LIX. Back to Zorpondam
The sunrise after next sees your exit from the place of respite Qirmiz had so chariably volunteered. The world after the wyldstorm is coated in blue-green crystals that shimmer and shine in the dawn's sun, but these beautiful things are born of chaos and they faintly scream as they blacken and burn.
Because you have your wyld forecasts, you know the storm has passed and you can push the men hard to get to the next town. The mercenaries behind you are not so forewarned, and there is still no sign of trailing vultures behind you even by noon. All in all, therefore, this was a quite excellent little gambit that left you somewhat more pecunious from your plunder of that man's coin, better equipped with horses and mules from their stables, and of course, with the awe and respect of your men from the fact you lead them to a clear and crushing victory.
You also rescued a hostage, but after only half a day of travel, you have decided that Yasir as-Sawahir is a man who honestly did not deserve rescuing. He might be a second cousin of Zia (or something like that, you didn't pay much attention), but he's nowhere near as cute as Zia and is instead a hard-eyed man in his late forties who always seems to be leering at the world. The fact that his family will hopefully owe you one if you bring him back intact is a lifeline you cling to when he starts telling one of his stories.
He's just not attractive, but he thinks he is.
You'd be a lot more willing to put up with his tales if he was hot. At least you would have something interesting to look at while listening to him drone on about that time he killed a deyha princess. A story which also poses real and pressing questions about how he was captured by a two-yen bandit. You won't ask that question, though. Then you'd have to sit through his explanation.
To make things clear, you would usually appreciate a storyteller who can entertain you on the tedious, long walk through the smoking, smouldering remnants of the changestorm. But that requires that they actually have some skill at storytelling. Yasir is a man who has no natural timing or sense of flair, and yet is convinced that he is the gods' gift to storytelling and also women. He tells the kind of story a bald-faced liar could entertain you with, full of glorious battles and bandit lords falling by his blade, but he tells it artlessly and with no actual flair. Or humour. Or… well, anything that entertains you at all. It is just the puerile pontification of the blathering braggart.
"... of course, we are none too far from the site of the battle of Zorhypro, where the last Sugun of Cahzor fell," registers through the haze of monotonous storytelling. It takes you a few attempts, but you blink away your stupor.
"I'm sorry, but excuse me? Say that again."
He squints back at you in the morning light. "Say what?"
"Say what you were saying. About the last Sugun."
"Oh! Yes! Well, Amaya III fell at Zorhypro, her body hacked apart by the jackals of Gem, and…"
"Forgive me, but I thought that the Sugun reigns down in Zorgranzar," you say.
Yasir scoffs, making a phlegmy noise at the back of his throat. "That jumped-up wastrel who sits on a throne won by - ha - the backs of dehya mercenaries? He is no Sugun, no Sugun at all, and his authority only extends to those close enough for his pet savages to - ha ha - savage! He has not the blood, nor the authority, nor the right to use that title!"
"Ah," you say. Living in Cahzor of course you cannot escape the legacy of its final fall at the hands of Gem, but there is a difference between a vague awareness of a history that is written across the landscape and the grudges that the jansi endlessly nurse on. You strongly suspect that from his vehemence, the last Sugun was someone that the Sawahir jansi claims descent from. After all, you have seen how Zia endlessly broods over the lost prestige of his city, and it would not surprise you to find that this family are even more monomaniacal in their maudlin focus on the missing marvels of yesteryear.
"Indeed, indeed. In fact, Meira!" Yasir pontificates. He is being too familiar; you do not consider yourself on first name terms with him. "You should come with me to see the battleground! It is practically right by us, and it is quite the beautiful place in its melancholy! It reminds us all of the treachery of Gem, which should never be forgotten - and the cursed, wicked, corrupt Elemi who defected to them!"
That is enough to catch your attention, and though you do not like where this is going you do reluctantly decide that finding out more about such things might be useful. After all, one of the patron gods of these hated Elemi is now your family goddess, such as it exists.
You don't trust his estimates of the distance, though.
"It's none too far," Zakiya says when you check with the Far guides. "Take my uncle and a few men for safety, but I reckon you will be safe enough. Especially with your," she glances at Blue, "
bodyguard there.
That was an unseemly emphasis on 'body' there, but you let it slide. "I suppose I'll take a look, then," you say.
The route to the old battlefield passes by a collapsed aqueduct, which serves as a wall that stops the hot winds that blow up from the desert expanse to the east. A few straggly scrubs cling to the fallen water conduit, bent and bowed by the breezes, root-like structures extending from out of the ground to capture any dew before they retreat below ground for the heat of the day. Sand is stepped high on the windward side, and the mounds creak alarmingly. The stonework, where it is visible, looks to be more recent than the ancient buildings of artificial gemstone, and indeed seems to have been constructed of material taken from older buildings. A few of the pillars of the structure still stand, lonely figures sometimes daubed with jansi-markings as one family or another laid claim to this worthless, barren land.
It is a mark of how once, the lords of Cahzor did things to try to remedy the problems of their thirsty, dry city, rather than sit and bemoan the tragic misfortunates and calamities which afflict them.
One of the soldiers in your escort takes up a pipe and she plays a thin, reedy song as you ride. It fits the melancholy air you feel right now, that even Blue - alert and watchful with eyes on Yasir like a hungry man at a buffet - cannot pierce.
"Beyond this here hill, this ruin of antiquity, this monolith of the forebears of my kin," Yasir announces pompously, "lies the site of the great battle at Zorhypro. Where once the bravest, most heroic Sugun of the latter years of Cahzor, yea, and the flower of the nobility rode out, only for vilest betrayal to strike them dead and so with them quench the hopes of Cahzor in that war against upstart Gem!"
He has been saying things like this for the last hour, apparently in the belief that you will forget why you are taking a short detour if you are not constantly reminded.
"Oh, how awful!" Blue says, because this is the sort of story which suits him.
"Well, let us see, then," you say, and nudge your tired horse on with your heels.
Cresting the dirt-covered ruins, you gaze down upon the flat area ahead of the ruined, broken land, and see this long-past battlefield.
From a distance it looks like a field. It is not a field, for the strange flowers that sprout from it are swords embedded in the ground, with faded ribbons or painted metal pinwheels around the hilts which flap in the wind. Each of these swords sit at the head of a cairn, the masonry and rubble piled up on the sandy ground.
"How many are here?" you breathe.
"Only the gods know," Yasir intones portentously. "The flower of the jansi and the greatest warriors of Cahzor, cut down in the late Fire of our city."
The sun is bright enough and high enough in the sky that you should not have to fear the Dead, but you still dismount and walk past the rocky field rather than risk offending any touchy proud spirits that may still linger. "You keep on speaking about vile betrayal," you say, "but what happened exactly? This doesn't look much like a site for a major battle. It's not on any of the major roads."
Yasir has another wearisome, self-pitying story for you, but stripped of his pointless repetition and long-masticated grudges, it goes like this: during the war with Gem, the mercenaries of Gem sent light cavalry raiders over the valley walls to harass fields and break water supplies within the city, while one mercenary army attacked via the eastern trading routes and another came from the north down the dam route. That must have been what sacked that fortress when you followed a similar route on your own way here.
The forces of Gem took Zorpondam, but the town atop the dam was always somewhat separated from the rest of Cahzor, due to the problem of travel up the dam face. However, that let Gem close the trickle of water that still at that point eked a way through the dam. The Sugun had to respond, and on the report of a force of Gem's soldiers attacking the water-aspected manse at Zorhypro, which could have been used to release further water downstream, she took a cavalry force to break the siege.
But she was working off inaccurate reports. Zorhypro had already fallen by treachery within, and its sorcerer-savant had been well-paid by Gem to take control of the flow systems. He called on the waters, sending them to sweep through the encampment of Amaya III. The sorcerers of Cahzor managed to stop the wall of water from drowning them all, but exhausted and fighting in muddy ground, the Sugun and her elite cavalry were encircled by two large detachments of mercenaries and cut down in a bloody last stand.
You nod in understanding. A well-played stratagem. With control of a channelling manse that could fuel the magic of a water-elementalist sorcerer, Gem could cut off water supplies to even more of Cahzor. The Sugun had to respond to stop that, and so she was forced into an engagement on unfavourable ground. Her sorcerers exhausted themselves stopping the waves from drowning them, and thus they could not be used to break out of the encirclement.
Whoever planned that stratagem had definitely read their history. You've read of similar battles in the annals of Grand Cherak, the Realm, and even in the war doctrines of the Shogunate.
"... and so when the battle was lost to such base, disgraceful methods, the flower of Cahzor had been plucked and so, yea, even to the end of days we must weep the bitter tears of such a tragic loss! A loss, no! A calamity that should break the hearts of an uncaring world!"
"And that was the end of a unified Cahzor?" you enquire, after a tolerable silence.
"Aye, yes, unquestionably."
"The succession?"
"The Sugun-in-Waiting Mehene was slain in the great battle at the Third Gate, and with her dead, there was no clear line of descent - and so the other jansi showed themselves to be traitors much like the wretched Elemi! Too consumed by greed rather than the beauty of serving our fair city!"
There is a loud sniff from Blue. "What a tragedy!" he exclaims loudly. "Such deep, dark melancholy! It is beautiful to behold!"
You stand on his foot, because the last thing you need is him revealing what he is in front of someone you barely know who is also a garrulous fool. "So where is this water manse?" you ask loudly. "If they were fighting over it-"
"Gone. Gone and ruined, like the hope of Cahzor," Yasir groans. "Brought to ruin, brought to wreck, laid low by the treachery of Gem! For these vultures did not come to rule; they came to feast, to destroy, to plunder and to drag us down into the depraved dust which brings only despair and desolation!"
Some more questions are required to get him to actually answer what you asked him, and the story you hear is interesting in its own right, not least for what is not said.
"Gem didn't want to conquer Cahzor. Gem didn't want to rule it. It wanted to knock it down and stop it ever recovering," you muse to yourself. If Cahzor could ever have recovered. If the river was already nearly dry and the city could not control its boundaries, that tells you that the place was already essentially a collection of jansi holdings in the ruins of this valley.
And if Gem did not seek to occupy Cahzor, then the war was not one of territorial gain by Gem. But, ah, a declining power, sitting atop one of the major routes from newly prosperous Gem and its nigh-infinite mines? You'd make a flutter that the cause of the war was one of tax and trade, and Gem came to Cahzor to kick its old master down so it would stop preying on the trade routes from the Deep South.
Yasir has no time for such logic, so you don't bother to say it to him as he curses Gem and its greed. "And in the end, the hyena-vultures of the South did not even seize the water manse here. Instead, they willingly destroyed it, condemning countless souls to slow deaths from thirst in their death-loving malice. Look ahead! Behold!"
Ahead there is nothing, and you say as much.
"Exactly!" Yasir says, taking pride in his poor communication skills. "For once, in times of tragically departed days, this is where you would have seen Zorhypro. But now there is just the pit left by the cruel, pernicious sabotage of the manse there by the monsters of Gem!"
Carefully, you pick your way past the cairns and the pinwheel-bearing blades to find the edge of what you had thought was one of the ravines that litter this city. But no, this is not like the more regular cracks where the roads or buildings have given way and slumped into under-layers. This is a colossal black pit.
You look down, down, down,
down. Gods above - no, below, rather! How deep is it?
"They say," Yasir says in his wearisome voice when you express those sentiments, "that it's deep enough that the bottom of the chasm is illuminated for only one hour, at the height of the day."
Huh. You could calculate the depth then, with some trigonometry. You're not going to because that would take more effort than you want to give, but you
could.
"There is water down there," you say.
"Ma's water. Even if you could reach it, the gods would not want that."
Hmm. Is this how deep Cahzor's water table has receded to? "Has anyone ever measured how high the water is down there?" you ask.
Yasir's expression is one of vacuous contempt. "Why?"
Why indeed? Well, for one, it would let you over the years track changes in the water level. But of course the jansi don't care. They never do. And you'd bet that the Cult of Ma pay close attention to that, but they're a bunch of backstabbing shitstains so they probably don't warn people about falls in the water table.
The melancholy wind whips through the pinwheels, laden with dry sand, and you sigh. Cahzor, ladies and gentlemen; Cahzor!
Days more walking are measured in the sand in your boots and the callouses on your soles. Each hour brings the looming height of the dam closer and closer, and every day brings an earlier dusk. There is just a little more humidity in the air, accompanying the reek of the Little Nam, and a little more dew-feeding plant-life growing in the endless ruins. On the way to Zorpearl, you found the area down by the dam to be depressing and dead; having seen more eastern areas of Cahzor it is nearly a garden in comparison, and you feel much better for seeing a little green around you, even this late in the year.
The mood is contagious, and your baggage handlers and your soldiers have higher spirits. As your convoy picks its way over a collapsed tower that now serves as a bridge across a slumped chasm choked with debris and sand, the high-pitched woman who plays the four-stringed instrument you can never remember the name of starts to play.
"Arm yourself, my sisters and brothers," she sings.
"Arm yourself for love,
"Wash away demons of doubt,
"In passion, rise above!"
It seems to be an old Cahzori song, for many people join in; a song of love, bloodshed, and vengeance, of ancient grudges renewed in the name of fresh mutinous reasons.
Unfortunately, at Lobay, the town at the base of the dam where the lift connects up to Zorpondam, there is no passion and there is no glory to be won - but gods, more than enough reasons for mutiny. In the dusty customs port near the lift you have to face the greatest of all evils inflicted on men by the Demio; import dues and haulage fees. It's not that you didn't mind paying tax to Fahd, because you most certainly did. Damn that man and the way you - even with your willful tax avoidance and evasion - had to pay him a fortune to take the things you found off his land. But at least it was, from a certain point of view, at least within the laws of this ruined city, his land.
But
this bitch is making you pay to take the treasures into this city so you can sell them so you can get the money to pay off your debts! Extortion, racketry and gross unfairness!
You don't say as much because you won't give these greasy little assayers and tax farmers the satisfaction as they rifle through your hard-won earnings and hand you a little note with an absolutely outrageous figure on it.
And what's worse is that even once you challenge their evaluations with the aid of a few small bribes to overlook certain things, the revised, smaller number is still outrageous! You worked your people hard to get this out! The Demio didn't do a thing! How dare she charge you this much just to take this plunder into her city and use the cargo lift in the dam she controls!
You pay your men who mostly rapidly disappear into the streets of Lobay, arrange for the escort of your plunder up through the extortionate lift up to the markets of Zorpondam, and schedule a meeting with Captain Burhan to conclude the contract at the mercenary market two days hence, where you will provide the market with your oath as to the quality of the service of the mercenaries. Then comes the long and rattling trip up to Zorpondam with your goods, and escorting them to the warehouse you've rented to hold them before sale.
More money down the drain.
You are most decidedly fuming as you stalk through the reeking streets of Zorpondam, past the water-beggars and the priests and the swarming crowds with Blue and Amigere carried with you in your wake. Yasir, thank goodness, is gone - back to his family, though he has invited you to dine with them once he has recovered and spoken to others of the Sawahir.
"Meira," begins Amigere.
"Hmmph! Hmmph!" you inform him, nearly gagging as a movement of the air brings the smell of the Little Nam back with full force. You had not missed that in the ruins. Not one bit.
"Meira, this is serious. Will we even be able to pay back our debts after this? Between the tax in Zorpearl and the tax here and the fact you said you're not even planning to sell some of the most valuable things…"
He is worried, and you force yourself to come to a stop. "Darling," you tell him, patting his feathered cheek, "let me handle this. This isn't just about money. And if I do end up in debt, I have ways of securing the funds. Working for a season as a war sorceress is something I've had to do before," you lie, "and it isn't the worst thing in the world."
"This is how Cahzor is," he grouses. "They're out to fuck us."
"Yes. But," you chide him, "we can talk about this in private. Not in front of everyone else."
The tired, faded, stained elegance of the Cerulean Lotus is a blessing after far too long down in the unspeakable savagery of the ruins, and you have a bed to get to and two boys to share it with. You bathe quickly, just enough to stop you tracking dust into your bed, and are already done by the time the two men are back from their own baths.
"Won't it be nice to not be sleeping on mats on dusty ground?" you coo, unbelting your robe.
"Gods." Amigere grins at you foolishly. "It felt like half a desert was coming out of my feathers. I feel actually lighter."
"I would simply not get dusty," Blue says helpfully.
"Blue, you charming idiot, stop using your mouth to talk and put it to more productive purposes."
And then as you are getting into things, a rap comes sharply at your door. Because of course it does.
"Amigere," you groan, "go get it."
After only some complaining your darling does what you want, and he returns the bearer of ill news.
"They want you."
"Well, who is it?" you demand irritably, pushing Blue's head away with your hand.
"A servant of the Demio."
"I swear, if I get invited to dine at the table of
another unstable princeling when I'm just back from another long trip…" you fume, belting up your bathing robe and stomping over to the antechamber to your suite.
But of course, that is exactly what the bloodless, snivelling wretch at your door is here to inform you of. You are cordially invited to dine at the table of Naima ar-Redar, Demio of Cahzor-upon-Dam.
"And if I have other plans…"
"Lady Meira as-Sayu, you do not have other plans. The Demio herself invites you to her table for her evening meal, to begin at sunset."
You do not want to go, but you really don't have a choice. Not when you saw the beasts she makes from men who offend her in the fighting pits, and everything you have of value lies in her domain.
"I understand - though do inform your mistress that I am just back from a long trip and so am tired and saddlesore. So forgive me if I am none too exciting a guest."
That dull-eyed servant bows, and says that he will tell his mistress that. You let the door close, and slump down against it, feeling every year of your age. Fuck. Fuck.
Fuck!
"My lady! Come to bed!" Blue calls out.
No. There is no time for bed and pretty boys. You need to take advantage of the facilities here at the hotel to clean yourself up, and ah! What will you even wear?
More fees, more expenses, more taxes. Rena is getting real sick of this shit.
Import Dues for Plunder: 7 Debt
Lift Costs to Elevate to Zorpondam: 2 Debt
Warehouse Rental: 1 Debt
Bribes to Officials to Overlook Certain Items: 1 Debt
Total: +11 Debt
What does Rena wear to the dinner with the Demio, and how does she present herself?
[ ] Cahzori garments, the style of a jansi noble, fine and picked out in glorious cloth, who belongs in these ruins.
[ ] The armour she found in the dig, the garb of a warrior of old ready for battle and able to fight.
[ ] Her last set of formal Cheraki clothing, the outfit of a foreigner visiting these lands who does not intend to stay forever.
