Fortunately, he — and the Wand — will get some help from an unexpected source…
Due to the peculiar nature of the Antiquarian delving, a wall of dark red stone, one fathom thick and five ells high, had been raised around the whole quarter. At equal intervals along it had been erected towers mitered with immense lanterns of Lucifer-glass and cunning amplifying lenses brought at great expense from glassblowers in Kaiin, so that beams of particular penetration could transfix any effluvia, grues, dire-sloths, revenants, melancholics, or apparitions that might appear, or illume fugatives. The well-lit avenues allowed citizens to walk abroad at night without fear of pelgranes or press gangs. Murders, thefts, and morbid eventualities were rare.
These lights did not reach into the Cleft, a huge well piercing the Magistrate’ s square in the center of the Quarter, which gaped beneath the shadow of a skeletal derrick. The cries and moans that issued from the Cleft reminded passersby of the stringency of the law in the Antiquarian Quarter.
The other quarters of the city were not so orderly. Scofflaws and smugglers haunted the wharfs of the Mariner’s Quarter, and the ruffian gangs there were said to be organized by a voice that spoke out of the waters of the bay on moonless nights. A nest of Deodands occupied the empty mansions of the Old Quarter and had ferociously repulsed recent attempts to unseat them. Nomads from the Land of the Falling Wall moved into the deserted buildings and shops of the Carcass-Delver’s Quarter, housing their animals in the empty Odeon, penning their oasts in deserted arcades, pulling down mansions for firewood, and driving away Invigilators with glass-tipped arrows from their tiny, recurved bows. Each time they slew a patrol, the tribesmen could be seen in their painted contumely-masks dancing naked jigs on the rooftops.
The Invigilators manned the gates leading to the Antiquarian Quarter as if against besiegers. Only Manxolio Quinc made it his habit to travel into the ulterior parts of the city, where the laws held no control. He walked the route his fathers and grandfathers had walked during their tenures of office as Civic Remonstrators. The lictors whose duty it was to accompany the Remonstrator on patrol, carrying lancegays aflame with luminous venom, allowed their obligations to lapse, under the excuse that he needed no protection.
The fame of Manxolio Quinc rested on a mystic weapon thickly fraught with ancient reputation, called the Implacable Dark Iron Wand of Quordaal, which he was seen to carry with him, and from which a ominous susurration oft could be overheard.
Not even the Deodands in their fury dared molest him, as he strode each day at dawn to the highest point of the ruined citadel in the Old Quarter.
From here, the crumbling streets and ruins of the outer city lay outspread in the musty, wine-colored light like the intricate diorama a sorcerer’s table might hold.
The prospect included both the mountains to the north, their peaks stained cerise by the intervening air, and the sweep of the sluggish Szonglei River to the south, where feluccas with slanted sails and many-oared galliards brought silks and spices from Almery and Nefthling Reach and Lesser Far Zhjzo. These same galliards bore away the unearthed findings of Antiquarian Quarter: books and folios leathered in the skins of extinct animals, set with clasps of amethyst, citrine, or ametrine. Each outbound ship was a melancholy sight, for she carried away a treasure never to be replaced.
To the east, on the barren slope of Sunderbreak Fell, sometimes were glimpsed the strange lights that hovered unwinkingly over the onyx tower of the Sorcerer Iszmagn. To the west lengthened the dun shadows of the Ineluctable Forest, slowly overrunning roofless crofts and weedy plantations. The forest garmented the abandoned hill-land beyond, which was said to now be the haunt of the titan Magnatz, recently come from destroying the great metropolis of nacre-walled Undolumei, where the Three Ivory Princesses once dwelt in opiate bliss. From this direction, as if to lend gravity to the rumor, oft could be heard the echo of enormous convulsions, for whose origin no antiquarian of Old Romarth could offer an undisquieting theorem.
The sorcerer Iszmagn was known to have sent a split-tongued crow to the Chief Invigilator of the city, with this offer: to bend his unearthly art to the task of turning aside Magnatz. The price for this theurgy was exorbitant: six hundred fair gem-studded illuminated folios unearthed from beneath Romarth, and twelve of the fairest virgins in the city, blonde of hair and younger than sixteen winters, and two thousand talents of gold-weight, and the sacred white monkey from the pagoda of the beast-god Auugh. The Chief Invigilator pondered the decision, consulting with augers who watched the birds and astrologers who watched the stars.
From that high place, seeing all the world underfoot, all things in order, and with the great city and its red- tiled roofs and green glass towers silent below, chimneys threaded with blue smoke, Manxolio Quinc would be aware of a profound satisfaction. Certainly there were sorcerers, dark forests, titans, smugglers, nomads, and Deodands. But, what of them? What harm could they do, in the little time that remained to the world? History had entered its repose. No further great wars, experiments, or deeds were left to be done. It was an era for no effort more excessive than quaffing a hot rum toddy, before life on earth closed its eyes and sank into rest.
This routine was interrupted one morning as he descended the municipal stairs from the Citadel down toward the human-occupied Antiquarian Quarter. The third landing, called Leaper’s Landing, was hemmed in on two sides by statues of famous suicides in postures of defenestration. The dawn was wan that day, and the sun had a number of pustules on its surface: in the uncertain illumination, there seemed to be an extra figure among the statues.
Manxolio thought that the figure was contemplating a suicide in the gulf of air underfoot, as the hunched shoulders of this silhouette seemed poised as if to leap. It being no concern of his, he made as of to stroll past. Only then did Manxolio realize that the silhouette was facing him, and its posture suddenly seemed one of menace.
A man’s voice issued from the hood. “You are Manxolio Quinc? I seek you.”
“I bear that name.” Manxolio casually lifted the Implacable Dark Iron Wand and extended it to its full length. “Observe this instrument! It dates from the Nineteenth Eon, the time of the Knowledgeable Pharials. It is said to govern eight different actuators of energy, three aspects of visible refulgence, four more no longer visible, and an astute principle of anti-vitalistic projection.”
The man came closer. Manxolio tapped the heel of the rod on the flagstones of the landing, eliciting an almost-inaudible throb from the shaft. A dark nimbus shivered through the surface of the dull metal.
“With this,” continued Manxolio, “Quordaal the Rarely Compassionate slew the leviathan Amfadrang at a single impulse, annihilating the beast! See! The otherworldly vigor already begins to tremble through the weapon’s unquiet heart!”
The figure said, “No.”
Manxolio waited to hear more, but the cloaked man was now apparently caught in a reverie. “No? To what purport do you utter that monosyllabic negative?”
The figure sighed, and then spoke. “I mean, no, your estimation is understated. The wand is from an earlier time, the middle Eighteenth Eon: the design follows the precepts of Thorsingolian engineers. The energetic forces it commands are correctly numbered at twenty-one. Stroking the Implacable Dark Iron Wand to the ground merely activates its repair-cycle, which, if the cells had not been drained by effusion, would make no noise. Only an empty jar rattles so. The connection with the central potentium has been abrogated, leaving only secondary functions viable. Also, the Leviathan was not evaporated, as you said. The incorrupt serpent-corpse clogged the Szonglei River and blocked the harbor of Romarth for three centuries and a half, and thence was mined for bone and scale and cartilage, and other valuable byproducts, for several luxurious decades.”
