CHAPTER 19
Another attack happened on the island.
The rumors traveled along with the refugees from the northern, and extremely rich Xegula district, a district filled with the heirs of Sarkoshia’s first opportunists. Some said the attack involved, in some way, the Hylusa Menagerie also, a legendary museum of magical animals both living and dead. Jallin always wondered if the place were really full of live animals, like a livestock market, or was it more like a hallway of stuffed things.
A commotion like what took place every day in the flesh port now took place on Triumph Road, the road that went between The Bay of Golden Sunrise, where the Imperial Navy harbored, all the way to the Palace of the Lord Emperor.
The journey here had been, over all, nearly boring. Kir-Tuko had led Jallin through a series of pleasant streets and across little squares in the view of prosperous store fronts, and even through a little park surrounding an odd structure made out of stone.
Kir-Tuko called it an old door, but he didn’t explain beyond that. He didn’t know. Several people, what must have been Aethren, had been hovering around it as the two passed. Two of these figures dressed in light blue robes, and another dressed in a shimmering silk tunic and big billowy trousers. Five or six scribes or clerks or whatever they were stood by to record whatever the Aethren told them to write. Two of these sat in the grass with their books opened. One of them stood ready, quill in hand, a jar of ink balanced on the page. The others stood with books closed and talked amongst themselves while their masters pawed at the big stone circle.
Jallin wanted to admire the view on Triumph Way. He’d never seen such buildings as these high, imposing stone edifices. They stared down at the street like a row of soldiers, many of them showing evidence of three, four, maybe five or six floors, or at least that’s how many windows Jallin could count up. Who knew if there were dungeons or cellars down underneath them? Maybe even catacombs, whatever those were. All up and down the street were the flags of the famous in Sarkoshia, none more prominent than the flag of Lord Emperor Sarkelosh’s family lines. His emblem, the golden sword dividing the red and black flutterby wings in a white sun on a field of blue looked sort of like an eye to Jallin, at least when he didn’t look directly at it (likely to change). He’d heard someone say something about that flag, that it represented triumph over evil.
But stepping out onto Triumph Way, everything changed.
Mothers held their children close to them, either holding their hands or pressing them under their chin. Fathers and brothers looked around for people to talk to about what was happening. Merchants competed to be merciful, giving out water and food to the people, knowing full well how rich they were and how much they might possibly appreciate such charity. Several guards wearing the royal livery moved among the crowds. Weapons were drawn. Everyone was tense.
No one would talk to Kir-Tuko, and even fewer would say anything to Jallin. Most people didn’t even acknowledge his existence. Kir-Tuko kept his sheaf of papers ready, in case they had to give an account of themselves. Likely they would not, as there was no law about walking onto Triumph Street, not even if one was a slave, or at least Kir-Tuko said there was not. But, Jallin thought, as he looked at the grieving people, a clever thief among this crowd could really make use of the chaos this latest crisis had caused. Jallin felt dirty after thinking like this. He wished he hadn’t. Wealth like this, prosperity and the beauty of a place that people cared about reminded him of where he lived, in the extreme southern parts of the island. He’d grown up in a house that no one bothered to repair. He’d lived not on handouts, but on what his hand could grab. He had trained his mind to think like a thief.
The best either of the two travelers could find out was that a house had fallen in on itself. Some people died inside. The neighboring houses, which were attached at the walls to the first, had fallen down with it, and this set up a chain of fainting walls and failing foundations in a place where the houses had been handed down from grandfathers.
“Why do they think it’s an attack? Couldn’t it have been just a storm or a trithquake or something?” Jallin asked Kir-Tuko.
“That Xegula district? I think it has protection on it. Magic.” He pointed off to the east, towards the bay. Jallin could see the top of a tower, which seemed shrouded somehow, as if by a haze. Jallin saw another of these, near the palace to the west as well, also surrounded by a shimmer or a wave of heat at the top. “I think those things, those tovers, they like those vind columns Master Noshó has in the garden, vut much vigger. I don’t know, vut I think they keef storms avay, or mayve slow the vind down or something.”
“Well, it could have been a trithquake, couldn’t it?”
Kir-Tuko shrugged.
They moved on through the crowds. Occasionally, a guard asked them where they were going, and Kir-Tuko briefly explained, pointing towards a corner where Victory Street met Triumph Way. A cartographer had set up shop, selling maps of the city. Jallin wondered how much a map was worth. Out in front of the shop, standing on the corner, an old man with a gray beard, apparently an Allorinian, was discussing something with a narg and a kunjel wearing a blue robe and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat. The narg guard looked up and down the street in a bored way, while the blue-robed figure and the old man looked at a piece of paper or parchment.
As Jallin passed, he met eyes with the blue-robed figure. He’d never quite gotten used to looking kunjels in the eye; they had raig eyes, gremlin eyes. Their pupils were vertical slits. But as Jallin met this kunjel’s eyes, he noticed something: the kunjel never blinked. Not once. He watched Jallin pass, and at no time did he break that connection.
For some reason, the way this man stared at him from under his hat made Jallin feel guilty, as though he were somehow responsible for the deaths of those people and the collapse of those houses. He happily caught up to Kir-Tuko as they turned down Victory Street.
He felt stupid for asking, but he asked anyway: “How much further?” As though this would somehow magically make the distance that much shorter, however much it was.
“It is at the end of this street. Ve are not far now.”
Victory Street was yet a different market than any Jallin had yet seen. Jallin saw the facades of taverns and quiet restaurants, a few gambling parlors and pubs, and even brothels right out in the open. The houses here were well-built, many with stone walls on the first floors and upper floors that overlapped these walls like the bellies of well-fed men. Korriks, horses, and japals all pulled carriages up and down the streets and Jallin met eyes now with fancy-clad footmen and coach drivers. They wore powder wigs and very serious expressions.
The people here all dressed their absolute best, even if they were going in or coming out of a tavern or brothel or betting house. The Kunjels dressed in the deliberately mismatched or lowbrow clothing they called unenvy; the kinto-shah wore spider silk gowns or robes; a few Allorinians dressed in robes and loose-fitting wraps, but made of linen or the finest wools, one even green, having been made of processed nern wool which was very expensive; the Morrigari wore the stiff, high-collared, dark coats and trousers they were famous for, along with their peculiar pipe-shaped hats that looked like cakes on top of their heads.
In the vin M’Lagra, the livestock market, these rich people’s hired servants and house slaves flipped the ears of cows and greegs as though looking for gills and ran their hands down the quivering flesh of a horse as though looking for tears. They picked up febrits by the scruffs of their necks, between their fingers, put them back, picked up another again, as though at any moment they’d start to juggle the small furry animals.
“Are these all you have?” they disdained. “For that price, it’s robbery. You’re absolutely picking my pockets, and my master’s pockets. I’ll skin this and put it in a pot, and then he’ll do the same to me. Oh well, it’ll have to do, it’s getting late.”
“I think perhaps your farts smell like roses,” Stasser said, watching these people with Jallin from an alleyway. He waved his hands about as though trying to catch and collect into his face his own flatulence. “And I’ve found a new way to drop dung into a chamber pot, the very latest thing. These days, you squint one eye just so, and you grit your teeth just so, and hold your right hand up while squatting…thusly. One must never grunt, though, and you mustn’t lean over or hold onto anything. This is just not done these days. See how my slave here does it? Demonstrate for the stupid peasants, Jallin.” His hand flipped at Jallin with nonchalance. Jallin, barely able to control his laughter, attempted to demonstrate to the orphans with them, who screamed with glee.
As silly as these servants acted, they were very clever about going through the markets. They used tricks to avoid pickpockets, and one of these had almost sent Stasser to the slave pits. They moved on one of them, and discovered the real buyer was somewhere behind, watching to see which animal the well-dressed servant liked best, and they came with the money to buy them. In teams like this, the hidden servant managed to see Stasser reaching for the bag the mark carried, and called down a narg guard after them.
Today, the servants and house slaves carried the makings of teas and suppers and stopped in the street to talk to aristocrats and rich merchants.
He wouldn’t pay money to see the livestock and other animals like what he could see in the vin M’lagra every day, but he might have paid to see these fancy birds, strutting around in their fine-tailored and pointless feathers. These people either forgot or forebore the fact their ancestors were all just merchants, thieves, gamblers, gladiators, whoremongers, slavers, and pirates.
The ravages of plagues and famines, the devastation of three years of storms and hurricanes all over, and the horrors of the Fallen and Lostlings, left the bastard children of an orphaned world washing ashore in a place where people rubbed stones together over piles of dung to keep warm. People happily became slaves to keep warm and find someone who could think for them. They gambled their lives in the blossoming arena, like a fly landing on a spider-inhabited flower, in the hopes they could win food, shelter, and a new life.
The triumph of Sarkoshia and the Taming of the World by Lord God Emperor Sarkelosh, Bastion of Hope, Keeper of Truth, Lord of New Hope, Dreamdreamer was something storytellers told sitting by hats, with wild faces over guitars or fiddles, while trading air with flutes, or flailing hands slapping at the skins of drums. And it echoed through the complaining of arthritic old men griping about the chairs they sat in and the taste of the food they shoveled spoon over fork into their faces.
Jallin had grown up with an education on the Rekindling, the reclamation of the world, the reestablishment of civilizations. One of Stasser’s cousins, even, or maybe an uncle, or some relative Stasser never really knew and couldn’t name, had been sold into slavery to a surveyor, sent out into the world to see what Sarkelosh could claim for himself. He never returned to say. Jallin never claimed this for his father. He was too afraid he might find out some day.
After walking from wild markets, to chattel markets, and now through the streets of rich gamblers, the Grand Arena of the Emperor’s Worthy Amusements seemed a quiet place. It rose from a park, Triumph Square, like a giant tree stump, or maybe a huge bowl a god left behind after eating porridge. Jallin could not help but to stare at it, as it took up most of the horizon in front of him.
Triumph Street sprawled out like a river widening to become a bay, and now Jallin saw a pleasant park. People mustered through, walking along little paths among the trees to either side of the main street, disappearing and reappearing behind great stone statues on pedestals.
Jallin didn’t know the people honored here, but Kir-Tuko knew a few of them.
“That vun, he Ovrin Theanar, the first grand chamfion, during the first of the games here.” Jallin saw a man who looked more like a pirate than a hero of legend. He held a sword, the point stuck between his feet, the blade of which was curved and smooth on one side, saw-toothed on the other. “He called his sword the ‘Vastard.’” Kir-Tuko explained. He must have been half-kunjel or half-something, as his ears were pointed at the ends. Quite a few half-kunjel, half-human mixes came out of Allorinia, so maybe he was Allorinian. What Jallin noticed most prominently, however, was the jagged scars on his face and his arms. The maker of the statue must have wanted complete and total accuracy, or the statue was carved by magic.
“Some of the statues here, they chamfions. Some of them are the Vroken.”
“The Broken?”
“Some Varriors who fought in the Rekindling. They all vroken in some vay.” He led Jallin deeper into Triumph Square, and the further in they went, the more he noticed a peculiar sense of calm came over him. It was not sleepiness, though Jallin had been exhausted from his long trip. It felt as though he had walked a hundred miles, and could easily walk a hundred more. His feet and body straightened, and he found it easy to just stand and walk. The weight of Kir-Tuko’s arm didn’t bother him at all. In fact, he felt as though Kir-Tuko were his brother. Not a friend, not a fellow worker, not a mentor, or another slave, but actually related to him. Was there something here?
“Here is Lar-Fon,” Kir-Tuko said, gesturing at a statue of a kinto-shah now. A bandaged was carved over his eyes. His ears were ragged as though the birds landing on the statue had chewed bits of his ears off. “He fought against the Lostlings and the Fallen, and they tortured him. They foked his eyes out and cut out his tongue. He vas a sfy. During the Circle of Fire, vhen the Vroken came together after the vars, they say feofle saw the gods. They say he vas given vack his sight vy a goddess, vut vhen he saw her, he asked for his sight to go avay again. He vanted to ve vlind vit the memory of her veauty than to see all the ugly things in the vurld.”
“Which goddess did he see?”
Kir-Tuko shrugged. “They all saw the truth, the stories say.”
“How do you know all this stuff?” Jallin asked.
“I veen slave for long time. I veen around. My masters study things, learn things. Vun time, I ask some feafle around here vhat some of these statues vere. I come here sometime, and I learn. Ju learn from me.”
They saw other important statues and Kir-Tuko told Jallin what he knew of them.
A bulkey-looking man holding two bottles, one in each hand, was dedicated to Padreic Al’Dunhar, the monk of the Forever Mountains in upper Frosomia who found new medicines, refined Liquid Portals and made them take more people farther than ever before, and found and rekindled ancient disused Travelisks.
Famous, wild Kellobrii stood with bow and arrow raised to the sky, a T’wii who lead part of the Inner Circle in service to the Kunjel King Sábel Sithrin I of Thortinis. In his beginnings, he found ways through the Forever Mountains for the Kunjels to get to Allorinia, to fight on the side of Allorinia against Morrigar in the The Morrigari Revolution. It was the Quellobrii, one of the High Masters of the Inner Circle, who assassinated Morlin the Black, and the Inner Circle who assassinated several of Morlin the Black’s lieutenants and military strategists.
“They all come from Frosomia?” Jallin noticed. “Didn’t anyone else do anything famous?”
“This just vun flace around here, vun fark. This is the flace from Frosomia. There are other statue farks, too.”
Their task here was a disappointingly simple one, and they were not able to stay and watch the games. Instead, they visited a dormitory, where many of the fighters of the arena were kept in apartments. Jallin didn’t even get to see the training grounds, which Kir-Tuko said were all the way on the other side of the Arena from where they were just then. Instead, they met with a slave, and exchanged gold pieces for a bottle of the stuff Kir-Tuko made and used on Jallin’s bruises. He pointed to Jallin as he talked and said:
“And he’ll tell ju it vurks, jes? I tried a bit on the voy here, and it vurked very vell,” Kir-Tuko said. The slave, obviously another belonging to a rich noble or someone who kept a stable of fighters, looked down her nose at the both of them. Her jaw, which was already rather square-shaped, tightened, and she blinked at them, despite Jallin nodding enthusiastically and blathering a bit much about how much better he felt after Kir-Tuko gave him some of the medicine.
“Will it close wounds?” was the only question she asked.
“It vill stop vleeding, jes. Vounds cure faster.”
“As we have indicated to your master, Master Noshó, we will try this medicine you have brought us, and if it works as both you and he have said, we will certainly be purchasing more. We had to amputate one slave’s legs after the last big battle, and that cost my master dearly one of his best slaves. Incidentally, you do not have something to grow back limbs do you?”
“I do not think so,” said Kir-Tuko. “Recifes for such things are very difficult to come vy outside the juniversity.”
“The what?” the slave asked.
“The juniversity.” Kir-Tuko pointed towards the place he mentioned, and the slave nodded and blushed.
“Ah, yes, well. Thank you Kir-Tuko, and thank you, um…”
“Jallin, ma’am,” Jallin said. He looked at Kir-Tuko to see if he answered right. Kir-Tuko flipped an ear at him. They left.
After all of these things, Jallin felt himself growing very tired. He begged Kir-Tuko not to take him back through the slave port, even though Kir-Tuko assured him it would not be as busy in the afternoons. Jallin didn’t care. He’d walk the entire perimeter of the island before going back there. So, they passed through several housing districts and through a couple of interesting, but unnoticed squares, and a few markets, the “long vay,” according to Kir-Tuko. By the time they returned home, Jallin felt like he was wearing boots made of pure pain all up his feet and shins and knees. He’d never walked so far, so fast, in his entire life.
Kir-Tuko gave him a little food, what was left from supper, but Jallin only shoved a few bites into his mouth and found his way to his hut. He didn’t say ‘good night’ to anyone, not the master, not Shi-Feo, not Aunty Hurga, not even Eja. He was asleep before he realized he hadn’t even undressed.
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