He stood dumbfounded amid the shining clutter... Why? He had killed one of their own, shamed the dread Scarlet Spires in their very own city—why would they simply release him?
He left the owner wailing among his copper wares, wandered down the thoroughfare, his thoughts reeling. As always, a wave of startled looks preceded him, and a wake of whispers and gestured charms trailed him, but he scarce noticed.
Vermin should be amazed by the likes of him.
He had wandered all the way to the Heaps, the ancient spice market of Pruvineh, the greatest in the Three Seas, the wags in the Worm said—as old as Shir itself. The expanse was military, stalls stacked into far-flung regiments, and immense enough to afford a clear view across the shoulders of Carythusal. There, above the marmoreal estates and pleasure gardens of the Hermitagic, the famed mosaic walls of the Palaparrais gleamed in the evening light, winking violet, black, and gold: the great palace that Sarothesser built, and that his corrupt descendants had soiled for more than 400 years.
He looked to his war-girdle, saw Queen Sumiloam’s favour still hanging there, her blessor, the white ribbon that caste-noble Ainoni women would tie about their left thigh inked with messages for their husbands and lovers. He snatched the thing—what the first sorcerer, Nagamezer, had wanted from him—realizing that he still had no clue as to what she had inked across it.
They know of you at the Creeping Postern.
Come, Hero.
Not all has been conquered.
And he smirked wondering. Had the Queen cringed upon writing this, or had she merely thought herself clever?
§
Shinurta was wrong. Carythusal was better known for things quite apart from the Sranc Pits and the Scarlet Spires, things less dramatic, yet nonetheless more pervasive. Plague. Spice. Women. Cosmetics. Slaves. Narcotics. These were far more likely to accompany reference to the ancient capital of Ainon. She, as perhaps no other city, had earned her many monikers: the Diseased City, the City of Flies, the Whore of Nyranisas. Not a port on the Three Seas accepted her traffic without inspection.
Eryelk should know. Stitti’s death had wrecked not so much his heart as his aim. The same bloody wandering that had delivered him to the shrieking crowds of the Pit had also delivered him to the Momus Gale, for a time the dread of commerce across the Three Seas. He had won the ship the way he had lost her, playing numbersticks, and since gambling enjoyed all the piety pirates denied the World, he found himself a fool captain aboard a ship of murderers, thieves, and rapists.
And so he learned what Carythusal was to the wider world plundering ships bound to and from her antique bosom. The pirates of Cern Auglai were renowned for acts of outrageous brutality. Some merchant captains set their own boats afire, burned themselves, rather than throw numbersticks against their rapacious fury. The crew of the Momus Gale had no doubt that their souls lay beyond reprieve, and so they sucked as violently as they could from the teat of brief life. They were Takers in every way, and woe to those with wares to be taken.
They were condemned, and it was simply the lot of damned souls to crow about the damnation of others. So they described the Carythusal they needed to balm their own blistered hearts, or to stitch the mercurial rifts that arose between them. For them, she was a place where the fires of damnation licked as a whore’s tongue, anything but the gleaming marvel that Stitti had described. That Carythusal, the man liked to say, “was simply what happened,” a consequence of Men outliving their ancient customs and laws. ‘Souls are born old in that city, boy. Wonder never fights clear of boredom. Men so crowd the edge of fashion that everything is either dead or dying...’
Carythusal was simply what came after, a civilization that had run out of blank scroll, and so began to overwrite what was written. It was a place where anything was allowed so long as it did not impede commerce, where aimlessness was not a crime...
Where indulgence, rather than deprivation, was held to be holy.
A city of wicked Takers.
Where the Virginal Queen could openly boast of wanton liaisons with white-skinned lovers.
§
The Creeping Postern turned out to be a gate hidden in a wooded cleft low upon the Assartine Hill. The guards cavorting there had known him, and snapping into sudden and improbable discipline, they escorted him across the palace grounds. Humid gloom ruled beneath the age-old cypresses. The guards did not so much as glance at him on the way—to protect the dignity of their whorish Queen’s suitors, the barbarian supposed. No one bothered to check the blessor he held clutched in his right hand. His weapons did not seem to be a matter of concern. They brought him to an outbuilding constructed of ancient Shiradi blocks, many of them bearing weathered suns and ciphers, lines of cuneiform text, as liable to be upside down as sideways or right-side up. He was delivered to a low-ceilinged lounge, not so much lavishly furnished as amply. A man dressed in white, gold-trimmed vestments—the garb of the Thousand Temples—stood awaiting him.
‘I am Ûsulares,’ he said in a crystalline yet deep voice. Despite his shaved jaw and cheek, he spoke as a native Ainoni—from the Secharib plains, Eryelk guessed. ‘Shrial Emissary to the Blessed Queen.’
Whale-oil tripods burned between the chairs and settees, allowing the barbarian to study his assessor closely. He had no real lips to speak of, but he possessed a well-groomed beauty reminiscent of Sranc.
‘Priest?’ Eryelk asked.
The merest nod.
‘Collegian?’
A scowl darkened the fine features, but it was merely ornamental. Ûsulares’ eyes twinkled with anticipation—relish even.
‘That abomination, Shinurta,’ he said, ‘did he speak of me?’
Eryelk felt a twinge of surprise, even though he knew the whole city had heard of his abduction by now. All the better, he decided.
‘No.’
‘And the Blessed Queen? Did the blasphemers speak of Our Celestial Lady?’
Eryelk furrowed his brow. ‘The first one did.’
‘You mean Nagamezer. The one you killed in the Third Sun.’
A trill of wonder inflected the man’s voice, and Eryelk realized that Ûsulares genuinely admired what he had done, as he should. The man belonged to the famed College of Luthymae, the arm of the Thousand Temples charged with the prosecution of sorcery. Ûsulares almost certainly possessed the Gift of the Few, the ability to see the Mark, and like Eryelk, he had elected to eschew the accursed power it promised. Unlike Eryelk, however, he had chosen the God of Gods over anything his own hand might deliver. He had gone to Holy Sumna to train and meditate upon the Tractate and the Chronicle of the Tusk, to become a lifelong guardian against the greatest and most terrifying blasphemy of all. Sorcery.
‘Shinurta claimed that Nagamezer survived,’ Eryelk amended.
‘He didn’t, but there’s no way Shinurta could admit as much. As far as the city is concerned, Nagamezer has to be alive, otherwise the Spires would be releasing someone who had murdered one of their own.’
The barbarian shrugged. ‘Regardless, he demanded I let him read this...’ Eryelk brandished the white and wilted blessor.
The Collegian’s gaze clicked to and from the ribbon.
‘And after, when they questioned you in Kiz?’
‘They squeaked like the rats they are, but they said nothing of her.’
‘Did you witness blasphemous acts?’
The most violent Son of Wiglic snorted.
‘You’re the Collegian. You tell me.’
§
Thurror Eryelk had found his way to many caste-noble couches since arriving in Carythusal. The path to Queen Sumiloam’s differed only in luxury and scale. After his interview with Ûsulares, he was taken to the baths, where a small host of slaves scoured all trace of the city from his hair and skin. A pallid scribe inventoried all his belongings before absconding with them. He was then taken to a familial shrine, where he took an oath of discretion before some nonsense idol. More than tw
o watches had expired before two enormous Sansori eunuchs at last led him, dressed in nothing more than a traditional white Shiradi kilt, to meet the Blessed Queen.
The ornamental splendour of the palace proper stupefied the Holca barbarian. The eyes thirst for gleam the way the mouth thirsts for water, and for a soul born upon the very fringe of civilization such as his, the parade of great foil plaques and bejewelled prizes beggared all he had hitherto seen. But he was not so foolish as to be awed by the display. Stitti had always insisted he recall the misery that lay beneath flagrant luxury: the slaves whipped, the artisans maimed, the temples looted. ‘Why else would your kin die to sell me Sranc? Murder, boy. Murder is the mortar of all great works...’
The Palaparrais, he reminded himself, was as much a crypt as a palace. Men had been ground to meal in its making.
Only the pleasure garden contradicted this intimation of death and foundation. Too much earth. Too much life. Lotuses braided the black pools; orchids hung humid in the gloom. Golden censors hazed the porticos with sandalwood and myrrh. The eunuchs led him down a path through the premeditated undergrowth. Walled in by their black-skinned bulk, he marvelled that rats could grow so big. A bucolic grotto opened amid bamboo and silkwood, a circular depression ringed with sumptuous couches, and centred by a black-lacquered table no higher than his shins. High-hanging lanterns waxed behind paper screens. An alternating motif of dragons had been painted across them, throwing ferocious shadows across the coin of marble, violet and crimson. The scent of ambergris and moss haunted the air.
A young man—a boy, really—and a woman he immediately recognized as the Queen reclined across pillows set at opposite sides of the table. A bared sword threaded the golden receptacles that crowded the table between them.
Both eunuchs fell to their knees, scowled fiercely when he remained standing.
The Queen frowned, but the boy seemed not to care in the least. He fairly exploded to his feet, crying, ‘Such an honour! You make a temple of our floor, Sacred Hewer—a temple!’
Sumiloam swivelled her frown toward the youth. ‘This is my husband’s eldest, Horziah,’ she said, camel eyes aflutter. ‘I fear he insisted that he meet you.’
‘And I am dazzled!’ Horziah cried. ‘Look at him, Stepmother! Is he not ferocious to gaze upon?’
Eryelk noted that it was his sword, Vampire, lain so negligently across the table.
‘Hmm. He is indeed.’
‘You are stamped, Northman. Struck in the very mould of War!’
The most violent son of Wiglic snorted. Some Ainoni saw religion in the Pit, something more exalted than apes whooping for the sight of blood. Horziah was one of them.
‘How many have you killed, do you think?’ the adolescent yammered. He did not so much walk as float toward him. ‘I’m sure the likes of you keeps no count, but if you had to guess, how many would you say?’
Earth and muck. He understood jnan better than this greased rat.
‘Sranc or Men?’ the barbarian asked.
Horziah would not survive his vicious inheritance, Eryelk realized. His nature was too daft, too good. The Blessed Queen hugged her bare shoulders, for the same premonition of doom, perhaps—though her eyes remained fixed on Eryelk’s bare torso...
‘Come-come, Horziah!’ she cried, her voice bearing the gentle ire that souls reserve for simple kin. ‘You’ve had your look now!’
‘Perhaps we can dine after, then?’ the boy asked him plaintively. ‘There’s so much I would love to discuss!’
Eryelk stared, witless. For the first time he noticed the semi-circle of figures kneeling behind the surging bamboo—almost a dozen slaves, tucked in their shadowy stations, awaiting the opportunity to appease some whim—eagerly no doubt.
Rats were easily trained.
‘We co-could drink...’ the Prince continued.
§
The Sranc had been screaming in their pens that night. But Eryelk’s ears had always been unnaturally sharp—‘Like a skinny’s,’ Stitti was forever saying. He heard the creak of timbers above, the scuff of boots below. He slipped nude from bed, his hairless hide sizzling for sensation. Grabbing his dead father’s sword, he scampered down the stair, crept through the gloom of the dwindling hearth, through the kitchens, and into the scullery. There he found the slave-trader dressed all in black, fussing over a sack.
‘Where did you go?’ Eryelk asked, his voice shredded for slumber.
Stitti whirled, his eyes shining white from a black-painted face. ‘Boy? Back to your rack!’
‘Your face is sooted. You’re covered in blood.’
A long pause.
‘A sacred rite of my people. One that cannot be spoken of.’
‘Who?’ the boy pressed. ‘Who was it?’
‘Earth and muck. Back to your rack!’
‘Who did you kill?’
Another, even longer pause.
‘Kaman Phiraces,’ Stitti said, not so much as blinking. ‘For a grudge he did not even know existed.’
‘Phiraces... From the trade mission? But they only just arrived.’
‘The grudge has dwelt here for years.’
Young Eryelk regarded him narrowly. ‘You do not sweat. Your eyes do not dart for apprehension... This is something you have done before!’
The very relentlessness of his gaze answered the question.
‘It is time you learned,’ Stitti said.
‘Learned what?’
‘Chirong.’
‘Chirong?’
‘There is more than jnan, boy. More than manner and manoeuvre. More than gaming the benjuka plate.’
The young barbarian lowered his sword—at last. ‘What are you saying?’
The Ainoni’s gaze sharpened. He nodded in the manner of patient and ruthless men.
‘There is blood.’
§
Queen Sumilaom indulged her eldest stepson—the Crown-Prince, no less—but only so far as his muddy wit required. Horziah was one of those useless sons, a boy with a talent for nothing more than dreaming of talents he would never possess, a man who would never be more than a boy in the presence of men. Insulated by his station, forever chasing the lure of his fancy, Horziah simply could not apprehend the grim truth of his place in history and the world. His stepmother went so far as to dismiss him with her waddling eunuchs, and he remained oblivious!
‘My husband’s eldest, I fear, is an idiot.’
Eryelk was always bold with women he was about to bed, no matter what their beauty or station.
‘You risk much, speaking to him as you do.’
She scanned the silent semicircle of attendants about them, for a heartbeat merely.
‘He cannot see for squinting,’ she said.
The Holca snorted. ‘But others can. Skulls like his are stoked as easily as they’re cracked.’
‘What are you saying, barbarian?’
‘That you’ve grown lazy in a world that only seems to indulge careless whims.’
‘You call me lazy? Your Queen?’
He stood with the stern, statuesque immobility he always used to cow his caste superiors. Let them pull on their invisible strings—their jnan. The truths of strength always wins out.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘I call Sumilaom lazy...’
‘You what?’
‘Sumiloam. The woman who possessed the cunning, the care, and the patience to conquer such a place as this.’ He leaned over the foot of her settee, felt the reciprocal tremble that passed through her body. ‘That woman, I wager, would do more than scowl at your recklessness.’
Her eyes narrowed in shining reappraisal. Perhaps, like Horziah, she had loved him before he had arrived. Perhaps she had lain at night yearning for this encounter. But if not, there could be no doubt that she loved him now. Sumilaom was a murderess and a mummer, and with but a single declaration he had exposed her, torn away clothing far more intimate than her glorious, olive skin.
‘
So it’s true,’ she said, speaking more with her breath than her voice. ‘What they say about you.’
‘What do they say about me?’
Her smile was girlish for embarrassment.
‘That you woo as ferociously as you war.’
He placed a great, scarred hand upon the couch’s gilded backbone, loomed above her.
‘Truth,’ he said, ‘can only seem ferocious to a race so bent as yours.’
Heat thickened the grotto between them. She raised a palm, ran it down the idea of his chest and abdomen, rather than touch the blushing skin. Her left knee drifted outward, at once fleeing his proximity, and inviting.
She swallowed. ‘Tell me, Sacred Hewer, is a flower depraved for blooming brighter, broader than those scattered wild across the meadow?’
In the corner of his eye he saw a shadow flit through the lattices of growth, then slip into place among the others arrayed about the grotto’s servile perimeter. Another slave?
He pinned her breasts beneath callused fingers.
‘Not depraved,’ he growled over her moan. ‘Merely weak.’
§
She slipped his embrace, danced to her feet.
‘Come, Barbarian,’ she cried in mischief, her laughter as husky as any man’s. ‘Fill Sumiloam with your wisdom and your cunning. Find reward in serving your Queen!’
Her hair was jet black, pinned and piled into caste-noble absurdity. Her face was more frank than fine, more athletic than fair—it was her eyes that rendered her exceptional, brown and glistening, as large as those on ancient Shiradi statuary. She wore a kitsari of brocaded white-silk that covered her shoulder to ankle, save, of course, for the long, open seam that ran down her left–the side of desire. When she twirled to lead him to one of the larger divans, this one nearer the meridian of shadowy slaves, weights in her hem drew the whole out in a conical sweep, and the dress opened like the curled pages of a book, revealing the oiled glory beneath.
Grimdark Magazine Issue #3 ePUB Page 8