Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Road Home
Monday, May 3rd, 2010
We drove. No light outside but eye-reflections of hedgehogs in the road, around which Sotehn swerved. No light inside except the speedometer and the yellow-dim beam of the flashlight I held on the copy of the Psalms of Enoch which my master, Lulnon, read aloud.
We didn’t want any other light. On the dashboard stood a figure of the Baptizer made of pale plastic that glowed in the dark. It was nearly three in the morning, and its glow had faded hours ago. If it brightened again, that meant a nephalim really was pursuing us, as Sotehn had said, and it was gaining.
I leaned from the back seat to keep the light shining over my master’s shoulder. The car smelled of sun-cracked vinyl upholstery. Most days, I was content learning distilling, compounding, and the rest of the alchemist’s craft. Ever since that bridge over the dry streambed, and the voice that came out of the water that wasn’t there, I’d wished I’d been apprenticed to a cobbler or a wool merchant like my brothers.
An hour later, while Lulnon read haltingly from a copy of the Psalms of Noah with very small type, I thought I saw the figure begin to lighten.
“There,” said Sotehn before I’d found my voice to speak.
We’d be fine once we reached the city. The priests had renewed the designs on every road leading in just last week, retracing the protective geometry with chalk I’d helped my master compound from the bones of animals sacrificed at the temples.
Setehn touched the sigils painted in a ring around the Baptizer, invoking each planetary angel by name as he touched its sign. The yellow-green glow went cloudy for a moment, then came back bright as before. Maybe brighter.
“A strong one,” Setehn said. “Probably newly wakened.”
The glow intensified as the city drew closer. Even with sodium lights along the road now, I could see it. Ahead of us, the chalk designs just visible against the road black.
We passed over them. I slumped back in relief.
“No,” said my master, “we are betrayed.”
The figure still glowed. The bones hadn’t been blessed after all.
“I’ll lose it in the market,” said Sotehn, and, knowing how familiar he was with the maze of alleys there, I had no doubt he would.
But an unholy creature walked the city, and someone had opened the way for it.
Lessons in the Dark
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
Today’s story continues last week’s The Tale of the Astrolabe.
“Why am I learning all this?” asked Saan after his first day on the shore of the subterranean ocean.
The scorpion-man was the one who finally answered. “Study a year and a day, and you’ll know.”
“You’ll tell me?”
He didn’t answer, and if his carapace-skin hadn’t been translucent, Saan wouldn’t have seen his smile.
Beyond the sea-light’s shimmer, everything was unchanging darkness. Saan had no idea when days began or ended. He doubted he’d have much more sense of a year.
First thing after waking, he cleaned and repaired owl towers. Rather than keeping mice out of fields like their counterparts above, these owls kept lungfish from overrunning the delicate gardens of land-coral. Before sleep, Saan polished the astrolabes they hung to scare off the fish the owls didn’t get.
Between, he had lessons.
The troglodyte women taught about the world below. Irzell taught history and her sister Zirell, geography. Some days, he was sure they switched, but the subjects blurred anyway–listing Aldressorian battle-griots led naturally into recounting the shifting borders of their telling-lands down the years of the memory wars.
The baboon doffed his filigree robes for long strips of cloth like mummy wrappings to teach combat, hand and blade. He had to repeat every move a hundred times before Saan could make his far less flexible body imitate the vaguest shadow of the motion.
Saan sat with the scorpion-man for hours, rehearsing protocol, which was even more elusive than the other subjects. If you were given a snail, the proper thing was to praise the sky over the land of the snail-giver’s birth. Unless you were in the south of Uil, where saying anything before eating the snail was a mortal offense. Unless this was during the festival of Noltu, and the snail was spiced. Then you needed to feign sneezing, and remember that loudness counted for sincerity among the Uilish…
Saan had gone from wondering why he was learning these things to wondering if he was learning anything.
Irzell sensed his uncertainty. “There are patterns to everything. All knowledge is written in stars above us.”
“We’re in a cave,” said Saan, but, looking up, he saw faint glints on the far-off cave ceiling.
“The knowledge of a dozen lost libraries is there, encoded.”
“But how do you decode…” he said, and remembered the garden’s astrolabes.
A year and a day didn’t seem quite as long.