pencils in the lair of an academic fiend seemed to be the only things not in meaningful locations.
Caliph circled the enormous table, looking at Sena’s meticulous research. Her lanthorn hung above the middle of the sprawl, too far for him to reach, its lenses gray and dark. There was a single chair with comfortable-looking leather upholstery that Caliph tapped thoughtfully.
Back in the house on Isca Hill, his uncle had taught him a small obscure word that required no blood. A curiosity that had earned fear-based opprobrium from several college professors. He spoke it now to ignite Sena’s lanthorn, which smoldered into absinthe-colored light, immediately soothing his tired eyes. A warm woody smell of spice and flowers flowed out from it and pushed Caliph down into the chair. The light picked words from the pages more clearly, it seemed, than direct sun.
Soon, he was following arrows in the notes, reading bracketed paragraphs, flipping to cross-references and devouring a terrifying set of journal entries that fed him ceaselessly into the brilliant ache of a morning unbacked by sleep.
CHAPTER
3
All my servants are dead.
I watch the nilith ooze across ubiquitous wet jungle stones and banyatha leaves. Gaudy blue and orange- speckled bodies burble across the slabs of my fallen estate, make sucking noises under Naobi’s light and leave trails like alien wine—the last traces of madness, one might think, from dreams of bygone revelry.
But there were never any parties at this house. Never any guests that surreptitiously made love in the flowering gardens or stumble-danced to the tune of the melikon.4
As I write in the stifling ruin of my study, I feel little remorse that my fantastic estate has fallen to the slow, quiet suffocation of the jungle and the weird mating rituals of giant slugs.
I was born in Pandragor where the skies sear your eyeballs with blue and the sands are the color of crystallized honey. I grew like the greenery in a narrow strip along the Bainmum River, but did not stay there long. My people, the Despche, have a saying:
I moved with the sand, blowing south and east off the Tebesh Plateau. Beyond the Sea of Grass and the Theocracy of the Stargazers, I went south between the Great Desert Rauch and the Afran Swamp. I have been to the north but most of my life was taken by the jungle.
Five years ago I turned from exploration and treasure hunting in order to carry something special out of the rain forest. Its aperture was small. We had built a forge around it and ringed it with numbers.
I was meant to deliver it to the priests in Iycestoke, but decided not to. I knew what I had.
Tonight is the anniversary of the night in 487 when my indignation for the priests finally boiled over and I achieved my smallest nevertheless most notorious crime. I butchered the conclave. They were more
It was after nightfall on the twentieth when I crested the final hill. In the volcanic glow of K’rgas and Jag’Narod I beheld again as I had so many times before, crawling like a cheerless riot of kudzu, the endless expanse of the Khloht Jungles.
Behind me was the roar of the twin mountains; ahead of me the roar of insects and inside of me the roar of insoluble guilt, not for what I had done, but for what I was about to do.
Hidden from city detectives by artifices stolen from the Cabal and supported by a host of machetes that flickered in unison from the grips of my pale servants, I cut our path into the ruffling black rib cage of a fungal- smelling shadow of a land, never to return to the sprawling urban sweep that had been my occasional home.
We carved our way south, all the way through Khloht and out the other side. Near the great necropolis of Ooil-Uauth, on the luminous shores of a pink ocean below the equator, my servants built a palace of stone to withstand the decay of the climate and I began my long wait for the end of the world.
Caliph noticed movement in the room. It disturbed him. A page drifting from a shelf had settled against the floor. He looked toward it with uneasy curiosity, trying to gauge the limited strength of the fireplace draft. Eventually he turned his attention back to the journal. The handwriting of Arkhyn Hiel was vaguely familiar and he followed one of Sena’s notes to another entry in a separate volume.
In the far north, near the Glacier Rise, the red-bearded Nanemen have many myths, more perhaps even than the Veydens. In Naneman mythology they speak of the Hjolk-trull, the
The archives at Shaerzac University, which will survive the Civil War of ’61 …
“Will survive?” Caliph whispered. He glanced up at the dates. One of them had to be wrong. He felt something cool drag across his neck and slapped at it. More drafts? His stomach turned cold and rolled up on itself as if fists had clenched the ropy mass of his entrails. He looked at the date of the journal entry, a full four years before the Civil War of ’61, and tried to find some reasonable explanation. The second five could be a six, he decided. And maybe the seven was actually a two with an overly short base stroke. Five sixty-two. That would make sense. Except for the inexplicable future tense associated with the war. Nevermind. The whole thing was handwritten, unedited and therefore certainly full of mistakes. He was too tired to care.
… which will survive the Civil War of ’61 house texts that describe the Gringlings in the words of scriveners from the previous century.
A mythological radiant people endowed with the gift of prophecy who authored legendary books until the Rain of Fire.
This is, by my own account, an accurate description.
But at the High College of Desdae there are private collections. There are deeper myths crawling out of White Tongue, Mallic and Old Rilk. Many of the pages have been translated. Many more have not.
I was there … or will be there. I went through the entire library and afterward compiled the Sothic Myth:
Writers and Eaters of Time. I am a Gringling, you see. Not in flesh but in spirit. I once tapped a holomorphic hybrid of floro-dririmancy to check the heartbeat of the north: the color of the petals, the way the blood dripped from the zebrian orchid’s ovaries and anthers. I knew soon. Soon—soon the Sslia5 would open the book.
Caliph scowled. He had little patience for this sort of drivel and had to force himself to keep going. Sena’s notes now pointed him toward a different stack of papers. He rummaged and found the reference.
Excerpt: pages 23–27
