Salabasq
J Simon
I
In distant Sa’bahr, there lived a Sultan who loved stories. His magicians taught his treasure to tell every story ever told, each coin in its reedy little voice telling a different tale of breathtaking adventure. When the notorious thief Fanye Silverheart stole his treasure, the enraged Sultan sent eighty thousand men after her. The disfigured twin growing out of his back, the anti-Sultan, sent fourteen thousand armored camels, nineteen hundred battle elephants, and eighty-three ferocious tigers. The Lord of All Birds sent a mere few million of his darting, slashing minions, their beaks sharpened and their feathers dipped in iron. And fish? Why not! Brave fish warriors darkened the land with their flopping, gasping masses. And frogs! Frogs by the millions descended upon Fanye Silverheart, dancing poisonously on their enemies’ tongues and deafening the world with incessant croaking! Oh, and spiders! Their swords may be small, but who can parry eight strokes at once?
Fanye Silverheart clutched the treasure to her, but the battle never came. Her pursuers had come for the stories, not the treasure. They knew what was important. But when all the world’s stories had been stuffed safe into a leather sack, there was a problem. They hadn’t counted on there being one more story—this one—and the sack wasn’t big enough to hold them all. It exploded. Stories poured out into the world, and the proof of it is, they constantly stomp upon our tongues and force us to shout them out in pain. Someday, perhaps, they’ll find their way home—but hopefully not today.
Strange how few stories our conquerors, the Majeri, seem to have. What is Serzhen but a tiny speck to be added to their greatness, a desert land of helpless savages crying out to be pacified? Lies must be cut from our tongues; our vibrant colors must be plastered over with plain and inoffensive white; our stories must be stuffed into a sack and forgotten. I defy them. Let irrigation summon an unexpected bounty from this arid land. Let cunning old men and wily widows tie the world into knots with their fractured logic. Let artists and philosophers speak dreams into being with such demented conviction that, beholding them, riddle-asking sphinxes hang their tongues up in shame. If we tell enough tales, I’m sure, our would-be conquerors will be quite surprised when a dusty old sack explodes and flings them to the moon.
So it is told, and so it must be…
* * *
Is there any place more delightfully frustrating than the back streets of Durbansq? Trails twist in impossible directions, splitting and looping without warning. On every side, houses glow with joy and life, painted every unique color of their inhabitant’s souls—covered with the paint-splat handprints of children, some of them, or illustrated with scenes from bizarre and quite possibly apocryphal animal fables. You can walk under arches that bubble and split into thousands of smaller arches, while overhead sway creaking, cantilevered greenhouses that hover over the street without ever quite falling.
On this day, leading my family through Durbansq was even more difficult than usual. It was just past the Time of Rains—that time when water pours from the sky and the whole universe turns to mud, when children with seed-covered feet dance beauty into the ground until it can’t help but explode in a mad excess of flowers. The flowers may have been fading as dryness and heat returned, but they were still everywhere, and it was hard to find a way around them. Who could just step on something so delicate and precious? Granted, a flower—having brought so much joy and happiness into the world—must, upon dying, be immediately reincarnated as an even bigger, more spectacular flower, but that new flower might also be able to speak and command bees. I, for one, object to being pollinated against my will.
“He’s lost again,” Eyla said wryly.
“Aris is a good boy,” Mother said. “He’s leading us in circles on purpose, knowing that the tale of our journey will prove far more fascinating if one of us starves to death.” She glanced at her daughter-in-law. “Any volunteers?”
“Bah!” Eyla said. “Starving is boring. If Aris truly loved me, he’d humbly beg me to punch him in the nose. Drama all over the place!”
“I’m not so sure you should. Aris needs his face,” Father said stoutly, then paused. “Or does he? Would a nose with twice the nostrils appreciate roses twice as much?”
“Let’s find out!”
I rolled my eyes. Eyla is small and canny, with a grin like The Cat Who Built A Nest On Its Tongue, and I sometimes think she was born when a djinni accidentally sculpted the world’s supply of fire powder into the shape of a girl. Light her off and she explodes—and, sometimes, fills the sky with a blazing, burning glory of drifting embers. Don’t ask why I married her. Ask why I haven’t strapped her to my back and filled my hair with matches.
“I’m not lost,” I said mildly. “Everything I do is right. I’m just too polite to point out all the mistakes that Reality keeps making. For example, if the world were a true and perfect place, there would be a road right there,” I said, pointing at a spiralling, terraced tower of miniature gardens. “Damn you, Reality!”
“Right,” Eyla said. “New plan. Let’s set Aris on fire!”
Mother glanced at her. “How will that get us out of here?”
“Oh, I’m resigned to the fact that there’s no way out,” Eyla said, grinning. “Now it’s time to focus on entertainment!”
It felt a little like giving up, but I pursed my lips and whistled a trilling, swooping snatch of song, one I used when I was still young enough to be a messenger. Faintly, a similar song answered me. I followed it, occasionally stopping to whistle and listen for the response as I led my family down a street I’m fairly certain didn’t exist. It might have been a year since the streets were moved during the Truth Wars, but I still get lost far too often. How do the residents find their way home? Do they just blunder back and forth until they’re too exhausted to go on, then fall into a house and declare themselves married to whoever’s inside?
We finally emerged at the northern edge of the Artists’ Quarter, one of the poorest parts of Durbansq. I spotted the person who’d been answering my whistles, a messenger-girl ensconced in a circle of sick and degenerate gamblers. Or, given that my mother’s father the Sheyk Sindba was one of them, perhaps I should say that they were brave and noble individuals, nursing poor sick coins through an ordeal of glittering golden pus and tiny numismatic sneezes by means of selflessly passing them around and around a circle of odds-chanting healers.
“Aris!” Sindba cried. A tall dark man who had once led his tribe across the Qabdi desert, the Sheyk grinned as he strode over to us. Eyla tried to grab his sword—a Qabdi weapon for a Qabdi man, since we Serzhi don’t carry such things—but he turned swiftly and she ran into him instead. Looking disgruntled, she tried to pretend she’d been going for a hug all along.
“Grandfather Sindba,” Eyla said.
“Perverted progeny of a fatherless goat,” he replied, then did a double-take. “Oh, Eyla—it’s you! My sincerest apologies. I retract the word ‘degenerate’.”
“One of these days, I will get you,” she promised—but she was smiling.
The five of us headed north. Everywhere I looked were fading flowers, along with the surprisingly large miniature boats left abandoned by children when the waters receded, many of them complete with sails and cannons. There were also countless people simply out conducting their day’s business—gambling, gossiping, trading, singing. A few enterprising individuals managed to do all four at once.
Suddenly, silence fell with the heavy thud of a clockwork concubine shrugging the copper cloak from her supple (if ticking) shoulders. A pair of soldiers swept down the street, men of Majra, white-painted armor clicking and clacking with every step. Lies are not permitted in the occupied city of Durbansq. Gamblers hid their hands, gossips fell silent, hawkers abruptly forgot their sales-songs. Where only one note is allowed, there is no music; where only one color is permitted, there are no paintings; where only one meaning inflects their words, it’s a wonder people can speak at all. The soldiers went from person to person—assessing taxes, extracting fines, taking away seller’s stamps if a merchant was judged noncompliant. I averted my eyes. The Majeri are almost fanatically lawbound, even to the point where I—an aspiring lawbringer—can sometimes strangle them with their own rules and rescue my people from their worst excesses. Later on, I could defend my people before the justicemongers, but here, now, there was nothing I could do. It still felt terrible to stand by and do nothing.
“If I had a sword…” Eyla muttered.
“You’d kill them all,” I assured her.
“Bah. Too easy. I’d slice them to bits and reassemble the pieces until they had to fart to speak and vice versa. Then I’d feed them the world’s largest bean and wait for hilarity to ensue.”
“In their esteemed homeland of Majra,” I mused, “truth is so prized that people can only speak those words that—out of all the words in the universe—are the most true. Just imagine, an entire nation screaming ‘EYLA IS GREAT!!!’ over and over again, struggling to make themselves understood through inflection alone!”
“I’m beginning to remember why I married you.”
I tapped my chin thoughtfully. “Of course, those are also the words they’d have to scream at the utmost height of passion…”
“Aaand, I just forgot again.”
In the northwest corner of Durbansq, the holy grove stands surrounded by a crumbling wall. That wall has been painted over a thousand times, by children and parents and artists alike; knocked apart to make way for trees and vines and flowers, the fallen stones used to build perfectly tended miniature gardens; and its pieces broken and rearranged into impromptu artworks that are half inspiration and half serendipity. It’s wild and beautiful, this wall, so much a part of Durbansq that it’s hard to remember the Majeri built it. Some things are more corrosive, even, than acid, and the patient defiance of an entire people seems to be one of them.
I slipped through a gap in the wall, pausing to savor a garden whose flowers twined one about the next like the gemlike tales-within-tales of insane island mystics. The five of us entered the holy grove, and the bustle and noise of the city vanished instantly. No sound reached my ears but the sigh of waving branches, no sight greeted my eyes but the grand soaring columns of ancient trees. The holy grove isn’t large: How can it be so utterly apart from the world?
We soon reached the center of the grove. In a clearing were a small hutch, a fire pit, and a sole bench—plus a hundred or more people milling about. It was a most unusual thing to see in a place of such peace and solitude. On the bench sat a man who was the very picture of timeless wisdom, serenity and grace graven into every line of his aged face. Gaja Vidur—the wisest man in the world—stood, eyes sparkling with something that, in anyone less perfect, I would have thought was mischief. In him, I’ll just assume it was a form of wisdom far too advanced for me to comprehend.
He raised his arms, waiting for the crowd to fall silent. “Please do forgive me, my wonderful and precious friends, but I regret to inform you that I died some days ago!” he said. “Please excuse anything licentious and perverted I may do. Death throes. Not my fault.”
“HOW DID YOU DIE?!” someone shouted.
“I bent over to sniff a pretty flower,” Vidur said. “What? Not enough? Did I mention the nectar I accidentally inhaled? What about the horde of morally questionable bees that grabbed me by the nose, flew me halfway across the world, and filled my nostrils with the world’s most evil honey? How about the brigand swordsmen I sneezed on, thus sweetening them into the world’s most evil candy, which I sold to a horde of veil-dancer girls, who—also being evil—intended to lick free swords enough to drown the world in blood and slaughter? And how I gambled with them for the fate of the world, and lost, first my money and then my clothes, whereupon I danced about and mocked the evil bees until they stung me repeatedly, causing certain parts of my naked body to swell to ridiculous size, thus paralyzing the evil veil-dancer girls with howls of laughter, after which I defeated them by pushing them over with my littlest finger? Subsequent to which I sniffed another flower, filled my nose with nectar, and let good bees fly me back home again?” Gaja Vidur paused. “Wouldn’t you know it, after all that, I tripped and broke my neck on the way to the privy and died. But feel free to assume it was an evil privy, and I was on my way to do unspeakable things to it!”
“You’re dead, eh? How terribly sad,” Eyla said laconically. “Guess we’d better get rid of the corpse before it starts to stink. WHO’S READY FOR THE FUNERAL!!”
A hundred people screamed their approval, and thus began the funeral of Gaja Vidur.
The feasting. The dancing. The burlap knots of fire powder hurled into the air, thence to explode into bursts of shockingly colorful embers that swirled upon the breeze as they sifted slowly back to earth. Happily shouting children flung flowers at each other in a half-game, half-battle whose rules seemed to change by the moment. Muscular men grunted and raised logs into a funeral pyre three stories high on which Gaja Vidur’s surprisingly active corpse sat and kicked his legs and mocked everyone for not honoring him highly enough. What could we do? We drank more, ate more, danced faster, shot fire powder higher. All around the clearing hung great sheets of paper perhaps twice the height of a man, supposedly works of the Paper Genius herself. Occasionally a burning ember struck the paper, causing small burns but not much else. Then a spark hit the right spot. Evidently the paper was impregnated with highly flammable chemicals, but only in certain places. Fire roared across the paper, blazing with every color a wounded sunset has ever bled, and suddenly a galloping horse engraved itself there in searing flame. The lines were stylized and simple, yet somehow the horse was so real you could practically see its muscles strain, its sweat fly. Then the whole sheet of paper went up in a fiery flash and there was nothing left. Eyla whooped and started flinging fire powder at the other sheets. One by one they caught fire, revealing dragons and camels, sphinxes and sultans, island fish and riddle-asking turtles, all of them blazing bright and then gone in an instant.
At last the funeral celebration began to wind down: It was time for the speeches, one person after another explaining what Gaja Vidur had meant to them. The corpse sat atop his pyre, chin on his hands, embarrassed yet pleased to hear so many words of gratitude and praise. Mother told the story of how he’d helped her capture my Father, who had been rather startled to wake up one morning and find himself married to her. Sheyk Sindba told the story of how age and infirmity had forced him surrender leadership of his tribe and come to Serzhen, where he felt himself a burden on his family until Gaja Vidur, among others, replaced his eyes with delectable grapes and taught him all over again how to see. I think my own eyes must also have been grapes, for there were parts of his story that made them yearn to leak wine. Finally it was my turn. I climbed the pyre, the dozens of stories I’d meticulously prepared vanishing instantly from my mind.
“Ah… well…” I turned to Gaja Vidur. “People treasure you so much, apparently, that if we lacquered your dead body, it would make for the world’s most hideous coin…?”
Gaja Vidur grinned at me. “You are perspicacity itself,” he said generously, “to the confusion of sages around the world who have suddenly found tiny copies of you lodged in their ears.”
I laughed, the stress draining from my shoulders. “It is and is not,” I said, “but there was once a mighty wizard who learned to create life. Meat requires maggots, and Lo!—we have maggots. Mud requires frogs, and Lo!—we have frogs. Thus did he hire a blacksmith to craft minuscule brass cities the size of barley-corns. A city requires people to inhabit it, and Lo!—they appeared—minuscule brass people with glowing gemstones for hearts! The wizard laughed coldly and declared himself their god. But the blacksmith—ah! He was fascinated by these tiny people, and befriended them, and celebrated their triumphs, and mourned their losses. No one noticed when the wizard died, but when the blacksmith died, a thousand thousand motes of brass flew before and behind his body in an honor guard of gleaming metal, and more gemstone hearts than the sky has stars pulsed in unison their light of mourning.” I smiled. “Gaja Vidur never got caught up in his supposed greatness. He never declared himself a god, as he surely could have. He merely loved us all, never demanding anything in return. Inexplicably, our bodies are opaque, but if we all contrived to burp at once, I think he’d be quite surprised at the pulsing light of love shining from each and every one of our open mouths.”
The next person stood up to speak. I climbed down to Eyla but paused on the verge of kissing her, unsure whether I should subject Gaja Vidur to that particular strain of perversion. But then, I figured, if he really was the world’s wisest man, he’d understand the contrition in my heart, in which case I could freely…
Tired of waiting, Eyla climbed me like a tree and kissed me—hard. I turned a very bright shade of red—but did not, you’ll notice, push her away. I think we must assume that I was too shocked and horrified to move. Yes. That certainly seems likely.
I finally managed to break away. “Ah,” I said, turning an even deeper shade of red as my parents approached. “Mother. Father. A lovely afternoon, wouldn’t you say?”
“More to the point,” Eyla said, “don’t you think Aris ought to give every coin he has to his sweet, harmless, obedient little wife?”
“Most certainly!” Mother said. “Where is she, and what have you done with her?”
A last few people were still paying tribute to Gaja Vidur, but their words suddenly fled my ears. Standing before me was Sar Efrem, the richest and most powerful man in Durbansq, grand in size, effortlessly intimidating. His vast wealth and cunning mind were two of our surest defenses against Majra—yet for every scheme I’d convinced him to fund, I had a dozen more sitting fallow for want of money. What should I do? Beg for coin like every other supplicant who came to him, or merely enjoy his company as an equal and a friend?
Eyla let go of me and bounded over to hug her father. I managed a hesitant smile.
“Aris,” he said solemnly. “You’re looking well. Too well. Seeing your peerless face, a man could feel his heart swell with longing until he found himself imprisoned inside his own colossal, wet, beating heart. I can only assume this is some arcane form of attack. Try to be less appealing!”
“Sar Efrem,” I said, bowing. “Apparently my eyes are idiots, for they continue to obtusely insist that a man so excellent as yourself, somehow, isn’t made of gold.”
He smiled wryly. “Come you to demand my wealth and steal my treasure?”
“Never, my lord! As it happens, a very tiny djinni has taken up residence in my heart, where—pummeled by unceasing heartbeats—she’s become confused into continuously granting wishes. Gold springs up beneath my feet, gems accumulate like sleep-sand in my eyes. My wealth breaks yours on its knee. You cannot bribe me, you cannot move me. I ask nothing but your tales and your lies.”
“I am delighted to hear it,” he said generously, putting his hand on my shoulder and leading me back toward the fire. “There is much we need to do. Gaja Vidur, they tell me, is dead, though a man who happens to look just like him may enjoy a pleasant retirement wandering from porch to porch, savoring the hospitality of one and all. Such is life. But how can a city as large and illustrious as Durbansq have no Gaja, when cities half our size boast three or four sages of transcendent wisdom?”
“If meat generates maggots and mud generates frogs, surely the holy grove itself generates wise old men,” I suggested, “and if we kept removing them, it would keep making more. Soon, we’d have thousands! We could start selling wise old men at a silver a throw!”
Sar Efrem rubbed his temples. “Talking to you is like getting an intimate examination from a puppet doctor. Futile, painful, and faintly ridiculous. Even so…” He raised his arm, flipping his hand in a summoning gesture. The funeral must have ended, for Gaja Vidur walked over and stood on his left. Sheyk Sindba walked over and stood on his right. Sar Efrem watched me keenly.
“I think we can all agree that Aris is perceptive,” he said. “Some would liken that to the beginnings of wisdom.”
Gaja Vidur nodded. “But what will he do when his subjects don’t want his advice? People rarely open their ears to those uncomfortable and unwelcome facts that require them to change. Sometimes it takes a tiny rhetorical lightning bolt to shock people into paying attention to such stark and unwelcome words. Does Aris care enough to dance around naked in front of his horrified victims, splattering them with insightful wickedness and salubrious abuse?”
“Huh?” I asked.
“Aris,” Gaja Vidur said, putting his hands on my shoulders and gazing into my eyes, “I’ve taught you everything I know, assuming that I was recently brained with a rock and forgot everything. But tell me: If a woman came to you, weeping, because her husband had beaten her—again—what would you tell her?”
I hesitated, thinking it over. “I’m reminded of a story…”
“She comes to you again the next day. Weeping. So do her neighbors, confirming what she says. So, even, do her husband’s parents.”
“In distant Shamar…”
“She comes to you again.”
“It is and is not…”
“And again.”
“You’re not giving me time!”
Gaja Vidur stepped back. “Aris is a wonderful boy,” he said wistfully. “Forgive my unbent words, but he is loved, and it is not difficult to see why. Still, it is clear that he will not be a Gaja during my lifetime.”
“Or mine,” I said ruefully.
Gaja Vidur glanced slyly at me. “When that woman came to me, I told her that she was a widow, and recommended eight of the biggest, burliest men I knew to chase the screaming, fleeing corpse of her husband so they could drag it back to the funeral pyre. They failed,” he noted, “but neither did his corpse ever return to Durbansq.”
“Me!” Eyla cried, bouncing on her toes. “I’d be a fabulous Gaja! Give me the test! I’ll murder anyone you want, I swear! I’m just that benevolent!”
“A dog has a thorn in its paw,” Gaja Vidur said. “What do you do?”
“Before or after I cut off its paw? Hey, where are you going? Did I forget to mention that I repeatedly set it on fire? Wait! If I killed everyone in the world who wasn’t me, you wouldn’t have a choice—you’d have to make me Gaja! That means I passed, right?”
Gaja Vidur and Sar Efrem left. “I feel morally obligated to do this,” Sheyk Sindba said, drawing his sword and menacing Eyla with it. She tried to clasp the blade between her hands so she could steal it, but he simply flipped the sword around and sheathed it.
“Will you be supping with us tonight?” I asked the Sheyk. “Father has invented several new breeds of rose you really must see. Lantern roses that would float off into the sky but for the stems that tether them. Whitesilk roses so pristine that a princess springs from the earth wherever a petal falls, even if only a Princess of Toads. The incomparable lacuna rose, where each stem leads to empty space, since no reality could be as perfect as the roses of one’s imagination.”
Sheyk Sindba laughed. “Ah, but a demented fool who looks just like Gaja Vidur has invited me to wander from porch to porch with him, however many years it takes to see them all. I just might do it!”
“I wish I could join you,” I said wistfully. “Well, I’ll see you the next time I argue before the City Assemblage.”
Sindba made a face. “Which would be a far finer thought if I knew when we were having our next meeting. Being a member… it’s an honor, I suppose, but an empty one. We never do anything.”
I nodded in commiseration. Though technically in charge of Durbansq, the City Assemblage is notoriously slow. If it’s action you want, you’d better have someone wealthy and important, like Sar Efrem, on your side.
“Just send me a message the next time your wandering leads you somewhere close,” I told Sindba.
Eyla grinned. “Keep in mind, Aris didn’t say what should be in the message, just that you should send one. You could send him a thousand-page manuscript of calumnies so insulting, they’d make his eyes gasp in horrified harmony!”
Sheyk Sindba grinned. “Or I could write a sole, magnificently obscene word over and over again a thousand times. Which, if Aris truly loved me, he’d proudly read—as loud as he could!—to one and all in the middle of Market Street.”
“I’m beginning to regret not being more specific,” I muttered. Sindba laughed and hugged me again. Eyla went for his sword, and pretended she’d just been trying to jump into his arms when he took a single step to the side.
* * *
If you want proof that the Time of Rains recently tried to drown the world, just look at the miniature boats lying abandoned along the edges of Craftholder Street, or the fading flowers that gout profusely from gardens, yards, and even the roofs of buildings that children industriously seeded through the long dry months. Eyla and I walked arm in arm, resisting the temptation to venture into the shops. One old crafter sang songs of wonder, as pertained (with an odd specificity) to leather. Great multicolored umbrellas spun grandly in the breeze in front of another shop, their colored shadows overlapping like stained glass come to life for the purpose of making artists howl with jealousy. In front of a third shop, puppets displayed an odd propensity to ascend into heaven when they happened to wear the right sort of hat.
The singer suddenly fell silent. The puppets vanished behind their cabinet. The umbrellas continued to spin inexplicable masterpieces into being. Turning, I saw dozens of white-clad soldiers marching down the street—Majeri, of course.
“Let me kill them,” Eyla said fervently. “If I spun their heads around fast enough, they wouldn’t even realize they were dead until twelve separate doctors had been baffled by the fact that their bodies were on backwards!”
“Bide,” I said quietly.
“I could do it.”
“I know you could. But merely killing Majeri isn’t the answer, here. Removing their hearts actually makes them better at serving out the dry and heartless strictures of Truth.”
“There is that,” Eyla admitted.
I grimaced as the soldiers neared, knowing there was nothing more I could do for her. Majeri law sees women as incomplete semi-humans incapable of making their own decisions: No woman could ever be a lawbringer, fighting the Majeri directly with rules and writs. Should I tell Eyla, then, to stand with her head bowed, passively waiting for a man to save her? Say, rather, that I enjoy having a torso, and would like to continue doing so. Eyla and others, including my mother, have decided that—if the law doesn’t respect them—they need not respect the law. Devious, criminal and deranged, the Black Cabal has spread its strangling fibers throughout the city, determined to correct by force what the law dares not.
“Hey! HEY!” Eyla shouted at the nearest soldier. “I’M ONE OF THE DREAD SECRET LEADERS OF THE BLACK CABAL!”
“Can’t they ever speak the truth?” he grumbled. He pulled a tiny book from his pocket, bound to him on an even tinier chain. “‘Seeing that which is true, no mind can deny it, but gratefully accepts that singular proof of GOD’.”
Eyla turned to me. “The Majeri teach me so much,” she said under her breath. “Every time they order me to sit still and behave, I confess, so many insults leap to my tongue, I spontaneously learn three new languages just to accommodate them all!”
Sad to say, the soldiers weren’t on Craftholder Street to savor the sensual dance of seduction between flower and bee. They moved swiftly and decisively into certain specific shops one after another, as if someone had told them exactly what to look for. They seized cache after cache of forbidden goods, and often the offending shopkeepers, too.
I sighed, turning to Eyla. “If you’d forgive my unbent words—”
“No,” she said, her eyes dancing. “I refuse. I will never, ever forgive you for refusing to clothe your words in tales and lies until they’re whimsical enough to dance me around the jealous moon. But would you forgive my unbent words?”
“In my memories,” I promised, “extremely tiny birds built nests between your teeth, and every word washed over me like a refreshing spit-spray of brilliantly befeathered wonderment.”
Eyla smirked. “I have to go. The Black Cabal will need to know about this.”
“I should go, too. Whatever the Majeri are up to, I have to be there to challenge it.”
“You spoke plainly!” Eyla gasped.
I looked at her oddly. “How can you tell over all the tweeting coming from between your teeth?”
“All right,” she said judiciously. “I’ll forgive you… this time.”
I fell in behind the Majeri as they headed back toward their compound. The center of Durbansq is a glorious, beautiful, and peaceful place. In my memories. Guards and swords, threats and punishments—these are a violence to the delicate things of the world. A great and glorious park used to occupy the heart of Durbansq. The Majeri did away with that foolishness when they seized it for themselves. They ripped out all life and enclosed what remained in walls of pallid stone, their daunting halls squatting upon the barren earth like monuments of sun-bleached bone, each the same as the last.
I showed my passbook and entered the main courtyard. No flowers grew between its white-painted stones, no trees shaded its soaring white buildings. In a way, I think, it’s daring of the Majeri to present such vast unadorned expanses of white to the world. They’re like a whole constellation of canvases each demanding its own masterpiece. Perhaps I should warn the Majeri not to paint their buildings so provocatively, lest a band of feral artists rush forth and splatter the world with paint, driven beyond the limits of sanity by such a profligate display of inchoate potential.
“Passbook?” the door guard asked. I showed it to him and was duly admitted to Justicemonger’s Hall.
I walked down a series of stifling, windowless hallways. A veil-dancer girl, with all of her teasing promises, can make it hard to breathe. So can the heat and humidity of Justicemonger’s Hall. Had I made the right choice? Considering that I am, as yet, unmurdered by Eyla, perhaps I had. Most of the Majeri I passed were of the Aspiring class, and fanatically lawbound: If any of them saw a signed and witnessed piece of paper declaring that he didn’t exist, I’m sure he’d obediently fall over dead. I could battle any one of them word against word, law against law. It was those of the Exalted class I needed to avoid.
“Ah, Aris. I thought I might find you here.”
The man who stepped from the shadows was Dhrevos Scarb, Chief of Mission for all Durbansq. What could be more evil than a man who isn’t evil at all? There should be pleasure in hating a villain. He should delight in his wickedness, cruelty dripping from every word of his mocking speeches. To my eternal disappointment, Dhrevos Scarb is just a man doing the necessary work of pacifying us lying savages.
I bowed as shallowly as I could without giving offense. “Your will, my lord?”
“Come with me. Quickly, now.”
He started down the hall, sweat glinting on his balding head, but I stayed where I was.
“Begging your forgiveness, my lord, but a lawbringer cannot be interrupted in his duties. Regulation seven-six-four clearly states…”
Dhrevos Scarb stopped. “Are you telling me what to do?” he said quietly. “More to the point, do you imagine that you—a provisional and special member of the Aspiring class—could bandy words with an Exalted like me?”
“All men are equal before the law,” I said piously.
“We are not equals,” Scarb said, anger flaring in his eyes. “I will provide as many lessons as needed until that particular fact is embedded so deep in your mind that it is inescapable even to one of your limited—” He stopped himself. “Enough. Come with me and do as I say.”
“Much better!” I said, impressed. “A little maniacal laughter and you’ll have it down exactly!”
“What?”
“Nothing, my lord.”
I followed him up a flight of stairs and into the realm of the Majeri Exalted. The wealth on display was beyond belief, each chamber heaped with riches seized from Sar Efrem and others. Some of the pieces I recognized. Modesty prohibited the Exalted from showing off their own wealth, but displaying what they’d seized was apparently “educational” and “morally instructive” to people like me, and therefore permitted. I felt like throwing up, if only to see a kaleidoscope of barfing Arises reflected in a hundred highly polished surfaces at once.
We finally entered Scarb’s personal office. He sat down behind a desk bristling with pointy golden statuary. He did not offer me a seat. Standing nearby was a Serzhi like me, a man I vaguely recognized—Lathan, I thought, who was very nearly rich enough to call himself a Sar. Many fangs pierced the skin of his forehead in a swooping “V”: The first, a serpent’s, they say he accepted on a drunken bet. The other twenty or so commemorated great events in his life, wandering up and down like a supplementary scowl. I’m not sure he needed two of them.
“Lathan,” I said politely.
“Sar Lathan,” he snapped.
“Lathan,” I repeated.
“Enough of this.” Dhrevos Scarb tapped a bundle of papers on his desk. “The unrelenting terror of the Black Cabal has haunted this city for far too long… and I’ve begun to wonder, Aris, if you’re doing enough to fight them.” His eyes bored into mine, holding them, piercing straight through to my soul. “Sar Lathan has given us a great deal of information about Serzhi crafters who may actually be cooperating with these deviants. We found much when we raided their shops at his direction. Tell me; do you mean to defend those criminals we arrested today? Keep in mind, if you are found lacking in honesty, rightness, and truthfulness, the consequences could be dire… for yourself, and for your family.”
“Let me speak to him—alone,” Lathan said quietly.
Scarb glanced at the near-Sar. “Hm… I suppose you’ve proved yourself trustworthy. Go ahead.”
Lathan led me back into the hall, just outside of Scarb’s office. I could hardly contain myself.
“You’re helping him?” I demanded. “Why?”
“I’m taking what’s mine,” Lathan said coldly. “I should be a Sar. I am a Sar. You and Efrem have denied me my rightful title for too long.”
“You speak plainly—”
“You don’t deserve my tales and lies!” he spat. “I can get what I want… what I deserve… in one of two ways. From Scarb, as a reward, for turning in my fellow Serzhi. Or by getting you to back my claim before the other Sars, as you should have all along. So: Will you join forces with me, or will I be forced to continue assisting the Majeri? Think carefully, Aris.”
Lathan turned on his heel and walked back into Scarb’s office. I followed at a slower pace, mind whirling.
“As it were,” I said to Scarb, “you wanted to know if I intended to defend the Serzhi who were arrested today. I would never interfere with the joyful task of pacifying us savages… but of course I must review the paperwork to ensure that the law is being applied correctly.”
“Of course,” Scarb drawled. “And I, naturally, will be watching very closely while you do so.”
“Of course.”
Lathan glanced at me. “Is there anything else you want to say, Aris? Anything about me? Here and now—or, perhaps, later, in front of the Sars?”
“No,” I said simply.
“So you’ve made your choice,” Lathan said quietly. “I see. Well, so have I.” He turned to Dhrevos Scarb. “As it happens, friend Scarb, I’ve just remembered a number of things that may be of great interest to you.”
“Then by all means, stay,” Scarb said, his eyes grey and untroubled. “Aris, you may leave.”
“As you will,” I said, and backed out of the door.
* * *
Two girls and a boy trotted off in various directions, carrying the messages I’d given them. That done, I approached the House of Forbidden Delights, a rambling building which had long been the center of legal resistance in Durbansq. If you wonder why our beloved friends the Majeri haven’t ‘corrected’ it into so much broken trash, consider that they subscribe to a wide variety of fascinating and unbreakable holy taboos. At first, numerous people breathlessly claimed that the House of Forbidden Delights was a house of ill repute—a place the Majeri could never enter, or even approach. When the Majeri found loopholes to get around that, it briefly became a coven promoting devil awareness (not worship, as that would have brought reprisal), then a museum of profoundly provocative codpieces, a madhouse for compulsive nudists, a whimsical-poetry-themed slaughterhouse (I don’t think I’ll ever forget that month), and—most recently—an asylum for those of deranged mind.
“No entry,” Yusuf said sternly.
“But I must go inside! I say I’m a chicken. My wife says I’m not. Logically, she must be insane. Isn’t it my right to visit her here?”
“You’re a chicken?” Yusuf said doubtfully.
“Ba-kwak!” I said.
“Well, your story checks out.” He fought back a rebellious little smirk. “Go on in.”
The House of Forbidden Delights isn’t the most wondrous place in Durbansq, but it may be the most relaxing. Interconnected rooms rise and fall a step at a time, following the contours of the hill: Fueled by a diverted irrigation channel, countless courtyards burst with flowers and trees and profuse vegetation. Scholars pace back and forth, words of wit hanging sparkling in the air as they invent teaching fables: Other people read books, argue amiably, or simply doze the day away.
I walked to a round green room, a cylinder composed wholly of bookshelves clothed—indeed, almost concealed—behind shade-loving vines. Nestled amidst that beauty were our copies of the Majeri lawbooks, like turds amongst emeralds. I put my finger on the book I needed, then hesitated. In distant Guarefa, a enormous nut once fell from The Tree That Holds Up The Sky, so vast and heavy that it convulsed the land with earthquakes when it hit. As a new universe-tree sprouted from the nut, the people didn’t pay it much heed. So what if it was a trifle darker today than it had been yesterday—who would even notice? Little by little, the shadow spread. Little by little, day turned to night. After a time, the people of Guarefa were quite surprised to find mushrooms growing profusely from their translucent bodies.
How long had it been since I’d stepped away from my individual cases and truly assessed the whole of Durbansq? Five months? Six? Sometimes, I think it would take a sixty-armed golem to handle everything I take on: I never have the time. But then, the leaders of Guarefa surely said the same thing, just before their groins burst into a slightly sheepish cloud of spores. Sighing, I left the books where they were.
I made the rounds of the House of Forbidden Delights and talked to Durbansq’s other lawbringers—Gatma the Apothecary, Sula the Stork, even the sleepy and confused son-of-a-Sar who calls himself Dabran Al-Dabran. I talked to sages and scholars. I listened to merchants and crafters. What I found out was greatly disturbing: Durbansq was in trouble. Merchants could hardly afford their stands, crafters could hardly afford their shops. My fellow lawbringers had to seek paying customers over those who needed them most, for fear of being unable to feed their families. It was hard to say why, but the whole city was convulsing in a slow and silent scream.
“Aris?” A girl—one of the messengers I’d sent earlier—poked her head through the window. “Sar Efrem flatly refuses to see you, in his manor, on the orchid porch, now.”
“Many thanks,” I said, tossing her a coin.
It wasn’t far to Thieves’ Hill, where the supremely wealthy of Durbansq live. The houses of almost-Sars burst with frenzied ornamentation as if to shriek—”NOTICE ME!!!”. Sar Efrem’s great manor was huge and imposing, and needed no such decoration.
“Hai, the house!” I called. An old servant woman answered the door, nodded, and let me inside. The wealth on display was just as staggering as what I’d seen in the Majeri compound, but this, at least, had been arranged with a keen eye and impeccable taste. It also went on for about twenty times longer that a person would expect, unfolding through room after room, gallery after gallery. A man’s measure is on the inside, true, but he can still be made to feel small by such an overwhelming excess of glittering and gleaming that-which-matters-not. At least there were the Sar’s rampaging daughters to distract me: “Dhira!” I called, waving merrily. “Sudha!” “Aya!” “Ah…”
“Varema,” she said dourly.
“Of course you are,” I said graciously, though I took careful note of her face. I wouldn’t put it past Eyla to continuously recruit and add new sisters just to mess with me.
The servant woman finally delivered me to a screen of real, living orchids which grew from a series of pots hanging in the air. I politely clapped my hands.
“Who comes?” rumbled a deep voice.
“Aris Al-Sindba, O celestial master! A storm of stars falls from the heavens, determined to worship your radiant brilliance. Let me in, please, before I’m crushed to death by an infinitude of chiming golden spheres!”
“Didn’t I clearly state that I refuse to see you?” he asked, sounding amused.
“Ah, but you won’t see me, given that I’m invisible! At least, I aspire to be, and it would be unconscionably rude of you to point out my shortcomings in that direction.”
“Then do come in,” Sar Efrem said, “and wait out this storm of storms.”
The Orchid Porch would have repaid a closer inspection, but I didn’t see any of it. Sar Efrem stood in the middle of the porch, supping from a spiralling vessel of colored glass. His robes were caked with searing dye-powders of pink and orange, blood and flame. Clay vessels atop his shoulders slowly dripped water, streaking and transforming his vestments into spectacular new artworks by the moment. It would have made an unholy mess if not for the two servants, armed with towels, who hovered like hawks near his hands in case he should choose to touch anything.
“I, er… what?” I managed.
“Lucid as always, Aris. I think the key moment in our friendship came when I stopped listening to you.”
“What?”
“What.”
“What?”
“Exactly.”
Sar Efrem shifted his great bulk, causing rivulets of flameheart orange and sun’s-blood red to wind and branch across his chest. It was as though a thousand volcanoes made of spices were continuously erupting on him, or being sick on him, or both.
“The first thing I want to… wait,” he said, suddenly glancing upward. Following his gaze, I saw Eyla clinging to the beams on the underside of the porch’s roof, apparently trying to sneak up on us unseen. I’m not sure she needed to sneak up on her own father, but then, who was I to tell her how to have fun? I noted that she’d changed into a fairly plain and mostly white burnouse—an unmarked canvas, one might say.
“Daddy!” Eyla panted. “Hold still and let me hug you!”
Dripping with a violent confluence of hues, Sar Efrem sipped from his glass vessel as every color that fire powder had ever dreamed streaked down his arm.
“No,” he said. And smiled.
“That’s it!” Eyla swore. “If I can figure out how to get down from here without breaking my neck, you’re done for!”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” her father assured her.
I cleared my throat. “If I may? I regret that I have nothing to discuss but dull, boring business…”
“Fear not, my friend. In my memories, your tongue sprouted arms and legs and sprang from your mouth to attack Eyla with a disturbingly wet and sticky club.”
“I… see. Anyway, we have a problem. Maybe more than one. To start with, Lathan is colluding with the Majeri…”
I described what I’d seen in the Majeri compound. Sar Efrem nodded, his expression growing steadily more grave as he listened.
“I see,” he finally said. It’s not an easy thing to bear, the flesh-piercing hardness of a Sar’s gaze: There are pleasanter ways to draw a map of one’s innards. I was very glad that his ire, for once, was not focused on me.
Sar Efrem considered his spiralling glass. “I may just have to have a word with our ambitious young friend. Regardless of the outcome, we’ll need to discuss the matter, you and I. Shall we meet tomorrow, just after midday, at the Melting of the World?”
“I’d love nothing more… much to the consternation of my wife.”
Eyla finally managed to jump down. She charged her father, planted her head right smack in the middle of the amazing, searing, crazy dyes that covered his burnouse, and whipped her head around like a dog shaking itself dry. When her hair was loaded with enough orange, pink and red to shock the sun itself, she ran away laughing.
“I blame you for that,” Sar Efrem noted.
“But you’re her father!”
“Nonetheless. And now, while we wait out this storm of storms, perhaps you would earn your shelter by paying me some tales?”
“Of course,” I said, pleased. “I’m reminded of what happened in distant Felendia, where a man once bred dogs to be wizards, wizards to be princesses, and princesses to be gigantic mountain-devouring toads…”
* * *
Is there anywhere in the world like Market Street? Imagine a beehive gone mad, if bees drank treasure instead of honey and swelled with wonderment until they bloomed into merchants. Sellers sing stories about cumin and cardamom, myrrh and dragon’s blood—their origins, their secrets, the mystical powers known only to a virtuous few. Old men stagger around having heart attacks, ready to bestow oddly expensive “gifts” on whoever saves them. Trained monkeys surreptitiously slip goods into people’s pockets, giving their masters an excuse to scream about theft until their embarrassed victims pay twice as much. Veil-dancer girls whirl past, promising without ever revealing, leaving behind them a trail of concussed boys who may or may not have been distracted enough to walk into trees. Hear the seller’s chants, inhale perfumes and food-scents beyond number… and try to avoid children whose wide, innocent eyes belie the sophistication of the seller’s tales their parents have taught them to tell.
At the very end of Market Street, near the south gate of Durbansq, was the table where Mother usually sat. She wasn’t there today—but her table-mate, the widow Essaffah, was. Essaffah’s smile widened when she saw me.
“Hai! Young hero-champion-wizard!” she cried, her eyes growing huge and round. “You must buy this cake!”
She moved a dried honey spice-cake into the sun where it would drip and melt and fill the air with scents so wondrous, even the gods hadn’t gotten around to inventing words that could describe them. Essaffah, I think, must have been raised by honey-drenched pirates who’d themselves been raised by bees. It was the only explanation. I considered turning and running, except that she always manages to make getting robbed so much fun.
“Insidious cake pirate! I won’t buy a thing. You can’t make me!”
“A challenge, is it?” I won’t say that Essaffah’s laugh was totally evil. Let us say, rather, that all the world’s goodness, for some unspecified reason, chose to flee her throat and stare in awe at the overwhelming morality of her toes. “Have I mentioned that these cakes grant long life, perfect health, and the ability to fly?”
“The ability to fly?” I said. “Ah, what a shame I’m afraid of heights!”
“Not to worry. They only grant the ability to fly downward. Some people call it ‘falling’, but they—I fear—lack imagination.” Essaffah broke into an appealing grin. “But here. Eat this cake. Really. It’s free!”
I paused like a man who, hearing the whirring of gears from beneath his hostess’ veil, just can’t help but look.
“It’s free? Truly?”
“Practically! I’ll charge you twice what I charged Eyla for her cake this morning, for which she paid absolutely nothing!”
I looked at the cake. I looked at Essaffah. I looked at the cake. Slowly, watching her carefully, I took a bite. I surely must have been transported to a chiming crystalline realm beyond the stars, at least for a moment. That much bliss couldn’t possibly fit in the World.
“As it happens,” Essaffah grinned, “Eyla paid nothing at all for her cake… except a sworn oath to make you pay for it, later. You agreed to pay twice as much as her… meaning two sworn oaths that you’ll pay for a cake, later!”
“But ‘later’, by definition, is never now, so I can never pay you,” I pointed out.
“Curses! You win and I lose. I guess you’ve defeated me utterly.” Essaffah bounced on her toes, humming merrily to herself. I groaned.
“Except…?”
She glanced up at me, grinning. “Except. How many cakes do you think I could give Eyla, by making her promise to extract payment from you, later? A hundred? A thousand? What kind of living horror would it make of your life, having her hunting you every waking moment?”
“You obviously weren’t there on our wedding night,” I said laconically.
“Pay me now, I swear, and I’ll never give Eyla another cake again. Refuse, and I’ll have to get my money from you in a more… shall we say, ‘roundabout’ manner?”
I sighed. I dipped my hand into my pouch. One, two… ah! Three! I did have enough. I paid her.
“Forgive the plainness of my speech,” I said, “but where’s Mother?”
“Out,” she said, winking enormously.
I took that to mean the Black Cabal. Essaffah and Mother, along with Eyla, are the three leaders of that dread secret criminal network. I frowned, looking at my mother’s baskets of roses and petals, along with the pots of honey sitting unsold next to Essaffah.
“And who covers for her while she’s gone?”
Essaffah glanced at the empty space beside her, seeming startled to realize she was alone. She whistled loudly. After a moment’s pause, a dark Qabdi man limped back to the table, dragging the broken leg that had prevented him from returning to the desert with his trader cousins.
“Qaad,” I said, amused.
“Aris,” he said. “I’d offer to sell you a flower, but you obviously don’t need one. You chased Eyla and you caught her, conquered and claimed, tied up like a roped pig in the bonds of marriage. You never need to show her that you love her ever again, eh?”
“Those flowers come from my parent’s fields,” I pointed out. “I can have as many as I want.”
“Of course you can,” he said generously, “and I’d certainly never question the morality of a man who wouldn’t even slip a paltry few coins into his mother’s pocket.”
I groaned. “Fine. I’ll buy a flower!”
“Of course you will.” Qaad glanced at the basket, puzzled. “These three seem to have gotten stuck together.”
“He’s almost as good… or bad?… as you,” I told Essaffah. “You’re a dangerous man, Qaad.”
The Qabdi trader shrugged, his smile fading. “Selling things… it’s a good enough living, I suppose. I don’t miss my tribe at all. My parents with their stories, my sisters with their gossip, my cousins with their pranks. That I was forced to stay here… truly, it was a blessing.”
I fidgeted. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Is there a desert in your pocket? No? Then I can’t think of anything.” He smiled briefly. “Not that I deserve even more generosity. Sar Efrem is the one who paid for my medicine and care. He’s the one who found me this job. If anyone deserves boundless joy, it’s him. Does he have any more annoying daughters you could threaten to marry, whereupon I could delight him by stabbing you with my sword?”
Essaffah tapped her fingers on the table. “Qaad, take a break.”
“There are aspects of this job I do enjoy,” he admitted, swiftly limping away and leaving us. Essaffah gave me an appraising look. Something daunting came into her eyes: Here, now, sat a dread master of the Black Cabal.
“An upstanding lawbringer such as yourself could never conspire with lowly criminal scum like the Black Cabal. It would mean a career-ending scandal.” Essaffah coughed into her hand. “But perhaps you’ll give me your day, and some lowly criminal scum will just happen to overhear?”
“My day wasn’t so interesting…”
“Then make it so!”
I bowed to her. “Then listen well,” I said, “and drape your ears over my words until my mouth is wearing the world’s most disgusting cloak, for I have a tale to tell…!”
She’s been at Gaja Vidur’s funeral celebration, so I started with the raids on Craftholder Street, continuing through Lathan’s apparent betrayal and my own work in the House of Forbidden Delights. If a handful of exploding dragons found their way into my tale to make it more interesting, well, who am I to tell dragons not to obey the mysterious yearnings of their hearts which beseech them to explode?
“…and so it seems as though the entire city of Durbansq is suffering,” I concluded, “caught up in one long and silent scream.”
Essaffah frowned. “I thought it was just me,” she said absently. “Well. And your mother, but she has the friendship of Sar Desjali, doesn’t she?”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me. It must have been this naughty and gossiping cake that told you. It needs to be punished. Quick! Buy it so you can spank it with your teeth!”
Sometimes, there are finer things in the world than pride—like getting home to Eyla with some of my money left. I fled at a run, pursued down Market Street by Essaffah’s gleeful laughter.