“Have you seen anyone else nearby, someone looking for the cave city very recently?”
“Oh yeah, your friend already went in.” At that, Misling stopped short and raised his voice excitedly.
“It is close?!”
“Yes. But we’re going the wrong way.” Her expression was one of having been helpful despite the circumstances. She pointed in the correct direction and shrugged her shoulders at his consternation. Just as he turned away from her and began in the direction to which she’d urged, Sylhauna grinned.
Inside the massive cave opening, a faded painting of a burning man rose high along a flattened rock wall to the quartz crusted ceiling. Deeper in the sprawling caverns, bathed in electric light strung years ago for tourists, carved stone apartments and storehouses seemingly clung to the walls like thrown mudpies. Massive tunnels riddled the ground in checkerboard fashion under their feet. The nameless city had been abandoned for generations; and common knowledge did not record the significance once held by the burning man image although it recurred in numerous places throughout the ruins.
“I’ll show you. It’s a little creepy through here.”
Sylhauna led the Recorder through to another cave mouth, opening up to a broader view of the sloping hillsides. At the perimeter of Misling’s earshot, Ring was conversing, looking up at a gargantuan and grotesque fat man, easily an eighth as tall as the cavern itself and rolling with flesh. The towering stranger was wrapped in shimmering fabrics in places and bare in others; and perhaps a trick of the light caused his skin to appear a pale green. It was difficult to hear what they were discussing; but the man was evidently intrigued, bowing his massive head low to hear Ring when he spoke.
“Why is he so big?” Misling asked of the girl, who was looking in the same direction and possibly imitating the Recorder’s posture and stance. She glanced at him questioningly.
“Because he eats a lot?” She shrugged.
“It is your charge to play caretaker to this man; and certainly you have been asked before the cause of his uninhibited girth and frame. What answer have you been instructed to provide?”
“I’m asked that a lot, so I try and say something different every time. Except I’ve said that before; and they laughed. I must not have said it right.” Sylhauna pursed her lips idly. “But he does eat a lot. That can’t help.”
As the Recorder stood watching, his hands on his hips, he gradually noticed the odd girl was in fact mimicking his posture. She’d set her bag on the stone floor and was eyeing his thin legs to ensure her stance was similar to his own. Surrendering any notion of gaining context for the conversation, Misling went silently closer such that he could overhear and was followed by Sylhauna. Impossibly, he thought he saw movement from one corner of his eyes; but it vanished when he turned to look.
“Incredible question.” The Rauchka Sniper’s voice was deep and soothing. His face was puffed and round, kind with smiling eyes, but on a head closely as large as an entire man. In fact, his skin was a pale green. Strangely, he smelled lightly both sour and clean like pine or bleach.
“I have loads of them.”
“This is the matter you’ve really brought, yes? I see now your line of conversation led a more direct route than I’d assumed.”
“Yeah, maybe. I liked the chat though. What do you think?”
“The Augur came long before…even so, I can’t quite put this notion of yours quickly away.”
“All solutions develop eventually, yeah?” Ring scratched his eyebrow, leading the dialogue with his tone of voice.
“Inevitably…but to what purpose? Only torture and the tearing of nations resulted. If the Augur were a creature, dependent upon the minds of men for its sustainment, its advancement would require unity and continuity, not havoc. And how would you explain Talgo’s hatred and annihilation of the Rauchka?”
“I don’t have to because I’m not sitting in a cave promoting myself as a guy with big answers.”
“His unleashing of such horror in confrontations with the Clown Prince, Laoka…what would that advance? Still, if the Augur’s nature reflects the nature of man…”
“There you go, that’s what I’m thinking.”
At that, without losing his interested smile, the hulking fellow rolled to his side and vomited something murky which pooled in a crevice and ran in tiny currents toward the cave opening. The Rauchka Sniper continued as if nothing had happened. In fact, he laughed at something that had apparently just occurred to him.
“I am old and strange and speak vaguely, and I am pretty good at sounding wise through hindsight. As a consequence, I’m brought silly questions about baldness and pregnancy, the acquisition of businesses and land and sometimes battleships. I’m asked about gambling and marriages, people whose genitals don’t work. Even so, I’ve had cities founded at my suggestion. In all this, I’ve never been asked a question as profound and new as what you have asked me.”
“Scratch some clay, then, you big green crazy.” Ring gestured to the clay spread within an iron ring, the traditional work area of an event reader. The markings there were roughly smoothed over; and the iron was in places dented and rusty. It was quite a famous site, this circle; and perhaps it was surprising to see it in such disrepair.
In event reading, specialized figures were impressed into the clay with a stylus to reproduce complex dynamics of an event both in the personality types involved and the situational forces acting upon them. The purpose was to draw special insight into the flow of events like simulations in miniature. In the true heyday of event readers, their majestic declarations represented to seekers ecstatic glimpses into the workings of the human universe. In order to understand the Rauchka Sniper’s next reaction, one must know that the revealed and, some would say, sacred method for running those simulations was to flush out similar patterns and transformations from the Pool of Recorders to leverage the repetition of history.
“Hello, Sylhauna.” After this, the Rauchka Sniper glanced to Misling’s forehead tattoo, then back to Ring. His eyes, like eight inch rolling sacks, widened.
“Your Recorder?” The voice was a bass rumble, beautiful. Misling watched Ring carefully, interested no doubt in how Ring would answer the Sniper’s inquiry.
“He’s my buddy. Four lives in his Pool. Knows all kinds of stuff.”
The Rauchka Sniper lowered his incredible head to within the breath of Misling, almost touching foreheads.
“’I thought of the momentum of history as a fast ship on the sea, the wake of decisions rippling through the future as inset circles fluttering on an idle pond…the awesome, secret structure of coincidence tying designs from behind the hanging tapestry, and pulling back… like standing to appraise a chalk drawing, the whole of it falling into wheels within wheels…a clockwork of events the scale of mountains and yet also as the fuzz of an insect stumbling drunk from the flower…and suddenly I saw the shape of history in all its wonder.’ Do you know those words, Recorder?”
“They are said to be the first spoken by the Salt Mystic when she stumbled into the great market, though it is considered unlikely she spoke with such poetry.”
“And you are here, brought by a young man who asks me a question of profound depth which I’ve never before heard, relating to forces and players stressing our very times. A man of faith would say these are signs of turning points. But there aren’t men of faith anymore, are there?”
Ring glanced to his side suddenly as Misling had done earlier when he thought he’d seen someone there. Misling noticed, perhaps Sylhauna as well; but the Sniper continued.
“Strange that we haven’t seen any signs of turning points in the figures, Sylhauna. Maybe your old fat teacher is too unplugged from the real world. Obsolete and forgotten, yes? If the inputs to the figures are false, then so is the reading.” He leaned over again and vomited as before, yet this time wiped the remnant from his mouth against a fleshy, rolling shoulder. Sylhauna motioned for them to sit on some oversized cushions closer to t
he iron ring, then handed them each a piece of cream-yellow fruit. She drew a net from an adjacent pool which held orange tea in glass bottles chilled in the mountain water and offered them. They declined to drink.
“Little Recorder, whose lives are in your Pool?”
“Duke Exeter of Sarling in the days of the Brewing, Court Poet Phianna in the early days of Naraia, and Under Governors Faring of the Southern Red Witch Annex and Delton of the Fountain City.”
“Delton!” The Rauchka Sniper’s huge face grimaced. “Delton was a spoiled and feckless irritant! How on earth did he rate a Recorder?”
Misling’s face inappropriately showed his intrigued fascination and puzzlement at the implications, a fact which amused the Rauchka Sniper deeply and calmed his irritation. Sylhauna was impatient and short with the Recorder’s slowness to dawn.
“One of the memories in your head is of meeting him when he looked different. Are you going to be able to keep up?”
“Fascinating, how the shape unfolds.”
Ring chuckled as Sylhauna sat up quickly, a mischievous grin broadening, “Why don’t you tell him your name?”
“I came to this cave to escape that name, dear heart. Whether it’s a wheel or a force bringing it back to me, I’ll not open the door for its return.” At that, he playfully lowered his massive head towards her and smiled.
“I wasn’t a sniper then.”
The huge and mysterious man rolled his body over a couple of times till he dropped into the black pool, circled by a stone wall and steps engraved with images of a burning man and raised symbols. They could still see him from their vantage point at the iron ring, although only his head was above the water. The splashing and ripples of the water made lapping noises in the cave, joined by the gentle whistle of a breeze blowing through from the cave opening.
“I don’t know the other three. You must be an inexpensive Recorder. Are you unbound, or attached to this mysterious smiling young man who brings me fascinating questions?”
“This Recorder is bound to Goodman Farmilion of the living theater, and was tasked to attend this visitation.” Misling eyed the giant with his head cocked slightly, trying to place the face and voice unsuccessfully.
“He was lost outside.” Sylhauna saw fit to add this.
“So are we right now, dear heart. You know, I dealt with him as most like me did, this Talgo you’re asking about…long ago. He was a cruel general; but his times were very cruel as well. Is it unfair to judge him under our own values when so much has moved on?”
“Are you sure you’re not rambling?” Ring flicked a pebble out into the valley idly.
“The core player was a strongman, no doubt, backed by two whisperers and a tinker embraced in mystique” Sylhauna smiled, kicked off her boots and squatted in the dun clay, madly sketching out the requisite figures with a curved soapstone stylus.
“Opposing was a reluctant strongman and libertine spearheaded by dreamers, rebels, and whisperers.” Much of what the Rauchka Sniper described hereafter, though couched in the sacred runes and language of event readers, was common knowledge of events following the War of the Rupture and how Marshal Cassian and Judge Wentic came to rule the largest remaining pieces of what was once a cosmopolitan world government. His rushed descriptions formed a complex web of heroes, thieves, philosophers and clowns, the key personalities of those times leading to these, locked into a cuneiform design in clay that to a trained eye clearly formed forces driving these events by their arrangement and relative orientation.
Misling leaned delicately in as the Sniper solicited similarly oriented events from his own Pool, caught up in the beauty of a well-designed and informed reading very much in alignment with the hallmark principles and rules taught by the Salt Mystic herself so long ago. It was an intense and moving experience, solemn in its immensity of purpose; and in such readings one prone to fantasy and daydreaming could almost hear the roaring of machines and furious passions, the cries for mothers and lost loves, and the joy of the events indwelled in those strange clay impressions. As a result, none of the group recognized that Ring had in fact wandered off.
After some time when the creative and intellectual rush had faded, they paused to consider and process what the group had made. Sylhauna hopped out of the sod-brown circle gingerly and stretched her back, then looked around for Ring.
“What was his question?”
Misling scanned around himself, then mumbled something under his breath. The Rauchka Sniper had rolled his pale green flesh once again out of the well to gain a vantage of the figures. His expression, though smeared in its size and roundness, was clearly one of dawning surprise.
“Recorder, this fellow with whom you travel…is he familiar with your language and ways?”
“Moreso than is common, yes.” Misling creased his forehead, folding the black and red design thereon. The Rauchka Sniper was lost in the figures, and possibly amazed at the intensity and clarity with which they had developed them. After a long and curious time where nothing was said for lack of direction on what could be said, the massive jiggling man broke into a fit of loud laughter that echoed across the abandoned cave city.
“What’s that? Are we done?” Ring’s sluggish voice came from outside, where he’d evidently been sleeping perched overlooking the wide valley. Awakened by the deep laughter, he clumsily flopped himself inside the opening. He’d slipped off his own boots and taken off his shirt to sun himself outside.
“Ooh.” They watched curiously as he knelt beside the clay work area and examined the hieroglyphics thereon. The Sniper was chuckling, such that he was almost crying. Ring looked them over, then before crouching closely in as one would a fire on a winter’s evening, he scratched his chin.
“Right, so this bit here…this is the meat right here, isn’t it?” With his stiffened thumb, he pointed out one of the figures and circled a curved symbol adjacent to it, drawing flaky stubs of clay. Quickly, he twisted to have a look at the final figures they’d drawn, those representing the forces and players of their own times.
“What was your question?” Misling asked him, clearly intrigued but suspicious of gaining an answer. Ring looked at the Sniper, still chuckling from his own perch, and pointed. He grinned as well because laughing was clearly contagious for him.
“What’s the big guy laughing at?”
The Rauchka Sniper cleared his throat, calmed himself somewhat, then got his companion’s attention, “Sylhauna, I believe you should join this fellow and his Recorder. You should go wherever they go and listen. He’s sure to turn the world upside down; and you might as well be there to see it.”
Ring’s eyes widened as he looked at Misling, casting an expression intended to say, ‘I told you’.
“What was his question?” Sylhauna’s face showed surprise, maybe frustration.
“Old man Talgo is long dead; and his sons are ruling, his grandsons possibly on the rise. The Augur has eroded into a dusty antique, visited only by the superstitious and the foolish not unlike myself. Both should be irrelevant and yet strangely are not. His question was whether the Talgo family’s mystique is a tool of or product of the Augur, or perhaps its master.”
“And your answer?” Her expression softened as if she didn’t even understand the question; but his laughter broke out again.
“I don’t know, my sweet girl. I just don’t know.”
She looked at Ring as if for the first time. Misling had stepped back from the group, eyeing events from his more typical distance, unobtrusively. Ring actually started to say something to her; but she at once mumbled something about having to pack and walked past him to climb down into one of the tunnels.
“That’s a bit of a cop-out, you know?” Ring had stepped closer to the Sniper, leaning against a copper column made green in verdigris. “I mean, we came all this way.”
The Sniper shrugged, “Isn’t why you came.”
Ring smiled briefly then changed his tone of voice, “Do you miss it…shooting people from
buildings and stuff?”
The Sniper was examining Ring’s face distractedly; and didn’t at all answer the question, “It really is amazing.”
“Yes, it is. Do you miss it, I said? Being a sniper.”
“I do not. In fact, I have a higher and better purpose in doing this. I have been at it for some time now; and I can say now why the Augur works so well.”
“And why’s that?”
“They come to me and tell everything...both sides of every conflict, rattling off what they want and what they’re afraid of. It’s a comedy at which I must nod and sound supernatural as I repeat what I hear back to them. I would be useless if they’d just address this rot to each other rather than to me.”
“Well you could stop throwing up. That’s disgusting.” Ring scratched his cheek idly.
“You’re going to the Augur next?”
When Ring nodded, the Sniper touched his shoulder cautiously, his fingers like a man’s calves, “There are no secrets there.”
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