The Book of Ninety and Nine Lost Cities

26: Of Vorlom

2007-04-28T04:15:00.003-07:00

In the broad swamplands south of the Yann, where now dwell none save klemn savages in the muck, there was built by the Cirilmen the city of Vorlom. This place was built in the first years of the Great Dark Ages as a city of refuge. In that age of turbulence it is said that Inimis, a Cirilian of one of the equatorial cities who had been high up in the employ of the Company, desired to lead away a number of his own people, so that they might live together without any encumbrance by other kinds of men. For Inimis thought, and perhaps rightly, that the troubles of Tsai in that age were due to these other kinds of men, and not to the Cirilians, and that the Cirilian race had been greatly harmed by their association with other races in the centuries of the Company. Many others thought the same way, and it is said at that time that very many of the Cirilians who dwelled in the cities of Tsai departed for the deeps, taking many artefacts of the Company with them, and greatly swelled the ranks of the Cirilians of the deep ocean. Because of their artefacts and their cunning honed among the less truthful races of the continents, many of these Cirilians rose to become powerful among the Cirilians of the sunken cities, both in the Outer Ocean and the Inner Ocean, and they founded many new cities deep beneath the ocean. But Inimis was a weak swimmer, it was said, because of an injury it had taken when it was very young, and for this reason determined to build a city of refuge on the land. There were many other Cirilians of like mind to it: whether because they were weak of body, like Inimis, or whether because of their great love for the smells and sights of fresh waters and flowering plants, like Hybenis, or whether because they secretly wished not to retreat forever from the other races, but to bide their strength in hiding for a time and then come forth as rulers of the land, like Thalikis. These three names were the names of the three founders of Vorlom, as they are named in the annals of Hjanaim, and they bound themselves together by ties of flesh: Inimis chewed off flesh from Hybenis and Thalikis, and made itself two children, and Hybenis likewise chewed off flesh from the other two, and made itself two children, and Thalikis did the same. These six did not reckon their parentage separately, but all called themselves the Vorlomim, the people of Vorlom, and from the breeding of these six together came all of the leaders of Vorlom until its last days.
The annals of Hjanaim were graven on two-hundred and eighteen tablets of imperishable steel. each tablet as long as a cirilman one each side and covered with characters no larger than a mhir pip. The originals were lost at the time of the Fall of the Fourth Empire, but many copies were made and can still be read in the archives of the West. The annals of Hjanaim treat chiefly of the memories of the Cirilians in the Great Dark Ages, and Vorlom is written of in them in many places. Little is written of Vorlom in the records of the T’sai lho of those ages, for it remained always a city were all races but the Cirilians were unwelcome. So most of what will be related here is drawn from the annals of Hjanaim.
The trees of that land were of a kind greater than any trees of Tsai, save perhaps the God-trees of Dhomin. They are called bimir, in the annals, and grew to a very great height, with broad-spreading branches and smooth black bark like leather. Since the lowlands of Arvhen were filled with farms and canals under the * Emperors, only a few scattered stands of bimir remain, and they are small next to their ancestors, as our virtues are small next to virtues of our ancestors. But in the last days of the Company and through the Great Dark Ages, all that part of Arvhen was sparsely peopled, and dense forests of bimir stretched for hundreds of parasangs across the lowlands, from the marshes of the Cvath almost to the Heights of L’dron. Like the folk of Dhomin who build their cities around the God-trees, and never fell them, the people of Vorlom built their city around the bimir, so that from the sky it could not be told from any other reach of the forest. Between tree and tree around the edge of Vorlom, for the nine miles that were the bounds of Vorlom and ninety feet high, was an unbroken wall of living wood like stone. This was a kind of thing that was a work of the Khintivir, the Green Men, who still remained in a few places in the West in that age. This only passage through this wall was by tunnels beneath it, which were filled with water even in the driest seasons: there were many of these tunnels, of different widths and lengths, and every one guarded by different devices and artefacts of the company. Within Vorlom were many things made of the living wood of the Green Men, especially when it was first built. Of this living wood was built the dwelling places of the Vorlomim, which were towers shaped like the narrow ant-hills of Hlim, but sixty feet high or greater; and of this living wood were built the first archives and judgment halls of Vorlom. During the long Dark Ages the secrets of keeping this wood alive were lost, so in time all of these places died, and were lacquered to preserve them. The city wall was lacquered within, but on the outside was sheathed in kiln-baked bricks glazed with dnarish glazes, so that it could not be burned. Like many of the cities of the Cirilians, in ancient times and today, Vorlom had no solid streets, but only canals. These canals made a labyrinth of the city, and it was said that no dweller in Vorlom knew every canal, or could find its way in every part of the city. It was divided into six parts, each of which was built around a deep pool. These were called Dimom, Irom, Ghiyom, Hjabom, Anom, and Hsahjom, and they were esteemed strictly in that order. Different kinds of the fishes the Cirilians eat were raised in each pool, and the inhabitants of that district prized most highly their own kind of fishes. Many other edible things they raised in pots of water, and in the canals and lesser pools, and all of these creatures were fed chiefly on the fruits of the bimir. Unlike all other Cirilians, they also ate flying creatures, which they caught with nets in the high branches of the trees, and also unlike all other Cirilians they flavoured their food but little, and ate it alive by preference. These unusual customs of the Cirilians came about because they wished to take all they needed to live from Vorlom only, and not subsist by commerce or pillage of lands near or far. For the same reason, they did not leave to each Cirilian of Vorlom the decision to have offspring, nor how many to have, but these things were decided by the Vorlomim. Those who did not do the will of the Vorlomim in this way were killed, or what was considered worse among the people of Vorlom, driven from the city, because the people of Vorlom judged no place in Tsai more favoured than their city. In the same way the dwellers in each district of Vorlom judged their district the most favoured of all the districts of the city, and their own food the best sort of food. In truth the folk of Vorlom were not greatly favoured in comparison to those who dwelled in other cities enduring through the Great Dark Ages, once the artefacts they had brought from the lost places of the Company began to decay. They had few luxuries, and because their food was poor they did not live so long as Cirilians of our age: one of twice ninety years was thought venerable, and one of three times ninety was esteemed a prodigious wonder.
Those offspring of Vorlom that were made outside the law, and at some times those who had been guilty of lesser crimes, were not counted as Dimomim, or Iromim, or members of any of the other demes. Instead they were called the Vohjorim, and so were any offspring they were allowed. These Vohjorim were not held of any account, being named last and least of the eight demes of Vorlom, but they were of great importance to Vorlom. Only the Vohjorim were sent out from Vorlom, while all the other inhabitants of the city remained within it except under great duress. They were sent out when they had reached maturity with orders to seek out all knowledges, whether preserved in writing or in their memories, and bring them back to Vorlom for its enrichment. In this way the archives of Vorlom were filled with very many notable things, and it became a proverb to speak of the archives of Vorlom. The Vohjorim also had orders to bring back certain things that could not be found within the walls of Vorlom, but were needful for its prosperity, such as malleable metals and bitter spices. Since Vorlom produced little that any other place would want, it was the habit of the Vohjorim to steal these things, or to get them in trade for other things which they had stolen. Many of the Vohjorim did not return from these sorties, due to mischances on their journeys, and those who did were raised in the respect of the Vorlomim, and rewarded in other ways, in so much as they brought back knowledge and things that were of value to the Vorlomim. These Vohjorim wandered through the whole subcontinent of L’dron during that Age of Darkness, and in all those lands they became known as the Thieves of Vorlom. In those days all the lands close by Vorlom, which are now the southern part of Arvhen, were but sparsely peopled, but further away there were many scattered settlements of civilised folk, Cirilians and T’sai Lho and D’nar. In these places the Vohjorim had to take care to conceal who they were and where they came from, and wander further and further through dangerous wilds to find lands where the name of Vorlom was unknown: the Annals of Hjanaim record things brought back by the Vohjorim from north of the Spine of the World, and from the heart of the deserts of Forn. In the early years of Vorlom it was the custom to scar certain patterns into the hide of the Vohjorim, as certain patterns were scarred into the hides of the Dimomim, Iromim, and the inhabitants of the rest of the six districts. Once the fame of the Thieves of Vorlom had become known, it was foolish to mark the Vohjorim in this way, so it became the custom of the Vorlomim to mark the Vohjorim in many various ways, in imitation of the Cirilians who dwelled in other places. For at that time there were different styles of adornment among the Cirilians who dwelled along the shores of the Gulf of Chelt, or by the Golden Sea, or the Sea Impudicus or the Outer Ocean, or any of the many inland waters. As for the Vorlomim, it was never their custom to scar or shave themselves in any way, or pierce their flesh, and they held it a dishonour to do so.
The Vohjorim were cunning in their thievery, and remembered very many stratagems for robbery, burglary, and swindling- most of which are now fortunately forgotten. It was their custom to be absent from Vorlom for several nines of years at a time before their return. Because of their great skills, the Vohjorim were sought after during these long sojourns by other thieves, and often took them as confederates and even bound them into guilds of thieves. These confederates were most often not Cirilians, but more often T’sai Lho or Hradar. There are records of two or three even of the sour-smelling D’nar of High Etalon who became allied with the Vohjorim in thievery. Many of the Vohjorim became wealthy and esteemed in the places where the dwelled outside Vorlom, and never returned to Vorlom from them. Some even became masters of cities distant from Vorlom. For the most part the Vorlomim did nothing against those who did not return, so long as they did nothing against the Vorlomim: but if they suspected them of some treachery from the tales brought back to Vorlom, then they would send other Vohjorim out to slay them. All of the Vohjorim, both the renegades and those who remained loyal to the Vorlomim, knew how to recognise one another by secret signs, and passed messages one from another whenever they met. They were often in that age the only ones who travelled between the scattered settled places of L’dron, so they were known in all those lands not only as master thieves, but as the bearers of tidings. The records of the Cirilians in many places still preserve tales of the cunning of the Vohjorim, and how they owed allegiance to a mysterious city of thieves; but the location of Vorlom, and the secret of passing its walls, was kept secret for many ages. Most celebrated in these records was one Adirimizhis, who plied his trade in vanished cities near where Irpizar now stand, on the shore of the Golden Ocean. Many proverbs and tales deal with the cunning and the wealth of Adirimizhis. It ended its life as tyrant of the city of Gom, which stood in a gap between two hills a day’s journey from the sea. The annals of Hjanaim say that Adirimizhis was hatched 922 years after the founding of Vorlom, and last left it in the 974th year of the city: but when it died is not known. In that time the location of Vorlom became known among the other settled peoples of the West, though it was distant from other settled places and its defences remained impassable. In the years after Adirimizhis, Vorlom began to rely more on trade than thieving, for many of the Vohjorim settled in diverse lands had begun lawful occupations which could be improved by the learning stored in the archives of Vorlom. In those years the Vohjorim were held in great respect outside of Vorlom, and the tyrants of the scattered cities vied to have them in their employ; but in Vorlom they were still held of little account. At that time they had also grown in number to me the most numerous of all the demes, and for the purposes of Vorlom were divided into four parts, according to their style of ornament.
I apologise that I have written so much of places outside of Vorlom, and so little of Vorlom itself, in this part of my account, but little of interest is recorded of the affairs of Vorlom in the years it was ruled by the Vorlomim, save in its relations with other places.
Jhazhaminis is accounted by some to be the offspring of an offspring of Adirimizhis, but this is contradicted by other sources, which say it was only a Vohjorim of no account who was hatched in Vorlom. This Jhazhaminis is the Vohjorim which the annals of Hjanaim record as the one who cast down the rule of the Vorlomim, in the 1436th year of the city. Many many times it was doubtless said, by many of the Vohjorim over a thousand years: ‘All the prosperity of Vorlom depends upon us, and without use the Seven Demes could hardly remain alive. Yet we are scorned by them, and accounted little better than the barbarian hradar of the swamp. Why should we let the Vorlomim rule us, and these others lord themselves over us? We should make ourselves rulers over Vorlom, as so many of our number are tyrants over cities elsewhere, from the Spine of the World to the Outer Ocean.’ Many doubtless said such a thing, but it was Jhazhaminis who acted upon them with success. Jhazhaminis conspired with other Vohjorim, within and without the city, to take Vorlom, and killed as many of the Vorlomim as could be found. Jhazhaminis was named the first Tyrant of Vorlom, for it did not rule as one of the Vohjorim, but in its own right: it did not make the Vohjorim the chief deme, for it wished to have the support of the other demes, but kept the ranking of the seven demes as it had been before. In the time of Jhazhaminis there was first much coming and going between Vorlom and other places, and the lands around Vorlom where the bimir grew began to be settled and populated by the people of Vorlom. Vorlom was greater and richer than it had been before in the time of Jhazhaminis and its successors, the Second and Third Tyrants. But at that time Vorlom lost two great things which it could never regain: first, it was no longer a place of mystery, but one of many cities that any Cirilian might journey to, with time and luck. Secondly, and the greater loss, was the belief of its people that Vorlom was finer than any other place on Tsai. So long as the Vorlomim ruled, even the Vohjorim who had travelled in distant places held to this belief, but under the Tyrants even the people of the Six Demes lost their belief in Vorlom, and wished to follow the customs of other cities. The Second Tyrant, Hjir, made the Vohjorim highest among the demes (in the 1581st year of Vorlom). After this many of the others left Vorlom, or conspired against the Tyrant, and this changing of the demes was a source of great disquiet for as long as Vorlom endured. Cirilians from other lands came to dwell about Vorlom, and fewer and fewer held to the old customs of Vorlom, and these were mocked even by those close to the Tyrants, who were mostly Vohjorim who had lived for generations on the shores of the Golden Sea. Many of the people of Vorlom continued to leave it for other cities, and this is to be accounted no tragedy, for those other places were mostly finer and life in them more pleasing.
The annals of Hjanaim put the death of the Third Tyrant in the 1906th year of Vorlom, and they do not mention any other rulers of the city, so it is probable that it was not of great importance from that time onward. It is not sure why this is so. At about that time a new race of hradar came into L’dron, the Gmoy, a fierce pale people from the caverns under the Spine of the World. These Gmoy destroyed many things before they were broken, and came in numbers as far as the south of Arvhen. It may be that the people of Vorlom were slain or driven elsewhere at this time.

25: Of Cobonis

2007-04-28T04:15:00.001-07:00

Cobonis was one of the cities built by the men of Eos in the days of their glory, on one of the mighty tributaries that cut through the plains of Barad. The Tahun had built a city there in the Dark Ages, and before them there had been a city of the Old Erlen there, and in the most ancient days a city of the T’sai lho: but all of these were long dust when the streets of Parvis were laid out by the engineers of distant Zaminder. For it was a fine place for a city, at the meeting of two waters, and mid-way along the easiest road from the mountains of Barad to the head of the gulf. The men of Zamylos planned the city with straight avenues and broad plazas, casting it over a much greater area than it needed, so that it might fit as many men as the greatest city of Tsai: for in those days all plans men made were grand in their vastness, and their dreams knew no boundaries. In that time men carved roads through moutnains and jungles, and spread them with ease, as straight as the horizon, across the plain of Barad. They made scores of cities like Cobonis, filled with imperishable wonders and prosperous folk, humen and lomen- and the old people of Vuin, dour-faced and uncomprehending. Under the Empire of Damahan, Cobonis was made the capital of the province of Tejola, one of the forty provinces of that Empire. For upwards of a thousand years Cobonis played its part in the quarrels and the victories of Damahan: many great men dwelled there, and many fine things were built, and rebuilt, over such a long time, and it is mentioned many times in the annals of Damahan through its years of glory and decay. In all those years the people of Cobonis were mostly a mix of humen and lomen, and it was never a place where the humen hated the lomen, or the lomen hated the humen, as happened in some parts of Damahan. Indeed, they dwelt closer together in Tejola than in any other part of the Empire, and there was much cohabitation, and many of the race called half-erlen dwelled in Cobonis.
The men who built Damahan had a fierce and burning will, and were united to do one thing, which was to build Damahan. Nothing of that kind can endure forever. It is clear that two things happened, as the years passed. First, many people lost their will, and desired to live only for the pleasures of the moment; over time these folk withered away, and were remembered no more. Second, those whose wills remained strong divided into many factions and turned their wills in many different directions: some desired that the Empire be strong, and built on magic, and others that its people should be free, and rely on the arts that the men of the Zamhylos had applied in their days of greatness; some turned their backs on the cities, and wished to live as free nomads on the plains; some wished to cut their own race off from all other races of Tsai, while others wished to dwell among many diverse kinds of men. The men of Damahan were divided in their philsophies, whether of the ultimate nature of being, or the relation between the genders,or between the races, or the proper form of governance, or the proper means of arranging trade between themselves. Divisions of this kind were at their worst in Tejola, and from the days of Sideros the Pious (who was a famous Emperor in the middle days of Damahan) Cobolis is mentioned less and less as a player in the great events of the Empire, and more and more a place where one faction quarreled with another faction over the ordering of Tejola.
To the northward of Cobonis all the vast plains of F’lhai were depopulated in that time, as men left their farms for the great cities of the coasts, or took to nomadism. A day’s long journey north of Cobonis brought a man to empty grasslands, the ruins of old farms and villages almost effaced, where lived only nomads and their herds, and the tax collectors of the Empire were never seen. But around Cobonis there remained still many prosperous fields and orchards, watered by the two great rivers. At this time Cobonis was divided between two main parties, which endured from generation to generation, and became more and more entrenched. Each had within it lomen and humen, in much the same numbers, and they agreed on many things: they favoured magic over the empirical arts, and the unity of the Empire over its disunity, and thought that each race should order the affairs of its own genders without the hindrance of civil laws. They both thought that the commercial affairs of men should be in part governed by the officers of the city, and in part left free, and that each man should be free to follow the guidance of Dara-Zam or of Eos in the woship of the deity that the men of the Zamylos followed in those days. But these two factions also disagreed on many things: one faction, called the Greys, looked towards the intricate customs of the coasts, and followed the habits of thought that came from Eos, and held that the ideal principles for the governance of Cobonis were unknown, and yet to be discovered; while the other faction, called the Silvers, looked towards the simple customs of the interior, and followed the habits of thought that came from Ambarai, and held that the ideal principles for the governance of Cobonis were those that had been followed in the first days of the Empire, and had been obscured in subsequent generations. The quarrel between these two factions grew more and more bitter with each year, and each side had its champions and martyrs, and remembered its vanished leaders with parades and festivals. Both established their own schools of magery, and trained up many skilled thaumaturges to forward their own cause. The Greys came to live more in the southern districts of Cobonis, closer to the sea, and the Silvers in the northern districts, closer to the mountains. Men sought to speak only with others of their own faction, and scorned to visit markets or temples where the other might be found. Less and less did they cooperate together even in the essential affairs of the city. All of this was not such a great matter so long as the Empire retained some of its strength, and strong governors were sent from distant Eos to keep order in Tejola: these outsiders had little interest in the quarrels of the people of Cobonis. They made sure only that the laws were obeyed, and that the roads and drains kept in repair, and ensured that only a few men each year were slain in the quarrels between Grey and Silver.
All the histories of Damahan recount how Querin, the last of the Old Emperors, was cast down by the human Halash, and the seat of the Empire removed to Pilanon in the north. The governor of Cobonis was recalled then, and another was not sent for some time. When governors did come Pilanon, they were weak, and brought too few armed men to keep order in the city. To make Tejola a base for their own ambitions, these men relied on the support of one faction or another in the quarrels of Cobonis: usually the Grey, but under some governors the Silver. In those days there were few laws obeyed in Cobonis, and the avenues and parks fell into disrepair, and the parades and festivals of each faction often ended in pillage and rapine. The leaders of the two factions excoriated the leaders of the other in the grossest terms, attributing to them no crime too vile. Those who had remained aloof from the quarrel more and more left the city, making their way to the coasts or to the hill country of Barad. Small were the dreams of the men of Cobonis in those days, and they hardly lifted their eyes beyond the walls of their city. Rather they spent all their will in disputation, and brooded on the wrongs their enemies had done them a year or a century before.
In the plains to the north of Cobonis had arisen a people who spent no time in disputation. They were united in purpose and austere in their habits, and were lomen who had turned their backs on the settled lands to be herdsmen on the plains of F’lhai. They thought that lomen should live among lomen, and follow loman ways, and humen should live in their own places and follow their own ways. When the House of Halash had ruled for fifty-seven years, this people grew angered by their deeds, and began to fight against them. At first they only stopped the Emperor’s men from travelling the roads through the plains, and overran those fortified place he still maintained there. But soon their leader grew bolder, and made war against the Emperor’s men to every side of the plain. Loris was the name of the leader of this people, and se is named today among the emperors of Damahan.
Perhaps in the people of Cobonis had not been so disputatious, they would have driven off the armies of Loris, and preserved their city. But perhaps this would not be so. Perhaps the cavalry of Loris would have been numerous enough, and patient enough, to reduce the city even if they had resisted like heroes of old. But the people of Cobonis only sent deputations to Loris as se drew near, seeking ser aid to support the Grey or the Silver faction in their quarrels, and no man closed the gate or armed the watchtowers against the lomen of the plains.
The rich country around Cobonis pleased Loris, for se saw that it would make fine grazing land for the beasts of ser cavalry. The people of Cobonis did not please Loris, for se saw in them only humen and lomen promiscuously mingled, living next to one another and mingling their blood. Ser cavlarymen had never before been within so large a city, and looked with loathing at the walls and towers that hemmed in its people as if they were fish in a pond. So in the fifty-eighth year of the House of Halash Loris commanded that the district of Cobonis should henceforth form part of the plains, rather than of the settled lands. Loris sorted out the people of the city and its surrounding lands, making a column of lomen, and a column of humen, and a column of half-erlen, mingling Grey and Silver together without distinction. The lomen se sent away southwards, to the settled lands closer to the Gulf of Eos, and the humen se sent away westwards, to the settled lands near the Hills of Hennifar, and the half-erlen se drove away with whips and curses northwest towards the Mountains of Barad, where their descendants can be found today. For a few months Loris encamped near Cobonis, until se had subdued all the lands nearby, and then se rode off for the next battles in ser struggle with the human emperors. Se destroyed nothing in the city, but took only what was useful for ser armies, leaving the rest for wind and rain and foraging beasts to ruin slowly.
Cobonis was never a city again. After its abandonment it became a habitation of brigands and necromancers and a place to be feared. In the later years of Damahan and the ages that came after Cobonis kept a reputation as an evil and dangerous place, until the rivers changed their courses and its ruins crumbled away into nothing.

24: Of K'zimmir Dan

2007-04-28T04:14:00.001-07:00

At the time of the greatness of the L’hakk, when the T’sai Lho of the West were more numerous than any race which has been recorded in the histories at any place or time, it is well known that many new lands and cities were built in places now waste. A myriad of cities flourished at that time, and in no time before or after. Of these one of the most splendid was the city built on the copper-blue lake of Dan, in the copper-red hills of Atul.
To the waters of this bitter lake had come cirilmen, from season to season, but they did not live there the whole year round, and neither did the rat-men who prowled the stony hills, eating srommash roots and small crawling beasts. Yet the air was clear there, and with some effort plants other than srommash could be made to grow on the shore of the lake, and there were few places left in the West at such a distance from the multitudes of men who swarmed in the valleys and the coastlands. So to the lake of Dan came some hundreds of elders of the philosophy of Prin- already the least among the permitted philosophies in that age- and some thousands of youths and adults of the same mind, the build themselves the city of K’zimmir Dan.
In what did the splendour of K’zimmir Dan consist, in the years of its glory? In its learning, in its beauty, and in its dedication to right behaviour, say the chroniclers. This may be shown by the following three examplars.
It is written how the a sage of K’hasno came to K’zimmir Dan to visit a certain place of learning, but was unsure of how to find it, and came by chance into a place on the waterfront where many youths and adults sat eating and speaking one to another. She was welcomed here and sat in a place of honour and brought victuals, and as she ate she listened to the speech of all those who sat below her. The sage found that their discourse was of the highest matters, and their syllogisms were clear, and that they drew exemplars from the most subtle empiricians and the most obscure philsophers and wove them into their speech. The sage had never heard such speech before from mere youths and adults, and was deeply impressed. The soup that she was brought was also very fine. After some time of listening to this speech, she stopped the youth who came to carry away her empty soup bowl. ‘What is the name of this school?’ asked the sage.
The youth was startled, and dropped the soup bowl, falling to the floor before the sage in embarassment. ‘This is the fisher’s guild hall, O honoured Elder’ said the youth. ‘We are only eating before we go out upon the lake for the dusk fishing.’ The sage thanked the youth and told it to go back to what it was doing, and decided to go no further on her travels, and not seek out the school she had come to visit. Instead she put away her sage’s inlays and took up work as a fisher, paddling out at dusk and dawn on the waters of lake Dan to catch the weed-green eels that could be found there with the other fishers of K’zimmir Dan.
It is written how those who came from distant lands to the lands that are now L’fallik would often travel to K’zimmir Dan, even if they had no pressing business there, to watch the sun rise over the lake Dan and the hills of Atul from the gardens of K’zimmir Dan. These were built atop the hill that stood behind the middle part of the city, and comprised nine splendid towers of dawn-coloured stone, each constructed to illustrate the aesthetic principles of the Prin, among a perfumed garden where were gathered aromatic plants from every land of T’sai. These were also arranged to illustrate the aesthetic principles of the Prin, in their olfactory embodiment. It was necessary to restrict the numbers of those coming into the gardens, so that they would not be overwhelmed, and it was the custom to select those who might enter by lot, each day 8100 elders and 2700 adults, and 90 othermen of kinds that were not vile-smelling. The odes that were written to the beauties of the gardens of K’zimmier Dan, by more than ninehundred poem-artificers of the West, were gathered together into a celebrated volume which was widely circulated in the Fourth Empire, and can still be found in the libraries of our age. It was of the dawn seen from the third tower of the gardens of K’zimmer Dan, which illustrates to its perfection the Prin principle of balance in imbalance, that the poet-artificer X’u J’hu J’haan wrote these words:
‘The age turns and old things vanish
New things arise wet with silver and rose-gold.
These will age and vanish in correct proportions
Like the solitary eel-fisher standing
At the stern of the the boat on Lake Dan.”
It is written that one of the chief elders at the changing-house of F’jau, which was the greatest and most celebrated changing-house of K’zimmir Dan, was once busy with the preparations for the funeral feast of the Emperor’s legate for the city, who had reached his ninety. While she was thus busied, she was interrupted by another elder whose time had also come, a lowly fish-oil rendering drudge named G’ka U H’ran. The chief elder turned this G’ka U H’ran aside with a brusque word, which was contrary to the maxims of right behaviour, so as to attend better to the feast of the Emperor’s legate. But after a moment the chief elder realised what she had done, she dropped her preparations with alacrity and ran off to find G’ka U H’ran. Finding this elder of ninety years, she prostrated herself before him in an attitude of abasement, and begged him to return. To atone for her deviation from right behaviour she made sure that the funeral feast of G’ka U H’ran exceeded in every way the splendour of the funeral feast of the emperor’s legate. The bones of G’ka U H’ran were gilded and limned with maxims in starmetal and set up in the place of highest honour in the changing-house of F’jau, and shown to all visitors to K’zimmir Dan as an illustration of the righteousness of adherents of the Prin philosophy.
But it is the intention of this record not to tell of K’zimmir Dan in its splendour, but of K’zimmir Dan at its ending. Today it is nothing more than a melancholy ruin. Where the fisher’s guildhall stood is only a beach of tumbled stones; where the perfumed gardens grew grows only the spiny srommash, and at the temple of F’jau there stands only a crude idol of the rat-men, with bulging belly and breasts carved of some heavy black stone. It would seem evident from what I have described of K’zimmir Dan in its splendour that it was not destroyed by the folly of its inhabitants, but was crushed by a calamity that came from beyond it: and in truth this is what the annals of the ending of the Fourth Empire tell. The ending of K’zimmir Dan began with a rumour that came into the streets and markets of the city, like a strange bird blown from its accustomed place by irregular winds. ‘The L’hakk Emperor, Sixtieth of her line, comes to K’zimmir Dan to make it her judgment seat for a season.’ This rumour was unwelcome to the elders of K’zimmir Dan, for this emperor had no great love for learning, or beauty, or right behaviour, and was unloved in turn by those who esteemed such things. Wherever she went followed her courtiers, who were venal or stupid, and legions of her soldiers, who were ugly or cruel, and the paid flatterers who were her sages and poem-artificers. With these hordes came other things, inquisitions and extortions, the beggaring of notables through the giving of rich gifts, and the executions of traitors in nineties and nine-hundreds. The elders of K’zimmir Dan were disturbed at all these things, and wished to keep them far from their city.
Many people had come to K’zimmir Dan, since it was first built: t’sai lho of philosophies algebraic and geometric, even those from Vuin and Mir whose customs were strange, and cirilmen from lake and ocean. These had all been made part of K’zimmir Dan, woven into it for their shared love of learning and beauty and right behaviour. But the elders of K’zimmir Dan feared that the city could not survive the coming of the Emperor and her people. So they began to plan ways to divert the L’hakk Emperor’s schemes, and persuade her to spend the season instead at Tkolo, or Mherim, or Gim A’thai, cities only a little less beautiful that lay no great distance from K’zimmir Dan. But the rumour persisted that the Emperor meant to come to K’zimmir Dan and make it her seat for a time, and one day the rumour was made into a proclamation, and the elders began to prepare as best they could for the onslaught. The streets were made yet more beautiful, and palaces set aside for the use of the L’hakk Emperor, and legions of youths trained in pleasing dances. A fund was established by the city for the purchase of gifts, so that the notables of the city might not be ruined. The elders recommitted to memory all the statutes proclaimed by the L’hakk Emperors and proclaimed them again and again to their people, so that not one of them should infringe these statutes in any way, and attract the attention of the inquisitors through their own fault.
One more thing followed the L’hakk Emperor, and this was those who resembled her only in their unlove for right behaviour: conspirators and assassins who were determined to destroy her, she who had been the cause of so much harm. In every season, among the thousands executed for treason, there were nine or thirty of such as these, men who had truly spoken and acted treason, and had tried to destroy the L’hakk Emperor. A company of five of these men came to K’zimmir Dan when the coming of the Emperor was still a rumour, and took lodgings near to the fishers’ guild hall, and made their plans to destroy the Emperor. Their names are not recorded, but it is known that two were empirical investigators from the town of V’kajh in the Bowl Country, and one was a man who had been an Under-bashar in the flying soldiery, and two others were as-yet unformed sages of the learning houses in K’hasno, young adults whose parents had been executed been the L’hakk Emperor. Their plots were not detected, and took shape out of the knowledge of all the lawful inhabitants of K’zimmir Dan.
The appointed season came, and the L’hakk Emperor arrived in K’zimmir Dan to sit in judgment there, and all happened just as the elders had feared. The Emperor commended the entertainments the elders had organised, and demanded more; she commended the palace they had given over to her use, and had more made over to house her courtiers and sages. All the streets and markets and parks of K’zimmir Dan were filled with the creatures of the Emperor, and reduced greatly the standard of discourse there. Among these hordes were those who stole from merchants, and those who debauched youths, and those who brought with them new vices and philtres which had not been seen in K’zimmir Dan before. Inquiries were made, and after them executions, one or two or three a day: but the people of K’zimmir Dan were not used to these forms of justice. The elders of K’zimmir Dan were sick at heart, and waited patiently for their trial to finish, and the L’hakk Emperor to return to her proper place; but the conspirators’ bones burned with white fire, and they waited patiently for their plans to come to fruition.
The L’hakk Emperor had heard of the eel-fisheries of K’zimmir Dan, and wished to watch the fishers at work. So a great pleasure-boat had been made for her, and now it was launched on the waters, and the L’hakk Emperor embarked on it with a great number of her courtiers, her soldiers, her sages and poem-artificers, to feast in the midst of copper-blue lake Dan and watch the eel-fishers at their labours. It is recorded that it was an hour after dawn, and that one of the Emperor’s poem-artificers was reciting a poem of the form T’za K’hiim, about the wisdom of the Emperor’s dictates and the symmetry of her limbs. ‘I am pleased with the poem,’ said the Emperor. ‘Let this lake henceforth be named for the poem-artificer.’ The courtiers and paid-flatterers exulted at this, and one of the least of her courtiers leapt too high, and fell into the water, so that three of her marines took flight to rescue it. Those four were the only ones on the pleasure boat to survive. For as the marines were carrying the courtier to safety, there was a mighty roar from beneath the boat and ripped it asunder, so rapidly that no others had time to take flight. Green flames leapt ninety feet into the air, and after them a roiling cloud of green vapours, vapours that burned the skin and lungs and killed all who touched them in a few hours. This was the work of the device that the five conspirators had made and concealed in the waters, to kill the L’hakk Emperor who they hated. From the waterfront the people of K’zimmir Dan watched in horror, for never had so great a crime been done in their city. The cloud of green vapours hid the ruin of the pleasure boat and rolled toward the shore, but by the time it reached the city it was too weak to kill, except those who were already sorely ill. The cloud was not the worst thing that befall K’zimmir Dan that day. Those who had come with the L’hakk Emperor, the soldiers and inquisitors, thought that such a thing as the killing of the Emperor could not have been done without the connivance of the elders of the city, so they moved through the city and took them all in chains, and dragged them off to be prisoned in the palaces. All the elders who resisted, and all those youths and adults who resisted on their behalf, the soldiers of the Emperor killed on the spot. In places the soldiers of the dead Emperor were moved to unreasoning fury and simply slew everyone they came across, so that many thousands of the people of K’zimmir Dan were slain before dusk. These killing were not the worst thing to befall K’zimmir Dan that day. In their fury some of the soldiers of te L’hakk emperor had not ben content to kill the people of the city, but had wished to destroy the unliving parts of the city, and in several places had lit fires to destroy markets, lodging-places, and schools. Just before dusk one of these fires spread to a warehouse where were stored large quantities of perfumed oils, of a knd that burned with a particularly fierce flame, and from that time onwards raged so fiercely that it could not be extinguished, This fire consumed the temple of F’jau, and the guild-halls of the fishers, and most lamentably the palaces where the elders of K’zimmir Dan were prisoned, so that during the night the greatest part of them were burned to death. By dawn most of the buildings of K’zimmir Dan had been destroyed, and a great number of its youths and elders also slain. Thus in less than a full turning of the world K’zimmir Dan was ruined by the madness and folly of those that had come from beyond it.
The L’hakk Emperor who was sixty-first in that line judged that the soldiers of her mother had acted rashly, and punished many of those who had destroyed K’zimmir Dan. But she also judged it impolitic to restore the city, so she had its ruins pulled down and its survivors settled elsewhere, in Tkolo, or Mherim, or Gim A’thai. The gardens of K’zimmir Dan had not been consumed in the fire, and these she re-dedicated as a monument to her mother, and had a tenth tower built in the midst of the gardens, taller than the others, according to the philoprogenitive principles of the P’rin J’han K’o philosophy. With the accession of the Z’san dynasty, some ninety years later, this monument fell into disrepair and the gardens that surrounded the towers were abandoned. At the tumults at the end of the Fourth Empire they were cast down, and there has never since been any work of men’s hands to gaze upon where were the splendours of K’zimmir Dan.

23: Of Enku

2007-04-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

Enku was a city of the Third Empire, somewhere in Yalun. Its ruins are believed to have been swallowed up by the sea, or the jungle, or the salt dunes, sometime in the long Dark Ages. But it had been ruined already for nine hundred years at the beginning of those times.
Many are the tales of nations and cities brought low by seeking after wealth, or glory, or pleasure, or dominion over others, just as there are tales of nations and cities raised high for a time by seeking after such things. I have come across some tales of cities brought low by seeking after beauty, as many have been enriched thereby. There are also tales of cities that were brought low by seeking after truth, and destroyed by their hunger for knowledge. Of these cities Enku is the chief exemplar in the annals of the West. It is little regarded in these days, when the philosophies of the multitudes are united in preaching that the hunger and thirst for knowledge are to be sated, and those who favour ignorance in anything are mocked. But in ages past Enku was cited as a warning by many philosophies with many millions of adherents, and its tale has been recorded in many ways, by many different scribes, of the Z’san, and the Prin, and H’pau L’hir, and other philosophies which have vanished from the minds of living men.
Enku had been esteemed for its climate, for it lay on the Outer Ocean and was cooled by it in warm weathers and warmed by it in cold weathers. There were sanitoria there, and the anchorages of some fleets of the Emperor, but it was far from the greatest of the ports of Yalun, or even the ninth greatest: it was numbered among the ninetieth (says the chronicle of M’hai) or the nine-hundredth (says the chronicle of X’casz) of the ports of Yalun. It was known for its salt limes (says the chronicle of P’hal).
Enku was a place of little account until a certain geometer settled there, an elder above eighty years of age, whose name is variously given in the chronicles. Most are silent as to the reason for his fame and for his wealth, but the chronicle in use among the Prin suggests that he was a learned master of what is called eight-geometry, and a student of the mathematical lore of the cirilmen. He was also an acclaimed pedagogue, and he put his fortune and the last years of his life towards the establishment in Enku of a school of empiricism. His goal was that this school would follow no one philosophy, and would promiscuously employ all mathematics, and seek only to impart the methods and the findings of empirical researches. This motive all the chronicles are united in condemning as folly. In a space of a few lifetimes this school had grown in fame, becoming the chief school of empiricism in the empire, or one of the chief schools, and the students and learned folk of the school, and those who served them, formed the greatest part of the inhabitants of Enku: one-third (says the chronicle of P’hal), or two-thirds (say the greater number of the other chronicles). The chronicle of M’hai says that the school was granted land and towers by the Emperor J’hron, and that its central tower was given over to debaucheries and named for this Emperor, the Great Rod of J’hron. There is no mention of the Emperor J’hron in the other chronicles, however, and they say that the school grew slowly, like a reef built by tiny animals (X’casz) or like a tumour in the flesh (P’hal), with no gift from any Emperor.
It seems to be that the people of Enku were inordinately proud of this school, so that they ‘waxed exceeding great in their folly’ (says the chronicle of the Prin). Over the millennia of the Third Empire it was decorated with many great scholars and many splendid edifices. There were gardens of wondrous plants in Enku, and menageries of every kind of beast, observatories that pierced the sky with many cunning instruments, and stores of precious artifacts gathered from all known lands, and libraries where ‘every kind of error’, ‘every pernicious lie of a thousand generations of misguided empiricists’, ‘mad tales from the dark spaces between the stars’, ‘follies of the humen’, and other things of that kind were gathered in great numbers. Most famed among all the works of Enku were the instruments that were made and used there, to seek out empirical knowledge of the most extreme things: the smallest things, and the largest things, the fiercest forces of nature and the weakest, the most tenuous things and the most adamantine. Many of the names and properties recorded in the books of empirical lore still current today were first set down by the scholars of Enku. It is said that the people of Enku were virtuous in their ways, failing only in this one thing (P’hal), that they were far gone in every kind of wickedness (M’hai) and that they were like people in every land and age, being composed of good and wicked mixed together such that no piece of good can be found, however small, without some wickedness in it, and no piece of wickedness, however small, that is not redeemed by some gleam of good (X’casz). The chroniclers are united in condemning the error that led to the destruction of Enku, and identifying it as the desire to find an empirical ‘theory of all-that-is’ which would tie together all empirical observations of all observable phenomena, past, present, and future, into a single entity described by a single mathematics. ‘Blinded by pride and far gone in jukla-grass thought, like humans in their presumptuousness, the scholars of Enku sought to create a God out of eight-geometry.’ So says the chronicle in use among the Prin.
In order to test their theory, the scholars of Enku required devices greater than any ever created before in the service of empiricism. Great caverns they delved beneath Enku to house their devices, and great engines within Enku to drive them, so that the skies of Enku-on-Sea were blackened with smoke. It is said that in the construction of their devices the scholars of Enku used twice-ten-thousand miles of golden wire, and a hundred pounds of starmetal, and more than a thousand artefacts which had been stolen from strange stars in the days of the Second Empire. The cirilmen brought them up many curious ancient artefacts from the depths of the sea (says the chronicle of X’casz), things with the power of great engines that could yet fit in the hand, and things that could kill with a touch, and other things which the cirilmen did not themselves understand which were yet of use to the scholars of Enku. The chronicle of X’casz says that the cirilmen brought these things, but that they never dwelled in Enku during the days of its great researches, preferring to remain at a distance, Yet the other chronicles says that there were always a great many cirilmen in Enku, even in its last days, and that they thronged its libraries ‘like so many thread-maggots in a piece of meat’ (P’hal).
Such were the splendid instruments built by the empiricists of Enku, the like of which had not been seen for many thousands of years before, and would never be seen after. They desired to pierce the membrane surrounding that-which-can-be-percieved and see the shadows beyond of that-which-is, shadows which could be traced back to their generators with eight-geometry: or so says the chronicle of the Prin. These instruments are given names in the chronicle of X’hasz, which states that there were nine of them. The names have no meaning in the language of this time, when there are no empirical scholars of eight-hgeometry such as there were in that time. The chronicle of P’hal also says that there were nine instruments, but only that each device was larger and more costly than the one before.
The chronicle of P’hal presents a colloquy between the nine elders who governed the operation of the devices of Enku, but much of it is obscure and other parts clearly refer to controversies many millennia removed from the fall of Enku, so it cannot be trusted. We cannot tell if there was any dissension among the scholars of Enku before the operations that destroyed the city. There may have been no foreshadowing that those operations were unlike the operations that had gone before; that is the consensus of the other chronicles.
A device in the underground chambers burned with a fire that could not be quenched, (says the chronicle of M’hai), and there was an earthquake which threw down many building (say many of the chronicles, but not that of Prin), and a mysterious sickness gripped the people of Enku. According to the chronicle of J’ho P’zan, which is expansive only at this point:
‘The joints of the people became weak, and gave much pain, and oozed a clear fluid. Their vision became cloudy, and their colours dull and unchanging, and all that they saw or heard or smelled was as outlined in pain, and described in ideographs made of pain, so that their wits left them entirely unless they were of very strong mind. In time their eyes and ears bled, and they could hear and see no more, and a little time after they were dead. This ailment struck Elders, and adults, and youths alike, but came swiftest and fiercest to youths. It also came swiftest and fiercest to those who had been closest to the tunnel which lead to the devices of Enku, who were ailing in an hour, and dead in a few days: but those on the outskirts of Enku did not sicken at all until a week had passed, those who had not fled the city, and of these most survived. The healing of this ailment was very slow, and those who survived still felt pain and weakness in the joints for years afterwards, until they metamorphosed. Few of the Cirilmen of Enku fell prey to this sickness, but those who had been the closest to the tunnel fell unconscious, and could not be roused. The physicians of Enku could not explain this ailment, not the other physicians of any of the cities of H’tai, when victims were brought to them. H’rau K’jhai Ko has left an account of the progress of this illness in the annals of her life.’
Because of this sickness Enku was abandoned, and not rebuilt after the earthquake. The chronicles say that this ailment lingered in Enku, and any who sought to go there would begin to suffer as those who had lived there before had suffered. The chronicle in use among the Prin says that bounds were set about the ruins of Enku, and all men forbidden to pass them, until many generations had passed, and the tale of its destruction had passed from the memory of men. The chronicle of M’hai says that the Emperor P’vai forebade any other scholars to seek to make such instruments as were made in Enku, and suppressed the study of such empirical arts as were studied in Enku. Enku became for many years a watchword among those philosophies which teach that some knowledge is unlawful, and the hunger for knowledge a vice like the hungers for other things which are destructive in excess, and it was remembered in proverbs and moral tales in many lands.
But no more is written of Enku as a living place in any chronicle.

22: The Tale of the Wicked City whose End was Greatly Celebrated

2007-04-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

As I was travelling in the land of Khad, nine days ride distant from Darba-Ul in the direction of the debatable lands of Khadaar, my attention was drawn to a solitary hill which seemed to offer a fine vantage over the countryside. Desiring to stretch my muscles after so many days of riding, so that I did not become permanently mount shaped, and to take advantage of such a fine opportunity to survey the plains of Khad, I determined to climb the hill. I left my mount at its base, grazing happily on a patch of xerophile grass, and ascended the hill in a long steady climb of about fifteen or twenty minutes. A bracing climb it was, good for working up an honest sweat, and a pleasure to stand atop that boll of stone and feel the breeze on my face, warm to lazy flesh, made cool by my exertions. It is a good thing to be young and fit; I recommend it to you without reservation. Anyone can keep their youth and vigour into a fine old age, if they start the proper preparations and exercises early; it is probably too late for you, my friend, but we diBalors have always been known for our foresight and persistence.
I looked about me from the summit, and saw off to the north the Mountains Ralthan, beyond which my forefathers spent their energies nobly and uselessly, seeking to bridle its jungles and the savage dwellers therein with the pulpit and the plow; but there is no cleared field in that country anymore, nor any man who can recall a single saying of the Prophets. Much like my own family’s lands in the Fifth Barony, I am sorry to say, since that cousin of mine has had the care of them this last decade.
To the east I could make out the distant Skein Mountains, where I used to go asqon hunting with the Prince, before he had to devote his time entirely to affairs of state. I was but one of many young men in his entourage, naturally, but it is still a fine thing to have done. One day I shall have to tell you the story of my asqon hunts with the Prince, who is as great a sportsman and as fine a storyteller as he is proving to be a ruler. And beyond the Skein Mountains, the dim-blue forms of the Piri Mountains, from whose roots from time beyond memory have come to plague us the Shadowmen, the Dark Ones, the Mind Rapers, the Soul-Stealers of Tsoraan that is perished, called the Malakhin in the most ancient tales. Frightful things! I shall never forget the one that was brought to Gesh Kolim on the back of that poor Khadite savage in the last years of King Harram’s reign, all wriggling legs and horrible beaked tentacles smeared with the man’s blood.
Afar off to the south I fancied I could see the ponderous curve of mighty Ubar, the beloved river, but at such a distance it was lost in the haze, and the general appearance of unrelieved immensity spread before me, as far as Saluq and the Aal, and around the great curve of the world with no mountain to break it before the Heights of Uz, God knows how many days journey. Ah, the golds and browns and greens of the Khadite back-country in the spring; glorious! Free of any marring work of man, no roads or villages, or quarries, or stinking roadside Khans where inedible food is served up to you by women you cannot abide to look at. Not a featureless plain, not featureless at all, to one who knows how to read it, for whom each subtle variation in shade from where I stood attests to a different sort of bush, a different chance of running across jalana birds, edible roots or not, biting hormigants or not, thorny brack-grass or goodly xerophile - and so on.
To the west, the happy vision I have described was marred somewhat, but in a most subtle fashion. For scattered all over the plain there were spots where the soil seemed a certain shade of red beneath its spare cover of foliage, and others where the thorn bushes grew thickly, to give the land a golden-yellow hue; and in the west there was a most unusual regularity to these patterns. The reddish soil seemed to me there to mark out an enormous square, a league on a side, in which there were many similar shapes of like regularity, delineated clearly to my sight in red and golden yellow.
“What is that?” I asked of my guide, stabbing my finger in the direction of these markings. This guide sent panting on a stone behind me, for like most Khadites he was a frail man, not built overmuch for physical work. I had taken him on in Darba-Ul, to guide me through Khad, to explain the significance of the various sights which we passed, and to bargain on my behalf in markets where the dialects of the merchants are barbarous and unwholesome.
“My Lord,” my guide replied, for he had learned some manners, having served no few Geshian gentlemen as a guide before. “My Lord, that is the place where once stood the Wicked-City-Whose-End-Was-Greatly-Celebrated.”
“That sounds like a tale well worth the telling,” I said. “Come, unpack the victuals, and make us some coffee, and as we picnic upon this hill you may relate this tale to me.”
Then my guide brought out the cold meats, and the honeyed nut pastries, and some fine roasted tchounuc from the neighbourhood of Maazom, which we had visited some days before, and also some very good hard-boiled eggs preserved in the Khadite fashion - you may find them unsavoury, I know, but it is easy to acquire a taste for them when one travels in Khad, if one is of an adventurous and persistent spirit. He kindled a fire with the wood we had brought - for as it appeared below, so it was above; the hill was one great boll of bare stone, without so much as a thorny bush the size of my hand. Then he brewed us some most excellent coffee, using that enameled service of mine that was a gift from Lord diKheeg. Afterwards, he also fried some of the fatty groek-meat we had brought, wishing to make good use of the fire, so for a final course we devoured this, with sambal paste and nut cakes. It is a fine thing, to sit at ease beneath a parasol in the midst of a howling wilderness, dining very nearly as well as one would on one’s own estate, and be treated to a view as sublime as the one I could survey from the summit of that hill.
When we had eaten our fill, I reminded my guide of his duty to regale me with the story of that place, as he termed it, the Wicked-City-Whose-End-Was-Greatly-Celebrated.
“My Lord, we are told that in times long past, obscured by the vapours rising from the corpses of so many thousands of years, there was a great city on that site, greater than High Yuaralon, greater even than Darba-Ul; as vast and as wealthy as any city in the world today, even to Efatat itself. We are told also that the ways of that city were very wicked, and for that reason it came to a bad end. When news of its destruction spread to other places, it was received with great rejoicing, for the city had been most evil in its ways.”
I waited for my guide to continue. These Khadites will often stop in the middle of what they are saying, and wander long in meditations of their own, being a dreamy and impractical people. However, in the end I lost my patience, saying ‘Well? What next?”
“My Lord, I do not understand,” said my guide.
“You had undertaken to tell me the tale of that ruin, the Wicked-City-Whose-End-Was-Greatly-Celebrated.”
“My Lord, that I have already done,” he said.
“Well then, how was the city destroyed?” I asked him. My guide would not look me in the eye as he replied, but only mumbled that it was most ill to speak of such things.
“What did the wickedness of the city consist of, then?” I asked. “Surely you have been told some tales of their evil deeds.”
At this my guide blanched, and turned his head away, and said that it was not good to speak of such things. “If you do not know, at least be man enough to say so,” I chided him, for I have always detested the womanly habit, so prevalent in Khad, of concealing one’s ingorance by sly words and subterfuge. This is something I never do. If there is a matter I am ignorant of, I proclaim this fact at once; this is right, and decorous, and serves notice to the speaker that I am a practical man, not given to spiritous generalisations and dreamy mind-wanderings.
I perceived, upon questioning my guide further, that was of no more use as a guide than a deaf-mute would have been, and commanded him to pack up at once and descend to the site of the Wicked-City-Whose-End-Was-Greatly-Celebrated. The love of adventure is very strong in the blood of the diBarols, and when we hear of a mystery we cannot rest until we have laid it to rest, or perished in the attempt, or been called away by higher authorities to carry out other tasks.
So I descended the hill and remounted my steed, well rested by its spell, and rode off towards the Wicked-City-Whose-End-Was-Greatly-Celebrated. My guide did not speak insolence openly, but his manner was sullen, and I knew he had taken a childish offence in the harsh words I had spoken to him. I felt moved to apologise to him, as one does to a child one is fond of, for he had been up to that point in most respects an admirable guide. “Do not worry yourself about the matter,” I said. “I know only too well how you folk of Khad are bowed down by a lamentable weight of foolish superstitions, which you are no more able to shake off than we of Gesh our adventurous spirit, our pride of blood, or our desire to triumph over our adversaries by force of arms. Such differences between the characters of nations should not be a cause for personal argument.”
I had memorised from the top of the hill the location of some minute mounds in the midst of the square precinct where my guide said the city lay, and only upon arriving beneath these could we be sure that we had reached it. These mounds stood perhaps twenty feet high, among a broad patch of thorny scrub that came up to the knees of my mount.
“My Lord, the city is passed away utterly,” said my guide. “There is nothing to find here; not a potsherd, not a nail, not a squared stone; all has vanished utterly, decayed away with the corpses of unnumbered years,” - they do ramble on, these Khadites - “Now that you have seen the place where it was, let us be away before nightfall.”
“What?” said I. “Leave before we have had a good look around it? So dusk is nearly upon us; it is a simple matter to make a camp here, and explore at leisure in the morning.” My guard paled again, and tried anew to persuade me that there was nothing to see in this place, and that we should move on and camp in a place less befouled by ancient evil, as he put it in his quaint Khadite way. Well, you know what we diBarols are like, when we get an idea in our heads. I have been told we have a vein of iron in us, a strength of will quite unlike most other men. I was the victor, and my guide made a camp for us, fifty yards from the nearest mound, where there was a sandy patch of ground nearly empty of thorns. While he went to a dry watercourse nearby to dig for water, I amused myself by grubbing away in the sand for relics of the destroyed city, and sure enough it did not take long before I had found something, a little triangle of black ceramic about the size of my thumbnail. Not a potsherd, indeed!
My guide was a long time in returning, and when he did took little note of my potsherd, advising me to throw it away. I had not let his absence trouble me, of course, but had prepared my own dinner and sat down in the cooling evening air to reflect upon the events of the day. We ate well that night, on roasted groek ham, and I ate too many of those preserved hard-boiled eggs which you think so ill of. I must admit they have a strong effect on the imagination if eaten in quantity. That night, for instance, I had the most curious dream.
I was dining with Lord diKhamaal at his house, only he was not quite Lord diKhamaal, he was more like Lord diSavereel, and his house was much more like diSavereel’s than his own. We were talking about the future chances of various mounts in the races, and I was expounding on the virtues of a beast whose name I cannot now remember - for I was being distracted by the antics of his daughter, who was pretending to eat the grapes served at the table, but instead was slipping them down the neck of her garment. I had not known Lord diSavereel’s daughter was half-witted, and turned around to tell him so, but he was no longer Lord diSavereel, but Lord diCholt, and he had a little marzipan thaigar in his hand.
“Take this thaigar,” he said, and I said, “No thank you, I am quite full,” and he said again, “No, please, I insist.” So in the end I relented and took the thaigar, and when I bit off its head I saw it was curiously made inside, in concentric layers of red and green and yellow, and was about to remark on this when I heard a voice screaming, most unlike the voice of Lord diCholt’s daughter. It was a scream womanly in its quality, but not in its nature, and as Lord diCholt’s house dissolved around me I realised it was the voice of my guide. I awoke instantly, and took my sword in hand, and had just time to dress before bursting out of my tent to confront my foes. There were two of them, advancing towards me from the direction of the dry watercourse; strange hairless Ruhurdh, with large red eyes, and long, bony limbs that put me in mind of spiders. Quite like that servant you used to have, who was always getting into the fortified wines. I heard Lord diTimris was fool enough to take her on, after you dismissed her, and had no end of trouble from her for his pains. Some people just make it a point of pride not to take advice when hiring servants, I fear. Foolishness! We diBarol’s are not so proud and always listen to advice, if it is sensible.
At any rate, these two were expecting another Khadite, not a hot-blooded Geshian with a first-rate blade of Ash-Bazian steel, and after I had lopped the ugly head off of one of them the other turned and fled. They could run a little faster than I, for though I was fit in those days, I was not quite the athlete I had been. Fortunately for me that guide of mine had not stopped screaming, and I could follow the sound of his cries well enough.
A brief run through the thorns brought me to the foot of the nearest mound, and a cunning door we had not seen in the sunlight, a circle of woven branches disguised to look like the thorn-covered ground. If I had not seen it close at the moment, as the Ruhurdh I pursued climbed through it, I would certainly never have found it, even with the rest of the night to search and the screams to guide me. I needed light, of course. No use following deformed Ruhurdh down into a pit in the middle of the wilderness without a light. I cut a mark in the ground to show where the door was, then went back to the camp for a lantern. It can be a trial to get the things lit sometimes, I find.
So there I was, descending into the guts of the earth, down a narrow and noisome tunnel made by those rat men. It was dark, dark. The Ruhurdh must have felt their way along it, for the ones I fought carried no light and there was no source of light in the tunnel, not even that glowing moss that one always hears of in tales. I did not worry about the lantern giving me away, for I knew that no more than one could attack me at once, and I had no fear of the scrawny beasts. Well, two at once, as I soon passed a fork in the passage, and could expect attack both before and behind. Prophets and Saints, I thought, how will I find my way out of this place? For soon enough it was true labyrinth, worse than the neighbourhood between the Racecourse and the Holor Gate where we got lost after Lord diQemeb’s party.
Always I sought the way that led down, down, and after a time I found myself no longer in crude passages dug by rat men, but in a long hall of shaped stone blocks, smooth and of immeasurable age. It was impossible to tell what colour they were in the dark. For a little while I followed this, and then I heard the sound of voices ahead, low whispering cunning noises like the ones your female relatives use to tell the servants not to bring you any more, you’ve had enough, and think you haven’t the wit left to understand what they’re saying. I hooded the lantern and snuck forward to see what was going on.
I could no longer hear any sound, and had well lost the ones that had carried my guide below; this was two old women, gossiping, I suppose. ‘My, that Ughblag of yours is coming up a lovely girl, all knobbly knees and bald patches. I wouldn’t be surprised if she isn’t snatched up any day now by a likely lad and dragged off to his noisome pit.’ ‘Yes, and that’s a nice damp hole your Shanglegug has, with a good infestation of blood sucking vermin - how are those grandchildren of yours coming along?’ ‘Well, the one that wouldn’t suck was very tasty-‘
At any rate, I didn’t pay too much heed to the gabblings of these ratman crones, for I was looking at the thing that shared the room with them. It was a case made out of something like glass, covered with the dullness that something gets when it has lain beneath the earth for who knows how many thousand years, but still whole and unbroken. Within it I could see, though murkily, what appeared to be the body of a woman in armour, standing as if she were on parade in Gesh Qolim. It goes without saying that the armour was not of any kind I had seen before; not in Gesh, or Khad, or Ash-Baz, or in the civil reliquaries of distant Frun-Bassar. I waited impatiently for the old women to pass by, for the love of adventure was well risen in my blood by this time. On and on and on they mumbled and droned in their scratchy rat-like voices. I peered at the figure of the woman within the mysterious case, but could make out little detail from my vantage point, and in the abominable light.
I got sick of waiting and spitted the wretched old things, then had a better look at the ancient case. The glass sides fitted into a base of something rather like the black stone of the ancient walls, which looked like it could be broken without too much effort. A strange way to keep a corpse, I thought, peering into the glass but not seeing much. The more I looked, the stranger it appeared. For there were places where pieces of the armour appeared to be missing, and under these I could not see bone, or cunningly preserved flesh, but only what looked like more armour; as if there was nothing in the case but layers of armour within armour.
There was no choice but to get the thing out and have a proper look at it. The black material was weak enough that I was able to hack it away and cut beneath the glassy stuff. It cost me a gash on the hand, and I came close to ruining the edge on my sword, but in the end I had that case wrenched to pieces, and that plated corpse standing before me. It looked both more and less like a woman when the glass was removed, for its shape was unmistakable, and equally unmistakable the fact that it was clad in armour fit only for a skeleton, and made with an intricacy quite obsessive in its many-times-repeated density of detail, like those carpets that are sold in Darba-Ul for which whole families of nimble-fingered Khadites have supposedly given their eyesight. I reached into to one of the places where the inner armour was exposed and tried to wrench it aside, to expose whatever lay beneath, but without success.
‘I wonder how heavy this thing is,’ I thought, for it was clear that I could not spend the rest of the night there, standing beneath this relic of elder times with the corpses of those two old hags cooling at my feet, my guide still captive, and who knows how many of those rat-men sneaking about. It was a job to get it down from that pedestal, I admit, but once I had the thing down it was surprisingly light, and whatever was making it stand stiffly left it, so that it flopped in my arms like a live woman. So feeling rather like Arfilas with Yardis, my sword hanging uselessly at my side, I started to carry it out.
The body opened its eyes. They were red like garnets, and shone with their own light in the darkness. And a sound came from where the mouth of the thing should have bene, saying words I didn’t recognise. Ancient, I suppose, as it was spoken in the Wicked-City-Whose-End-Was-Greatly-Celebrated. Then the stranger thing happened. I felt a curious feeling inside my head, like it was filled with round stones and they were all tumbling around, and then the red eyes became blue eyes, with proper pupils, and dark eyelashes, and the armour beneath the armour turned to flesh, darker than that of the Barsanites who live in Upper Khad, but perfectly human to look at, and if the truth be told, rather comely. ‘You may put me down,’ it said, in a commanding voice, sounding a bit like your elder sister did before she married that appalling admiral and got old and fat and screechy. I put the woman-thing down– gladly, for the sound of many angry ruhurdh approached, and I wished to have my sword arm free – and thought, this is what is called magic! I wonder what my diBalor love of adventure has gotten me in for this time.
‘Who sent you?’ she said. ‘How many legions do you have?’
‘Nobody, and none,’ I replied in good humour. ‘I am Lord diBalon of Gesh, a land you will never have heard of, being a relic of the dim and distant past. If you have any means of defending yourself, I would suggest that you use them, for our enemies approach swiftly.’ The woman-thing looked about and saw the ruhurdh approaching swiftly, about a score of them pouring into the chamber where the case had stood, hissing and gibbering and waving sharp sticks.
‘These are my enemies,’ it said, and it was not at all clear whether it was a question or not. Then there was a tearing feeling, and my ears rang, and my head felt a bit like a stiff muscle feels, when it is rubbed with camphor oil. That was all that I felt, but all the ruhurdh lay dead, or moving very weakly on the ground, with blood coming out of their nose and ears.
I thought– as one does, looking at a scene like that– what folly it would be for me to bring this thing back to Gesh, unless I wanted to make myself King; can you imagine, a diBalon? We would all be reduced to penury in a twelvenight. Admittedly she had disposed of my pursuers with admirable efficiency, and might come in handy yet, but she seemed set on following me wherever I went, like a newly hatched aigret. As I crawled along the passage, first this way, then that, she followed close behind me, and when I glanced back, as I could not help doing, it seemed that she moved on her hands and knees with more stateliness and command than many a woman I have seen standing high on a dais, a circlet on her brow and an iron sceptre in her hands. How could I get rid of her?
It was impossible to remember the twists and turns I had taken on the way down, of course, so we ended up moving pretty much at random, and found ourselves in another relic of the wicked city whose end was greatly celebrated, a long low oval hall with large chunks missing here and there from the walls and floor. It seemed to be made all of the same black material that had held the woman’s casket together, and it was dimly lit by a kind of trelliswork at one end, on which a luminescent fungus was growing. You see, those things that are spoken of in tales do come to pass, from time to time. In that pallid green light, my artifactual companion looked even more fey and imposing, and the faces of the hairless ruhurdh clustered at the other end of the room, tearing strips of meat from the limbs of some man-sized creature, looked even more malevolent and inhuman. ‘The Fore-Audience hall of the Statisticians,’ the woman-thing said. ‘The Audience Hall Proper would be through there, but it appears to have been blocked off.’ She began to walk calmly towards the other end of the room. I was not overly concerned, having seen her performance the last time we had met ruhurdh. This lot threw stones and bones and such at her from a distance, but she did not seem to mind, even when what looked to be my guide’s boot bounced off her temple.
A four of them charged down the hall to rush us, and fell down at a raised hand from the woman thing. I felt like my head had just been banged in a door, and was in a foul temper, so I busied myself hacking the heads off of these four while the rest scattered. He’d done a good job of carrying my things, that Khadite fellow, even if he hadn’t been much use as a guide, and I would be hard pressed to carry it all without him. I thought of bringing something of his back for his relations, but it had all been more or less gnawed on. I had no idea where to find them, at any rate.
The woman-thing had found another tunnel out of the Fore-Audience Hall, and was heading that way. I followed her, as my best hope for getting out of that place in one piece. The wonders we saw, buried beneath that dreary bit of Khadish desert! Buried temples, and palaces, and God know’s whats, all in better shape than half the buildings of Gesh Kolim, with the lax building codes we have nowadays. They must have lain undisturbed under the earth for a good many thousand years before the ruhurdh dug them out, else they would have looked a fair sight worse.
‘What evil has come over the city?’ my companion kept asking. ‘Did the radicals subvert the Council of Stewards? Or did the Fishmen breach the defences at last?’ It seemed to reassure her when I told her that there were no Fishmen in Khad. I told her the tale of the Kingdoms of the East, as far back as any of the histories I knew from my schooling, back to the days before Tsoraan, before the Empire of the Catmen, when the brave men of Zamylos first planted humen on Tsai; but none of this impinged on her experience at all. I thought, either this is a creature out of the uttermost vasts of time, an antiquity from before the great dark ages, or it is some kind of lunatic magical device that knows nothing of anything that actually happened, but only things it has dreamed in its long sleep; or else, I am mad. At the time, crawling through those dark and filthy passages, I must say the third possibility seemed much the most probable.
We only had one more bit of trouble. Another little gang of ruhurdh rounded a turning on us, and were a handsbreadth away from putting out my eye with a sharp stick– rather a challenge to parry on your hands and knees; I would like to put in quite a lot more practice, if I had to make a habit of it– were on the point of putting my eye out, when the woman-thing did her trick again, leaving me with the most miserable headache.
Well, with one thing or another, all this crawling about eventually led us to a way out. I climbed out first, then the woman-thing, and we were back upon the surface of the wicked city. We had not come out the same entrance I went in, but against the starlit sky I could see the hillock, behind us no great distance, that marked the position of my camp. I thought I had best get hold of my beast at once, if it was still there, before those murderous spider-like ruhurdh got their teeth into it, so I trotted off in that direction. The woman-thing followed very slowly, walking like she was in a procession. At the tail end of one, somewhere, gawking up at people in the balconies throwing flowers, for she kept looking up, instead of where she was going. My tambil was none the worse, God be praised, and I was tightening the girth strap by the time she caught up to me.
‘Where are the moons?’ she asked. I looked north, and sure enough Alba had set, its yellow light twinkling down on the mariners of distant seas. I supposed some of the dim lights in the sky might have been the lesser moons, Dismash, Kasmar, and Ferengar, and told her so.
‘The circumpolar moons – vanished,’ the woman thing said, and if that artifact could wonder, that is what she did. ‘The Sky Fortress of the Executive – vanished.’ She turned slowly around, gazing upwards. It was unnerving to see her beneath the open sky, for the lineaments of her under-armour could be seen dimly beneath her illusory flesh, keeping it always to the forefront of my mind that this was no woman of the ancients miraculously brought back to life, but a magical artifact of unknown power and purpose. If I brought her back to Gesh Kolim, she would have the city in ruins in a few six-days, more likely than not; or, she would make a mighty weapon in the hands of the great and powerful, to spread the glory of Gesh even further than it has spread already. Of course I had no quarrel with that, save that I have spent enough of my life in the shadow of the great and powerful to know what was likely to happen to me under such circumstances; those who chuck twelve-murzim weights on the balance of power always make many times more enemies than friends.
While I thoiught over these things I packed up the camp, reluctant to leave behind the coffee set, and also a fine carpet of Darba-Ul that I had picked up on my travels. Without my guide there was no way I could carry them back, and this too weighed heavily upon my heart. Perhaps the woman-thing would carry for me, as far as civilised lands? But no, best to rid myself of her as soon as possible. She had left off observing the stars, and now she spoke again.
‘I see that the world is greatly changed, diBalon of Gesh. But my duty to fulfil the will of the Executive remains, even if the Executive is no more. Where is the nearest large concentration of Fishman War Machines?’
Now, the answer to that question sounded like it ought to have been the Inner Sea. But with all of Gesh to traverse before you get there, that was not the right answer to give, I thought. So Nine Prophets forgive me, I lied. Fishmen, fishmen, where did the tales say there were lots of fishmen?
‘That way,’ I said, pointing north toward the Mountains Ralthan, ‘in the great rivers of the land beyond those mountains, there are numberless hordes of Fishmen. If they have War Machines anywhere, they will be there.’
She stood looking at the direction I was pointing for a moment. I said ‘that way’ again, to make things perfectly clear, and without a word she began to walk in that direction, getting farther and farther from Gesh with every footstep. I watched her go until I could no longer make her out in the darkness, and then I mounted my steed and made as rapidly as I could in the other direction, towards the river Ubar and home. Saints and Prophets, what a headache I had! I must have cursed that woman-thing a thousand different ways, for the pain in my head and the loss of my coffee service. And that carpet cost me fourteen double herons. Never such a miserable morning in my life, even after the time we were drinking on Lord diZifal’s river barge, the night after Thoravan told you she was going to marry that insufferable prat from Mouth-of-Ubar. Life is strange, isn’t it? Who’d have thought a bandy-legged clerk like that would be governor of Qalendu?
Well, I have never heard any rumours out of the jungles of Niim, telling of a strange armoured woman who kills with a thought, so I expect she is sunk in a swamp somewhere, or is still wandering around in the very thickest part of the wilderness. If there are Fishmen there, I pray I did not put them to too much trouble. Nasty things, anyway, they make my skin crawl. I will have to tell you the story of the Fishman I had dealings with once in the Old Bazaar of Khabar Khabar when I was negotiating that shipbuilding contract for Lord diTevai. It came to my chambers one day, waving its arms this way and that like some kind of epileptic squid, insisting that I pay for a murzim’s worth of pearls I had supposedly taken delivery of. I had no recollection of doing anything of the kind, of course, and told it so in no uncertain terms…

21: Of Uuk Zephar

2007-04-28T04:09:00.000-07:00

Uuk Zephar was the finest city ever to be built by the race of Klemn. Of little account are they held in the annals of most ages: barbarous dwellers in the waste places, beggars and thieves in the vile places of cities built by others, slaves, spear-carriers and eyeless mad priests in murky pools. But there was a time when the other races of the West were weakened by plague, and led astray by venal leaders and vain philosophies, and the insane Gods that plague the inner eyes of the Klemn slept. In that time a drought in the south drove out a strong race of Klemn from the forests of Chellon, a race that were brave and cunning and thick-souled, and they made a great journey around the Golden Sea to cast down the Empires of the West and rule there for a time. For their capital they took a place in the midst of a land in L'dron that had lately reverted to marsh, where they alone could live and fight with surety. The leaders of the Klemn in the time of greatness were the family called Uuk Phnom, and they called the city after themselves, Uuk Zephar. For sixty years they caused to be built this city. Twenty-nine great stepped pyramids were raised in the marsh, none less than a hundred metres high and half a mile to a side, and each of these was covered over with palaces and workshops and the dwelling places of men of all races. For from out of all the nations of the West the Uuk Phnom had brought artisans, scholars, and clerks and soldiers, to ornament their capital and govern their Empire. In between these pyramids the water rose and fell with the seasons, and the greatest part of the dwellers of the city lived here in boats, or hollow houses of borogove wood. They were klemn of each of the companies that had marched from Chellon, and also many fishmen, and t'sai lho boatmen of old L'dron. Atop the greatest of the pyramids of Uuk Zephar was built a meeting house for representatives of all the nations of the Empire of So-Phnom, a parliament of wise men to advise the enlightened dynasts of the Uuk Phnom. And for a hundred years Uuk Zephar was the seat of a vast empire, and a home to all that was finest and wisest in the lands of the west, and filled with boats of all nations. For a little time – less than a breath in the long life of thinking beings on Tsai - the klemn truly possessed one of the greatest cities of the world.
From the date of its founding to the date of its founding, the age of Uuk Zephar was less than a thousand years, so it may be held to have perished a mere child among cities. Furthermore - loud be the lamentations - for the most part its time on Tsai was a melancholy time, where the great things that had been raised up by the Sisters of Uuk Phnom were pulled down and despoiled by lesser beings. For the last of sisters was slain by an assassin as she dictated a letter in the palace. And three newly-gendered sisters of the family of Ur Geph, which had envied the Uuk Phnom since before the Leavetaking, made themselves masters of the city. These quarreled among themselves, and there followed seasons of fear and seasons of dearth and war, and three years passed before one empress alone crouched on the high table at Uuk Zephar. She was Vromon the Absolute; and at her word the parliament of the Empire was dissolved, and the building where it had met filled with golden images of the gods. She had been a scribe to the last of the Sisters of Uuk Phnom, and she was not advised and restrained by a council of the wise, but rather flattered and moved from one whim to another by a council of the cunning, who sought their own power. These were nobles and sorcerors of the race of t’sai lho, mostly of those families which had ruled L’dron before the coming of the Klemn. They disliked the impermanence of Uuk Zephar, its newness, the shape of its pyramids, the very taste of its water and odour of its air. Thus in the reign of Vromon many of the ministries of the empire were removed to other cities, to Irpizar or Alun or Hlea K’ron, and many of the wealthiest dwellers in Uuk Zephar also removed themselves. After Vromon ruled in Uuk Zephar Zramuur of the family called Orn Phnom, and then Vramekh the Black, and Zul, and Vlekkuuk, and Gjamok, and Keebol the Weak, and Keebol the Strong, and Vramekh the White, and Vromon called the Younger, but these were all creatures of the same kind, and while each of them sat upon the high table Uuk Zephar diminished. The third empress to be named Vramekh is called the Red in the histories of the West. She was one thought by the sorcerors of Udnon to be of the same kind as these others, but she was of a different nature, and her inner eye burned like a mirror in the sun. She listened quietly to all her advisors said, and indicated her agreement, and then one day at noon her voiceless guards fell upon them wherever they were lying, whether in Irpizar or Cimmiril or Uuk Zephar itself, and cut them into pieces. The history of Uuk Zephar cannot be cut free from the history of the West, and all the threads of the time of So Phnom meet and tangle there. Vramekh the Red commanded that every Elder in the empire suffer the fate of her advisors, for she saw in each of them a link from which a new chain to bind her might be made. In most places this command was not carried out with any vigour, due to the devotion of the t’sai lho for their Elders, their inventiveness in concealing them, and the smallness of the klemn armies. But horrible was the slaughter in Uuk Zephar in those days, where her command could be least gainsaid. When the first line of execution pits beneath the pyramid of Toor was filled, and the digging of the second line of pits was near complete, it was found that Vramekh was dead. It was said that she was poisoned.
A group of nobles who had survived the massacres named Empress Xur, of the family of Orn Phnom, who was skilled in divination and had one withered limb. The incidents of her reign were not memorable, and there reigned after her Avhak, and Bregakh, and Xom, Zophror, Krevhak, Yomon, and Xur-Phnebar. In those years many of the pyramids of Uuk Zephar were abandoned, and those who had dwelt there dispersed, as more and more of the offices of the city were removed to K’ralho and given into the hands of the t’sai lho of that most ancient place. In the empty palaces atop the abandoned pyramids met companies of klemn who had sickened of So-Phnom as it was at that time; one such was the Nine Banners Horde, which later was to have such great fame throughout the West. At the time they met in Uuk Zephar they were not yet bold, and did little more than break into the houses of the rich and despoil them with tokens of the old gods of the jungle. In all the reigns from Xur to Xur-Phnebar, there was never a nine-day without some trouble between the factions of the klemn - between those who would break down and those who would build up, and those who would have nothing done. Or between the poor of the t’sai lho and the poor of the klemn. Or between t’sai lho of different kinds of philosophies. All those who lived there, of whatever race, were given to disputation, and ‘in a calm night in Uuk Zephar’ were words used to signify ‘at no time’ in the speech of the streets of So-Phnom. And in their caverns far beneath the surface of Tsai the insane gods stirred and woke.
At that time each of the pyramids of Uuk Zephar fell to be the portion of one of the great houses of the Klemn, to hold as though they were emperors over it, and at times there was open war between these empires. In the lamentable reign of Xur-Phnebar, it is said, the pyramid of Klom was destroyed by fire, and thousands of the servants of Klom and Porok perished in the struggles that followed. The kindler of the fire was found to be in the thrall of the people beyond the mountains, the dwellers in darkness. This was but a warning of the greater evils which would befall Uuk Zephar in times to come.
In the reign of Zramegh who followed Xur-Phnebar the thralled armies of the dwellers in darkness came over the mountains and descended to the Sea Impudicus and the Gulf of Chelt, destroying and subduing a vast and populous land. K’ralho was then finally lost from the nations of the west, after nine thousand years of greatness, as well as lesser cities without number. And because of the cunning talk of those who came from beyond the mountains, the remnants unconquered did not bind themselves together in alliance. Instead, the subjects of So-Phnom everywhere sought to renew their old nations and quarrels, and many lands no longer heeded any command of Zramegh. So the emperors Zramegh and Vraal, and those t’sai lho who were their secret masters, rebuilt Uuk Zephar as a city for war. A wall of brick and double wall of thorn were raised about it; fortifications were raised on each of the twenty pyramids which remained within the walls, and their old masters made to obey the emperors. The greatest of these fortifications was erected upon the pyramid of Klom; the Armoury of Vraal, guarded with traps so numerous and cunning as any fortress of the Empires that are gone. Very many sturdy soldiering folk of the old marchlands were settled in Uuk Zephar, Klemn of Aa-Kamn and Argandarr of the dry plains of the Bowl Country, and it became a less shifting city, with causeways and walls built between the pyramids for these dwellers in the fixed lands. Thus were half the days of Uuk Zephar spent.
Vorrom, the sister of Vraal, had cultivated the Klemn of Aa-Kamn, promisjng them the restoration fo their homeland under her rule, and when her sister was eaten she used them as weapons against the great ones of the t’sai lho, who would rather wait for others to defeat the dwellers in darkness. Among the t’sai lho today she is remembered as little better than Vramekh the Red, but this is due to tales invented by her enemies, for she killed few. Testing stones were placed at each gate of Uuk Zephar in her reign, forged with knowledge which is now lost, to find all those in thrall to the phthon who sought to enter. Foundries and other sorts of manufactories were made in Uuk Zephar in her time in great numbers, as in all the cities of So-Phnom, as she strove mightily to regain the lost lands. Also in that time were the great hospitals of Uuk Zephar built, to hold those maimed and maddened in the endless wars, the hospitals atop the pyramids of Xeghal and Vel and Zrolghovrom. The reigns of Vorrom and of her sister Vad, in which the wars continued, were the last great age of Uuk Zephar, though to those who dwelled then it seemed like the morning of a new age, as the dwellers in darkness were driven from province after province.
Xevad who ruled after Vad was a venal ruler, and extravagant. The moneylender descended on Uuk Zephar like biting flies, and the food intended for the soldiers was stolen and sold in the markets. Then came four years with little rain, and famine and sickness, and always war, war, until Xevad wearied of seeking to restore Aa-Kamn and sued for peace. Then there were three years of good rains, and then another famine, and Xevad was killed when there was a shaking of the earth that brought her palace down upon her. A third part of the dwellers in Uuk Zephar were killed on that day. That day was the ending of So-Phnom, for from that day onward there was never one empress who was called the empress of So-Phnom. Hjarmugh of the palace guard, a farseer of the race of Aa-Kamn, made herself ruler of what was called Zepharud, which extended no more than a day’s ride beyond the edge of the swamp in which Uuk Zephar lay, in the crook in the arm of L’dron. For the rest of the years of Uuk Zephar, it was never again important in the alliances and campaigns by which the west was lost to the dwellers in darkness, but for a little time it was still a large and prosperous city. Hjom after Hjarmugh lost all of Zepharud to the t’sai lho of L’dron, and in the confused years that followed after Uuk Zephar became itself subject to the T’sai Lho of L’dron.
Never was there a klemn empress there again: but its rulers for a time were good and wise, and it was kept as a great redoubt of the free peoples for ninety years, thanks to the defences built by Vorrom. When Uuk Zephar was ruled by L’dron it was named T’zar C’phar. There came noather great earthquake, in the ninth year of the governor H’tal K’hl N’ym, and afterwards the hosptials of Xejhul and Vel were not rebuilt, and neither was the Armoury of Vraal (which was called then the Cage of F’sai), and many of the testng stones were taken away to Irpizar. Those were the days when the withering of the free peoples of the West was swift, and Uuk Zephar withered with them. The walls were rebuilt around the dimniished city, high and wide, but only six of the great pyramids remained within them, and no men of any great repute.

The ending of Uuk Zephar in the annals I have followed is obscure. It is certain that it succumbed wth the other cities of L’dron when that land fell before the ancient enemy. There are no records of Uuk Zephar, or T’zar C’phar. or Urrash in Zepahrud (as it was called by the Argandarr) in the annals of the enemy in their age of pestilential greatness, so ti must be that they erased it from the face of Tsai. Such was the ending of the finest city ever to be built by the race of klemn.

20: Of the Leavetaking from Koph Orn

2007-04-28T04:08:00.002-07:00

Koph Orn was a city in the country between the lands of Chellon and Qosim, ringed by high jungled mountains and reached by tunnels and narrow paths cut into the stone. The steep valley in which Koph Orn lay was terraced on every side, and made beautiful with many pools, ziggurats, and observatory towers like upended cocnh shells. Koph Orn is said to have been built in the days of the Fourth Empire as a dwelling place for the Klemn. Koph Orn meant in the language of that people ‘the silent place’, for it was a place where the murmuring voices of the Gods, which all kalamen can hear to greater or lesser degree, were stilled entirely. That made it a place of sweetness to the Kalamen, and a place that was much desired, for the kalamen find little that is pleasant in the murmuring voices of the Gods. Everywhere on Tsai they are slaves or vagabonds, building nothing great, making no roads or empires, but the sages say that this is not because they are fools, but because their thoughts are forever troubled and led awry by the murmurings of the Gods.
Many different clans and peoples of the klemn dwelled in Koph Orn, peoples who had in earlier times met only to fight with spear or poison, but in the silent place there was no shedding of blood. It was watched over by a clan called the Aghuam, who smelled like no other Kalamen, who were said to be descended from the first kalaman who had found Koph Orn, at a time when the Gods still walked by daylight. To Koph Orn came Klemn from all the northeastern parts of Vuin, sages and magicians and pilgrims and all manner of restless wanderers. The great clans a thousand miles distant, in the jungles of Chellon, each kept emissaries in Koph Orn, and valued the wise men who came out of it. Ever was Koph Orn the place for the making of treaties between these tribes. Prisoners would often be released by one clan, on condition that they remain forever in the city of truce. All these clans, even those who hated each other with a great hatred, would stand together to defend Koph Orn from those who sought it out- armies of t’sai oh and of humen, two or three times in each ninety of years. In a thousand years the only othermen who brought news of Koph Orn back to their fellows were a handful who had been captured in these wars and escaped before they could be sacrificed. Some of the prisoners were no sacrificed, it is said, but were kept so that the work of their hands might ornament Koph Orn, and it is said that they and their children and their children’s children carved many of the curious things that can be found carved in Koph Orn, and made the jewellery that can still be found at the bottom of deep pools there. The carvings show all the doings of the klemn of Koph Orn, and the subduing of armies of one race and another, and fabulous beasts: but the carvings of the sea are not as would be made by men who had seen the sea, and nor are the images of the fabulous beasts such as would be made by men who had seen beasts beyond those that could be found in Koph Orn. None of these men ever wrote their story, and they dwindled or were massacred before the leavetaking from Koph Orn, so it not known how the lamented being prisoner their whol lives in that narrown valley among so many of the klemn.
The tales told by those who escaped from Koph Orn grew in the telling and the retelling. These tales were such that the kings of the plains and the shores grew wary of Koph Orn and the mages of the Aghuam who watched over it, and there came a time when no more armies were sent against it from the shores and the plains. As the sleep of the gods grew deeper, and their dreams ceased to trouble the klemn of Chellon, the confidence of the clans of Chellon grew, and their lands became perilous for othermen. Plagues and diverse troubles came to afflict the peoples of the West who were not klemn, and there came a time when the clans of Chellon began to think that they should go forth form the jungles and take for themselves the cities of the plains and the shore. And at these times also, with the quiet of the gods, the clans began less and less to respect the ancient truces and privileges of Koph Orn.
This is the account of the leavetaking from Koph Orn.
It was midnight and red Oculis, the eye of the Flaigar, stood high above Koph Orn. The emeissaries of two-score tribes had gathered at the oldest of the sacred pools, where the most ancient females of the Aghuam commanded all the affairs of Koph Orn. The clans had made treaties among themselves in Chellon concerning the lands of the othermen, and were resolved to go orth and subdue the plains and the shores and the distant lands oversea. These emissaries had gathered in Koph Orn to secure the blessing of the Aghuam, and the assistance of their magicians and sages. In the darkness the emissaries made their speech, in the silent way that the klemn use for that which is most important. Greatest among the speakers was Xur, of the clan of Xek Phnom. She spoke, and then spoke Ghad of the clan of Uuk Phnom, and Vjod of the clan of Ur Geph, and many others, in favour of the decision of the clans of Chellon. When they had all spoken the eldest of the females of the Aghuam spoke from the bottom of the pool. She was named Xhriguam, and was held to be the greatest of all the mages of the klemn in that age.
‘We are a leaf that floats on the black waters of time. They are deep waters and they bear us swiftly to an unknown place. We float upon these waters, and go where they bear us. The gods are they who swim in these waters. They seem far away from us now, and sleeping, but they are near, and their waking is near. They do not move in time as we move in time. Aiee! In the north there are two gods. Even now they grow fitful in their slumber in the roots of mountains beyond the sea. Their psouls are hard like daimonds, hard like starmetal. They are not soft, like the psouls of the gods our ancestors new, but hard like the psouls of our ancestors’ ancestors, who tore peoples out of the sky and scattered them over the world. Them I will not name (said she). The diamond psouls of these gods reflect two futures to my inward eye. In this place and in this time one of these will become no reflection, but what is to be.
One reflection is this, that you go to the lands of the othermen, to take them and subdue them. If you do this, your descendants will be empresses over a hundred lands which you do not know. They will command armies as numberless as the water-fleas of the River of Spirits, and raise up cities greater than Koph Orn like so many ant-mounds. All men will know of the power of the klemn of Chellon, and all men will fear it, whether they live on the tops of great mountains or on distant islands in the midst of the Outer Ocean. The glory of the klemn will endure for a thousand years. Yet a time will come when all this will be made as nothing. The waking gods will laugh over the destruction, and their servants will be masters over your descendants for twice ten thousand years, or longer, into a darkness which my inward eye cannot pierce.
One reflection is this, that you return to your forests, and put aside the vanity of ruling over othermen. Abide with all the customs of your ancesotrs, and respect this place as it was respected by your ancestors. Then you will raise no empires and no armies and rule over no othermen, and Koph Orn will remain the greatest of all the cities of the klemn. Othermen will enslave us, but only in places, and for a time, as happens today. The waiting of the klemn will endure a thousand years. But when the gods arise in the north, your descendants will be waiting for them, and will bring forth such mages as Tsai has never before seen. Then they wiil cut down the servants of the woken gods and ruin them utterly. After that time the mages of the klemn will return to Koph Orn the klemn of Chellon will on living even as they do today for twice ten thousand years, or longer, into a darkness which my inward eye cannot pierce.
These are the two great images reflected in the psouls of the two nameless gods.In the time of our descendants those nameless gods will wake across the sea. In this time and in this place you are to chose which image will be truth and which will be a fable.’
Clouds passed over the stars, and in the darkness of Koph Orn the emissaries of the tribes of Chellon spoke silently one to aother and to the ancient females of the Aghuam, and the choice was made.
Said the speaker of the Xek Phnom ‘A thousand years of glory, from this moment onward, is better than a thousand years of waiting, from this moment onward. What have we in common with the people of the long twice-ten thousand years that end in unknowing? We cannot tell which image will lead to the better ending, once the black river has borne us to its end.’
Said the speaker of the Ur Geph: What duty have we to those who are yet to come, who can feel no pain today, who can make no plans today, who feel no joy, who are but a vacuity and a nothingness, a ripple on the depths of the waters of time?’
Such was the decision made of the klemn of Chellon. To some it may seem like a foolish one: but to to the klemn of that time and place it did not seem like a foolish one. Xur knew that one time is enough for each generation to cotnend wth: one ethics that subsumes all times and all places cannot exist without omniscience, which G’dal proved is impossible.
Then the Xhriguam spoke again in words without sound. ‘This is the image that is no real. We Aghuam will bless tis venture, and support it with all the wisdom and magery that is ours, until the world is remade and what lies beyond the darkness is made clear to our inward eyes.’ Then the Xhriguam commanded all thoe who dwelt in Koph Orn to gather all they had and join the tribes in the jungles of Chellon. Some were sent to each tribe, to be the cords that would bind them together and the ferment that would swell them to greatness, so that the klemn would be made the people that is written of in the histories of that time, brave and cunning and thick–souled. Those old ones of Koph Orn who could easily travel, the females and the males, remained behind in their pools in the empty city until they died. And their jewels sank with them to the bottom of these pools, while vines grew over the observatory towers of Koph Orn and the wild beasts made their lairs beneath its stairways.
Such was the leavetaking from Koph Orn.

19: Of the sinking of the floating city of the Sea-Khans

2007-04-28T04:08:00.001-07:00

The Sea-Khans arose in the days when the pirates of Darmund had dragged their warboats ashore and sought wisdom among the Lomen, and the raiders of Vulk had turned to philosophers, and the last vessel of the fierce water-folk Dorren plied the waters between Roghashtash and Dirlim, taking stones from the temples at the one to decorate the palace of the White Priestess who dwelt at the other. Then, the timorous peoples of the hundred coasts were first putting their vessels again into the water, to trade jissamon for hrin, and silk for silver, and wine-red ankhamores for hairless slave-girls of the Yatharrim. In such days arose the Sea-Khans.
The Sea-Khans walked never upon the unmoving lands, but dwelt in the middle of the Greater Ocean, where the great weeds make moving lands into which no ship may pass. They were of the race of Nathians, but they were not given to jollity, lusting only after wealth and the power to go where they willed and do as they wished. And for a mere instant in the life of Tsai – the lifetime of a lomen, nothing more – they were the terror of every ocean, and every great river, and gathered more wealth to themselves than anyone could ennumerate. Reckoned the first of the Sea-Khans was Prem. It was exhausted from gathering the Nathians of the moving lands together, and making them lust for wealth, and died of a flux off the Isles of Prinjar. The second of the Sea-Khans was Yuzdra, and it led a fleet of a hundred horn-beaked vessels against the coast between Thiim and Urbik, and then a greater fleet around the capes of Nargan and against the cities of Hulud. It was stabbed while it lay budding in a place called Ad-Jumar, in Hulud. The third of the Sea-Khans was Jobborom, and it reigned a very long time, preparing its own food and dancing only at its own birth-pool. It was after Jobborom led what was called the Great Raid, up the River of Gamar to carry away the treasures of Ad-Zemak, that it first imagined the Floating City.
And the form of the Floating City, as it was imagined by Jobborom, and built by it amid the endless moving lands of the Greater Ocean, half a world from the stone bulwarks of Ad-Zemak, was as this:
Let us make for ourselves a city as the cities of Gamar are made, with tall towers, and broad avenues, and walls wide enough for armies to march upon. But let us build it upon the waters. Let us build it in the moving lands, where the great storms never come, in a place where the weeds are sweet. We will have towers of timber taller than their towers of stone, and avenues of water broader than their avenues of stone, and moats of deadly weeds wider and more impassable than any wall. Let us make paths to take twice nine-thousand ships into the moving lands, where the great storms never come, and let us chain them together to make lanes and quarters, and people them with men from every land that is touched by the Greater Ocean and the lesser seas. In the middle of the city let us make a broad space greater than any park of the cities of Gamar, and let us gather there all things that are fine and admirable that grow upon the waters in the moving lands. Let us place there three great ships, greater than any have yet been made, with masts taller than any tower, and let us make them splendid with ivory and gold. One will be the ship of Prem, and one will be the ship of Yuzdra, and one will be the ship of Jobborom, and there will be space enough for ninety more Sea Khans who will come after.
Jobborom commanded every port that faced the Greater Ocean and the lesser seas to make over ships to build its city, and sailors, and skilled artificers according to the arts that were practiced there. The number required from each port was determined by its size, many from the great ports and few from the lesser, but all were commanded to deliver such a tribute or face the wrath of the Sea-Khan. Many were the tribulations of those who crossed the oceans at the command of Jobborom, and forged a path through the moving lands, and arranged twice nine-thousand boats in the form of a city in the midst of that expanse of great weed, under the fierce sun. There is a pillar carved in Thiim with the names of the men of that city who went to build the Floating City, and there is a song that is still sung by the sailors of Karak, in Damarcus, about the building of the Floating City, and another song of Celabar about the ships of that land that went off and did not return. There is a great library in Mouth-of-Yann that was built by a Cirilman named Irilim, who returned wealthy from the building of the Floating City. From every land that touches the sea, men and ships were made to come and build Jobborom’s city: and few ever returned to the places they had come from. By the time of Jobborom’s death its city was builded just as it had imagined it.The floating gardens became as beautiful as any made thing on the surface of Tsai, and marvellous were the skies of the Floating City when it was completed, where banners of red and gold fluttered from every tower and mast of the city. Within the Floating City dwelt men of diverse kinds from every shore in Tsai: Nathians and Cirilmen, for the most part, but also Thudun and Lomen and Humen and Taracen and Fip, Kalamen in numbers, T’sai Lho from east and west, Horned Men, and even fierce black-haired Parathi of Yatharrim.
Biram of Yatharrim was one of these, and she came as a marine on a ship called the Amberfox, which became a hostelry in the district of Wind-Three-Quarters, and stayed there in the pay of the Sea Khan. For the Nathians of the Moving Lands desired only those arts of war in which they sailed swiftly from one place to another, and plundered their enemies: they had little fondness, and little skill, for keeping guard over a fixed place such as the city Jobborom had made. So even while Jobborom lived the Sea-Khans took other kinds of men into its service and made them into watchmen, and Biram rose to officer a thirty of men-at-arms. Biram had two daughters whose names were Issuk and Dethram, and when they were of an age they took service under the Sea-Khan Brebom, and both rose high in its service, and kept watch in its palace ship, and Biram died joyful to see her daughters placed so highly in the service of the greatest rulers of the world. For in the days of Brebom’s greatness the Sea-Khans were truly masters of the seas of Tsai, and sailed unmolested in every water, taking tribute from every land.
But next of the Sea-Khans was Gom. Gom had been budded and hatched in the Floating City, and knew nothing of the open seas of its ancestors. Gom neglected the practice of war, so that in its time the shores of Vuin grew insolent of the Sea-Khans, and dangerous for their servants. But before this Gom hated Brebom and its works, and had destroyed the palace ship of Brebom, and brought low all those who had been high under it. Gom had Issuk killed. Dethram Gom also killed, and it took all that she had so that her family were impoverished. There were three children of Dethram, two sons and a daughter: the sons left the Floating City, but the daughter of Dethram went to live in a district called the Little Waters, where there were many Taracen and Humen of humble station, and took lodging there in a vile hulk. There was sickness there, and bitterness for one whose family had been so high in the service of the Sea-Khan, so she soon withered and died: but she left a little son of seven years named On-Biram, which is ‘Hope of Biram’. He was strong and clever, with the sea in his blood so that he was as much at home in the water as on the deck of a ship. He lived by his wits on the waterways of the Floating City until he found service with a human merchant and took to calling himself Gadron, which is ‘The Broad-Shouldered’: but he did not forget who he was, or who he might have been if Gom had not slain his grandmother. The parathi Gadron guarded the goods of the merchant Timon of Uz in the same way his ancestors had guarded the Sea-Khans of all the oceans. He remained strong as he grew older, and clever, and nimble on water and seacraft alike. He spoke seldom, and never in jest, but said what was needful to say when it was needful to say it. It happened that Timon had business with a human named Varis, who was an officer in the fleets of Gom. Varis was impressed with the servant of Timon, and offered the parathi a post in the fleets. For in those days many men had gone to do battle with the lomen of Celabar and Talis, and the restive fishmen of the Inner Sea, so the navies of the Sea-Khan were much depleted. There was insolence in the Isles of Damarcus, and along the fjord coasts of Kiriath, and sailors and marines of all races were demanded by the Sea-Khan, old grey Gom. So it came about that Gadron took service with Varis: but neither Varis nor any other servant of the Sea-Khan knew that Gadron’s name was On-Biram, or where he came from. Many black-haired mercenaries of Yatharrim and Nhillash took service with the Sea-Khan in those years.
Varis commanded one of the fleets of little craft that went up and down the channels near to the Floating City. There were a maze of these sea-roads cut through the weed so that craft could approach the city, forever shifting and changing beyond the moat of death-weeds. These channels were places forbidden to the common subjects of the Sea-Khans, for fear of mischief they might make there, and the weeds on either side were shot thrgh with traps and snares.
It is said that Gadron was patrolling alone in this place when he saw a Cirilmen caught in a snare. He drew his sword and leapt over to where the Cirilman was, for death was the penalty for anyone found in the forbidden places.
‘Spare me!’ called the Cirilman in the speech of the Sea-Khans. ‘Spare me, O Noble One! That nine-hundred years of learning should end here, in this snare, that cannot be. It must not, not on such a morning.’ The dawn of Midsummer’s day was breaking, and the sky was the colour of apricots in the east, and the pale pelt of the Cirilman glowed like rosy amber.
Gadron did not reply, but he stayed his sword, and stopped a few paces back from the Cirilman.
‘Let me free!’ called the Cirilman. ‘Let me free, O Noble One of the Parathi! I will never trouble your Master’s city henceforth. It was such a little thing I had to find here, and I can live well enough without it. I will live without it, if you spare me, Noble kinsman of Biram.’
Gadron had stepped forward, and raised his sword, but now he stopped. ‘How do you know that name?’ he asked.
‘I saw her once, and was told her name, when first I came to this place,’ said the Cirilman. ‘And you are very like. You could be no one else but a kinsman of hers.’
Gadron knelt forward and cut the Cirilman free from the snare. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Do not come back, or you will be killed.’
‘Thank you, Noble kinsman of Biram!’ said the aged Cirilman, making coiled obeisance before the guard. ‘You do not know what learning you have saved from oblivion today. Jade or silph I have none, neither gold nor nhej, but I will give you a prize that will enable you to rise in the service of your Master above all other servants.’
‘Go,’ growled Gadron, but he did not step forward.
‘I will leave and not return, Noble One,’ said the Cirilman, and it coiled away through the weed. But when it was a few score paces away, it turned and called back to Gadron.
‘Noble Kinsman of Biram, not a hundred steps from here is a place where the floor of the sea rears up in a mountain to seek the light, ending no more than nine man-lengths from the surface. On that mountain are two trumpet shells the colour of this dawn, and between them lies buried a stone box. In the stone box is a horn carved of wolde-ivory. The man who blows that horn may summon the Ur-Wolde Arzamur, and command it, so long as his will lasts. Farewell!’ And the Cirilmen sped away, and was never seen again in the neighbourhood of the floating city.
Gadron stood until the Cirilman had vanished, and then he left his arms and armour by the side of the channel, and dove down into the waters. Dark and treacherous are the waters beneath the Moving Lands: like a net and forest and a cloak and a cage of seething things are the weeds between the diver and the sky, and the sunlit channel a dim and narrow thing far behind. Gadron dove and saw the sea-mount of which the Cirilman had spoken, steep sided and festooned with the drab sponges and hive-corals of the deep waters. At the top he saw the two trumpet shells, their stalks as high as a man, and between them a little clear place of mud. From this he dug with his hands a squared stone the size of his head. With it he returend to the surface, to breathe again a moment before the darkness could take him. The box was cemented shut with the crusts of sea-things, but Gadron pried it open with his sword and took out the horn within. It was of ivory the colour of honey, unmarked by any rune, polished as a mirror and as soft as the inner fur of a young erkvaard. He tucked it in his belt and cast the box into the waters, and returned to his boat. He told no one what had happened, and he kept the horn hidden. Gadron told his thoughts to no one, and no one knows what they were.
A year and a day later there came word to the Floating City that Nromon had proclaimed himself Sea-Khan off the Rinnorian Isles, and hastened with a great fleet to unseat Gom. From scattered coasts and seas the old grey Sea-Khan Gom called back its navies to defend the floating city, but they were far away, and it seemed that there would be but few defenders to meet the fleet of Nromon. Among these defenders were Varis and his company- humen and thudun and argandarr and taracen, and a few of the black-haired parathi of Yatharrim and Nhillash, with Gadron among them. Gadron took the horn from its hiding place and kept it by him, sleeping and waking. Each day there came word that the fleet of Nromon drew closer to the Floating City, and more of the subjects of Gom deserted to its banner. Gadron told his thoughts to no one, and no one knows what they were.
There came a night when the weeds beyond the moat were alive with the lights of a thousand ships of war, and the war cries of Nromon’s myriads came from afar across the water like the cries of kressails, and Varis lay dying in a warboat in the district that was called Red Waters. Gadron went to a place when he was told, and left it when he was told, and ever and again sent an arrow flying as he was commanded at the outrunners of Nromon, or leapt aboard one of their scouting boats. He had taken as yet taken no wound, and had escaped already from the wreck of one boat, swimming away underwater a longer way than was thought possible for that kind of man. He wore the horn of wolde ivory at his belt, tied so that it could not be lost, and any man who noticed it thought only that it must be booty he had taken from some officer of Nromon.
There came an hour just before dawn when the navies of Nromon pressed close upon the Floating City on every side, and his marines entered into first one district and then another with jubilation. All of Varis’ company were slain, or scattered, but Gom had yet taken no wound, and he found himself in the district which is called Little Waters, at the very hulk where he had been a child. He climbed to the top of the mainmast and looked out over the Floating City, and then- and only then- he raised the horn of wolde-ivory to his lips and blew it. The wind took the sound and whipped it away, and only in the parts of Little Waters that were close at hand did men glance curiously upwards, and wonder at the sound. Gadron climbed back down the mast, and sought out men of Nromon in the water-streets who had given themselves over to pillage and might be fair prey for a single man who had kept his wits. In one hand he held his sword, and in the other he still gripped the horn of wolde-ivory, so tightly that the muscles of his arm burned. In all this time Gadron told his thoughts to no one, and no one knows what they were.
Great and terrible is an Ur-Wolde. At dawn the Ur-Wolde Arzamur rose amid the waters of the moat, vast beyond reason, and the sun shone upon it like a newly-born island of iron. Mother and Father of many Woldes, older than Empires, its will was not its own, and it turned upon the fleet of Nromon like a great storm. Arzamur swamped one of the chief ships of Nromon with one blow, and cracked another in its jaws, and then another, till the water about it on every side was filled with struggling men. Some say four hundred ships were destroyed by the Ur-Wolde that morning, but the chroniclers of all times and places are given over to exaggeration, and there are others who say it was no more than three-score. But all this tumult stayed outside the limits of the Floating City, and the flagship of Nromon hid from the Ur-Wolde among the water-avenues. Swiftly it pulled on towards the fabulous Garden of Jobborom, where the four palace-ships of the Sea-Khans and fearful old grey Gom awaited the victor. The men of Nromon swarmed over the palace ship of Gom on every side, and found the old Sea-Khan hiding in a basket, and gutted it like a fish. Cries of jubilation went up from the hosts of Nromon, though the Ur-Wolde still raged without, and Nromon raised the crooked stick of the Sea-Khans above its head and climbed atop the Sea-Khans’ throne of amber.
At about the same time Gadron had his knee crushed by a great hurled stone, so he could neither walk or swim, and was taken captive by some of the men of Nromon in the district of White Two-Thirds. They broke his hand with a club so that he would let go of the horn, and tied him together with two other prisoners. Then they brought them before one of the captains of Nromon, as they had been ordered. This captain was named Vimak, and she was a kinsman of Gadron, for she was the daughter of one of his uncles who had fled when Gom had become Sea-Khan. Such are the jests of chance.
‘Do not fear, brother,’ she said. ‘Only the cronies of Gom need fear us. We will not kill our prisoners, for Nromon is a merciful Khan, and has need of many men to keep the mastery of the oceans in its hands.’
Gadron looked towards the edge of the city, where the tumult of the Ur-Wolde could be heard like the wind through distant trees. He did not speak, but his eyes seemed to say the words ‘‘No man is master of the oceans.” And some miles distant the Ur-Wolde Arzamur ceased her ravages, and sunk beneath the waters, and began to head for the open ocean.
“Where did you get this horn?” asked the captain Vimak, for the warriors had handed to her the horn of wolde-ivory. “It has the look of a thing of power. Did you steal it, or are you of a greater rank than you pretend to?”
Gadron said nothing for a long while, and then Vimak grew impatient raked his face playfully with her claws.
‘Take this one to the Loreman,’ said Vimak to her warriors. “And take the horn also.’
So Gadron was taken before to the Loreman of Sea-Khan Nromon, as it was called that morning. This was a Cirilman sage who had travelled with Nromon from the Rinnorian Isles and was learned in the ways of arttefacts: but it had see one year for every three seen by the Cirilman sage who had told Gadron of the horn, and knew nothing of it. Gadron would not explain what the horn was, or where he had found such a treasure, so Vimak had Gadron taken to an upper deck and scourged. And all would have been well, for the Ur-Wolde was far away in the black waters and the rage was fading from it, but the will of Gadron failed. The hooks of the socurge struck him at the bend of his back, and each one took out a fingernail’s-worth of flesh, and he thought only pain for an instant, and gave a litle cry. And far away in the black waters the Ur-Wolde Arzamur, slowed, and turned around, and started back towards the Floating City. For the Ur-Woldes are slow to rage it had taken all the struggles of three-score ships or more to goad it into fury- but also slow to calm, and it wishes to revenge itself on the tiny beasts who had pestered it. When Gadron had been scourged the prescribed number of times, he was taken below so that his wounds might be bandaged: but the Loreman remained on the deck and observed the horn by starlight for invisible runes.
Arzamur the Ur-Wolde arose in the fabulous garden of Jobborom, stirring it into a morass, and with four great thrashings of its tail it sundered the four palace ships- the ship of Prem, the ship of Yuzdra, the ship of Jobborom, and the ship of Gom that was for a moment the ship of Nromon. The flagship of Nromon was dashed to pieces, and twenty or thrity other ships of his fleet that had been gathered in the floating garden. The waves of the Ur-Wolde’s passage shook the Floating City, and everywhere dashed little boats into the fixed ships, and swept men and beasts into the waters. Then the Ur-Wolde seemed to be sated with destruction, and went to pass down the broad avenue that ran through the Floating City from east to west: and the waves as it passed swamped boats and cast down towers. But it became tangled with one of the chains that linked ship to ship, and began to pull under the whole of the district of White Two-Thirds.
With horror Vimak had watched the passage of the Ur-Wolde. ‘Unchain the ship,’ she commanded. ‘Before we are dragged to the depths. This battle is lost.’ On every side others were endeavouring to do the same, but the men of Vimak were among the swiftest, so her ship was one of the few to escape from the drowning of White Two-Thirds. Three more of the districts of the Floating City were destroyed in large part by the Wolde, before it broke free.
It is said that very many ships were unchained and left the Floating City that day, though many were unsuited for the open water after so many years and never made it to land. The lieutenants of Nromon quarreled over the spoils, and each took with them a share of the ships of the Floating City to a different quarter of the Outer Ocean, so it is sai that a year after the night of Nroon’s victory no trace of the city remained. Vimak sailed for Yatharrim, and returned to the port of Duz, whch Biram had left as a young woman/. In Duz Vimak had a daughter, who she named Biram, and in Duz Vimak died old and prosperous. Gadron’s wounds never healed, and he sickened of a fever in the last months of the year, and died off the Isles of Karakuz. The Loreman of Rinnor was swept overboard when the Ur-Wolde was entangled with the chains of the Floating City, together with the horn of wolde ivory, and neither were ever heard of again.

18: Of V'dar

2007-04-28T04:07:00.002-07:00

In the most ancient times, the city of V’dar was established as a place of punishment by a ruler whose name has been forgotten. In its lowermost levels there were found many chambers carved from stone, filled with the bones of elders and adults. On the walls of some of the chambers were found ideographs scratched by those who had been prisoned there, drained of meaning by unnumbered years. Some of the ideographs were copied down, and long after all trace of V’dar had been removed scholars of T’sim divined their meaning. One inscription read thus:

Around me are killing beasts in a labyrinth of quicksands. My bones are painted with fire. I am eighty-four years old. My deeds were evil. The masters will not let me die. May their names be forgotten, may they be erased from every history, may the place the made be unmade stone by stone and brick by brick, and never be remade.

V’dar was built on a stone hill amid the marshes, somewhere along the western shore of the Impudent Sea, no one knows where. Upon the bones of the prisoners of Vdar was built a fortress, and around the fortress was built a city, and with the rising and the falling of the seas the marshes around it were made into fertile fields. Dynasty succeeded dynasty, and Age of Wonder succeeded Age of Dearth, over and over as though there would be no end. V’dar endured through the Glory of the First Empire and the Madness of the Second Empire, through the wisdom of the Third Empire, when all names were changed, and it endured through the long Dark Ages, with the cold years and the storm years and years of windborne dearth. V’dar endured into the Fourth Empire, when strangers came from the stars to end the long silence. For all those years the bones of those who had been prisoned in V’dar lay in the chambers beneath it, and moved not.
In the middle years of the Fourth Empire V’dar became the stronghold of a phoboprogenitive philosophy, and began to diminish. It may be that many such philosophies were strong there, in one generation and another, for many names are recorded of the philosophies of V’dar. But for a time, less than nine hundred years, it was esteemed for its scholars, and diminished little by little. Near the end of that time the city was purchased by a merchant who had made a fortune in condiments, who followed one of the philosophies of V’dar, so that its scholars might abide there free from impositions and taxes. It was passed down to the descendants of that merchant, but they followed different philosophies, and they did not pay to upkeep the walls and streets of V’dar, which had been an ornament to the world through so many ages. Its ending is obscure, but where it is now is only a great orchard of beridon trees, whose flowers are useful in so many condiments.

17: Of the Place where the Sun dies

2007-04-28T04:07:00.001-07:00

Goland the Death-Beloved was a mariner on the Outer Ocean, and a pirate of the race of the Argandarr, and in later years a queen, and a mistress of fleets and armies. Goland the Death-Beloved came to the Isles of Nhej, and planted her standard on the island called Anrim, which is shaped like a student’s stool, and commanded that a fortress be built there, to hold her fleets and her armies, and that a city be built around the fortress, to hold the merchant folk who would victual them, and forge their weapons, and gather the nhej from the nhej beds, and dry it so as to preserve its scent, and sell it to all the nations of the east for the shining coins that would pay for it all. And so it was done. The city was named Golandashsh, which is the city of Goland, and havens and walls were built for it with much labour of Taracen. It endured there for many thousand years, and was never lacking in shining coin.
The walls and towers of Golandashsh were of stone cut from the bones of Anrim, but at sunset they shone as if of gold, far off over the waters. Mariners would point to the city, from far off on the sea, and say to the youths who were making their first voyage: ‘that light is where the sun goes down to the waters of Tsai, to die and be born again.’ It is written that mariners said this, but maybe they did not, for their jests are more often of a different kind. But certainly in its later centuries Golandashsh was called ‘the place where the sun dies’. It was accounted the uttermost east of all the cities of Tsai, and first to see the dying of each day’s sun.
The people of Golandashsh were proud, as any of the Sea Argandarr ever were proud; as proud as the men of vanished Sarnashsh, and of Harnshnash that is no more, and of the lost great havens of Dorren, and Vulk, and Dar Kalabashsh, that are all passed into the hands of other men, or the embrace of the sea; as proud as the men of Mithdak and Muruk, of Mhillash and Zaguan, in our own age, who swagger through the markets of Great Charn like gods come to earth. But the cause of the ending of Golandashsh was not the pride of its people.
The people of Golandashsh were fierce and cruel, and their amusements were fierce and cruel, and their labours were fierce and cruel. But neither their cruelty nor their ferocity brought the ruin of Golandsh.
The people of Golandsh were great drinkers of wine, and squanderers of coin, and oppressors of the poor, and addicted to many vices; but fewer cities have been destroyed for such things than are said to have been, in the chronicles of the humen.
‘Look at me!’ you would hear, if you walked in the market of Golandashsh, among the sellers of combs and cardamom at the end furthest from the great stone image of Goland. ‘Listen to me!’ you would hear, from the mouth of an Argandarr maid of twenty or twenty two years, frail and ill-favoured, sitting cross-legged on a mat with a few coins lying on her skirt. ‘Stop but a moment, and listen to my tales, and you will have joy of the telling; yea, and wisdom, also.’ You would see that she was frail and ill-favoured, with a bend to her leg that would make her hobble, and a brittle pallor to her horns; but her voice was the voice of a queen, of a mistress of fleets and armies, of a rhaetor and a giver of laws.
It was the custom of this maid to tell tales in the market, each day from morning until mid-afternoon. She told tales of ships that went upon the sea, and of heroes and their deeds. Her name was Gormbarr. Though she had never served upon a ship of war, nor slipped arrow to bowstring in the service of any admiral, she wove such a spell with her tales that those who listened to her could taste the salt spray, and the blood, and see with their own eyes so many strange islands of the Outer Ocean, and so many wonders of men and gods. To hear her tales was to wish yourself a mariner, even if you were the lowest clerk or drudge in all of Golandashsh. Nay, even if you were the highest of merchants, and wanted for nothing, the tales of Gormbarr would make you wish you had gone rather to face the perils of the sea, to live a sailor’s life or die a sailor’s death. Aiee! Of such little things, from such frail ill-favoured maids, can come the endings of cities and of empires.
‘Why should I not be a great mariner and warrior, rather than a counter of coins and a haggler after perfume-stuffs?’ wrote Kagdarr, who was a merchant of Thazarud who dwelt in Golandashsh, to his twin who dwelt still in Thazarud. Thazarud lies a little south of Thiim, and before Thiim it was master of the northern rim of the Outer Ocean, and Kagdarr had come to Golandashsh on some business of his trade, which was the selling of nhej in the markets of Thazarud.He wrote on writing stuff of the fishmen, which does not burn or decay, and his twin’s kinsmen preserved his letter for long ages, so that we may read it today.
Kagdarr had heard the cry of Gormbarr by the comb-sellers, and was stopped and held by her tales. ‘I am an Argandarr, of the ancient race of Nargan,’ wrote Kagdarr, ‘and in my veins flows the blood of so many sea-kings of old, I cannot name them. I dare not shame the blood of my forebears by living my life grubbing in the markets, like a fishman, like a t’sai lho. No more will I spend my days unworthily, but be as I am meant to be, a warrior, and a mariner.’ It is not recorded what the twin of Kagdarr said when he received this letter, but it is likely that he thought that this foolishness of Kagdarr’s would soon pass, with the cares and duties of his trade, and return him to himself. But it did not pass. If it had passed, perhaps Golandashsh would not be numbered among the cities that are lost.
It is said that Kagdarr sold all that he had, as men are exhorted to do in the scriptures of Flesilin; and also in accordance with the teachings of that great sage and prophet that he gave the greater part of his wealth to those who had little or nothing. He hired sailors who had been put ashore in Golandashsh for immorality, and mercenary marines who had grown weary of waiting for war to return to the coasts of Tokhra, ruffians of all kinds who had not fixed dwelling place in the city, and not a few idle prentices or wastrel youths who had listened too often to the tales of Gormbarr. For those were prosperous times, and it was no small matter to find a crew, if you had no name as a master of ships.
Kagdarr gave his wealth also to the sellers of swords and bows, and grappling hooks, and instruments for hurling fire through the sky, heedless of the cost. He bought armour new landed from the foundries of Minash, and cloth of scarlet and gold to make frightful banners. And Kagdarr went also to the master of the ‘Arbiter of Sarnashsh’, who had offended a clan of the fishmen, and was weary of the sea; and joyed was that weary sea-captain to recieve twice what any other man would pay for his vessel. Kagdarr named the ship anew, calling it the ‘Star of Staameral’, and sailed away from Golandashsh to find glory as a master of fleets and armies, like the Argandarr sea-captains of old. Last of all he bought the crippled poet Gormbarr- or had her carried away, rather, and lavished the last crumbs of his wealth upon her, so that she might accompany the ‘Star of Staameral’ on his quest for glory, and make him immortal with her tales.
When they were well out upon the Outer Ocean- vaster than any man knows, holder of more secrets than the void places between the stars- Kagdarr had Gormbarr brought before him. She had been clad anew in a cloak of gold, and horn-tips of silver, and a breastplate of chain studded with carnelian, Gormbarr, the frail and ill-favoured tale-teller of Golandashsh.
‘You are my teacher and my prophet, O Gormbarr,’ said Kagdarr. ‘You have told me what it is like to be a hero as of old, and all that I have I have spent so that I may be a hero as of old. To you I will give all that it is in my power to give, and all I ask of you is that you record my doings in your tales.’
‘Your sword arm is flabby, my Lord,’ said Gormbarr. ‘Your ship is no true ship of war, and your crew is no company fit for heroes, but a rabble, and a pack of fools. It is not the spending of gold that makes a hero, but the spending of blood. And I am no teacher and no prophet, but only a teller of tales. I need no more than I had in the marketplace, my Lord; return to Golandashsh, and give away this foolishness.’
‘You have told the tales that have re-kindled the ancient fire in my blood, O Gormbarr,’ said Kagdarr. ‘I want nothing more than to spend blood as I have spent my gold, and gain treasures precious beyond price, and take my place among the heroes. My triumphs shall be your triumphs; my losses will be my own. Record my doings, however they may end, with truth and beauty, and I will honour you like a Queen, and like a Mistress of Fleets and Armies.’
‘I am no Queen, and I am no Mistress of Fleets and Armies,’ said Gormbarr, and a flush came to her throat. ‘If you can be made a hero, it will be through no doing of mine, nor of yours, but only through some mighty working of the Gods of Old, some wondrous jest of Muustagon or Vorraghis or Daäkon, who walks on the surface of the sea as tall as a mountain.’
‘You are to me even as Muustagon or Vorraghis, or Daäkon striding green and terrible over the surface of the sea, raising and sinking islands with each step.’ And Kagdarr smashed his fist upon the table between Gormbarr and himself, so that it broke into pieces. ‘By myself I am nothing, but with the help of your tales, I can raise empires and bring them low, and do such deeds as men will sing about for ten thousand years. Tell me where I may win such fame.’
Then Gormbarr bowed her head a moment, and thought on her crooked legs, and her ill-made face, and would have called Kagdarr a fool. But she was possessed by the spirit of her own tales, and by the spirit which is more ancient than all tales, and she said. “I am no Goddess, my Lord. Yet I can tell you how your name can live ten-thousand years, if you prove yourself worthy. Keep your vessel unmutinied for a year and day, and do not founder her on hidden shoals, and earn no wealth by trade, and much by feats of arms. Then I will tell you how you may earn undying fame.’
The Gods let Kagdarr live, and gave him great good fortune for a year and day. Gormbarr watched and listened, and told Kagdarr which of his crew were plotting treachery, so that they might be drowned or marooned. She took but the ninth part of all the gifts Kagdorr offered her, and spent many days at the prow of the ‘Star of Staameral’, watching the horizon from dawn until dusk. Kagdarr defeated upon the waters merchantmen of Nargan and the Balm Coast, slaveships of Torobilan, wolding vessels from the grey shores beyond Thiim, and even one long beweaponed cutter of his own Thazarud, sent to hunt pirates in the northern seas.
It was a day at the end of spring, a year and day after Gormbarr had made her promise, and the ‘Star of Staameral’ lay at anchor a thousand leagues south of Golandashsh, in a lagoon where brightly-coloured sea-worms seethed, so numerous as the stars of the sky in every bucketful of water. Again Kagdarr had Gormbarr brought before him, and now she wore a circlet of starmetal on her brow, and anklets of jade, and a sword that had belonged to a Prince of Gorrod. Kagdarr’s sword arm was as thick as a tree, and his ship was fitted out as a ship of war, and his crew were no more a rabble. He was now named among the pirates who were worth a price, and no more called a mere fool.
‘O Light in the darkness!’ said Kagdarr. ‘You said that you would tell me where I might win undying fame, if for a year and day I could preserve this vessel, and increase my fortune through valour. This I have done because you were with me, you who are like a Goddess of war, and gave me your tales to drink like wine, and your words of wisdom, which are like food for valour.’
‘I am no Goddess, my Lord,’ said Gormbarr. ‘I am no prophet.’ And yet she smiled in her pride, and let herself speak words for her pride to eat upon.
‘I know of a most audacious feat of valour, which has never yet been attempted, which ranks with Staameral’s challenge of the Gods. If you were to attempt this quest, your tale would be told for ten-thousand years, should victory or glorious defeat be your portion.’
‘Speak, Lady Gormbarr,’ said Kagdarr, bending before the maid as if he were her servant.
‘Know then, my Lord, that in the uttermost north of the world, where there is no sunlight in winter, and no starlight in summer, there is a shore that is but one mighty cliff of black stone higher than mountains, stretching to eastward and to westward a hundred leagues. In the midst of this cliff there is a gate, high and broad enough for a ship to sail through, if it is sailed with great skill. Beyond the gate is a lightless tunnel through the flesh of the world, crafted by the Ancient Enemy in times before any annals were made. For three days and three nights this tunnel goes, ever northward, to a city of the Ancient Enemy, buried beneath a mile of stone and a mile of ice, where in those forgotten ages the greatest of their mages sat in council weaving their schemes of dread. In that place is heaped the plunder of a thousand worlds, and the wisdom of a thousand generations. Yet none has ever gone there and returned, for over it all broods evil and unconquerable the Dark God Axak, who hates all free men with an endless hate. Ten thousand of the ancient enemy serve Axak and worship her, and each commands a hundred slave warriors, with poison talons and transparent flesh, and eyes the size of fists that glow vilely in the darkness. In that place is kept the greatest of all treasures from the time before the coming of the Ancient Enemy, the Eye of the Eyes of Udom. He would possess it would be as a God; and he would fight to possess it and fail, he would be immortal in the tales of a hundred lands. But no hero has yet dared to enter that place.’
‘How might such a great enemy be defeated?’ asked Kagdarr.
‘No man knows,’ said Gormbarr, her eyes gleaming like her circlet of starmetal. ‘But many are the ways in which heroes have brought down great foes, even as great as Gods.’ Gormbarr told him in her pride desperate stratagems out a hundred tales, until long after sunset, and they remained closeted together in Kagdarr’s chamber. And as the sun rose the ‘Star of Staameral’ turned to the uttermost north, to seek the great gate of which Gormbarr had spoken.
The ‘Star of Staameral’ stopped in Golandashsh to take on new crew, and weapons and provisions, and amulets and artifacts of renown. In a day and a night there Kagdarr spent all that he had gained in a year, in preparation for his new quest. In that day and night no officer of the Lords of Golandashsh dared to draw arms against him, for there was a strange and terrible look in his eyes, as though he were one of the heroes of old. Gormbarr made sure that his tale was known, and in the wineshops and chandleries of Golandashsh it was said that Kagdarr dared to do what no man had done, and it was whispered that he was a fool, to lay down his life and fortune for some wisp of a tale spun by a wisp of a maid. Even then there still might have been hope for Golandashsh, but those believed his tale had not the means to stop him, and those who had the means disbelieved, and had not the will to stop him from seeking his own end. And after a day and a night Kagdarr sailed away into the cold grey ocean, on the first day of summer.
In after years it was not uncommon to meet sailors in the ports on the western coasts of Mir, who claimed to have sailed on the ‘Star of Staameral’, and to have left her in Golandshsh at this time, and afterwards to have made their escape from Golandashsh. No doubt there were some such. But if all those who told the tale were collected together, they would be crew enough for a dozen ships.
Even in that season, there were dreadful storms in those seas, and ever and again a man would be swept overboard from the ‘Star of Staameral’; and in the middle of summer mountains of ice were seen floating upon the water. Gormbarr and Kagdorr were ever together on this voyage, and when each was seen they looked exultant, and it is said Gormbarr’s eyes had the same fierceness as Kagdarr’s had, the same gleam of starmetal, as though they were the eyes of a hero of old. ‘Look at me!’ she would cry, and ‘Listen to me!’ she would call, striding the rimy decks with a cloak of askon fur, with the sword of the Prince of Gorrod in her hand, and she would tell a tale to quicken the blood a man’s veins and set the marrow in his bones afire, and make him long to die in battle for the woman with the crooked leg and the brittle horns.
Ten days after the mountains of ice were first seen, something like a line of black cloud was seen along the northern horizon, which as they came nearer became the black cliffs of which Gormbarr had spoken. Unceasing the waves crashed against those walls, as they had crashed against the walls of Zegul long ages before. Beside them the Star of Staameral was as a toy boat made of leaves by a child, and many of the sailors would have turned back, had not Gormbarr not already woven their psouls into a web of valour and glory. Perilously close to those walls they sailed, for nine days, first to eastward and then to westward, before they found the gate. It was three times as high as the ship, and little more than three times as wide; and foam billowed about it in tumult from moment to moment, with the rising and the falling of the sea. And within all was dark. Into that place the Star of Staameral sailed, and was not desroyed, by the jest of some God. Her crew rowed her on, in utter darkness, and the ceaseless noise of clashing waters, through a tunnel carved before the Horned Men had first set foot on Tsai. Three days and three nights they toiled onward in the darkness, by the light of a single lantern. Then they saw ahead a vast cavern, and docks and quays, and pale lights like the decay of corpses adorning carven things impossible to name. They saw also movement in the darkness, and they knew that they had come to the greatest city of the Ancient Enemy, where no free man had been before. At the edge of this place they anchored the ship, and drew lots for their places in hushed voices, and cut their arms and bled together into a goblet. Gormbarr whispered words in each man’s ear to make them bold beyond reason, and they looked at the pale lights with lust for glory, and not with any atom of fear.
‘We go now into a tale which will be told for ten-thousand years,’ said Kagdarr to his saiolors, who had once been a rabble. ‘We have the stratagems of the greatest heroes of old, and amulets and artefacts purchased at great price, and we go now to challenge Axak, evil God beneath the helmet of the world, and all her vile servants. We go with the blessings of the Gods of Old, the Gods of Heroes, which we have not forgotten, Muustagon and Vorraghis and Staameral of the Sword of the Stars. We will become as Gods, with the wisdom of a thousand generations, and the plunder of a thousand worlds. Or we will die as men, and as heroes, and our names will live for ten-thousand years.’
Then Kagdarr and his company left the Ship of Staameral, and set foot in the galleries carved by the Ancient Enemy, and vanished into the the darkness. Nine men were left behind to watch over the ship, and Gormbarr also. It was feared her weak leg might fail her, and Kagdarr wished that she be preserved- if any could be preserved- to tell the tale of his quest.
It is not such an easy thing to invade a city of the Ancient Enemy. Gormbarr heard a splash in the darkness, and then a voice spoke inside her head, and it seemed as though her tongue was stilled before she could call out, as though her mouth was full of curd. ‘You are Gormbarr, of Golandashsh,’ said the voice. ‘And you have brought these thieves into my city.’ And the bottomless hatred of the voice would have destroyed her reason, had she not been made drunken on her own tales of valour for so many days without ceasing. The she heard the plop of something crawling onto the deck; and another splash, and another. Nine times there came the splash of something going from the quay to the water; and nine times the sound of something crawling onto the deck; and nine times the splash of something falling from the ship into the water. Then Gormbarr took her sword- without willing it- and cut the anchor rope, and herself turned the tiller to set the Star of Staameral towards the long tunnel, and the open sea.
Gormbarr sailed the Star of Staameral back to Golandashsh, with a crew of nine of the slaves of Axak, creatures who hid their faces from starlight, with poison talons and transparent flesh, and they arrived in Golandashsh on the night of the autumn equinox, between midnight and dawn. This is known because the ‘Herald of the Red Horse’ left the haven of Golandashsh at midnight, and behind it were the lights of many lanterns, and songs floating over the water; and the ‘Pearl of Fortitude’ sailed into the haven of Golandashsh at dawn and found it a city of dead men, killed by some silent plague in the night, with but one living woman, who sat at the end of the market furthest from the statue of Goland. Over and over again she told the tale of how she had come to Golandashsh, but never did she speak of what the slaves of Axak did in Golandashsh. And never another word did she speak, but this one tale, told over and over again, out of all the thousands of tales she had known. She was taken to Bastarash, in the lands where there is no winter, and lived at the court of the King, and died an old woman. It is said that years after she was brought there she bore twin girls, named Lerash and Lulk, whose skin was as white as alabaster. But no other word did she speak.
No man lived again in Golandashsh, and the isle Anrim shaped like a student’s stool wa sleft empty, and when men grew emboldened to make new cities in the Isles of Nhej they were built on other islands. ‘For that is the Island of Goland,’ mariners would say. ‘Goland, who was called the Death-Beloved, and her island is a place beloved of death, and it was named the Place Where the Sun Dies.’

16: Of the Place of the New Born Sun

2007-04-28T04:06:00.001-07:00

In a distant time there was a place of the Parathi where many of that people dwelt together in peace, tending their vineyards and fruiting groves and schooling their children among vaulted palaces of stone. Behind that place rose mountains, tall and chill and terrible, yet pleasant enough to behold on a day in spring from the valley below, keeping glittering vigil in their white mantles. On such a day they might seem to be a gathering of wise Gods, with some tenderness towards little beings; but in the winter they could only be Gods from the dark places between the stars, older than mercy or justice. The city of the Parathi stood with its back to those mountains, but its face was turned to look across the river Lek, which is young and wayward in that place, and only restrained by her high banks of black stone. It looked across to a gap in the hills that ran hard by the further bank, through which the first rays of the rising sun shone on the day of midwinter. The sun rose in that place on that day only; and whether that gap was made by chance, or by the work of some race in a forgotten time, I do not know.
The Parathi of that place were united in the worship of a God, and for that reason they had condescended to dwell together. and share their goods, and had left off quarrelling and the eating of flesh. For in that time, as in this, the Parathi were for the most part a fierce and obstinate people, given to the hunting of all kinds of beast, and liable to slay one another for debts of honour. Their God was likewise a fierce and obstinate God. The likeness of their God was carven out of white jade and stood in a temple of white jade at the highest point of the city, looking across the Lek towards the hills where the sun was born. The name of that place was in the language of the Parathi the city of the New Born Sun; and the God of that place was pictured in the form of a disk, held aloft by a noble matron of the Parathi.
There came to that place late in the autumn a traveller, of the race of Thudun of Argaon, and as was their custom the people of the city were hospitable to the traveller. They bade her stay by them in one of their vaulted houses of stone that was at that time empty, and gave her to eat and drink of the stores that they had laid by. Nothing did the Parathi ask of their guest, save only a few times they asked her to tell them tales of her journeys; for she had a wise aspect, even as the mountains, and had journeyed in many distant lands. The Parathi of the city were eager to hear her tales, so they gathered together in the amphitheatre that stood hard by the Ossuary of the Gyrfalcons.
And the traveller told tales of the wonders that she had seen in the Vale of Ulmnek, and the dead lakes below Kaawil, and the jumbled heights of Moror in Teglath where Aboleth is worshipped, and in many other places. And all wondered at her tales, and implored her to tell them yet more.
So she continued to speak before the Parathi until midwinter had come, and she had wearied of that place by the river, and of the heavy deep-throated singing of its people, and of their easy laughter; and many other of their practices were become tiresome to her. So when it came to the day of midwinter she again recited before the assembly of the Parathi, but at this time she did not tell of her travels, but instead spoke in syllogisms, and by examples, and of good and evil, and of how things might be proved and disproved by the use of logic. Furthermore she spoke of the motions of the stars and planets, and of what the philosophers of Argaon had determined of life and death. And the traveller disproved by cunning logic the God of that city.
At this all the people of the city, who were gathered as before to hear her speak, fell upon her with their claws and with their teeth, and tore her asunder. Silently and terribly did they kill the traveller, and that day for the first time the floor of the amphitheatre was despoiled with death. But when the philosopher of Argaon was slain, her logic remained logic, and their God remained disproved.
So that very day they left their city of vineyards and palaces, each to wander a different road, and never to look back to where their blind dead God waits high above the white waters of the Lek.

15: Of the Siege of Uxmal

2007-04-28T04:04:00.000-07:00

I am told there is a tradition among the humen that poets should be blind; of some humen, and in some times, I am sure that this is true, for they are a numerous and varied breed, and in many places dwell as near to the kalamen as siblings. At any rate it is said today that this is the tradition of those humen who live about the shores of the Golden Sea, and sometimes cross over in their travels to these colder shores of Gadara, thought I have seen poets of those lands who were as sighted as any of their fellows. In truth I have only ever known one blind poet of the humen who was not a rumour out of distant places or times. This one I saw and heard in a hostelry of the thudun on Calamine Street, near the delvings of the House of T’fau, where I went sometimes to hear the tales of the sailors.
This was many years ago, when silveroak trees still grew along Calamine Street, and more ships came to Great Charn from Niim and Baharaz and other such lands, which now trade directly across the Inner Sea. On one of these ships the human had come. It was dressed in thudun garments, and had a shaven head, and seemed to travel in the company of one particular thudun, a silent woman who seemed to be carved out of some heavy fine-grained stone. I would have said the human was old, after the fashion of humen, and but its voice was strong and sweet, not like an ill-tuned-drum as human voices often are. It sang there in the hostelry in the language of the thudun, with a clearer intonation than those who speak it from birth, and the song it sang was of its own making. I listened, and was joyed to hear that it sang of matters precious to me, the lore of the losing and finding of the cities of the elder days. Those others who listened did not appear to think highly of the song, and the poet did not sing it again; but when it was finished I asked it to repeat it to me alone, that I might copy down the words, and this it was pleased enough to do, for a few coins.

Life’s crooked fortunes drew me in my youth
to journey through the bitter March of Chaal
where when the world was young the Kalamen
encaged their Gods. A fey and fevered land,
bereft alike of Gods now and of men.
Borne on a vast and turbid stream we sailed
by noisome marshes, poisoned swamps and mires,
and thorny woods where things more beast than man
made horrid sacrifices in the night.
We saw their fires emblazoned on the night.
When once that night’s last evil murks had fled
the river left us in a dreary wild
where broad its inky waters overflowed
the ruins of a fair and spacious town.
Encompassing us round to every side
with foundered towers, and colonnades cast down
and broken pillars girding roofless walls
where ruby idols once in state reclined
with incense curling round their carven heads
To languorously wreathe their godly heads.
It stood defiant, sunken and obscured
like some poor harlot agèd by her trade
who stands unpainted, sullen, unperfumed-
yet softly sings a psoul-enchanting song.
Thus so to me that ravished city called.
Stripped of its jade and silver, and the gold
which ornamented once its every hall.
An ill-used strumpet, ancient and diseased
who has no living but her withered charms.
Who still must vaunt a vanished maiden’s charms.
And even so that city seemed to leer-
to bid me pass beyond its curtains vile,
enjoy within the feast it had prepared
and raise a cup of venom-blackened wine
in fealty to its beauty and its name,
while slimy things their wicked dance essayed
beneath the shadows of departed kings
and round about my feet like children played
returning sated to their foetid pools.
Their pale eyes glinting from unwholesome pools.

River of Spirits! Rightly men so call
that Behemoth of waters which we rode.
For from those pools I fancied I could hear
a horde of spirits, noble in their pain
lamenting still amid their ruined homes.
Then said I to my brothers: “Let me stay,
to seek what I may find in this sad place.
For fain would I to these dead psouls give ear
to hear their lamentations and their tales.
Hear bitterness and wonder in their tales.”
My brothers said to me, “We see no ghosts.
No shade or phantom moves among these stones.
This wreck is ages dead, and does not dream.
We hear no night gaunts wailing at the dawn,
nor youth unjustly murdered crying still
for vengeance on his false accuser's house.
Nor yet some maiden fool who died for love
bewailing still in melancholy tones
and calling curses down upon some youth.
Reviling still some faithless long-dead youth.”
I would not hear those spirits called unreal
which beckoned to my haunted inner eye
So bright they looked, so pure, so proud in death,
more fitted to my honour than those true
companions who had struggled by my side.

Again I begged my brothers, “Grant me leave
to hear from out of buried vaults of time
what mysteries these spirits might reveal.
If once you loved me, grant me one small hour
From all the store of time, a single hour.”

River of Spirits! Rightly men have named
that glutted lord of rivers where I turned
from true companions, seeking truer songs.
With faces dark my brothers bid me haste
and gave to me one hour from all of time
to drink my cup of folly and return.

So swift I kissed them, then more swiftly rowed
alone away beneath the forest shroud
to find what tales those spirits had retained
What tales like wine or venom yet remained.
Beneath the dark and tangled limbs that sought
to keep the leaden waters from the touch
of silver-fingered morning- as I stilled
my oars to drift above those deathly pools-
before me sprang a sudden into flame
a dawning spirit, as a child of dew
With golden limbs and tresses black as hate
and silver circlets round her ankles fair.

She laughed to see the fear that lit my eyes,
The fear that for an instant filled my eyes.
She gave a flourish with her pearly hands
as if she traced along a golden maze.
Then spoke to me, as any girl-child might,
with voice like any daughter of the day’s,
with lips as red as any orchid grown
on blessed island in the torrid seas.
“My name in life was Alacran”, she said.
“The only daughter of Queen Harephar
of Harephar the Queen of many towers,
of Uxmal with its fruiting trees and towers.”
I started at the name the princess bore
so blithely from the prison of the past
and wondered where she kept her hidden sting
whose touch is death or unremitting pain.
I made no sharp discourteous word or move,
but bowed as I would bow to greet a child
of noble birth chance-met by my own door
who knew no more of Uxmal’s evil fame
Then I knew of far Nerin’s icy moon.
Of grim and distant Nerin’s rumoured moon.
The girl-child turned and gave a gentle bow,
like to a tree that bends before the breeze.
I trembled as I listened to her speak
so proud and bright and cursed to live no more.
“We dwelt here once in peace, O Stranger fair.
We were not trained in any arts of war.
Nor were we learned in vain philosophy.
We juggled gems and made swift songs like birds
to fly within the gardens of the Queen.
To soar beyond the palace of the Queen.
And in those gardens fountains ever flowed
however sere the unforgiving skies.
In those long seasons when the cloudless void
pressed down upon us like a coat of mail
our hormick-servants brought us honeyed-ice
and danced before the couches where we lay,
making a music precious beyond price,
until sweet night had roused its starry hosts
and vanquished all the furies of the day.
Had put to flight the bitter rage of day.
Then when the thunder in its season came
and rain beat down upon our gilded domes-
when fat the river grew within its bounds
like serpent swollen with a thousand young-
we drank Arqadi wine and played at games
with gaily painted kalamen for pawns.
The fishmen brought us toys of coral and pearl
and books of wonders from the worlds’ first dawns
with algorithms sensible and true.
With tales of wisdom marvellous and true.
I dwelt in plenty in my mother’s house
with all things close at hand to ease my psoul.
I ate, and slept, and bathed in glassy pools
in gardens cooled by heavy-blossomed trees.
The Gods I served, each at its proper time:
came to the temple with the silver morn,
to dance before sweet swollen-bellied Quan;
And walked at night beneath the sacred jewels
in silent contemplation of the stars.
With pious steps beneath the blessed stars.
My world was made of many-coloured birds,
of jasmine-scented rooms and fruiting vines,
but there were other worlds beyond my own.
I could not name it, yet I always knew
of some vast something brooding in the dim
beyond the merry city where I played.
Rumours of wars, and voices sudden stilled
when unannounced I entered on some confines
where spoke my elders of the days ahead.
Took counsel for the darkening days ahead.
I had no name to give my buried fears.
I never heard of Tafraban or Qavh
nor of the Prophet- blessèd be Her rest.
I heard them only as a distant grey
and strident clamour in the hour before
the sun makes pale the sky above the east.
With each new-painted sunrise, and with each
night’s feasting lit with fiery cagèd spheres,
there came as well this spirit from beyond.
There came a shrouded herald from beyond.”
It seemed her voice sank low, and then her eyes.
No longer could she bear the dreadful sight
of walls and towers tumbled in the slime.
I bowed my head to hear the girl-child’s words
as through the stagnant air they sank and fled.
“One precious day to Uxmal came in flesh
what for so long had come as spirit alone.
A grim dark-shrouded herald of the men
whose dreams had set so many lands afire.
Had put a hundred cities to the fire.”
‘O Queen of Uxmal! Loose the binding chain!
The consecrated fleet draws near and must
pass by before the coming of the flood
to strike a city on a distant shore
where gather now the enemies of God.
Unbind the river, idol-ravished Queen!
Make haste to bring us fruit and bread and meat
sufficient for ten-thousand men at arms,
and God may spare your city for a time
May hold aside His judgment for a time.’
He made a gesture with one heavy hand
grown calloused from the gripping of a sword
to warn my mother that she dare not speak
one word in plea for all that she adored-
or fast and hard would strike that greater fist
that gripped so many blades beyonds the walls.
The fist of virtue roused, and waking dreams
to sweep all heathen vileness from the world.
He stalked away before the Queen could cry.
Before he heard Queen Harephar give cry.
My mother cast her prayers upon the stars
That lay unseen behind the turquoise sky;
To Karrakel she sent a brace of slaves
and danced herself before the belly pale
of blessed Quan. She knew she would not feed
the legions set in wrath against her gates.
Since childhood she had heard the whispered fears,
had prayed the words to turn aside the night:
Now on the river hung a thousand sails
of white that turned to crimson in the sun.
That bled beneath the setting of the sun.
No wagon rolled beyond the chainèd gates.
The river mutely bore its bonds of iron.
That last day’s sun sunk down and looked no more
upon the gardens where our songs took flight
to praise its fall. But every song we made
was scattered with the failing of the light
and lost among the chant of countless men
who turned white-mantled shoulders to the sky
reciting words the Prophet once had taught.
To wayward boys with gentleness had taught.
My mother tossed upon her jewelled couch
her psoul atremble for the city’s fate.
How clear and simple seemed the way of Hope-
which false and sweet bid her appease the horde,
each word repeated by the craven Fear.
Yet she knew well enough the ways of men
To know the fleet would come another year
demanding Uxmal give another tithe
of bread and gold and slaves and of its psoul.
Until the prophet held entire its psoul.
She could not bring to naught the ancient Gods
whose names endured from long before the sky
was piercèd first by sky-ships from afar.
The Gods who watched each barefoot dancing girl,
and ate the flesh of slaves from age to age.
In fury veiled next morn the herald came
and curses called against my mother Queen,
‘No city of vain idols can prevail
in obstinance against the Prophet’s law.
The merciful commandments of the law.
Unbind the river! Bring us meat and bread.
Or be it brought upon your bowels now
the wrath that would be bridled yet awhile.
The righteous wrath of vengeance on all psouls
that cleave to folly and that shun the light.’
So spoke the herald of the fleets of Qavh.
Then rose my mother queen to make reply
Her jewels gleaming proud upon her brow.
I watched her stand and gloried in her pride.
Took on myself her majesty and pride.
‘Hear me, O herald! We will loose no chain.
In every age their blazes bright, then fades
some transitory overbearing God
who seeks to bend all nations to his will.
But Uxmal ever and has and shall endure
in worship of the Gods we have of old:
Great bellied Quan, and cunning Karrakel,
blue-mantled Ibrum of the shaded glades
and Shurka mother of a thousand young.
The mother river with a thousand young.
They do not seek to subjugate all lands
with iron chains or psoul-ennobling fire,
but here have gathered. And forever shall
we not forget these Gods our fathers loved
to make of Uxmal but another town
like Tafraban to squat beside the stream
in cheerless worship of a faceless rule.
The Gods of Uxmal hold us now as then
and if they wish it Uxmal will be saved.
From all your swords and stratagems yet saved.’
Enraged the herald turned, and round our walls
were kindled in a moment countless fires
so that amid our gardens I might look
unblinking at a sun as red as wine.
The men of distant nations swarmed like lice
through all the sacred places of the wood.
They filled the sky with chanted prayers and death
borne on a thousand thousand feathered shafts.
And to our prayers no ancient Gods replied.
We heard no answer to the pleas we cried.
A multitude had gathered in the streets
and clamoured for some greater sacrifice
to bend the Gods of Uxmal to men’s will.
In one voice they demanded, Stranger fair,
that some unblemished maiden should be killed
and bled upon the altar of the stars
to force a quick conclusion to the siege
that pressed so fierce and certain at our gates.
And when the lots were drawn the one was I.
The maiden slain for Uxmal would be I.
Remember, Stranger, how my mother Queen
gave way before the terrors of the crowd.
Remember how my life spilled out in vain.
Not blood of maidens, nor beseeching loud
from every throat could wake our senile gods.”
The girl child turned and gave a gentle bow
and vanished like a shadow in a dream.
I gripped my oars and fled that cursèd house
Of Harephar the Queen of many towers.

Before I heard her cry amid those towers.

14: Of the Doom that came upon A-Hraon

2006-09-12T03:37:00.000-07:00

In the Age of the L’hakk, when it is said seven hundred myriads of myriads dwelt in the Empire of the T’sai Lho, the fields and cities of the T’sai Lho extended into the remotest wildernesses of the lands of the West, and mountains were terraced to their summits. To find more dwelling places for their subjects, the L’hakk Emperors conquered new lands not only from the barbaric races beyond the frontiers of their ancestors, but from the sea; and the greatest of these new lands was at the head of the Gulf of Chelt, extending a hundred leagues in either direction behind the greatest earthworks ever raised on T’sai. The rivers of that land were placed high above the level of the new province of T’shaar L’hakk, held in by mighty walls, and the cities of the province perched atop these walls while the broad lands below were given over to fields of lissamon and djurias, orchards, fishponds, and hives of useful creatures.
First of the cities of T’shaar L’hakk was A-Hraon, built at the confluence of two great rivers, the black Cteblath and the grey-green Plaa, where the restraining walls melded together to form a gigantic triangle of brick and earth. From its inception it was made to be a monument to the audacity of the Emperors of L’hakk in wresting such a vast and profitable land from the mud-dark waters of the sea. At the centre of A-Hraon were three broad plazas, large enough for nine-thousand aerial sappers to land at once, linked by peaked arches of tremendous height. Into each of these places poured thirty avenues, laden with all the commerce of the vastest and most populous empire in the whole history of T’sai. At the centre of each plaza stood a three-sided pillar of a kind of metaxa made like crystal or glass but stronger than steel, on which were carved the axioms and lemmae of the P’rin J’han K’o philosophy, the great philoprogenitive creed that had brought such power and such teeming multitudes to the Empire of the L’hakk.
To A-Hraon the emperors dispatched surplus artisans and labourers from every district of their Empire – from distant Laan and Nur across the Golden Sea, from the dawnlands of far Ka Z’usar and the dry plains of R’kaan. So fertile was the soil of T’shaar L’hakk, so many prosperous industries were established at A-Hraon, and so desirous were the L’hakk Emperors that the city be a splendid monument to themselves, that within a ninety years it was counted seventh among all the cities of the Empire. In that time it began to be called also “K’saam”, the chosen one, for it seemed to be a favoured podling among the countless cities that looked to the Emperor as their benevolent parent. The Emperors gave monies to build in A-Hraon schools and temples for each of the many philosophies and factions of philosophies that had found their favour. Learned philosophers, naturalists, and remembrancers of all kinds gathered at A-Hraon, and its libraries held more volumes than even the Cirilmen Memories of Mregim or Mouth-of-Yann. They were the largest and finest of the libraries within the whole of the Fourth Empire, and greater – perhaps – than any that have existed since its fall. Seventy of the Twice Metamorphosed dwelt in A-Hraon, more than have been gathered together in one place since. They dwelt in a spacious precinct of gardens and palaces which was called Y’va X’cai, the precinct of wisdom, and also Y’la X’cai, the precinct of ylan-trees. There were in K’saam gardens of plants from every land of Tsai, and schools built of the gilded bones of ninety myriads of elders, and vast shipyards that could construct a warship for the fleets of the L’hakk as often as twice a day. But in truth very little of all that was in A-Hraon has been recorded, or has been preserved from that day until this, so that many wonders have been lost to memory.
As the great age of the L’hakk reached its height, and the subjects of the emperors were more numerous than pebbles on the seashore, A-Hraon stretched out far beyond its original limits. Wharves and factories, youth-houses and viillas, were built for thirty miles to upstream and downstream, and in every direction towers clustered hardly less thickly than the buildings of the city spread for many miles across the fertile bottomlands. The last of the L’hakk Emperors destroyed some hundreds of these towers to have a mighty palace built at the foot of the triangle of A-Hraon. In its four thousand dunams of land the whole of the empire was recreated in miniature, maintained by nine myriads of servants. Within it ninety lesser palaces were contained, one built entirely of chrysolite, and others of the bones of defeated armies and ivory of beasts no longer to be found on Tsai. A stairway, broad enough for a ninety of archers to walk up side by side and not touch the tips of their outstretched wings, led up from this palace to the Plaza of Clocks. After the last of the L’hakk emperors was eaten, this place was turned over to representatives of the thirty prescribed philosophies of the Z'san emperors, that the fullness of all the wisdom gathered by the race of T’sai lho be gathered in one place, and it became known as the Chrysolite Palaces. The province of K’saam was then called T’shar L’sai, rather than T’shaar L’hakk, but its prosperity endured. And for many millennia more A-Hraon was a great centre of learning, numbered among the mightiest cities of the empire.
Well known is the tale of the end of the Fourth Empire; and of the tyrants and generals who figure in the histories of that time, the battles and sieges, the laments of the defeated and the exhortations of the rhetoricians, so much has been written that to add more would be wearisome. T’shaar L’sai was one of the provinces which was fiercely disputed between H’tallik, L’fallik, and F’nhal, and although none of the famous battles of that time were fought there, many armies marched back and forth across it or descended upon its cities like plagues of flesh-eating flies. The fields of lissamon and djurias were trampled over, and the orchards burned or cut down so that no archers might lurk within them. The fishponds were poisoned with the bodies of the slain, and from the broken hives crawled creatures starving and maddened. Those who had dwelt in the fertile land of T’shaal L’sai left their homes, or the ruins of their homes, and fled to the cities of the province where there were watchmen and walls to protect them. Thus all the farmlands became waste and desolate, and hunger walked by night and day like a mad God of the Ages of Darkness. Fully grown youths were sold for meat beneath the crystal pillars of A-Hraon, and a gourd of black weed from the riverbeds was sold for an azel. And night and day all those who could afford the cost took ship out of A-Hraon, to seek lands further from the armies of the three empires. Every crime that is known to the legists was done in T’shaar L’sai in that time, and all of these crimes were done to determine which tyrant would be remembered as the one who established the dynasty to succeed the P’van. But the histories record the P'van as the last of the dynasties of the Fourth Empire.
One night during these wars a mighty wind and storm came from the sea, as had happened numberless times during the years of A-Hraon, and waves like woldes hammered against the sea-walls of T’shaar L’sai. Whether by malice, or because their keepers had fled, the sea gates at the mouth of the Plaa had not been closed – which had also happened many times in the years of A-Hraon. So a wave half as tall as a warship swept up the river for many miles, destroying many boats and harbours along the river walls and drowning many. And some damage was done by this bore to the river-facing districts of A-Hraon, which had been built with such a calamity in mind. In some places distant from the city, the river was driven over its walls, and carved channels down to the lands below, to fall in cataracts onto the plains. This too had happened many times before in the years of A-Hraon, for which reason the villages of the bottomlands were raised as towers. But in all these earlier times, there had been myriads of myriads dwelling in the plains, and engineers and engines of construction in every town along the river-walls, so that any breaches could be swiftly mended. Now those lands were empty, and the engineers busy in laying siege to distant cities.
After the wind and waves had stilled, water poured down through many breaches into the land of T’shaar L’sai, growing wider and deeper moment by moment. Far from these cataracts a sheet of water, silvery in the starlight, grey-green and turbid in the sunlight, crept slowly over the land. So slowly the water crept over the empty fields, and joined the abandoned fishponds, and left the villages islands, until the suburbs of A-Hraon were lapped by vast lakes. Too late efforts were made to repair the river-walls, and levies of myriads were marched out of A-Hraon, to find their path blocked by furious torrents. The city was seized with fear, and many who had not fled before now sought to do so. Ancient vessels were dragged from gardens and filled with elders, only to fall to pieces in midriver, and vexil fish grew fat on the bodies of the drowned. A boat twice as long as a man sold for ninety azels, and a berth on a mason’s barge for ten. Still the water rose, and filled the grounds of the palaces and villas, and slowly crept– so slowly crept up– to the foot of the great stair, and then over the first step, and the second.
Too late a truce was made in T’shaal between the generals of each empire. Two legions of H’tallik were sent to build up the river-walls, and a fleet of F’nhal sailed to A-Hraon to bear off those wishing to flee. A fleet of L’fallik was also sent, and there was blood shed between the fleets over who was to carry the Twice-Metamorphosed, and the treasures of the scriptories in the Chrysolite palaces. And the grey water lapped in the upper windows of the Chrysolite palaces. A section of wall along the Cteblath collapsed, four miles long, and took with it a legion of H’tallik and some myriads of youths from A-Hraon, and faster the water rose, until it reached the summit of the broad stair, which was the level of the sea. T’var L’him, a philosopher of the C’saan school, climbed down to where the waves beat at the stair, and tasted the water, and found that it was salt. Then it was known that the sea-wall also had failed, and K’saam, favoured podling of the Empire, was surrounded by the sea.
Hunger grew in A-Hraon, and as so many dwellers in the plains were crowded there, and its waters so fouled, sickness grew also. Night and day ships of all kinds carried away the dweller of A-Hraon, those selected by the elders waiting silently in long lines, but as many as were removed starved or died of fevers in the streets and cellars of A-Hraon. Long before the city was emptied, the truce faltered. Ships were burnt at A-Hraon, and towers where thousands lived, and T’var L’him has written that many died who found themselves trapped between the fires and the waters. Warfleets sailed over T’shall L’sai, and the drowned province eventually became part of the portion of L’fallik, some three years after it had been lost to the sea. T’var L’him has written that at the conclusion of the wars, L’fallik alone lacked the wealth to restore the seawalls and riverwalls, and was not willing to share the expense with its enemies, for that would give them claims on the restored province.
T’var L’him left A-Hraon a nineday after the great fire, on the barge that carried the metaxa obelisk form the Plaza ofDoors to the port at T’ras, and writes of the the doomed city sinking into the darkness. Only a few lights burning in the towers that once glowed like nine thousand stars, and the reek of death and hunger that hung about it falling away before the sea-winds. ‘That which was K’saam is gone forever,’ the philosopher wrote that night. ‘It is now K’suu, the paralysed one, and even if it is restored, the memory of this time of horror will always remain to darken and harden it.’
Without ceasing the waves beat against the sides of K’saam, and its streets and towers crumbled. It was never resettled, being thought a place of ill-omen because of the numbers of uneaten dead that remained there, and year by year all handiwork of thinking beings was erased by air and water. When the war-fleet of Vorraghis sailed to the head of the Guld of Chelt, little trace of the city remained, and she named K’saam the Haunted Island, Xaamir. Many treasure hunters of the Horned Men landed there in the early centuries of Ulgrund, but none ever found great wealth, and it was said that the Cirilmen of the deep sea had long ago removed all the secret hoards. Sometime between the fall of Tarashsh and the rise of the Phthon, Xaamir was swallowed up by the slow rising of the sea. Today it is only part of what is called the Xaamir Reefs, the overgrown relics of old sea-walls and river-walls where the silver rambutan fish can be caught in great numbers.
There is a tale that no coral or sea-plant has ever grown on the Chrysolite Palaces, and that it still sits at the bottom of the grey-green sea, its halls and towers thronged by silent companies of rambutan fish. In one telling of this tale, it is said that this is so, not by chance or magic, but by the labours of the Cirilmen of the deep sea, who reverence the learning that was once held there and have made the palace a hatchery for their young.

13: Of Rghaem

2006-09-03T03:26:00.000-07:00

When T’var L’him left the doomed city of A-Hraon, of which is written elsewhere, that esteemed philosopher was eighty years of age. Moved to shame for the race of T’sai lho by the enormities he had seen them commit upon one another, he journeyed beyond the frontiers of the four new empires that had worked such bloodshed. This journey brought him to the broad dry basin land of R’kaan, which the Thudun know as Ar-Kahan, a vast and empty country on the frontiers of F’nhal. He travelled far inland, following the river of R’kaan upstream nigh to the roots of the Spine of the World, where both summers and winters are fierce and cruel. Here he knew a race of T’sai lho had lived side by side in peace with the Thudun of Ar-Kahan for many millennia, a people called the K’ghae lho. In the age of the L’hakk emperors many millions of t’sai lho from the greener lands had been settled even in that distant part of R’kaan, but most of their descendants had returned to the west, and in some cities of the K’ghae lho it was said that people remained almost entirely unmixed with other t’sai lho. It was to one of these, a place called Rghaem, that T’var L’him came in the eighty-second year of his life. In Rghaem he wrote the four volumes of his concordance of the Third Empire Prin, and here in time his skeleton was incorporated in the temple of A’naik H’za.
T’var L’him writes that Rghaem was a city built atop a single hill, in a bare plain some miles distant from the river of R’kaan, and within sight of the Spine of the World, white and faint in the distance. The land had been irrigated and fruitful many years before, and the lines of old canals could still be seen, but in that day only a few groves of vines remained. Three miles around was the wall of the city, built without mortar of stones the size of groeks, and the buildings within it likewise of unmortared stone. The roofs had been made horned and spined to block the way of aerial raiders in that lawless age, and grew so close to one another that a child of two years could walk from one end of the city to another without touching the ground. He writes that Rghaem had no buildings of unusual size or beauty protruding beyond this forest of flier-traps, only flimsy towers for archers driven up above the roofs in one place or another. There were but two temples within the city, the temple of E’von K’hraal and the temple of A’naik H’za, and neither were equal to the least of the seven-hundred temples of A-Hraon. ‘In so many degrees as the K’ghaem exceeded in all the virtues the denizens of A-Hraon, so much was their city of Rghaem exceeded in size and prosperity by the least of the suburbs of A-Hraon,’ writes T’var L’him. He esteems their devotion to elders, their reticence and courtesy, their respect for the niceties of philosophic discourse, the balance with which they devoted themselves to industry and other pursuits, their cleanliness, and their patient way of speaking.
In one other respect were the K’ghaem different from the people of A-Hraon, which T’var L’him also records. Each household of dwellers in Rghaem treasured in an inner room a certain carved tablet of green stone, as high as a foreleg, and these tablets were believed to be as old as the race of K’ghae lho. Each of these tablets bore its own name, which was a word without meaning in the language of that time. Some were carved with many markings, and others with few; or a single symbol, repeated over and over. Yet none of these were ideographs in any language which was known to T’var L’him, who was a great scholar, nor did any of the people of Rghaem claim to know their meaning. The pride in these tablets held by each household was immense, and the marks upon them would be worked in many ways into the garments and furnishings of that household. The tablets were kept preserved from all unclean matter, and each year were washed and painted with certain ceremonies, using aromatic oils imported from Vuin. This was done by every household, whichever philosophy they followed, and a denizen of Rghaem would no more insult the tablet of another household than they would break the bones of an elder of another household. T’var L’him records without comment the estimate of a merchant of Rghaem, that one-third of the trade of the city was in aromatic oils of Vuin.
‘It is not inconceivable, say the Elders of Rghaem’ – so writes T’var L’him – ‘that these stones are more than stones, and are the pupae, or the larvae, or something like the discarded skins, of a kind of living being. They do not state that this is so, for no empirical evidence of such a thing can be presented; but they will say many times within a single chain of utterances that such a thing is not inconceivable. The perspicacious might ask: What might be the nature of this kind of living being? And why might such a race incubate its children, or leave its relics, among the K’ghae lho? The Elders of Rghaem do not pronounce any answers to these questions.’ But in another place, T’var L’him writes: ‘I have heard of a book which sets out many correspondences between the names of the stones, and the symbols upon them, with what others have written concerning the vessels which brought the Thudun to Tsai. Those vessels were not made of stone or wood or metaxa or metal, but where a kind of living being, grown to serve the Thudun in the dark places between the stars; so it is recorded in the Calameth of Queriot. Here it is written that they could think, and speak after a fashion, and reproduce others of their kind, but had been made by another race of men, and not by gods or chance.’ T’var L’him writes that he has been unable to find a copy of this book, to examine its claims, and cannot see how a race of any kind of flesh might transform itself into tablets of green stone.
Such is what is known of Rghaem, and of the tablets kept there by the K’ghae lho, and of the hypotheses entertained there as to the nature of these tablets. It is not known what became of the city of Rghaem, but sometime after the fall of R’kaan to the Phthon it disappeared from the annals of the times, and today its location is obscure.

12: Of Eos

2006-08-26T02:04:00.000-07:00

When the people of the Zamylos descended from the void, and woke from their slumber, and spread over the face of Tsai like a dreamer who remakes his dream, the greatest part of the race of Zaminder followed the setting sun to the lands of the Vuin on the southern side of the Golden Sea. Here there had been for thousands of years many great nations, and for more thousands of years many bold and tumultuous barbarisms; here there were the graves of countless wise men and philosophers, and a hundred ruined cities of the T'sai lho, and a hundred ruined cities of the Old Erlen, and of the Kalamen, and of the Tahun – a race which has long since vanished – and of other races likewise gone from Tsai long ago. In those lands could all these peoples be found, living in amity or in hatred, scattered across all the vastness that lies ot the west of Dhomin, in deserts and broad plains of golden green, and bogs, and forests of madar and kathani and great-fir of Talis. The lomen of the Zamylos, the people of Zaminder, came to all those lands and subdued them, and stitched them together with roads and garrisons and havens of the sea and air, and compelled their inhabitants to live together in peace and forget all injustices their ancestors had done in the Ages of Darkness.
In the northern part of Talis called Ancosa, on the western shore of the Gulf of Yrse, they found a deep harbour ringed with many islands, with a broad and fertile plain lying behind it; they called this place Eos, and built there the chief city of Vuin. How many generations lived and died within its triple walls of marble and rhyolite? How many emperors and kings are recorded in its annals? For how many centuries was it numbered among the first and most glorious of all cities of Tsai? And now, it is vanished as though it had never been.
The lomen who live now in the northern part of Talis called Ancosa, on the western shore of the Gulf of Yrse, are fisherfolk and gatherers of nuts and honey, and do not seek to rule over anyone or build any monument. Neither do they allow any stranger to dig in the black soil by the deep harbour of Eos, where the kathani trees grow tall and gnarled and ancient. If you ask them about the lomen who ruled over Vuin, they will look at you with black and poisonous eyes, and answer no more of your questions. They do not love their ancestors, who did not know the truths they know, and who were– they believe– far gone in folly and wickedness.

11: Of a Twice-Lost City in the Most Distant Isles

2006-08-26T02:03:00.000-07:00

This tale I was told by a Thudun mariner of Great Charn, a man with a smell of cured fish-leather and the far-staring eyes of one who is unused to walls. She had spent many years as a sailor in the southern oceans, and was familiar with every one of the lands that face the Inner Ocean to southward of Narak. Once, when no older than a youth, she had sailed from Korvash in Drensneik for the Uttermost Isles. This voyage across the cold waters of the Outer Ocean, without sight of land for forty days, is said to be the longest and most perilous journey still regularly made for purposes of trade, although this is disputed by those who make the northern crossing of the Outer Ocean between Mithdak and the Rinnorian Isles. It is not disputed that the storms of the cold southern oceans are fiercer than the storms of the cold northern oceans, nor that the ice-bound coast of Nath, inhospitable though it may be, offers a better haven for survivors of shipwreck then the landless southern seas, where there are only woldes and floating mountains of ice. There are pirates of the horned men that sail both seas, and furious winds, and the currents that are sure and true lie in latitudes where one may sit down for a meal at dusk and rise from your board with the rising sun. In either case, it is only those sea-captains who are most skilled, or most desperate, who will assay the voyage.
The Uttermost Isles themselves are given a different name by those who dwell there. Larger than the Isles of Yatharrim they are, with some millions of inhabitants, thudun, humen, lomen and horned men, divided into many nations and sects whose histories are here unknown. Though the Uttermost Isles are not of fabulous wealth, they are fertile and well-settled enough to crave many of the manufactures of the three continents. The mariner of my acquaintance made the journey on the Geometer of Gul, with a cargo of tolsty, red iron, mirrors, white lead, and Charnian clockwork dolls. I have never met anyone younger than this mariner– who is now as old as an Elder– who has made the journey to the Uttermost Isles, so it may be that this trade has grown unprofitable.
Omal ak-Thebwel says: ‘Four days beyond Mirhaven, two days before the Horn Islands, the watchman cried out a row of shoals before us, foaming white beneath the stars. We dropped anchor, and our guide was summoned from belowdeck. He told us that we had veered too far to the south in the night watch, and come to what were called the Shoals of Gyalme, which were unwise to pass in the darkness. This guide was a slow-limbed horned man of the Uttermost Isles, very small for one of that race, quick-talking and eager to appear wise, and to my thought utterly without any virtue. Of course, I was then young, and knew little of the ways of Othermen, and the foolish things of the world (it is written) are often set to confound the wise. So I may have been too quick in my judgment. His name was Garrorsh. His advice gave us a night of enforced idleness, and I spent part of it taking a watch on the foredeck. There was no need to ceaselessly scan the waters ahead, so I spent much time looking out over the white of the shoals, and then down into the water, where I fancied I could see lights moving beneath the surface of the sea. After a time was certain of their reality. They were corpse-green lights, different from the light of any sea-thing I had yet seen, and they moved as things with a will, and not as things pushed from one place to another by the waters. This guide Garrorsh I spoke of came on deck for some purpose and saw where I was looking. He warned me not to look too closely, saying that the lights would confuse my mind and I would try to follow them, dropping into the sea like a stone. The lights were the psouls of evil thudun of long ago, he said, doomed to wander the place where they had worked evil while they lived. This had been where their city was once built, he said, when the lands were differently made, and all these shallow seas were plains studded with castles and stitched together with stone highways. I nodded and turned my eyes away, though I had no faith in Garrorsh’s psouls. The dead are dead, and the priests of Az-Gamar tell us that they do not have psouls to trouble the living. But I had already seen very many works of magic while travelling upon the sea, and I did not doubt that such an ensnarement was possible. So I nodded and made a sign of no account, and thanked Garrorsh, and watched the horizon until it was my sleeping time.
I thought no more about the city that Garrorsh had said lay beneath the Shoals of Gyalme until the next morning, when we had to raise anchor. This was more difficult than usual, taking double the usual number of men, and when we had it on board we found that it was thickly tangled with masses of black weed, each stalk as thick as a forearm. This weed had grown through and around another thing, which we had also dragged up through the water. This was a kind of a frame of golden metal, though harder and whiter than gold, and about as large as a child, made something like the head of an insect drawn with lines of finger-thick metal rods. It was not apparent what sort of a thing it might have been. Garrorsh told the ship-master that it was a psoul thing, as was sometimes found at the bottom of the sea near that place, but that it should bring us evil fortune and should be thrown back into the sea. The ship-master did not listen to this warning, for like me he was a thudun, with no trust in psouls. There seemed to me– and also, I believe, to the ship-master– that there was value but no malice in the thing. I thought also that it was unlike a thing that thudun would have made, and joined the two humen who carried it to the ship-master’s chamber. When I saw it near, and how closely and finely it was put together without any straight line, and what marks were made upon it in certain places, I knew it was no working of thudun, however wicked or long-vanished. Rather, it seemed to me a part of some instrument of the Cirilmen, such as can be found in the dwellings of their greatest remembrancers. I had dealt with Cirilman remembrancers even then, for a former ship-master of mine had taken me with her to visit one such when she sought the secrets of a mariner long dead. I thought then, Cirilmen have no psouls, and this is certainly no psoul thing. How does it come to be that there are things of the fishmen in this ruin, if it is a city of the Thudun, as Garrorsh says? When I questioned Garrorsh again about the Shoals of Gyalme, he could say nothing beyond the same story of evil thudun and drowned psouls, and I talked to him no more. I resolved that at the first chance I found, I would find a Cirilman to speak to, and ask if in its long life it had heard or read anything of this place.
We took on a cargo of copperwood in Narrhaven, which is the chief port of the chief island of the Horned Folk, and as drear a place as any I have ever seen. I was mistaken for a slave there, something that made me love the place less. We had stones thrown at us in Azaghis, stopped in Ajanhaven and lost four men to fever, and had come to our last stopping place in the Uttermost Isles– Kal Marrul, on the isle of Calrat– before I had the chance to meet a Cirilman of that country. It was larger than any I had seen before, even in the deep ocean, and lighter in colour, with a shiny patch on its head and the very deep red eyes that the oldest of Cirilmen have. It had a shorter name than those who dwell in Charn– still too strangely shaped for me to remember– but was called simply ‘The Old One’ by the thudun there. They said that it had seen the placing of the first stone in their city, and that it would live as long as their city endured. It was a fortunate landing, for there were probably few in all the Uttermost Isles who would have been better able to answer our questions. I went to see The Old One with the ship-master and one other, Albaket the boatmaker. I can still see it in my memory in the strange domed room where it lived, ringed by smouldering braziers of aromatic sea-things that made our eyes smart, half lying and half sitting in a great stone basin of water almost too hot to touch. It spoke slowly, and Albaket wrote down every word it said as though he were a Fishman himself. What he wrote I read many times, so I can now repeat it without error.
The Old One said: "In the lifetime of my remote ancestors, whose duty it is mine to remember, the waters of the Great Sea were much reduced, and year by year the ports of the land-men of those times took more labour to keep clear, and shoals came where there had been no shoals. Then shoals grew to islands, and islands grew to enclose lagoons, and lagoons filled to become marshes, and marshes dried to solid land. All these islands where we dwell– which had been at first lesser than they are today– became in some hundreds of years very much greater in extent. In these years Murak of the thudun of Gurakh made himself ruler over a great part of the new land when it was still for the most part a morass, and on a cold and cloudless spring morning he established an outpost on the border of his realm, not far from where a deep inlet of the sea still flowed, to store supplies for his armies and protect his marshes from others who might claim them. This place he called Abnalshshar, which means 'To Build Fame' in the language of the Thudun of that time, for in its building he wished to build fame for himself through all the ages of Tsai. But very soon it became known instead as Amakshar, which mean 'Deep Water' in the language of the thudun of that time, as numbers of merchants and sailors came to dwell there because of the nearness of the channel. Eleven years and twenty-nine days after the establishment of Amakshar, the city was entered by the legions of Geled of Adukh, another Thudun ruler of that time. From then on it was not on the edge of the dominions of Gurakh, but in the middle of the dominions of Adukh, and it was given a town-lord with a golden circlet instead of a captain with a gilded helmet. My ancestors, whose duty it is mine to remember, came there often in the years that followed to trade for things that could not be obtained from the sea.
In those years Amakshar was in no way comparable to the cities of the Cirilmen of that age, nor to the older cities of the thudun, which had been carved out of the flesh of the mountains where the phthon had ruled in more ancient times. There was no glory or beauty there even after the reckoning of the thudun, and there were few beings of learning or perspicacity there. But there came one thudun lord, forty-seven years and ninety-three days after the death of Geled, who made his seat in Amakshar, and he made a decree that the form of the city was unworthy of it. For it was now the busiest port on the eastern side of the new lands, and the wealthiest, and the seat of the strongest of the new lords. He spent the wealth of Amakshar, plundering beside many riches from places on his frontiers, from the old cities of Gurakh and Adukh, and within eight years there was much glory and beauty there after the reckoning of the thudun. The streets and towers were fashioned of cut grey stone from Calrat, broad and tall, and between them were gardens of statues larger than life and golden trees from Prinjar. The streets were made in straight lines, and cut the city into pieces all the same size, 252 in number. The buildings of stone were made up also of straight lines, in so far as their builders were able, or else of pure curves like arcs from a circle, and all made in height much the same– one height for the shops and dwelling places, and one height for the palaces and temples, and a third height for the great towers that stood around the edges of the city. There were still few beings of learning or perspicacity in Amakshar, but this was not lamented by those who dwelt there.
My ancestors, whose duty it is mine to remember, had much to do with Amakshar in the days of its prosperity. They admired the handsomeness of the buildings that the thudun made, with their thick walls, clean lines, and high domes. It was they who provided the thudun with instruments for lighting them inside and outside, during the day and the night, and sold them coral and pearls to garnish their altars. They moved through the harbours and canals of Amakshar, and through its streets and gardens, and looked with approval upon the great flat surfaces the thudun had made to shine in the light of the Oversun. There were iron and silversteel in abundance in Amakshar in the days of its prosperity, worked in many different ways which my ancestors had not seen; made into devices for making music in the air or casting different-coloured fires atop the towers, for weaving garments, and for cutting the flesh of men and mountains. For very many years my ancestors would visit that city, and always they admired it greatly.
I do not know to what extent the people of Amakshar were evil, as it is said some cities of men in the first years of the worlds were evil. I know that the people of Amakshar were to a very great extent unwise, as the days of their prosperity dwindled, as is to be feared of a place with few beings of learning or perspicacity. The lord who had replaced Geled was forgotten by the thudun, and all those who came after him were forgotten, and the city dwindled and began to founder into the waters.
My parent's parent's parent was among those who swam into Amakshar as the waters ran down its streets, and the last of the thudun grumbled and fought. It was among those who bought the city from the last of the thudun for eighty-nine Wolde pearls, and then watched over it so that it would not be broken by the waves or looted by landmen. All the cirilmen of that time in Amakshar exulted that the thing they admired had come to them, and that they might at last inscribe their own deeds upon the walls and towers of the city, and arrange the lights within it into more pleasing patterns, and live beneath its domes in pieces of city all the same size and sundered from one another by streets as straight as the emig weed is twisted. Those parts of the city that the cirilmen found unbeautiful we removed; and those parts that we found beautiful we made more beautiful; and every surface in that city was inscribed and bejewelled with records of our doings. When my parent's parent was young, Amakshar-that-the-thudun-had-made was the chief dwelling place of our people in the shallow seas; the old harbour we had made into a great amphitheatre in which all the people of Amaksahr could gather at once to discuss how their affaris should be ordered.
There was a year when the current brought a strange death out of the west, a weakening of the bones and a blackening of the flesh. In that year the fear of our people was great, for we cannot forget. Many hid themselves in their dwelling places within the city and did not go out, but still the waters flowed around and between all that thudun and cirilman had made, and brought the death with them. The year after the coming of the strange death, the ilimifrim came also out of the west, bringing with them many marvellous devices and instruments. The ilimifrim could work metal, even as those who dwelt on the land, and with the artefacts they held could make and re-make all those things that had been lost to us at the time our kind had been scattered throughout all the oceans of Tsai. They had come– as is well known– seeking a place where the strange death was not. Though our own land was not that place, still they stayed, for it was not as rapid in its progress nor as all-destroying as it had been in the lands they had fled, nor had they any knowledge of any habitable place lying beyond us to the east. Now the ilimifrim had knowledge of the observance of proprieties, and took care not to give offence by their speech or by their actions, nor act in any way as to deprive the old cirilmen of Damarcus of the things that were in our possession. Still, it was they who came to rule over all the cirilmen in a few nines of years, by their skill at the use of the instruments of the time before our race was scattered. Also was it known by the things they said and did (though careful never to give offence) that they did not admire the custom of dwelling in a drowned city of the thudun. The dwellers in Amakshar whose philosophies had grown to completion did not change their dwelling place, but year by year fewer of the young desired to live in Amakshar, imitating the customs of the ilimifrim. Thus Amakshar became in time a place of that remnant who persisted in the old ways, of those old in spirit and in flesh. At the same time it became more beautiful than ever, filled with all the devices and instruments, vehicles and entertainments, which were made possible by the arts of the ilimifrim. For there has never been a race of men, whether of the sea, or of the land, or of the dark places between the stars, that can turn aside from such things, no matter how strongly they reject the customs of their creators. It is a strange thing, but ever after the coming of the death from the west some fragrance of it still hung about Amakshar, so that in every nine of years some of the dwellers in that city would fall ill with crumbling bones and blackening flesh. And the fewer the dwellers in Amakshar, the more this misfortune hung about the city, so that few would visit it from our other dwelling places during its last times.
There came a year in the time of my parent when those living in Amakshar had dwindled so that it was filled only with the engraved writings of the dead, and scattered with devices for which the dead had no further use. Still the stones set into its walls cast their light into the darkness, though there was no-one there to see them.
The fear of annihilation is strong among the cirilmen, who can live twice a thousand years. This all men know. But even among the cirilmen, there are those who look into the unknown darkness and find it less fearful than the world that is, where so many things are so greatly otherwise than they should be. For 728 years, such of the cirilmen have left their places to journey to Amakshar, to dwell there with others of like mind and wait for the darkening of the flesh. It is their lights that can be seen, as they go about Amakshar doing one task and another task, and they do not seek to repair any of the instruments of their ancestors."

And that is the tale of the Twice-Lost City, which the fishman recited to Albaket of the Geometer of Gul, and which Albaket recorded and passed on to me. "There are very many different kinds of people in the world," said Albaket, "and their habits vary without end and without reason."

10: Of Harnshnash, city of the Prophet

2006-08-12T18:44:00.000-07:00

Never louder were lamentations raised in every land of Tsai than when word was brought of the loss of Harnshnash. Harnshnash, the Holy City, where in the Age of Heroes was born and died the greatest of all Prophets.
In that age the teachings of the Great Prophet had been spread into every land of Tsai where psouls were held to exist, and believers in Her revelation were to be found from the uttermost east to the uttermost west. And in all nations where these believers dwelt, they rent their raiment and lamented the end of an Age when word came of the loss of Harnshnash. Many sold all they owned and fled their homes to waste places to await the end of All-that-is, while others could bear life no longer in a world without the City of the Prophet, and cast themselves into the sea.
Never had such a calamity been imagined, never had it been foretold in the Sayings of the Prophets. No believer could have thought that such a thing were possible, and in Baharaz a school of priests was founded that preached the abandonment of Tsai by God, teaching that a God could not exist in a world in which such a thing might happen. In every land there was despair growing like kalarba grass, and in all lands many believers fell into apostasy.
Harnshnash had always been held to be the most beautiful and salutary of all cities upon Tsai by the believers, and even to the unbelievers Harnshnash had seemed a place blessed by whichever Gods might be. The airs of Harnshnash were always dry, and clear, and fragrant, and sickness was there a thing unheard of. In the spring the winds came inland and filled the streets with the scent of ishala blossoms, which grew thickly on the lower slopes of the mountains. In the summer the heavy-branched sunapple trees that lined the broad avenues spread their perfume throughout Harnshnash. Even in autumn, when the sea was already a mad beast for the slaying of mariners, and winds gusted fierce and cold from all points of the compass, no dwelling place was beyond the subtler fragrance of the ancient black trees of Urmland that filled the city’s parks. The winter winds were cold and stark, but pure as no other winds on Tsai, pure as the teachings of the Great Prophet before Tsai was changed and cast into darkness. They were winds born from ten thousand miles of empty ocean, from the seas that are thick with cold, were dwelled no living being that could kindle a fire or cast filth upon the waters. As there were no good roads leading north and south of Harnshnash, and only a narrow track into the unpeopled west, there was little need for beasts of burden. And since the city relied on the traffic of pilgrims rather than any kind of manufacture, there were few kilns or leatherworks or other vile-smelling establishments. And as the city lay long and thin like a sickle between the mountains and the sea, there was no place that was far from fresh winds in any season.
Though the harbour of Harnshnash was small, and made by artifice long ago, even in autumn it was as smooth as a sheet of polished silver-steel. The greater part of the city did not face the harbour, but looked onto the unfettered sea, and all of it climbed not steeply but inexorably to the first of many ranges of mountains. The inland road made through a little pass in that range, a narrow ribbon of stone laid down when the masters of Vulk scorned to be stopped by mountains or armies. Behind that range was a broad stony valley, and then another range, and another stony valley, onwards and upwards through rank upon rank of deep blue mountains. The lands about Harnshnash were dry, and on most days from a ship lying at harbour could be seen beyond all these the yet more distant mountains on the edge of the high country, forever bound in ice. Grey rivers raged through the back valleys in spring and were dried to nothing by the summer, but Harnshnash did not rely upon them, for within the city itself there were never-failing springs of fresh water.
In Harnshnash there were many temples of alabaster and carnelian, richly decorated with fragrant lacquers of Urmland, topazes and black dnari pearls from the lands beyond the mountains, and gold and ivory and precious stones gathered from every land of T’sai. One temple there was for each of the fourteen thinking peoples, as commanded in the Eribol Colloquies, standing each in pride atop a separate hill of the city. In addition to these there were temples and schools endowed by all the lands of the Prophet, each seeking to outdo all the others in splendour and richness of decoration. The Lomarchs of Talis alone had a cluster of many temples, covering acres of gardens and towers, and the Thalassocrats of Celabar a vast library of marble with twice ten thousand holy books in the lomen tongue. Great in reknown were the schools endowed by the Emperors of Tixryn and Nargan, the High-Kings of Konrad and Koron-Ag, the Elector of Himrad, and the Arch-Preceptor of Minash-Hor. Even the warlords of sun-worn Mairil had a temple on the heights of Harnshnash, built of alabaster and senussi pine, where Gort maidens in armour of gold and chrysoprase kept vigil before the sacred trees.
To these temples every spring and summer thousands of pilgrims flowed from each of the lands of the Prophet, to lay their offerings before the white priests and carry away seeds from the sacred trees. Over the long ages many pilgrims had stayed, and opened hostelries for their own peoples, and spread out into streets and districts, so that in Harnshnash there were districts named for the swarthy humen of Uz, and the lomishfolk of the Arades, the great dust-coloured argandarr of Ashad and the strange silent lomen of Porbistin. Most numerous of all were the lomen of Talis and the humen of Tixryn, whose dwelling places took up more than half the city. In these districts one could dwell for years and hardly ever glimpse the ancient folk of Harnshnash, grey-eyed Drensneiki humen and those nimble Argandarr whose ancestors had left Doro Belash in the Age of Ignorance.
Oldest of all the monuments of Harnshnash were the stadia built by the League of Ten long before the birth of the Prophet, when champions of all the cities of Harnkulud gathered in Harnshnahs to decide the rulership of the League by trials of strength and combat. Though that custom had been in abeyance for many thousand years, the stadia had been left standing in the midst of the new city with its temples. Flowers and fruiting bushes now grew across the grounds that had once rung with the clash of sword on sword, and climbing vines hid the statues of the ancient Gods from view. But trees were not allowed to take root among the pavements, nor was any quarrying of stone permitted there. Some among the ancient folk of Harnshnash said that a prophecy had been made that the city would endure only so long as the stadia were kept intact. In the stadia, it was said, the shades of unruly Argandarr warriors would spend their deaths in contest as their lives, and vent their malice on one another rather than upon the living. But if the stadia were destroyed, they would spill out into the living city and wreak great ill there. Many who passed by the ruined stadia by night swore that they had seen dim shapes moving within, like men cut out of ragged cloth, and heard the distant sound of sword on sword, and the screams of those pierced by horn or blade. And though they were frequented enough in the daylight hours, no man of Harnshnash, beggar or master of a hundred vessels, would venture within the stadia at night. Parties of sailors from afar, or holy pilgrims eager to do battle with such heathen shades, had at times camped within the stadia. Some slept soundly and reported nothing; but others were tormented by dark dreams, and forced to flee in the deep hours of the night by dreadful visions.
From age to age Harnshnash waxed greater in wealth, for as the word of the Prophet spread into more and more nations of T’sai, ever greater numbers made pilgrimage to the city. The gifts they made were husbanded carefully by the priests of Harnshnash, and invested with the merchant princes of Harnshnash, and through wise and fortunate trade grew many-fold over the ages. Every street of Harnshnash was choked with pilgrims in the months of summer, and fortunes were made and lost on single hostelries, or concessions to sell citron-ices in a particular district. In some years the flow of pilgrims became so great that the little harbour of Harnshnash was entirely filled with seacraft loading and unloading their cargoes of thinking peoples; and vessels laden with pilgrims were then required to wait for days at anchor beyond the ancient stone breakwaters. One year while six such ships waited beyond the breakwater for their turn at the landings, laden with pilgrims from Ash-Baz, a storm rose up suddenly and dashed them into the cliffs a little below Harnshnash. Every ship was destroyed, and a thousand pilgrims were drowned within sight of the city.
Then “a wailing was heard in Ash-Baz, and a lament arose from the streets of Karabar”, as is written in the Book of Many Lamentations.
“O God!” sang the psalmist: “My salt-white foal, the daughter of my gladness, has been stolen by the devil-black sea. Now there is no savour in sunlight; now there is no sweetness in rain.”
The people of Harnshnash looked upon the broken bodies that had washed up on their shores, and cursed their city for the smallness of its harbour. And the chief priests and merchant princes of Harnshnash met together, to cast about for some way to make the haven of their city greater before the next summer’s pilgrimage.
Vurrash, chief of the engineers of Harnshnash, spoke to those who were gathered, and said that the harbour could be extended by the construction of new breakwaters in such and such a place. He was a pious Argandarr of the race of Ulgrund, resistant to fancies, a solid man of great height with arms like trees. “It will be both difficult and costly to quarry sufficient stone during the winter,” he said, “and to transport it to the harbour; there is no certainty that the work can be achieved in time.” And he named a sum for the cutting of stone from the mountains, ennumerating the cost of the hundreds of men that would be needed to cut a sufficient amount within such a time, and under such conditions, and carting it to Harnshnash. And the priests and merchants considered their treasuries, and the cost to the city of so many drowned pilgrims.
The Vurrash said, “There is a source of cut stone nearer at hand, in the monuments of the age of ignorance that stand above the town; these could be unbuilt far more speedily than new stone could be quarried, and with less men and expense.” And he named a sum for the unbuilding of the ancient stadia, and the removal of their stones to the site of the new breakwaters. And once again the priests and merchants of Harnshnash considered their treasuries.
Then spoke Selvarn, one of the boldest of the priests, of the Temple of All Humen. “Why have we preserved these monuments from the age of ignorance? There is no need to remember the vain deeds of that time. Keeping such things encourages the simple folk to reverence and fear their ancestors, while it is proper to look upon the dwellers in the Age of Ignorance with pity only. Furthermore, the stories that are told about the shades within the ruins are lamentable superstitions, encouraging simply folk to folly.”
Then the chief priest of the temple of Minash-Hor, which was cramped on its hill and overshadowed by the temples of Tixryn and of Talis, thought of the fine new domes that could be erected on the site of the stadia below and spoke up in favour, saying how the stories told of the haunting of the stadia caused the simple to fall into impiety or even necromancy, and how he had found offerings left at crude altars there before the carvings of the old Gods.
Some others then spoke in favour of the proposal of Selvarn, and some others against, citing respect for the ancient traditions of Harnshnash. “Many are the salutary lessons which can be imparted by these relics of the age of ignorance,” said Darathnaal, a slow-eyed priest of the Temple of the Houy. “It is salutary to contemplate such works, so great in the eyes of their makers, and so vain in the eyes of God. They were made in pride for purposes their builders esteemed greater than the Most Great, and now they stand empty, without purpose. So might we gaze upon them, and consider how often we spend our days in piling up our own works of vanity, rather than in building up works that do not perish.”
Then spoke Adamon, who was one of the oldest of the great merchants, a grey-eyed human with a face like weathered pine, and hands bearing jewels like clusters of pine cones. “Though we know it is folly to think that the fortunes of Harnshnash are bound together with the buildings of our ancestors, this is a common belief among the people. To scorn this belief will cause them to fear, and find fault more readily with all that is done by their priests and princes. Perhaps there will come another storm, or tremors in the mountains as in the days of our grandparents, and the simple will blame the loss of the stadia, and act foolishly. Remember the fate of the council of Sart-Ejor? And the doom of the merchant princes of Tulmnash? They did things that seemed of little account in their eyes, and in seasons after these things were remembered and held against them, and they were deprived of their positions and wealth by demagogues. Let us pay Vurrash and his labourers more gold now, to keep more gold in the days to come. Let us advance with gentleness and prudence in all things, as we have always done."
Then some of the younger merchants questioned how Adamon could dare to speak of gentleness and prudence, when her dealings with the pirates of Zil had been so extensive; and the discussion of the assembly was diverted into other matters. But at length they returned to the establishment of a greater breakwater and a greater harbour in the city of the Prophet. After many more words – as numerous as the waves endlessly crashing upon the shore – they resolved that, in the interests of the safety of the pilgrims of next year and the years to come, the ancient stadia of the League of Ten were to be unbuilt and cast into the sea.
This decision of the assembly was the cause for great dissension among the people of Harnshnash. The greater part of the ancient dwellers of Harnshnash, the grey-eyed humen and nimble argandarr, were believers in the prophecies that the fortune of Harnshnash was bound together with the stadia. Those humen of Tixryn and Baharaz, on the other hand, so numerous in the city and so close in blood to the lost pilgrims of Ash-Baz, were united in calling for their destruction. Each party painted slogans upon walls, and scorned to frequent the shops of the other, but there was as yet no general cry raised against the priests and merchant princes.
Only when the work began in earnest were open words against the city’s leaders heard. A guard was posted to watch over the masons as they toiled at the unbuilding, and armed men were set at the gates of the temples, and at the doors of the merchant princes. Each day there were fights in the streets with fists and staves between men of Baharaz and men of Drensneik. Tax gatherers were driven out of the Grey Lanterns quarter, where many men of Drensneik lived, and the great wooden engines on the new breakwater were set afire in the night. Stones were thrown at the chief priest of the temple of Minash-Hor, and blinded him in one eye; and another gathering of the merchant princes and chief priests of Harnshnash was called.
The chief priests and merchant reckoned up the obols they had spent on guards and walls, and the obols lost on revenues uncollected, and they considered again their treasuries.
And Khabad, owner of a fleet of a dozen ships, white-skinned and soft of body, but in will as dark and hard as iron, spoke to the assembly. “The Prophet had said that the better part of wisdom lies in recognising one’s own folly. We have started out along a path which is leading to distress and unrest among the people, more and more as we follow it further. The way now to move forward is to turn back, and take another path. Let us abandon the unbuilding of the stadia of our ancestors. Time yet remains to quarry stone before the season of pilgrimage.”
Then spoke the one-eyed priest of Minash-Hor, his head still wrapped in a bandage. ‘If wisdom or folly were given as things carved on tablets of stone, unchanging forever, than what Khabad speaks were truth. But what is wisdom at one time can be folly in another, and one season’s foolishness is another’s prudence. To have set out building the breakwater of stone quarried from the mountains may have been wisdom; but to turn aside at this time, and assent to the howls of the mob, is folly. We rule here so long as the people of Harnshnash know that we are wiser than they; that we see clearly things which are obscure to them, and comprehend that which they cannot grasp. So let us continue on our present course with all speed, hire more labourers and watchmen from oversea, and finish the work we have started in good time before the season of pilgrimage.’
Next spoke Hespidor, a hard-eyed human who had succeeded to the fortunes of her aunt Adamon. And already she was known for the subtlety and power of her tongue. ‘Should we be as stubborn as our enemies? This will only sow bitterness for the future. The art of war – it is said – is to fall away in one place so as to strike better in another place; to use the strength of the enemy to destroy it. There need be no weakness in our actions, no perception of weakness in our actions. We must strike without gentleness at those who have caused trouble in the streets, of whatever party, and we must declare that stone for the breakwater will be cut from the quarries inland, that from the stadia having been proved unsuitable.’
Many others also spoke; and many who had spoken before for the unbuilding of the stadia now spoke otherwise. It was decided to remove the labourers and guards from the stadia of the games, and cut new stone from the flesh of Tsai, cutting it in such a way that it would accomplish the widening and smoothing of the road leading east into the mountains. And it was further decided that all those who had fought one another or spoken against the rulers of Harnshnash during the disturbances would be taken from their homes, and put to work at the stonecutting under guard until the work was complete. These things were done. And the greater part of the inhabitants of Harnshnash praised the wisdom of their high priests and merchant princes.
Was ever greater sorrow voiced on T’sai than when word came of the loss of Harnshnash? Harnshnash, the Holy City, where in the Age of Heroes was born and died the greatest of all Prophets. Never had such a calamity been imagined, never had it been foretold in the Sayings of the Prophets. No believer could have thought that such a thing were possible, and on Flilpansnik a school of priests was founded that preached the final destruction of Tsai by for its sins, teaching that God could not countenance the greatness of sin that filled the land, and would swallow it in an upwelling of black water even as the cities of the plain were swallowed. In every land despair grew like kalarba grass, and in all lands many believers fell into apostasy.
Who can encompass the will of God? Who can make it clear where it is obscure, and comprehensible where it cannot be grasped? For when Hespidor was an old woman, and her fabled tongue was stilled with a canker, doom came to Harnshnash. Far beyond the mountains there were great sheets of ice that lay upon the plateau, in high lands where summer never came. Beneath one of these sheets there came tremors, and fire from the earth, and a mass of mud and ice and stone was made, vaster than a duchy or a county of these times. And this mass began to flow along the channel of one of the rivers that descended from the highlands, the very one that passed behind Harnshnash and spilled into the ocean just beyond its harbour. It scoured the bed of the river away, and the forests along its banks, and moved as fast as thought and as loud as the death of the Unbelieving Sun. And everywhere it passed it left madness and ruin and a new river flowing a hundred feet above the bed of the old one. When this mass reached the sea, it found its way blocked by the new breakwater, and it made a cauldron of the harbour, grinding every ship to powder and sending waves as tall as the Temple of Talis washing over the wharves and jetties. The mass found its way blocked by the new breakwater, and as it filled in the harbour it banked up behind, higher and higher in the valley that lay behind the city of Harnshnash. And from the notch in the mountains, where they had been carved deep and wide to make room for the road and stone for the breakwater – from this notch came the doom of Harnshnash. For the city could have survived the destruction of the wharves and jetties, and the districts near the sea, and the infilling of the harbour; but what came was a river of mud and ice and stone, greater than any work of mortals, scouring through the centre of the city. The great Temple of Talis, and the Temple of Tixryn – and the Stadia of the League of Ten alike – all were ground into fragments, and of the city only the suburbs were left to north and south, with perhaps a third living of all those who had dwelt there a few minutes before. Of the places of pilgrimage, all were utterly destroyed; no trace remained of the city where in the Age of Heroes was born and died the greatest of all Prophets.
Those who survived returned to the places from which their ancestors had come, whether in Uz or Tixryn or Talis or Porbistin, the coasts of Ash-Baz or the coasts of Hulud, and the place of Harnshnash became desolate, with but one hermitage of white and silent priests who remembered the futility of mortal striving.

9: Of Nhinath, City of Pearls

2006-08-04T15:43:00.000-07:00

Nothing is recorded of Nhinath in the Temptation of the Lover of Eshaon, for at the time of the lover of Eshaon it had already faded, and was no longer a city for which any allegiance would be betrayed. In its hour beneath the sun Nhinath had been a splendid city, first of the cities that ringed the wide green lake of the Cimiril. It had canals rather than streets, and the t'sai lho that lived there had as little fear of the water as do cirilmen, stepping nimbly from boat to boat and crossing the deepest pools without trembling. The Cimiril contained all that was needful for life, boasted those who dwelt about its shores- there were broad plantings of pondweed, thick and nourishing, for feeding armies, and plantings of redweed for medicines and glues, and plantings of aelan, the waterplant that was most prized by the t’sai lho of the Third Empire and has vanished from the west since the Great Dark Ages; but in that time it was still preserved in the lake of Cimiril. In the lake were plane fish, and arishan eels, and narr, and the headless eels that the cirilmen eat, and boatloads of all these things were salted and sent throughout the lands of the west. Many kinds of beautiful and venomous things were grown for medicines, and water-beetles harvested for lacquer. The combs of wax nymphs were melted down for candles. The shells of other mindless things that lived in the lake were burnt for lime, or polished into jewels. One city about the Cimiril would be most famed for one of these manufactures, and one for another. Zelhiar was known for the breeding of marsh wreaves, of a kind that has now vanished, biddable to one master, which were used in those days as guardians of forbidden waters. Aharz was known for its perfumeries, where aromatic water-herbs and the ichors of lake-things were distilled. And Nhinath was known for its pearls.
Nine-hundred varieties of pearl were ennumerated by the pearl-growers of Nhinath, each with its own properties and lore, and those who specialised in its cultivation and marketing. Ninety grades
were recognised, from flawless spheres thirty-years in the growing to seed-pearls like grains of sand, sewn by the thousands into robes for damsels of Nur. Thirty guilds of pearl-growers were established in Nhinath, and each had many houses, and fleets of vessels, and many fine fields of pearl-making creatures on the green Cimiril. They vied with each other in the splendour of their produce, and the gifts they made to the temples and changing houses, and the odes they wrote to laud the beautiful things they made, and in decorating their companies for processions on festival days; and in the councils of Nhinath the Elders of each guild vied with one another with syllogisms, and on the streets the youths of each guild vied with one another with blunt poles.

Nhinath was surrounded by the Cimiril on five sides of six, and was builded upward so as not to waste the waters of the lake with the dwelling places of men. The common houses there were six or seven stories high at the least, all of kiln-baked brick, but the great towers were three or four times taller, and made of ancient dark wood rafted down the rivers from the Bowl Country of Cimbelan, before it was given over to orchards and cities. By dawn and dusk and midnight, the towers of Nhinath shone with countless lights, and rang with countless songs. By dawn and dusk and noon, the canals of Nhinath thronged with boats, and echoed to the voices of t’sai lho and cirilmen and glossy-pelted ruhurdh. In the years of its greatness Nhinath had no monuments such as are built by emperors or generals, for its joy and its boast was that it had always escaped the attention of such men, who gather where they have not sown, and harvest where they have not tended. Instead it had fine schooling-houses, and well-built bridges, and cunningly laid canals, and markets, commodious and grand. The wealth of Nhinath was not pillaged from many nations, but was made in Nhinath. Ever the striving of the thirty guilds was that it should remain in Nhinath. All the public buildings of Nhinath were splendidly decorated, as though they were the buildings of emperors or generals. Decorated they were with mirrors of gold and glass, panels carved and painted, statues of silversteel and stonesblood, and flags of many colours, and bells of imperishable clay. A thousand pages might be filled with the catalogue of the riches of Nhinath. and the greater part of it remain unrecorded.

No great cataclysm overcame Nhinath. It was not destroyed by siege, or storm, or pestilence, to vanish in a day or a year. It suffered a slow wasting, with the changing of the lands and the seasons, and those who lived there were by slow degrees dispersed to other places.
Nhinath first faltered when there came to the Cimiril a canker of the pearl creatures. They died, and rotted on their trellises. Other illnesses of the pearl creatures had come and passed away, over the long years, but this canker did not pass away. It came again from year to year, sometimes in force, sometimes little enough that men dared to hope that it had gone forever; but ever enough that but few of the better grades of pearls could be grown, and the output of the pearling waters was much diminished. Then also was the wealth of Nhinath much diminished, and the weaker guilds began to wither. Nhinath faltered then, but it did not fall. For while the Cimiril endured, Nhinath endured with it, and was a city of substance, though it might deal more in fish oil and less in pearls. But there then came years of disorder, when one Dynasty was being broken down to give way to another in the distant home of the emperor, and the governors of the lands upstream of Nhinath did not enforce the taming of the waters in the way they had done in the years of order. In those years each spring brought great floods, muddying the waters of the lake and lifting them through the lower windows of the dwellings of Nhinath. And in such times no pearls couild be grown, for the pearl-trellises were swept away, or the gills of the pearl-creatures choked with mud. The twelve guilds withered, and their lore was dispersed. Their houses were given over to guilds of oil pressers, or to orphan schools, and their masters left for far countries where the pearl-creatures could yet be grown. In time the new dynasty was established; but in that time there were no more pearls in Nhinath. The waters, which had been of more worth than the land, so that Nhinath had need to build upon itself, and scramble for the sky, were now of less worth than the orchards or hives that might be built upon the land. So year by year the lands were extended, and the waters diminished, until Nhinath stood amid a plain of fruiting plants. It was still riven by canals, and dappled with fishponds, but it was not a city amid the Cimiril, the great lake which had contained all things needful for life. Nhinath was no longer ornamented then, and no longer splendid. When its towers of black wood became too old and frail to stand, they were pulled down and not built anew. Those who dwelled in its tall islands of brick pulled them down, little by little, and used the bricks to build lesser dwellings on the new lands.
Nhinath it is named, even today, but it is not the city of pearls. It has no monuments of emperors or generals, and long ago the colonnades of its grand markets have been broken down to mulch sihara vines. It is named Nhinath, but it is only a market town of Cimbelan, one of ninety or ninehundred others.

8: Of Zegul, City of Jade

2006-08-04T15:41:00.000-07:00

Every merchant knows that there are two kinds of jade, as like as two raindrops or as two men. One is called white jade, though it is but rarely white, and the other is called black jade, though it is white as often as it is black. The names arise from how they are seen by the eyes of the kalamen, when they are held in the sunlight; for white jade only reflects back the light of the sun, but black jade glows with a light of its own, in a colour that the kalamen name black.
White jade is frequently green, and when it is the merchants of Meph-ash-Anthus style it nephrite. It is never so clear as glass, though some stones may let light pass. It is softer than black jade- though still as hard as mild steel- but not liable to break at a blow, and for that reason it has been used in even the most barbarous ages in armours and in blunt weapons. It is had in quantity in many lands of Tsai; in Seloom, and in Banjar, and on the plateau of Lacruman; in the uplands of western L’dron, and some parts of Dhomin, and also in Urmland. While it is a rare stone, and esteemed, most particularly by the Argandarr, it is far from the most precious of gems, and can be had by even lesser emperors in quantities enough to tile a chamber, or build a throne.
Black jade may be found in all colours, and may be as clear as crystal, or as opaque as milk. It is harder than white jade, and less often found with blemishes, but it is also more brittle, and for this reason it is used more often for ornamental things than useful. Most prized is black jade which is truly black, and that colour which was called by the Ar-Thudun ‘Imperial Green”, which is as deep and as dark as the sea-deeps of Narak. Black jade is rare in all the lands of Tsai, and there is no mine now known which yields it, only stones that mimic its virtues. It is written in the Book of the Lore of the Stones that the greatest part of the black jade which is held on Tsai- in the treasure holds of Az-Gamar, and the palaces of the kingdoms of the east, and the temples of Dhomin- was brought to this world by the fleets of the Thief Emperors, twelve-thousand years past, when cruel vessels sailed from world to world and made piracy under distant suns. There was but one mine of black jade under the sun of T’sai that is preserved in the histories. That mine was at the place called Zegul, which no man has seen for a myriad of years.
It was in the early millennia of the Fourth Empire, when the world was in a ferment, and all things seemed possible. The men of one race would journey to a part of Tsai where they had never dwelt, and build an empire there; or return to their homeland with riches and marvels; or squabble, and vanish. All that had been sundered over so many years in the long ages of darkness was being knit back together, by men of all races who trusted in their machines, and in themselves, and had no patience with the timorous or the prudent. A merchant would scorn a return of a quarter in a year; and a warrior would mock at odds of four to one; and a sky-sailor would set forth into a gale, though the sages foretold one ship in three would be dashed to pieces in such a storm. Such was the spirit of those times.
In those days the makers of new philosophies did not preach to little knots of dyers, gathered in some hovel at midnight or midday, or to bands of peasants who would enact unprecedented ceremonies in fields of stubble. No, they stood proudly before multitudes at dusk or dawn, and spoke with great merchants and protectors and masters of empirical lore, and had books pressed by the nineties and ninehundreds of thousands. Such men sacrificed all prudence, and embraced the opprobrium of all, in hope that their philosophy might be added to the canons of the learned while they lived. And to some such were granted success. Of a sort, and for a time. One such was the Phetar R’nin, who became wealthy through his philosophy and gathered about him in H’tai lovers and disciples in nineties and myriads. The Phetar R’nin had lived long among the races of the east, and drunk in with the waters of their lands the spirit of the Zamylos which had come down from the stars, and he had become perverted by the ways of the mannish races. The philosophy made by the Phetar R’nin extolled machines, and the application of empirical knowledge, and audacity, and the rightful mastery of the wise over the foolish, even if the wise be youths and the foolish elders. After the manner of the races of the Zamylos, the Phetar R’nin made a philosophy which made unclear the boundaries between empiricism and philosophy, and was solicitous towards the young. Furthermore he took the training and selection of podlings from their parents, and entrusted to a council of those well-advanced in his philosophy their schooling and winnowing, from before sentience.
When the Phetar R’nin was an elder he resolved to take his people away to a place where they could follow the rules of his philosophy unhindered by the laws of K’ralho, and free from the disapproval of the heteropraxic, and he led them to a place which was as yet unclaimed by any empire, in the north of the world. At that time the great plate of ice which had lain over the eastern continent in the ages of darkness was still foundering, and the seas rose higher from year to year, and there were many lands which are now gone. One such land lay along the western edge of Great Nath, like a string of black pearls, ninety leagues long and as bare and as cold as a kalaman’s feast. They were the isles of K’to, in the tongue of K’ralho, and they were as yet claimed by no empire, for they had nothing necessary for sustaining life, and held nothing- so it was thought- of any value.
When the people of the Phetar R’nin came to the isles of K’to, ice was falling from the sky in chunks large enough to stun a man, and the air was chill enough to freeze quicksilver. The sea made waves as tall as the obelisks along the grand avenue of Hlim Tsai, and eternally they pounded the black shores of the isles of K’to, throwing spray into the air to the height of the Green Tower of Olmar. ‘Here,’ said the Phetar R’nin, pointing to a bare hill some little way from the sea, ‘here will be built the city of right practice.’ That was the place called Zegul, which no man has seen for a myriad of years.
Great was the suffering of the people of the Phetar R’nin, beneath the long nights of winter on the western edge of Great Nath, and beneath the long days of summer, before they had built the city of right practice. All was dug into the stone of the hill, for shelter from the wind and the bitter cold, like any village in the valleys of the Spine of the World. But the city of right practice was at first far ruder than any village, for the people who built it were used to be dwellers in the cities of H’tai, and not mountain folk. They ate seaweed, and viler things, which were washed up on the shores, and they were always hungry; but they were not fettered by the laws of K’ralho, nor were they mocked at by the heteropraxic. For nine bitter years they struggled and died, and wavered in their devotion; and then some of their number who were delving a cistern found a stone that colour which is called Imperial Green, as hard as steel and as clear as the skies above R’kan.
With the wealth of the mines that were established the Phetar R’nin bought the skyships that alone could bring men to Zegul, from Narak or Dara-Zam. These ferried jade to these places, and brought back necessary things, and were sailed and maintained by the people of Zegul. For no man was allowed to dwell in Zegul, or to travel there, who was not adherent to the philosophy of Phetar R’nin. With the wealth of the mines the Phetar R’nin had also bought great engines for delving, and machines for making heat and light, and winning victual from the sea, and also armaments cruel and cunning, to protect his independence. And when he died he did not die in a crude cold delving, but in a palace so well appointed as the dwelling of any grandee of the Fourth Empire.
For an eyeblink of time, no more, in the long tale of years that is the chronicle of Tsai, did Zegul abide and prosper. The heir to the Phetar R’nin, who interpreted the precepts of his philosophy, was called the preceptor, and might be an elder or an adult; and even though there was never a youth who had this honour, it was not a thing prohibited by the law of Zegul. The preceptors allied themselves generally with the mannish empire of Dara-Zam, which was a place distant and powerful, so that neither Ar-Thudun or the empire of K’ralho would seek to subdue their city; but their jade they sold freely to all nations. Deeper and deeper Zegul was delved, and more halls of crystal fires, and water parks, and perfumed bedchambers were added to it day by day. The people of Zegul grew numerous and proud, and shunned to have any intercourse with the greater world, save for those few of their number who sailed the sky-boats and dealt with merchants in distant cities. They dwelt at ease and with plenty in the midst of the winds and snows of the uttermost north, and grew ever more of one mind, and stubborn in their practices, for so profitable had their philosophy proven. Since no visitor was allowed to the isle, it became a name of wonder and mystery to those who can feel such things, and a name to jest with for those who could not.
There were nine preceptors in all, for the first to the last. So brief was the glory of Zegul. In the time of the penultimate, X’ka T’hur, and the last, Mhar T’kiil, the people of Zegul grew more greedy for comforts, and there were many who clamoured that some warmer place be purchased where the adherents to the philosophy of the Phetar R’nin might dwell, and the mines of black jade be handed over to hirelings. There were also those who looked warily at the ever-rising sea, and the tremors that sometimes shook the isles. For the plate of ice upon the north of Mir had held all those lands still, like a heavy load may still a wayward pack-beast; and with its lifting the lands and the seas had become more skittish, and would shake from time to time like an unruly pack-beast tosses its head about. So it is written.
There are no tales recorded of the ending of Zegul, only here a line or there a line in the tale of some other city or philosophy or notable. There are no preceptors recorded after M’har T’kiil, and after the time of M’har T’kiil it is recorded of no ruler that he made purchase from Zegul, nor of any city that a sky-ship laden with black jade was landed there. It is written in the histories of the Fourth Empire that the philosophy of the Phetar R’nin was still followed by some few t’sai lho in the cities of H’tai nine-hundred years after his death, and that they celebrated this anniversary by becoming audacious in publicly pronouncing their tenets, and so were suppressed. It is written in the histories of Ashad that there were living in Nath some few barbarous t’sai lho, who knew not the ways of other t’sai lho, and used only the speech of the Zamylos, when that land was made subject to the Queens of Kerian. It is written in the annals of Ar-Thudun that there were great waves on the coasts of Ar-Thudun, at about the time of M’har T’kiil, and much loss of life in its harbours.
In the gazetteers passed-down of Kerian are recorded no strings of islands on the western edge of Great Nath, only shoals and maelstroms and reefs of massy stone.

7: Of Z'ril

2006-07-21T17:33:00.000-07:00

In the First Empire there were many cities cast about the girdle of Tsai which were established as havens for the craft that swam from star to star. Their names are like the names of jewels– M'ren, A'lir, A'tai, L'rin, Z'ril, C'tau– and they were built of glass and iron, and leapt up at the stars like music of the First Empire when it is played in the H’tau fashion. And now they are all gone, for when the First Empire came to grief they were the first of its works to be cast down. I think of them today, because this is a good day to write the tale of a city destroyed by fire. The wind is a hot wind off the desert, and the stones on the ground are like fire, and fire today would be like something greater than fire, like star-flesh.
Z’ril was a city built where the girdle of T’sai meets the Outer Ocean, at what is now the bay T’niir in the land of Arvhen, and it is mentioned in the most ancient chronicles. There were great ports there for sky vessels of all kinds, and for vessels that go upon the ocean, and there met many great highways from all the lands north and south. At the centre of the city was builded- so it is written- a tower of imperishable glass which had its foundations buried deep in the flesh of T’sai, and reared its spire many leagues into the sky, so that from its topmost galleries the sky appeared black, and not blue, and the stars could be seen at mid-day. In all the chronicles of that age Z’ril is mentioned as a great prize, for the ruler who could control it could control all of the Empire. In one chronicle the dwellers there are numbered at ninety myriads, and in another chronicle 810 myriads, and in yet another 2700 myriads. Who can credit such numbers? Yet when the First Empire built its warrens of glass and iron there were many cities so vast, which have served well as mines and quarries for all the empires that came after.
In Z’ril there dwelt t’sai lho of many philosophies, and also cirilians, and humen, and kalamen and dnari, and many races which are no longer to be found on the world. They were named a hard people in the chronicles of those ages, of whatever race or philosophy, for the getting of wealth was the great passion of Z’ril, as it was of Aljemul of old. It is written that the people of Z’ril thought it a little thing to cheat the stranger, or repay fine goods with poor; and they ever strove mightily, by night and day, labouring in their marketplaces and manufacturies, and came but seldom to the crystal galleries and parks of fabulous beasts for which Z’ril was famed. There was a proverb recorded in the First Empire, that such-and-such a thing were as ‘rare as a kind word in Z’ril’, yet we must believe that there was always virtue and wisdom there as well, for good and evil are mixed together in our world like rice flour and addis flour in a cake, and not like black stones and white stones in a ballot box.
Great were the sky-fleets of Z’ril, and great the sea-fleets, and great the armies emplaced in many strong points about the city. So when the race of the thudun first came to T’sai, the masters of their sky-armies decided to strike the city down from afar, and by surprise, so that it might not hinder their conquests. They sent a weapon against it that is no longer found upon the world, and fortunate it is that it is so; for were such weapons still to be found there would be no man still living, and desert from land-pole to water-pole. Like a star it fell upon Z’ril, and consumed it to ashes, for many leagues to every side of the great sky-tower, and all the ninety or 810 or 2700 myriads of men who lived there. Sky-ships and sea-ships were burnt to husks, like the shells of locusts, and all the learning and wealth of Z’ril were made as nothing in an instant. For thirty days, it is written, a black smoke rose from the vast ruins of Z’ril, making the skies black with poison and spreading until a plume of smoke reached right around the girdle of T’sai. Of those who survived the fires, many sickened and died with the poison, even if they fled to the other side of the world.
There were tumults and wars in all the lands of T’sai, and for the shadow of an age the thudun were the masters of the world, and then passed on, and there was peace again. But still for generations after the ruins of Z’ril remained poison, so that wreaves and land-crabs and desperate men were all that dwelt there. The sea rose, and black waters seeped into the ruined cellars of the warrens of Z’ril, and rubbervine and thorn-trees grew thick upon whatever tumuli broke the level of the poison swamp. And the men of the Second Empire thought upon building Z’ril anew, when they were still vigorous and pure; but in that time the art of making imperishable glass was lost, and also the art of sailing from star to star, and the numbers of the people of T’sai were greatly dwindled. So nothing came of it.
When such arts were discovered again, in the time of the Historian and those who came after, there was no need to build so many towers to the stars, and they had but two such cities as Z’ril was, and A'tai and C'tau; one in Etalon, and one in Flilpansnik, on the other side of the Outer Ocean.

6: Of Rtye

2006-07-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

“Xvar Mheon found that the people of the city of Rtye were every one of a mind to support Ar-Kahan, because of their crooked minds and the bribes that had been given them. Rather than leave such a city behind his army, he had all those who lived there killed, and gave their possessions to the company of refugees from the delta which had been following him, and destroyed such walls and fortifications as the city had. When word of this massacre came to K’hellik, he was demoted from his position, and Cxuar Mharom was despatched from Rzab to lead the autumn offensive.”
- The Annals of Fnhal, Year 28 of the First Republic

I have found many tales of lost cities which have been preserved because of the wonderful things which were to be found there, or of the great deeds of those who dwelled there; and the most of the tales here recorded are of that kind. Other cities have been remembered for the peculiarities of how they were lost; of such are the tales of X’var, and of T’shal, as are written above. These tales communicate one kind of moral lesson. There is another kind of tale, both lamentable and common, which also communicates a moral lesson. These are the tales of cities of no account, in which were no glorious monuments or heroes, and which were destroyed in no very peculiar way, which are remembered for the ferocity with which their buildings were cast down and their inhabitants removed from the numbers of the living. Such a city was Rtye. That is the form the name is recorded in the only book in which it is mentioned; there is another city, R’yai, which may be the same one, but very little is written of it in any place.
There are dangers in reading too abundantly of the cities of the past, as I have done all my life. Some of these can be avoided easily, and others less so. I now feel but the ninetieth part of the horror I would once have felt, when I hear news of massacre or calamity in a distant part of the world. ‘Why, what is that compared to the massacres of the Nathians? Or the calamity that befel Harnshnash? Or the slaughters of Vramekh?’ These are unworthy thoughts to have, but so thickly heaped around me on every side are these memories of injustices past that the injustices of the present no longer gnaw at my bones. The outrage that those who sit beside me feel so easily at tidings of atrocity is in me a feeble thing, my senses dulled by so many years willing the diminishment of outrage at the many-times multiplied vilenesses of the past.
Rtye was, and now it is not. There is no need to remember the tale of its ruination, or to ennumerate the sufferings of its people. They were, and now are not. Each of them was like the pattern of clouds seen from a particular point at a particular time, at once unique and completely interchangable with any other. Some philosophies call each sentient being an island universe, connected to the greater universe beyond by a thin cord of sense. Perhaps each contains within itself all that is needed for the creation of a greater universe, and wants only the power to do so. There is no sense in adding or multiplying infinities, so why then should the death of ten million cause me more pain than the death of one? But still I cannot help thinking, when I hear the news: ‘What is that beside the Spitting Plague? What is that beside the burning of the cities of the First Empire? What is that beside the dark waters that swallowed up nations and peoples at the fall of the West?’
This moment is sufficient to mourn Rtye, a city in a remote place, of no great reknown, destroyed by a general of no great fame in a war now little remembered.

5: Of T'shal

2006-07-08T17:38:00.000-07:00

Forgotten today by all but the most assiduous of antiquarians is the philosophy of the P’kan R’hau Prin, being neither a school of the Thirty Prescribed Philosophies nor one of the forbidden philosophies used as a counter-example in texts for the instruction of youth. But there was a time when it was known and taught by numberless Elders around every side of the Golden Sea, from Nur to L’dron and from the Salt Waste to the Gates of H’vran. It was strongest along the southeastern coast of the Golden Sea, in the land now called Qosim, where in these days T’sai lho are rare or absent. Such has been the case ever since the philosophy of the P’kan R’hau Prin flourished there. All the land between the cloud-topped ranges and the flat sea, where the fog brings life, was at that time called H’va. For millennia it had been the home to many T’sai lho, and for much of that time the finest and wealthiest of its cities had been the city called T’shal. T’shal was built along the canyon of the Alk in the uplands of the Qosim, where many a vanished empire had built highways from the interior to the coast. The T’sai lho of T’shal had watched each empire rise and fall, and though the outward form of their city altered from generation, their memories and traditions were preserved. T’shal had passed from the Cirilmen of Van to the First Empire of C’taab, and waxed decadent and vile in the Second Empire like so many of its sister cities; it had seen the long-lived Third Empire come and go, and the great age of Discord, and the humen emperors and lomen emperors who reigned from Eos or Pilanon. T’shal had seen off the Priest Kings of Yalun, and welcomed the gleaming cohorts of the Fourth Empire, embarked from Hleamur with javelins of silver-steel.
The P’lan R’hau Prin was the philosophy prevalent in T’shal in the latter days of the Fourth Empire, when its defences were entrusted to Parathi mercenaries and its wisdom to Cirilmen rememberers, and in provinces such as H’va men looked to K’hasno only as an example of follies to be shunned. Its prosperity as a marketplace had been somewhat diminished, as the interior lands became desert and unpeopled, but it was still a handsome city, where famine was unknown and few lived with hunger. In times of war or pestilence (which came more and more often in that age) the tall gates at either end of the city would be shut, and the walls of the canyon would defend the city better than any walls built by engineers. Many humen could be found in T’shal, both Chellonians and Inlanders; lomen of Yedek and Nur, Klemn from the jungles of Chellon, and some few Cirilians who remembered yet the sacred lakes of Urda before T’shal. But in that time, as it had been for unnumbered ages, the greater part of those who dwelt in T’shal were of the people of T’sai.
The P’lan R’hau Prin philosophy was not of the kind that is more usually responsible for the downfall of cities and nations. It was not phoboprogenitive, nor was it philoprogenitive to a degree which would incur the opprobrium of others. It did not dabble in the excesses of jukla grass thought, nor stray into a non-empirical theory of the natural world. It did not propound algebraic formulations at a time and place dominated by geometricity, neither did it propound a geometric paradigm in an empire under the sway of algebraic philosophies. It did not advocate a particular gender, or cripple its adherents with too severe an admonition to peace or war.
The P’lan R’hau Prin had been established by seers of the J’ha Ko T’so who wished to preserve and purify the teachings of their ancestors from foolish fancies that had arisen in their lifetimes. It was philoprogenitive, qualitative, and algebraic, and sought to seek beauty in all things and make all things beautiful. When the P’lan R’hau Prin was first propounded, these seers laid down a rigid set of principles for the selection of youths. These stipulated, firstly, that they be chosen according to the dictates of K’lhai: purity in odour, clarity in colour, harmony in sound, symmetry in all proportions, fluidity in all motions, and adherence as far as possible to the other eleven criteria of physical beauty. Furthermore, youths were to be selected for aptitude in mathematics, both geometric and algebraic, and appreciation for what is beautiful over that which is merely useful in what is called the test of N’zhau.
These rules were applied by the greater part of the T’shal lho, though more or less stringently in different households, and over generations they contributed greatly to the comeliness of the citizens of T’shal. The quality of the podlings sought was such that out of every hatching no more than one or two podlings would be selected, and only the great fecundity of the T’shal lho allowed the continuance of the race. In those days it was said that they more than any of the denizens of T’sai were beautiful according to the dictates of K’lhai. And the continuance and perfection of this comeliness became the chief goal and then the sole obsession of the T’shal lho. Each household contended with every other to produce podlings of the highest degree of perfection, and the shame of producing an unworthy podling was reckoned greater and greater with each generation. So as generation succeeded generation, fewer and fewer podlings were selected, and many adults passed into elderhood without becoming parent to any youth, so even the great fecundity of the T’shal lho could not prevent the dwindling of that people. As they dwindled, their dwelling places were left empty, for the fortunes of the other dwellers in T’shal dwindled also with the passing of that people so skilled in all the arts of peace.
What also came to happen in those days were that the surplus podlings were not eaten, but sold to slavers. For more and more beautiful had become the T’sai lho of H’va, esteemed by every aesthete from Cimbelan to Seloom, that even those considered most wretched by the T’shal lho were eagerly purchased by traders from across the Golden Sea. This was the one industry of T’shal that grew and prospered in its last days, the selling of the flesh and marrow of its people. They grew to scorn any work that might lead to the marring of their features, the breaking of their symmetry or the coarsening of their sensibilities. They hid themselves behind walls and thick embroidered cloaks, dwelling in concealment from the sun, the wind, and the gaze of lesser creatures. The guarding of T’shal was handed over to heavy-breasted old erlen of the plains, and the business of its markets to smooth-skinned humen of the coasts, and T’shal lho were seen in its streets only as unthinking youths, and as merchandise. The beauty of the youths of H’va became a proverb in every land where t’sai lho dwelt, though they were but offcasts deficient in beauty by the reckoning of the T’shal lho. In distant lands the comeliest slave of H’va would fetch the worth of a warship, or a thousand dunams of fertile land, and even the least comely would be valued at nine trained artisans, though yet a podling of no mind. But each year youths were rarer and rarer in H’va itself.
One year the Emperor in K’ralho raised a new tax upon the trades of H’va, and the chief elders of the humen of the seaports rebelled against it, and named one of their number a King of Qosim. The King Malaqat swore peace forever between the humen and the other peoples of Qosim, the lomen and kalamen and cirilmen and t’sai lho, and in a very few years the trade of Qosim with the t’sai lho across the sea was undiminished from what it had been before. But the T’shal lho showed little respect to the servants of the King, for they had grown great in their arrogance and thought humen a barbarous and ill-formed race. And they dwelt in concealment and guarded their comeliness; and preserved the P’lan R’hau Prin alone of all peoples of T’sai.
Some nineties of years later there arose in Qosim a new King, a King who did not remember the oath of Malaqat. He had little love for the T’shal lho, who had grown greater and greater in arrogance, and his treasuries were exhausted by wars upon the sea against the pirates of Forn. So he resolved to sell into slavery all of the t’sai lho in Qosim. In this way, he would at once be absolved of his debts, and rid his dominion of a people who had become tiresome to him. Though his councillors warned him of the folly of such an action, he was a young and stubborn king, and would not be swayed. The councillors urged him to the preservation of a trade that had been so profitable for so long, but their arguments did not move him, for his recklessness was great. The sale was made, and the last of the T’shal lho led away in silken cords, for chains would mar their integuments. And so dwindled had they become in those days that it is written that all those who had dwelt in T’shal were embarked for the markets of Kankadra on only five ships.
Then there were no more slaves to be sold in the markets of T’shal. For many centuries the lands that lay inland of it had been barbarous, and its highways were unfrequented; so little by little those humen who were now the greatest part of the dwellers in T’shal had dwindled, and more and more often they were raided by Old Erlen of the high plains. At the flooding of the Alk that first followed the embarkation of the T’shal lho, those houses that were cast down were not rebuilt, and those that had lived in them removed themselves to other places.
So it was that some nineties of years after the embarkation of the T’shal lho there remained only the ruinous gates that had stood at either end of the city through so many sieges, and a few cirilmen in stone towers that had survived the raids of the Old Erlen. And when these people were asked what the place was called, they named it Urda, and that was what was written on the maps of that land, and no one remembered that the T’shal lho, most beautiful of all the people of T’sai, had ever dwelt there.

4: Of X'var

2006-06-30T16:29:00.000-07:00

Many are the means by which cities and nations have met their end: in many places war, or the risings and ebbings of the sea, or pestilence, or a change in the wind, so that the seasons that once brought rain bring only dust and flying hormigants. None has suffered such a curious fate as X’var, which lay somewhere to the north and east of the Gulf of Chelt, on the margin of R’kaan, and flourished in the Ages of Darkness, at a time and in a place within that long echoing expanse of time that was less dark than we are used to imagine.
As R’klei and P’har, X’var was one of those cities of the Third Empire that had survived its ruin, and walked a strange path through the Ages of Darkness. It had been a mere outpost of the Third Empire, remote from the greater cities of the northern coast, but when the first teachers of philosophy had come from distant T’sorhai had come to teach the inhabitants rightly, they were eagerly welcomed there, and the schools of X’var were soon filled with disputants of the Nine and Twenty prescribed philosophies. When the tumults of the darkest of the Ages of Darkness were finished, trains of Thudun waggons came to settle on the plains below X’var, and the D’nar from over the mountains sent forth scouts to prowl the hills above, and build mines and aeries. At this time the people of X’var did not seal themselves off from the world, but instead opened their city to the trade of these nations, and to all peoples who could journey thence. In its days of prosperity, X’var had eleven temples, teaching halls of Nine and Twenty prescribed philosophies, and a goodly number of libraries, theatres, and scriptoria. Within its walls of polished tearstone X’var was divided into five districts, each ruled over by a council of Nine Elders, and each had its own peculiar expertise: the district of T’vahl took in janta pods from the Thudun, and wove from them cloth of exceeding fineness, which was sent in caravans to clothe the notables of distant Kaawil; the district of P’vrai specialised in the intricate crafting of brass and silver-iron; that of X’lim in the mixing of perfumes and flavouring oils; T’shai in the making of waterproof cloths for the D’nar, worked in vivid reds with symbols in the ways of writing that the D’nar had begun to use in those times; and H’ku X’var, the oldest part of the city, in the copying of the works of the philosophers, and sending them forth to all the lands of the west, as far as trade went, to keep the learning of T’sorhai alive. Very many other works of various kinds were also copied in the scriptoria of H’ku X’var, book of tales to amuse the young, primers of rhetoric and of mercantile cunning, songs of courting and loving, and fantastic bestiaries and gazeteers to soothe the idle hours of Elders. Books were copied in the scripts of the Thudun and the Cirilmen, as well as for the T’sai lho, and every traveller who came into H’ku X’var was commanded to show all the writing that it brought, so that copies could be made of it. There were populous quarters within X’var besides in which dwelt the merchants of the D’nar, eating and drinking the foul things that they brought with them from over the mountains, and other quarters for the Thudun of R’kaan, and the Thudun of more distant lands.
One day a certain frivolous book came into the markets of X’var, a book written for the amusement of youth. The protagonists of this volume were shemales, and spent their thirty years of adulthood in acts of heroism, and the virtues of being a shemale were extolled above the virtues of all other genders within it. This book took a great hold on the imagination of all the youths of X’var, so that in the first year it was distributed among the people all but a very few of the youths who changed became shemales.
The adults and elders of X’var thought little of this, for such passing fancies were not uncommon among youths, who are fickle and weak of mind. Next year, it was said, this fancy will pass; but in the next year, every one of the youths who changed chose to be shemale; and again in the year after, and the year after. The Elders of X’var did not wish to condemn this book, for it seemed to have nothing within it to incite vice or error, but they strove in many ways to diminish its hold upon the imaginations of the young, having new volumes written every year extolling the virtues of existence as a hemale, or an itmale. At length they ordered all the copies of the beguiling book to be collected and destroyed, but by that time the tale was already well known among all the youth of X’var who had reached an age of reason, and the desire of youths to become shemales continued unabated.
It is said that this fashion among the youth endured for thirty years, and each year the ranks of adults were swollen only with new shemales, intent on living the heroic lives they had read of or heard of; dazzling all with their valour, aweing with their feats of athleticism, and with their epigrams, and in their quieter moments whispering poetry to one another in the shady loving-niches built along the river of X’var.
So for thirty years all the youths of X’var became shemales, and at the end there were no more youths to speak of, and no adults save shemales. All the manufacturies of X’var were in decline for want of youths, and of adult craftsmen, for many of the shemales had abandoned trade and given themselves over to lives of licence and debauchery, or else had repented of their devotion to fashion and departed for other lands in search of mates. Forty years after the book had appeared the district of X’lim had been entirely abandoned, and in the other districts most dwellings were empty. The colonies of D’nar and Thudun had retired to their own lands, for no more manufactures were made in X’var, a city only of melancholy elders and debauched adults. In another twenty years the city of X’var was empty, and its tearstone walls soon melted away beneath the winter rains.
When the legions of K’hasno came, an age and a half later, and subjected the margin of R'kaan to the Aragonite Throne, no one could say with certainty where X’var had been.

3: Of P'har

2006-06-23T15:16:00.000-07:00

Well known even in these times in the lands of the West are the T’sai Lho of R’kei D’ron, with their curious modes of dress, their strange dialect, and their philosophy not near akin to any of the three and thirty Prescribed Philosophies of the Fourth Empire. All of these things - their art the same as their immorality, their speech and their heresy - they fell into during the long dark ages, when they were sundered from their kindred on the coast by the wild and barbarous jungles of Hlim. Then rat-men dwelt there, and black Kalamen with poisoned spears, and all kinds of wild beast. Now Hlim is become the heart of F’nhal, the Golden Empire, home to a myriad myriads of industrious T’sai Lho, and is purfled with a thousand cities. A fertile land, knit together by the roads and canals of a great empire; but the people of R’kei D’ron look down from their mountain and remember it as it was.
A few hundred miles to the westward of R’kei D’ron, travellers may find even today in the heights above Zsedra Min many delvings into the earth, and broken fragments of walls and towers that look like they were once part of a mighty city. The air has no savour at that height, and the T’sai Lho of these degenerate times cannot labour there long, but from the size and style of the ruined doors, and the carved words on some pieces of stone, it is obvious that T’sai lho once dwelt there, guarded from the world without by the walls of the mountains which are called the Spine of the World. This is the place that was once P’har, like R’kei D’ron a haven of T’sai Lho sundered from the coast by the ages of darkness. In the long ages when jungle and barbarism separated them from their fellow kind, the T’sai lho of P’hor fell into many customs abhorrent to the coast peoples – ways that might have been acceptable in the Second Empire, or at the decadent courts of Laan, but no longer in the waning years of the dark age, when the stern and righteous people of K’hasno first made their claim to establish the Fourth Empire.
It will suffice to mention only a few of the perverse practices of the people of P’har. It was the custom for all adults to be publicly deflowered in the temples of P’har, when they had first changed into their gendered form, as is still done more secretly among the heretics of R’kei D’ron. Worse, hemales and shemales would join one to another without an itmale, going about brazenly in the plazas and courts of the city together and inscribing poetries of physical admiration to one another. Even the Elders of P’har were not pure, but lay in thrall to a subtle philosophy of error, which seemed to the first emissaries of K’hasno as vile as any of their deplorable perversions; they had abandoned the primacy of the evidence of their senses, write the chroniclers of the legions of H’un X’ar X’ar, and were no better than Thudun or Kalamen, declaring to be true unverifiable statements about gods and distant stars.
With so little air above them, the people of P’har were always devoted to the stars, and the finest buildings of their city were observatories. They claimed twelve-thousand named stars, and in a garden of stone in the centre of P’har they had reproduced the skies in carved tearstone, with each star named in the proper place and pictured in fantastic terms. It was hard even for the enduring people of P’har to do any sort of work in the thin air of that city, so it was the custom of the inhabitants not to eat their surplus children, but to hand them over to labour in the deep fishponds and terraced fields of the valley of P’har. The children of the P’hari were very numerous, and when they died- for their work was very arduous- they were rendered down to make glue and lacquer. Work that could not be done by the unwanted youths was done by rat-men, of the race that was found in other parts of the Spine of the World as slaves of the Phthon. And very many of these pale hairless folk dwelled in the dark tunnelings beneath P’har, below the lit places where the people of P’har thronged at dusk and dawn.
There was in P’har a great statue of an Elder, three times the size of a living T’sai lho, which could answer questions put to it, and changed in colour and scent with the folly or humility of the one who asked. There were also obelisks of metaxa made like crystal or glass, but stronger than steel, on which were engraved the lamentable precepts of their philosophy. These were grounded in the bottom-most levels of the city, and rose through great shafts far above the highest ramparts of P’har, so that only the sturdiest fliers could read the whole of what was inscribed on them. And many more are the wonders of P’har that have been recorded by the chroniclers of H’un X’an X’an.
P’har had little commerce with the other cities of the T’sai Lho, sundered from them by the Spine of the World and the great jungles of Hlim; and the tales of P’har that came even to R’klei were obscure. So it was that as the legions of H’un X’an X’an’s moved into the lands of Hlim, gathering the long-scattered T’sai lho of that land into the Empire of K’hasno, P’har was first heard of as a place of great skill in artifice and lore, a remote and inaccessible observatory where wise elders looked upon the stars. Scouts were sent to follow these rumours, to brave the Spine of the World and invite the people of P’har to rejoin the other remnants of the Third Empire in K’hasno’s great enterprise. Some of these scouts at length found their way to the hidden bowl of P’har, out of many who set out, and they were received with honour by the people of that city. A very strong and handsome people they appeared to the emissaries of H’un X’an X’an, who marvelled at their survival in such a place, and how splendid a city they had built, as fine as any city on the distant shores of the Sea Impudicus. The scouts suffered from fire in their joints in the air-without-savour of P’har, and the people of that city anointed them with aromatic oil, and gave them the flesh of their children to eat. But at length the vile ways of the people of P’har became evident to the scouts of K’hasno, and they fled in horror in the middle of the day, when all their hosts slept, and returned to where the hosts of H’un X’an X’an were encamped in the forest of Zsedra. “The city of P’har is full of wonders, as has been reported,” they said to the general. “But the people who dwell there are wholly vile, and must be destroyed.” And H’un X’an X’an consecrated his legions to this task, to the glory of the new Empire and the purity of the great race of T’sai.
Great was the suffering among the legions of H’un X’an X’an as they ascended into the Spine of the World. When scouts tried to fly, their lungs would burst, and blood would bubble out of their breathing holes. Others fell into the waters that had carved paths through the mountains, and sunk before they could be rescued; and others weakened beneath their loads, and fell from the narrow paths, or pushed onward until they could gain no more sustenance from the air, and their hearing membranes swelled with fluid, and they became insensible. H’un X’an X’an made his legions to carve roads as they went, and to build stations along the way, fortresses of hewn stone to guard the new road for all time. More than half of those who remained were too sickly to fight, or carry loads, when the legions came to P’har, and the corpses of those who had perished were left in a thousand pits along the new road.
The people of P’har were unaware that the legions of K’hasno had marched to destroy them, and wondered at the appearance of this host at their gates, so numerous and so sickly. They threw their gates open, and the strangers were welcomed into every part of the city and given victuals and water. The sickly and injured were given resting-couches in the dwellings of the people of P’har, and while H’un X’an X’an spoke with the Elders of P’har the learned doctors ministered to them, for they had many centuries of knowledge of the sicknesses brought on by air without savour. H’un X’an X’an pretended interest in the philosophy of the Elders of P’har, and listened to some of their sages speak in the lecture hall of the Great Observatory until he was well satisfied of how numerous and abominable were their errors. The he took his axe and crushed the head of the sage who was speaking, and the twelve warriors at his side rushed forth and killed the rest of the Elders who were present. Then they took all the carved tablets, the speaking stones, and the painted scrolls, everything on which the philosophy of P’har was recorded, and built a fire of them before the window of the observatory. And upon this fire they cast the severed limbs of the Elders, so that a thick and foul-smelling smoke was made. This fire was the signal for the rest of the legion, who arose wherever they were and slew all the people of P’har they could find- Elders, Adults, and Youths, and whichever of the rat-men came to their aid. Only some of the podlings who had not yet shown reason were spared, two hundred in all, and these were carried down the mountains by the legions as they returned, having lost a quarter of their number in their expedition.
The buildings of P’har were left standing, for the legions of H’un X’an X’an had not the strength to pull them down, and every dwelling and passageway was left choked with the dead- those of K’hasno scarcely less numerous than the dead of P’har, so weak and sickly had they been in the air without savour. In all the times of the Empire of K’hasno P’har was never again occupied by T’sai lho, though the survivors of the rat-men crept back and made their home there for a long while, decorating their dwellings with the bones of the dead, until the Phthon arose once more to beguile them away. The highway the H’un X’an X’an built was garrisoned by the Empire for half a thousand years, for some mines and little school-towns were built in its middle reaches, but there came a year when much of it was swept away by great rains, so now it goes only a little way into the Spine of the World. From the place where it ends one can dimly see the traces of where it once continued, and the ruins of great fortresses clinging to more and more distant precipices, inaccessible reminders of the days when the glory of the Fourth Empire was being kindled.

2: Of Ektarxis

2006-06-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

Ektarxis was of old the home of a mighty race of humen, who had no fear of the sea and built for themselves fortunes and empires upon it. The harbour of Ektarxis was a day’s journey around, and filled with great ships whose sails shone like sunlight on the clouds, ships with gilded prows fashioned into images of gods and men. On those ships there laboured many thousands of slaves and freemen from all the lands that owed allegiance to Ektarxis - green Kalamen of Serim and Flilpansnik with copper bangles on their eyestalks, Lomen with pink eyes and skin like milk, Argandarr wearing the red cords of the Prophet, and thick-fingered naked Bemmel of Banjar. There were merchantmen whose decks were piled high with haigus hides from the Isle of Vulk, and jars of aromatic musk from the white sloths of Uz, and dream melons of Kal-Mahar, where the Malash, father of rivers, meets the green sea; and the great ships of war bristled with a thousand points of starmetal, and had black sails shot through with silver sigils in the shape of sea-eagles.
The harbour was girt with towers and pavilions of white stone, and behind it were seven hills, on which were palaces and temples set among gardens of fragrant zarjassi and amandelwood. At the beginning of summer the zarjassi trees would let go of their flowers, and carpet the gardens with red gold. And the humen youths of Ektarxis would go walking with their lovers in gardens of red gold, and those who played upon the eribor would sneak along beside them from one perfumed tree to another, and keep them always drunken on songs the like of which the world has not today. It is said the songs of the eribor were not written by any race of men, but were living spirits of the air, summoned from a place beyond T’sai. And it is whispered that the players on the eribor could conjure poetry out of the abyss, and weave tapestries out of the shadows of virgins.
As for the wonders of Ektarxis, who can begin to describe them? For ten thousand years it endured, and not a day passed in which it did not gain some new marvel. Each generation of kings that vied to possess it strove to outdo those who had gone before, raising up pyramids and fountain-temples and other things for which our little language has no words large enough. Such was Ektarxis. In the time of its greatness it was ruled by the kings of the Omphalos, a proud and generous race of men who had swept out of the mountains to cast down the tyrants of old.
There came to Ektarxis rumours of seas that boiled in the west, and of fiery vapours in the skies, and of western islands cast down by underground fires. And the learned sages of Ektarxis disputed these things, and moral plays of doomed islands were enacted in the theatres of Ektarxis, and it became the fashion to wear black cloaks of Vulkish sea-silk, since the passage to Vulk was become hazardous; and the noble women of Ektarxis wore the golden pearls of Ur-Kortash, which island was no more. And there was written a satirical lament to the horned fisher-folk of Ur-Kortash, as if it was sung by one of the merchants who had made their fortune by its loss. A great statue was comissioned to an admiral whose ship was lost in the foundering of an isle beyond Banjar, cast of silver-bronze by artisans of the T’sai Lho, and its pedestal was of jasper. But as the statue lay in the workshop to be gilded, a great wave came upon Ektarxis from the sea, tall and green as a mountain of Zimbelaine. When it had receded the streets were buried in mud, and all the admirable works of humen cast down into them, or swept to places far away and wholly ruined. And the silver-bronze statue of the admiral had been carried many leagues inland, where in later ages it was worshipped by ignorant folk of the forest.
In the time afterward the shape of the harbour was much changed, and choked with debris swept of the hills or from the depths of the ocean. And the distant lands that Ektarxis was accustomed to reign over were likewise laid waste, or foundered, so those few who survived the wreck of Ektarxis turned their backs to the sea.

1: Of the City of Khimar Kar Khamar

2006-06-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

In a time far removed from this, among a people who dreamed dreams as we do today, there ruled a proud and foolish queen named Khimar Kar Khamar.
She reigned over a empire of the horned folk, seventy days journey by foot from north to south and forty from east to west, which was watered by nine great rivers. It was rich in parameen and silph, and other spices, and also in precious stones, in lincobia and jacinths and grey pearls. On the coast of that empire, looking out into the waters where the sun dies, there were eleven great merchant cities, wherein were many riches, and many wonders, which had been named anciently after the virtues esteemed by the people of that land. All the noblest of the horned folk lived in the Eleven Cities, and also many of the changing folk, and the dark-winged people who drink poison, and great numbers of Cirilmen and T’sai Lho who spent their lives in buying and selling and making beautiful things.
One day the queen Khimar Kar Khamar grew tired of always travelling from one place to another, to enjoy all the marvellous things there were in the Eleven Cities. And she commanded that all of them were to be brought together in one place, so that she might enjoy them at her ease, and be done with travelling. So she caused to be built a city on eleven hills, overlooking the sea where the sun dies, and she named it for herself, the city Khimar Kar Khamar. And the great theatre of the city Courage, where cunning towers were set so that when the wind blew through they would give sounds like the tramping of armies, or the rejoicing of multitudes, or the wings of many birds, or voices singing “glory be to the Immutable God”, depending on what windows were opened or closed by the artificers; this the queen had taken to pieces, stone by stone, and put back together on the first of the hills in her city. And likewise did she deal with the garden of beasts in the city of Temperance, where the last of the silver flaigar were kept in a field of snow, and flying dragons in a crystal dome. This garden was four miles around; and the queen Khimar Kar Khamar caused it to be taken down, and put back up again on the second of the hills of her city. And she dealt also likewise with the Palace of the Elders in the city of Liberality - where the gilded bones of philosophers were used to spell out proverbs - which was set up on the third hill. And she removed the Water Gardens of the city of Magnificence to the fourth hill; and the Red Tower and the Green Tower of the city of Magnanimity, to the fifth hill; to the sixth, the quarter of the artists’ in the city of Love-of-Honour - which was all of madar wood, and three thousand years old - and all that pleased her from out of the cities of Manseutude, Affability, Truthfulness, Pleasantness, and Justice. Each of these things she caused to be set up on its proper hill, and many others besides, until all she wanted was gathered in one place. And the bones of the slaves that took down the wonders and set them up again were cast into the sea; and at the foot of the great cliffs upon which the city of Khimar Kar Khamar was builded they were thrown into great heaps by the waves.
Around the eleven hills Khimar Kar Khamar had built a mighty wall, upon which two armies might encamp, and in the spaces between the hills she ordered to be placed two-score palaces of different coloured stone, and gardens of aromatic trees, and fountains and pools without number. And to the city of Khimar Kar Khamar was diverted the whole of the river which was called Jessamine, to feed the pools and fountains. And a mighty throng from all the empire, and from lands beyond - for there were not artisans enough within the Eleven Cities, nor labourers in the valleys of the Nine Rivers - were gathered around about the city Khimar Kar Khamar, and their houses were piled one on top of another like clods of earth, so that no open space remained. Even so, it took more than a day to cross the city, so that those who lived on its fringes and laboured in the palaces had to leave their homes long before sunrise and return long after dusk.
Within the city of Khimar Kar Khamar were gathered all that was of profit from the empire of the Nine Rivers; curtains of grey pearls, and horned gods carved of lincobia, and silver mirrors, and sticks of golden silph, and things that cannot be found today on Tsai and whose names are not remembered.
The Queen Khimar Kar Khamar dwelt in her city Khimar Kar Khamar with her many servants, and those she called her friends, and stayed every night in a different magnificent palace, and delighted in the pleasures of a different city of her empire. She would dine every night on dream melon, and the flesh of the irpizarn, and translucent mimosa fish from the very depths of the sea, and young dostaks flavoured with parameen. To drink she would have strong wines from the lands of the heroes, cooled with ice from the mountains, and drunk from skulls powdered with omophon. At her dinners she would amuse her guests with staged battles between her slaves, re-enacting the victories of her ancestors. If the battle had been fought in a desert, she would have the heat of the sun cast on the combatants with great polished mirrors, so that if they did not move fast enough their blood would boil. And if the battle had been fought in the high mountains, in the heart of winter, she would fill whole courts with snow brought from afar at great cost, so that her slaves would fall down in it, and be trampled, and freeze, and never rise again. And she also had lakes made big enough for a score of warships, stocked well with monsters, in which she would stage sea battles. And it was the boast of Khimar Kar Khamar that more men had died in her pretend battles than had ever died in the true wars of her ancestors.
Neither were her guests spared, for when she had had her fill at dinner she would let loose hordes of white prosimians, which would swarm over the tables, and despoil the food, and bite the guests, and tear off their clothes. These creatures were her especial pets, and if any guest made so bold as to kill one as it tormented him, he would be taken and slain in some new and ingenious way for the amusement of Khimar Kar Khamar. But it is not good to speak of such things.
Such was the life of Khimar Kar Khamar, in the city Khimar Kar Khamar, and the vanities with which it was filled.

Now there was in the empire of Khimar Kar Khamar a famous school of philosophy, which had been endowed by a philosopher-king of old. It was built high in a mountain valley by a stream of water at the top of a waterfall. Here, thrust high into the pure air and clear cold light of the sky, there lived no more than a score of philosophers, leading pure lives and thinking clear, cold, thoughts. The school and the schoolmen were honoured by all the people of the empire for their purity and their wisdom. The school was not large, but it was finely built, a fitting edifice to be company to such mountains and such philosophers. All of marble it was built, with a high dome of white gold.
The philosopher-king of old had left the academy with many curious and wonderful devices, worked by cunning artifices. Some of these could be used to divine the secrets of the earth and the sky, and others served to illustrate moral precepts, but of others the use had been forgotten, if indeed they had ever served any. There were elders worked of silver-bronze in the middle hall, which were made to sing hymns of praise to the Immutable God at dawn and dusk. In the cellars there were machines of green glass and blue fire, and in the gardens gimblebeasts worked by clockwork, with jewelled eyes, and talons of imperishable steel.
It came to pass that the Queen Khimar Kar Khamar remembered the school of philosophy in the mountains, and commanded that it be brought to the city Khimar Kar Khamar, that she might amuse herself with it. So some thousands of labourers were set upon the road, with some hundreds of warriors at the front and rear of their column, and at the head of the warriors the Bashar Hormizdar One-Eye, a courteous and valiant man of war.
When he came to the school of white gold, he left his captains-of-arms at the gate, and went into the garden. There he found the chief of the schoolmen, casting flower petals upon a basin of water. And as the flower petals fell they took the shapes of the seven and thirty majiscules, as if they were for the first time known that day, and that quiet grove was the one where the Gods had taught the horned-folk the knowledge of such things. But from beyond the walls of the garden came the sounds of some thousands of waiting men.
And it is recorded that the Bashar Hormizdar One-Eye and the Philosopher Ras Ul-Ras spoke together as follows.
Said the Bashar: ‘I have come at the command of the Queen.’
And the Philosopher said: ‘I came many years ago, at the command of One who is greater than she.’
Said the Bashar: ‘It is the will of the Queen that this place be taken down, and put up in her city of Khimar Kar Khamar.’
And the Philosopher said: ‘It is the will of One who is greater than she that it should remain.’
Said the Bashar: ‘I have a company of soldiers with me, and scribes and draughtsmen, and many thousands of labourers. It is our duty to begin at once the reduction of this place; and to remove you Schoolmen also to the city of Khimar Kar Khamar, that your schooling may edify the Queen and those persons who are great in the land.’
And the philosopher said: ‘There are none who are great in the land, except the One who is Immutable. I am alone in this garden; and it is my duty to remain.’
Then the Bashar said: ‘I must do what I am commanded.’
And the Philosopher said: ‘Do what you will.’
Then the Bashar Hormizdar One-Eye turned aside form the Philosopher Ras Ul-Ras, and left the grove, and returned to the dust and tumult of his twice ten-thousand men without the walls. Then he gave command to the soldiers, to enter the school and take hold of the schoolmen; and to the scribes and draughtsmen, to catalogue all the marvels that were within the walls, and to record the place of each stone. And when this was done he commanded the labourers to cast down the wall of the garden, stone by stone.
But when the first chisel was lifted and the first hammer blows struck against the first stone of the topmost tier of the wall, they sounded in the ears of Bashar Hormizdar: This far! This far! This far and no further!
And he knew that what he willed was no longer to obey the Queen, who was evil, but to obey the One who is good. So he called out to the labourers, Halt. And he ordered the release of the schoolmen, and returned with his entire company to the city Khimar Kar Khamar. But word of his disobedience travelled before him, and was first to reach the queen Khimar Kar Khamar. So she ordered her picked guard to arrest the Bashar as he entered the city, and bring him before her to be tortured. On a narrow bridge over the Jessamine they set upon him; he chose death before torture; and his head and body were cast from the bridge into the waters of the Jessamine, one to the left, one to the right.
Then the queen Khimar Kar Khamar called the Bashar of her picked guard, who was called Arak son-of-Thar, and was as cruel as the sea. It was his boast that he was afraid of nothing, neither on land, nor the sea, nor from the stars, nor even from the dark spaces between them. She placed him at the head of two thousand armed men, with a great company of artisans and labourers, and sent him to the school in the western mountains.
And it happened with the Bashar Arak much like it had happened with the Bashar Hormizdar. When he had seen the school of philosophy under its dome of white gold, and the sunlight on the pool of its waterfall; when he had spoken to the chief of the schoolmen, and laughed at him; when he had commanded his warriors and scribes and artisans to set to their work - when he had done all this, he heard the sound of the silver-bronze elders scraping against the paving stones as the labourers loaded them into waggons; and it seemed to him that the sound they made was: This far! This far! This far and no further!
Then he knew that what he willed was no longer to obey the Queen, who was evil, but to obey the One who is good. So he called out to the labourers, Halt, and started back with all who followed him to the city Khimar Kar Khamar. But word of his disobedience travelled before him, and before he could come near the city he was met by an old friend, and given poison wine to drink. When it had burned through his entrails, his old friend hewed off his head, which was brought back before the queen Khimar Kar Khamar. And his body was thrown into a well near at hand.
Then the queen Khimar Kar Khamar brought her own brother before her, the Prince Bashar Varakmar. Many dreadful tales are told about him, but perhaps the most dreadful is that he is said to have found nothing to love, neither on the land, nor the sea, nor in the great void beyond. And the queen gave him command of ten thousand foot soldiers, and thirty war-beasts, and sent him to the place of the schoolmen in the western mountains.
When Prince Varakmar had arrived, and had begun the reduction of the school of philosophy, and the marble blocks of the outer wall were each numbered and loaded on the back of great waggons, he took out his sword and went to the cell of the chief philosopher, who he had been commanded to slay with his own hand. But as he was about to, something within him broke. It seemed to Prince Varakmar that he could hear the bellows of the great war-beasts outside, as they hauled away the gateposts, and that they bellowed the words: This far! This far! This far and no further!
Then he knew that what he willed was no longer to obey the Queen, who was evil, but to obey the One who is good. So he called out to the labourers, Halt, and he said to the chief of the philosophers, Come with me, and ride by my side, and be my advisor. Then he rode down towards the City Khimar Kar Khamar, upon the back of a great war-beast, at the head of his ten thousand men. And he did not go direct to the capital of the Queen, but turned aside to the headwaters of the river Celaebine, and the towns of the dark-winged folk; and twice ten thousand of them marched with him. And from there he went to Bim Pathra, which lay halfway along the river Valinom, and there he was joined by forty thousands of men. From Bim Pathra he rode to the city of Justice, and then to the city of Mansuetude, and in every place along the way soldiers flocked to his banner. Thus when he reached the river Jessamine he had with him a vast host of men of all kinds, both armed men and workers, horned folk, Tsai Lho, and nacreous men. Instead of moving any closer to the city Khimar Kar Khamar, he set this host to work building a great dam across the river Jessamine, so that its course was altered, and the fountains of Khimar Kar Khamar were stilled.
Then the Queen Khimar Kar Khamar was greatly angered, and cursed in her withered gardens, and sent forth her armies against Prince Varakmar. And the slaves in their dusty hovels muttered angrily through their parched lips, and whispered treason with mouths as dry as bone. The first army the queen sent against Prince Varakmar lay down their arms, and joined him; and likewise the second. And she sent no more armies, but gathered her loyal guard about her, and made ready for a siege. Since two armies had deserted, she feared the others were filled with traitors; so she gathered all the Bashars and captains at arms together in a feasting hall and burned them to death; and afterwards she was likely at any time to point at anyone she thought of, and say, There is a traitor, and have them slain.
Months passed, and the armies of Prince Varakmar besieged the city Khimar Kar Khamar. Outside the palaces where the queen still feasted, the slaves began to die of thirst, until they littered the streets in thousands and tens of thousands. And in that time sixty of them awoke to find that they were no longer slaves, but men, and they overcame the defenders at the Twelfth Gate, and threw the city open to Prince Varakmar.
It is said that a mob burst into the palace where the queen Khimar Kar Khamar was staying, before the soldiers of Prince Varakmar could get there. It is said that she was eating a sugar-ice, and that a stonecutter named Ulok threw her down from the top of a staircase, so that she burst open at the bottom like a sack of offal. They cut off her head and gave it to Prince Varakmar, and the walls of the city Khimar Kar Khamar they tore down. And all who had lived within those walls fled back to the places from which they had come; and that place was never tenanted afterwards from that time until this.

Thus was the ending of the city Khimar Kar Khamar.

I am told that the place where this city stood was in the desert land men now call Seloom, and think it possible that those very stones I saw so many years ago were once part of the palaces of that most vile person, the Queen Khimar Kar Khamar. So it may be said that those palaces, and that vile Queen, did one thing not wholly vain, in awakening within me this love for ancient things.

Apology

2006-06-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

I beg you to forgive me, gentle reader, for laying before you this poor collection of tales. Well aware of their innumerable flaws, I find myself nevertheless compelled to present them to you. I am afraid I can only excuse myself by telling you one more tale, which is as follows:
When I was a youth I dwelt at a schooling hall in the city of Great Charn. I was not always attentive to my studies, and at morning and at evening sometimes I would make my way out by stealth to the wharves of the city. There I would watch the vessels of many lands that came to trade, and the business of the strange folk who crewed them. And I would watch also the business of the ships of Great Charn, which had returned from distant lands, or were setting forth to those places, where our city’s name was known as a place far-removed and marvelous. And within me there was engendered a love for distant places, as I watched the sea-craft coming and going, a bitter love for all that was distant and dangerous and spoke in strange tongues of spices and hurricanes. I loved the sea, and all those things that came and went upon it, but I also dreaded it, for at times ships would come back with tattered sails and half a crew, or in tow with none - for all had died of the sea-sickness. And there were ships that did not come back at all, and shipwrecked sailors fished from the sea more often dead than not. I saw one once, a Thudun, half eaten by the worms that live in the kelp, with nothing but red crusts in the sockets of its eyes. I saw it once, but it is more true to say that I saw it a thousand times, for the image still follows me in sleep. I used to dream always of the sea, the green-black sea, the sea that could drown all the world, the sea that goes down and down to where it is always night, and monsters thrash about in the slime.
Nevertheless I was resolved to one day go forth myself, and see for myself the wonders with which all T’sai seemed to be liberally salted, though I was but a sickly youth, and often afraid.
The things of my home, which I saw every day, were become odious to me with familiarity. I longed to see things that I might see once in passing, and never again. I thirsted for those foreign places, and drank in those vessels with my eye - their proud banners where embroidered boasts coiled like silver vines, the golden birds worked by clockwork, the decks black with the blood of sea monsters butchered beneath merciless tropical suns. And the men who sailed those ships! What a marvellous world did it appear to me, that could hold such things and not burst.
It came to pass that I was watching one day a ship lately come to Great Charn from one of the havens of Mir, where the Thudun rule over slaves of many nations. And from the ship there came slaves of the race of Ashad, with iron collars round their necks, and horns cut away close to their skulls. They bore baskets of stones, which they cast down in a heap in a place near at hand. These stones had ballasted the ship as it sailed from a far place to Great Charn; and the slaves threw them into a field where once had stood a place for the working of glass, and where then the Nathians were used to camp on their peregrinations. I saw that the stones the slaves were casting down were worked stones, though many were broken. Some of the stones had squared corners, and on one face a carven fragment of some greater picture- here a part of a palm leaf, here a lordly hand, here a part of the head of a fierce man. Other stones were like wheels, and had once been parts of pillars, held together by iron rods through the middle.
At the sight of these things my lungs were filled with wonder, which intoxicated me like strong tea; and I began to clamber about on the heap of stones, picking them up in my hands and peering at them, deciding first to keep one, then another, and then wondering which one to discard when I found my hands full. I wondered how I could contrive to hide even one in my chamber - and there were enough to fill it nine times over. And I sought also to piece together some of the pictures - join sail to ship, and tail to hindquarters; but not one stone could I find that seemed to fit another.
My presence must have been an impediment to the stone bearers, for after a while they stopped coming, and huddled together speaking a little ways off. And a little while later I was startled by the harsh voice of an adult, roaring into my auricles from very near.
I returned from the far off land in which my thought was wandering, and craved forgiveness of my elder, feeling chastised and confused. I can still see her fierce yellow eyes, pinning me fast like a slith, and though in my later life I have met many great and terrible persons, I can recall no-one who has frightened me more. I abased myself, and made apologies for not hearing what she had said, which was something like:
“Get yourself hence from that rubbish heap, O youth of many recalcitrances! Truly, you have become a shame to your it-mother, and a stain upon the rolls of your clansmen. Begone, or I will chastise you with much vigour!”
Such was the way adults were used to speak, when I was a youth. I backed away from her, muddling through as many formulae of apology as I could half-remember. But even so I could not contain my curiosity.
“Many pardons, honoured ancestress. Before I go - I mean, as I am leaving - could you tell me, perchance, where these stones come from?”
And for some reason the ship-sailor did not thrash me, though she stared at me for a long moment before answering, and looked as though she would like to. Her colour faded, and she said in a less furious tone:
“If that is all you are seeking here, it is but the matter of a moment to end your seeking. These stones are ship’s ballast, of the Filial Piety, collected in Seloom where there is nothing of value with which to load a vessel. On every side of the harbour the fields are strewn with such, for a distance of many hours journey. So now you can depart, wiser and older.”
“But, your pardon-” I said, for I was burnt up with a longing to know things. “Who put them there? What were they?”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Someone. Something. Who can tell?”
I left, and I forgot to carry with me even one stone. I barely saw the streets around me as I made my way back to the schooling hall, for my thought roared through my head like a great wind, and carried me with it, and my thought was of places that were farther away than any I had dreamed of. For it came to me then that the strange and marvellous places I had always longed for were, though far away, were places one could get to with time, and luck. They were places where rumours of Great Charn might have come, and travellers as well, and where I might find Kalamenish traders squatting in the streets hawking gaudy ornaments from the workshops of Great Charn, and liniments in jars marked with the seal of the All-Chandler. How much further away were the cities of the past! The places to which I could never walk, though I walked from now until I were ninety; the places to which no magic could transport me.
It was as though a hundred new T’sais had appeared before me. A thousand new worlds; the worlds that are no more. And from that day onward it has been my passion to travel to them, in as far as I am able; to seek their spoor in old libraries, and guess at their likeness from the footprints they have left behind; a broken anklet, a fragment of cut stone, a whispered hexameter in a forgotten tongue. This I have not done for any good purpose that I can think of, but only because I have been compelled to.
I was a sickly youth, and even now am unsuited to travel. The small voyages I have made upon the sea have nearly driven me mad with terror. Now I feel myself growing old, and slow, and I am often sick. The weariness of centuries seems to have settled in my bones. So many millions of the dead, clamouring to me, demanding to have their stories heard again. How few have I salvaged even from the fragments that remain. How many have I never heard, how many remain youth-weavings that fall apart at the touch of a pen. But there have been more than enough stories to fill this one poor life.
I have never left the Principiate of Charn; I am unsuited to travel. I have never seen An-Narak, where my landlord spends the summers. But I have seen Uxmal. I have seen Yrsamon. I have seen Zoph, the debatable star, from the crystal observatory of Mnak. I have seen the Usurper cast down from the Red Tower of Bimbirizan, and the starlit pools of budding night-lotus that reflect the gold-green towers of Ashvangar.