Raindrinker the Garden of Burkannyl Tabatha[1]
[1] Kaffiyon the Hlori Agent – once a student of mine & not a broken man. Though his loyalty was firm & linked inextricably to the Tower of Gold & the Golden Dream his heart was once given to Wei – such correspondences are not uncommon to one in my line but the correspondence of consequence that I receive are rare. Among my most valued are the mud-stained letters that Kaffiyon chose to share with me. These are, I’m led to believe, faithful duplicates of his official reports. I have no way of knowing if he made yet further copies for other correspondents – it’s entirely possible that Kaffiyon’s heart belonged to many, big as it was it was no shame to share it.
The Forest
Seasons in the Duskmarch are indistinct. Though we are, by the reckoning of my cohort well within the Grey the seasonal variety that we expect in the more benign latitudes is not to be found. The march through the woods, which is what we’ve called our last four weeks of travel, have been at the very least difficult. The Aismoth Falls, which had very little to recommend it, is a paradise in comparison to the privation we’ve endured. Our company. The company that I’ve infiltrated in service to the Empire has suffered rather badly at the indifferent whims of the capricious wood. We are at all times in the midst of howling creatures – the ravening, gnashing sound of which I hear even now – pacing the edge of the firelight. The darkness here is incredible. The fires we’ve built each night have been larger & larger. We’ve taken to snatching every scrap of combustible wood we find in our path each day to build yet bigger campfires & for all their mass, each larger than the previous night’s, they are each like a sputtering candle flame at the bottom of a well. We are stalked by indistinct creatures always at the edge of perception. The days are brief, startlingly so in fact. When sometimes we have found a clearing in the dense forest it has been possible to see the speedy progress of the sun through the northern sky. It is an intensely dispiriting thing to observe – so much so that we, to a one, commented that we preferred the gloom of the overarching canopy to seeing the brief sun sliding upon the firmament.
But we have had casualties. I considered not naming them for the sake of their anonymity – to protect their people from investigation or surprise – but the circumstances of their deaths have been so tragically ignominious that I feel I must comment upon them. So I have designed to call them by pseudonyms. Pertinash from the Tree of Iron, a surveyor drowned in mud after an embankment was undercut by a sudden flow of water, as if a dam had burst. The hillside washed away beneath him & he as well as two of his local guides, both Euyemen foresters tumbled into the torrent & were subsequently buried under the flow of mud that followed their own fall. I heard him scream & could not reach him – I had to leap to safety & was able to rescue two other of the bearers. I know not the names of any of the Euye foresters. I do not trust their silvery eyes or their wolfish muzzles. I & the others, rely on Gregor to interpret their speech, which they use quite sparingly, and to manage their contributions to the trek. Gregor indicates that these porters, guides & camp aides, who number at nineteen now, have greater fear of the Utterdark & the Duskmarch than we, which thought gives me the greatest trepidation. That those who are closest to the threat understand it & fear it far more greatly than do our own official company of now nine brave men.
We lost Ambrose as well – but to sickness possibly to poisoning. The old man was fearless in his exploration. He came upon a species of toadstool heretofore unknown to the Iron Tree & in his analysis of the mushrooms, which he indicated grew in bulbous buttons like a rash upon the roots of the aigathos trees, he became somehow compromised, maddened at first & then hysterical. After an interminable night of the old man’s mad peals of hilarity we watched all the color fall from his face, even his eyes were bleached and I saw for myself the color drain from his hair – from silver to white like watching wine drain from a glass. His force was spent & when we buried him we noted that he weighed nearly nothing and that carrying him was like carrying a dried & hollow log. We never knew if had eaten the mushrooms or had merely touched them. His notes on the matter are coded in Irontree shorthand cypher but the texts are retained with the increasingly vain-seeming idea that we will encounter someone capable of transmitting these messages back to the capitol.
We have been treading down a circuitous track that barely suffices as a game trail but which accounts as the main street of Duskmarch. Somewhere within this trackless forest the Kannyl of Raindrinker has made his headquarters. That such a thing has come to pass is beyond confounding. I am sent by the secret chiefs of Gold Tower to find answers. I travel in the company of an enclave of Irontree surveyors as my cover. At present I suspect that I am not the only agent of the Tower in the company. I believe that Gregor, who’s name I have altered here, is a fellow of the conspiring service.
I had considered to make records of the sights & personalities of Duskmarch but I have observed the rigor of the, true, Irontree surveyors & am made to feel some shame regarding my lack of acuity of eye or cleverness with words. They have compiled a great quantity of text already – using the immense fires & the long nights to write, and often enough with a fury which, I have no doubt, is sustained as a means of avoiding consideration of the beasts just at the edge of perception. Just now, my concentration has been shaken by the cackling roar of some creature at the edge of the fire, a monkey or a cat – I think, based upon the scattered words of Euye I’ve absorbed. The guides are not frantic, as I’ve seen them become occasionally, instead they’re scanning the perimeter.
It seems that the piercing shriek was the cry of some monkeys attacked by a lion of some description, the cry of which is too similar to the wailing of an infant to be borne. Evidently the cry precedes its strike & the Euye woodmen are unconcerned because local legend claims that you cannot hear the cry of the lion that comes for you. So we experience sudden death as spectators rather than victims.
Thus far I’ve passed off my writing, and there’s little to do by the firelight in this company besides write, as a record of the winds. Such study being esoteric enough to be deemed impenetrable to outside curiosity while related in some way to my being an Hlorii, and as well my use of the hlorin script is both useful for secrecy and outside of question. It is not the first time that I’ve used this cover but I’ve not attempted this identity or any other save my original for so long. I ought, I think, have studied more about the winds though there are too few in the wood to comment upon, I have held that the lack of a wind is equivalent to an abundance of winds to the initiated. I think Gregor saw through this deception & this is why I think that he is, if not an agent of the Tower then an agent of some opposite force – which, until this moment I had not considered a possibility. The Empire rules the world entire – all civilizations are within its bounds and all that lies outside the bounds is ungoverned wilderness, so I had always assumed.
So I still believe, I suppose it’s meet to say. The bounds of the world are known. The edge of the empire, where I find myself now, the border between the inhabited forest and the utter dark, where the sun is unknown. Why would Arno make his camp here, why would he claim the woods, why would he refuse his recall to court. The Tower has more questions than these & Arno has offered the same answer to each – silence. So I am dispatched to see for myself and make an answer to the Tower of Gold. Could Arno have agents of his own? Opposed to the tower? I have seen the Tower, just as I have seen the tower – I know the vastness of the resources committed to the clandestine service & cannot imagine a way in which the poorest Kannyl in the remotest Kannylte in the empire could mount anything approximating that power, let alone capable of challenging it. Nevertheless, I see Gregor at another edge of the fire, writing in his own codex & cannot help but think he is making note of me as I have made note of him. Perhaps he is who he claims, a student of the divisions between human appearance, an Anthropiphist of the Iron Tree, studying the greyhided Euye but also the big Hlorii beside them, perhaps he’s never seen my like, though I imagine that unlikely, or perhaps he merely hopes for a view of my horns, though they are barely there.
A monkey has been driven to the camp, probably by the death of its fellow & the guides are busy trying to corner it – and now they’ve driven it into the fire. There’s aught to do besides write about what’s happening around us or to drive a monkey into a fire for the scant & grim amusement such cruelty gives.
The Trail, another night.
The trail is arduous. The world is endless, the forest. We’re on the twenty fourth night. The nights are so long and the days so brief that I’m certain we’ve made truly terrible time on this journey, we’re probably only a few hundred leagues out of Aismoth Falls. Though the wood lacks mountains or hills of any description it’s not a flatland either. There are innumerable deep gullies that embank trickling streams through the wood. The whole forest drains in tiny rivulets north to the River Euyhmer. Not one could be navigated by anything but a minnow.
Senjamis says that the forest to the south & the east of the Euyhmer is the borderland of the empire & ever will be. To the south is the Utter Dark where no sunlight is ever seen and to the east & north is the interminable plain – which none have crossed & which is thought to continue into the theorized Ever Day. Senjamis is a surveyor, not merely in title, like the rest of the survey – he marks the road with the chains & for every gully we’ve had to cross, first by uncertain descent down a steep muddy bank & then by a hazardous ascent up a steep muddy bank he has sketched a plan of a bridge of rope & planks accompanied by a coordinate, a measurement & a calculation. Each of the crossings -and he says there have been eight so far, have occupied the whole of one of the Duskmarch’s brief days. I’ve learned this because Senjamis is talkative but not a friendly sort, a pedagogical sort, a lecturer. He’d previously been joined to Pertinash by the chain & stave, for these surveyors work in a team. When they worked together they were efficient & capable, our troupe didn’t need to pause for their work as they kept our pace & sometimes set it. Now we’re hindered because I have been made Senjamis partner. Pressed into that service by him as he observed to me – “Map the winds like it was a sea? No, you’re not fooling me big son, you’re an idler but no more, I’ve need of a partner in the staving & chaining. We’ll mark the measure of the road me, and you, idle windmapper. You’ll see, the path is easier to mark than the flow of the breeze through these trees.” This he said amidst gulps of air as he carried the gear that a pair would carry by himself. Even in the cold he sweated & I felt the human urge to aid one on the same path. I took his staves and helped him with the chains. I’m told our efforts from now will be a poor first draft of the route but will still serve when the road builders come. He is certain that they must.
“No Kannyl ever was that didn’t have the one road from Klial to his door and no Kannyl ever will be that doesn’t have the Kannyltine’s highway rolled out to meet him, like a carpet at a fete.” Senjamis iterates some variant of this exposition over and over. Sometimes one chants or sings on the trail – as a meditation. One foot falls then the other, a determined steady pace – forward, forward, forward. The trail is meditative, when you let it be but sometimes the chant is what’s needed to let it be. This is Senjamis’ chant. “No Kannyl ever was that didn’t have the one road.” “From Klial to his door.” “No Kannyl ever’ll be that doesn’t have the Kannytline’s highway rolled out.” “Like a carpet at a fete.” “No Kannyl ever was.”
I think that perhaps this is why Arno has taken to Duskmarch. Or has gone to the Utterdark. It’s muttered here and there in our troupe that this is where we’ll go. That we’re following him into the dark.
It is darker, growing darker every day as every day’s bounds are truncated further. The nights have grown longer when already we were persuaded that they could not be longer. Soon we’ll be in the umbral realm of the world, near the Utterdark & though we’ve all along known that this would be our destination the reality of it, the truth of the experience of interminable night can be anticipated but only as one regards a poorly remembered dream – there is something that you know -but you cannot bring to mind what the experience will be. Today we camp near a treefall, one of the titanic aigathos, dragged down by the vines that drape upon their limbs, pulled to earth by the weight of all the life it supported, through the gap in the canopy that such a fall allows we were able to see the sun swim through the sky & its disk never broke from the horizon, it skimmed along the northern edge of view & never broke contact with the edge of the world We watched it set with terrific speed, much more than we’d previously believed possible. The sight of it, barely hung in the sky, barely visible under the canopy, barely with us – the sense of being forsaken penetrates to the bones, it hollows our eyes makes us feel as though we’re stranded upon an eroding island in a rushing stream.
The dark of the wood is counteracted now by the presence of hanging chains of burning coal. The heat of them is insufficient to light the wood but they are there- vines of coal, burning black, a red flame dancing furled upon the branches of the wood like bunting. The little chasing flames flow in waves & I’m reminded that I should at least pretend an interest in the wind. Fire doesn’t blow with the wind but reacts, dances against the breeze. I’m sure a physician from the old school would know something about this, wind and fire – opposites? It’s my past self that knew these things, not well I suppose, since I can’t recollect a fact beyond the existence of a flame and wind without a concept of their relation. But I’ve seen the fire in the night, snapping in the wind, hissing its little sound like a sheet flapping on a mast but so faint. Each flame is like a woven strand, like a braid of charcoal that burns but so cold that even the dry needles won’t ignite. A fire of light alone. Ambrose, who’s dead, had talked about wanting to see the coalchain so all of us feel we must give it our attention so as to honor him or his wish, though I recollect how he wailed hysterically for a night before dying and find I can’t muster any feeling more than relief. The others are content to just look at the chains and to glumly nod at the wonder of them. The old man’s cackle was too horrible and being forced to remember it as a surprise has taken the pleasure from the discovery. The Euye woodsmen are indifferent to the coalchain, it goes unremarked upon by them but now I see them gathering some, out beyond the campfire’s glow. Yes, you can see them pulling down the vines, the deformation of the liquid flame in the dark, the shadows of men, yelping from the pain.
They returned, the Euyemen I’ve not named here, they came back with laurels of the coalchain dragged behind them leaving motes of ember in the dirt. They made a show of removing their shirts & exposing their grey skins to the camp. Then one among them draped the burning coalchain upon the shoulders of each of them one after the other until each had a length wrapping about a quarter of their upper body. By the time the final one among them was being wrapped the first to be so decorated could contain himself no longer and began to scream after his stoic tooth gnashing & foot stamping availed him not. He howled into the night, eyes rolling in panic, he howled, spoke no word in the cries but screamed all the same. He peeled the braided cords of the burning plant from himself and upon his body were left scars, welts, blisters and blood. Then the others peeled their own coalchains off as they, out of turn, chaotically, succumbed to the anguish and were forced to relent. In an hour they each had been draped and then cast their chains into the fire, which once stoked gave an ugly smoke and spit furiously, it still sputters and pops though this was an hour past at least. I can see the chains in the fire not consumed but burning like charcoal. The foresters, the Euyemen are more grim now, more than even their customary dull-witted, casual cruelty can bear. They take turns inspecting their welts, the patterns of the burns around their necks & shoulders, the one who’d laid the laurels upon them he holds forth his hands, blackened and bloody for them each to see and smears one finger’s gore on each of their faces. I know nothing of this act they’ve performed but I imagine that they will regret it sooner than later as there’s little water left just now and we’ve seen no sign of a stream for a day at least.
Tabatta’s Garden
They must have known we were about to approach this place – the Euyemen. I think of their conduct elsewhere upon the trail, consider each action of each of the men, think of the surreptitious glances, the trips into the bush to gather game, the silent brooding at the fire. They knew and led us here without a thought of telling us. I’m not yet sure if it’s a betrayal by intention or omission. They do seem too dull-witted to betray us in accordance with some interior drive, some machination – but they are servile enough that they may have betrayed us out of a competing loyalty. Tabatta is the newest of the greatblood aristocrats of Klial, it seems. There’s been no annunciation, no adding her name to the genealogies, no word at all from the Duskmarch which is the inciting cause of my journey here but is, in its effect quite like the minimal daylight here, much worse than you’ve expected though you expected what you had considered to be the worst already. A new floor lies beneath what I’ve taken to be the trouble here. It’s not disobedience to the order of recall it’s outright sedition such as the Empire’s not seen in generations.
Quickly, Arno has left even the gloomy duskmark behind and advanced into the Utterdark of his own accord, plainly in defiance of the several refusals that have been issued from the throne. He is meant to hold the borders and to make no war on the extreme south and the Trulkings there. That was the word from the Kannyltine’s chair and was issued in proclamation at least four times. I’ve seen the proclamation, I have a sealed copy upon my person even now, meant to be clandestinely snuck into Kannyl Arno’s possession at such time as I am able to enter his chambers in secret. A typical threat offered by the Tower, a message of warning. There’s no chance of any such maneuver now though, the Kannyl has slipped the bounds of the Empire to, one presumes, carve his own sovereignty from the southern wilds.
I should collect myself, record my impressions as I experienced them, as I got wound into this tale.
First the trail wound through a dense stand of trees and switched back, descending one of those hidden slopes, a gully, like where we lost Pertinash – but here & note this, when you come for you must come here, send others, more. There’s a need of the Tower’s intervention, at the very least. You must come to this valley – which is broad & deep & spreads out under the glimmering edge of night where the duskmarch descends into the endless night of the antipode. There’s a line in the sky, a line of light that writhes like a serpent, edges across the firmament inching – not a serpent, but a worm. It edges across the sky, a rigid, clear line in the sky marking the utterdark & the lands where the sun sometimes still shines – for an hour or two in a day. This line is a light like starlight, it cascades down in a ribbon of every color, a rainbow that arcs over the whole world. When you’ve walked the trails and found the edge of the deep valley covered over by the trees that fan out over the earth, concealing everything – when you’ve found this deep valley where you cannot see the floor beneath and you see overhead this rainbow that marks night & day in permanent dull hues, sometimes colors and sometimes grey bands of differentiated streaks – hen you’ve come to there make your way, carefully now, into the valley. Here is what you will find there.
Tabatta’s garden is at the center of the valley which bounds are marked by falling streams of water, bare stone seeping as if from walls bleeding rain in a flood, the walls of the valley are steep stone bluffs that seep ceaselessly, slow torrents of water that pool at the base of the high walls. For a roof this house has the great tall pines but these are – they are unlike any other trees – they are like the bones of trees – as if a cavern were excavated out of bare rock & the supports were columns left intact within all of the subtracted stone but carved as well, decoratively to resemble trees, to look for all the world like any tree at all but made of brittle stone, not wood These trees stand under the grey rainbow, their branches spread out over the valley but these are not clothed in the leaves or needles of any other trees, no.
No, I reached the lower branches, for I am hlorii, taller than THEM, and feeling upon the branches I could see, by the light. The light! I must mention that as well, I must tell you. But first, in place of leaves, in place of cones or seeds this tree, all the others here, they have a mass of buttons, fleshy toadstools, mushrooms – those same that killed Ambrose, that drove him mad. I am smiling, hard right now, my jaw is gripped by it, tension that spreads my smile wide. It can’t be that I’ll die howling laughter, like Ambrose did. I.
I think it’s fading, from me. I am young & great, broad of shoulder, firm of heart, not an old withered man, and I have felt some of what it was that killed the old man, but I endure it. Now, after lying for a time under these skeletal trees in this garden of burning coals.
A Creature’s House
The coals. Here the people have wrapped the coalchain so it grows in abundance upon the stone trees, and on the rocks strewn by old falls. The wrappers of glowing, cold flames cast light over the secret valley & by this light their lives are lived, their staples are grown, their days are measured. There is just one day, the long dim day in Tabatta’s garden. This place is wonders and terrors meshed and compounded. We are in the house of one of the leading people of the village. They say they are a man & we’ve all grace to take it at that, to say, “sir, yes.” When we go into their home it is only a pit in the earth under the stony arch of the roots of the unbending trees & descending the bare earthen ramp into the place, a single room, entering it we are warmed and realize that we’ve been freezing. The house is a room, only a room. Mud for walls, for floors, bare excavated earth and by the light of the coalchain draped from the ceiling we can see. I must duck, crawl, to enter and then stumble, scuffing my palms, there are living worms & beetles crawling upon the floor. The earth is clay and slippery loam, my knees plunge into the surface, inches into the cold wet of the home. The host, our host is Trulkish, a hybrid of the Euye and the Trulkings of the utterdark. Trulkings, I do not know – though we’ve heard from Gregor a warning, saying that not one Trulking has survived in the sunlight, that they’ve gone mad & eaten off their own limbs rather than bear the sunlight and that they’re well suited to this autocannibalism given their reddish teeth, infused with iron, their rubbery necks, their flexible limbs. That’s what the texts describe. We’re hosted not by any Trulking but our host is what’s called trulk-ish. He’s long like me but not quite so, long and narrower than an Euyeman. Thinner than a Zunman but not altogether. His limbs are too long, they hang & collapse over themselves, as if with extra joints. His fingers are long & the nails shimmer a dull red, his teeth as well, which he flashes with a will, not a smile but a snarl. Not one of these Trulkish have smiled, they’re more dour still than the humorless Euye. They’re a terror. His teeth are too long, his hands, his arms. From his bare chest there sags a single fleshy rose, a bloom of plump petals that hangs like a solitary bosom. It slaps upon his chest & though we’ve seen much of these trulkish – only he has this tumorous flower. We suppose it is a mark of rank idly, when we gather in his pit-house me and the other Irontree guests are finished with our own congress. I’m writing now because the others have collapsed from exhaustion mingled with anxiety while I, the biggest, strongest and most capable among us have been pressed into service as a guard. So I sit guard in this pit and keep my eyes on the entry, lest our host return without warning. We’ve seen them move, these folk of Duskmarch, these wrigglers these tree-climbers, these serpents – they’re, if human, abominable, if not – then a horror. Creatures. Just creatures.
We’d been resting in the garden though we didn’t know it as the garden then, just the bony trees & their fungal coverings overarching the coalchained arbors beneath. We laid & rested – no need for a camp, at last, no need for a fire in the darkness – the light under the trees is plenty, it’s dull and burnished light, a ruddy shadowy light but greater light than we’d seen in this latitude. We lay to rest, I laid to rest, the others paced but I was drugged, the button rash of mushrooms I’d touched affected me, enough, not enough to kill like they’d killed Ambrose, but badly enough that I had to lay, to feel my body spin sickeningly, to feel myself flipping over and over until I was sick in the bare chalky earth twice. It was better after that, I felt the earth solid as ever at my back but wriggling, living – the worms here are immense, finger-wide, as wide as my own thumb that’s like a wrist of these others. These senseless worms writhe up to nestle at your back to gather the warmth from your body, to drink it from you. It was enough to startle me up, to launch me halfway to standing to feel the cold ribbon on my flesh, of the heat-thirsty worm. And rising up, sudden as a whipcrack, I startled these creatures that came upon us, sneaking. Said they to me, sneering, “Big big giant man. Man, man of the city. Man of the empire.” This last, he meant himself. He gestured to me – “Man of the city” then to himself “Man of the empire.” I didn’t believe it, not a man. A horror, the extra joint in their knees, the extra join in their wrists – I saw their limbs furling & unfurling as they came. “Back, away from us.” Said I at them. They kept away and I said “What is this place? Who are you men? And Where is Kannyl Arno?”
“We are empire’s men, we are Klia-lee. Our mistress is Tabatta, she is Burka-nill” One said, one spoke up, and the others followed. “We” said one and seven finished together “Burka-nill”, Burkannyl, bow-muster lord.
This was enough to rouse the others, my troupe. They sprang up and engaged these men, these new sorts of people. Trulkish. They led us under the trees, through their gardens – whorls of plants grown in spirals around each stony tree’s trunk. A wave of millet, of maize, of beans, of tubers – spiral arms all lit by hanging boughs of coruscating coalchain for want of the sun’s light. A plot like the petals of a flower spread from each trunk of the stone trees, and under each tree was a house like this one, a hole. We watched the ugly withered folk rise up from their houses, small & sickly – the children? Bent with red nails, red teeth and the pale white eyes. These, the smallest of them, they had, I could see the pale eyes of the Euye, and the muzzles – the long mouths, but bursting from them were their red teeth. I’m formulating, now, an idea about these folk. I wonder if they’re born or made – I think they’re made, forged somehow out of the Euye greyhides. Or mingled – cross-bred? They’re each fantastic, bizarre. They drew us into their village, hissing, spitting flaring like fires they screech anger. The others with me hold out their iron branches. I follow suit, remembering my cover. The iron branch, inviolability goes with it. No one dares to harm the Kannytline’s servants. I hold my branch & the others do. I think, I’m thinking now of the stone trees here, how like the iron tree they must be What must these trulkish make of them. Have they ever seen a branch of the iron tree? Did they take it as a cousin to their own stone trees? They understood our brandishing as if we’d held up weapons. They withdrew, covered themselves, hissed, spit again. One among them – a Talan? A leader of some kind, they said they knew what the branches meant & who we were. He said, come to my house, wait at my house for the Burkannyl Tabatta, she’ll sort you out. “We are here to present ourselves to the Kannyl Arno.” Gregor spoke up for the mission, the rest of us were stunned or dismayed enough to forget ourselves. “Come to my house.” The Talan-thing said. The flower-of-flesh bursting from his chest, dangling flesh in perfect petals – just like a rose, it breathes with the rise of his chest, it breathes as he breathes. Come to my house, when the Burkannyl comes she will tell you, all about her father. “Who is her father?” “Her father is the Kannyl Arno, ruler of the forest of the world itself.” And I am here to warn this man that he is under suspicion of sedition to his ruler, I wonder what he’ll make of a warning. Of what he might expect from its deliverer.