Kiravi's Travelogue Ch. 07

We made our formal, or our best attempt at proper, farewells and were led back out of the sprawling courtyard by another attendant. I wrapped my sword in a handful of rags and tucked it under my arm, heeding Qusirlay's words. Long shadows stretched from the western bank, draping over the rippling Seleyo and hiding most of the riverside in their gloom. I winced, internally of course, at the fact I'd just subjected Leotie to hours of rambling, but I still didn't understand why my half-breed companion was still practically thrumming with rage.

Slipping only a few times, we clambered back across the clapper bridge, the mist swirling off of the water chilling us as the light faded. We climbed back up Temple Hill through the unfamiliar and shadow-drenched alleys, trying to find our way back to the traveling house in strained silence. But this wasn't my city, and many of the cobbled streets were strangely empty of people to ask for directions; we were soon well and truly lost.

We paused beside a collapsed tenement where I hoped to get a better bearing on our surroundings through the gap in the skyline. Trying to pluck Leotie out of her spiraling anger, I asked a hopefully innocuous question, "What do you think, Leotie? What should I do with the land and—"

The slap caught me completely unawares, knocking me down onto one knee on the broken mud bricks. My ears rang, and the vision in my left eye swam maddeningly. Leotie stood over me, Niknik strangely not sharing her sudden fury.

"You arrogant fucking bastard!" She spat, spit flecking her lips, and her angry tears finally unleashed to spill down her cheeks. "Gods-damned petty, selfish, useless man! Get up! Get! Up!" She shrieked at me, fists balled tightly, and I knew, even as spots swam in front of my vision, that this was not the same game she'd played in Atala.

I rose unsteadily back to my feet, blinking. "Leotie, what are you talking about?" I spoke as softly as I could, but confused anger was creeping into my voice.

"You just don't get it, do you?" She half-cried and half-shouted.

"What?! What in the Akagi's hells are you talking about?" I raged back at her.

She laughed viciously and cried all at once, shaking her head slowly, "Don't you get it, Kiravi? Can't you think about someone other than yourself? Think!" She stabbed a finger at my head, and I flinched, thinking another blow was coming. "That touched-in-the-head woman is offering you a chance to end this little romp of yours. Oh, you could go and be a Mayor or take the money and the honor and trot on home. What about me, huh Kiravi? What in the Chaos Wastes am I supposed to do if you just decide to turn back now?"

The first tendrils of a new wave of self-loathing trickled into my mind. "You could always come with me, whatever I decide to do."

She laughed a harsh, mirthless bark, "Oh yes, Kiravi, I'm sure you'll find a place for me when you're a Mayor or go back to being just another rich, useless noble flitting around Anghu. A place beneath your hips, perhaps? Or as part of your household, a mere servant even though I fought at your side? And what about that poor girl you have wrapped around your finger? She'll do whatever you say, and she'll never get the answers she needs. All because you've thought only with your cock and your foolish delusions of honor!"

"Leotie, I could —"

"Don't. Don't you fucking say you would marry one or both of us! It would never be me in any case. I may not know much about your world, but I know Mayors don't marry peasant girls or homeless Bhakhuri," she jabbed me in the chest hard enough to tip me back. "No, you don't marry people like us. You just fuck them."

"If I'm Mayor, I can do whatever I want," I tried to rally back, but the words were hollow even to me.

She shook her head slowly, the rage ebbing from her face to leave only the sadness. "That's all this was to you. Find your way back home, and bury your cock in a few maidens along the way to pass the time. You just don't get it," she gestured back and forth between my chest and hers, "This is all I have. Whatever this is, this journey, this little band. Whatever you and I are. I have no tribe and no Blood Debt to drive me forward. And Serina? She loves you, Kiravi, as much as a girl can be in love, and you'd just cast her need for answers aside without a thought. You're all she has in this world, too, and you don't even care."

"Leotie—"

"No. I'm not fucking done," she tore my shirt, pulled it back to expose the raw and scarred skin. "Kapak saw something in you, Kiravi. We all did. But he was wrong, wasn't he? And I was too, all because you're ready to go home and live a soft life again."

"I..." I started to respond, cowed by her absolute fury, but the words died just past my lips. For the first time, I thought, really thought, about what Leotie was going through. She was adrift in a city that held more people than all the Bhakhuri tribes combined and, beyond that, lost in a world that was suddenly huge and foreign to both of us. Serina wouldn't be able to make it on her own yet either, not yet, and Leotie was right about her. She was in love with me. Was Leotie in love with me too? Both of them were lost in the world, tied only to a man who cared more about reclaiming honor he never even had, and sating his carnal needs, than the well-being of the ones around him.

Stuck with me, like a stone tied around their ankles as they floundered in the Mother Rivers.

I was a fool — you already knew that dear readers — and I didn't know what to do. Whatever Leotie thought, I did care about her and Serina, or at least I believed that I did. I'd only thought of how to use the windfall of the Mayorship and my mastery of magic as Leotie has spiraled further into despair and anger.

Again, I tried to respond, maybe even apologize, but another voice interrupted me.

"You there!" The harsh male voice barked, "Why haven't you punished this Agasu half-breed for speaking to you in such a way?!"

I glared over Leotie's shoulder; inner turmoil suddenly chased away by a surge of healthy suspicion. Another glance behind me reinforced my instinctual concern: two knots of men approached us on the narrow street, led by four well-dressed human males. Their robes bore the same chevron-like markings as Sata's had, and beadwork and feathers adorned their simple caps.

And, at their waists, the four carried bronze swords just like mine.

"Just having a simple discussion!" I shouted back, quickly slipping into the familiar persona of the silver-tongued rake. "How can I help you gentlemen this fine afternoon?" I asked. I shifted the bundle of rags masking my sword under my arm. There was no way out of the narrow street past the crush of hungry-looking humans, save maybe going over the pile of broken bricks, but I hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"Agasu don't speak to us that way!" The same man, with the most elaborate headdress, shouted again, "They don't even meet our eyes, sully our gazes with their twisted faces. You should know that, shouldn't you?" The two groups edged closer to us, hemming us in further. The bare few pedestrians we'd passed on the way here had all disappeared, and most of the blankets and hides covering the tenements' doors and windows had been pulled shut. Beyond the four nobles, the rest of the crowd carried just simple cudgels, hammers, and knives, but their numbers were intimidating.

New beads of sweat formed on my temples, trickled down in rivulets through the dust caked on my face. "I'm from the north!" I called back, hoping by pretending I was Sata I could talk my way out of this. Our way out. "Simply visiting the city on business. I have no quarrel with any of you, and her? She's no one, not worth any fuss."

"Shut your gods-damned mouth," he snarled, "you might be above her, but you're still beneath me, so remember your place." He drew his sword and pointed at Leotie with it. They were only a few dozen paces away now. "Normally, I'd just bloody your lip and make you kneel in proper deference in the gutter, but tonight is different." He smiled a crooked half-smile, which I imagined wasn't much different from my own brawl-twisted face.

Ice filled my veins, flooded my heart. I muttered to Leotie before the mob would be close enough to hear, "Edge up onto that rubble and let me handle this." She rubbed the enraged tears from her eyes and nodded, slowly stepping up onto the broken bricks while Niknik grumbled and pinned his ears. "Please, master noble, no disrespect was intended. My belt is heavy with coin; I'm sure an agreement could be reached?"

If he heard my words, he ignored them. "Tonight, we deal with the taint your kind brings to our city and our land. Tonight we feed the Kwarzi and the old ways!" The man shouted, pumping up the crowd with wide strokes of his burly arms. "But that doesn't mean we can't have our own fun first, doesn't it?" They cheered, jeered, "It's just about all their kind is good for, isn't it?" He pointed the heavy sword back at me and snarled, "Once we've finished rutting your little Agasu whore here until we break her in half, and slit her throat, then we'll gut you and dump you in the mess that's left over."

So. There wouldn't be any way out of this, not without blood. My guts sank, knotted on themselves. Dragging Leotie into this city, from the Palace to these ragged tenements, had ensured her death. She'd been right about me, every word of it. The two bands stopped just a few paces away from us, the common rabble seeming just as hateful towards us as they were fearful of the four Old Nobles. Their skin was thin and sallow, eyes shrunken into bony sockets, but the Nobles, of course, looked well-fed and healthy.

There was nothing else to do now but run, run up and over the broken bricks and see if we could make it to a friendlier part of the city. My heart thundered in my chest, preparing me for the coming struggle, but I couldn't help but feel one last burst of shame at subjecting Leotie to this. What a damn fool I was.

"Go," I muttered to her, growled really, as the internal and external anger and hate made my limbs tremble. I ripped the heavy sword from the rags under my arm; it gleamed in the dying light, and the mob took a subconscious half step back. "GO!" I shouted again, thinking that I might be able to buy her a few moments before following. Or falling. I remember thinking it was the least I could do.

"Ah, a thief or a traitor; that would be the only reason you'd have that sword. Either way, we'll make sure you're properly punished. Once we're done raping her to death, of course."

The rabble surged forward from all directions and I turned on my back foot, roared in their faces, and swung the heavy weapon. It was a wild blow, a wide and dazzling swing to try and force the crush of bodies back, but the bronze blade still bit into something and cut. I'd love to be able to tell you that I was a master swordsman, dear readers, and that I valiantly fought off the horde of rabble, but that's not what happened.

The blade stuck in my first victim, grating against bone, and I vainly tugged it backward. It finally sprang free in a welter of bright blood, but I was suddenly off-balance, and the mob crashed into me. I remember flailing, tumbling back up onto the rubble, when a cudgel smashed into the back of my head.

Everything spun, and down I went.

*****

"That was the best ritual we've had in years," the priestess cooed, walking around the small chamber we now shared. I'd awoken to the burly giant, now bereft of his glamour, carrying me into the room and felt another involuntary surge of lust at the feel of his muscular body. The priestess had followed soon after, deigning only to drape a translucent white cotton robe over her statuesque body. "All thanks to you, little girl."

"I...I didn't mean to intrude," I responded, still a little woozy, sipping cool water and resting comfortably on piled cushions. "The magic was just so...powerful."

She smiled, her face uncovered now with the black veil pulled back and bunched over her lustrous black hair. Her face's high cheekbones and oval shape exuded easy superiority, and though her mouth smiled, her large and dark eyes only studied me. "The Ettuku are power," she said it as if it was the most obvious fact in the world. "They give us power to exert over others and, in turn, we glorify their rightful place over all other gods."

I nodded, not understanding but cowed by this woman's presence. We were alone in what I guessed were her personal chambers. Magically glowing stones sat in ten ornately carved bone sconces, their light faintly pulsing with the currents of magic I could see and feel ebbing away from the heights of the ritual. Each sconce was different, but all were carved into vaguely humanoid forms, with over-exaggerated muscles and curves. The dark walls glimmered with dozens, no, hundreds of mica chips and flakes of polished obsidian, drawing the eye constantly about the space and reminding me of the night sky over the Ketza.

She sat beside me amongst the carefully arranged cushions and blankets, at least two hands taller than me, and looked at the most imposing object in the room. It rested at the center of the chamber but hadn't been placed there by priests or temple-builders. No, the chamber and, indeed, the whole temple had been built around it.

The smooth and black stone, the size of four seated men, looked like obsidian at first but didn't have the same glossy shine. In fact, the object seemed to swallow the light suffusing the room. A shadow made manifest in the real world.

"This is the reason the temple was built. This is the reason our ancestors even settled here and built a camp that became a village, that became this great city." She lovingly stroked the stone. I could see the magic pass between her and the stone with her touch, and beyond that, the currents of magic that swirled around the room and into the relic.

"But, what is it?" I whispered, still nursing my drink and a small but insistent headache.

"Quiet. Listen," she smiled at me with teeth that were too perfect, "You know the stories, don't you, little girl? The gods fought a Great War here, long before the time of us mortals. Like the broken spears and spent arrows, the leering skulls and reaching, bony fingers, their war left things across our land. Is this the tooth of a god? A kneecap? A fingernail? Who knows, but it is divine, a connection between the Ettuku and us."

My headache wasn't improving, growing worse in fact, and I took another sip to try and stave it off. Something inside me throbbed, not as it had just a short time before in the ritual, but insistent, painful. I wished that Kiravi was there with me to cling to while this woman told me of the Ettuku.

"How," I swallowed away a stab of pain behind my right eye, "how do you know it belonged to an Ettuku?"

She smiled again, her face too perfect, too neat and symmetrical, to seem perfectly mortal. Her hand met mine, skin smooth and cool, fingers slender but firm, and drew my hand to the stone. The pain in my head flared again, as if in warning, before the magic of the stone met mine. For a moment, it overwhelmed me.

"Look, little girl. Look at what the god has to show you!" I heard her voice, but only as if it were far away, muffled by wind and dust. Sensations swirled into my mind, crashing into each other like driftwood carried by the spring melt. A wind that couldn't have possibly existed in that room reached my ears, plucked at my dress. Ice cold water poured across my skin, but it didn't. It couldn't have.

I opened clenched eyes and was reminded of a cold, dull echo of my goddess' home. The sky glowed like a dark silver sheet, with ribbons and streams of brighter vapor twisting through it. Half a dozen nearby stars shone in the strange atmosphere, one larger than the others, but their light together didn't equal the sun over Anghoret.

The ground — the ground I could see, not the stone I forced myself to remember was still beneath me — fell sharply away from me in every direction. The Priestess stood beside me, her flesh translucent and oily with shadow, like the glamour the giant had worn as he dominated the maidens. We stood, existed, or perhaps didn't, atop a high mountain of black granite, overlooking a city the likes of which I couldn't imagine was even possible.

Great towers of darkly lustrous metal stabbed skywards in neat, ordered rows or in twisting spirals that reminded me of the writing in Kiravi's book. Their sides glimmered with great slabs of obsidian or mosaics of jewels, like the outside of the temple but infinitely more majestic. Streets paved with white marble or silver crossed through the city, always meeting at sharp angles, always marching along right to their designated destination. Great stones had been hauled to the tops of each of the reaching towers, each enchanted to glow a subtly different shade of red or orange. Smaller lamp-stones shone from sconces along the streets, mixing with the pallid light from the strange sky to make the entire city glow faintly.

Dominating the city, overpowering the skyline, blotting out the light of another of the faint stars I hadn't even noticed before, a mountain rose in the near distance. But, our dearest readers, it wasn't a mountain, not truly. It was a vast fortress, a stepped pyramid of impossibly vast stone, ten distinct steps stacking towards the distant peak that scraped the dim sky. Individual bastions, each the size of Tebis, marked the steps like battlements. Strange spires of obsidian and more exotic materials glimmered along the endless walls. My mind knew, somehow, that they were weapons, but I couldn't fathom how they worked.

The highest step, the peak of this divinely artificial mountain, was ringed by a wall of the glowing red blocks and capped with a palace the size of a city. The single, impossible structure had been shaped out of a single block of obsidian and chased with features of gold and bronze. Twisting down out of the alien sky, two churning and frothing rivers of glowing energy entered the palace before being captured amongst its strange walls.

"Amzit, home of the Ettuku," the priestess waved her hand, her voice faint and echoing within itself, "And Sanarkar, throne of Timal, God of Gods, Emperor of all Worlds, Father of the Divine and Grandfather of the Mortal, Defender of Reality itself."

My head throbbed more insistently, the conduit in my breast twisting in and around itself. There was something wrong here, something off, not quite true. Unlike my time with Yupanki and the Pashudia, I didn't want to learn everything I could here. I only wanted to learn one thing.

"I have seen the goddess that granted my gifts and curses in my visions." I described her to the priestess, "Please, tell me: was she an Ettuku?"

She laughed at me, mocking, her glamoured flesh making the haughty sneer of her face even more pronounced and vicious, "A delusion, I'm sure, born from raw magic and your youthful ignorance. I do smell power on you, little girl, power like only the Ettuku can grant, but it has a strange flavor to it. Come." She grabbed my hand roughly, pulled me to her, and Amzit swirled away like gray mist before the sun.

We twisted, suspended in the same dim, silvery sky that surrounded Amzit. The same firmament from my vision in Atala. Below and away from us, a point of light burned amongst the haze, achingly bright. I couldn't tell if it was massive or tiny, distant or just beyond our reach. All I knew was that it throbbed with purpose.

"Please, answer me," I begged, my eyes aching with the pain thrumming behind them.

"When you understand that the Ettuku gave you this power to in turn magnify theirs, you will have your answer!"