Back to The Book of Ninety and Nine Doomed Cities
|
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, for 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 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. 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 Shanrglegug 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 bay, 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 that looked much 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 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 its mouth would be, 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 trellis work at one end, on which a luminescent fungus was growing. 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 knw’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 rthousand 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, and 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. 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 14 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…
|