tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67568907133929242402024-03-08T15:01:33.582-08:00Godhead of the Immortal Moth-KingThe world of Cthun is changing.The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125truetag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-35422077200623752192012-08-06T14:52:00.001-07:002012-08-06T14:52:07.931-07:00THE PAINTER<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Andrea le Scorier lies atop her
scaffolding beneath the arch of the northwest chancel's ceiling, her
bare arm crusted to the elbow with paint. She is unmasked, an
unthinkable prospect outside the walls of Resplendent Orchid, and
dressed only in plain black robes. Above her a painting is taking
shape, a fresco depicting the Three Gods and their Lesser Emanations,
the thousandfold avatars of their desires and dreams. Monkey, the
burning ape with his fiery coat and clever eyes. The Eel Queen,
sleek, beautiful and almost human but for her gills and the hint of
teeth behind her smile. Last the Hollow God, the glass-bottle man.
He's the most challenging, his subtle shades and empty angles.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Andrea.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
She nearly drops her brush, but
manages merely to slop paint all over her already-stained sleeve.
Twisting her sore neck and rolling onto her side she squints down at
the floor where her twin brother, the Daimyo Claude de Scorier,
stands. She wets her lips, nervous. “What is it, Claude?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Come down. We have business to
discuss.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Andrea scrambles to the scaffold's
edge and swings her legs out over the void, fumbling for the ladder.
She leaves her brush, her paints, and with her own good arm makes the
laborious descent to the chancel's bamboo floor. The chancel echoes,
its tall, narrow windows throwing spears of light over the seasoned
wood. Claude stands at the center of one, haloed from behind like a
fleshly statue of the Machi Living Sun. “What is it?” Andrea
says again. The look in Claude's mismatched eyes, one green, the
other blue, unnerves her. Something is wrong.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
He sucks his teeth, his little nervous
tic. “The Red Turbans have disbanded. The Raptor massacred the
rebel army and took Stephane de Pare captive last night at Iron Wind
Field.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Andrea smiles. “He's won, then.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“This is a dangerous time for us.”
Claude takes her hand and squeezes it.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Our uncle is a hero, the savior of
the Empire.” She frees her hand, tucks a few loose hairs back
behind her ear and kisses her brother on the cheek. “You never
know when to be happy.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Claude snorts. He pulls away. “He
has the loyalty of the army and the love of the commons. The Shogun
is thirty, childless, and prickly. The Senate decays a little more
each day and the Cabals hate each other so much there's no room in
their heart for another grudge. To be a hero is to be feared.”
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Hush, brother,” Andrea says.
“You are too dour.” She smiles to take the sting from her
remonstrance and kisses him again, on the lips this time. He returns
the kiss. His hands undo the sash at her robe's waist with less
difficult than she has undoing it herself, and then his fingers are
in her and she is biting his lip hard enough to make him grunt with
pain.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
After, while Claude lies sleeping on
the dusty canvas, Andrea climbs her scaffolding to paint. The Hollow
God comes quickly now, escaping her brush in a rush of blues and
whites, greys in narrow little strokes. He is a man, a vessel, a
temple to himself. Since childhood he has been her confidante more
than any other of the quarrelsome pantheon. She gives him no
definite features, just the suggestion of a transparent face. He
sits hunched and brooding behind the others and in his eyes is
something Andrea had not meant to put there, a look of hollow longing
tempered with regret.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It is hours before she finishes, and
when she climbs down from her scaffolding her back is sore, her arm
stiff with overuse. The stump of the other, that useless knob of
flesh and bone protruding from her left shoulder, aches fiercely.
She thinks sometimes that knotted up within it is every failed idea,
every messy brushstroke and misplaced accent. Outside the windows it
is dark and the cicadas have begun to sing. The servants are
well-practiced at ignoring the Daimyo's business, but even they will
begin looking for him if she does not rouse him soon. She kneels
beside him on the canvas and smooths his fine black hair back from
his brow with her paint-spattered hand. “Wake up, Claude.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
He grunts, stretches, and slumps
forward with his elbows on his knees. He looks sullen as he always
does after they share in one another.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“No sulking, dearest,” Andrea
cautions. “You're ugly when you pout.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Claude snorts, but he gets to his feet
and smooths his robes. “Ugly, am I?” He kisses her stained
hands, her neck, her ears. “No, no.” His lips brush the fine
hairs on the back of her neck. “You think I'm beautiful.” His
hand slides inside her robe to squeeze her breast.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
She laughs and pushes him away with
her shoulder. “Not now,” she says, teasing with her eyes as she
reties her sash. “Daimyo de Roquefort's stewards will be here in
half an hour.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Claude's expression darkens. “I'd
sooner have them in the moat than here to dine with us.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“You know this has to happen.”
Andrea feels it too, the wrenching in her gut at the idea of sharing
him, her brother, her other half. Claude, though, lacks her
restraint. She must be strong for him. “Mother is dying and
Resplendent Orchid needs...needs an heir.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tears threaten at the corners of his
dark brown eyes. “No. I'll sire no sons but yours.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Andrea shakes her head, blinking back
her own tears. The ache of the children she'll never give him gnaws
at her like a disease. “You know the Shogun would only have them
drowned.” She kisses him chastely on the cheek and departs the
shrine. In her apartments her dead slaves prepare her for the
evening reception of the Daimyo's stewards. Their cold grey hands
lave her skin with scented oils, braid her hair into an artful knot
held up with skewers of ashwood and steel, dress her first in thick
linen and then in silk patterned with embroidered cherry trees. At
two and thirty she is past marrying age, consigned by her missing arm
to spinsterhood. If not for her brother, no man would ever deign to
touch her, to love her, not when her deformity might carry on to any
children she bore.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Her mask comes last, borne out on a
silken pillow by two dead and wizened dwarfs. They were a gift to
her mother from the late Daimyo le Francois, a great alchemist and an
ardent suitor for Linnea le Scorier's hand after the death of her
third husband, Andrea and Claude's father, Giacomo. Now they serve
Andrea, freaks waiting upon a freak. She holds still as the mask, a
regal and aquiline thing of beaten brass as smooth as water, is
fitted to her face and bound around her head with silken ribbons.
She touches it with her fingers, feels the cold metal as the dwarfs
retreat back into their alcove to carry on decaying into dust.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The stewards come bearing
their mistress's face. Angelique, the youngest daughter of Daimyo de
Roquefort. Plain, Andrea thinks from where she sits on a woven reed
mat, her one hand resting on the warm, dry snout of her dwarf
carnotaur, Vaselias. The horned saurian snorts warm, meat-smelling
breath across her face as together they watch Claude play the
gracious host, exclaiming over every dish brought out by the dead
slaves, complimenting the stewards on their conversation, their
shamisen playing, their singing. He dances with one or two, but all
the while his eyes linger with Andrea even as the Daimyo's daughter's
face spins with him.
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Angelique le Roquefort
comes late. She arrives on gallus-back with an escort of her
father's knights, a short woman, her mother's lovely mask covering
her face. The Lady Camilla had been a famous beauty. On the steps
of Resplendent Orchid, Andrea and Claude wait with the stewards and
six of the household deadguard. Andrea's arm aches from painting,
from the familiar rigor of eating one-handed, from sex. How many
more times would they have that? Not many.</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"My lord de Scorier," says the woman as two of her men help her to dismount, "your uncle's victory brings great honor to the Shogunate."</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
"My lady is kind to say so," Claude says, "and my uncle is a bold man, but his victory is not mine."</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In a private room the
Daimyo's daughter removes her mask, unlacing it with deft fingers in
the flickering candlelight. The stewards around her bow their heads.
Claude hides his disappointment well, but Andrea can see the sulk
building behind his eyes.</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Angelique is plain, she thinks, but
her eyes are a lovely shade of yellow.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-53812782319202136172012-06-30T01:00:00.002-07:002012-06-30T01:00:36.775-07:00Spotlight On: AlchemyTHE HISTORY OF ALCHEMY<br />
<br />
The practice of alchemy originated amongst the peoples of the vanished Fourth Continent. It was brought by the fleeing Thulhun to Machen and Maturin where it flourished in various cults and courts, supplanting the shamanistic and priestly traditions extant in those cultures. The Coven of the Sun, the Iron Cabal and the Golden Cabal are the three greatest alchemical traditions of the southern continents. <br />
<br />Alchemists, historically, have been powerful political forces no matter their location or disposition. The ability not only to raise and command the dead but to<br />
<br />
Aligher makes use of alchemy only in the totemic binding of man and beast.<br />
<br />
THE ALCHEMICAL SUBSTANCES<br />
<br />
Almost every substance known to Man is readily transmutable by a capable alchemist. Notable substances include:<br />
<br />
Iron<br />
Silver<br />
Wood<br />
Marble<br />
Water<br />
Blood<br />
Bone<br />
Stone<br />
Paper<br />
Cloth<br />
Steel<br />
Bronze<br />
Copper<br />
Malachite<br />
Dust<br />
Hair<br />
<br />
Obsidian is the only substance which cannot be transmuted. It is also inert as a reagent. <br />
<br />
THE PRODUCTS<br />
<br />
Some results achieved with alchemy are not reversible and do not in principle flow both ways. These are referred to as Products and include:<br />
<br />
Chlorine<br />
Sulfuric Acid<br />
Oxygen<br />
Carbon Dioxide<br />
Mercury<br />
Sulfur<br />
Nitrogen<br />
Hydrogen<br />
<br />
THE REAGENTS<br />
<br />
Charged by an alchemist's will, a reagent facilitates the transmutation of one alchemical substance into another. All substances are reagents.<br />
<br />
THE FORBIDDEN SUBSTANCES AND REAGENTS<br />
<br />
Transmutation of thought: Facilitated by gold. Thought is prohibited as a substance not because of its nature but because it responds only to gold, which is itself taboo. Any attempt at transmutation of thought results in an explosion of alchemical energy rendering everyone within a quarter mile irrevocably mad. It is fabled, but unproven, that the process can result in the alchemist gaining unspeakable knowledge.<br />
<br />
Transmutation of age: Facilitated by the life's blood of an exsanguinated sacrifice. Forbidden for obvious reasons, and delivers diminishing returns.<br />
<br />
Transmutation of memory: Facilitated by silver, the transmutation of memory divorces the transmuted party from reality and plunges them into another world. They lose their language and speak thereafter in a strange tongue undecipherable by Men. Eventually they become silent and then, undying, sit and turn to stone.<br />
<br />
Transmutation of distance: Facilitated by iron. Transmutation of distance results in the collapse of distance as a concept within the area effected by the transmutation. Over time, if the transmutation is exercised repeatedly, the locale will collapse into an aleph, the confluence of many locations at one point.<br />
<br />
The use of gold as a reagent is expressly forbidden by most or all alchemical covens. Historically, gold was used by various cults as a ceremonial reagent for its occasionally spectacular results. It is, notably, the only reagent capable of imparting life to inanimate objects. Common results of transmutation via gold include madness, explosion of alchemist, alchemical substance or both, destruction of the alchemist's soul or, in cases recorded apocryphally, the summoning of a demon.The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-56435489060772050122012-06-22T21:43:00.002-07:002012-06-22T21:43:39.272-07:00THE BANKER<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tomas Dutiful Boar, Senior Adjunct of
the Imperial Maturi Bank, sits alone on a soiled mat in his drafty
tent. He huddles beneath the quilt his wife Mara sewed for him
before his departure from Tsang, eyes red and nose running. The wind
howls like a lunatic along the Road of Dust, bringing with it the
Grand Ocean's stinging spray. The seabirds that nest on the dreary
span are screaming at the gale, raucous voices rifling the iron dawn.
Tomas has not slept at all. He has scarcely closed his eyes since
leaving Tsang two weeks ago, and now that Machen's sandy coast is in
sight, the Mountains of Madness looming like teeth over the Road, he
sleeps even less. Today the Legion will take the road to Soma, and
Tomas will ride with them, mocked, jeered at, or else ignored. Since
Sieur Lorelei's stunt in her war tent, her signature in blood, no one
in the camp takes Tomas seriously.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Outside the banker's tent the soldiers
are stirring, their galluses making inquisitive sounds as the grooms
saddle them for the day's ride. The dead, Tomas knows, stand ready
as well. They make no preparations because when night falls they do
not billet down. Instead they stand in ranks, those false men with
their golden eyes, spears in hand, shields at the ready, and they do
not move again until Maestro Longardeux orders them forward. They
fight naked like the ancient Thulhuns, lockstep warriors who kill
without remorse. Even thinking of them turns Tomas's stomach.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There comes a rap on the post beside
Tomas's tent flap. “Banker,” says Sieur Jocelin, Sieur Lorelei's
brute of a second. His outline hulks against the canvas wall. “We
march. Done sleeping?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Yes, yes,” says Tomas. He rises
from his chair. He will forgo shaving today, he decides as he crams
his second-best wig onto his stubbled head. Sieur Jocelin departs,
his shadow slipping away from the tent's rough wall. Tomas watches
him go as he dresses, retying his underrobe where his gut has popped
the straps. Mara badgers him to eat less, but he never listens. He
pulls on his robe, his culottes and hose, his traveling coat, and
finally his thick leather gloves. They hide his fat fingers
admirably well, he thinks, inspecting them as he steps outside into
the waning dark. The cold is fading fast so close to shore, but the
chill in the air is still enough to rattle his teeth.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Two glowering soldiers stand a little
ways off, waiting to break down his tent. Tomas ducks past them,
head down, already chilled by the salt breeze. One of the men
sniggers. Tomas blushes. The rest of the camp is moving, tents
packed into the wagons, cavaliers mounted, officers oiled and ready
to order men into death. Tomas's ancient manservant, Gregoire,
materializes at his elbow like a cadaverous shadow. “Maestro,”
the old man mumbles, brushing dust from Tomas's sleeve with his
arthritic fingers. “Will you take breakfast?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Hmm.” Tomas thinks guiltily of
Mara, of her stern mouth and icy glare. He swallows. “Octopus,
rice, the seaweed cakes if there's any left, warm wine, a dumpling,
no, two. And eggs.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Yes, maestro.” The old man makes
a slow, deliberate <i>wai
</i>with much creaking and puffing
before he straightens up and shuffles off in pursuit of breakfast.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tomas's stomach
growls. His vision is bleary, his stubble greasy, unwashed. His
wig, unpowdered since the first week of travel, itches fiercely.
When will he go home again? So much is waiting for him there. The
junior partnership Director de Somme promised last autumn, his
parents settling grumpily into old age, his eldest son, Pascal,
turning three. And Mara. He's given up so much to please her, to
please her unpleasable father who had married her off for the Dutiful
Boar fortune, modest as it was. He loosens his collar. Thinking of
Maestro de Carnelia always upsets his lungs, and usually the rest of
him as well. With a sigh he sets off for the pickets, head bent
against the wind.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Tomas's mule,
Philippe, is waiting like a particularly patient boulder at the end
of the last picket row by the precipitous drop to the sea. The
swaybacked beast, unfazed by the surf crashing yards below, glances
sidelong at Tomas he approaches. He makes no move but to slowly,
deliberately continue chewing. He's already been saddled, though the
grooms have ignored his currying again. Tomas sighs, finds a brush
discarded next to a pat of fresh gallus manure, and sets to work
rubbing the mule down. If Philippe is moved by his master's
attention, he chooses not to display it. Gregoire's own mount, their
nameless baggage mule, looks on from further up the picket line with
what Tomas can only assume is murderous rage in its eyes.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Gregoire returns
with a loaded bowl and tin mug of wine just as Tomas is finishing up
Philippe's grooming. The banker wolfs down his breakfast as around
him the camp dissolves, peeling apart into its constituent persons
and canvas heaps, its supply wagons and chattering nemicolopteri
cages. Tomas hoists himself awkwardly onto Philippe as the
cavaliers form up in ranks further down the Road of Dust. Sieur
Lorelei rides up and down their lines, exhorting her soldiers to a
fast march. “We're nearly there, you rotten bastards,” she
shouts, turning her gallus. Seabirds rise in shrieking clouds from
the nameless sand-washed metal of the road. “The Hierophant's
armies, I've heard, are out of swords. Shall we bring them ours?”
The soldiers laugh and cheer, even those still disassembling the
camp.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman's
bloodlust sours Tomas's stomach. Is there nothing she does not wish
slain? He grips Philippe's reins tightly in his gloved hands as a
double line of armed soldiers marches past, boots clattering on the
road's impervious surface. Tomas wonders, not for the first time,
who built the Eight Great Roads that link the three continents and
the grave of the vanished fourth. What other wonders did they work
before the ruin of Thul and the end of humanity's golden age? His
research, the hundred little half-finished essays crammed into the
drawers of his desk at the bank, has led him no closer to an answer.
That the alchemists who built the Roads are long since dust is his
only certainty.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“The resource
reports, maestro,” husks Gregoire, now mounted. He hands Tomas a
sheaf of wrinkled papers covered in the illegible scrawl of the
legion quartermaster, Emil Standing Water. The man, like most of the
legion, is a southerner, but their shared ancestry has as yet yielded
no brotherly love. Instead Emil has sought to sabotage Tomas at
every turning. Stealing his inkpots, exchanging his
carefully-written letters with profanity-filled diatribes, always
positioning camp so that the latrines stand just beside Tomas's tent.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
His current report
reads simply:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i> We have some of
some things and less of others. -Emil.</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i> </i>Tomas
sighs. He heels Philippe into motion as the rest of the legion
settles into its routine. In the distance Machen waits for them, a
kingdom of dust where the burnt-skinned nomads nest in cities built
by greater men. What will happen when they reach that barren
kingdom, Tomas wonders? He passes a hand over his face and heels
Philippe into motion, the resource report and Emil's useless letter
stuffed in his breast pocket. </div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-83369567866022221952012-05-26T18:34:00.002-07:002012-06-30T00:48:50.505-07:00THE SORCERESS<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Delfine le Fleur sits patiently in the
barber's chair as the fat, mustachioed man shaves the stubble from
her scalp. “Just a moment more, magistra,” says the barber, as
he does every few moments. “Just a moment more and we'll be quite
through.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Summer Arcade of the Golden
Cabal's temple in Tsang is a beautiful place to sit. Columns of
transmuted gold line a walkway open to the temple gardens where
alchemists wander alone or in groups along the labyrinthine paths
through twisting hedgerows and sand gardens, through stands of cherry
trees in roseate bloom. Dead allosaurs with golden collars around
their throats patrol the gardens, silent and sleek as death. They
pass like ghosts between the hedges, ignored by all but the Cabal's
newest acolytes who watch them in awe. Delfine watches one such
beast from the corner of her eye, admiring the play of muscles
beneath its leathery skin. The Iron Cabal makes soldiers and
drudges, but her order makes works of art.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Just a moment more,” the barber
says, wetting his razor in a dish of rosewater. He draws the blade
along Delfine's scalp in a succession of quick, confident motions,
then pats the bare skin with a moistened towel to collect any hairs
left behind. With a flourish he removes the catch-cloth from around
her throat and steps back, smiling. “There we are.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Thank you, maestro,” says
Delfine. She stands, an imposing figure in her lavish alchemist's
gowns, and smiles at the barber. “My slave will arrange for your
payment as usual.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Magistra.” He <i>wais</i>
deeply.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
temple pays the barber a healthy retainer, but Delfine likes to
remind him where the real power lies. She departs his little stand
in the shadow of the Summer Arcade and sets off across the garden
toward the low, red-tiled eaves of the Pagoda of Silent
Contemplation, the nine-tiered tower where Delfine and the other
master alchemists of the Cabal keep their workshops and come together
in council. Her postosuchus, Malvolio, detaches himself from the
shadows of the arcade and lopes after her, armored tail swinging. Acolytes and Adepts <i>wai </i>at
Delfine's passing and shrink back from Malvolio's jaws. The beast is
nearly twelve feet long, better than four feet tall at the shoulder,
and he weighs as much as five acolytes. Taming Malvolio was the work
of years, but what assassin could be paid enough to dare his wrath in
killing Delfine?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“This is a good
day, Malvolio,” says the alchemist. She pauses to admire a cherry
tree of particular beauty. Its blossoms drift in the air like snow
touched with the lightest dab of blood. “All of Tsang will know
the Cabal's greatness tonight. The City of Cities will gather us
close to her breast and the Lich King will be forgotten, just another
corpse shut up in a glorious mausoleum.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Malvolio grunts,
ropes of drool dangling from his parted jaws. A passing lecturer
swallows and quickens his pace, darting glances over his shoulder at
the monstrous reptile.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the
conclavorium of the Pagoda of Silent Contemplation three of the eight
Golden Councilors, the most senior amongst the Cabal's upper
echelons, are already deep in consultation when Delfine enters. She
watches them from the shadows of the doorway, Malvolio pressing up
against her side like a great scaled hound. Idly, she scratches the
reptile's armored snout as the Councilors, seated on woven mats,
debate amongst themselves.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“It would be too
gaudy,” says Mona le Croyel, the Cabal's withered Grand Archivist.
“Surely we can think of a more tasteful way?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
current Flesh Sculptor, a slender, handsome man of thirty or so,
makes a <i>tsk</i>-ing noise.
“We require gaudiness, Magistra. We need to make the whole
Shogunate stand up and take notice. And besides, our new creation
defies the laws of taste.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Here, here,”
says Delfine, clapping her hands as she steps into the dim light of
the teak-walled chamber. She descends the five steps to the Council
Floor, Malvolio keeping close beside her. The other Councilors watch
her with varying expressions. Mona le Croyel distrusts her, holds
their old grudge close and dear. The Flesh Sculptor is a grinning
cipher, talented certainly, but whether buffoon or serpent none has
yet determined. The third Councilor, Jean-Marie de Flambeux, High
Justice of the Cabal's internal courts, looks at Delfine with
undisguised contempt, the same expression he levels at anything less
than six hundred years old.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Grand
Transmuter,” says the ancient Justice, a scowl deepening the myriad
lines that web his sagging features.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Jean-Marie,”
says Delfine, <i>wai</i>-ing.
She takes a mat opposite the old man, who eyes Malvolio with
distrust as the postosuchus lowers himself to the floor. Delfine
lays her hand on the reptile's armored back. “He's quite tame, you
know.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“We were
discussing the details of tonight's...display,” says the Flesh
Sculptor. “Mona and Jean-Marie feel that we ought to curb our
approach, rein in the fireworks until the Red Turbans are put down
and Marshal de Grande has returned to the city.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“They return
within the week,” says Delfine. “I had a nemicopterus this morning from
my man with the legions. Nevertheless, we should press our point
tonight. Besides, the Raptor of Tsang will never be more unpopular
with Senate, King, or Shogun than he is now.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“But he's just
put down the rebellion, if that's true,” sputtered Jean-Marie.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Ah,” says the
Flesh Sculptor.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Delfine
raises one penciled eyebrow. “Precisely. His reputation has
become too great. Certain factions will expect an coup, certain
others will demand it, and those against whom it might be carried out
will become more paranoid with each passing day. We must be seen to
distance ourselves from the Marshal, and now is as good a time to
start as any.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mona le Croyel
looked scandalized. “The Marshal Louis has been our staunch ally!”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Delfine is
right,” says the Flesh Sculptor. “He's finished.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Delfine reaches
into her sleeve, produces a cigarillo on a long ash holder and lights
it. The tip of her left index finger is capped with flint to
transmute oxygen into flame. A little parlor trick. The alchemist
inhales clove-scented smoke. “We go through with tonight's
presentation.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The other four
Councilors join them before dusk, but there is no debate, no
deliberation. They had worked tirelessly and in secret for better
than a month, and even Jean-Marie, Delfine is convinced, wishes only
to see the fruits of their long labor. He fears it, too, though, as
all old men fear what is new and terrible. It is only the little
children who know that change cannot be stopped. They leave the
Pagoda just after sunset, processing out into the gardens and then to
the Gate of Chains where dead iguanodons barded in the Cabal's black
and gold wait patiently, palanquins slung between them.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The city of Tsang
lies glittering in the shadow of the temple complex's hill. There
the soaring heights of the Palace of Regret where tonight the Cabals,
the Shogun, the Senate and the King will meet tonight, and there the
huge expanse of the Bay of Laughing Swine where a thousand ships bob
at anchor, beyond it the grim shadow of the Iron Citadel where their
sister Cabal holds sway. The city is a salt-smelling oasis, a
paradise of old stone crazed with moss, of alleys reeking of stagnant
water. It is an ancient city, its fanes and whorehouses of an age
with one another, both crumbling and full of lechers. Some say a
million souls dwell here where the air is hot and close, where the
sea threatens always to swamp shops, markets, slave pens, tenements
and villas. Mosquitoes buzz in the gathering gloom and their whine
is nearer than the million-fold lights of Tsang.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Delfine leaves
Malvolio with an uneasy stablehand and takes a palanquin with the
Flesh Sculptor. She ties the silk curtains shut as the great
reptiles lumber into motion, their passengers swaying between them.
Her skin prickles at the Flesh Sculptor's touch, at the warmth of his
lips on her throat and the stiffness of his short, thick cock pressed
against her thigh. She forces him back against the palanquin's
padded boards and lowers herself onto him, takes his member into her
vagina. He shudders, legs jerking, and his hands move beneath her
robes to the small of her back. In silence they make love as the
dead iguanodons bear them with ponderous tread down the long, winding
road to the city of Tsang.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
In the streets of
Tsang there are crowds, and Delfine peers out at them in delight
through sweat-damp curtains while the Flesh Sculptor busies himself
between her legs. Shopkeepers, street-sweepers, lamplighters,
fullers, drovers and merchants stand alongside robed civil servants
and the occasional knight in lacquered bamboo armor. City guardsmen
occupy the corners of each street, and here and there Delfine sees
nobles, masked and robed or armored. Dead servants and soldiers are
everywhere. Delfine bites her lip, fighting the urge to scream as
the Flesh Sculptor's tongue touches, licks. “This is all going to
be ours,” she breathes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The crowds part
for the Golden Cabal's procession. Parents hoist children up on
their shoulders to watch the dead saurians and their palanquins
lumber past in the light of the flickering streetlamps. Soon enough
they reach the outskirts of the palace precincts, the vast marble
plaza that fronts the Palace of Regret. The quetzalcoatli of the
Iron Cabal already roost on their shit-streaked landing towers,
stirrups dangling from their saddle girths. The huge pterosaurs flex
their wings at the approach of the iguanodons, unsettled by the dead
behemoths with their spiked thumbs and pressed-gold eyes. Delfine
deftly rearranges her underclothes, pushing the Flesh Sculptor away.
He wipes his mouth on his sleeve and slips out of the palanquin. She
follows, a picture of magisterial dignity.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Palace of
Regret looms above them, its stone bulk cold and reverent in the dark
at the heart of Tsang. Paper lanterns drift through the air around
it like a swarm of sleepy fireflies, casting wild shadows over the
plaza and the palace walls. The rest of the Golden Council gathers
around Delfine, though the Flesh Sculptor has already begun to climb
the great stone steps toward the yawning entryway. “Come,” says
Delfine to the others. “We have an impression to make.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Golden Council
follows its Flesh Sculptor up the steps, ignoring the hundreds of
dead palace guards that watch them from alcoves carved into the
crumbling facade. A word of discord and the Lich King's bodyguard
will be upon them in their uncounted thousands. At the top of the
steps one of the Sixty-Six, the Lich's personal Cabal, awaits them,
naked but for the pointed black hood that obscures his face and
shoulders. Carious eyes, untempered by slave-making gold, stare out
at them through holes cut in that rough sackcloth. Delfine makes a
shallow <i>wai</i> in passing, though Jean-Marie neglects even this
brittle courtesy.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The entry hall
swallows them in its moldering vastness. It is a living thing, the
moist, dark throat of the Palace of Regret. Delfine counts her steps
as her sandals scuff the mosses and lichens that cling to the cracks
between uneven stones. One hundred. Two. Three, and now she can
glimpse the light at the end of the hall, the Flesh Sculptor
silhouetted against it. She smiles in the lessening gloom, the
whisper and clack of her fellow Councilors building all around her a
second palace made of echoes. Their Cabal is smaller than the Iron
order, but their prestige is greater, their history rich. They are
not sellswords. They are not slavers. They are the disciples of the
Monkey, the Third God, who was born in the heart of the sun and who
one day will return there to die.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
This is their
hour.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
Flesh Sculptor waits for Delfine near the hall's terminus, the very
mouth of the Hall of One Thousand Glorious Senators. He looks back
at her, his long hair brushing the collar of his embroidered gown.
The Hall is an amphitheater, hundreds of tiers of long stone benches
rising in a great half-circle around a deep pool where crocodilians
swim lazily in brackish water. The benches are not empty. The
nobles of Maturin, masked and swathed in their richest finery, sit or
stand in private boxes while the alchemists of the Iron Cabal,
bearded men and ropy, scarred women in robes of undyed cloth, their
silly alchemical bells sewn to their sleeves, are clustered together
on a round platform jutting out above the pit, a platform mirrored by
an empty twin on the pit's far side.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Opposite
the mouth where Delfine stands are the thrones of Shogun and Lich
King, the divided sovereigns of Maturin. The Shogun, Jacqueline le
Guerre, is an enormous woman, a wall of fat and muscle perpetually
straining the joints of her much-scarred armor. Her face is hawkish,
enormous hooked nose and beady eyes. Her big hands grip the arms of
her throne as though trying to strangle the polished oak. By
contrast the Lich King, Real de Thanatos, appears close to a second
death so attenuated has his ancient husk become. He is naked, his
wizened flesh exposed uncharitably for all to see from his wormlike
member to the trembling folds of his throat and his scabrous head with its wisps of yellowing hair.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
rest of the hall is occupied by the corpses of the Dead Senate, the
three thousand sentient dead who have administrated Maturin since the
birth of its first Lich King after the fall of Thul. Their nude
multitudes only grow, a desiccated quorum of fading minds and
crumbling bodies. Delfine does not sneer, but contempt boils in her
stomach. These dead things have no place among the living. They
belong in chains, tilling fields and toiling in the sewers. Their
formaldehyde reek fills the air.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Iris
de Chymede, Grandmaster of War of the Iron Cabal, has the floor,
though he has ceased his speech and now looks at the Golden
Councilors with dislike printed plainly on his square, sunburned
face. The Hall has fallen silent, has become the mausoleum the
peasants mock it as.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Proceed,
Grandmaster,” says the Shogun through gritted teeth. “Councilors,
to your post.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Delfine
<i>wai</i>s deeply to the
sovereigns and then sets off down the sweeping obsidian stair toward
the dais reserved for the Golden Council. Arriving late is part of
the plan, another way to build anticipation. Everyone in the Hall,
even as Grandmaster de Chymede resumes his dry speech on treaties
with the Floating Empire, on the movements of dead troops and the new
insults offered by the People's Holy Confederacy in Machen, thinks
now of nothing but the Golden Council. Delfine takes her place at
the platform rail and fixes de Chymede with a humorless stare. He
returns it, losing more and more of his audience as he stammers
through the end of his report.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
dry, papery voice of Real de Thanatos cuts through de Chymede's
muttered conclusion. “The Apparati will hear now the words of the
Golden Cabal, who have requested one hour of our time.”
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
de
Chymede's brow furrows as he steps down from his lectern and Delfine
mounts hers. Who, after all, would request longer than a
quarter-hour of the Apparati's time? More than that and boredom is
certain. de Chymede's look of confusion becomes one of smug
confidence, certainty that his rivals are burying themselves beneath
their own legendary arrogance. Delfine ignores him. She directs her
words to the twin thrones, to Shogun and Lich King. “Our armies
have struggled for centuries against the great behemoths of the Machi
hordes. Their sauropods, their tyrannosaurs. Our natural philosophy
has proven itself insufficient to prize back from death the corpses
of the great inland saurians, and we are not a people given to
scratching in the dust with living beasts.”
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
dead senators, those who still deign to listen to words spoken by the
breathing, lean forward on their benches. Yellowing beards sweep the floor as the dead crane their necks with much popping and snapping of joints. They peer down at the bald alchemist before them. de Chymede's
smile widens. He believes his enemy about to confess to some great
failure. Surely even this brute knows the resources consumed by the
Golden Cabal, the loans taken out by its senior magi. He suspects
that they have gutted themselves. Delfine is hard-pressed to hide
her grin as the first tremor rocks the Hall.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Nobles
cease their quiet banter, abandon their flutes of wine and opium tea.
Their masked faces turn in the direction of the hall. Delfine keeps
her expression carefully neutral, though at her back she feels the
concentrated excitement of the other Councilors. The Flesh Sculptor
alone seems immune to the infectious glee, protected by his natural
air of cavalier dismissal. Delfine grips the lectern, fingers
whitening. “We have done what no other alchemists have dared to
try.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
Hall shakes again. Dust sifts down from the domed ceiling with its
gilt friezes, its murals of the Three. Delfine turns her back on the
Shogun, on the Lich King, on the Senate, the nobles, and the
sweating, discomfited de Chymede. It is a calculated risk, a breach
of etiquette meant to secure the new order of things. Delfine clasps
her hands behind her back, sharing a private look with her fellow
Councilors. No matter what they think of one another, now is their
moment. Tonight is their night. Again, the Hall trembles.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Delfine
looks back over her shoulder.“If you will deign to follow this
unworthy one?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
There
is an exodus, a crush of potentates shambling, shuffling, hustling
down the long stone throat of the Palace of Regret toward the distant
tympanic rumble of what approaches. Conversation bounces from the
walls, echoing and re-echoing until in blather secrecy re-emerges
from pure nonsense. Delfine's skin is aflame with anticipation. Her
hands tremble. She is the first out through the towering entryway,
first to see the great inanimate diplodocuses making their way up the
Dead Road from the sea. The behemoths, concealed in the harbor for
weeks now, still look fresh. Their slack grey skin is like expensive
leather, their whiplike tails still supple. Each of the three
saurians is over one hundred feet from long, blunt head to lashing
tail. Their slow tread shakes the earth. Their sides heave like
bellows, neat stitching concealing the immense hematological
batteries necessary to preserve their motive force. They tower over
shops and tenements. Their feet crack the cobbles.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The
populace cries out in a mixture of fear and awe. At Delfine's back
the men and women and dead of the Apparati are struck speechless, or
else gibbering to one another like madmen. Delfine turns back to
them, allowing herself at last a thin, knifelike smile. “One hour
for questions.”</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-40005061632740852342012-05-25T16:09:00.001-07:002012-05-26T21:14:39.910-07:00THE LITTLE THIEFIn the shadow of Resplendent Orchid a
child must be quick, or else she is dead. There are slavers whose
agents hunt the alleys for those suitable to sell in Machen's flesh
marts, while the dregs go to the gulags in frozen Aligher. Packs of
feral raptors call the undercity home, and on some nights there are
worse things than slavers or saurians abroad in the dark.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Quick or dead. This is the Eel
Queen's Law, and all children who run in the streets of the city know
it by heart. Or else they are dead. Mari knows the law. She will
be ten soon, and she has not yet been caught. By Resplendent
Orchid's standards this is an accomplishment of great moment. She
has worked for thiefmasters, for tanners, for fullers and hadrosaur
stables, has stolen fruit, jewelry, meat, bread, coin, even candies
from the stalls of the Golden Cabal. She is small, light-fingered,
an acolyte from birth of the Eel Queen and her art. Now she sits in
a the crowded attic of a flophouse with a dozen other ragged
children, wondering what tempted her inside to listen to the woman in
yellow.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Woman is young, ten or eleven
years older than Mari at the most, and she is so pale she looks like
the invalids who beg outside the temples at the center of town. Blue
veins run like rivers beneath her papery skin, surround her yellow
eyes like the fractured shadow of a noblewoman's mask. Her hair is
long and black, pooling on the floor around her, and bells made of
many metals adorn her trailing sleeves. Kneeling before the
children, light from the window at her back breaking over her, she
looks like a consumptive angel. She makes a slow, deliberate <i>wai</i>,
and Mari echoes it at once. It is always best to be polite with
alchemists. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Once, she has heard, a Grandmaster of the Iron Cabal
turned his boy-whore into salt for spitting on his slippers.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Welcome,”
says the woman in yellow.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mari says nothing,
and neither do the other children. They all know the laws. Never
speak first, never steal from a thief, never flaunt your take. The
list goes on. She does not speak; she listens.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman in
yellow laces her fingers together, the bells on her sleeves jingling.
“Who knows who rules your city from the great fortress on the
hill?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Claude de
Scorier,” says some idiot, a gaunt boy with a harelip. “He lives
in Resplendent Orchid with his sons.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman smiles a
thin, sharp smile like a knife's edge. “Correct. How would you
like to own everything that Claude de Scorier owns?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The smell of greed
is sharp in the air. Mari feels it, too, the forbidden goal of
wealth, real wealth and not just cold survival. She knows better
than to trust it, though, and she swallows her lust. There is
nothing but betrayal behind smiles, nothing but disappointment behind
promises. If you wanted something, you had to take it yourself.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“He sleeps on
silken sheets,” says the woman. She has her audience in the palms
of her pale, slim hands. She knows it. “His galluses eat better
than you ever have. How much injustice have you choked down since
your births? How much more will be force-fed to you?” She reaches
into her sleeve and produces a flat obsidian coin impressed with the
Shogun's glowering visage. A koku. Enough money to buy food for two
months. More money than any child in the room has ever held at once,
and certainly more than any of them has ever earned through hard
labor.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“What do you
want?” says another child, a squat, flat-faced girl with shrewd
eyes and scars on the backs of her hands. Mari thinks she has seen
her before, out on the streets some night by the Green Kitchens or
begging in the Plaza of Contempt.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I want
nothing,” says the woman in yellow, “but the Hollow God desires
all, and it is Their will I serve. Tell me, will you help me kill
your Daimyo?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
de Scorier has
knights at his command, swaggering bullies with <i>ko</i>-flags
displaying their made-up ancestries to the whole world. He has the
city guard, rough men and women paid just little enough that they
must extort and brutalize everyone beneath them. Worst of all,
though, he has the Sad Men. de Scorier is not to be toyed with,
especially not by half-starved children. Still, Mari is tempted.
The room waits, holding its breath. Mari bites her lip. What to do,
what to do.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I will,” says
the boy with the harelip. His voice is a drawn-out snivel, wet and
cringing.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The others join
in, each clamoring to be heard above the others, all proclaiming
their skills as hardened killers. Mari watches in silent disgust.
She knows the other children are lying, and even as the woman in
yellow explains her brazen plan she is caught up in their twitching
faces, their covetous eyes and the flush in their gaunt cheeks. Do
they understand nothing? Soon they're leaving, filing out through
the narrow door, coins clutched fast in their sweaty palms. Mari
rises and moves to follow, eager to leave the stuffy attic and its
strange inhabitant.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman's voice
freezes Mari where she stands. “Wait, child.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mari looks back at
the woman, still kneeling in the light that pours in through the
dusty window. “Magistra?” she says, her throat suddenly dry.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Most of them
will take my coin and try to sell me to the city guard,” says the
woman in yellow. She seems unconcerned. The footsteps of the other
children are already retreating down the winding stair, heralded by
creaks and groans. “Not you. Why?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mari swallows.
“The guards don't listen to children.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Still, you
might have had the coin.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Where would I
spend it? The merchants would call me a thief.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman nods.
She runs a hand through her long black hair. “Yes. Many of the
others will die. You knew my gift was poisoned.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Poisoned?”
Mari trembles, thinking of how she nearly took the coin.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Figuratively.
What urchin could have a koku who had not stolen it?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mari says nothing.
The woman's pale yellow eyes, the color of piss or cornflowers,
frighten her. She wants to go, to run back to the streets and see if
Ugly Ursula has work for her in the stables behind her inn, the Red
Dimetrodon. Still, she does not move.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“The rest are
chaff,” says the woman in yellow. “You may be worth something.
Help me and I can promise an acolyte's place for you in the Iron
Cabal.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Mari's chest
tightens. The Iron Cabal, those sellers of slaves and soldiers,
beholden not even to the Shogun but only to the Lich King and the
Dead Senate. It is said that the alchemists of the Iron Cabal give
up their souls when they take up their posts, that they wield powers
no other alchemist could dream of. In the woman's offer is a
lifetime of, if not ease, then at least security. Privilege. Power.
Mari swallows, wipes her damp palms on her trousers. “What do you
want? Really?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman in
yellow smiles, showing her teeth this time. “Something beautiful.”</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-1908615354902064272012-03-31T14:11:00.004-07:002012-05-26T22:20:27.563-07:00THE KNIGHT<br />
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sieur Lorelei
Dancing Crane, vassal of the Daimyo de Ponsier and commander of the
ninth senatorial legion, rides north with her men along the Road of
Dust, the indestructible bridge that joins Machen to Maturin. The
great track, raised in centuries past by the mighty alchemists of
long-lost Thul, is a marvel beyond mortal reckoning. It is made of
some stark black metal, a single unimaginable length transmuted from
water, and it cannot be transmuted or destroyed by any weapon known
to man. It has borne the weight of armies, Lorelei knows, and more
than one war has been decided on its span. Not this war, though.
No, this war lies in the west of Machen, that dusty, sanctimonious
neighbor to lush Maturin. Machen with its cruel religion, its stern
god and hard-eyed warriors. Rocking in the saddle, her gallus's
spine shifting beneath her sore arse, Lorelei is sure that if her
luck holds to its course she'll be buried in an unmarked grave
somewhere in fucking Machen.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The banker
interrupts her bad mood. He looks like a toad, like a storyteller's
idea of a banker plucked from the pages of a whorehouse scroll. He
clears his throat, adjusts his wig with fingers that must be modeled
on short, fat sausages. He rides a mule, leaving him a dwarf among
the legion's gallus-mounted knights and cavaliers. “Sieur,” he
says in his whistling, nasal tone, “I must remind you that my
employers specified an arrival date which, according to my most
recent calculations, we will miss by fully three days.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Yes,” says
Lorelei. She is irritable in the heat, sweating under the weight of
her lacquered bamboo armor. The <i>ko</i>-flags jutting from her
shoulders hang limp in the dead, salt-stinking air.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Sieur?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I said yes,
maestro. Yes, we're going to be late. Yes, it's unavoidable. Yes,
your ledger-scribbling masters are going to wet themselves with
anger. What would you like me to do about it?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The little man's
round cheeks redden. “I fail to see-”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Can't march
faster,” grunts Jocelin Summer Pollen, Lorelei's hulking
second-in-command. He scratches at his stubbled chin. “Not enough
water.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei spits
neatly through the gap between her front teeth. “My verbose
colleague's summation suffices. This isn't the Road of Tears, or the
Broken Road. There's no source of fresh water between here and
Machen except for our alchemists, and they can only make so much. If
we run the galluses, they'll die, and then we will. So, we walk.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The banker's mouth
opens, closes, opens again. He settles on a scowl and, flipping open
his ledger with saddle-horn as writing stand, begins to scribble
furiously. Lorelei imagines kicking him in the side of the head,
imagines him pitching off the edge of the Road of Dust, down that
sheer ten-foot cliff of nameless metal and into the hungry sea where
mosasaurs wait to pick the flesh from the bones of the clumsy, the
unlucky, the suicidal.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Not an
unattractive option after a week on the Road of Dust. The track is
monotonous, an endless stretch of black. Its width and appearance
are both uniform, its surface uninterrupted. Maturin is no longer
visible behind the legion, and it will be weeks yet before Machen
appears on the horizon. The Daimyo, curse his mother's fertile gash,
could have given command of the exploratory expedition to any legion,
to any of his hundred knights. And he chose Lorelei.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Scowling, the
knight heels her mount forward. The gallus, a strapping bay gelding
she has not yet bothered to name, squawks in indignation and quickens
its pace. Jocelin follows, keeping pace with the easy skill of a
natural cavalier. Lorelei remembers the Daimyo's masked face as they
spoke in his solar, remembers his wrinkled hands on the stem of his
wineglass and the wig-powder dusting his shoulders. Her hands
tighten on her gallus's reins. “Why in the name of the Hollow God are we out here shilling for a Machi warlord?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Can't break his
word,” says Jocelin. He spits neatly, efficiently. “Made a
deal.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei grinds her
teeth. “Ahmad Levi.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Jocelin grunts in
the affirmative. He removes his wig to pat his scalp dry with a
kerchief. “Land. Money. Troops.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Gods,” adds
Lorelei. The new temple complex in Tsang is part of the pact between
Daimyo and Shah. Two temples, one of marble, the other of obsidian,
linked by a bridge of gold that stretches across the river Melieur.
The shrines of the Divided Gods are greater now than the Thousand
Temples of Maturin's pantheon. Lorelei dislikes them, those stark
bastions of an unfamiliar faith with their maskless priests, their
echoing halls and mumbling congregations. She prefers the heat and
incense of the old fanes, the aging priest-whores of the Bloody Lady
with their rheumy eyes and wrinkled mouths. She likes the warm,
coppery smell of iguanodon blood on the low stone altar.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Banker,” says
Jocelin, jerking his chin back over his shoulder.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei looks back
to see the little toad waving a message cylinder at her
quartermaster, Emil, who keeps the legion's tiny nemicolopteri, the
little pterosaurs they use to send messages back to the mainland.
Emil is studiously ignoring the banker, his nemis shrieking in their
cages slung over the flanks of his lumbering styracosaurus. Lorelei
smiles at the sight of the banker's beet-red face, but sooner or
later she'll have to order Emil to attend to the odious creature.
The bank is too important to de Ponsier for her to get away with
flouting their agent's authority completely.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Jocelin spits
again. “Something has to be done.” For him, an expansive
speech.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I suppose it
will,” says Lorelei, still watching the banker as he begins to
shout at the unresponsive Emil.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
That night they
make camp on the bare road, legion tents weighted down against the
fierce salt-smelling wind, galluses picketed well away from the
precipitous cliffs where sometimes plesiosaurs lurk in wait, long
necks craning up in search of unwary prey. Lorelei holds council
with her high officers. Sieur Jocelin, Sieur Raymonde, Sieur Elaine
and Maestro Longardeux of the Iron Cabal, accompanied by his servants
with their eyes of gold and their loose grey skin. The banker
insists on sitting in, watching them through his spectacles over the
edge of his notebook. She does her best to ignore him as she briefs
her staff for the dozenth time on their mission west: ride to the aid
of Levi's upstart kingdom, rendezvous with his forces at Soma and
make sure that when Levi plopped his arse into the Hierophant's
throne in Leng that he knew whose swords had put him there.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The banker's dry,
forced cough draws all eyes. Lorelei turns from her maps to stare at
the little man as he adjusts his cravat and clears his throat.
“Yes?” she says tersely.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“What if Lord
Levi has abandoned Soma when we reach it?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Jocelin taps the
map with an armored finger. “Find him in the field.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Sieur Summer
Pollen is correct,” says Lorelei. “Now, as to the matter of the
cannon. Maestro, when would be the ideal time to convert our wooden
castings?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Surely as late
as possible, Sieur,” says the pallid alchemist. He is an
odd-looking man with his watery eyes and his bald, wigless head. He
wears lacquered bamboo armor dyed grey and hung with little iron
fetishes, the emblems of his order, obscure tokens of his training.
He tents his gauntleted fingers beneath his chin. “I can transmute
the full battery in two days, with notice.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“When we reach
the mainland, then,” said Lorelei, satisfied. The Cabal's fees are
outrageous, but she isn't the one paying them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i> “Ahem.”</i></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei suppresses
with difficulty the urge to draw her knife and fling it at the
banker's smug, fat face. “What is it?” she grates through bared
teeth.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I require your
signature, sieur,” the banker says through an iron smile. “These
expense reports and estimate sheets, which must be returned to the
home office by week's end.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei puts both
hands on the table, just to take the knife at her belt out of the
equation. “Send your messages then. I'll put my name on them,
sign them with a kiss, spritz perfume on the parchment, if you'll
just leave them with my aide and shut up about it.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The banker blinks,
taken aback, and then his lumpish face slides back into its usual
infuriating placidity. “I think now would be best.” He proffers
a sheaf of parchment paper crammed with his miniscule writing. “At
the bottom, sieur.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Sieur Elaine, a
battle-scarred veteran of the first years of the Red Turban
Rebellion, snorts derisively. She slaps the table. “This is a
circus. Where is your <i>shul</i>, money-changer?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Sign,” says
the banker, eyes narrowing.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei
straightens up, ears ringing. It took sixteen years to claw her way
to legion commander. Sixteen years of infighting, backstabbing,
scheming and fucking to get where she is now. Her hand moves to the
knife's hilt. She draws it, smiles at the fear in the banker's eyes,
the involuntary widening. She draws the knife's point down the pad
of her thumb and, crossing the tent in two swift strides, presses her
bloody digit to the sheet. Three terse lines and her name is signed.
<i>Lo </i>for ambition, <i>re </i>for water, <i>lei </i>for victory.
“Send that home,” she snarls in the banker's bloodless face, and
then she throws the papers into his lap and stalks out of the tent
into the cool, windy night, leaving the banker and her officers to
stare. Elaine is laughing heartily.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A legion messenger
approaches her as she nears her tent. “Sieur,” says the
smooth-cheeked young boy, saluting. “A messenger from the Shah
awaits you in your tent.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Lorelei raises an
eyebrow. “A message?”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“A messenger,
sieur,” says the boy.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Take me to
him.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
He is near the
picket lines, a handsome Machi man dressed in riding leathers. There
are lines at the corners of his haunted eyes, but he cannot be more
than thirty, perhaps thirty-five. He is laving his gallus's heaving
flanks, petting the saurian's serpentine neck as it pants in
exhaustion. “I rode a long time to reach you, Sieur Dancing
Crane.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“You might have
sent a pterosaur.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The man shrugs,
still tending to his mount. “The Shah prefers a personal touch.
Consider me his Hand.” He turns from the spent gallus, wringing
dirty water from the cloth in his scarred hands. “I am here at his
request to appraise you of the situation in Machen.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“The war, you
mean.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The Hand smiles
sadly. “Yes,” he says, water dripping from his fingers. “That,
and other things.”</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-81680561560784790622012-02-26T23:53:00.000-08:002012-05-26T22:34:59.384-07:00THE MASQUER<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Alonzo de Carnelia's father had always said, before his death in the streets of White Starling City, that the fortunes of the great of Maturin were sculpted by the masquers of Tsang. Now, bent nearly double over a gold-inlaid porcelain mask commissioned by the second son of the Daimyo de Ponsier with a brush in one hand and a needle in the other, Alonzo understands what his father meant. The mask, a piece as fine as any he had ever crafted, conveys in the lines of its long, noble features worldliness, power and indomitable charisma. It is the face of a king surveying his realm from the battlements of his castle. How could it not fail to change the hearts of those who saw it, if only in the slightest of degrees? What events might then ripple from that tiny alteration of some unknown person's thoughtless perception?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
All great things come from moments of perception stacked one upon the other, combining to create a portrait in rough strokes. Alonzo reaches for his best quill and begins to ink the mask's tiny beauty mark, a little blemish purposefully inserted beneath the left eye-hole. Beside his workbench his oviraptor, Astora, preens her blue-green tailfeathers with special care. The cobbler's cock, Lepidus, has been prowling the alley behind the shop. Alonzo reminds himself to check the locks so that the bastard won't get inside some night and saddle him with a new brood of unmanageable hatchlings. He has enough on his mind with his daughter's marriage to the toad in shambles.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“The Daimyo's son will be well pleased with this,” says Alonzo to Astora. He speaks to her often when he works. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It is past dark when the mask is finally done. Alonzo allows himself to slump back in his craftsman's chair, the tension in his shoulders slowly fading. Outside the lamplighters move down the narrow streets of the Woven Quarter, stilts click-click-clicking against the cobbles as they light the whale-oil lamps that hang on short chains from the iron lampposts. Alonzo watches one of the lamplighters pass by the window of his workshop. A girl in roughspun, skinny legs strapped to long oaken stilts. She looks like an insect creeping down the street, weaving with expert care between the milling men and women of the crowd. The Street of Masks is busy night and day, for men always need new faces. They tire of their old ones so quickly.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Papa.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Alonzo turns to the stairwell, but it is empty. He passes a hand over his face, thinking that he should shave in the morning before the Daimyo son's stewards arrive to collect their liege's order. It would not do to meet women of such status in a state of discomposure. If he is to marry again it will be from the ranks of the stewards that he will choose a wife. Now he sits in his workshop, a bedraggled craftsman nearing fifty in his dressing robe and sandals. He thinks of the children he fathered and lost, of Lani and Mieli, his wives who had died in the Shogun's coronation riots at White Starling City. So many died, that day. He rises, pours himself a glass of honey-wine and drinks it alone in the dusty workshop. Another glass sees him to his bed.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
He shaves in the early morning, just past sunrise, and cooks himself a breakfast of peppers, squid, and eggs. He dresses in his best black craftsman's robes, lights incense in the shopfront beneath the altar of the Monkey, and dons his best wig. Astora feasts on half-rotten iguanodon steak in the workshop as Alonzo opens the shop's glass doors, doors that cost him a small fortune in fees to the alchemists of the Golden Cabal. Smells waft into the shop along with the morning heat. Dust, fried meat, flowers, sweat, dung, a hundred traces of perfume from the Street of Musk. The masks on their display stands glitter in the pale light, shaded by the palms that nod somnolent over the quiet streets. In an hour they will be filled to the brim by commerce, by the weavers who hawk their silk and the clothiers trying to catch the eyes of the nobility.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Now only the dead walk the streets. They cart away the dung left by beasts of burden, sweep the alleyways for garbage, shuffle dead-eyed through the dust. Alonzo watches them from the doorway of his shop. Another man of Alonzo's means might have bought a dead slave's contract from the Iron Cabal, but he finds their golden stares disturbing. He does his own work at his own pace, and because it is the finest in the city there are none who complain. Even some among the Dead Senate wear his masks. Last season the Shogun's sister bought one, a delicate work of spun sugar glazed with alchemical resin, for the Spring Revels at the Palace of Memory. The fame won by a visit from Lasciel's stewards alone would feed a dozen masquers for a decade. Still, Alonzo is not a man to rest on his accomplishments. Each day he labors nine hours on new work, fresh designs. Incomplete upon his workbench is an allosaur-mask of surpassing beauty. In glass display cases, another fortune spent on the precious substance, sit scores of others. Warlike, demonic, adoring, penitent, absolved.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A face for every occasion.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The stewards of the Daimyo's son arrive at the appointed hour, six women wearing their master's polished face and long robes of blue silk. The dead have gone, replaced by the babble and warmth of the living. Alonzo meets the stewards at the door, taking just long enough in his ritual courtesies to show his neighbors and competitors who honors him with patronage, and then ushers his guests inside. The mask is brought forth and presented for consideration. The shortest of the women turns it over in her slender hands. “This is fine work, Maestro de Carnelia,” she says, running a thumb along the curve of a gilt cheekbone. “Truly, you are without equal in your field.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“My father taught me well, magistra,” says the masquer. “Please, allow me to prepare the mask for transport. Dust would aggravate the varnish.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman hands back the precious piece of artifice and Alonzo wraps it carefully in velvet before placing it inside a flat brown box of treated oak. The women seat themselves on tatami mats in his receiving room and he closes the shop's doors and serves coffee in the gathering heat. Astora watches from the shadows, leery of so many strangers. The women discuss payment with Alonzo as they drink their coffee, exclaiming over its quality, over the porcelain, over the patterns woven into his tatami mats. The shortest, who must be their steward superior, takes the lead.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The woman sips milk-lightened coffee through a sieve in her mask. “My master, the valiant and handsome Baptiste of the Great House of de Ponsier, is prepared to offer sixty-six koku.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“His Purity overestimates my <i>shul</i>,” says Alonzo, setting down his cup and gazing at it in a show of humility. “I would be overwhelmed by even so much as thirty-one.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
It isn't about the money. Alonzo has all the money he needs, all the money he'll ever need. This is about favors, about forcing the Daimyo's son to underpay. Accepting low fees improves a craftsman's <i>shul, </i>increases his standing in the local courts, and betters his prospects for a marriage. Alonzo inspects the women before him even as they haggle, weaving together along the careful tight-rope of prices that flirt with offensively low and degradingly high. Three of the six are too old for childbearing, but the steward superior and two others look suitable. Broad hips, narrow shoulders, throats smooth and hands unwrinkled by age. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Fifty-nine koku,” says the steward superior.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Thirty-five,” says Alonzo, appraising the woman's breasts. They look firm. Not too big.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“Fifty, with the promise of patronage by the Daimyo's house guardsmen.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“I am unworthy of such a gift. Please, allow a poor old man to save face! Thirty-eight.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
A moment passes. The steward superior sets her porcelain cup down on its saucer with a fragile <i>clink. </i>Behind her mask, sculpted in Baptiste's handsome image, blue eyes narrow in consideration.<i> </i>In the corner of the room Astora chirps and clicks her beak. </div>
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“Forty,” the woman says.</div>
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Alonzo <i>wai</i>s more deeply than protocol requires. The steward superior, bound by the more rigid rules of service to her master, cannot equal his obeisance. She rises and the others follow suit. Alonzo sees them to the door. His hand lingers on the steward superior's as he surrenders the mask in its velvet-lined box. Their eyes meet, and he sees that his intent is understood. She nods. They depart. Alonzo locks the door. It is not yet noon, but he has finished his business for the day. Shutters drawn he removes his wig, unclasps his robe and sinks into a chair. Astora joins him, nuzzling his palm as he drinks the dregs from the biggin he used to brew the morning's coffee. He scratches the oviraptor behind her crest, suddenly tired of the game he has played in his little shop for so many years.</div>
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<br /></div>
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What does it matter if he marries again, or if his new wives bring him children? He will be dead, ground down by the weight of years, before they grow. They lack the time to replace what he has lost, or to undo the necessary sham of Mara's marriage to the southern banker, that poem-named preener with his perfumes and his powders. Alonzo rubs his chin, resolves to drink no wine, then rises and pours himself a glass. It is the city's finest transmuted vintage, cast from pure agate into liquor by the masters of the Golden Cabal. He drinks it slowly, savoring the deaths of his memories, the decay of his regrets.</div>
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Another glass sees him to his bed.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-55348104642922379122012-02-26T11:53:00.000-08:002012-02-26T11:53:07.518-08:00MetamorphosisThis blog has been a considerable project from day one onward. It's been dry for months, obviously, but that's only because it's been changing and I've had to change with it. When I started Godhead, it was a fantasy novel. That much was obvious to myself and, I hope, to the reader as well. It remained a fantasy novel throughout its first volume. There were wizards, soldiers, world-weary noblemen. Hidden skills were learned, quests begun, conflicts established, protagonists apprenticed to mysterious masters.<br />
<br />
Volume two isn't like that. It's given me pause up until now, and while I've got a small backlog I haven't really plunged into the narrative yet. By nature the story's something of a mess, which makes it particularly difficult to change gears. Nevertheless, I've come to accept that I'm no longer really writing fantasy(even though I totally am). What I'm doing is something between love story and horror novel.<br />
<br />
Do you know what horror is? It's fantasy without a mentor. When the Nazgul come riding into the Shire on their black horses there's no Gandalf to spirit the Hobbits away, no Aragorn to lead them through the wilderness. There's no Galadriel, no Elrond. Just Sauron, and Denethor going mad in his tower. In horror Voldemort's horcruxes are pebbles at the bottom of the sea and expelliarmus doesn't save the day because there was no Dumbledore to shield Harry through his childhood.<br />
<br />
Anyway, keep your eyes peeled. We'll be getting back on schedule very soon.<br />
<br />
And now, for something completely different...The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-13131971367512538922011-12-24T16:05:00.000-08:002011-12-24T16:05:32.960-08:002011<span style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">2011 has been busy. I got my first job in the writing world, published my first short story, finished a few more novels for the pile. I think I'm learning a lot about what it is to be a writer.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">2012 looms. I've got a heap of new projects in the works. Redrafting The Etherist, following up my short story, Cthun, with a sequel, Rakasha, writing a TV series I'm not allowed to talk about yet. </span><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Short stories forthcoming: Rakasha(Jane's further adventures in Hell), Audley(a surrealist story about a woman who rides a ladybug), and The Devil at his Elbow(Cormac McCarthy meets Dragonslayer as a team of maladjusted degenerates try to find and kill a marauding beast).</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">Novels forthcoming: Ruin, The Etherist, Prophet's Tomb.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #717171; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">It's going to be quite busy, I think. I've set myself a pretty relentless pace.</span>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-84191337942721252602011-10-20T11:47:00.000-07:002011-10-20T11:47:22.177-07:00Spotlight On: The Religions of CthunReligions of Machen: The Church of the Maintainer and the Divided God.<br />
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The Maintainer, worshiped since before the organization of the first Machi tribes 3,000 years before the Thulhun invasion of the continent, is a sky deity associated with tradition, preservation and light. The "He" used to refer to the Maintainer is a gender-neutral super-pronoun reflecting His genderless state. Oral tradition and the Book of the Living Sun hold that the Maintainer came into being to shield Cthun from the ravages that sank the lost continent of Thul and that he chose the people of Machen for their virtue and steadfastness to be his flock. <br />
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Worship of the Maintainer in organized mass prayer is an integral part of the religion's structure. The religion's priesthood has a strong oral tradition dating back to the original sermons of the semi-human prophet known as the Living Sun, a manifestation of the Maintainer's grace and also a physical child of the god's own body. The Living Sun organized his progenitor's religion into an ecclesiarchy, placing the priests at the apex of society and appointing the first Hierophant or Father of Tribes as the society's head. Thereafter Hierophants were elected by popular acclaim to lifelong terms. <br />
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The Living Sun's message to the Machi people was one of brotherhood, generosity and goodwill toward one another, but never toward an enemy. "To a friend the meat of your table, to your blood the robe from your back, and to those perfidious ones who are not of your fold the steel of your swords, which are to be whetted nine and ninety times of a month." The cohesive nature of the formalized religion led to the union of the Machi tribes and the overthrow of the Thulhun Empire and its emperor, Azurean.<br />
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In Machen the Living Sun is looked upon as the first great sage to deliver true Alchemy to Man.<br />
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The Two-Who-Are-One, more commonly termed the Divided God, are two emanations of the same deity whose existence and teachings are preached by the half-Thulhun theocrat Ahmad Levi, the Shah of Five Thousand Years. The halves of the divine being are nameless and are identified by their attributes. In sharp opposition to typical light-dark deity pairings, the Two-Who-Are-One each embody seemingly random characteristics. The Left-Hand-God, represented by the porcelain half of the icon mask, is identified with sterility, indomitability of spirit, revenge, despair and transcendence while the Right-Hand-God, represented by the mask's obsidian or onyx half, is identified with fertility, war, labor, illness and scholarship. <br />
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Worship of the deities is mandatory and practiced in immense temples in the cities of Carnea and Shibola. A vast bureaucratic priesthood has sprung up around the institution with Ahmad Levi as its high priest and prophet. Sacrifice, both of the flesh and of the field, are demanded routinely of all worshipers. Slavery is heavily tied to the institution and temple slaves are numerous and often used ritually. Orgiastic behavior is also an important cornerstone of the worship of the Two.<br />
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Ahmad Levi's writing on the worship of the Two are collected in the nine volumes of his tract <i>The Traveler in the Eyes of God.</i><br />
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Religions of Maturin: The Three<br />
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The Three, Ismael, Monar and Leshua, are a divine triumvirate of death gods who rule over the underworld. Worship is decentralized and informal, monastic orders are plentiful and the influence of the gods upon architecture, culture and dress is obvious. Funerary masks, sculpted in the likeness of one's ancestors or taken directly from death masks of same, are common ritual and formal dress in all echelons of society. Silk is prized both for the making of burial shrouds and the traditional <i>mani </i>robes worn by noblemen and monks. The three holy flowers, Lily, Chrysanthemum and Lotus are of paramount importance to the Maturi as are compsognathus, jackals and ramphoryncus for their associations with the Three.<br />
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Funerals in Maturin tend to be deeply involved and families often schedule weddings to coincide with them so that the Three will shed favor through the corpse upon the young couple. Black is the funerary color in Maturin while red is the color of marriage and white the color of war. The Deathless, the Maturi term for the alchemically reanimated dead (who they do not, in contrast to the Machi practice, lobotomize) are a unique caste in society and function in advisory, administrative and clerical capacity. A senate of liche, or dead, runs the Empire of Maturin's civic affairs and conducts any summits between the Noble Houses of Old Blood and Great Honor. In fact, a family can be raised to that peerage only by the Senate.<br />
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Cannibalism of the dead by their family and loved ones is considered a private matter in Maturin, but is routinely practiced especially by the peasantry and craftsmen.The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-43933437182036043412011-10-19T19:18:00.000-07:002011-10-19T19:18:44.755-07:00Prologue: THE MOTH'S DAUGHTER<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">O, Oceanus!</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Your briny tears crash</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Against all shores</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">While Zeus's wedding bells</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Ring in Poseidon's reign.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">This brash usurper of</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Great kingdoms writ in coral.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Fish swear him fealty</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">In scaly ceremonies</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">And he is King.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">You are nothing.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">The memory of surf</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Breaking on weed-draped stone.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Oceanus.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Oceanus.</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Rushing in and out like tidewater</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">Across the sweep of the sand.</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">THE MOTH'S DAUGHTER</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span style="font-style: normal;">“The dead will come up from the sea,” she says to the waves of the Grand Ocean, though they pay her no mind. “He will be in three parts, for so was his body cast down to the depths, and when the three are made one he will reign for a year and a day before his death and the end of this world.” It is an old poem, as old as her order. She sits alone on the sweep of the Maturi coast while the waves roll over the sand, foaming white before they are dragged hissing back into the oneness that is their birth, their death, the sum of them all. She is sixteen, perhaps a little older, pale like a consumptive with dark hair that pools around her where she sits. Her lips are bloodless, her delicate nose tinged with the faintest suggestion of branching veins, blue beneath her cream-colored skin. Her eyes are a soft yellow like spring daffodils in bloom. Shells rattle in the surf, the ocean's bones. Behind her lie the salt marshes of the coast, and beyond them pine forests creaking in the cold brine-smelling breeze. A hundred yards from shore a pair of elasmosaurs sun themselves on a sandbar, serpentine necks swaying as they voice their mournful songs. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> To the west lies the long, dirty-brown smudge of the Bridge of Sand, one of the indestructible Great Ways that link the remaining continents to one another. The bridge is far distant, near to the mouth of the Bay of Laughing Swine where Tsang, the capital, sprawls like a drunk along the coast. She can see the city's smoke upon the air, if she squints.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The men of the Daimyo de Ponsier's army come for the girl along an old chalk road that cuts through the forest and the salt marshes with their witchgrass and their eels to the broad expanse of the sandy beach. They are proud men, obviously wealthy in their fine powdered wigs and lacquered bamboo armor, their </span><i>katana </i><span style="font-style: normal;">sheathed across their knees in scabbards of aged teak. Their galluses, lean beasts bread to the hunt and the clangor of war, are barded in fine silks. Their gilt-sheathed claws click against the pebbles of the beach as they approach the seated girl. Most halt. One moves forward, bearing its fat rider, too fat for armor, down toward the streaming edge of the tide. Clouds fly across the vaulting of the sky, threatening rain like belligerent teamsters promising a strike.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> “I bear a message from my master,” says the fat man, not bothering to </span><i>wai, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to bow his head and press his palms together in acknowledgment of the supremacy of the Three Gods. His skin is sallow, his robes of heavy silk strained by his bulk. Beneath him his mount pants, its flanks dripping foam. He tosses a scroll case and it hits the sand before the girl and sticks there.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The girl ignores the cylinder. “I am not a whore,” she says, still staring at the ocean. “Nor am I some eunuch scribe. I do not read. Tell me what Marian Daimyo has to say to me, or I will leave and not return.” </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> One of the elasmosaurs heaves itself from the sandbar and vanishes without a splash beneath the waves.</span> Ripples spread from the point of its disappearance. The other remains, still singing at the afternoon sun. On his gallus the fat man pushes back his wig, revealing a stubbled, sweating scalp, and mops at his brow with a handkerchief. “You dare much,” he says, “alchemist.”</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I dare nothing,” she answers him. Her slim, pale fingers draw lines in the sand. </div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The fat man swallows. “I am sieur Reginald of Ten Thousand Oaks,” he says, chins wobbling as he speaks. “In my capacity as a vassal to the Daimyo de Ponsier of Laughing Water I-”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The girl's lips curl upward in a faint smile. “You are no knight. You have no </span><i>shul. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">No honor.”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Sieur Reginald swallows again. He forges ahead, sweating more than ever. His men watch him from the road's end. “My lord has acquiesced to your request,” he says. “He has met the price you ask of him. Will you now deliver your end of the bargain?”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The girl stands, her saffron robes shedding sand and salt as she turns to look up at the fat knight with her pale yellow eyes. Her hair blows in the wind. Bells sewn along the hem of her long sleeves jingle. “Yes,” she says. “Resplendent Orchid will burn. Daimyo de Scorier and his line will be expunged from the records of the three temples.”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “My lord will be most pleased to hear it,” says sieur Reginald. He adjusts his wig again, plump hands fluttering about the powdered ringlets. “When-”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “By Ironday,” says the girl.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> A nervous smile touches the fat knight's lips, dimpling his cheeks. “They don't call you Lucrece the Knife for nothing,” he says. “de Scorier will never know what-”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> “Only fools make light of death,” says the girl named Lucrece, who men call the Knife. “The temples do not play favorites.” The bells on her sleeves jingle as she makes a shallow </span><i>wai </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to the fat man, to the false knight. “The sea moves as the Three will.”</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> “May they smile on our endeavor,” says sieur Reginald uneasily. He </span><i>wais, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">skirting disrespect with the degree of his bow, and heels his tiring mount back toward his men. Lucrece watches him go. She binds her hair up in a tight black knot as he joins his men and they turn back down the forest road, their galluses quickening to a run. The thunder of their passing kicks up chalk dust and scares pheasants from the tall brown grasses of the marsh. Lucrece pins her hair in place, bells jingling, and puts on her wide-brimmed straw hat. She puts on the sandals that sat beside her on the shore and touches one of the bells, a little brazen one, to the fat knight's message cylinder. In an instant it is ash, transmuted into a fluttering cloud of grey. It vanishes, borne away by the wind even as the second elasmosaur joins the first in the ocean's cold depths. Lucrece makes a deep </span><i>wai </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to the ocean and then she folds her hands within her sleeves and starts toward the forest road. </span> </div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The boom and crash of the ocean fades into the distance as Lucrece walks along the edge of the trail in the dappled shadows of the pines, needles crunching beneath her steel-shod sandals. Sparrows twitter in the branches while herds of ridge-backed scutellosaurs meander through the half-light of the forest, digging amidst tangled roots for grubs and tubers. Somewhere far away an allosaurus coughs, signaling the beginning of its hunt. By dusk the road has widened and sometimes Lucrece passes travelers on gallus-back or pulling rickshaws laden with their belongings, their families, their livelihoods. There is a war in the south, Lucrece knows, between the Red Turban rebels and the armies led by the great Shogunate field marshal Louis de Grande, the Raptor of Tsang. The war is not her business. Its fires, too, will pass as all things must.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Resplendent Orchid, the great castle of the Daimyo Claude de Scorier, occupies a bald hill surrounded by walls of quarried granite sheathed in marble. Guardian tigers grin down from its battlements at the village spread out around its hilltop vantage point, fierce gargoyles but gargoyles only. They are like the winds of autumn: loud and toothless. Lucrece stops at the village's outskirts to drink from a stream where the washerwomen, at their work in the current, give her saffron robe, straw hat and alchemist's bells a wide berth and </span><i>wai </i><span style="font-style: normal;">deeply to her. Thirst slaked, the young monk sits down in the shade of a gnarled maple and lets the weariness of her day on the road wash over her. She misses the sea, as she always does when she and it part ways. The sea reminds her of many things.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> A butterfly comes to her as she sits in the shadow of the gnarled oak tree, its jewel-bright wings sparkling in the fading sunlight. Lucrece holds out a hand and the insect alights on her thumb; it is so light, so insubstantial that it hardly feels real. She </span><i>wais </i><span style="font-style: normal;">to it. “What do you know, little brother?” she asks it, looking deep into its faceted eyes.</span></div><div style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “The dead will come up from the sea,” says the butterfly in a voice like gossamer blowing in the wind. “He who is called the Lord-Without-Mercy-or-Death, Master of Lost Souls and King of Moths, is coming. He will reign for a year and a day before his death and the end of the world.”</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I know all this, little brother,” says Lucrece, who men call the Knife.</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I know nothing else,” says the butterfly. “My own death is close at hand, and the flowers call to me. I must find a wife and, dying, love her.” It flaps its wings and leaves her hand. Soon it is gone, vanished into the shadows of the forest. Lucrece sits beneath the tree, praying in the shadow that comes before the death of the sun.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-73289408080026232822011-09-16T22:38:00.000-07:002012-06-22T22:07:22.478-07:00THE WANDERING ALCHEMIST: EPILOGUE<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
The moth was coming. Swift on wings of dust he came, up from the ocean where other things stirred fitfully in their dreamless sleep. The moth was coming, and in his tower the Alchemist felt a flutter of fear stir in his breast. Shadows danced on the tower's basalt walls. The Alchemist walked balls of malachite along his knuckles. On the hearth the monkey's oven sat on its four stout legs, its grate shut. </div>
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“There is nothing you can do,” said the monkey from his iron house. “Machen will go down to join Thul in the depths of the ocean.”</div>
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“That may be, effendi,” said the Alchemist. He steepled his fingers and looked over them out the orange glazed window at the desert beyond. “That day may come.”</div>
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“The day <i>will </i>come,” said the monkey. “He will come forth into his husks, and on the day of the Most Great Conjunction those husks shall be as one and he will be reborn to die again.”</div>
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“I know how it will go, effendi,” said the Alchemist. “I have lived it all before.”</div>
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“Then why dally with the crow witch? She has already doomed herself.”</div>
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The Alchemist, who had named himself Azurean to the girl called Safa, sighed and let his arms fall to his sides. His long fingers trailed over the stone and two spheres of malachite rolled away across the polished surface. “The days of the mighty are numbered,” he said after some time had passed. “If someone is to staunch Machen's bleeding, it will be her.”</div>
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“You aim to teach her. Fool. You have not the time. Better a master, someone with the power-”</div>
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“I have never had time, effendi,” said the Alchemist. He rose from his seat and went to the window, a scarecrow draped in black, shoulders slumped with age and weariness. Outside the desert waited, a barren mouth just waiting to drink, to drink, and drink. The setting sun hung low in the sky. “You know this.” </div>
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The stove coughed soot onto the hearth. “I know, old friend,” the monkey said. “I hope your trust is not misplaced. I hope you know the risk you take by choosing this child.”</div>
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The Alchemist passed a hand over his unshaven face. “Thank you, effendi."</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-35340158060093824402011-09-16T21:27:00.000-07:002011-09-18T19:04:48.956-07:00THE HANDMAIDEN III<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The halls of the Floating Palace grew stranger by the day. Servants and generals alike routinely lost their way in the labyrinthine corridors, and sometimes, the slaves whispered, they were not found again. Scheza had insisted that Aliya move her sleeping quarters to a small room adjoining her own. Aliya had been hesitant to acquiesce, but when she'd discovered that the brass tub had been emptied of its vile contents and the Princess's apartments cleaned, she had given in. After all, she was a slave. What choice did she have? </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">On a warm summer day, just before the first of the Month of Light, the guards barred the palace doors and there was fighting in the streets. In Scheza's chambers Aliya combed her mistress's hair with shaking hands while through the open windows came a summer breeze, the clash of steel and the screams of the dying. Scheza sat on a low padded bench in her solar, her usual stained and threadbare robe hanging open over an equally filthy cotton slip. The midday sunlight bathed both women in lurid gold. “Mistress,” said Aliya, dipping her comb into a bowl of rosewater. “Perhaps-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">From the foyer came the sound of wood splintering. Aliya froze, her heart pounding in her chest. She dropped her comb, remembering the day the slave merchant's men had broken down her father's door and clapped him in iron shackles. A dirty, toothless man had dragged her out from under her sleeping mat and tied her to the back of his mule while she screamed herself hoarse and the men and women of their slum looked on in silence, just so many empty faces. “Mistress,” she said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Be silent,” said Scheza. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Wood groaned and broke. Aliya heard the voices of men and the scuff of their heavy boots in the hall outside Scheza's apartments. She clasped her hands together to hide the tremors. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“He's moving faster than I thought he would,” said Scheza.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Who, Your Serenity?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Scheza stood and brushed dust from her robes as with an echoing crash the door in the foyer broke and the trample of booted feet on the tiles began. “My father.” She turned back to Aliya, her eyes a burning, feverish violet. “Stay out of the way,” she said as the door burst open and the first of the Tranquil Guard pushed open the door and strode into the solar.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Princess,” said the soldier, hefting his ax. He was huge and burly, his grey hair cropped close to the lines of his skull. More men spread out behind him, axes in hand. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Guardsman,” said Scheza, her voice cool. “What is the meaning of this?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“His Immensity's orders,” said the man. He moved forward, raising his ax. Aliya screamed.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Scheza moved so fast she blurred into color and sound. The guardsman's arm exploded at the elbow. His ax flew up and back in a lazy arc, trailing his own blood. Scheza, bending backward like a bridge, drove a delicate foot into the wide-eyed soldier's chin. He hit the ceiling with a sickening crunch as Scheza blurred forward, dropping beneath the ax of another guardsman to sweep his legs out from under him. The man dropped, arms waving, just as the first guard slammed into the tiles in a burst of blood. Aliya scrambled back, watching in horror as Scheza ripped the fallen man's throat out in one smooth motion. The Princess was an engine of destruction, her slender frame moving with inhuman speed in among the suddenly panicked men of the Tranquil Guard.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Kill her!” shouted a voice from the foyer. “Maintainer's eyes, just kill her!”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Blood splashed the walls as Scheza drove her foot through a fat guard's chest and then yanked it out amidst a gout of gore and ichor. The man sagged to his knees, muttering to himself. Aliya pressed herself back against the wall, unable to look away. Limbs broke. Blood ran. Intestines coiled like serpents on the floor while cold steel swung and found nothing but the sluggish summer breeze. Soon enough the guardsmen ceased to fight and began instead to run. When it was over Scheza stood alone in the middle of a spreading pool of blood, broken bodies all around her. Blood painted the walls and dripped like a fitful spring shower from the ceiling. A leg twitched near the bench where Aliya had combed the Princess's hair not a minute before.<br />
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</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Princess turned to Aliya, her hair matted with gore, blood running in rivulets down her lovely face. “Water,” she husked. “Please.” Her eyes were golden once again, sunken deep in waxy sockets. She sagged against the door's frame while heavy footsteps dwindled into the distance.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Slowly, Aliya made her way to the basin built into the room's northern wall. The clash of arms in the streets below the Floating Palace on its high hill still drifted through the window. With shaking arms she primed the pump until cold water splashed into the fired sink. She filled a mug and brought it to the Princess, helped the other girl to drink. Scheza's skin was dry and hot, hotter than the sunlit floor. She felt like a griddle to the touch. Cold water dripped down her throat as she drank, and then the mug slipped from her fingers to shatter on the floor. “Hide me,” she whispered. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Scheza's eyes rolled up into her skull. Aliya caught her as she fell, knock-kneed and still feverish. For a long while Aliya stood, clutching Scheza against her chest while her own breath whistled in her ears. The air reeked of iron.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> What am I going to do?</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i>She was halfway to the stables before she realized it, her arms sore with the effort of dragging Scheza down flights of stairs, empty halls and through echoing baths where women floated face-down in the water. In the kitchens she had seen Mulkut, the Palace's head chef, hanged from the ceiling beams like a fat chandelier. Twice she passed beheaded slaves in the halls, and soon she was numb from the shock. It was all just one long nightmare, as everything had been from the day Chamyde assigned her to clean the Princess's chambers. She lost her way time and time again, familiar corridors twisting back on themselves or leading to strange rooms where strange things swam in dark, shallow pools of water that smelled of salt. Once, through an open door, she saw a little ape made all of flames clambering over the body of a washerwoman. Its feet left little burn marks on her skin.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“What have we here, my darling?” it said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Aliya moved onward, dragging Scheza after her. The sounds of riot in the streets echoed weirdly in the halls. The windows they passed looked out seemingly at random at a myriad of different places. The foundries on the heights. The half-built towers of the Divided Temple. A flower seller's stand upended in the plaza, its aged owner sobbing over marigolds, violets and lilacs strewn across the dusty street. He looked up and his eyes met Aliya's, but he said nothing. Aliya moved onward until, in the echoing emptiness of the Imperial Concourse, she met Lord Captain Commander Azhar Khalid of the Tranquil Guard. The captain, who had been so kind to her in the hall not a week before, lay slumped with his back against a silent fountain. His eyes were glassy, his sherwani and trousers red with blood, torn where Scheza had ripped his abdomen open during her mad dance. A long snail's trail of red led from the far door to where he sat, breathing through his nose with a lit pipe clamped between his teeth. He saw Aliya, dragging Scheza with her like a sack of meal, and said nothing.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">"I'm sorry," said Aliya as she passed him by.<br />
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"It's nothing," said the captain.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> At last, when her feet were raw from walking and her arms trembled with the strain of supporting the Princess's weight, she heard the cries of galluses and the bass rumbles of hadrosaurs somewhere close at hand. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Nothing makes any sense, </i>she thought. <i>Nothing in the Palace is as it should be. </i> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i>A door loomed before her. She knew it for the door to the stables, but in the pit of her stomach she wondered if it now led somewhere else. She wondered if the monkey thing awaited her behind it, its burning arms spread wide to receive her into its embrace. <i>What have we here, my darling?</i> it would say as she burned. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">She drove a shoulder hard against the warped planks of the door and staggered, wheezing, onto the stone steps that led down to the dung-smelling dimness of the stables. Most of the galluses were gone, their stable doors thrown open. Saurian dung and blood smeared the straw-covered stones of the floor and the light that filtered in from the open arch leading out onto the cliff road had grown dim. Aliya limped to a pile of fodder set aside for the hadrosaurs and lowered Scheza down onto the moldering straw. The Princess's skin was still unnaturally hot. She muttered nonsense in her sleep, limbs twitching. Aliya straightened, her back screaming in protest, and looked out over the stables. A few loose galluses were nosing through a trough of spoiled fruit while a lone gelding hadrosaur snored in its open pen, bellows sides rising and falling ponderously.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The cliff road, chalk dust drifting over its surface, seemed a different world. Aliya's mouth felt dry. She imagined riding out of the Palace, abandoning her life there. <i>I could even leave Scheza. I could leave her here, and whatever demon she has inside her. </i>The thought of it, after so many years prostrate in silence while the nobles passed by, so many years scrubbing pots and sweeping cobwebs from the corners of unused rooms. <i>I could be free. </i>Suddenly the sounds of bloodshed in the city seemed distant and the blue of the sky called to her. She saw pterosaurs circling the market district and wondered what it was like to shed the earth and its dust.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Aliya.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Shackles snapped shut on that world. Aliya turned back to the fodder heap where Scheza, bleary-eyed and filthy, swayed like a drunk. “Saddle the hadrosaur,” said the Princess, slurring her words as she groped for purchase in the straw. “Get me out of this...fucking city.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Aliya tried to refuse her, to defy the pathetic girl before her. Her face twitched. She pushed back a stray lock of hair from her tear-streaked face. “Yes, Your Serenity,” she said, though the words stuck in her throat like burrs. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>I will never be free.</i></div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-80323110304473718852011-09-16T16:27:00.002-07:002012-05-26T21:15:23.938-07:00THE DUTIFUL SON III<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>I command you to storm Soma's walls on the first day of the month of Light before the sun has set. Do this, holding fast to your faith, and you will be delivered to victory. </i>Yussef touched two fingers to his breastplate, engraved with the twin faces of the Divided God, behind which he had placed his father's letter between armor and quilting. <i>A son must obey his father.</i> Cannons thundered to his either side, pounding the walls of Soma. From where he stood in the gathering dusk on the crest of his war-camp's earthworks, Yussef could see the city's dead defenders taking cover behind crumbling crenelations. His own men, he knew, were nervous. They feared assaulting the breach. They feared the dead. He glanced to the left where Bobek, towering over the lines in his horned helm and bearskin cloak, commanded the flank. To the right was Nephru, hidden somewhere within a clot of officers and bodyguards, and in the van was iron-willed Horus with his hammer in hand and his ankylosaurs, hooded and leashed, beside him. A light rain had begun to fall. The saurians stirred, the bone clubs at the ends of their tails swinging back and forth like pendulums. </div>
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“The Divided God will smile on us,” said Yussef, more to himself than to the soldiers standing around him in the softening earth. He signaled his standard bearers with a raised fist and the legionary standards, displaying the army's twin-masked sigil, dipped forward as the brass peal of horns rose to drown out the throaty roaring of the cannons. “For the gods!” cried Yussef, freeing his sword from its sheath as he broke into a run. The lines surged forward, the earth shaking beneath the boots of more than fifteen thousand men. Yussef felt as though he might be jolted skyward by the thunder of his army's swift advance. His legs devoured distance, pulling him closer and closer to the breach. The cannons had fallen silent and it seemed that his breath rasping in his ears was the only sound. All else was dull vibration and the slap of the rain against bare skin. Pikes and axes bristled in the breach, and from dead sockets eyes of gold stared out at nothing.</div>
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Like a wave breaking on the sand Yussef and his men closed with Soma's dead defenders. Swords hacked rotten flesh, crushed mail, split leather, splintered bone. With his scimitar Yussef turned aside an ax's spike seeking for his heart. His riposte laid open his attacker's cheek, but the silent abomination seemed not to notice. The lines surged around them and Yussef struck blindly. No room for technique in the mad, thundering press. Skulls burst. Blades squealed against armor. The men of the Floating Empire of Eternal Peace tested their faith against the dumb courage of the dead. Grey limbs rose and fell like pistons. Crescent axes stove in helms and hewed limbs. Yussef screamed wordless rage at his enemies as the tide of battle jostled him forward into their grasping arms. He hacked the head from one, then lopped the arm from another dead soldier and rocked clumsily back on his heels as the creature's remaining fist slammed into his jaw. <i>Father, </i>he thought as he fell back, broken teeth rattling in his mouth. <i>You promised we would have victory.</i></div>
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<i> </i>The ax took him in the back without warning. He never saw its wielder<i>. </i>Numbness swallowed his lower half and his legs folded like cloth, dumping him into the cool mud. He spat blood, dragged himself with claw-crooked hands in amongst the milling feet and stamping boots. Legs swung like girders all around him. He squirmed like a snake until someone stepped over him and the pain made colored flowers burst before his eyes. He rolled over, still screaming. An ankylosaur blundered past, trumpeting in agony as alchemist's fire ate at its armored back. Its huge tail swung like a scythe over where Yussef lay and a soldier was smashed, his ribs staved in like kindling. Yussef sucked in a breath and wiped snot from his chin. He was cold below the waist and his left leg was twisted strangely.</div>
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<i>Father.</i></div>
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An iron ball-bearing fell from thin air and landed between Yussef's feet with a dull, final <i>splat</i>. A figure dressed in white appeared a moment later a meter from where he lay bleeding in the mud. Rain soaked the Shah's flowing robes in an instant, but Ahmad Levi seemed not to notice. He stood over his son like a colossus, his golden eyes trained on the breach in Soma's walls where the dead had congregated like locusts. Other alchemists might have worn a dozen different reagent rings, but the Shah of Five Thousand Years wore only one. A band of plain gold encircled his right index finger, and in his left hand he held another ball-bearing the size of a ripe orange. The Shah of Five Thousand Years pivoted on his left foot, wound his arm and flung the ball-bearing overhand at the walls where the disorganized remnants of Yussef's charge were being beaten back through the breach by Soma's defenders. The spears and axes of the dead rose and fell with terrible predictability, hacking through flesh, cloth, armor and bone. Men screamed for their mothers in the churned and bloody mud in the shadow of Soma's walls. The ball-bearing struck the wall.</div>
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It did not seem possible that so great a thing might move without a sound, but it was so. In a heartbeat the fractured wall was gone, the city laid bare behind the clustered dead. Soma's domes and low stone houses clustered like a treasure trove of jewels between the cradling horns of the pass. Yussef drew in a sharp breath, tasting his own blood and the rain-soaked earth. His father stood over him, robes flapping in a sudden gale. The men stared at him even as their implacable, unliving foes, unfazed by the miracle that had occurred, continued to butcher them. Then, a hundred meters above the embattled forces, the wall reappeared. Like an avalanche from nowhere, like a thunderbolt of inert stone, it fell from the sky in a vast crumbling cascade of limestone sheathing and quarried granite. Jagged spars of stone the size of hadrosaurs plummeted in amongst the dead and the men of the Empire, smashing living flesh and rotten with equal disregard. It sounded as though the world would end. Yussef covered his eyes as blood and rock dust washed over him in waves. </div>
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When his ears ceased their ringing he was being helped to his feet by Mustafa Horus. The one-armed General was saying something to him, shouting in his ear, but it sounded like the barking of dogs. The field before them was a hell of broken bodies and smashed stone. Bedraggled crows hopped among the dead, picking at pulped flesh. Ahmed Levi stood alone, serene amidst the chaos. Before him was a gaunt, bearded man with cadaverous cheeks and dull black eyes. He was escorted by two of the dead, their halberds planted in the mud like standards to his either side. “Horus,” said Yussef, sagging against the older man's shoulder. “Did we win? Is the city ours?” </div>
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“We were victorious, my Prince,” said the General. His face was pale and there was blood on his side where his armor had been punctured by a spear's point. “The Shah negotiates with the master of the city. Soon, we will move in to occupy.”</div>
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“Good,” said Yussef. He swallowed. “Get me to a surgeon.”</div>
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“At once, your Highness. Can you walk?”</div>
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“Send for a stretcher.” Blood dribbled down his chin as he coughed, clutching at his old friend for support. “I can't feel my legs.”</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-75579536619628511902011-08-24T14:15:00.001-07:002011-08-24T14:15:27.332-07:00THE MAGISTRATE III<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Nassar Qasim and Ibrahim the Necromancer walked together in silence along the ramparts of Soma's southern wall. No more talkative were the sentinels who stood upon the walls, dead men in scratched and battered plate the same grey as the leaden sky above the Magistrate and his deadly ally. Eyes covered over with funereal coins of gold stared out at the camp of Yussef Levi's besieging army. Gauntleted hands gripped crescent-bladed axes impregnated with latent alchemical transmutations by the city's few minor practitioners of that art. Soma was a waystation, not a metropolis. Its alchemists were second-rate, back-alley operators and academy hopefuls cast out for poor marks or dissolute behavior. The hum of the hematological batteries that imbued the dead with animation made Nassar feel as though he were at the center of a gathering thunder storm, waiting for the lightning.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “How many are there?” he asked.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “One thousand,” said Ibrahim. The necromancer, a fat man before his long imprisonment under the rule of Nassar's father, had become gaunt in his advancing years. His beard was shot through with grey, his hair thinning badly. “Our dead and theirs in equal measure, more or less. Twenty guard your prisoners. The rest man the wall. The expense in batteries is considerable, but with my current supply of bodies we will be able to launch a counteroffensive before the month is out...”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Nassar stopped listening to the other man's soft, reasonable voice. He thought of the prisoners, of grizzled, insubordinate Abbas and faithful, disappointed Ora who had been his tutor in statecraft, philosophy and the faith of the Maintainer. The others he cared little for, in truth, but imprisoning Ora had gouged a hole in his heart. <i>I am another poor sinner, </i>he thought wryly, glancing skyward for a moment. Theology had never been his strongest discipline. Others seemed comforted by the Maintainer's priests, by the long sermons on Rainday in the echoing galleries of the faith's Temples. Nassar's mother had been religious, before sickness had stolen her mind. Even at the end, though, she had muttered little snatches of her favorite hymns and prayers to herself.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “...dead,” Ibrahim concluded. He paused between two dead soldiers and put a pale, scarred hand on the rain-slicked battlements. His dark eyes seemed to plumb the distance between Soma's battered walls, shored up with dirt and makeshift barricades, and the earthworks surrounding Yussef Levi's stark encampment. Nassar watched the necromancer, trying to assess the other man's thoughts. He might as well have tried to coach a brick in alchemy. That Ibrahim, sooner or later, would betray him he was certain of. When, though? That was the question that kept him up at nights. For now the madman's fate was tied to Soma's, and so his miscreations manned the walls. For now. Nassar had a few tricks up his sleeve he thought might prolong the engagement, but he would need to survive the week to see them implemented. Now, with Levi's cannons ripping at the walls and the Serene General massing his men for a final assault, that prospect seemed uncertain.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Nassar passed a hand over his goateed face and blew out a long, tired breath. <i>Have I thrown my honor and my teacher both aside for nothing? </i> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i>“He will attack tomorrow,” Ibrahim said. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I thought so,” said Nassar, though in truth he'd had no idea. His grasp of tactics on a scale larger than backroom maneuvering had never been good. “Will you take dinner with me tonight?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Yes,” said Ibrahim. They were one of the things that disturbed Nassar most, those flat little one-word answers the necromancer gave. Never an “it would be my pleasure,” or a “certainly.” Just “yes,” or “no.” It made his every pronouncement sound like a judge's verdict. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> They returned together to Nassar's manse. Somehow, thought the Magistrate as he dismounted from his gallus in the courtyard, the building looked shabbier in the rain. Petty, somehow. If Ibrahim noticed, he said nothing. They ate together in silence in Nassar's study. Food stores were dwindling and the meal was simple: stuffed compsognathus with fiery peppers and chilled lemon tea served afterward, to soothe their palates. Ibrahim ate mechanically, saying nothing. Nassar picked at his own portion, though the saurian flesh was invitingly tender, its skin crisped to perfection. He would have to remember to congratulate the cook. When at last the necromancer had finished his saurian, a serving girl brought out the lemon tea. Ibrahim took his cup without comment, but he did not drink.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “You're going to want to drink that,” said Nassar.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “The nine great alchemical poisons can only be delivered in liquid form,” said the necromancer, his voice flat and toneless. He set the cup down on the table. “Lemon to mask the taste of arsenic? I am not a fool, Magistrate.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “No, no,” said Nassar, shaking his head. “You have me all wrong, Ibrahim. It was the peppers I had poisoned. The antidote is in the lemon tea.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> There was a long, ugly silence. Ibrahim's nostrils flared as he drew deep breaths. His hands shook. “Going to kill you,” he said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I rather doubt-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The necromancer <i>moved. </i>With a roar he was out of his seat, and in another instant he seized the chair by one leg. There was a flash, a crackling noise and the chair was made of tin. Ibrahim flung it at Nassar, and at the moment it left his hand another flash blinded the Magistrate and the chair transmuted into solid iron. Nassar threw himself out of the way, upending his own chair and scrabbling on hands and knees for the door as the thrown chair slammed into the mantelpiece and smashed it into shards of dusty marble. “Guards!” he shouted as Ibrahim, with a snarl, started toward him. The necromancer's pointed shoes approached across the carpet. Nassar scrambled to his feet, wishing, as Ibrahim produced a stiletto from his sleeve, that his plan had included a high, thick wall between himself and the madman. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> A guardsman burst through the door, halberd lowered. “Kill him!” Nassar shouted. Ibrahim flicked something at the man as he lunged. Glass shattered against skin and a suit of lacquered armor crashed to the ground, spilling dust over the carpet. The guard's halberd landed point-down between Ibrahim's feet and the necromancer seized its haft, spun it around and drove it through Nassar's leg. Bone snapped. The world went black. Nassar heard himself screaming, and then nothing. When he woke the table was on its side in front of the door, Ibrahim was crouched in shadow beneath the window and from the direction of Levi's camp came the thunder of firing cannons, playing counterpoint to the hatchets crashing against the door, transmuted into granite, from the hall outside. The halberd rammed through Nassar's left leg was a burning brand that pinned him to the floor. He bared his teeth and clutched at the wound. He felt cold and tired. “Ibrahim,” he said, blood pulsing through his fingers. “Ibrahim, we can work something out. The city-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I can defend the city from here,” said the necromancer, distracted. He had something in his hands, something made of glass that glittered in the light of distant explosions. A little vase, dark liquid sloshing in it. The cold feeling in the pit of Nassar's stomach deepened. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I transmuted your little drop of blackmail into water,” said Ibrahim, not looking up. “Never try to poison an alchemist.” His fingers slid up and down the sides of the vase. “You're going to help me keep Soma safe, Nassar,” he said. “Together, we're going to save it. Then I'm going to rule it.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Nassar saw what Ibrahim had in his hands in the next flash of cannon-fire. “No,” said the Magistrate. “Please, don't.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Your father should have stayed in his bedchamber with his harem,” he said. “He made a mistake, coming after me. I couldn't get him.” Ibrahim's eyes glittered in the light reflected from the battery he held. “I wanted to kill him, you know, but in so many ways...this is better.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Nassar closed his eyes before the necromancer opened his breast and slipped a second heart inside it.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-855631745482732692011-08-22T23:58:00.001-07:002011-08-22T23:58:53.014-07:00THE CONCUBINE III<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Alice touched her silver earring, her reagent, to the scrap of silk she had taken from a gown ruined during one of the Shah's increasingly infrequent visits. She could feel what the sages said, the tingling rush of blood in her hands that came with the advent of transmutation. A foul, acrid scent filled her nostrils and a second later she had fallen back onto her rear, coughing and choking as a cloud of white gas slowly dissipated in the damp, warm air of her privy. Chlorine. She'd been expecting lead, but any result was better than none. She had been through so many failures since the slave girl had brought her Scheza's book.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The book's diagrams and treatises detailing alchemy's basics were simple, but Alice was unschooled and nervous. The cryptic warnings against certain transmutations and reagents set her on edge whenever she so much as considered attempting to use the talent she hadn't even known she'd possessed until her jailer's daughter had told her. In Southern Maturi alchemy was practiced only by the Gold and Iron Cabals, the two covens directly beholden to the Dead Senate and the Lich King. Here in Machen there were guilds, temples, tradesmen and priests all capable of and trained in the Noble Art. To Alice, though, the Art was strange and frightening. Now, propped up coughing and red-faced on her elbows in the lavatory, she had another mixed success to add to her short list of triumphs.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Alice got to her feet, spitting to clear the taste of chlorine from her mouth, and replaced her earring in her left ear. The silver teardrop, dangling from the hook on a fine silver chain, felt warm to the touch as she left the privy and went back into the goosedown-padded cage that was her room with its deep four-poster bed, its elaborate tapestries, calligraphied prayer-sheets and lavish décor. Her bare feet made no sound on the carpets. Water fell from an ornamental spigot worked to resemble a gallus's head into a porcelain basin. Her breath still rasping in her throat, Alice went to the basin and cupped her hands beneath the ice-cold flow. She drank, washing the taste of chlorine from her lips. Faint cries from the city far below assailed her ears as she went to the window seat, but she did not look out. What could she do for those suffering under Ahmad's rule? She could learn, and she could strike against their oppressor, but she could not save them from his soldiers.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> With her rings, one of steel, one of silver set with topaz, and one of filigreed bone, she ran through the transmutations she had managed to master. The comforting pulse of heat in her hands built as she worked. First, she turned the onyx bracelet on her right wrist into quartz, then back again. Next came a fingernail clipping turned to water, then an iron cobbler's nail prized from a shoe which she transmuted inch by inch into crackling flames. She had to be careful with iron. Once, when she had transmuted an iron candlestick she'd found discarded behind her bed the flames had escaped her control and set fire to one of the tapestries. She'd had to lie to Mistress Chamyde, the foul-tempered and walleyed Slavemistress of the Palace, telling her in her broken Machi that a lamp had overturned. She'd even pushed over one of the heavy brass lamp stands and smashed its oil reserve, but she didn't think she'd fooled the old witch.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> No, she had to be careful. Exceedingly careful. Chamyde was the least of her worries. Ahmad would find out, sooner or later. He was brilliant, but his contempt for her might give her the moment she needed to turn his throat to water. It had been the first transmutation she'd mastered, once she'd worked up the courage to exert her will on a reagent. Her own blood, drawn with a pinprick to the thumb and applied to a mouse that had drowned in her bath. The unfortunate rodent had dissolved into the bathwater like a bad memory. Alice's lips curved upward at the memory. She laced her hands together and looked out at the setting sun, doing her best to ignore the smoke and screams rising up from the city. There is nothing, she thought, that I can do for them.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <span>The sound of something heavy slithering over the lavatory tiles rasped suddenly against the room's illusion of tranquility. Alice froze, her gaze shifting to the thick, oaken lavatory door. Her beringed hands closed into fists. The sound came again, closer now. She heard a long, rattling hiss, and then nothing. Wetting her lips, she stood and said: “Is that you, Divinity?”</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> <b>No. </b> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b> </b><span>Her knees failed her and she dropped abruptly to the carpet, the impact muffled by its plush weave. The thing behind the door hissed again, and again it spoke. Its voice was more in the mind than in the air, a cold and fetid thing with dripping teeth and huge, lurid eyes. Even through the door she could feel its eyes upon her, could feel them reaching deep inside her. “Please,” she said.</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> </span><b>Will the Sssssshah come tonight?</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b> </b><span>“Please, I don't know.”</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> </span><b>When he comessssss, you will tell me. I will be lissssssstening. </b> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b> </b><span>Alice stared at the door, her pulse thundering in her ears. What color were the voice's eyes? She longed to know. The desire consumed her, drew her to her feet. She crossed the room with brittle tread and pressed her cheek against the door. The wood felt good against her skin, cool and unyielding. “I want to see you,” she mumbled, her voice little-girl slow</span><b>. </b><span>“Please, let me come and see you.”</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> </span><b>I am death. To look upon me issss to know desssspair.</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b> </b><span>“I want to see you.”</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> Slow, huge coils shifted behind the door. She could feel it, close at hand. Water slopped onto tiles. Was it coming out of the bath? Had it come up through the drain? Its bulk rasped against the door and Alice's teeth chattered. Little chills of longing ran up and down her spine as her fingers, fumbling gracelessly, found the cut-crystal doorknob. “Let me come in,” she said. Her thoughts circled a great drain like the water she had made out of the drowned mouse. From a way long way off she could hear herself crying, breath hitching in her chest.</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> </span><b>No. You will await your Sssshah in ssssilensssse, and you will remember nothing of thissss, ssssssave that when he comessssss into your chamberssss you will announsssse it. </b> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b><br />
</b></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><b> </b><span>All at once the world was crystal clear. Alice smiled ruefully, dabbing at the tears of pain on her cheeks. How silly she'd been, stubbing her toe on the lavatory door. Sighing, she limped across the room and sank down onto the edge of her bed. She ran her hands through her long, dark hair. Her rings felt heavy on her fingers, especially the golden one she'd used to transmute the toenails of her little toes into pure agate. The toes still ached, but it had been worth it. She preferred the lesser reagents. Using gold made her feel wild and inspired strange moods, but it was surer. If her other knowledge failed her, she could use the ring of gold against the Shah.</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> As Scheza's book said, </span><i><span>the Golden Way is the road to freedom. </span></i> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span><br />
</span></i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span> Alice fell back against the embroidered pillows at the head of her bed. The scent of jasmine and coriander was strong in the air. </span><i><span>Can I kill him,</span></i><span> she wondered, </span><i><span>if he comes tonight? </span></i> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span><br />
</span></i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><span> </span></i><span>He did not come that night, but there was screaming in the halls and twice someone pounded on the doors of Alice's little apartment. She smelled smoke and huddled in the corner of her room, wondering when the men would come crashing through her door. They never did, in the end, and when a watery sun sent its rays like hesitant soldiers through her window and there were no sounds from the corridors outside her cell, she drifted off into a dreamless sleep.</span></div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-42733412783755987102011-08-22T03:01:00.002-07:002012-02-26T12:18:22.632-08:00THE CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD III<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">No alchemists in Carnassa. There were mutterers and dissidents in the streets now, hand-in-hand with the devotional processions constantly circulating around the skeletal beginnings of the Divided Temple to the Two Who Were One. No riots yet, but still enough dissent that Azhar Khalid was forced to order arrests and interrogations through a fog of horrified resignation. He did his best to ignore the screams of the men he condemned to the tender mercies of the Divine and Rectifying Inquisition, a group of thirty ordained torturers who never left their suite of filthy apartments adjoining the Palace cells. What was their suffering, though, beside the agonies of the child whose heart the Shah had eaten in the forest?</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">In his dreams Azhar Khalid saw the blood on the Shah's chin, the righteous fury in his eyes as he tore at the tough muscle of the heart before casting its ragged remains aside. They had ridden back to the Palace together, and somehow Khalid had managed to keep his seat and refrain from vomiting. That he had done later in the privacy of his own chambers. He had heaved until his stomach was empty, until all that came up were strings of bile-tasting mucous, and then not even that. Then he had poured himself a glass of transmuted liquor, drunk it down in one swallow and shaved himself in front of a mirror with painstaking care. Now, a week later, he sat poring over reports from the insufferable Aziz Jalafi, who in spite of all Azhar's wishes to the contrary, insisted on remaining both alive and attentive to his highly irritating duties as Captain-Informer of the Tranquil Guard.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">How the slack-faced ape collected any information at all, much less while hampered by the malevolent and, seemingly, ever-shifting halls of the Floating Palace, was a mystery to Khalid. Mysteries were good. They distracted him from the horror of his Shah's twisted rule, and from his dreams which sometimes spilled into waking. His, though, was not the only troubled mind in the Palace. The Princess's slave, a lovely creature of eighteen or nineteen years, had nearly vomited on his shoes just a few days ago when he had come upon her, pale and sweating, in the hall outside Scheza's apartments. What was the Shah's daughter doing in her sealed and silent rooms?</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Khalid pushed Jalafi's mind-numbing reports away and stood up from his desk. He put a hand to his throbbing head. A drink would be good. Yes, just one drink to take the razor edge from the day. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself three fingers of aged Maturi brandy. It tasted like honey and forgetfulness. He set down the empty glass on his desk, and then he realized that he was standing alone in the privy chamber adjacent to his bedroom, which was entirely impossible. But no, his desk stood on the polished tiles of the floor and through the glazed window he could see the half-built spires of the Divided Temple rearing over Carnassa's decaying sprawl. He looked down at his glass, wondering if Jalafi had poisoned him, or if he had gone mad.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“My office is not in the privy,” he said out loud.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“No,” said the Shah, who was sitting cross-legged on a bench by the door. He held a duduk in his hands, graceful fingers poised over its holes. “It isn't.” He raised the flute to his lips and began to play. The sound was low and haunting. It echoed from the walls like fading whispers.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Khalid managed, barely, not to scream. A drop of clear well water fell from the pump by the copper bath. It steamed on the frigid tiles. “Divinity,” he said, and in that moment he meant the honorific with every bone of his body. His hands shook like an old man's.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Ahmed Levi took his lips from the duduk's mouthpiece. His golden eyes seemed to glow. “Captain Khalid,” he said, raising a long, slender hand. Two ball bearings rested between his spread fingers. “I have a mission for you.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Khalid wondered, in a moment of mad panic, if he would kill a child to save himself.<i> </i>“Of course, Divinity. Whatever you command.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The ball bearings flashed as the Shah danced them across his knuckles like a peddler dancing coins. Golden eyes followed the little spheres of iron. “I must leave the city for three days and three nights,” he said. Another drop of water fell from the pump to strike the puddle that lay beneath its spigot. “When I return the temples of the Divided God will be complete. I have foreseen it.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Khalid glanced involuntarily at the jagged, half-built towers beyond the windows. They were colossal, each half again as large as the Maintainer's Temple Levi's men had burned when the city had fallen. How could they be finished in the span of three days? Khalid licked his lips and put a hand on his desk to steady himself. His glass of alchemical liquor, glowing with an inviting amber light, lay an inch from his thumb. Oh, if he could just have one drink...</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“There will be unrest in my absence,” said the Shah of Five Thousand Years. “There are those in this city who seek to unseat me. I need to know that Carnassa will be in capable hands, Captain. Can I rely upon you to do what must be done when the madness begins?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Khalid swallowed. A drink, a drink, a beautiful, wonderful drink and then a whore like the one he had promised Raed a million years ago when they had chased Scheza Levi through the market. “I am your hand, Divinity.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Levi's eyes rose from the flashing ball bearings and met Khalid's. “I like that, Lord Captain,” he said. “You have a poet's soul. From now on you shall be the Hand of the Shah.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“You are too...too generous, Divinity.” Khalid's mouth was dry as he sank down onto one knee, more to avoid collapsing than to reverence his Shah. “I will do all I can to honor the office you have raised me to.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Levi nodded like a father humoring a precocious child. In an instant, though, his good humor was gone and his eyes were hard. He slipped his duduk into his robes and stood, the motion sudden and fluid. “There is one last thing, Khalid,” he said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Divinity?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Shah's bare feet disturbed the water puddling on the floor as he paced to the window. He paused, staring out at his city. “After I depart the city,” he said slowly, “take forty men to my daughter's rooms. Burn anything you find. Papers, furniture, bedclothes. When you've finished, kill her. Do it privately and let no word escape the Palace. If a slave, a servant, anyone not inducted into the Tranquil Guard sees you, silence them.” He turned back to Khalid, his face expressionless. “When you're sure she's dead, burn the body.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Shah's hand flicked up before Khalid could so much as open his mouth. A ball bearing struck him square in the chest and suddenly he stood in his office, his uniform covered in thick white dust. Before him stood the square, bland-faced Lieutenant Aziz Jalafi, whose heartless expression showed not one whit of surprise. The man held out a thick sheaf of papers. “The afternoon's reports, my Lord Hand,” he said without delay.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The ball bearing struck the floor and rolled away as, laughing madly, Khalid fell back into his chair, snatched up his glass and drank down the rest of his liquor in one huge, choking gulp. Alcohol ran down his chin and stained his grey sherwani. Like blood.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The next morning, when word had filtered down into the city that the Shah had vanished in the night, there were riots. Men and women spilled into the streets, abandoning factory work and shunning the carts that brought the day-laborers and slaves out to the cornfields. Some cried out that the Shah had abandoned them. Others invoked the Maintainer's name, praying for relief from their demonic conqueror. Where are the alchemists, roared the crowds. Where is our Shah? Khalid, commanding eight divisions of the city's constabulary along with a thousand of his own Tranquil Guardsmen, conducted arrests and riot control with the greasy throb of a hangover pounding at his temples and a cold knot of fear sunk deep into the pit of his stomach. The third mob, a knot of workers three thousand strong and intent on marching to the great bellfounders' forge in the shadow of the half-built temples, was the worst. The workmen fought viciously against the constables, shaven-headed men in chainmail and boiled leather with the names of the Divided God tattooed in calligraphy onto the backs of their heads, but the workers were armed with knives, with bricks and broom handles and the constables had swords and iron-banded shields. There was blood. It frothed in the gutters like the runoff after a rain storm. Men screamed and died. Galluses ran wild in the chaos, vaulting over the fallen and the struggling to vanish into the twisted alleyways of Carnassa. From the rooftops, crows and buzzards watched the slaughter with hungry eyes.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Afterward, the grey-uniformed men of the Tranquil Guard went in amongst the groaning survivors to black-bag and manacle whoever seemed most vocal. Seated in a silk-curtained howdah on the back of a complacent bull hadrosaur and sweating through his dark sherwani and riot mail, Khalid watched his men at work. He barely knew them. Jalafi and a handful of other officers were his only liaisons within the Guard. He couldn't have described its structure had he been held at swordpoint. That didn't disturb him half as much, though, as the knowledge that when the chaos subsided he would be forced to execute Ahmad Levi's daughter. Even the memory of the girl disturbed him. Her sneering look, her eyes gilt like her father's.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Khalid gripped the hilt of his scimitar where it hung at his belt. Sweat dripped from the tip of his nose onto the crotch of his pressed trousers. His hadrosaur honked mournfully. At his side, mounted on a swaybacked Gallus, was Raed. Khalid had appointed the old fool his envoy to the constabulary and an honorary member of the Tranquil Guard. It felt good to have a familiar face close at hand. “Clearing right up,” growled the aging constable. “They didn't have much fight in 'em.” </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Smoke drifted over the city in a brownish haze. The peasants were firing warehouses and granaries in the slums. Khalid sniffed at the air, squinting into the sunlight. “Raed,” he said, “find Lieutenant Jalafi. Tell him to bring forty of his best men back to the Palace at once. I'll meet him on the Concourse.” Without waiting for an answer he took hold of the hadrosaur's reins and snapped them against the saurian's massive flanks. His escort, a quartet of mounted Tranquil Guardsmen in the tall, pointed grey hoods they wore in public fell into formation around him. Lowing, the beast turned in a ponderous circle and set off, flanked by riders, toward the distant immensity of the Floating Palace, which rose from the chalk cliffs overlooking the city like a spear aimed at the beating hearts of any gods that waited there. </div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-8701384551830092502011-08-19T21:52:00.001-07:002012-02-26T12:37:57.936-08:00THE HIEROPHANT'S SCRIVENER III<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The men and women assembled in the antechamber of the Hierophant's study paid Jafar little mind. They were a mixed lot, sellswords, cutthroats, bushwhackers and journeyman alchemists. They played <i>kurut </i>by lamplight or diced on the mosaic floor. One greasy-haired freedwoman had had the audacity to light her pipe, but Jafar had threatened to call the guards and the woman had subsided, muttering nastily. In the corner opposite Jafar's sat Astana Marid, the Coven's enormous Senior Philosopher. A pair of dead servants flanked the blunt-featured woman, their slack faces staring at nothing with golden eyes stamped with the Hierophant's profile. Jafar watched them all over his tablet, lips pressed into a thin line as he struggled to ignore the polished ashwood cane leaning against his high-backed wicker chair. It lurked there like a venomous serpent, taunting him.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“You cannot run from your death, old man,” it seemed to say. “It comes in the twisting of your spine, in the few fitful drops of piss you squeeze out in the middle of the night, in your rotting teeth and thinning hair. Soon you will die and face the Maintainer's judgment. What will he think, I wonder?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Jafar fought the urge to kick the cane away from him. He forced himself to go about mixing his inks and positioning his shakers of drying sand. The Hierophant had requested full transcripts of his meetings with every one of the men and women who had responded to his summons. Some few had, to Jafar's horror, refused His Holiness's invitation. One, a physician, had actually fled Leng in the night. The dishonor was too great for Jafar to so much as consider. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Hierophant entered the room without ceremony, striding through the doors even as his slaves labored to drag them open. He wore a simple saffron-colored cassock and moved with purpose, ignoring the sudden consternation of those he had invited into his presence. A slave jogged ahead of him, carrying a bench of polished oak which he set down in front of the doors to the Hierophant's office. His Holiness thanked the slave and sat, hands clasped between his knees. He bowed his head, his beard brushing the tops of his thighs, and for a long while he said nothing at all. The assembled crowd watched him, some with wide eyes, others wary as treed cats. At last, when it seemed the silence could stretch no longer, Massud opened his eyes. “The Machi people have been purified,” he said. “We have been tested by fire, by steel, and by sorcery.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Jafar's pen flicked over the sheet of fine paper, recording the Hierophant's words in perfect longhand. In his mind's eye, though, he saw the pale bodies of the Thulhun heaped in the streets and on the battlefields after First Leng and at Kakarot. He saw flames licking at alabaster skin and Machi horsemen riding on gallusback through the streets, long spears darting out to skewer the fleeing citizenry of the ruined Empire. He recorded his master's words, his hand steady.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“We have been purified, but there are those who would contaminate that purity. There are those who wish a return to the Rule of Thul, to depravity and sin, extravagance and licentiousness. The Bandit Shah opposes us in the west, across the desert. Across the sea the faithless Maturi delve into forbidden sorceries, denying the Maintainer's guiding light. We are beset on all sides by the iniquities of the wicked and the profane.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Silence reigned. In a room of back-alley cutpurses and luminaries, footpads and narcotics sellers, the Hierophant of Machen preached humility and piety of spirit. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“In the north, in the furthest reaches of the desert where the Mountains of Madness rise into the fathomless sea of the sky, there is a tower. A lighthouse.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Jafar glanced at the Hierophant, noting the other man's furrowed brow and serious aspect. His pen dashed notes across a new page as with his free hand he spread sand over the drying ink of the previous sheet. Massud stood and clasped his hands behind his back. “If you so choose, you may take my writ and go north in search of this tower. Kill all who occupy it. Set it to the torch, and when the flames have cooled pull it down, brick by cursed brick, and smash those bricks with hammers until the wind has taken the dust. There will be danger, and many travails, but to the survivors will go power, riches and eternal esteem in the Maintainer's eyes.” He gestured and his slave removed his bench, toting it back out of the chamber without a word. Massud put his hand on the knob of his office door. “Those who agree to do this thing, give your signatures to my scrivener.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">He went into his study and closed the door. The dozens packed into the antechamber turned to Jafar. One by one they either left the room without a word or came to put their signatures to a blank sheet the scrivener held out for them. Astana Marid signed, as did the greasy-haired woman, whose name was Sharun and who Jafar saw carried a sword beneath her coat in defiance of Hierophantic Law, and better than twenty others. When they had gone Jafar sprinkled sand over their signatures, crude scrawls and languid calligraphy both, and, taking up his cane with only a momentary flicker of revulsion, went into the Hierophant's office. Massud took the sheet and nodded, his face betraying nothing.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Sit,” he said to Jafar.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Jafar sat, his hip protesting even after the short walk from the antechamber to his accustomed seat opposite the Hierophant's desk. The cane was making him weaker, he suspected. Weaker with every step until someday he would collapse into dust, leaving no trace that he had ever been. He licked his dry lips. “What is the tower, Holiness?” The question left him before he could check his tongue. Perhaps it was his age, or the lateness of the hour, or his weariness after hours of Jamshid's needling reminders to use his cane, to exercise in the morning, to eat figs with every meal. No matter the cause, though, the words had flown. It was the first time he could remember questioning his master unsolicited.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Massud turned from his window and fixed Jafar with an iron look. “You'll know soon enough, old friend,” he said. “You are to ride North as my eyes and ears, to record the expedition.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Holiness,” said Jafar, his mouth dry, “I am no warrior. My age-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“I ask much of you, I know,” said Massud, “but I can trust no other. Will you do this for me, my friend? I cannot in good conscience do it myself with the Bandit Shah's depredations to consider.”<br />
<br />
The black loathing in Massud's voice at the mention of Ahmad Levi sent cold fingers racing up Jafar's spine. He swallowed, absurdly conscious of his aching hip and of the sweat soaking the collar of his sherwani. “Of course, Holiness,” he said. “Of course. I live to obey.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The next day Jamshid plied him with medicaments and herbs, with teas and tinctures to relieve the difficulties of the road. The physician warned against the diseases carried by the mosquitoes of the northern marshes and the anger in his eyes was plain. He knew as well as Jafar that the road was no place for the Hierophant's Scrivener. Naree was worse. She wept, sobbing even when Jafar gathered her into an embrace and promised her a speedy return, lying through his teeth about the rigors of the journey to come. He held her close, stroking her fine, dark hair. So like her mother.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“I'm not a child, baba,” she whispered, though she had not called him baba since her sixth birthday. “I know there will be danger.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Not so much danger, Naree,” said Jafar. He regretted so much of his life, not least his harshness with her in the past months. Somehow, though, he could not unstick his tongue to tell her. “Not so much as all that.” They sat together through the night, and when she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder he whispered a prayer to the Maintainer that she would outlive even Machen itself.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">In the morning, Jafar met the brigands, physicians, cutthroats and scholars of the Hierophant's expedition on the outskirts of the city at the Gate of Dust. The scrivener wore a simple black sherwani, high-collared and with loose sleeves for the storage of his papers. His house slave, Nussut, led a mule laden with bags and water skins and a pair of galluses meant to bear them north. The others were arrayed in the shadow of Leng's towering yellow walls with their own motley retinues in attendance. Astana sat in a howdah atop the back of a dead hadrosaur, its leathery skin peeling in the heat, the hematological batteries that gave it motive force visible between its barrel-hoop ribs. A pair of long-haired sellswords had brought a string of camels from the eastern wastes beyond the mountains and the brutish Sharun was mounted on an ankylosaur barded all in black. Slaves and dead servants were scattered throughout the group. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Scholar,” said Sharun. “At last, you appear. We had thought to pitch our tents and wait.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“I am prepared,” said Jafar, glaring icily at the younger woman. With Nussut's aid and a wooden stepping block he mounted his gallus, an old swaybacked female well past her brooding years. His hip began to ache even as he slipped his feet into the stirrups and stowed his cane in the saddle sheath meant to receive a warrior's sword. His back would be afire before the day's ride was out, be he would give Sharun no satisfaction. He set his teeth against the building discomfort at the base of his spine. “Let us be on our way.”<br />
<br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">They left Leng behind and set off in a long, straggling procession along the Road of Dust. Tears of pain stung the corners of Jafar's eyes, but he did not shed them.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>I will show them nothing of my suffering.</i></div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-68444311870690252952011-07-28T12:40:00.001-07:002011-07-28T12:40:39.004-07:00THE CROW WITCH III<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The letter offering apprenticeship had not come from Omar. Safa stared at the scrap of parchment, trying to puzzle out why Sharif Anasazi would want anything to do with her. Her performance in her surgical studies had been adequate, but never exceptional, and besides that they had hardly spoken. Yet here was his invitation in his own long, plain hand. Safa dropped heavily into a chair at the small rough-cut table in the kitchen and set the letter down beside her half-eaten breakfast of flatbread, dates and goat cheese spiced with radish shavings. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> I, Sharif Anasazi, Master Surgeon, choose as my newest acolyte the alchemist Safa Khan, daughter of the state. Should she wish it, her training will commence on the Day of Visions just after sunrise in the Surgery of the Tabernacle of Learned Wisdom.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>In my own hand,</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Anasazi.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The letter had arrived by pigeon with the dawn, summoning her to an apprenticeship in two days' time. Safa had not told Bassam, still sleeping after a long day at his workshop in the Plaza of Dust. Between his trade as an artificer and his work on the panoculum in the basement of their apartment he had little time for anything but sleep and rushed meals. Safa scratched at her breast beneath her robe, running her fingernails along the line of the scar where her second heart had been implanted by Sharif's own hand. It was true that she and Omar had never been close compared to other senior alchemists and their favored students, but she had always assumed he would take her on out of appreciation. She was the most skilled transmuter to have attended the Tabernacle in twenty years. Everyone said it. Why, then, had the note come from Sharif?</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Wings beat around the edges of Safa's thoughts. She saw the city from above, watched coldly its man-clogged streets and soaring edifices of dead stone. Lights twinkled below her like a million eyes. To the east and the south lay the ocean, murderous and impassable save to the albatross. To the west lay the open road, to the north the empty steppe the tribes had abandoned after their conquest. Now only dusty madmen and penniless dervishes wandered there. Sometimes they died in the heat and Safa would swoop down upon them to claim their softening flesh before the jackals came. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Safa blinked and saw the plain wooden walls of her apartment, washed in candlelight. She inhaled deeply and clasped her shaking hands in her lap. Every day it grew harder and harder to fend the visions off. Once it had come upon her in the bath and she would have drowned if Bassam had not hauled her from the copper tub and pounded her back until she'd spat up nearly a liter of water and bile. Afterward she had screeched at him like a crow, struggling to remember words as he held her tight against his chest. He had found reasons to delay the testing of his artifice, the Opticus he had built for her from plans forbidden after the fall of the Thulhun Empire. He was concerned. Afraid. Soon, if he didn't come around, she would have to force his hand. She needed that machine.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> A knock at the street door interrupted Safa's thoughts. She glanced up at the narrow wooden door and reflexively turned her outward eyes upon the steps. Birds roosting in the eaves of nearby buildings or preening themselves on washlines and flower boxes gave her a window through which to observe the robed and bald-headed man standing outside her door in the fading light. He was tall and rangy, his robe well-worn by travel. As Safa watched he raised a scarred fist and knocked again, scowling. She withdrew from the birds on the street, cold apprehension gnawing at her stomach. The man was no messenger from the Tabernacle. Standing, Safa retied her stained and unwashed robe, checked her sleeves to make sure her reagents were in place and moved to answer the door. If the man was a problem, she would deal with him herself. Her sweat-damp fingers closed on the door's handle. She opened it.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Good evening,” she said, her mouth dry.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Khanum,” said the man, inclining his head. He was taller than he'd looked through the eyes of the birds, his face gaunt and raw-boned, his scalp peeling, his eyes colorless behind wire-framed spectacles. In his long black robes he looked something like a crow himself. “Am I correct in stating that you hold the rank of alchemist?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “You are, agha,” said Safa. “If you're looking for a transmuter, you'd be better off at the markets in the Plaza of Dust. I don't work freelance.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The man nodded as though he had expected her response. “You were born in Carnassa, unless I miss my guess.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “How did you-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “To Daud Khan's lowborn mistress, Alaya. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Safa stepped back, a cold lump forming in her throat as the man slipped through the doorway. His shadow fell across her, black-winged and immense. “He kept you in his home for two years and seven days, raised you as his own until the city's noblemen began to whisper that he had lost his edge.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> There had been a house on the bluffs beneath the Floating Palace, a palatial villa with a bright, clear pool for swimming and the smell of ripe oranges from the orchard thick in the air. Slaves cleaning marble floors, women laughing in the baths. Safa put a hand to her mouth.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “He gave you a toy, a little monster made of rags”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> No. No. It was impossible. Nobody knew about Baba, hidden safely beneath the floorboards under the mattress. Nobody knew.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “He threw you out into the streets.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Cold. Hungry. Running fleet-footed from the rapers and the thieves, from the slavers at the market where she went to steal rotten fruit and old bread. Hiding in the alleyways with the filth and the dogs, fighting with other children for the merest scrap of food. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The man seated himself at the kitchen table and set down at his feet a little iron stove no bigger than a teakettle. His colorless eyes continued to pry into Safa's. She hugged herself, reagents forgotten. Birds shrieked at the corners of her mind while their wings battered her thoughts to pieces. “Who are you?” she whispered.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I am Azurean,” he said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Safa felt faint. She stumbled to a chair by the window and fell into it, hearts thumping. “Azurean,” she said. “You're dead. Drowned and dead.” </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The last Emperor of Thul smiled a gaunt, humorless smile. “The dead have come up from the sea,” he said. “I am Azurean, Safa.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Why are you here?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
“To teach you. Cthun will have need of you before summer's end.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “He is too late, khanum,” said a voice from the stove. “Man's world will burn.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Safa stared at the little iron box, feeling faint. Outside, trumpets and horns announced the passing of a column of soldiers. They marched past beneath standards flying the Hierophant's blazing sun, boots raising clouds of dust from the parched and sweltering street. Safa watched them go by, trying desperately to think of nothing. Officers on galluses led each company, and after them came white-robed Hierophantic Alchemists seated in howdahs atop the backs of plodding hadrosaurs. The Confederate Anthem, drummed out by a hundred soldiers with cymbals, horns and muleskin drums matched the rhythm of their march. At the head of the column a Marshal with a close-trimmed greying beard and weary eyes rode a roan gelding. Golden spurs gleamed on the heels of his sabatons.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> She licked her dry lips. “Why...why me?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “The Golden Way has opened. The Moth-King comes.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “The Moth-King?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Azurean leaned toward her. His spectacles slid down his long, thin nose. “He is coming, a hunger from the heart of our drowning world. When the stars align he will be born into Cthun.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “What can I do?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Find him,” said Azurean. “Find his vessel before his rebirth. I have wandered far and wide in search of him, but I have only my failing eyes.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “You know what I did.” The crow's eye, wet in the palm of her hand as the black bird writhed in its death throes in the dirt. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I will be your master,” he said, and his voice was frosted steel. “Take the surgeon's tutelage. Learn what you can from him and the rest of that tower of eunuchs and mystics, but know that your true loyalty is to me. Through me you will know power you cannot imagine. Through me you will regain all that your father stole from you, and more.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The iron stove made a strange sound, almost like a child's cry.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Don't tell Bassam,” said Azurean, and then he and the stove were gone. A bead of malachite appeared in midair and fell to the ground. It rolled away across the floor, throwing mad shadows over the walls as it went. Safa stood unsteadily, keeping a hand on the table for support. Azurean's seat was empty. The door was closed. Had he dared to transmute distance? Had he <i>dared? </i>She rounded the table on shaking legs and touched a finger to the back of his chair.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> For an instant she stood in a different room, a vaulted chamber walled in books with a fire burning merrily in a marble grate. Azurean stood beside it, pouring something dark from a long-necked bottle. He spoke to the fire and the fire answered. And then he was gone and Safa was alone in her kitchen, tears drying on her cheeks. How had he known?</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> How had he known?</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-61919281358188612562011-07-22T15:34:00.004-07:002012-02-26T12:50:02.507-08:00THE OLD SOLDIER III<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Deep summer brought an evil heat to the sun-baked streets of Leng. It lingered rudely even in darkened rooms, penetrated the darkness beneath thorny acacias and sheltering oaks. Noblewomen sweated through their silks and samites while the peasants, dressed only in sodden cotton, milled in stinking, miserable throngs through the streets of the city. The heat clung to stone, to brick and marble long after the sun vanished each night. Saurians gasped in the traces of rattling, sun-warped wagons, laboring to pull their masters' goods. In the fields outside the walls of Leng golden wheat waited to be harvested, fat stalks nodding like the weary heads of somnambulant old men. The ten thousand slaves of the Bureau of Agriculture, the second most powerful of the Three Holy Bureaus, marched out each morning before sunrise to cut and bale. The cracks of their overseers' whips and the plaintive cries of the elderly and the infirm presaged the bloody glory of the dawn.<br />
<br />
It was awash in that same carnelian splendor that Rashid watched his men drill in the shadow of the the northernmost guard tower of the Tabernacle of Divine Sacrifice. He paced the rearmost lines, scowling in the growing humidity as the foremost ranks threw siege ladders up against the tower and its surrounding stretches of wall. The Tabernacle Guard struggled against them. Blunted swords and spears thumped and crunched against armor and flesh. The thick straw-stuffed mats around the ladders ensured that any recruit who fell from the walls would, more likely than not, survive his tumble. Headless arrows hissed and buzzed back and forth between besieger and besieged, propelled by fat-stringed training bows. “Faster, you dogs!” roared Rashid. “No mercy!”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">He was in a foul mood and the heat had done nothing to improve his disposition. Several of the men had already collapsed under the sun's merciless eye. A reasonable commander, a small corner of Rashid's mind suggested, might call a halt to the afternoon's exercises until evening brought relief from the heat. After all, a soldier dead of sun-sickness was no use to the Hierophant. Rashid was not feeling reasonable. “My mother could take that tower unarmed and one-legged!” he bellowed. “I buried her sixteen years ago and she still makes you look like a wet shit!”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The men surged forward toward the ladders, crying out in inarticulate rage and hatred. Rashid watched them, chest heaving, teeth bared. His leg throbbed like it was newly broken. “That's it,” he snarled. “Get it all out.” He'd half-expected a knife in the back since he'd caught the idiot who'd tried to poison his morning coffee. The boy was still crucified in the courtyard over the entrance to the Tabernacle, a sobbing reminder to the rest that treachery's price was not lightly paid. He'd be rid of them soon enough, anyway. The whole blasted legion was marching out with the dawn on the Road of Dust, bound south for the siege of Soma and the Bandit Shah's rebel empire. Marching to war and death, away from their sweethearts and their weeping mothers.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">They did not take the tower that day.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“You are a disgrace to His Holiness,” said Rashid, limping down their bedraggled line. Flushed faces stared murder at him. Chests heaved beneath sweat-soaked shirts. Rashid's cane clicked against chipped, weather-worn flagstones. “Your cowardice, your weakness of heart and of character, your lack of resolve on the field of honor. When we rode against the Thulhun Empire we were less than ten thousand horsemen and hunters against the hundred thousand crack troops of the legions. We stole victory from their jaws and broke their backs. We drowned their cities in the blood of their soldiers, and when they raised up new legions against us, we crushed them.” The hate had faded from their eyes, replaced by fear. Rashid limped onward, sweat dripping from his nose, his brow, his back. “I did not make you men, but that is neither your failing nor mine.” He halted and rested against his cane, letting them see for an instant his weariness, his weakness, the price exacted daily by the mace of a long-ago Thulhun legionnaire whose throat he had slit. “Only war can make a man, and you have not known war.” He paused, a ruthless smile carving his face. “Can anyone tell me what the difference between war and a woman is?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Silence. Puzzled looks. Shifting feet. Rashid's grin widened. “<i>You</i> fuck a woman,” he said. “War fucks <i>you</i>.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">It was midnight when Rashid awoke to the sound of someone knocking at his bedchamber door. He stumbled out of bed, clad only in his dressing gown, and limped to the door which he wrenched open with a savage tug. “What the hell is it?” he snarled at the bald-headed slave standing in the hall, fist raised to knock again. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The slave took an involuntary step backward, then proffered a scroll sealed with fresh red wax. His brow suddenly cold with sweat, the old soldier took the scroll, broke its seal and read, squinting in the dim light of the slave's lantern as the man stammered apologies for waking him. Rashid waved him off, too engrossed by the note to take notice of the slave's discomfiture.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Faithful Servant of the Maintainer</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>This poor one has observed your labors and found them meet and fitting.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Your presence is requested in the House of the Living Sun.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Rashid carefully rerolled the scroll and tapped it against the palm of his hand. “I'll need to change,” he said to the slave, “unless you think the Hierophant would approve of my attending him in my fucking nightgown.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The slave prostrated himself at once, his shuttered lantern banging against the flagstone floor of the hall. “This fool is beholden to you, agha,” he said. “I am unworthy to convey you to his Holiness.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Just wait there,” Rashid snarled, and he slammed the door on the bald man's grief-stricken face. His bad leg, already remembering the man who'd lamed it, screamed protests as he struggled into his dress uniform. First the white roughspun underrobe, then the burgundy hose, boiled leather breastplate, gauntlets and greaves and finally the sun-blazoned tabard proclaiming his allegiance to the Maintainer's faith. He splashed rosewater on his face, ran his hands through his greying hair and took his cane from where it stood against his bed. “Fuck,” he said to himself as he limped toward his door.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The House of the Living Sun was everything Rashid had heard and more. Great gongs, one to either side of the enormous Peacock Throne, sounded as he entered through the brazen doors at the front of the hall. He felt small and shoddy, overshadowed by the chamber's gilt columns and by the moonlight flooding through its absent southern wall through the filigreed crest of the throne where Massud Madras sat, flanked on his left by an old balding scribe and, on his right, Matteus dressed in flowing robes of black and holding a brazen staff of office. The alchemist's expression was unreadable. The slaves who had sounded the gongs withdrew in silence as Rashid, kneeling awkwardly on the tiled frieze of the Death of the Living Sun, fought against the urge to grind his teeth. He had known Matteus was highly-placed in the Coven, but Grand Vizier? Why hadn't he said anything?</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Holiness,” Rashid managed. His bent knee was already ablaze with pain. “I am unworthy even to kneel before you.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Hierophant rose and descended his dais. He moved spryly for his age, just as Rashid remembered when last he had seen the great man during the end of the Summer Jihad, just before the battle of Mem. A flash of irrational jealousy colored Rashid's vision. Why should the mighty Massud keep his strength while he, Rashid, was forced to hobble about like an old man with one foot in an open grave? Then the Hierophant was before him and his complaints were forgotten as the leader of all the People's Heavenly Confederacy helped him to his feet and kissed him twice, first on one cheek and then the other. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Your soldiers have been well-trained,” said Massud Madras. Up close the lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth were evident. His dark skin hung slack from his bones and threads of white ran through his long black beard and moustaches. “The value of a good spear wall was one lesson the Thulhun pretenders had to teach the Machi.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“A lesson hard-learned, Holiness,” said Rashid, his mouth dry. His hand was slick with sweat on the head of his cane. Even Matteus seemed to have receded into the distance. “I was at Mem when the Princes Imperial made their last stand.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Hierophant nodded. He clasped his hands behind his back and, without warning, began to circle Rashid. His plain yellow robes trailed behind him over the tiles. Rashid stood still, ignoring the itch of his tight collar and the sweat running down the small of his back. The Hierophant's footsteps were loud in the deserted hall. When he had completed his circuit he halted and met Rashid's eyes with his frank black stare. “Matteus,” he called, not turning.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The alchemist came swiftly down the dais steps, leaving the old scribe to scratch out his notes in the shadow of the throne. Rashid noticed that the vulture-like man had his own cane leaning against the side of his wooden bench. He felt a twinge of sympathy, then returned his attention to Matteus and the Hierophant. Massud held out a hand as his vizier approached and from within his voluminous robes the alchemist produced a scimitar in a battered leather scabbard tipped with steel. The Hierophant took it and looked Rashid in the eye. His gaze seemed depthless. Behind him, Matteus remained impassive and silent, but his hands were white-knuckled on his staff of office. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“When I rode out to marshal my father's tribe,” the Hierophant said, “I took only the clothes on my back, my camel, a waterskin and this sword my grandfather left to me. My clothes are lost, my camel dead, my waterskin burned with my own son, Mani. This is all that is left of the beginning of the civilization that the Machi have built.” He held it out to Rashid. “Take it, if you would fight again in the cause of your god and your people.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Holiness,” Rashid said, his voice hoarse. “I cannot touch such a sacred thing. I would profane it.”<br />
<br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Hierophant seemed to consider that for a moment, then he hawked, snorted and spat on the scabbard. White saliva oozed over the cracked leather. A drop fell and hit the floor. Rashid stared in horror, trying to find his voice. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“It is only a sword, Rashid,” the Hierophant said softly, “but I give it as a gift to you, poor though it is.” He wiped the scabbard clean with the sleeve of his own robe and pressed it into Rashid's trembling hand. He leaned close and spoke in a hushed voice. “Nizzam Nizzar, my Horde General, is a stalwart friend to me, but he is old and set upon by rivals and enemies. You will protect him as best you can, support his rulings and command your legions. Not only must we conquer this murdering pretender in the west, but also our own dissension. Can I trust you?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Rashid's eyes flicked to Matteus, then back to Massud. He swallowed, the fingers of his left hand tightening on the oiled scabbard. “Yes, Holiness.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Hierophant stepped back and spread his arms. “I raise you, Holy Veteran Rashid Hadar, to the rank of Horde Adjutant. May you do good works in the Maintainer's service until the end of your days.” Without ceremony he turned and left, sweeping away over the tiled floor toward the darkness behind his throne. His aged scribe struggled to his feet and limped after his master, clutching the tools of his trade against his breast with one arm while in his free hand he held his cane as though it had done him a personal wrong. Matteus lingered only for an instant, his misery plain, and then he too followed the Hierophant into the shadows.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Until the end of my days,” Rashid muttered to the empty chamber. He turned and began the long, painful trek back to his quarters. The click of his cane against the tiles was loud in the silence.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">He was alone.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-62571348530282730362011-06-26T23:38:00.001-07:002011-06-26T23:38:59.046-07:00THE HANDMAIDEN II<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The Floating Palace was a warren of empty rooms and hidden passages. Dusty chambers sat unused behind sealed doors. Heated baths in the Thulhun style, leftover ornaments from the Imperial Governorate's long and storied reign in Carnassa, gaped like dry stone mouths in deep vaults excavated from the living bedrock of the cliff. Near the crest of the southeast tower, a great blocky structure sheathed in marble and overlooking the Sinner's Gate from its corner of the Palace's crumbling bluff, there was a ballroom that had stood unused for better than forty years, according to the oldest slaves who still remembered the days before the Hierophant's revolution. Aliya, like most of the younger slaves, had walked through a hundred dead places and gone hunting for others, plumbing the depths of the Palace after its masters had taken to their beds. Once she and Moana had found a room with a gold-banded polearm thrust deep into the floor and strange words carved deep into the walls, but neither of them could read and the gold bands around the polearm had unnerved them.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The room that Scheza had sent her to investigate, an unused scullery on the ninth level, well below the clifftop, was different. It had the same air of abandonment, the same dusty counters and stained floors, but there was something cold and slow to it that made the slave's skin pimple. Broken crockery was strewn around the dry washbasins and on the floor in the shadow of the granite counters. Mice had nested in the rotting cabinetry. In the center of the sloped stone floor was a grate of cold iron, waiting to drink spilled dishwater that would never come. Aliya swallowed. The sound was loud in the silence. Nowhere in all the cobwebbed corners and dank cupboards of the scullery had she found the thing that Scheza had sent her to find. An egg of gold filigree hinged with leather and within it a smaller egg of pure obsidian, the untransmutable stone. Why such a wonder would be left in a scullery Aliya had no idea, but she had spent an hour searching for it in the wreckage of the room.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Life as Scheza's handmaid was full of strange errands. Once the Princess had even sent her down into the sewers, her only instructions to sit for an hour on the bottommost rung of the iron ladder leading down into the pipes and listen for a song sung by a fish. She hadn't seemed disappointed when Aliya reported that she'd heard nothing. Another time they had gone together to the coops beside the stables at the base of the cliff where the Floating Palace's chickens and compsognathi roosted. Scheza had taken one of the chickens from its nesting box and slit its throat there in front of the slaves and servants. The other chickens had watched, silent and merciless, as one of their own bled out onto the straw. Scheza had dropped the twitching body with a snort of disgust and they had left.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Sometimes Aliya almost missed the monotony of slavery, the shouted imprecations of the taskmasters, the evenings spent bathing the Prophet's half-wild concubine. She blew out a long breath and sank down onto one of the scullery's moldering stools. She rested her head in her hands. The smells of grease and pepper lingered in the air, and for a moment Aliya could almost see the gross form of Mulkut, the Palace's ferocious head chef. She had slaved in the kitchens before Chamyde had chosen her to bathe the Son of Heaven's concubines. The wiry, temperamental woman had been little better than the bellowing Mulkut, but at least her hand had been lighter. Once Mulkut had broken Aliya's jaw for dropping a tureen of onion soup.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> A slave's dreams were small, mean things. Chains and lashes beat them down, drained the glory from them until they longed only for dreamless sleep and a crust of stale bread at the end of the day. Aliya could hardly remember a time when she'd imagined freedom, her own freedom, as something attainable. Sixteen years of shuffling beneath the yoke of servitude had cracked some part of her. She rubbed her stinging eyes and stood. She would just have to tell Scheza she hadn't been able to find the egg. Aliya turned to leave. She froze. In the doorway, coated in dust as though it had sat there for years, was precisely the artifact Scheza had described. The craftsmanship was incredible, hypnotic in its complexity. It was ten times the size of a chicken's egg and rested comfortably on four stubby claw feet. Aliya clutched at the front of her dress, suddenly unsure. The second egg Scheza had told her of was just visible through the golden filigree of the first, and something about its smooth blackness made Aliya want to turn and climb into one of the cabinets rather than stare at it a moment longer.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> In the end she wrapped it in dusty rags and fairly fled back to the Princess's chambers. It had taken some practice to locate them reliably. The halls around them, like the halls surrounding the Shah's apartments, seemed to shift and distort. Sometimes it almost seemed one stood in two places at once, so great was the sense of disorientation. Scheza was alone in her washroom, dressed in her usual stained and open-fronted black robe. She looked up as Aliya slipped into the porcelain-tiled chamber, decorated with symbols and patterns of Scheza's own contrivance. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Aliya clapped a hand to her mouth, choking on bile as a vile stench assaulted her nostrils. The copper bath was nearly overflowing with runny, flyblown dung. Insects buzzed around it in a miasmal cloud. Scheza, apparently unfazed by the appalling odor, held out a hand. “You found it?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I...I did, Princess,” Aliya managed to choke. She placed the cloth-wrapped egg in Scheza's outstretched hand. The Princess took it and for an instant she looked her age as pure joy pulled her plump lips into a smile and she clasped the golden egg against her breasts. Then, without a thought, she opened the gold filigree cage, withdrew the smaller obsidian egg and cast the glittering contrivance aside. She dropped the egg into the bath and watched as it settled atop the miniature hill of shit, sinking half its height into the offal.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Something small and so like-colored to the dung as to be almost invisible rose from the refuse. Aliya watched it, eyes watering in the foul air. It was a fat grey toad, its eyes yellow and evil, its skin gross with boils and warts. Slowly, it struggled up the hill of dung until it bestrode the egg. Then, with a vile gassy sigh, it settled down like a brooding hen atop the obsidian curio. Scheza clapped her hands together. “Beautiful,” she said. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> For an instant Aliya could almost see what her mistress meant. A weird, pustulant glow seemed to surround the toad and its egg. A low, dull thumping resounded in the air. Like a fat heart beating time. The smell redoubled. Aliya fled the washroom, retching. She made it to the hall before falling to her knees and vomiting. A passing slave looked at her, scowled and moved on before the puddle of bile and half-digested gruel could foul his shoes. Aliya knelt shivering on the cold stone, hugging herself as fresh tremors wracked her body. What had that egg really been? </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Aliya choked, sobbing for breath. She threw up again, watery vomit splattering over the flagstones of the hall. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut as the world spun around her. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Are you alright?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> A man's voice, not cultured but finer than the rough tongues of the slaves. Aliya looked up, still gasping and saw a slim, goateed man of medium height looking at her with concern. He wore his hair short and slicked back and his uniform was the plain sludge-grey of the Tranquil Guard. “Please, agha,” Aliya whispered. “I did not mean to offend you.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “You haven't,” said the man. He offered a hand and Aliya took it. Her stomach turned over as he helped her up, but there was nothing else in it to come up. She took a deep, ragged breath.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “You should see the surgeon,” said the man. His hand was warm on her shoulder. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Aliya looked down at her feet. “Please, agha.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The door to Scheza's apartments swung open and the Princess moved into the hall. “What are you doing with my handmaiden, Captain Khalid?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The officer took his hand from Aliya's shoulder and sketched a quick bow. When he straightened his face was composed into a statesman's mask, but for an instant Aliya thought she saw disquiet in his dark eyes. “The lady is ill,” he said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I am no lady, agha,” mumbled Aliya, silently begging the man to go, to leave before something terrible happened. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Get out,” said Scheza. Her hand twitched and suddenly it held a phial of blood. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The Captain's eyes darted to it, then back to Scheza's. He licked his lips. “I was just going.” Slowly, arms stiff at his sides, he backed toward the steps. “It has been a pleasure, your Serenity.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Scheza watched the man until he vanished down the stairwell. Aliya huddled against the wall, sick and miserable. Her skin felt slick and clammy and her nostrils were choked with the memory of shit and the acid reek of her own vomit. “Please,” she said. “Don't hurt him.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Men are swine,” said Scheza, and her voice was hard and cold as black iron. Her gaze lingered on the empty stairwell. “I'm going to kill every last one of them.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Aliya retched again and sick spattered over her shoes. Her last feverish thought was that cleaning them would be a nightmare when her knees buckled and darkness swallowed her.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-29449137455856906622011-06-19T20:18:00.001-07:002011-06-19T20:18:53.146-07:00Skip DayHey guys. No Monday Moth-King this week. Back Wednesday!The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-30793389658911812842011-06-16T21:37:00.000-07:002011-06-16T21:37:31.600-07:00THE DUTIFUL SON II<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The dead had taken to the walls of Soma. Their sightless golden eyes stared out across the barren no-man's land between the city and the Imperial camp. Yussef sat with several of his command on a crag overlooking the pass. He studied the defenses with concern, ignoring the day's heat. The dead had repulsed their every assault at great cost. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “We won't get through,” said Moustaffa Horus, gesturing with his stump toward the dead standing motionless at their posts. “The infidels have broken even their own ghoulish laws. As though their shambling servants are not abhorrent enough.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Be resolute, General,” said Yussef. He put his hands on his knees and stood. His staff followed suit, looking to him for guidance. “They cannot last forever behind those walls, and if they sally forth not even their dead can match our numbers. Whatever necromancers hold the walls cannot hope to press-gang many more into their rotten legion.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yussef hoped, as he climbed down the long switchback trail from the crag back to the canvas city that was the camp, that he spoke the truth. In the last days of the Thulhun Empire the greatest of the Houses had turned their dead upon each other and whole armies of the living had fallen beneath the boots of the dead like wheat beneath the scythes of farmhands. If Soma's garrison grew stronger, there would be no taking it. At the base of the ridge, in amongst the foothills of Rafiq's Folly where their grooms waited with the galluses, Yussef turned back to face his Generals. Horus met his eyes with steely resolution, gaunt Nephru with reptilian inscrutability and massive Bobek with patience and serenity. “We <i>will</i> take Soma,” he said. That was all. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “As His Serenity commands,” said Nephru, flashing a quick salute before moving to mount his gallus. The others followed suit. They rode back to the camp in silence. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> In amongst the tents the mood was subdued. Yussef had ordered the medical pavilions moved to the furthest outskirts of the encampment so that the screams of the dying would not demoralize the men, but the occasional cry of agony still drifted through the silence. The men weren't drinking. They weren't at dice or cards or chess. They sat outside their tents in the midday heat, shirts open and armor removed. Mail cuirasses hung from tentpoles and washing lines. Yussef clenched his wounded hand, feeling the scab across his palm begin to crack.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> He must not doubt his father's will.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> The officers' latrine pits were located at the camp's southwestern extreme and Yussef chose his path to them with care, assessing along the way the disposition of the camp's beating heart. It was good for the men to see their commander, even if he was on his way to the bogs. Good for them to remember that they fought not for him but for his divine father, the Son of Heaven. Men <i>did </i>straighten when he passed, even if they slouched when he'd rounded the next corner. The enginers, nearly dead center to the besieging army, bent their backs to their work with renewed vigor, stripping parts to build new trebuchets and scaling ladders while others directed teams of hadrosaurs in dragging extant engines into new dispositions. Yussef stopped to discuss the day's bombardment schedule with his chief enginer, a gruff Carnassan-born man called Wooden Surat by his men for his wooden leg and humorless comportment. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “There's cannon coming in from Shibola,” the man grunted as he stumped through the mad tangle, decipherable only to himself and his aides, of the camp's siege battery. “A fifty pounder cracked and repaired during the siege and two twenty-fives made before His Divinity's requisitions. We'll have them scrambling to patch their walls, dead or no dead.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yussef did his best to match the one-legged man's brisk pace while around him counterweights the size of millstones swung back and forth like the pendulums of murderous clocks and wooden yardarms dipped, rose and creaked with ferocious rhythm. “I'm glad to hear it,” he said. His bladder was aching, but he could spare the chief enginer a moment more. “As to the dead, I wonder if you might know any way to deal with them. I never expected the Confederates to make the move.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Caught with your pants down,” said Surat, limping without comment across a pace of bare earth mounded with hadrosaur shit. He halted and turned to Yussef, spinning neatly on his wooden peg-leg. “I ain't fought the dead before,” he said. “If it were me storming those walls, I'd want the necromancers found and done for. Get them and the game is over.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Something to consider,” Yussef said, forcing a smile. “Send word when the cannon arrive.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Surat tipped his cap and resumed his trek down the bombardment line, bellowing orders and curses with equal fluency. Yussef watched the man a moment, then headed for the latrines. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Flies buzzed in the hot air, thick with the smells of sweetgrass and shit. Yussef pushed aside the canvas flap of his personal stall, unbuttoned his trousers and pissed with considerable relief into the morass beneath the wooden bench with its single round hole. He closed his eyes, letting his bladder's release drain the day's tension from his shoulders. A last few drops spattered the seat's edge and he buttoned himself up, turning back toward the unappealing idea of spending the rest of the day in the strategic tent with Horus and the others. He would see no more men butchered in fruitless attempts to gain Soma's walls.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “The dead will come up from the sea.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yussef froze. He glanced at the wooden bench. Eyes of emerald green met his. In the filth and muck of the latrine pit lay a crocodile colored so alike with its surroundings its presence would have been guesswork had its eyes not been so striking. No. It was not like-colored with the camp's offal. It was of the same substance. He tried to speak and found his voice no more than a hoarse croak.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “They were banished to its depths,” said the crocodile. It smiled and its teeth were as vivid a green as its eyes. “Banished along with their master who is called the Lord-Without-Mercy-or-Death, Master of Lost Souls and King of Moths. Now they return to herald his coming, and the sacrifice they will lay upon his altar will be the sons and daughters of this land.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yussef found his voice. “What are you?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “I am the deep places,” said the crocodile. Its tail moved lazily from side to side, stirring the shit. “I am the gold-child of the fair departed.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> With frightening rapidity it plunged beneath the surface of the latrine's sluggish flow and, with a flick of its armored tail, it was gone. Yussef stood watching the ripples fade, his heart hammering in his chest. What had he seen? A demon? It had called itself gold-child. But no. The books of the Divided God spoke against that fallacy. Some agent of the Maintainer, that pretender to Machen's heavenly throne. Only when he pushed aside the canvas flap of Horus's tent and saw the puzzlement in the older man's face did Yussef realize he had decided to tell his father's friend. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Serenity?” the General said.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “In the latrines,” said Yussef. His legs suddenly weak, he sank into a camp chair as the tent flap fell to behind him with a puff of dust. “I saw a crocodile swimming in the shit.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “A crocodile?” Horus's brow furrowed. “I hardly think-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “It spoke to me, Horus,” said Yussef dully, knowing he sounded worse than mad. “It spoke of the dead. Of Emperor Azurean's Drowned Legions, I think. The armies he took with him to his grave.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> “Fairy tales,” said the older man firmly. He stood and put a callused hand on Yussef's shoulder. “Serenity, you must be weary. I've seen twenty-year campaigners with the scars to prove it hallucinate worse in better weather.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yussef almost gave in. It was so tempting to dismiss the madness of the shit-stinking latrines as heat-shimmers and hysteria. A grave chill settled in his bones. His sister would have called it the bad colds, when she was young and innocent. ...<i>banished along with their master who is called the Lord-Without-Mercy-or-Death, Master of Lost Souls and King of Moths. </i>“No, Horus,” he said. “I know what I saw. Send for a scribe. I will take dictation for a letter.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Eight days passed before a pigeon returned bearing a message from Carnassa. The heat in the pass had become almost intolerable. The camp followers lolled naked in the sun, taking turns at fanning one another. Custom at the whores' tents was so slack that they took to fucking for water, which was in short supply. The sauropod convoys that brought supplies up from the lowlands had been replaced by infrequent caravans of handcarts, hadrosaur drovers and tinkers. The rarefied air and heat together were too much for the great lumbering beasts. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"> Yussef took the letter in his tent where he sat shirtless and dripping with sweat, trying to make sense of reports sent by his scouts on the far side of the city. Each passing day brought closer the threat of Confederate reinforcements from Leng. Each night brought fresh dreams of the dead bursting up out of the earth, shit-colored and gold-eyed. The runs swept through camp and city both and soon the smell on the wind was always war's blood-and-shit stink. At least nothing burned. Who would set a fire in summer's worst heat? Awash in reek he could forget the screams of Shibola. He sighed and smoothed the tightly-rolled parchment out on his writing desk.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>My beloved son,</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Your diligence and courage daily strengthen my heart.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Your vision is cause for distress and moves me to contemplate the bearer, your crocodile, of these messages of import. The spirits of Cthun have come abroad to usher in my reign, but there are dangers to us greater even than Massud Madras. Soma must be taken, and swiftly. I command you to storm its walls on the first day of the month of Light before the sun has set. Do this, holding fast to your faith, and you will be delivered to victory.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Father.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>In the hand of an unworthy slave.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Yussef closed his eyes and crumpled the parchment in his hand. He pressed it to his sweating breast as though it were a suckling babe. Salvation. At last, salvation. His heart sang. A great weight had been lifted from his shoulders and even the constant headache he had nursed since the arrival of the cannons from Shibola seemed suddenly a distant thing. He felt with shame the salty warmth of tears pricking at the corners of his eyes. </span> </div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Salvation.</span></div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-82243420334612029992011-06-14T20:57:00.000-07:002011-06-14T20:59:47.968-07:00THE MAGISTRATE II<div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Soldiers struggled atop the southern wall of Soma in the wild light of flickering alchemical beacons. To Nassar, watching from a guardhouse not fifty feet from the bloodiest of the fighting, it seemed a madman's puppet show. Limbs jerked. Spears thrust, piercing bodies with linear exactitude. Life spilled out in hot torrents over rain-spattered stone. In the wall's shadow labored other figures, shambling troglodytes with iron teeth and gold coins set in the empty sockets of their skulls. Nauseous quartermasters gave to them the fleshly toll of the embattled wall, passing down the bodies of the newly dead from hand to hand. Slack forms slicked in blood were stacked like cordwood in handcarts while one of the Maintainer's clerics stood at the base of the wall's switchback stair to bless swiftly each corpse ferried past his station. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“This is folly,” said Ora. The old cleric sat cross-legged on a divan, his face drawn in the shadows cast by the tower room's single alchemical lamp. “You desecrate our noble dead, Nassar. The Hierophant will expel you from the faith for your sins.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Nassar said nothing. His knuckles had grown white from the force of his grip on the windowsill. The battle, the day's second, raged on. Ten times Yussef's men had stormed the walls, heralded by thundering drums and the peel of brazen trumpets. Long-haired warriors threw hooked siege ladders up against the carved bulwarks of the city, screaming prayers to the Divided God as they swarmed up the siege equipment to cast themselves upon the defenders' spears so that their brethren could gain footholds on the wall. Cauldrons of boiling oil were emptied on the bellowing attackers, reducing men to wailing pillars of unsteady flesh. Still, more raced up the ladders toward their deaths. The campfires of the rebel bivouac were a field of stars blazing behind the carnage. Somewhere in that scattered conflagration waited the Serene General, commanding his army's archers and trebuchets to deadly effect. Whenever the wall's defenders managed to push back the besiegers, arrows fell upon them like locusts. Huge chunks of stone arced over the city, heralded by the creak and thud of counterweights and clattering iron gears. There was damage in the miller's district already. Soon there would be fires. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Ora's voice softened. “What would your father say, Nassa?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Nassar scowled. That was easy. Abad Qasim would have stroked his massive black beard, sighed and said: “Necessity is a sword with two edges, Nassar. Never grip it too tightly.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Ora nodded. “You shoulder remember Abad's wisdom.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“My father forgot something when he said that,” said Nassar through gritted teeth. “A sword, even one that can turn in your hand, is still a sword.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The battle ended an hour later as the sun began to rise, washing the pass in a bloody glow. Great gongs rang out from the rebel camp and the attackers abandoned the walls, leaving their dead and their ladders behind them as ragged volleys of arrows fell among them, felling dozens. Already alchemists were on the walls, transmuting ladders into smoke with their rings of ivory. Not a cheap reagent, but a reusable one. The dead laborers finished their grisly business, donned the black cloaks they had been ordered to wear while abroad in the city, and bore away their carts down the narrow, winding road through the millery to the warehouse where Nassar had placed Ibrahim under heavy guard. The Magistrate watched them go.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Was Ora right? Had he doomed his city to a fate worse than Yussef's invasion?</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Nassar's doubts had only worsened by the time he sat down to council with his cabinet in the dusty light of the manse's solarium. The scarred Lord Captain of the city guard, Abbas Hamun, brought his mailed fist down on the table as soon as Nassar had taken his seat at its head. “Magistrate,” he growled, “my breach force is not large enough. If I do not receive new workmen the next breach Levi's trebuchets make could be the last they need. My details can't move enough debris to plug the gaps.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The old man was part of the same cabinet that had served Nassar's father, and his experience showed in the scars stretching back from the edges of his mouth to just below his ears, one of which was little more than a scarred stump. His mouth was a hard, wrinkled slash, his teeth uneven and interrupted by black gaps. Nassar often thought that he might prove a useful ally if he could ever stop thinking of his Magistrate as his old master's half-grown son. “You have my permission to draft laborers from the prisons,” he said to the older man. “I'll have a crier offer a sovereign a day in the forum for volunteers.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“The treasury is already strained,” began Shahid, but Nassar silenced him with a raised hand. The other four cabinet members looked to him. Two of the room's five, Ora and Abbas, had served his father. That the other three had not was down entirely to his own scheming, and the acquisition of loyal men had cost him. His cabinet was a treacherous place. Malek, his Master Alchemist, had financed the expansion of the City Guard. Interest alone made the alchemist a wealthy man. Shahid, the city's official tax collector, owned by magisterial decree the city's only cannon foundry. Only Nassar's old friend Hakim, his steward and Master of House, was truly loyal. For now, though, the room's occupants fell silent and donned expressions of respectful attentiveness.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Now, if there were ever such a moment, was the time to strike.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Nassar cleared his throat. “Some of you think Soma is doomed,” he said. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Abbas flushed an ugly shade of red. Ora looked puzzled. Hakim raised an eyebrow. Malek and Shahid remained motionless, their faces inscrutable. Nassar pushed on. “We are outnumbered and ill-supplied, cut off from the aid of His Holiness. The self-styled Son of Heaven looms to the South, more terrible even than his son, the General. With these odds stacked against us, you will understand why I ordered Ibrahim the Butcher freed and placed under my direct supervision.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Ora made a disgusted noise at the back of his throat. Abbas went so far as to spit on the solarium floor. The other three councilors simply stared openmouthed at Nassar. Malek was the first to recover himself. “You <i>what?” </i> </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“This is not a time for dissent,” said Nassar.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Malek stood abruptly. His chair hit the floor with a loud <i>clack </i>of wood on stone. “You,” he said, his fists shaking, “have betrayed the interests-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Lotus petal,” said Nassar.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Iron-shod boots clanged loud against the floor's tiles. With slow, sure tread the dead came into the solarium. There were ten of them, armored in plain steel and with axes to hand. Their eyes, plain coins of gold, stared blankly at nothing as they took up positions around the table. The councilors fell silent. Malek took a step back and nearly fell. Abbas's face was bloodless behind the thicket of his beard. His scars stood out like fresh wounds. Nassar remained in his seat. Ibrahim had chosen fine specimens for his soldiers. Strong men, heavily muscled and not much decayed. The smell of them, though, was thick in the air. Flies buzzed. “This is not a time for dissent,” Nassar repeated. “This council is hereby dissolved. You will stand under guard, your interests under care of the city.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“A coup?” Ora asked. The old man's voice was broken. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Nassar swallowed past the lump in his throat. They would understand his reasoning, in the end. He hoped they might understand. “Yes,” he said. He pushed himself back from the table and stood, weathering their hateful stares. Shahid, a thin and nervous man, made the sign of the Maintainer across his breast again and again without seeming to know that he did. The fingers of his right hand curled to meet his thumb, forming a mute twin to the distant Sungrave. “From this moment forward, Soma is mine and mine alone. The dead will man its walls.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Heresy,” said Abbas. He stood slowly and with deliberation placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. “You cast dishonor upon your father's grave.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“I am magistrate now, captain,” said Nassar coldly. “My sins are my own. Stay your hand.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Abbas's sword scraped clear of its sheath and the aging soldier rushed for Nassar with a cry of rage. Nassar's eyes widened in surprise. He forced himself not to flinch. An ax caught Abbas's arm just above the elbow. Bone and flesh gave way beneath the razor-edged blade and in a flash the captain was on his knees, his gushing stump clutched tight against his chest. The dead man stood over him, an impassive sentinel in dull plate, its ax resting on the nape of its victim's neck. It turned its golden gaze to Nassar. “Master?” Its voice was cold and heartless as a winter wind.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Take him to the physicians,” said Nassar. “When he's recovered, throw him in a cell.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The dead man nodded, seized Abbas by the collar of his uniform and dragged him bodily from the solarium. The aging captain uttered no sound as he vanished through the door. Nassar watched him go and listened to the receding <i>thud</i> of the dead man's footsteps until they faded into silence. “My sins are my own,” he said again, not looking at his councilors. “The dead will man the walls.”</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756890713392924240.post-15553288144132031122011-06-12T21:17:00.000-07:002011-06-12T22:40:11.538-07:00THE CONCUBINE II<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;"><i>From the skull of the righteous daughter came the roots of the tree that was the sun, and though her life was extinguished, she lived on. To her, oak-skulled and nameless, the Maintainer gave the Doors of Iron and the corridors between all things.</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Alice set the book down on her lap and drew a deep breath. After so long starved of words, even the nameless little volume's enigmatic parables made her feel light, as though they were breathing life back into her. She could only read a few pages at a time without being overwhelmed. The fear that Ahmad would appear from nowhere and snatch the book from her hands dogged her relentlessly. She didn't think she could bear its loss. When the slaves came she hid it under a loose brick in the hearth and submitted in silence to their razors and cosmetics, their milk baths and spiced perfumes. She let them bind her into a silk </span><i>tama </i><span style="font-style: normal;">which, while beautiful, was so tight she could hardly breathe. The plain girl who had delivered the book to her had been replaced by two others, younger and prettier. Alice had no way to ask them what had become of her erstwhile handmaid.</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> What had possessed the girl to bring the book? Certainly they ha</span>d never shared a moment, never come to any understanding or suffered for one another thoughts of sisterly love. Alice had tormented her slaves, abused them as she was abused, and they had endured her. Now she had a book, a precious escape from her gilded cell, and she had received it from the hands of one to whom she had given nothing but venom. As always, though, the strangeness of the book itself drew her back from her troubled musing. She leafed through its well-worn pages, fingers tasting faded ink. Not for the first time that day she silently thanked her tutors, who had beaten the Machi language into her before her voyage from Maturin to wed Daud Khan. Her lips twisted, forming a bitter grimace.</div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">What the book was about, precisely, continued to escape Alice's understanding. It began with a lengthy tract, written in an obscure form of Machi elegiac, describing in detail the creation of the world by an enigmatic demiurge referred to only as the Watchmaker. It dealt extensively with subjects Alice had seen handled only in the dustiest geological and alchemical texts. The formation of the Four Continents of Cthun, the waxing and waning of the first empires of Man, the Death of the Living Sun and the drowning of the Fourth Continent, Innesia, ancestral homeland of the Thulhun people. Where it differentiated itself from banal religious histories was that no pantheon was given primacy. Priests, it had been Alice's experience, liked to ignore the gods of other priests. The Maintainer's clerics hadn't waited long after the fall of the Empire to tear down every statue of the Three, the ancient gods of Innesia and of Maturin, and even from her room Alice had seen the smoke of Carnassa's burning Tabernacles and the rise of Ahmad's Divided Temple. Priests and prophets were jealous creatures.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The little blue-bound book had no prejudices. In it the Watchmaker gave over command of Cthun's functions to the Maintainer, styled as a sort of lieutenant angel, while other gods descended to live among their subjects. The Three ruled as God-Emperors over Maturin and Innesia. The Legion, mysterious and powerful, chose Aligher as their seat, parceling it out between them. There was a brief mention of Twin Gods of night and day that Ahmad would have killed to lay hands on, and then the poetics wound down into an examination of lesser deities and nature spirits, the mythical asura the alchemists of drowned Innesia had supposedly dealt with in blood, flesh and secrets. </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The author, whoever it had been, was eloquent and talented. Their analogies were strange, their metaphors alien, but the text bore scrutiny well. One hundred and twenty-two written pages, plus three more of illustrations of complex alchemical symbol structures. She hadn't read it all, yet. The strange poetry of the first quarter drew her back again and again, entrapping her in parables and flowing verse. At last she came to the furthest extent of what she had read. The Death of the Living Sun. It read:</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>That slow, bright star </i> </div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Born of Cthun and Heaven</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>First teacher of Man</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>Betrayed by loving neophytes</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>To flood and death.</i></div><div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Beside the poem was a sketch of a robed man sitting cross-legged on a hilltop, and where there should have been a head there was a burning solar disc. The Living Sun. Avatar of the Maintainer. His ten disciples, the sages of the Three had taught her, had turned against him and tried with a knife of cursed gold to transmute his heart to water and so drown his light, but the avatar's reaction to the forbidden reagent had been violent. His heart, transmuted, had become an inland sea and his killers had drowned with him. Now, of course, the Maintainer's Hierophant reigned in his name from his seat in Leng and the sigil of the sun flew over every great Machi city north of the Mountains of Madness. Why, in the names of the Three, had that slave given her a book of fables?</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“I asked her to give it to you.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Alice screamed and fell from her seat by the bone-latched window, her book flying from her hands as she scrambled back over the carpet away from the short, slender girl seated on the edge of her bed. Ahmad's blood was obvious in the slant of her high cheekbones and the gold of her large, almond-shaped eyes. She wore a long, dusty officer's dress sherwani that hung past the knees of her gold-embroidered leggings. “Try to keep it down, Maturi,” said the girl. “I've transmuted your guards' thoughts into dreams, but it won't hold up against anything </span><i>too </i><span style="font-style: normal;">loud.” It was said casually, as though the mere idea were not enough to land one in Alchemical Court for infractions against the Oldest Laws.</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Alice forced herself to choke down the scream that had been building in her chest. She stood, eyes darting between the girl and the book where it lay open on the carpet, its pages staring blindly at the ceiling. The girl's Maturi was flawless. “You're the Princess? Scheza?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“And you're my father's favorite whore.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Yes,” Alice said dully. There was no anger at that word. Not anymore. “I am. Or I would be, if he paid.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Then I pity you,” said the girl, her tone softening. Real sorrow dulled the bite of her caustic smirk. “His affections aren't gentle, are they?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Horror struck Alice dumb. His own daughter? “Please,” she said, desperate to avoid the crippling monstrosity of the subject. However awful her own suffering, Scheza's must have eclipsed it. “Why did you send me the book? Why would you bother talking to me at all?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The girl steepled her fingers beneath her chin in a curiously adult gesture. “Did you know that my father permits his other concubines the use of the Palace library?” </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">A bright stab of anger drove other thoughts from Alice's mind. “What?” </div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“Yes,” said Scheza. She leaned her chin against her hands and tilted her head birdlike to one side, regarding Alice with unblinking golden eyes. “Of course, none of the others are latent alchemists. That might have something to do with it, Maturi.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“I'm not an alchemist,” said Alice, her ears still ringing. “All the children at court are tested-”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> “For </span><i>real </i><span style="font-style: normal;">potential,” Scheza said dismissively. “No government wants a cheap conjuror. The alchemically capable population of Machen is twenty times its number of trained alchemists. Most Covens don't bother with anyone who can't handle a Totemic Binding. Normally, I wouldn't either, but my father had first choice of Carnassa's scholars. Pickings are slim.”</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> Alice bent to pick up her book, ignoring the loose hair that fell across her face. A wave of dizziness overcame her and she sat down on the carpet, swaying. She stared at the young girl seated on her bed. When she managed to find the breath to speak, her voice was cracked and thin. “I've been his for two years,” she said. Tears slid down her cheeks. She tasted salt. “Why are you here </span><i>now?”</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><i><br />
</i></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> The girl slipped off of Alice's bed and padded across the floor. Her small hand cupped Alice's jaw, lifting her face up toward her own. Alice felt the chill of a metal ring pressed against her skin. “My father is powerful,” she said. “He knows secrets I haven't uncovered, techniques I have yet to master. He's dueled master alchemists in the Carnificata. His people, and there are millions of them, love and fear him as a manifestation of frightening new gods. </span><i>He is a Living Sun to them</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. I, by contrast, am sixteen and a woman. Is it any surprise that I've had to move slowly?”</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><br />
</span></div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">“What do you want from me?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The golden eyes widened, as though surprised at the question. “I want to kill my father and bring his accomplishments crashing down around his corpse,” she said. “I should think that much was obvious. Will you help me do it? Even your small potential might be of use.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">Alice narrowed her eyes. Her mouth felt dry. “What do I get?”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
The girl stepped back, her hands falling to her sides. “Freedom, Alice,” she said. She paused to open the door. “Keep reading, and make certain my father doesn't see that book.”</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">The door slammed shut. Alice was alone. She swallowed past the lump in her throat, her eyes straying to the window Ahmad had shut against her forever. Outside lay Carnassa, city of a thousand lights. Outside lay freedom. Her fingers dug into the book's cover, distorting its shape. If she really was an Alchemist, then Ahmad's throat would be the first thing she transmuted. Into shit, if she could manage it. Her hands shook.</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br />
</div><div align="LEFT" style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">She was afraid.</div>The Moth-Kinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13414204514513091186noreply@blogger.com0