Through sylvan glades and winding valleys, sleeping red mountains and cerulean sky palaces, the architecture of the gods and the treachery of men- follow me. It is the Starving Eon in the once-magnificent city of Kasmakesh, and the King’s men are pursuing a slum boy kept in chains. The ashes of an old war are still burning, and the pursuit of paradise endures.  

City of Kasmakesh, Moon 73 of summer
The Starving Eon
Sable Hammontree

The last bronze plumes of sunlight were lazily melting into the coming dusk, and her son’s hair was growing darker every day. The two concerning events were unrelated and seemingly insignificant and yet they pressed at Sable’s consciousness with a meek but valid proficiency. Days were growing longer, it was summer in the russet walled expanse of their brine-rank city, skin was browning and peeling and hair should be blonding. But not for Low Lazar, the boy she did not birth.

Lazar let his brother alone. For almost an hour now Tarik had been mining pointed, flat stones from their crumbling wall and lunging them at the charred tree across the yard, landing each crude dagger with anticipated precision and a buried brute strength on his mark. Lazar, however, lay unobtrusively across the parched earth, coiling his arms above his head, squinting at the sky, ignoring his brother’s labour to rouse him. Tarik was a brunet whirlwind- wiry and dextrous, bleached hair curling insolently to his boned shoulders, fast voice with a gap between his teeth and a lisp on his tongue. Lazar was still water, solid flesh and chestnut hair, hesitant to speak and hesitant to act, sorely suspicious of his distance and his difference to this place.

“Where are you going, myrzal?” Tarik called, dropping his stones and gambolling over to block the archway as he spotted Sable making preparations to leave the hut they called home. Lazar propped himself up onto his elbows, suspecting already that his mother’s business concerned him. Too clever for your own good, my boy, Sable reflected inwardly.
“None of your business little lamb, eh?” Tarik scowled at her affections and turned back to his stones. “Find me a fish. Parsley and a lemon too. There is black bread in the keep.”

She left them to their supper voyage and continued through the frenzied parade of hovels spilling out from the high-walls of the city, all the way down dusty and fractured slopes to the sea. Where the sea met the slum it failed to present itself as sea at all- more akin to a profane frothing amalgamation of salt and human waste, a rank and watery assault to power. There was hierarchy, even here- the lowest of the low built their huts at the ocean’s mouth and slept in frail defiance against the tide. The highest of the low rammed thatched driftwood and cloth shelters up against the sentinel domes along the outskirts of the city, slept in tents of muslin, and lit broken lanterns to picket themselves against the scum of the night. The first to appropriate the second day scallops, the half loaves of stale bread and the rotting mango skins, they ruled with a pride that belongs to the big fish in the small pond. And it never failed that when the sentries stampede came to tear each house stick from stone, each beggar began again.

Sable and her two sons found refuge in one room of a rammed earth hut, in which she kept three sleeping slings, a splintered bench, a makeshift hearth, a pantry for their scarce food, a chest for their ragged clothing, and a range of pilfered ceramics. The days began at dawn- with a pastel haze of sky and a great golden orb fishing itself up and above the world, and Lazar and Tarik would break their fast on stale black bread. The hemp curtain would obscure the view but not the warmth, the sultry insinuation of a breeze came from the sea, and the boys’ dark shapes would march away, dislocating wreaths of silence. They would follow the Waterway, a broad clay alley that divided the slum all the way down to the water’s mouth, but Tarik turned back towards the Pity Gate and Lazar went down towards the fishing fleets. Hours later when the sun slipped back into the sea and the walls were awash with gilded light they returned, one with a fish and one with a coin, like clockwork.

Except three days past, when Lazar hadn’t returned until the pit of the night. Oh how the worry had screeched in Sable’s bowel like the string of some great instrument played too hard. Women rarely strayed from their encampments past sundown in that slum- those hours belonged to the drunken and the wretched, domineering kings of the alleyways, the two faces Azkari men who sold girls to the South in the dead of night. Sable rejected the delusion. Armed with the jagged end of a broom handle, she’d sent Tarik and his company down the Waterway and turned herself toward the Pity Gate. The sentries had guttered like flames when they saw her coming, offended that she still existed even here under the inky blanket of night.

The sentries had appeared the size of ants under that colossal archway. Hundreds of feet up was its apex, shaped into a pyramid with a great eye carved into the sandstone at the very top. It was 300 stairs up to the first checkpoint- Kasmakesh was a city built on humongous foundations that sit alongside the uppermost canopy of the jungle.  Concealing her exhaustion, her fear, assertive and controlled, she’d asked them if they had seen her brown haired boy.
“Your boy!” they’d jeered, “leave that stazsit, shit stain, in the sun- aye, his hair is like a filthy sewer.” Someone yanked her golden braid hard, questioning the legitimacy of Lazar’s birth. “You are sleeping in the dirty bed of the south eh? Perhaps his daddy visiting today? We saw him this morning. A peasant all cloaked up for a winter came down from the domes asking after him. We sent him down the docks and they went back through the Gate not long after- th’ pair of them.”

She’d panicked. Today? Now? They want him back? He was only a boy. She’d tried to pass through the Gate, and they’d shoved her away, shouting that no slum dweller could enter until sunrise. At that moment, Tarik had come barrelling up the stairs reporting Lazar’s return to the hut.

And here she was, seeking out the cloaked stranger who’d abducted Lazar just three days past. The great dirty gold steps grew taller before her, each one seeming to spawn three more when she conquered it. Towering walls of sandstone grazed the plumes of ashy cloud that had been drifting seaward from the city all afternoon- signalling a feast in the domes. At the first checkpoint she paused under the arch, gazing up at the separate hemispheres of stone and sky, hundreds of feet above her. The eye of the Gate gazed back. Nobody stopped her, and on she strode past the last loitering sentries in their glittering chain mail and myrtle green head wraps.

Kasmakesh was a sight to behold. In decades gone by Sable had known it well, when she had been an entertainer with a well-recognized troupe and her traditional Azkari beauty had been the main selling point of their touristic regime. They had played as showgirls to travelling nobility, the lords and their budding lovesick sons of the south who wanted to witness the exotically striking girls Kasmakesh and the other cities of Azkar are known for. They’d come on their stamping cavalry from all over, both the beasts and the men always melting into lifeless sacks as the arid climate set in on them. The frantic, arrogant Spearlove boys of Rothdeer Vale came often, always ill at ease and anxious to be comfortable once more tucked away deep in their fjord in the mountains. There were the Iralow’s too- but never had an Iralow set foot over the mountains since the civil war. More common had been the travellers from the south east, over the ____ bay- the fat and jovial Fellheart’s from Redwater, the lesser royals of Araluen, the nomadic lunewalkers of the Tomewood and, very occasionally, a tall golden visitor or two from Arkale.  They always paid the best.

The city was different now, since tension had built between the southern dynasties behind the mountains. Kasmakesh was suspicious and closed up, angry and alone. Everybody suffered. On the horizon, in a hemisphere of sanguine and scintillating bubbles, all the great domes of the city crowded together and recoiled against the filthy struggle below.  Perhaps had history not gone awry, the whole city within the gates would have been the mass of golden orbs it was supposed to be. Currently it was half a marvellous kingdom bordering on a lecherous sprawl of poverty. The putrid stench fish market Sable was scuttling through reassured her of this.

At a narrow laneway opening up on her left, Sable noted a rotting drift wood plaque chained tactfully to a scallop stall. It directed her, if she was indeed seeking the Blue Steeple tavern, down the alley and to the last shack on the right.

She drew her makeshift weapon in her sleeve, guessing at what too prepare for. He would be sent for a reason, yes, a friend of the King- but sent to retrieve her adopted son, nonetheless. Lazar had caught a word, a word that blew in with jungle debris on the sultry wind of the mountains that something was afoot in the south- and he’d been right.

In the nooks and along the tables, ear to ear, floorboard to rafter in the Blue Steeple, they were speaking of war. The fools were drunkenly proclaiming, the cautious men were brooding in hushed tones lest the wrong people overhear, and the wisest men were stony in their non-convicting silence.
“The Azkari are lambs who go to sleep outside a slaughterhouse. The butchers are hungry.”
“Hungry for a piece of dirt to breed their mongrels on, aye.”
“They’re surrounded. Rothdeer Vale guarding the only pass through the mountains, and all the might of Helmfirth at the base. It was a man from Tallengrove told me about six days past- he says the lads of their lot are being recruited for something. Not much in this forsaken tangle for them, ‘less what they want is more slaves…”

Their naïve suggestions melted into other similar plumes of conversation and event. The tavern was barren. I suppose that’s what happens when you take away the hole for them to stick their cocks into, Sable thought to herself. Alone in the corner of the common hall she didn’t draw much attention- but every now and then a drunken dupe would stagger over and crack his elbows down on the bench with the clatter of coins to follow. “If you want to buy a piece of meat, go back to the fish markets,” was her response. Until their dying breath they chase after something to soften their minds and harden their cocks.

And softened, indeed they were, Sable mused, listening as a bearded merchant raved with a drunken charioteer. Outside, the sun had been replaced with a pale and bloated white prince, loitering in the sky as she imagined the last bronze flumes rippled to black across the sea. A breath of cool wind stirred the lanterns by the door, and she wondered what the hour was. It had taken her a good deal of time on foot to reach the Blue Steeple. Shadows were gathering amongst the rafters where the rusted tin lanterns had not been lit, creating hollows along the thick oak panelled walls of the alehouse. Daylight had diminished ominously early, and her instruction from Lazar had been to meet the stranger at sundown. She held fast. It had been fifteen years since they’d brought Lazar too her, swathed in a hessian sack. It may well be the same soldiers and the same council gathering this evening.