#85 - She is Yes

“Why are you so angry?”  The voice out of the darkness was feminine, though not overtly female, Ahrimaz thought.  What? How can a voice be feminine and not female?

“Ummmm.”  I sound like an elephant calf.  “Because I’m frightened.  Rage and despite and anger all keep me safe.”

“Do they keep you safe, in a world where only one person has ever truly attacked you, and he’s dead?”

“You mean the Cylak King who Pel replaced.” Even here he would not say the man's name.

“Yes.”

“In my world he was an ineffectual, foolish man who insisted that the world was by right his.  I disabused him of that thought.”

“You also disassociated him from his head as I recall.”

“Yes.”  For a moment Ahrimaz had the flash of memory  in his hand as the Flamen burned through the man’s neck.  At full gallop, he didn’t have time to see him fall off his deer.  One more opponent lost on the battlefield. One more killing he could use to try and assuage his rage and his pain.  He didn’t see him fall, but he knew the man’s clothing and body would be on fire.  The Flamen did that to people. And things.

“Who are you?” He asked though he knew icy well. Scorching well.  He knew.

“Liryen is what you call me in this tiny portion of understanding.”

“Goddess. Demon. Divinity.”

“Some of what I am.  I just am.”

“And You’re just talking to me.”

“Why not?”

“Because You are those things? Because I killed Your followers?  Because I raped and beat my wife to control her, and beat my daughter because she was defiant?  I am a monster, not a… a… priest.”

“Don't you already long to correct those things? To recompense the innocent, somehow?  That is part of the pain you feel.  Your inability to fix what you did. I am speaking only to you. You are broken enough to hear Me.”

“I’m certainly broken.” Below… Ahrimaz suddenly realized he could see the salt pan below him again, and he could see a man struggling across the waste that was salt and brine and reflection of sky and sun and nothing else.

“Who is that?”

“You know.”

Ahrimaz watched his brother stop at an enormous canyon broken into the land, where fire rose from below.  There was a bridge across it but it was made up of weapons.  Sharp weapons.  On this side of the bridge there were the stinking corpses of the Kenaçyen family shambling around, slashing each other with words and with whips, bleeding on each other and the land.

Across the bridge a little girl sat on a white tiger, green plants growing up out of every one of the great cat's footprints.

“Go!  Arnziel you can get out!  Don’t be afraid!”  For an instant he was the older brother, hiding his little brother under his bed and stepping in to take the beating his father wished to lay on someone’s hide.  It didn’t matter if you had done wrong.  The old monster just had to make one, or all of them, hurt.

The image faded as Arnziel stepped out, barefoot on the bridge of swords.

“It’s not really swords he’s walking on,” Ahrimaz said.  “It’s his fear that makes them edged weapons. He's doing that to himself.”

“He’ll learn that,” Liryen said.  “But it will take his own time to do so. Just as you will.”

“Are we all different in all the worlds we exist in?”

“Yes.”

“How do You stand it?  It would be a cacophony of prayers.”

“It is.”  He could sense her smile.  “You might be able to understand it if you consider it a choir or a garden.  A tapestry.  An opera. A story. A vast chord that encompasses everything.  I am a music lover.”

“And You like apples.”

“And songbirds.”

“And cats that kill songbirds.”

“Yes.”

Ahrimaz glared around himself looking in the dark, in the light, in the rainbow of colours in the vastness that had no edges, no limits, no time forward or backward, struggling to glare the Goddess in the face.  “EVERYTHING IS A YES TO YOU ISN’T IT!?” 

His rage fell into the enormity and was less than a dust speck’s dust speck.  He felt another scar of his rip open, with the rush of pain and joy and relief.  “It’s not about me, is it?”

He could hear her smile. “Not really.  Though I could say yes.”

He had no air to laugh with, but laughter bubbled through him and around him, the only response other than a shattering madness.

“Yes,” She said.

#84 - Sacred Suicide

Ahrimaz pulled himself out of the mud next to one of the Veil platforms, where he’d actually fallen, face first.  Rutaçyen sat, cross-legged, next to the High Priestess.  They looked almost like bookends, though Rutçyen had the Kenaçyen blond hair, cut short and sharp now, and High Priestess Mara had long dark brown hair that coiled all around her as she sat.

“Go get cleaned up, Ahrimaz,” Rutaçyen said.  “The water is warm enough now.”

“Maybe to an ice-tits like you.”

“Give me fifty push ups,” she said without heat.  “Then go get clean.  I have clean clothes for you when you have the mud off.”

Ahrimaz glared at her, hands convulsively opening and closing.  The weather had finally shifted and the snow had melted in the warm rain that came day after day.  Today the sun was making a rare appearance and the water surging around his ankles was actually swimmable.  He was aware of Pelahir meditating on another platform down the Veil, far enough that the rushing sound of the water would give everyone privacy.

Yolend sat with him and the child… now running like a mad thing… made a beeline right to him. “…shups?” he inquired in his piping voice.  He insisted on trying to do what Ahrimaz was doing, especially if it was training of any kind and would cry if Ahrimaz tried to tell him he wasn’t ‘daddy’ but ‘uncle’.   

“Daaaaah?  …shups?”

“Yes, pushups,” Ahrimaz snarled, splashed down and began.  The baby did too, his bum in the air as he wobbled through four press-ups before sitting down and beginning to throw mud as Ahrimaz finished his fast fifty.  “You stay with the war master while I swim!” Ahrimaz snapped, scooped him up and dumped the messy toddler on Rutaçyen’s lap, mud and all, with an evil grin.

She grinned back and encircled the toddler, heedless of the dirt and the water.  “If you have trouble getting into the water I’ll call Didara.”  The elephant had found the Veil waterfall or waterfalls… the whole amazing length of them, to be her favourite place outside and was currently upvale standing under one of the more energetic showers.

“No,” Ahrimaz snapped, and yanked his shirt up over his head, flinging it into the dirt, with his trousers, turned and walked into the nearest pool.

Rutaçyen handed the toddler to an acolyte who carted the child back to Yolend who took him and offered him her breast.  He began nursing and was asleep in moments, arms and legs relaxing over his mother’s knee.

“So you think he’s ready for this?”  Rutaçyen asked quietly and the High Priestess shrugged.

“Soon if not now…”  There was an unaccustomed shout from higher up the valley.  “See?  Even if he doesn’t realize it, he’s ready to do the work.”  The shout was from one of the priestesses who came running down the hill, leaving her basket behind her, spilling early bulbs all down the hill.  She was chanting something under her breath as she plunged into the water near the main waterfall, the Goddess’s Hair.   

Ahrimaz had stood up from where he’d been scrubbing mud and sweat out of his hair, before the woman had called, his head turning toward the falls.  “He knows, even if he doesn’t yet understand.”

The priestess dove under the thundering waterfall and a moment later came up with a young man, hauling him out by the hair.  They couldn’t hear what was being said but she shifted her grip the moment his face broke into air and he tried to fight her, to drive himself under again.  “They feel so much pain,” the High Priestess said.  “This year it’s worse than it has been in the past ten years.”

“Is it in part the knowledge that there are other worlds?”  Rutaçyen folded her hands and looked over at Ahrimaz, watching another priest wade over to the would-be suicide, one of the youngsters pelting up the path to fetch Limyé or another Imaryan healer from Innéthel.

“I think so.  Some people just give up and think “in another world I didn’t do this.  Let that ‘me’ go on.  This life hurts too much.”

 Mara nodded.  “But She lets us know if it is not their time.  Some years She allows the self murder and calls home but we know, then.”

“And Ahrimaz, our stranger, can tell.”

“He’s already a priest.  He already knows.  He’s just fighting it because it seems too good to be true for him.  He still thinks it necessary to be in pain, to pay for the evil he did in that other world.”

 “I see.” Rutaçyen smiled brightly as Ahrimaz sloshed out of the water, clean. His face was troubled.

“That boy…” he said.  “How did I know it wasn’t his time?  How did I hear him howling about how he had to die?”

The High Priestess handed him a clean robe and a towel.  “Probably because you have had the same urge.  It will make you sensitive to it.”

“Oh.” He dropped the robe over his head, then looked up in shock.  “This is a priest’s robe, not trousers!”

“Yes.  That’s all the investiture you’re getting,” the High Priestess said.  “You are now welcome onto the private meditation platforms.  Please don’t set them on fire if you get upset.”  She smiled at him and nodded to Rutaçyen.  “I’ll be over with Yo and Pel.  Limyé will, no doubt, report to me once he’s calmed that young man down.”

“Ahrimaz, you need to rest.  You pushed yourself to half-crazy today and are still shaking with fatigue.”  He was watching the boy being led out of the water, escorted by the two priests and the healer who had just arrived, running.

“Hmmm?” He took a deep breath, sank down to the platform.  “Yes, teacher.”

#83 - I Am So Humiliated

I swear these people will be the death of me.  The humiliation I feel burns and I cannot lash out in rage.  Truly they are ALL like this… Even the scorching shit elephants and the ice-assed High Priestesses.

They nearly blow themselves up because gun cotton looks ‘so innocent’.  One idiot, one fool, one moron with ice and shit for brains offered to sit on the box containing the explosive.  I heard afterwards, when they were picking the shards off us and the elephants were lifting wooden beams off people, that this self-copulating, hydrocephalic fool fainted dead away, confusing people who were trying to help victims of the explosion.

These people.  It looks so innocent? Freeze and scorch me I might just keel over in a dead faint myself should anyone show some useful cynicism!  I should never have said anything.  And M’sieur Lachemi has the insufferable gall, the inexpressible, unutterable and ineffable elephant balls to ask me about MORE things that the empire has come up with.

Fountain pens, enclosed air stoves, and high explosives aren’t ENOUGH?  I reeled off float glass, moveable type, which my friend M’sieur James says they have but made of hand-carved ironwood rather than poured metal, and lift locks on the river to make the navigation head somewhat higher into Innéan country than here and the man is gibbering.  He’s taking EVERYTHING I say now entirely seriously and it makes me want to start throwing fantasies at him.  Like the fool who showed me a children’s toy fire-balloon and tried to convince me that it could be up-scaled to a military observation platform. Silk gas-bags driven by leg-rowed spinning propellers!

Or the asinine idea of using water wheels to draw wire!  Wire rope! A fat-based paint that stops rust on military gear.  Can I throw all these wild theories at them to overwhelm them and make them leave me alone? Hmmm. Perhaps I will just throw everything at these Innovators.  At least they will then shut up and go away, leave me mostly alone.  I have a plan.  It will take them years to sort out which ideas are viable and which are merely chaff that I may hide behind.

And… and… I continue to avoid both Pel and Yolend and his children.  It hurts too much.  This makes the High Priestess’s offer to invest me as a priest up at the Veil much more appealing.  I just… can’t keep it together around people. I want to learn to love them.  Too much.  Too much. They... are lovable and I just do NOT know how to love without tying it to injury and torture.

I pull out the ink stick and the paper and begin to try and calm my mind.  Grind the ink.  Mix the ink.  Wet the brush. Breathe.  Try to draw a line.  Try to draw a circle.  Try to draw the image of Liryen’s Peace which has all the ink strokes in it.  Crumple them all and jam them into the closed stove in my room… the newly installed closed stove.  Ashes.  I have not one single clean line.  My mind is chattering and flailing and the ink shows it.  My hands are covered in ink spots and ashes.

Rutaçyen’s hands are always clean.  Her lines are clean.  I have managed ONE clean line and that was when I was so shaking exhausted I couldn’t see straight.

Didara can draw a better line than I.  Jagunjagun loves the idea of the ink sword and draws every day.  Innéans come to speak to him, to see him draw, to spirit away his ink marked pieces of paper.  I sit and am nothing but an embarrassment.

An embarrassment that needs to be dangled by one ankle and dunked in ice water until I obey. I hate them all.  I hate them all.  Of course I hate them.  They humiliate me. I hate them. I want to love them so badly.  But that's hard.  It is easier to hate them.  I have never done 'easy', though.

#82 - Explosions, Dunkings and Investitures

News at the House of the Hand

-  By Teel James

Hand Press, Innéthel Printers, Spring, Year Two of Ahrimiar Kenaçyen’s Sitting

First this author must comment upon the recent explosion at the House.  The Innovators of the House had taken Ahrimaz’s comments concerning the so-called ‘gun cotton’ quite seriously, but apparently not seriously enough.

The research facility had made tiny amounts, based on the ideas that came out of the journey to greet the Rummmumalos Ambassadors and had proposed to make a rather larger quantity.

The Innovators, led by M'sieur  had planned for their demonstration to be in the open courtyard before the Great Hall until a late season ice storm had them move into the Hall itself.  The Emperor of Strange Inné, Ahrimaz, gracing the gathering after his regular morning training with Swordmaster Rutaçyen, was just straightening his cuffs when he entered and saw the quantity of gun cotton they were about to light.

His bellow of “NO! Out out, everyone out NOW!”

Undoubtedly saved a number of lives, since most witnesses had been in the military and reacted to the command with alacrity.  Ahrimaz leaped into the centre of the Hall where M'sieur Lachemi was just lighting the fuse, grabbed him and his assistant by the collar and bodily dragged them through the partially open doors and outside into the freezing rain, even as the flame reached the small pile of gun cotton and it exploded.

Of the hundred or so people, already fleeing the hall when the gun cotton went off, forty-one were trapped in the rubble of the galleries crumbling.  Four elderly people who either did not hear, or react in time, were killed outright in the blast.

Ahrimaz and the Innovators were all three injured slightly by the doors of the Hall as they were blown off their hinges and splintered.  Everyone had their hearing damaged to some degree, the Liryen priesthood and the Imaryan healers report, but it should come back in a few days.

This reporter heard, with his own somewhat damaged ears, Ahrimaz say to the dazed Innovator, M’sieur Lachemi, “Didn’t I tell you?  What did I tell you?”  All three lay on the ice covered cobbles, half buried in enormous gilded splinters that could have, with a bit more energy behind them, become lethal weapons.

“M’sieur… I should have attended more carefully.  Emilié, take a note.”

“What? Oh, yes M’sieur.”

We encourage the researchers and Innovators to not disregard the information supplied to them, especially in regards to the safety of Innéan citizens.

We also thank the Rummmamalos Ambassadors for their invaluable assistance in freeing our citizens from the mostly ruined centre block of our Governmental House.

The committee for Maintenance and Repair are already discussing the logistics of rebuilding the public venue.

**

Healing of the Emperor: Continues

-  By Teel James

Hand Press, Innéthel Printers, Spring, Year Two of Ahrimiar Kenaçyen’s Sitting

The spectacle yesterday, of Didara the Curious, carrying a screaming, cursing flailing Ahrimaz, through the town hoisted up to near second story height, by one ankle, is easily explained.

The House healer Limyé explained that the Emperor made an abortive attempt at self-harm while in the Ambassador’s presence and when prevented, proceeded to argue with Didara. Unfortunately things escalated until the Ambassador acted, with both dispatch and alacrity.

This reporter was first made aware of the incident when the howling Emperor was carried, swinging, past the Broadsheet’s glass windows.  His coat hung inside out over his head and muffled the worst of his invective and impecunious language.  This reporter rushed outside and proceeded to follow the Ambassador as she carried Ahrimaz down to the river and proceeded to dunk him in the icy water to, as I later ascertained, “Cool his head.”

She then placed him, dripping and mortified, upon her back and calmly walked back to the Ambassadorial Hall and the hot pool in their reception theatre, where this reporter was barred from immediate entry.

Ahrimaz declined to explain, when interrogated later, turning an intriguing shade of embarrassment red.  This reporter intends to continue following the healing of Ahrimaz, and continue training with the man.

The High Priestess of the Veil, the honourable Mara d’Rom, has accepted Ahrimaz into the ranks of her priesthood, his investiture to proceed later in the spring when the weather turns.  

 “We don’t want to give our new priestesses and priests lung thick by having them go into the Veil when it is freezing,” she said.  “However much we pride ourselves in controlling the water temperature around us, acolytes and students and new clergy often have difficulties there, so of course we take that into consideration.  Ahrimaz will be re-invested, since he, in his other incarnation, was invested as a priest of Liryen then.”