all the ballots for those who did not or could not vote. And when I say taken, I mean, three men came into our polling place, flashed guns at us and left with them.”

“Describe them.”

Bartholomew gave a description of three men who, in his account, behaved and moved like people who expected to be obeyed and who had any of several different remedies to turn to in the event of non-compliance. He gave a slight start when he noticed Taiko, and he shifted his weight from foot to foot, struggling to keep his eyes away from her.
Victoria turned to Taiko. “Do his words and thoughts match?”
As nearly as I can tell, Taiko thought to her four friends. I can be fooled, you know. I am young yet. But what he imagines as he speaks of the three men fits his words.

“They do not sound like any of the men I know who do this sort of work,” Hiram said.

“And they bore no symbols of any sort of affiliation?” Victoria asked the poll worker.

“No marks on their clothing,” he said, looking at only four of the five members of the Company. “And they used but just enough words to get their point across. No claims of having done it for any of the honorable mayor's opponents as they left. And they didn't break nothing.”

“It would appear we've got a mystery on our hands. Mystery and a chance for a donnybrook: Is there a finer way to spend an evening in a city by the bay, my friends?” William said. He locked arms with Victoria, and they set a pace walking that had the already-winded Bartholomew pumping his legs for all their worth to stay with them.

I can't say I share William's love of mysteries and battle, Taiko thought to Hiram and Miriam as they followed. My preference for an evening here is a fine steak – cooked according to Starbuck's recipe – and a bottle of wine and a view of the water . In fact – she broke off wincing, sending something that Hiram and Miriam experienced as a flash of light.

Hiram stopped and looked around. A few meters away, a man with the body of a dock worker and the head of a bison stood engaged with a police officer.

Miriam frowned. “I thought you Laikans attuned yourselves to the same vibration of thought when you were in proximity.”

We Laikans hold ourselves apart from the Taurans, who really have no sense of civility and decency, Taiko sent to her friends – including the sensation of a haughty sniff with her statement. Hiram chuckled. No, Hiram, it's not bigotry. It's simply a matter of how the Lord arranged things. Now what's got you laughing?

“I am amused by how people can fail to see the similarities in things that are similar. But this is neither the time nor place for a discourse on such matters – look, even poor, slow Bartholomew, who didn't know whether to be repulsed by your canine features or attracted to your womanly proportions, and who likely found some bothersome delight in the combination of the two, and I don't need to be a Laikan or an alienist to discern that, has gotten far ahead of us. Come.” Hiram put an extra stretch into his steps, with Miriam and Taiko matching him, the latter thinking, to herself, that she was grateful that the parts visible above her collar bone could not blush and that the parts below were well-covered.


Bartholomew and The Good Company found the polling place in shambles – with regard to its people rather than its arches and beams. Many of the workers stood with weighted shoulders and tight expressions. Some offered hastily created and properly filled out ballots as proof of their commitment to the winning cause, and Victoria assured them that her Company had arrived not to punish but to aid.

“None of you is to blame. We have time yet to find the boxes and set things the way they ought to be,” she said, moving among them with a calming smile and comforting touches. Where she passed, mouths turned downward in frowns eased into less severe lines.

“I love to watch her work,” William whispered to Hiram, Miriam, and Taiko. “I've often wondered why she just doesn't run for Mayor.”

“I'm sure the Devil and the Lord alike would be amused by the bitter irony of her running for an office and being unable to vote herself into that office,” Miriam said.
“Oh, hush, you,” William
said with a smile that was a good mate for the one wielded by his lover. “Taiko, what manner of mind images are appearing to you?”

It's difficult. So many people, with emotions running so high.
“Poor thing,” Miriam whispered. “How do your people reach adulthood without being committed to sanatoriums?”

By not doing ill-advised things such as trying to read surface thoughts in a room of agitated people. Her ears lay flat against her head and her eyes narrowed; a growl rose in her throat unbidden. My apologies, Miriam. One of the problems with this setting is that the thoughts I read can become my own thoughts. Miriam nodded her acceptance of Taiko's apology. I'm starting to pick up on something. Most thoughts here corroborate William's story. But it appears our thieves were wearing insignia. Or...no, they were not,but there's a man here who is strongly associating them with a symbol I cannot pick out from his thoughts.

“Who is it?” Hiram asked, flexing his grip on his club. His words and his actions were both enough to frighten the man in question into revealing himself before Taiko could point him out.

With a yelp, a tall and lean man in an suit of poor condition made a dash for the door, trying to make a wide run away from the ochre. He paid no mind to Miriam, and so failed to notice her outstretched leg. William picked up a shaken man with a busted lip from the floor. He slipped an arm around the fellow's shoulders and treated him like an errant friend. “There now, my good man. What's all this?”

“Beg pardon, beg pardon, beg pardon...” the man stammered.

“Yes, yes.”

“I knew I was done in when this dog-woman started doing her mind witching! I don't care what they say, you can feel it when they dig into your brain. It's just like when you got the beginning of the brain fever.”

“That may be.”

“And then when this used to be yellow boy here grabbed his club, I knew I had to run for my life.”

“Because you'd done something wrong.”

“Well, I...” the man began. “I won't waste your time. You must have heard it all before. I've got four children, a sickly wife, and all men alive want more money. So, I told some men the way around the warding runes and when to come, and...”

Victoria turned to Taiko as the man wheedled, and the Laikan responded with a nod. With a sad sigh, Victoria whispered into William's ear. William in turn gestured to Hiram, and they started toward the door along with the man, who turned to regard everyone with a look of contrition before exiting.

Taiko let out a deep breath. I need to sit down for a moment, my friends. Miriam took the Laikan's arm and guided her to a chair. One of the poll workers brought her a glass of water. Miriam and Victoria had, of course, seen their friend drink from a glass many times before, but several of the poll workers ignored all pretense at propriety and gawked as Taiko raised the glass to her mouth. She drank from it the way a human with a numbing ointment on his lips would negotiate a drink from a cup: head tilted back, the contents poured with care straight down her throat.

Miriam shook her head in admiration. “I can feel their eyes on you,” she said. “I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to feel their thoughts as well.”

With this many pressing in on me, it is difficult to ignore them, though not impossible.

“I'm reminded again why you tend to take your meals in your room...and also why you tend to become intoxicated before the rest of us when we lift glasses of cheer,” Victoria said.

Hiram and William walked back in without the man they'd taken outside.
“Now, Taiko, don't go spoiling the surprise, let me speak before you reveal what's on my mind,” William said. With movements that spoke of his past career, he reached into his coat pocket, drew out a white, monogrammed handkerchief, and wiped his hands. “Nasty business, that,” he mumbled. “Now, as I was about to say,” he continued, “we coaxed all the information we required from that fellow. Harold Darling is the source of our troubles on this day.”

“I did not know that Harold Darling had changed his insignia,” Hiram said. “I do dislike people deviating from the accepted practices. There are ways to do these things....”

“If you start to ramble on about hallowing and consecration, dear friend, I shall slap you,” Miriam said. Several of the poll workers switched their stares from Taiko to once beautiful Miriam at that: on the whole, three women acting in an unusual manner was yet another disturbance beyond the usual mayhem most of them had come to expect on an election day. Hiram twirled his club and assumed an innocent expression.

Victoria took the opportunity to return The Good Company to the task at hand. “In any event, friends and companions, we must away into enemy territory. Shall we?”



In the hansom on their way to Harold Darling's chief place of business, very near to Chinatown, Taiko reflected on the circumstances of the evening while the other members of the company kept their own counsel.

If I could draw a tree or perhaps a path connecting Darling to all the men below him and all the men above him, doubtless I'd stop at the governor when I reached the top. Or could I go even beyond that? What web connects all these men?"

“Why are you putting images of spiders into our minds?” Hiram asked. Taiko sensed Miriam grimacing behind her veil.
After all that we've been through, Taiko thought to Miriam alone, and all that I've seen you brave and brazen your way through, the thought of spiders sends a cold finger creeping down your spine?

“I only like fighting what I can see,” Miriam said. “A spider will creep upon you while you sleep or stand unaware. They aren't very sporting, are they, being so small but still so deadly?”

I suppose they aren't. But what if they were big enough that they could not creep upon you? Wouldn't that make them worse?

“Now now!” the driver called from the front. “It's bad enough your big yellow in there like to kill my horse on account of all that weight, I don't need no dog witch gal filling my head with pitchers of spiders – especially spiders as big as my horse! You settle down back there, or I'll report you for unlawful use of magic.”

My apologies, dear sir, Taiko thought to him, though not with obeisance. When they reached the end of their ride, she considered, for a moment, sending the horse images of an especially sweet sugar cube that was always just out of its reach after they exited the hansom.

Victoria whispered to her as Hiram helped them down to the street, “Dear, I needn't be a Laikan to know you're considering repaying the man for his threat. Think of how often his hand strayed toward his whip while driving us here. What fate do you suppose you would be leaving the horse to if this man found himself in a still fouler mood?”

Taiko nodded. You are correct, Victoria. And I've suffered worse, in silence.

Victoria put an arm around the Laikan's waist. “You're no religious, sweet Taiko. None of us are, not with the things we have in our pasts. But I like to take a cue from the religious on occasion and forgive others even when it would satisfy some call from the id to punish them.”

“Whereas me, I stay my hand only when I don't stand to benefit in a pecuniary sense,” Miriam said. “That's my--”

“If you say 'Golden Rule,' dear friend, I shall disassociate myself from you,” Hiram told her. The Good Company had nothing but smiles for each other as the hansom drove off, with neither horse nor driver bothered by Taiko.

After the hansom had gone, two men who could had to have been the greater part of the trio Taiko and her friends sought stepped forward. The larger of the two addressed them as he twirled a club that matched Hiram's.

“If you are all finished with your play at words and meanings familiar only to yourselves after long years of companionship through numerous ordeals, perhaps we can get, at last, to the business of the evening?”

TO BE CONTINUED. . .