DEATH OF EAST – 9 WEIRD TALES
The direction East is dead.
When the direction East, a giant living atop an island at the far Eastern 'pole', is murdered, the Empire falls into disarray. The compass can no longer be trusted, and trade with the colonies falls apart as merchant fleets founder on rocks and get lost on the open ocean.
Only the Lady Arabella, a legendary explorer and captain of the fastest ship in the fleet, can help. She knew the giant East before his death, and only she suspects the true identity of his killer.
But she must act with haste, as the men of the Empire seek to turn its great bureaucracy against her, even as a new and terrifying challenge rears its unlikely head - love, while she seeks to solve the question of the age.
Who murdered the giant East?
This collection of 9 weird tales strains against the borders of reality, filled with sky-painting giants, gods of the mud, and a world where the direction East can die.
OTHER WORKS BY MICHAEL JOHN GRIST
Zombie Ocean (zombie apocalypse)
1. The Last
2. The Lost
3. The Least
1-3 Box Set 1
4. The Loss
5. The List
6. The Laws
4-6 Box Set 2
7. The Lash
Ruin War (science fiction thriller)
1. Mr. Ruin
2. King Ruin
3. God of Ruin
Ignifer Cycle (epic fantasy)
1. Ignifer's Rise
2. Ignifer's War
0. Ignifer's Tales - short stories
Short fiction
Cullsman #9 - 9 science fiction stories
Death of East - 9 weird tales
Non-fiction
Ruins of the Rising Sun - Adventures in Abandoned Japan
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For SY.
CONTENTS
1. BONE DIAMOND
2. CATERPILLAR MAN
3. THE TONSOR'S SON
4. THE MUD GIRL
5. FLATLAND
6. THE ORPHAN QUEEN
7. SKY PAINTER
8. LEANNA DREW THE MOON
9. DEATH OF EAST
About the Author
1. BONE DIAMOND
I discover the first bone diamond in a hunk of crocodile clavicle, lodged between the foramen and articular process. I had meant to simply facet the bone tip's lamellar weave, that it might, once polished, dove-tail into a brooch that some high lady in the court might wear to the arena flooding.
Rather, I find a diamond, at least thirty carats in size. It is the most extraordinary bright yellow, like amethyst but glowing hot within. Allory would have loved it.
I take it to my lathe and polish it on corundum, brute it with emery, and at last heat it over a sulfur jet as though it were a citrine. Its yellows melt, whirl, and blaze as though afire inside.
I sit atop my cankerous clay rooftop and hold it up beside the sphere of the moon. Of the two, my bone diamond shines the purest, the brightest, as though the sun risen at night over the slums of Memphis.
I do not know then that it will be the end of everything I know.
* * *
"Five hundred seinu," says the Pharaoh's own man, Ktolemy. He stands bold as saltpeter in my small cutting shop, his gleaming golden torc catching the bright of the mid-day sun. "It is a piddling thing, you see, polisher. You say twenty carats? I wager it is fifteen at best."
"Twenty, weighed and measured," I reply him. "And absolutely unique. You'll find none other like it in the world."
He turns the small golden jewel over in his hands. I faceted it to the euhedral cut and set it within a mount of partridge skull basted with liquid silver. It burns like a mote of fire in his hands.
"Then six hundred," he allows grudgingly. "And not a seinu more, unique or no. Perhaps the Pharaoh himself will sport it, at the games."
"I would be honored," I gush, appropriately.
Ktolemy laughs. "Of course you would, polisher. Six hundred, and you are lucky I do not grind off your nose on your own lathe for the presumption."
He leaves, and I think little more of it. How did a diamond come to be in an crocodile's shoulder? It is not for the likes of me to know.
I attend the games with the masses, gathered to watch the Pharaoh re-interpret the black pestilence that took my Allory and decimated the city. The arena's aquifer is opened, and we watch as the wood-packed sand is slowly swamped with brackish Nile water.
Men in brown leather rags jostle and cheer around me, stinking of gut-rot and sour lyrrhd. Before the pestilence it used to be that artisans were lifted above the commoners, given boxes from which to watch the entertainments. Allory and I always hoped to become jewelers together, that we might share a box.
Everything changes.
While the arena floods we watch ten legless slaves crawl about the slopping wooden floor. They have the sickly look of pestilence painted on their faces, have probably been tutored to scrabble and rage as though infected. They were perhaps de-limbed as much as a week ago; several of them have learned to walk astride their hands, their torsos upside down in the air above them. There is something repugnant in the way they scrap and claw at each other, like dying animals clawing for sustenance, but then I suppose that is the purpose of it.
At the end, as the water level rises above their height, only one of them will survive, he who fought the other nine off and climbed the single pole at the center of the arena. The pole has been carved in the shape of a single stalk of safram, the weed that brought the pestilence's cure. The winner is a Numidian, black as tourmaline and wiry, covered in the raking pink weals of fingernail gouges. He perches with the stumps of his legs wrapped about the safram pole and waves to the crowd.
The men around me cheer. I doubt though that there is much for him to look forward to- perhaps he will find employ as a rug-weaver's mate and live out his days twining threads and feeling the lash of his master's cane.
I shudder at the thought.
"Polisher," comes a voice, and I turn to see it is Ktolemy. The savages either side of him cower away, averting their eyes. "The Pharaoh would see you."
My heart at once hammers within my ribs. I can only think my jewel has displeased the Sun King, and now I will pay the price. Ktolemy smirks at the fear on my face, then reaches down to haul me to my feet, lead me meekly away.
* * *
In the Pharaoh's presence I fear the very pounding of my heart will disturb him. I know men have died hideous deaths for less. I must keep my eyes down to his feet at all times. I see there several of the women of his harem, languid, copper-skinned, bedecked in gold; his living treasury.
His voice comes to me soft, sibilant. Though I may not look I know he speaks from behind a heavy golden mask. Through my terror, I wonder how hot such a thing must be, to wear in this summer heat.
"From where did you dig this diamond?" he asks.
It occurs to me then that I have done a very foolish thing.
Prospecting for diamonds is illegal without the Pharaoh's grace. I have never prospected for diamonds before, have only ever bought from the Koran markets where the Pharaoh's grace has already been granted. Now I have sold him one for which no grace was even asked.
I realize I am seconds away from the fate of the men in the arena. There is no more hope that I might keep its origin a guarded secret.
"Great lord of the sun, I unearthed this diamond from within the clavicle of a river-crocodile. Being but a polisher of stones, I failed to seek your grace through foolish ignorance, not any wish to disobey."
"A river-crocodile," comes the musing reply. "Within the bone itself?"
I am sweating copiously. Am I to be forgiven my thoughtless mistake? Or am I to fight tooth and nail for my place above the flood water, my legs de-limbed?
"Great lord of the sun, yes, as though formed in bone mineral, like the nacre of oysters or the chitin of mollusks."
The jewel appears before me, held in the Pharaoh's ruby-ringed hand. I hastily avert my eyes to the side. It is forbidden to look at any point but the feet of the Sun King.
"This jewel, could there be more of them?"
I wonder if my answer will define my chance at existence. If there are no more, then I will certainly die for my transgression. I have no choice, and must take the risk.
"Certainly, great lord of the sun," I answer, hardly stopping to think. A bead of sweat drips down my nose and I barely catch the drop in my hand before it touches the ground of the Sun King's box, another transgression. "They can be found in the bones of certain creatures, at certain times."
"And you know these times, and these creatures?"
I feel as though I am already sinking legless beneath the waves.
"Yes, great lord, I have some knowledge of such things."
The hand with the jewel retracts. "Then bring me more."
"Yes, great lord."
"And do so with my grace granted."
I nod. Ktolemy jerks me in the ribs, and I back out, bowing, terrified.
* * *
I buy the bones of three crocodiles from the Kell docks, where they hang bleaching in the sun, destined to be ground into tincts by medicians or polished by jewelers of bone such as myself, perhaps even studied by didacts in the lecture halls of Sankore.
"Three?" asks the swarthy man, pushing to one side the hanging skins of ostrich that surround him in his dank and musky stand. I have never placed such an order before. I cannot imagine any would.
"And all that you get in subsequence," I add. "On commission to the Sun King himself."
The man's eyes widen in alarm, and he makes the sign of the sun across his forehead. Whether he believes I come with the Pharaoh's remit or not is unimportant- simply to claim it is a matter of life and death.
"Of course," he says, "three tomorrow, and three the next." I see his beady eyes glow with the profits to be made. He will be thigh deep in entrails all night to prepare them, but he's already spending the seinu in his head.
I hand them over, one hundred for the rushed payment and delivery. Plenty remains of the six hundred Ktolemy paid for the sun jewel.
The crocodiles are delivered by cart at my back, a small of team of wastrel boys tugging them along dusty streets. Back in my workshop, door shuttered against the world, I lay them beside the remnants of the original and take out my bone shears and vise.
I begin with the clavicles, left articular process, shearing them at epicondyles, splitting them in the vise. I chop the fragments to bits in my search, but find no jewels, nothing but the spongy honeycomb of labyrinth and collagen. My concern begins to mount, and I move to the right articular process clavicles, but again find nothing of note. I proceed then down their spines, smashing each vertebrae to dust, then to the ribs, then to cracking the long epiphysis of the fore and hind legs, caving in the sutured plates of the skull.
All for nothing. No jewels spill out. I begin to think it is an impossibility, perhaps the whole affair was an imagination. How did I ever think I found a jewel in a bone?
Then I see the five hundred seinu on my workbench, left by Ktolemy, along with the promissory writ requesting I supply the Pharaoh with more, and my knees turn to columns of sand. I have promised a thing I cannot deliver, a thing I have no more control over than the floodwaters of spring.
I am covered in bone dust and detritus, spongy osseous matter that is still moist from a recent kill.
I will surely drown in the arena with the other criminals. The only compensation is that Allory is not alive to see it.
* * *
I return to the boneman at first light. There are the three new skeletons, still red and raw with drying tangles of nerve and artery, on a cart by his side. Will they be as empty as the last three? The boneman watches as I pull down the first from the pile, my shears and vise in my hands; his eyes are weary and his leathers stiff with blood.
I crack the first crocodile's left clavicle there in the dawn-lit street, find it empty. I crack the right, likewise. The boneman watches as I work my way down the beast's spine, powdering vertebrae, breaking ribs, cracking the trabecular bones along their long spiny eminences, but find nothing. There are no diamonds, and I feel despair riding up my throat like bile.
I turn to the boneman and pin my hopes on a wild thought that had come to me as I lay abed that night, unable to sleep, dreaming of all the ways the Sun King might kill me. "The first I bought, from where did it hail?"
He looks at me glass-eyed, as though hypnotized by my swift work with the shears, demolishing the skeleton he'd so carefully exhumed. "What?"
"The first," I persist. "I bought it here a week hence. Did it hail from the Nile, as these other three? From the same hunter, trapping the same region, the same bank?"
He shrugs, points at the one powdered at my feet and the two remaining on the cart. "What does it matter? You have your three."
"It matters!" I cry and punch him weakly in the shoulder. "Have you forgot I come with the Sun King at my back?" I wave the paper of writ from Ktolemy in his face, and what color yet remained in his stubbly cheeks drains away. "Surely you keep records, man, of your purchases, of each carcass and where it was captured."
"I do, lord, I do, in my head, all in my head."
"Then remember, on pain of the arena, from where did you buy the first?"
He blanches at mention of the arena, as he should, but nods understanding. He takes a breath, holds it, squints his eyes shut, and slowly his cheeks turn red as bloodstone with the effort, as though he is pushing a heavy boulder up a hill. I realize he is thinking. I wait, until at last he gasps as though coming up for air.
"I recall, my lord, that the one you speak of was not hunted but reared, in a farm south of Saqqara, by a man named Bes. He brings his spawn to market at each season's turn, when his brood reaches full growth."
In his answer I see redemption flitting like a djinn.
"And have you more of his beasts? Anywhere? In any condition?"
"No lord, none—" he pauses, clearly sensing my abjection, then continues— "but he surely keeps studding pairs. If you sought his spawn, lord, I am sure he would sell."
"Yes," I say, "I will barge to this Bes at once. Have one of your boys direct me."
"Of course, lord," he bows, "and please, remember me as your servant, willing and able but sometimes slow only in the mind."
"Yes, yes," I dismiss him, "the boy, and the barge."
He hurries off to fetch a guide.
It is only much later, days gone by, that I realize I threatened him with death over what was but a trifling matter to him. I treated him much the same way the Sun King treated me.
* * *
Riding the Nile is a slow and laborious thing at any time, but worst in the months before spring and the rains. The mother river's flow is reduced to a turgid trickle, fecal and rotting with all the effluvium of Memphis.
I endure it with a palm leaf held wilting over my head to keep off the worst of the sun's baking heat. The boy poling us along is Abindian, probably the son of a slave, freed only to live out a short life burning to a crisp under the eye of Ra.
At Bes's spawn farm I debark. The land is flat and broad, broken by fences curtaining fields of low-cropped green and purple scrub, what seems to be safram, the pestilence weed, amidst which a few scraggy ibex graze. Water nets enclose sections of swampy Nile water, where crocodiles rove languidly. A few are full-sized; the remaining handful newly spawned. My heart turns over in my chest to see them.
Bes is an ogre of a man, thick-fingered and as broad in the shoulder as any I have seen, but he turns as flop-kneed as the boneman when I flash
him my writ of the Pharaoh.
"Yes, yes," he effuses, as I tell him why I have come, tell him what I need. "Yes for the Pharaoh, of course yes. "
I need not mention the arena to this man— I can see he bears the mark of the whip upon his skull and chest. Once a slave, I muse, as he leads me to the trapping cage. Small wonder he has taken up residence so far from the Sun King's seat in Memphis.
He baits one of the older beasts with rotting venison, draws it in, and impales it through the heart with a long metal spear. It twitches, thrashes in the mud, then falls still. Between them he and his man raise the thing over the wooden divide and lay it at my feet.
"Would you board it whole to your barge, lord?" Bes asks me, his eyes downcast.
I eye the thing; it is immense. It would sink the barge if we tried to ferry it; better to lay it on a float and tug it behind us. But I do not need the meat of it, nor do I need the bulk of its bones.
"No, flay its back now and leave me to my work."
He bows, doesn't question. He and his man expertly slice through the creature's thick green-brown hide with a sickle blade, peel it away as though sloughing off a vest; leaving the pink of glistening muscle and yellow of fat exposed.
I spy the clavicle, though it seems different embedded in flesh. I have only ever worked with bone excised, dry and separate as though a found thing like wood or rock. That is how Allory and I always imagined our work, as a crafting of something to bring it to life, not take it away. Like this, embedded in the still warm body of this great beast, it seems like theft.
I wave Bes and his man away. Alone by the riverbank, I steel myself, kneel, and dig into the crocodile's shoulder with my bone shears, slicing through the gristle of the articular process easily. I trim away the clavicle from the foramen and wrest the thick broad blade of bone free. It is hot, wet with blood, but already I can see what I have come to find.
A glowing diamond crystal, so large it has grown out through the sheer blade, emergent on both sides. It must be fifty carats in all, near perfectly spherical. I will lose perhaps only ten carats to faceting.
Death of East Page 1