Post by Sire Halfblack on Aug 9, 2014 11:46:15 GMT
Sunner IM 1007
The heat turned the city to tinder. Hot the previous year as it had been, still the city baked, even if the sun itself scarce penetrated the smog that lay thickly about Deci. The taller buildings were shrouded in the cloying filth and even in the common lanes, streets and jumbled warrens of the old settlement there was a thin haze of sooty fog. The heat was all around, not burning from above and it made for shorter tempers than ever. Tempers that in the divided city saw frequent clashes between the diverse groups. The Hundred kept their Guilds close, and if they were not open in their allegiance then that was common enough. Here in Deci the royalists were the rebels. Here in Deci even that was hardly cut and dried for there were many Kings, a Don and even, somewhere thereabouts, even an Empire.
Many even confused which king was which. Easiest was Blackjack. The foul orc held Cheapside and that was power in and of itself, for Cheapside was Deci to many. He was a brutal sort of ruler who did not even really seem to rule. He was the nastiest leader of the nastiest gang in the nastiest part of town, the old town, the real town. Cheapside, old Deci. So many had grown up there and then, having made good, moved outwards and upwards. There had always been fighting in Cheapside, always been the little gangs that really just supported a lane, a trade or even a name against others. Cheapside spat out more adventurers than anywhere in the Empire.
If it was in the Empire at all.
Even those that followed, or were within the shadow at least, of Blackjack still felt in their deepest hearts that the Majius ruled. The House did not actually have to do anything, it just was. There was such a thick vein of tradition in the people regarding Princes and Lords and Kings and rulers generally that most just saw the Majius as being the real power in Deci. Outwardly anyway. Troy had ruled the city for long years now and of course he had taken the crown. The very fact that he did not prance about demanding to have entertainers juggle, often without hands, was simply a sign of real class.
In the Slurries people knew the Don ran things. Even further afield everyone feared Argoth. It did not matter who wore a crown or who stomped the most heads, Argoth was a god and so high over them all. Everyone knew he was amongst them. Everyone in the city either went to the Slurries or stayed away altogether. The Slurries, where the streets seemed to move, or vanish altogether.
Of course, just as most feared King Blackjack, revered King Majius, paid desperate respects to Argoth, just as that was true then also there was Deci. The city, the very place itself. Hardly anyone was old enough to actually remember the bad old days, but they knew they had been free. They had been rebels. They had been a terror. Amora had conquered them. But Amora was dead. Deci was sharp and nasty. Deci took no nuts from anybody.
Then there was the Empire. But the Empire was very far away. The Empire was conquering their land, taking the rural places away from them and robbing them of their valuables. Few of course had ever even left the city but that was hardly the point. The Empire was seeking to tell them what to do, to cut off their balls. And no one took a knife to a Deci bollock and thought himself Jack Spanky for long after.
And with all this in mind, a lot of the people sniped and crowed, pushed and fought. Factions rose and fell. Lanes and streets took up with one cause or another. Shrines were gutted by fire. Storehouses were robbed. People died.
Deci had been raided by certain of the tribes and those that had lived in Deci that had once been part of that had been hung, or stabbed or just plain maimed. Anyone that looked a bit tribal, or had a funny name, or even smelled a bit tribal was chased by a mob that often hit another mob and then more fighting broke out. Even a trader from Gothiel was gutted over his stall for looking tribal. Or funny. Or for having too much wine and ale for sale.
One of those reasons anyway.
There were fires and there were robberies and to Anath’s experienced eye Deci was doing far worse to itself than the tribes had. They had suffered a little raid and the city, staggering a little thereafter, slightly bruised, had bumped into itself in a quiet lane. It had thought itself a nice target after being beaten a little and so had followed its instincts, cut its own hams and given itself a good, screaming seeing to.
Anath sighed.
He stood by the southern gate and wondered if even if they had had some sort of warning it could actually have been shut. It looked like it had stood open so long that the hinges had gone solid. He had never noticed before how the bars and brackets to hold it shut were actually on the wrong side. So Anath stood by the gate with a few large fellows set to keep the trouble away and pondered what was going on. He had spent so long beating the city into a shape where a man or woman could actually gather a few grey hairs, could actually make a little treasure and even only grumpily pay a little taxation. He had done all this and still he would try as long as he was able.
When the twenty horsemen rode along the old trail he raised a hand. The Countess Claugh had ridden hard to cross the Empire and had brought only the closest of her Guard. The horses were lathered and her protectors hardly happy either. Clearly not local, they were a little scarred and had the suspicious eyes and open faces of… Sellaville. The guard had lived in preparation for the time their own city would once more be plunged into hell and looked now as if they had been led to it instead. But it was neither they nor the plainly dressed countess that drew Anath’s eye. She was a stark, severe sort of young woman and it was probably because of her own sensible adoption of more local garb that her companion in contrast stood out so greatly.
“What’a ho, Halfblack!”
“I bid you welcome, Countess.” Anath bowed at the waist. His eyes though were still riveted to the man who had hailed him. In armour chased in both gold and mother of pearl, its plates hot enough to sear steaks, Dirk of the House Drakken grinned like a child on Dawn’s Eve. “And of course your very good self too, Drakken.” Behind the socially rising knight a slighter figure was dressed head to toe in pale linen. “And of course your good lady wife.”
“Egad! Bit of’a pickle, eh?”
“Drakken?” Anath snapped his fingers and his immense litter appeared from the gloom of a nearby courtyard.
“Noble’s getting’ snuffed. Ain’t right. Ain’t right’a tall!”
Anath had to agree that this was entirely true. He asked, as he seated himself in the stuffed red leather of his chair, what the fine and noble Knight was going to do about it? “The villains are in dispute after all.” He added.
“Beasts! Eh? Whether find’a in streety gloomy, or wood a’dark and fierce, ol’ Dirky’ll show ‘em five yards’a good Imperial lance, eh. Eh?”
“Our Dirk is the new Mennihaft, Anath.” The Countess Claugh pointed out. “And now I think we need to get to the Spire. Majius will be there?”
“I would have to assume so, Countess Claugh. I am not… precisely involved with the current disputes.” The irony of Deci exerted itself and a body fell from the nearest roof square between them all. There was a pause. Not one of them either flinched or indeed gave any sign of having noticed it at all. “And I am not actually allowed into the Spire. My blood, it seems, is too thin.”
The Countess patted her horse as it started to tremble. “Then you shall be my guest Halfblack, and Dirk and of course dear Medrel. It seems my father promised you certain land?”
“I would not wish to sully you with matters of mere commerce, Countess. I had only in mind to ensure that after your loss you would be received properly in this your city.”
“Good’a man!” Dirk sniffed loudly and cuffed a manly tear from his cheek. The very idea of those of the Blood being brutally slain was an insult to his honour. He would hear no word said against the Deci Nobility. None at all. Oh, he had heard stories but he was a Drakken and a Drakken paid no heed to the tittle-tattle of others. What was wrong was wrong. It was just about possible, he might have conceded, that one of them might have been a bad sort but in death the acts of life were forgotten about. If a Noble was a bad lot then it was for another Noble to settle the matter. Not some mangy dog.
“I never liked my father, Halfblack. He was a fool and a murderer and he deserved to die. He took part in the Long Ride and for that he was restored to title and estates. I will be House Lord now. I am here to ensure that no one protests about that.”
Anath stood up from his chair and bowed once more. This time from atop his litter. “You honour us all with their presence and your strength, Countess Claugh, House Lady of Claugh. Baroness of Bitter Mead and Seladane, Mistress of the Three Isles..?” Anath was nothing, if not prepared.
“For a start he always priced things too cheaply.”
Anath suffered a slight tick about the left eye for just long enough for him to master the irritation. “Indeed.” He bowed once again, appreciating the manner of it. Besides which he was going to get to enter the Spire. Anath never liked to put anyone’s nose out of joint and so he would suffer the Nobility’s with mustered grace.
The Slurries
He pushed through the ragged mob with disdain written across his face. They were a scrappy sort of malcontent band at best, unsure of even what they were fighting for, probably nothing indeed so much as what they were fighting against, pretty much everything. They were as different from the concerted, cultural Halgar mob as butter to blades. They were children. Nasty spiteful little children that kicked over a bucket because it held sugared plums of a slightly different colour to that which they had demanded. Children old enough to need a shave.
They were fighting of course. Deci was being picked at by the ants that, in truth, were Deci. Like a ghoul that tore strips from its own arm because its master had told it not to but not clarifying the order given as to for how long. He would have despised them had he actually cared about them. In truth, as a mass he loved them, it was the individuals that annoyed him. Working for the betterment of Deci was like herding cats in a room with twelve doors.
He entered the Slurries, crossing the shadow of the tall statue nearby that was mostly obscured by a ramshackle tower of wood. Here the gloom seemed to intensify and he had to work a little magic to prevent himself being diverted from his course. It was quiet in the Slurries. People whispered rather than shouted. They lurked even as they went about their work and actually ran when they had to cross a lopsided square with too much ambient light even dimly reflected as it was by the smog close above. Deci had turned and changed and been conquered and yet still there hid deep in its depths people, or things, that had come here in flight from Magiarch, Lord or even, it was said, Prince. They lived lives either in full view or hidden behind the façade of another’s face.
People still watched him, though he moved well. They might not know who he was but they watched him nonetheless. Urchins littered the streets and even they scrapped. Pale faced and cruel eyed the children of Deci were fiends. There was no evil like a child’s evil. Guilt and morality were learned and in Deci there were few teachers.
In a certain lane that bent back on itself in a rising horseshoe he ducked under the eaves that led down steps to a squat door in a wall heavy with purple moss. He knocked. Receiving no answer he took hold of the iron band that within held shut the door and sundered it with more magic. Eyes unseen still stared at him and to them he raised a single finger.
The Citadel
The citadel was old. It had been built and improved, fallen and been remade and successive lords and rulers with their titles eponymous or descriptive had sought to stamp their mark on the city in the time they very rarely had. It had been the local belief that if ruler made of the citadel a monument to themselves then their rule would be long and absolute. But unlike so much folklore, that had never really been seen to be the case.
The crumbling, ugly fortress loomed over what had become the Central Quarter and stared down over Cheapside to the west. For most of Deci’s life the city had been what was now Cheapside, with the citadel standing over it on the edge. Now it was hardly the largest building in the city at all with Guilds and Spire and others rising higher, or broader but all certainly more majestic even in the persistent gloom of the pall that covered the settlement. It’s upper third was hidden in the faintly poisonous smog and the cracked walls and lopsided dome that topped it were stained black with soot, grime and the murder of the ages.
It was cold in the Citadel despite the season. Even the uncomfortable and ambient heat that permeated the rest of the city did not step more than three paces into the always-cold walls. And the Citadel was empty. It was an unlucky place, a monument to the Empire now as in the years that had followed the conquest of the city by Amora it had been there that the Governors and his Council had ruled. But not for a long time now.
The remains of the Senatorial Guard had left early one morning and each night another thief, vagrant or urchin was found dumped in the cracked ditch that lay under the rising steps of the great entranceway. Snakes and ravens were tossed from the irregular ramparts. No one was in, and those that sought to change that were quietly sent away or rather found as the days turned and the nights softly, slowly grew a little longer.
Cheapside
Smoke rose from patches of Cheapside like so many chimneystacks burning dirtily. The heat saw people sitting about on the old stone steps and ironwood ledges in their normal gatherings, in their roguish groups. More than half the city as the scribes might judge lived in Cheapside, and the number was even higher than that. People were born here and some were able to do well and move on out but many would always make their home here, even if they moved from room to garret to gallery to cellar to old dungeon or roof roost. It was hot and, under the smog, humid. Sunner Season and the living, it was said, was easy.
The tribes had tried to raid Cheapside and had been slaughtered here, the only place where that had happened. The gangs were strong, because that was just the way things were. A gang might be as small as the people of a lane or even balcony, or be as large as the named and famous and old packs that changed their leaders, even their members, as often as those in Cheapside changed their toerags, so, every year or two. Outsiders might scarcely have credited it but an awful lot of the people here were actually in Guilds. Old Guilds and many of which no longer had a city charter, or even a Guildhall but in Guilds they still were.
Mournful music was playing somewhere out of sight when Sire Berry, chest puffed out and with his best swaggering boots buffed to a wet shine prodded a marker with a long knife. There was a fight going on a few yards behind him but the goblin ignored it. So too did the folk hawking wares from open packs up the twisting row a little way on, city peddlers that went from street to row to alley to square in the Quarter. Best to keep moving when you had something of value enough to sell. Stolen goods and smuggled wares, stuff made that never went to market and just one more crime that the scribes never saw. Not that the city had scribes really. Not that Sire Berry cared one way or another if they did.
He stroked his smooth cheek. It was the commonest way one showed the wares in his famous dagger shop, to demonstrate the edge by sitting a fellow in a tall chair and shaving his beard without drawing blood. For a shop that sold blades the Stepsons gave a lot of haircuts. And in recent weeks a clean face and a shaved head had become very popular. They set folk aside from the tribesmen, or anybody tribal. Sire Berry had just returned from the northerly Quarter after seeking the settled tribesmen there but of course they had been hung, gutted or just plain chased out of the city. It had been a vague mission in any case as Sire Berry had heard such news before leaving his shop. He knew most everything that went on in the city, he listened with his big flappy ears but there was little to learn of the tribes that had attacked as they, quite unreasonably he thought, neither lived in Deci or had remained long enough to boast of their purposes, deeds or plans to a two grull sleeper or in a grull-for-two-cups drinking den.
He recognized some of the markers. Or at least, the style. Mostly they translated as ‘feck you’, some recalled Cavrin but mostly it was feck the city, feck the Empire, and feck the witch queen that ruled it. There were other scrawls too of course. In Cheapside a wall told a lot of tales, gave a lot of opinions. It was the same he had heard in Halgar where the desecration there was better than a town crier for news and opinions. Here the more recent, local daubs were ‘Deci for Deci’. All well enough of course, but Sire Berry knew that there was a growing little bitterness in the city against them all, against all the beasts that ruled here. Against orcs, goblins, drow and… those that were half of one or the other.
Sire Berry scratched his arse and spared a little glance over one shoulder. Orcs and drow he could understand but goblins? It made no sense at all.
*
It had been going so well. He had found someone willing to smuggle what he needed and even now had discovered where the pit was to be found. He had purloined a spade and a pick and had been creeping through the very finest shadows when for no reason that immediately presented itself to his sharp little mind it became the very worst day of his young life.
The trouble, he realised as he fell, with deep shadows along old walls where no one went was that just very occasionally there was a reason for it. In this specific case it seemed that the locals kept away from the corner of the Maddened Tower because at some point in the past where wall met street was now a deep hole. He fell so sharply that he barely had time to catch hold of the dangling rope lurking just below the lip. The rope twisted in his hand and bit him. Venom was something that happened to other people but still it sent him further on his arrested fall, his dirty spade catching on the narrowing pit, jerking his arms, bringing out a grin of relief, then broke.
More than a century ago The Grand Lady Upside Flay had established in her four-month rule a hatred for the ways of her predecessor Dripping Lord Filthy. The Lord had been so intensely concerned about the particular ritual of the Scour Sisters that he had jealously guarded every dip and scrap of fluid and litter that came from his own body. He shat in barrels and he peed in glass bowls and when they ran out he used anything that could be considered watertight. He had in short filled what would later be the Citadel with his own effluence. Jugs and pitchers, buckets, pails and wineskins. Vats of piss and great cakes of pooh awaited Lady Flay after she had taken up the reins of power from the former ruler, who had vanished one lightning wreathed night after a secret meeting at the top of the already-then crumbling fortress with the Guild of Copper Workers and Pole Crafters.
She had, in short, had built for her a garderobe tower and for some time she had been able to void herself over the city below in complete contrast with the missing Lord Filthy. So enamored had she become with the symbolism of it all that she often held court on the padded ring of her own throne. That ended one night when an assassin without a sense of smell had climbed up the tower to stab her in the bum with a poisoned spear.
But what she had dropped on the city had gathered and festered and a little more than a century later was revived once more when a tumbling thief broke the crust and gasped at the intensity of the stench released.
It was a terrible climb. A terrible, slippy sort of climb the stink of which allowed no common conjurings nor disciplines of the mind. A climb that ended at length with a horrid crawl to a further shadow where the man gasped and choked and retched dryly on the broken flagstones of the city.
His coughing was a sound liked in Deci. It was a sound that said victim. Soon other shapes were appearing and hastily, though still slick with fermented dung, the unfortunate dug into his satchel and hastily arranged a disguise over his young face. He reached for a knife but they had been lost in the fall.
He jumped up, seeing the trail he was making in his wake. He turned sharply when someone ran at him from behind and ducked aside from the hasty charge, tripping the figure so that he sprawled on the stone. There was a crash, a tinkle and then a roar. The man he had tripped screamed and with a roar flared up with magical fire. The glass globe he had been carrying that carried the bound salamander melted in an instant and the fellow blazed up fiercely.
Also, it had to be said, lighting the alley as brightly as a paladin’s sword on finding a demons sleeperhouse. A sleeperhouse where they practiced peeling the faithful. With bent knives. Whilst swearing. A lot.
Dark shapes paused on the fringes of the light from the burning man. Dark shapes that were as surprised as the thief that had tripped the second thief when scraps of burning man fell to the ground, touched the stinky footprints and sent them to similar combustion. Slick and covered in what was now clearly quite the best lamp fuel ever to fall from a Noble’s ring then ferment for ten decades, the unfortunate and as yet unburning thief had a very bad idea what was about to happen.
So he ran.
After him ran the burning man.
The sticky thief slipped and fell. The burning thief tumbled over him and then fire met filth. Even three streets away people turned when they heard the boom, turned indeed in time to see a sudden balloon of fire roar into the smog and filth that hung over the city.
The fire dwindled as it rose and far below, where it had been born, one thief died and another whimpered slightly.
It had been a very, very bad day.
*
They stirred metal buckets of snakes or carved fungi into slices. For a city of such a relatively large populace Deci never really needed much food at market. There was an inherent suspicion of edibles prepared or shipped in by other folk, people liked to see to their own plates or buy it from eateries and slop halls they knew well. In Cheapside folk most ate communally within their own streets and gangs. And hunger was their bedmate.
Within the maze of the old city, in the jumbled lanes and confusing corridors and odd bridges and tunnels of Cheapside there was a King. King Blackjack ruled the old city, the real city. Cheapside was what the Nobles called the Quarter and if the name had stuck then now people hereabouts were starting to just call the sprawling area Deci once again. They were the city, they had themselves a proper mad ruler and like every proper mad ruler he did not give two stabs for what they did, as long as they did what he told them. Which being not much and never often made him a popular King. They had their gangs and their street Guilds and King Blackjack thought that was all liver and gravy.
Or at least, so people assumed. For King Blackjack had his court. It might be in his tower one day. It might be in the even older city below the streets in the next. It might be in the cellars of the Rot Twine Guild one morning, or the roof of the Harpy Fanciers that afternoon.
And he had gathered the larger of the gangs to him. The heads of the forgotten Guilds. The local trader barons. The gutter knights and the urchin bravos. He had called and they had come and they had not even fought on the way because Blackjack was the King and that was that. He would doubtless not last. King’s weren’t meant to last. Kings and Princes and Dally Lords, Molly Prancers or any of the rest came and went. Though the oldest of them and there were few of those, felt that Blackjack had something rather more settled about him than most they dimly remembered. Cheapside was his. It was not just a crown, he had no rivals and when he coughed everyone sneezed.
There were roughs on the corners, there were urchins in every lane, there were murderers on rooftops and pickeroons swaggering in the drinking dens. Blackjack had eyes everywhere and his knives, spiked maces and saw-backed blades were ready for trouble. Cheapside was a mess of gangs and a hundred little factions and they were all part of the King’s Horde.
Forgetown
People had died here.
Some had dug with their bare hands at the immensity of rock and clay that had fallen in on the mine so that even the bones that remained were split and fragmented about the fingertips. Others had clearly just sat and awaited their fate as the air ran foul, then thin, then just plain out. They had been people like any other from their remains. Not dwarfs or goblins or even stranger things and Jander picked up a helmet that had stood the time so well that when he buffed it on his sleeve the leather revealed was still hale, hardly cracked at all. There was wax covering the crown, crude stuff with a simple wick that suggested the helmet had belonged to someone of worth still for scattered about the first narrow chamber he had found the remains of tallow bowls. The fat within had long since congealed or been eaten by some sniffing creature. Like all mines it must have been hot, and it had smelt of burning fat. Then the clay had shifted and the rock had moved and twenty men and women had lost their lives.
It was as hard a land here as any. Once it had been an estate but the hedgerows had long been pulled up and burned. There were still low, drystone walls that marked out where once there might have been fields but the earth was dead now. Nothing grew thereabouts and Jander had not seen a tree for five leagues or more. In the Deci territories, Eartholme now he supposed, the land had been stripped of wood to bake charcoal for the foundries and forges, the smelters and the industry of Deci. The people had become nomads, only the places of note holding on to their stability with broken nails as all others went where the wood could be found to feed the city. And now there was hardly any wood to be had at all. Soon there would be raw ore and the hungry Guilds would flounder. There was not enough Blackstone on the markets to take its place. Already the city stores were filling with unsold ore, and perhaps as a consequence, perhaps as a coincidence, the people in the city seemed to have better things to do than toil in any case.
He pointed to the most likely of the fallen arches and the miners he had brought with him set to work. They were guilded, their observances and traditions making marks and creating little pools of power that provided a relief from the need for pit props. They dug and Jander watched then work. The mines were staying loyal to the city, hunkering down defensively against any that would tell them where to take their ore, or whom owned it. The places of note themselves were not all siding so well with their former masters, many already paying taxes and faith to Eartholme. The nomadic citizens cared not whom they called master. But still it was a divided land.
“Master!” One of the miners called and Jander ducked to join the front of the workface. One pressed a finger to leathery lips and Jander tilted his head to listen.
Hightown
If there was anything resembling a pool of calm about the city then it was wherever Talath Majius, The Baron Throttle went. He carried his sheer presence about with him like a cloak. A cloak that rippled and flapped about him as if caught in a wind so that people looked away that had murder in their hearts or ran if they had been thinking of causing mischief. Talath Majius, in short, scared people. The city did not have Watchmen as others understood the idea. For some years Deci had tried that, resulting in some very worried and frankly frightened lads that had rarely poked their noses into the streets. Now there were people who told other people what was, and what was not going to be tolerated. And the person that told the people that told other people, well - that was Talath Majius.
He did not smile much and he had eyes that could strip a man to his soul. He was a Deci Nobleman that went about the city and where he went things calmed down. People looked away. If they had shoes then people would look at them. It was widely rumoured that Talath was so straight that the Guilds used his back to measure the angle for a building. He did not run with the Deci Hunt. He did not skulk, or plot, or giggle. He was a Noble of Deci and a curl of the brow or a slight twitch of the lips could dictate an end to crime.
In Deci they hated the law. They hated to do anything that anyone told them to do unless that someone was twice the size and had knives fresh minted by Berry and Stepsons of Stab Street, Cheapside. The folk of Deci had all the morals of a spoilt virgin and all the responsibility of a drunken molly on the darkest night when the foundry smiths had just been paid. But if there was one person who could spank them and send them to bed without their supper then…
By Alan Morgan (CI9V4)