Tag: worldbuilding

Building an implement upon which to hang the flesh of the world.

While histories over the ages have indisputably privileged the happenings of the southern kingdoms, of the Revián Federation and Spar, the absence of widespread accounts north of the Gravestone Mountains–indeed, called the Wall by the northerners–should not be taken as absence of activity.  Spar, ever the partisan of the written record–and of history as written by victors–saturated its lands, its neighbors, its far-flung trading partners, even the hinterlands of the northern Windwood with stories of its conquests, which is, of course, how Taamir Ra recognized the asymmetry.  But north of the Wall, Khet, the jewel of the Shrah, the great City of the Sun, had no shortage of history.  Neither the Sun Queen nor the hierarchs of the Temple favored the pamphlet, which meant that though Khet was not quite cut off from the south–lines of trade persisted via Khet’s vassal port of Saltstill and the occasional trans-Wall caravans–its glory was not well-known to the Diarchian historians.  But it was glorious, Taamir knew, and for the popular disfavor of the inscribed word, its influence flowed strong in different ways.  Taamir knew, and he partook, and he supposed that was why he was now bound for the Ziggurat.

As he emerged from the Spicegut onto the southwest corner of the Palace Plaza, he felt a conspicuous wave of observation–not unexpected by any means in a district where royals wandered unaccompanied–and a matching sense of relief that the scarabglow still showed on his forehead from his attendance at service yesterday in the seedy chapel on Carpet Street.  Temple service was not compulsory for Khettite citizens, but participation in social activity, even the unsavory genre that Taamir facilitated, did rely on a certain measure of ecclesiastical approval.  Heresy was a crime, and it was well known that the Temple’s agents tended to use the label for any sufficient accrual of influence beyond the clergy’s vision.  Even Taamir was not sure how a weekly Temple service accomplished adequate supervision on matter, but as any savvy Khettite knew, the hierarchs’ means were not to be questioned.  The Temple was the one thing no Khettite–save maybe the Queen herself–ought fuck with.

Taamir the Exile had been a savvy Khettite for nearly twenty years now.  He had been born here to merchant parents long before that, but except for a few years of barely conscious childhood, his youth had been spent in torturous near-solitude south of the Wall after his parents–and their whole caravan–were slaughtered by bandits.  He escaped the massacre–apparently alone among the fifty-odd men, women, and children traveling with them–and scraped by for a few years foraging at the outskirts of an insular fur trapping camp in the Windwood before he became fortuitously embroiled in a reputational feud between neighboring Diarchian governors, in which he acted as a go-between, trading favors advantageously until he was able to negotiate passage aboard an adventurer’s vessel from Calais to Saltstill, returning home finally after a decades-long absence.

He was acutely aware that his proclivities, his infectious friendliness, his talents for squirming into the graces of royal and cutthroat circles alike, arose from trauma, from the years of silence and loneliness he had endured after watching his parents’ murder, but he was still grateful enough that his narcotic relationship with conversational company was, on the whole, productive.  It had helped him become established upon his return, and he’d discovered that for one with his exceptional talent for ubiquity, a career as a rumor broker, a dealer in nothing at all but overheard phrases, of vibrations and broad strokes of social environments, was actually possible.  Within ten years, he had risen to prominence as one of the most useful sources of sensitive information in Khet.  As of today, he gathered with chagrin at the scroll delivered to his doorstep–the summons to the Ziggurat–he may have become the single most useful.

Assured that he looked presentable, if sheepish, amid the intense surveillance of the Plaza, he crossed quickly, turning from the western gate onto Brass Row, walking with broadcast intent toward the Temple District and the Ziggurat, the seat of the hierarchs’ power.

Taamir did not think he had anything to fear from the hierarchs regarding his own behavior.  He attended service, he did not blaspheme, he did not deal in rumors concerning the clergy–though he did encounter them, some even salacious.  But still, a summons to the Ziggurat for a denizen of Carpet Street…it was not friendly outreach.  Whatever this was about, it was surely serious, and his worry–that it would put him, one road or another, in harm’s way–was certainly legitimate.

Upon reaching the Ziggurat, pausing for a moment to appreciate the immense scale of the structure–the base occupied a larger area than some of Khet’s smaller districts–Taamir found one of the temple guards to convey him to Blessed Aten, the hierarch whose name adorned the summons he had received.  Blessed Aten was, Taamir knew, effectively first among the equals of the high clergy, and as such his hearing chamber was likely to be the one at the center of the Ziggurat’s first tier, just above street level.  It was an interesting contradiction that the highest ranking hierarchs were stationed lowest in the Ziggurat, farthest from the Scarab Who Lights the Way, but Taamir suspected it was a prosaic function of the interaction between old joints and the Ziggurat’s abundant stairs which drove the inversion.  In any case, even if he knew where to find Aten, he had little to gain and quite a lot to lose by flexing his information and showing up unescorted.  No.  In this instance, better to appear small.

The guard’s response to the summons was, in fact, perfectly reasonable, and ten minutes later, he was waiting in that central hearing chamber, a wide, rectangular room lit dimly–though cleverly, he had to admit–by beams of sunlight reflected on mirrored passages bored through to the Ziggurat’s outer walls.  Before Taamir, bathed in the majority of this glow, was an imposing stone chair, where the hierarch would presumably sit during formal hearings, and behind it, in the shadows, were two scribe tables, each adorned by a candle, for who could expect the Temple to use its painstakingly acquired sunlight productively?

Taamir took a deep breath.  Sarcasm, even unspoken, would not behoove him here.  Still, he was annoyed.  The chair and tables were unoccupied, and he had been left to wait in the sanctum alone.  His summons had implied the utmost urgency, but it seemed the urgency was for him specifically.  It was not so urgent for Blessed Aten.

He turned, hearing the curtains which served as a chamber door shift behind him.  He was prepared to bow before the hierarch, but the two women who entered were not the hierarch.  But now he was truly worried.

“Hello, my friend,” the first said.  She wore a fine dress and shawl, embroidered with gold thread, along with matching gold earrings, necklace, bangles, and a circlet on her forehead.  Below the circlet, the golden smudge of scarabglow shone, mirroring his own.  And though she eschewed the eye pain popular among the nobility, Taamir did note that she was pretty in the way a well-fed cobra was pretty.  Wary or no, it was a rare observation–he did not usually see her face when they met. 

The second woman, for her part astonishingly beautiful but dressed in the nondescript cuirass of a caravan guard, met his gaze but said nothing, pulling the curtain closed as she limped into the room.

For several years now, Taamir’s single highest volume client had been a fixer known as Naham, the Serpent, a masked underworld luminary whose influence over Khet’s criminal domains had grown explosively of late.  She had a rare touch, Taamir acknowledged, for subtle bribery, gentle coercion, encouragement of subversive loyalty that made the brutality of Khettite criminal business seem genteel, approachable.  

Nobles with more gold than sense lapped it up, and her business carried with it a nigh-inexhaustible demand for Taamir’s services.  It kept him financially very comfortable, but he would be remiss not to notice that the image she conveyed to her clients was in fact quite far from the truth.  He’d dug into her business exactly as much as a subcontractor ought, and the reality was clear enough: She was ruthless.  She was ambitious.  And her capacity to make–and often directly eliminate–enemies made him nervous.  A few years on, their relationship reached a point that he needed either more insurance or less liability, so with her implicit blessing, he dug deeper.

The veiled Serpent did, in fact, have a face she showed the public: Lady Bas’ahra, once scion of a cadet branch of the Halima royal family, now de facto head of the Halima clan in their dethroned afterlife.  Dynastic shifts were historically not uncommon in Khet.  The most recent was fifteen years ago, at the height of an escalating feud between the Queen and the Temple over a petty request from the clergy to modify the Brass Army officer’s uniform.  Amidst an outpouring of combative rhetoric from various royal functionaries, Queen Petra VII fell suddenly ill, died, and her next three heirs all declined the crown, “prompting” the hierarchs to intervene, elevating Merin, matriarch of the comparatively minor Neema clan, to the throne.  The skulduggery was barely hidden.  Taamir had been new to the information trade at the time, but it had been trivial to discern that Petra had been poisoned, her heirs had abdicated at the point of the Shining Guard’s spears, and the rest of the Halima clan, ejected into Khettite society with only a fraction of the resources they had relied upon for years, had been ousted, no two ways about it.

Bas’ahra, barely in the line of succession in the first place–barely of age, for that matter–apparently took her family’s looming poverty personally.  She founded a merchant company when she was seventeen, moderately successful, enough for survival, but she didn’t want survival.  She wanted her clan ascendant once more, which meant she needed to stem their financial bleeding as well as her own.  She began to buy up purveyors of vice, taverns, pimps, spurge, donning Naham’s name and veil to conduct business thus.  These earned decent enough returns to keep her family aristocratically relevant, which formed the basis for her noble connections.

Taamir had been able to get much of this from a series of tipsy conversations with Nasir, a prolific copper smuggler who had rebuffed Naham’s attempts to encroach on his business in those early days.  It was logical he had dirt–he was still alive after refusing her.  But while the link between Naham the Serpent and Bas’ahra of Halima was probably sufficient insurance–a complaint to the Temple of a former royal stirring up the city’s undesirables would serve as a fine scorcher of earth–it didn’t fully explain her.  The woman who Taamir knew had moved on from managing whores and spurge addicts.  The Spicegut’s money wasn’t enough for her.  Carpet Street’s money wasn’t enough for her.  She solved royal problems because she wanted royal money, royal influence again.

But now she was here with him at the Ziggurat.  What was the next step up from royal influence, then?

“Lady Bas’ahra,” he greeted her with a polite bow, much shallower than the one he’d held in reserve for Blessed Aten.  “Saph,” he added with a nod to her bodyguard.  Saph turned up the side of her mouth with a practiced, flirtaceous–though, Taamir knew, entirely artificial–smile before returning to her stone-faced stare.  His use of Bas’ahra’s name, of course, was not an aggression.  She had come without the veil, to say nothing of the foolhardiness of arriving at the Ziggurat in the guise of an underworld broker–but she smirked at his greeting anyway, as if her own name was an in-joke.

“Aren’t we a curious pair, two children of the Scarab, barely acquainted, yet chosen together for this honor.  Why do you imagine we are here, Taamir?”

Taamir limited his response to a nervous smile.  He was just as curious, but he wasn’t comfortable with the goading, the insolence.  He didn’t like it.  There was nothing good that the hierarchs could be asking of him in the depths of the Ziggurat, and Bas’ahra being here as well meant the Temple was not merely aware of his dealings with this former royal–those dealings were at the top of mind.  Taamir was growing more and more concerned that what came through the door next was going to be violent.  But then–the glimmer of hope–why bring them here just to dispose of them?

It was less than a minute before the curtains moved again, but the white-robed, wizened man and single, gold-clad guard who came through did not portend violence.  This was not to say their entrance was humble: The Shining Guard were invariably armored ostentatiously and…reflectively, chosen from the largest, most physically capable specimens in the Brass Army.  This one was no exception.  And the cleric–Blessed Aten, presumably–was simply-dressed but literally luminescent, shining undulations wavering across his skin as if bending through rippling water, rendering him simultaneously resplendent and, if Taamir was honest, quite difficult to look at.

Bas’ahra and Saph bowed adroitly, and, stunned for only a moment, Taamir followed.  At first, Aten did not speak.  He stood, one hand upon the chair, studying them with either suspicion or disdain, though Taamir could not tell which.  The effect of the guard remaining at the door–armor reflecting the hierarch’s oppressive glow upon them from two sides–was not lost on him either.  It felt like being grasped, held up and considered, as if for nutritional value by something very large indeed.  Then:

“Do you know why you are here?” Aten asked.  His voice was thin, but it reverberated, ethereal, larger than he was.

“The Sun requires us,” Bas’ahra replied with almost convincing humility.

“Well chosen words.  Empty,” Aten said, practically spitting.  “You will be forthright to me, and your forthright answer is ‘no’.  We require substance of you, not rhetoric.”

Taamir caught Bas’ahra’s vanishing eyebrow raise and chose to preempt her:

“What is it you need us to accomplish?”

Aten’s gaze shifted to Taamir.  He paced in front of the chair, nodding slowly.

“You are both familiar with the difficulties Khet has with its leadership,” he said, prompting Taamir to steal another glance at Bas’ahra.  “And you are aware by now that the Queen’s health is degrading swiftly.  Matters thought to be solvable by more civilized means will, I think, require more severe measures.”

“You think that current plans for succession are a little too…gray?” Bas’ahra interjected, smirk returning.  

The scorn in Aten’s gaze was plain but telling.  Taamir was following now as well: Khettite law was clear that the office of monarch was strictly matriarchal, and Queen Neeth’s only child was a son.  There was a clear heir–Princess Persephone, the Queen’s granddaughter–but Aten’s problem surely lay with the other side of the family.  Prince Djoser, prior to his mother taking the throne, had married Helen of the Elea clan–the Gray tribe, as they were called, for their pale skin–a move that had surprised Taamir at the time for a host of reasons, all coming to a head now, it seemed.  The cultural divide between the Gray tribe and the rest of Khet was complicated, longstanding, and, Taamir suspected, an increasing risk for the Temple, which had painted their people as spiritual pariahs for perhaps a generation longer than was wise.  In any case, Bas’ahra’s pun was adequately descriptive: Aten would prefer that Persephone not become Queen.

Taamir opened his mouth to voice the obvious objection: Why would they ask a rumormonger to manipulate the royal line of succession?  But he swallowed the thought.  No, he wasn’t stupid.  This wasn’t a request for him.  The request was for Bas’ahra–Aten merely knew that she would engage his services.  His presence here, being brought into the fold, was merely to ensure he would not poke into the matter on his own and, perhaps more importantly, that he would not spread word of its occurrence.

“Well, that is a serious concern,” Bas’ahra continued, taking Aten’s protracted glare as answer enough.  “When all settles, how would you like the situation to look?”

“The heir brought to us,” Aten replied, syllables clipped.  “Alone, of course.  Her parents removed from Khet permanently.  The Queen would surely object, but she is of course infirm–and under the regrettable influence of parties for whom Khet’s welfare is secondary.  It would be wise to obfuscate any deliberate intention behind your results.”

Regrettable influences, Taamir noticed, did seem to be a relative thing, but he was relieved to see Aten shed his intense air of derision as they moved onto the business at hand.

“I imagine you will hear no more of the details,” Bas’ahra said.  “They are assuredly beneath the dignity of the Sun.  But the gravity of the request…”

“Is it beyond your capabilities, Lady Bas’ahra?”

Her smile was genteel and certainly venomous.

“I shouldn’t think so,” she replied.  “I merely refer to the price.”

“The price is consideration that even you will find valuable.”  Bas’ahra’s smile waned, but Aten did not elaborate.  He only held her gaze.

“…your Radiance?” Taamir spoke up, drawing attention from both of them.  “When the heir is brought to you, do you imagine she will be convinced of an…agreeable future–in the absence of these regrettable influences?”

Taamir was calculating prices as well.  He knew that one of his many costs of doing business was the knowledge that what he sold would be used on occasion to hurt people.  It eased the burden that many of them had it coming, but many, of course, did not.  He was not Bas’ahra.  He was not infinitely hungry for wealth of influence.  He wanted to survive, to not have to be alone the way he had been down south.  It did not seem like refusal was an option at the moment, but there were still lines.  There were outcomes he would not aid.  Aten’s expression remained aloof as he replied:

“If the Sun wills it.”

Forever ago, now, Taamir had been a child deprived of his parents by this same grim sort of taking, and he was not eager to pay that forward to the princess.  He would, though, if it came to it.  It would hurt him, but it wouldn’t be the field he died on.  What occupied his thoughts in this moment was what happened after the attack.  He had searched the wreckage, the smashed wagons, the overturned barrels, the…corpses.  His parents.  Their partners and contractors.  There was a body missing that day.  Taamir had a brother before the attack, and after…he never saw him again, after.  For close to twenty years, he had tried to make it back to Khet in case his brother had too.

For twenty-odd years, he remained there, disheartened, clinging to that futile rationalization that there was nowhere else he was likely to find him.

Yes, if he had to, he would deprive the girl of her parents.  But he could not help but see the same thread in her impending tragedy.  If she didn’t make it out alive–if she didn’t make it out alive because of him–what business did he have hoping he would one day find his brother?  That was the line, it seemed.  So it was indeed important that the hierarchs’ intentions were to influence the girl.  Reeducate her.  Compel her to abdicate, the way they did with Bas’ahra’s cousins.  But Taamir would not deliver Persephone to her death.

Taamir remained silent as Bas’ahra and Blessed Aten exchanged the concluding formalities, established the choking pact.  They turned to leave, and Taamir caught a significant glance from Saph.  The bodyguard had a way, he had realized, of noticing people’s cracks, though she refrained from commenting, at least publicly.  Even so, he consciously reinforced his expression.  He must not appear uneasy, lest either Bas’ahra or the Temple judge him a loose end.

Still.  If the Sun wills it.  Saph’s pointed stare had rendered his own conclusion quite conscious.  He did not trust Aten’s intentions for the princess at all.