Alstacia's 7th Commentary on Raindrinker

 

Kaffiyon’s Reports – Grey Season YK 2037 – Raindrinker – Court of Burkannyl Tabatta[1]

The Trulk           

Trulking, trulkish – there’s names for these things but when they speak their language it’s like the croak of a frog – “trulk”.  That’s their noise so I’ll call them all that.  Red fanged beasts, every one.  Tabatta is nothing like any greatblood, different in demeanor, in her court in her presence, all of it – she’s something new in the garden and not something good.  She’s supposedly only a few years old, she showed us her natal charts, provenances and good titles – none of them look like forgeries but none of them look like proper documents either.  If she is who she says she’s some kind of nightmare.  Supposedly she’s Arno’s daughter who he had on the way to the antipodal dark.  A fling with one of these red-fanged people.   We’ve not seen any among them that present as women, mothers daughters any of that.  Tabatta’s the only one so far.  She’s grown, fully grown and not a decade gone – if you believe what these things in the dark say, how can they even count years without seeing the sun.  She’s a grown adult & dresses like the others.  Lives with the others-  it’s a collapse of any protocol we’ve ever been commanded to uphold. 

The whole meeting is worth commenting upon.  We’d been caged in one of Tabatta’s men’s houses.  At first it seemed just a place to be stored for later need but it was a jail of a sort we soon deduced.  It was, I think Margus who tried to get out – he wanted to tend to his samples and made to leave but was kept from doing so.  There’s no door on their house – dirt holes that they are – but they laid a plank over the entry and had enough men or stones or something stacked upon it that even I couldn’t lift it, not with the help of all the rest of the iron tree’s men.  We realized then, far too late, that our bearers- the Euye woodmen weren’t among us.  We had thought they might be housed elsewhere in observance of some local taboo.  Reasoning that we’d be poor explorers indeed if we were trapped by a dirt hole – we began digging at the walls and were making our way out of the cage of stone roots that piered the dirt.  This was in opposition to a taboo as the trulkish of the village reacted with angry croaks, lashing at our hands with switches.  We retreated from the attack but could see – were able to peer out of the dark hole into the village to see what transpired.  Our bearers – the Euye we’d gone with down here to the Duskmarch – they were spread upon the ground – tied to stakes & each other ankles & wrists in a circle upon the open ground under the coalchain laurels.  The host of our house the one with the fleshy rose blooming in his chest then grunted at the rest and they passed among them a wooden bowl grown with moss.  “Drink the rain ulthansons!  Drink the rain like the horsetamer! the stormcaller!”  This they said in the Euye tongue but I’d learned enough by then to understand.  They drank filthy water, pouring it over themselves – then the one with the flower-of-flesh upon his breast leaned low over each of the splayed men on the clay – crawled over them, growling & spitting.  I felt the stone root of the tree crack under my hands but I could not break them or get free though I pulled at them with a will.  The rite we witnessed-  it was a horrid thing – the crawling man – from his flower of flesh a stream of blood, flowing like water, flowing with ease, poured over each of the captives who in turn screamed in terror and writhed in hideous pain.  Under the coal light the red of the blood and the trulkings’ teeth and the foam at the mouths of the captives – all of it, red and soaking.  The flower gouted blood and the man, our host, collapsed in the midst of the captives.  The ground quickly soaked in his gore bubbled blood and that flowed over the ground toward the hole we were kept in.  We struggled to shore up a barrier against it, replacing where we’d dug with mound of clay, desperate to keep the blood at bay.  The unnatural flow of so much blood.  So much, and I could see, through the stone bars of roots, through the handfuls of clay I mashed into the gaps, the man with the flower, the host, gasping at air, the flower pumping feeble jets in time with his breaths. 

Tabatta’s Garden Again

They drug the plank from the entry and waited for us to climb out of our own accord.  They didn’t pull or command or cajole at all.  Senjamis the foolish old man made to leave first with a noise about his knees doing poorly in the damp.  I had to hold him back.  “Get your iron branch old man.”  I realized without them we’d be in danger for our lives.  Without the iron branch to prove our status we could be killed – probably would be killed without a thought.  No one lightly slights the iron tree, to harm a member is unthinkable.  They say even the specter of death itself is frightened when it comes to the iron tree and that disease and hunger in personified form are hesitant themselves to harm one of the Irontree so that’s why they rarely go hungry or die of sickness.  So they say.  “Get your iron branch old man!”  He’d left it in the mud, which fact amazed me – but in the coalchain’s light I could barely see the old man’s face, the others in the troupe – they’d been frightened.  Obviously they’d been frightened, we’d spent a month clawing through the dark forest fearful of what was hiding at the fire’s edge and now confronted by it, it was altogether more terrible than we’d ever guessed, than we could imagine.  So it fell to me to act, as I could see the despair on them, by that bare red light, these men, industrious, decent – they’d never be ready for what we’d witnessed, they’d likely never recover.  But I’d been trained for it, to abandon fear or sense – to withstand a greatblood’s wrath or a talan’s challenge.  And now I was betraying myself to our captors – revealing too much by controlling myself.  “Get your stick, they won’t hurt us if you carry your badges.  They can’t.”  Which these eight men believed.  They trusted their badges because they’d been trained to, raised to and had through their experience been made assured of their inviolability.  So they took direction. 

I left the hole first – no reason not to pretend at least that I was bravest of the troupe – no reason not to upset the impression, change a watcher’s perception.  I held my branch of iron before me saying – “You know what this means – you don’t dare break the Kannyltine’s law do you?  Do you think you’ll break the greatbloods’ laws?”  I needn’t have been so forceful, I think – they looked at me and the others, scoffing, not laughing, they do not laugh – these men of the duskmark, these trulks – they do not laugh but sneer and hiss and bare their rust fangs and their crimson nails.  They sneered at our discomfort and sneered at our iron branches.  When Amiss went to examine our bearers – Amiss, a physician – he’d treated them their hurts on the trail, developed a sense of propriety, control – the physician’s way, I’d seen it elsewhere and wasn’t surprised by it now.  He’d been noisily opposed to their wrapping themselves in the coalchain – he’d pleaded with them to be treated.  They’d refused him, the mad Euyemen and now they’d surprised him.  Amiss shouted at the bound men and the trulkish only sneered again.  “They’re alive, they’re changing – look, their wounds!  Look!”  He cried, not just cried out but wept – in fear, you’ll see that sometimes, amongst the broken-willed, weeping terror.  We’d all been made to feel it, when we’d been brought to the Tower of Gold – once and for the last time when they purged fear from us.  Poor Amiss hadn’t the benefit of such discipline and fell upon the supine bodies and wept in terror.  Their wounds-  the welts they’d raised with the coalchain wrappings now boiled, bled a black seeping puss where the blood of the flower-of-flesh had poured into them.  And the man – the flower man – he’d withered to nothing by then, he’d wrinkled into desiccated mummy – just flesh wrinkled tight over displaced bones and topped, horribly, by the blooming flower, flesh, meat, dripping blood and blooming.  The captives, the tied men bleeding slime into the blood drenched clay  they each -all of them the twelve of them, they began t howl, to sing to shriek harmoniously together, joined by the other trulkish, our captors.  When they bared their teeth in their awful shrieks we could see they were stained red, their white eyes rolling as they twisted their limbs snapping them, breaking them stretching as they boke their bindings with popping noises, crackling like fat on a skillet.  They broke themselves and writhed free to stand, broken, draped in their bindings to join with the others – newly born, newly made trulkish.  They must have known – since Aismoth Falls, since we’d gone with them on the trail that this was their destination, this transformation, mutilation.  Such thought was not my own alone – the others of the iron tree, captives – we held each other close, gripped wrists and shoulders-  shock, terror.  I grabbed at Amiss, pulled him up from where he knelt, weeping amidst the ritual transfiguring.  “Keep hold of your stick physician.  They’ll not dare harm you.”  I told him, loud enough so the others would hear, loud enough that the trulkish would hear but I knew, then, that they would not care.  They would harm us or not only at their whim.  We would live or we would die here but nothing in us would make that determination for we’d fallen into an enemy’s power.

Without force our captors guided us where they wanted us to go.  They simply lined up, created a path and we followed it as they braced us on either side, their long limbs entwined their redfanged sneers shining in the coallight.  The path was a sinuous journey into the deeper part of the hidden valley.  Under a particularly large stone tree the roots of which rose out of the ground creating a cage of stone roots under a mass of stone – trunk and branches looming overhead and never not seeming precarious.  We were led to this realm where the coalchains were fewer the lights unkindly dim, we struggled on the red clay, slipping in it and clutching at one another.  We were drawn into the court of Burkannyl Tabatta then.  This court is unalike to any other of the greatblood courts.  She reclines upon the bodies of her trulkish men, who weave themselves together into a mat of limbs and bodies that undulate with breath.  Surrounding the supine Burkannyl were stands of the fleshy flowers – these massive, larger across than the spread of my arms and at their base are many dozens of the withered bodies from whence they must have sprouted.  Each flower stinking of cloves and rancid oil, each dribbling from their petalled lips streams of oily nectar that drowned the crawling bugs around their base in pools of stinking perfume.  She writhes with her men, breathes as they breathe and as the blooms of flesh gasp and breathe – there is heat in all this breathing that steams and rises like a dense cloud within the court, there is a hot wetness upon one’s face as they enter here, and which leaves oily sweating drips down their necks and arms.  I bow without hesitation to guide the others, I pull down Amiss who’s not out of his shock.  “Majesty. We are servants of he Iron Tree sent by the Golden Dreamer the Kannyltine to survey your territory.”  Gregor says it, breathes it out and we all mutter our assent.  We’re here to do a job, a cursed job but quite within what anyone could expect, certainly in the course of mortal affairs our task here is well within the bounds of the expected.   We steam ourselves, breathing hard as we hold our palms against the clammy clay soil.  It flows over my knuckles as if the earth itself would seek to hold my hands, to pull me close.  “You are the newest of the Kannyltine’s cousins, he wishes to offer greetings to you, to offer as gift our services.”  Still Gregor speaks – following a protocol, I’m certain, but one I know not.  No Kannylte has been created in a score of a dozen years.  No Kannylte has been made in all the generations of my family.  But these are the words said when a fresh territory is carved from the terminal edge of the empire.  We bow, offering service and giving up our works as an offering. 

She responds – every bit a greatblood her voice leaves an echo within our heads, an unheard echo that vibrates the jaw, raises the hairs upon one’s neck and arms.  My eyes seem to swim in my head and I feel borne forward carried along a golden path of wisdom and light.  The gnosis one feels when addressed by the greatbloods directly puts me at ease.  “Men of the Iron Tree, only men.  If you’ve come to serve you are welcome here.  Tell us about our kannylte given by our father the Kannyl Arno, ruler of the utter dark.”

To disagree with the greatblood voice, to hear these words and to say, “no” – such a thing is not attempted by the untrained.  I think to myself the words I must say – “nothing is given but by the Kannyltine, the world is his and he grants you its use, shares with us all what is his.”  This is what I ought to say and it would be right, we all should say it at once- each man of the irontree should know this and repeat it.  Only Gregor is able though – he says the words while I try to whisper them. 

“My cousin is generous with his lands and with his sages.  Thank you, men of the Tree of Iron.  I thank you for my father for your allegiance to our master.  I am only newly seated and not yet so gifted in courtly manners as many among you.  I thank you for educating me.”  She is not thankful, she is menacing, she is furious to be contradicted.  A glance at her terrible court tells anyone she has never faced contention, never been held in check.  The fury in her voice rakes over nerves, the Greatblood skill not trained but bred, she is a lash of scorn that stings the mind.  “You say that you’ve been given to me.  What is it to have a person?  I have my cousins, my kinsmen here but you’re outside the song from the dark, the dusk music like me.  I have you?  Gifts?  What will I do with you?”  This, what she said-  it meant little then, but the tone of it – she rose & approached me – long & with the extra joints like the others of the court – she approached and I knew she would come for me.  “What about you, a giant, a mountain.  I have heard of the mountains.  There are some in the darkness below – my father tells me about them when he sings to me in my sleep, when I sing to him I’ll tell him I have seen a mountain too, a man.  What’s this?  You’ve horns!  Horned giant!  My cousin the ruler of all men is kind to give me such.”  Always it is thus for the hlorii out in the world and whether I’d hoped for less predictable treatment from her or not, I still was disappointed.  She, more exotic than I by far, a unique specimen, and yet she feels confident to comment, well of course, it’s her court.  I’m her subject.  “I am an hlorii of the southern coast of the Empire my Burkannyl.  My people do not commonly wander far from the sea but I felt obliged to do the work of the iron tree and its master the Kannyltine.” 

“My father told me about your kind.  He has friends from across the sea.  Men who walked the ice with him. He says they walked the ice.  Do you know what that means?  I have not seen ice, only felt it.  In the dark there’s only ice.  But it can’t be seen.  Do you know that?  That in the utter dark there is not light at all?  Only ice and cold.  My father is there subduing the mothers of the trulk.  He’ll do it and the world will be saved.  That is his work.  He tells me you don’t believe him.” 

Marcus saved me her attentions – drew some his own way.  “We had not known that these creatures were a danger to the country.  They only drive from the utter dark every seventeenth year.  That is what we know of them.  And never in numbers They cannot overtake a wall or defeat armed soldiers.  That is what we have recorded for the Iron Tree.  Will you share with us, your experiences?”  I do not believe that she’d ever been asked a question. 

“My experience is that the singers in the ice and dark sing and when the song reaches our ears we must dance.  But I have learned to sing better than them, I’m cousins with your Kannyltine, is why.  I sing.  So my other cousins dance for me.  Live for me.  Die for me if I want it.”   She glared at us all.  This is her look – she is too tall because her joints are twisted and too long.  She has red fangs for teeth and red needles for claws.  She has a beautiful commanding face and a voice that melts the will.  She is draped in red hair that hangs like muddy ropes over her bare shoulders.  Upon her arms are the impressions of flesh-roses, skin flowers but retracted somehow, so they are nearly smooth upon her bare gray skin – like a pattern of flowers carved into her over and over, covering her.  She glares with pale eyes, gold eyes, she glares and locks her gaze with us each when she says it.  She looks hard at me and says “Kill for me if I want it.”

The others, I can hear their teeth chatter – they’re truly afraid, the chill of her words eats through them.  You see this sometimes, the real fear – that overwhelms nerve.  They quiver when she speaks – their knees knocking.  When the fear is real, not performative, but real – intense, true – physical – then your teeth might chatter and your knees might knock.  She makes them shake, the Irontree surveyors.  I am trained and do not betray fear.  I am trained and do not meet her gaze, she is superior.  I am servile.  She is greatblood.  I bow and don’t meet her gaze but I don’t shiver with fear.  This is apparently defiance enough for her.  “You are mine, my cousin, your Kannyltine gave you to me.”  She pretends it is a question.  I know what is coming.  “I want you to prove yourself for me.  I want you to fight for your life.  You, big one.”  The trulkish in the court murmur as one, like an undulating gasp that you’d imagine as the laughter of an ocean.  My fellow surveyors let loose gasps, tearful sobs.  It’s asking much from them, to bear up under a greatblood’s command in such a condition.  They weep and I rise, not meeting her gaze. 

“My Iron Branch makes me inviolate.  I and my troupe are not to be harmed.” 

She’s never faced defiance but she knows not to accept anything but assent.  “If your Kannytline protects you, what harm could come to you?  Do this for me, for my court.”

So I did.

 

The Trulkish

She picked out one of her men and sent him to meet me in the middle of her room.  They’d gathered boughs of coalchain & hung them on stone branches, this is what they have in place of candles down there.  Then they’d set fire to mounds of the mushroom buttons they had gathered apparently for this purpose specifically because they smoked and guttered for a few long moments before lighting and then burning steadily emanating a stinking ochre smoke.  The smoke is the main thing of their fight I think, not the light because I think they can see by the darkness in the dim of the duskmarch they could see like you or I can see by day.  That’s what I’m told by my reliable source.  It’s not for light but the smoke that they burn the mushrooms because the smoke is stinking but it fills the lungs and drives out good air and good sense along with it.  A potent effect, the noxious things have- they killed one among us with a touch but their burning smoke was sufficient to kill our reason and render my weak-kneed, cowering cohort a mess of sobbing laughter, hysterical – like Ambrose’d been when he died.  I laughed along with them but held together, since I was about to be in a fight for my life.  I kept my head up and didn’t fall to my knees but I couldn’t help but hold my head back and let free some bellows.  I yelled rather than laugh, shouted at the sky and sang, not as well as any hlorii but better than any woods-born Euye or trulk could sing.  I bellowed and waved my iron branch instead of laughing but the same convulsions that lead to Ambrose’s death were gripping my heart like an icy claw and I could see it hurting the others just as badly, driving them to the red-clay mud in desperate hysterics. 

The trulkish don’t laugh, they don’t laugh and when they smile it’s a menacing mask, nothing like friendship can possibly exist among them, nothing like a colleague – one’s either of their kind or meat to be eaten.  I found that out when they sent one of them after me.  He rushed in through the smoke, coughing as he came, drooling yellow gore it poured down his chest – the smoke turned to spittle, as he drank it out of the heavy air.  He came at me and accepted my iron branch which I held out like a shield, he accepted it as it crashed into his shoulder and came at me, twisting as he did, a frantic fall and a flailing as he saved himself a spill by clawing at my leg and middle.  He caught himself and dangling by his claws hung up in my flesh he drove his face into me and bit for all he could at my thigh.  I gave him the flat part of my stick with as much force as I could manage and I felt it break his skull but he didn’t let go – not one bit.  I let it fall on him twice more & felt his brains pour down my leg, felt his blood burning on me and still the awful claws the awful bite wouldn’t relent.  I had to pry his face off of me with the pointed end of my branch, pull his dead hands apart, breaking the fingers to get its paws to loose me.  Not a brief enough fight and not a long fight by any means but a terrible one and bloody.  I was angry and roared in the smoke – still not laughing though the other klialis did, I bellowed and stamped the dead trulkish’ body into the mud and I might have gone at Tabatta – my stick in hand – I might have but the meditation that drives out the greatblood induced fear it also reasserts one’s wits.  I’d like to have stove her head in as well as I’d done her servant but I held back and then the calm wash of clarity came over me, the wise voice of the Kannytline in my mind.  I let my limbs rest, almost dragging my iron branch in the mud. 

“You’ve seen it for yourself.”  Was all I could think to say.  And “Let us go.  Let them go, we’re here as a favor.  To you.”

 

Gregor

I keep referring to him as Gregor here, for the sake of secrecy but you, if you’re reading this must know who I mean, you sent him as you sent me.  He came to me in our cage – which after all is where we were returned.  He came to me and said what I was thinking to myself, what I knew well enough.  “She doesn’t dare let us go.”  I nodded.  Saying nothing.  Amiss was upon me, pulling his threads, sewing up my wounds and saying “The trulk, it tore at one of your canals, without attention you’d bleed, be still, let the threads work.”  He sewed me up with his chemist threads, kept me alive while Gregor came to talk to me.  “If we are able to get word of anything we’ve seen – it means she’ll be the target of every lance and sword and arrow in the empire.  An outlaw Kannylte?  Has there ever been such a thing?”

“Two hundred years back,” says Kirll, who’d know.  “There was, out upon Bronzecap, a pirate of the coast claimed himself Vorkannyl, he said he was a greatblood bastard.” 

“And what happened to him?” 

“I think the Kannyl of Silverheaven was created as a reward for the talans that hanged him.” 

“She doesn’t dare let us go.”  Gregor speaks, low and fast – he’s got a kind of hurried precision in his voice, he seems frantic when he’s calm, and always serious.  I turn and glare at him, as one does when their near-mortal bite wounds are being treated while you’re being told bad news.  I think it displeased him because beneath his styled beard he smiled a quick, sincere grin.  “You know she won’t.  But we must tell someone.”

“Must we?”  Amiss is worried, not for himself – I think he considered himself dead when the smoke rose up in his lungs.  I think he’s still affected by it, still near hysteria, he hasn’t stopped grinning.  “We’re servants at court, like we always have been, it’s just a different sort of court.  We’re supposed to survey – I don’t see why we oughtn’t carry out the survey.  Stay on task, that’s our duty no?”

“You think we can offer ourselves up to her and she’ll fall into line?  Act the part?”  Senjamis, the old man circumspect.  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’d seen a new-made lord behave so badly.  Only then there’s a Kannyl on hand to knock sense into them.  Where’s her Kannyl?  Where’s Arno?  That’s the question – Raindrinker’s got no masters at hand.  I think we’s aught to get at her on this account – get her to take up her papa’s duty.” 

“What about the others?  His other subordinates? “The Irontree servants fell into a long digression about what the proper order of succession must be amongst the lesser lords of Raindrinker.  But Gregor stayed by me, even helping Amiss tie off his threads. 

“What about Arno.  He’s got no dispensation to invade the Antipodes.  Who even knows where he’s gone?”  And I took his meaning, Gregor. 

And I answered him in Hlorin, the language I write here, obscure anywhere but particularly unknown in the East:  “The Moon is charming.”

And he answered, likewise in the language of my kin “It is as Golden as the Kannyltine's Vault."  Consummating the rite, his Hlorin better than adequate.  "I should have supposed that I would not be sent alone.  I confess it is a relief to find another among our party."  Quickly he revealed that he was suffering as I was – "Have you seen the Tower since we've achieved the Duskmarch?  When last did you see it?" 

Too long ago, before the Duskmarch and before it, at Aismoth Falls I saw a bloody mouth when I looked into the place in my mind where I would look to find the tower.  No tower but the bloody mouth, and further up the Euyhmer, when we’d gone under the fortress at Draylbuhn – there:  “I saw fire, a burning hearth,” he says. 

"It is obvious isn't it.  This adventure in the south the aggrandizement, the inauspicious nativity.  I think that the Burkannyl certainly understands her role as her father’s agent but do you think she has any orders?  She’s no conspirator, she’s a pawn – too new, too unready for whatever Arno’s plan is – she’s here to guard his back.”  Gregor sighs.  “It’s this I was sent to discover.  “For the Tower of Gold – discern the purpose of this Dusk Mark.  A modest task, and now – accomplished.   I take it, sir, that your work is yet incomplete.” 

I watch the little man pull at his moustaches, he’s truthfully nervous now, not playing a part – not pretending his Irontree duty.  He’s anxious and fearful – having broken the masquerade.  I realize as well that I’m more stirred by this than I was by the charging beast man I’d only on the hour killed.  No, revealing this secret was more terrible, by far than fighting any trulkish.  Even to another keeping the same secret.  “It's the father's will I was sent to learn, his ambition in the utterdark – whether he’s discover anything.  What she does here is curious, maybe terrible, but it is not my duty to discover." 

His duty is done.  We consider this place, this village, as they’ve called it.  Not one begging child, no men drinking on their doorsteps.  The only woman recognizable as such here is Tabatta.  It’s no village, it’s a camp, a war base.  Gregor’s seen it and knows that Tabatta calls herself a peer of the greatblood.  His duty is done – this is what is being done – a hidden army is being made – a monstrous one at that.  He’ll need to get out of here, he’ll need to contact the tower.  “They need to know what’s happening here.”  We agree on this.  I finish my own report, this report & put it in his hands.  He’ll get out of here, I’ll see to it.  He wishes me luck, in the dark, as I finish this report. 

---

[1]The second collection of Kaffiyon’s letters in my possession.  The hand remains the same, full of unintentional majuscule (typical of a Hlorii’s use of the brush & stamp), which leads me to believe that the Kaffiyon with whom I am acquainted was the document’s author.  The letters are a muddled mess of several documents, I’ve collated what I take to be the narrative thrust of his account and assembled it as a codex.  Thrilling stuff, if I say so.