Some Gossip That Fell Into My Ear As I Walked Into The Auld Mathom Shoppe
This is a short story I wrote for submission to the Lunar Awards Season 10 Fantasy Round. 1
You remove the loose stone that hides the thirteen silver tyrians which now constitute all that remains of your paternal inheritance. As you knead the Terra Figulina around one of the old coins, you curse the Djinn for their rarified preference when it comes to antique specie and consider how one day this operation will no longer be possible. You are careful not to burn your fingers too badly as you gently suspend this earth-encased coin upon the trivet that straddles the lit wick of a feline-tallow candle. You break the seal of the small scroll and use a jewelers loupe as you carefully copy the three lines of Helavah characters into the notebook you keep for the categorization of unreadable scripts. This extra step never seems to hinder the operation, but you still work quickly, wary with the feeling that what you are doing is transgressing some sort of unspoken taboo. Having cataloged the inscription and hidden the notebook, you locate the cartouche that contains the intelligible portion of the writing, and memorize it's mixture of scribal glyphs and cursive scripts. With a voice of authority, you recite this phrase which constitutes the name of the scroll as you place it upon the little platform of clay-wrapped silver:
"Some Gossip That Fell Into My Ear As I Walked Into The Auld Mathom Shoppe In The Oasis City of Atlcarkhan, Which I Suspect May Pertain To Something That You've Been Searching For"
The parchment of the scroll bursts into a flame that casts an eerie light which seems to desaturate the coloration of any object that it falls upon.
A billowy voice echoes around the room and declares:
"I have heard the words of Al-Ifriya, who was told them by Duafrashitha Whose-Memory-Can-Not-Fail. This is the report which was rendered to him by Kandrakar the Leathereater, who received it from Djevrah the Scribe, who wrote down all that was told to him regarding this matter by your counterpart who wills that it now be told to you.
Attend, O mortal, and hearken unto this message of such import that heaven and earth have been bent in order to bring it within the reach of your hearing!"
The billowy voice then echoes to nothing as another fades into your hearing, one that you have not heard for many years, weaker now and gravelly. More longwinded than you remember. You can almost hear the whiteness of his hair:
" that was sometime around the beginning of the secret summer, right after a certain well-known vigilante broke out of gaol and made his way up into the Shining Mountains to prospect for the sundrops trapped in the big veins of quartz up there. Some say that there's still something left up there to be discovered for anyone who knows how to look. But don't get yourself too excited about hidden lodes and secret deposits. That's a different story and only tangentially related to the subject at hand. Speaking of the subject at hand, at that selfsame appointed hour, he happened to find himself about six feet underground and descending.
Before the beginning of this particular adventure he had managed to accomplish the usual set of mundane tasks that comprise the bulk of a Finder's efforts. These included: walking, engaging in barter, sleeping rough with one eye open in the crooked roots of an old tree, and of course employing the type of indirect questioning that one might use were they to attempt to preclude the presumption on the part of their counterpart as to the purpose of their prerequisite preguntations, all the while endeavoring to ensure enough indirect information is offered up by their interlocutor to such a degree that one might infer the identification of certain items of interest. It was the decyphering of one of these items of interest (I won't say which exactly) that had initiated the fools errand of a get-wise-quick scheme that he was pursuing at that moment under the guise of a Noble Quest of Recovery conceived of with Honorable Intentions.
He was already a journeyman salvageur at that point in his life, although he preferred to work outside the purview of the Guild system, so it's difficult to determined how much of his success was bluster and how much was bravado. Somewhere along the way he had acquired the phrase "You who wish to be illumined, pass below the templon in the likeness of the moon." Sounds like a jar of jabberwock to any reasonable person such as you or I, but to a would be treasure hunter trying to sift the past up to the surface, it was quite a spooky little nugget. And so it was that he had come to this particular Threshold in his career, deep down underground and caught between a headwall and a hard decision.
The particular drift that he was prowling was not an ordinary spur off of the Forgotten City. It had been set in place secretly, they say, by sappers in the service of a crafty old khan known to be in possession of a rather vulpine nature who, despite his best efforts, never got the chance to realize the fruits of his labor before the legendary lifting of the Last Siege. Having been rendered redundant to outside forces, and somehow overlooked by the Restoration, it soon came to completion under the care of a concern of corsairs who promptly employed it in the smuggling of sundry provisions of certain peculiar persuasions which thankfully are no longer popular in these parts. With the waning of it's remunerative potential coinciding with the ascendancy of the Order of Prosperity (may their reign come to it's natural conclusion, Waka Inti!), the tunnel soon passed out of the realm of reality formed by consensus and into that corner of the cosmos that can only be noticed by someone who already knows what it is they are looking at.
He would not have been able to find it himself, except that he had managed to derive it's description from the intentionally untidy script in that leatherbound sheaf of rustic paper that smelled like fermented acorns and frequently resided in the embroidered carrier bag in which he kept his possibles, none of which were proving particularly powerful in affecting his temporarily dismal state of affairs. Let that be a lesson to you. Years of self-study, costly and meticulous preparations of a secret nature, days of overland travel through hostile country. All of your most clever cunning can been undone momentarily by the simple wisdom of the world as it once was. In his case it was the Old Wall that did him in.
Many present themselves at the Wall to admire the mystery of the skillful joining of the stones and to offer pompous opinions as to how it may have been accomplished. One thing is sure though. The stones of the Wall were stacked with a specific intention, and that was the keeping out of the venal, the lecherous, and the unanointed. A task which they managed reasonably well until the waning of the overnight vigilance on offer from the inside citizens. As is the case with most things that are old in the way that the Wall is old, it's strength lies not in it's sturdiness and fine joinery, but rather in what was sunk into the earth on it's behalf when it was young. The Wall merely wears those stones like a garment. It's true nature consists of the sacred geometry of it's landmarks, which were set down with wisdom and laid in with care at a time when men still spoke with trees in the tongue with which they now only share with the river. I know it's hard to believe, but it was as recently as his youth that the Wall still did not need to act as a barrier against mercenary motives and avaricious intentions, it simply was that. The stones can be avoided, but back then the Wall could not be evaded.
And so, mired in such lapidary liminality, realizing that he was the unwilling resident of a type of ersatz catacomb he had heretofore been so heedful to avoid, he made one final attempt to rekindle his lantern and proceed on his own way in the manner of a coyotl in a trap that will try to chew off it's own leg to get at the stink bait that got it there in the first place. For even as the last dregs of his tinderbox accepted a spark and rendered the darkness that enveloped him a little less than complete, he knew that he would not be able to regain the light that had been lost unless he acquire it from the Sun. As his last ember died against the wick of his lamp, he knew that the not entirely material causes for it's pyrophobic inertia would not be overcome by technique. He knew the alcheometric balance of the formula governing the Wall, and knew it would not submit itself to Geberic manipulations. As it has since passed into common knowledge I don't hesitate to share it with you now (you likely know it already):
||- (limes lapis } columna cippus [|] auger dives { adser honor) -||
He repeated that formula to himself as a sort of consolation to his intellect (silently of course, for he knew what it might coax out of the unlight if he wasn't careful). He recited it, not as a wise master finally perceiving the gestalt of a thing after long periods of contemplation, but rather in the manner of an exasperated tutor stating the obvious in order to chide an inattentive pupil who refuses to live up to his potential.
Like a Hrafenstafl player who knows that he has lost the game the moment he removes his hand from a blundered piece, he knew that he had forced his way into a situation beyond the reach of his craft and the grasp of his artifice. He would not concede though, not yet at least. There were many moves yet to play, if for no other reason than for the love of the game.
Having come to the end of his Knowledge, which was now frayed like the tag end of a rope dragged behind an ox-wain spreading manure, he resolved to resort to trickery by way of splicing the Luck of the Longshot into the thread of his Fate. He closed his eyes and went through the motions of preparing to cast a lot which would distill the compound complexity of the cosmos into a single, simple outcome entailed with all the information that he could not possibly know, and yet would attempt to make sense of by interpretation according to the rules established in the Classic of Oracles and Changes. He reached into his possibles and pulled out the arthritic knucklebone a fox that had died of old age. Casting it onto the ground with a well-practiced inward flourish of the wrist, he could tell by the clicking clacks of the tumbling bone that he had effected a successful determination. Like the best solutions in the reductive artes, it was simple, elegant, and impossible to confirm. He crawled around upon his hands and knees, pawing at the ground and failing to locate that bone which was now making use of all the information contained in the universe in order to suggest the means of his imminent escape.
It would be much too boring and academic to describe to you the heroic feat of how the outcome of that particular iachta has come to be know, but I will recite to you the relevant passage from the Classic of Oracles and Changes as well as I am able to from memory:
Opening The Box.
Curiosity turns upon it's own tail and the asymptotic nature of materia reveals itself.
The Image: A bottle is sealed with a leaden seal.
The Judgment: Death within. Wandering without. No recourse.
He began to walk, keeping one hand upon the headwall of the drift as he shuffled and stumbled his way into the darkness. He walked for a time that might have been three hours for as much as it might have been three days. On his way in he had noted many forks and shafts and branching paths, but contrary to his expectations, the path he followed then admitted not a single deviation. His mind slowed. His body grew tired. His will was becoming fatigued. He laid down, careful to keep his back against the rockface, and tried to sleep on the hardpacked damp earth beneath his feet. But alas! Attempting to rest in excessive darkness is as difficult as trying to sleep in too much light, and all he accomplished was to toss and turn and roll in the dirt like a worm.
And so it was that he came to himself, exhausted, dirty, and grasping for anything that he could find at the bottom of that carrier bag of the soul which constituted the confluence of his lineage. When it was new, that carrier bag had been a simple jar, made from a gourd and filled with gifts prepared upon the foundations of the world. Since that time though, most of what it had once held is now lost. It's contents as he received them had been curated to such an extent that at some point or another, every manner of thing under the sun had passed through that bag. Princes and mothers and fanatics and fools, all putting and taking, saving and using, altering it to suit their own purposes. As he rummaged around in it then in his hour of need, he found it to be emptied of all things. All things except for one.
You are no doubt familiar with the commonplace manner of performing a magical operation that is now promoted by the pedantic, the mighty, and those who prefer not to average their efforts with beings they regard as lesser than themselves. The process by which a man sets his face like flint against what is and exerts his will upon the elements of creation in order to actualize what he wants to be, accumulating and directing, stacking and linking, until such time as his desire is accomplished. All very tidy and repeatable, very useful for both direct action as well as action at a distance. I would be remiss to leave you ignorant, however, to the fact that things were not always this way, just as they are not now how they shall one day be.
There exists an older means of working which has fallen out of customary use. It is a more ... organic process. Uncertain. Nonlinear. Subtle. More like using a flint to carve a pillar of limestone into an imperfect impression for pouring out the will into like wax into a mold. The dust at the bottom of the carrier bag. Irritating. Inefficient. Unverifiable. A way of fire and blood that requires participation with the rest of the natural order. Uncomfortable. Squishy.
The last thing he wanted to do down there was to balance his survival on some desperate appeal to the uncertain, but against the power of the Old Wall, what else could he do?
So it was, they say, that he scratched the Vesica Pisces into the damp soil that he could not see in preparation to appeal to the Opener of Ways, who he also could not see. For the first time since the beginning of his difficulties, he dared to speak out into the darkness. The way I heard it, what he declared then was this:
"Lord of Near and Far," he croaked out in a shaky voice. "Hear my cry! Open my hidden eyes to what lies hidden. Reveal the overlooked and exalt the obliquely beautiful."
Then he had to make a blood offering. His life for his life:
"Refashion my anvil into a loom and remake my hammer into a loom-shuttle. Teach me the Gentle Way of the Weaver and unroll the yarn that will guide me henceforth into the sunlit land."
Nothing happened.
He sat back down. He closed his eyes. Phosphenes danced across his vision in the way that pain haunts a severed limb. Lyrian Purple, Canardry Yellow, an unnaturally bright pink, all undulating, swirling, colliding against each other and recombining into fractal stars of nephrite jade snowflakes, calicoes and kaleidoscopics, and azulejo mosaics. His eyes reminding his eyes what it was like to fulfill their purpose. Pinging with a noise like thirteen silver coins clinking in a purse. He snapped his eyes open, wary. In the distance which could not be reckoned in the darkness, a faint blue wisp shuffled and bobbed like a boat moored in a gentle harbor. He was hesitant to approach such an indeterminate form, but sitting in the statis of the Old Wall, what else could he do?
The blue wisp led him in a series of twists, turns, traverses, and tight fits, until it came to rest in a dead end next to a trapezoidal doorway. Unsure what to do, but anxious to be anywhere else, he passed through the opening. He stepped into a vaulted chamber containing furs and fine garments. A wardrobe of sorts. Turning to thank his spectral savior, he was greeted with the smooth face and vitrified joints of the type of polygonal masonry that has long ceased to rest within the realm of human capabilities. A rope ladder ascended out of the dimness into an opening at the apex of the vaulted ceiling. After a shaky start, he was able to make a slow and steady climb back to the surface. He exited onto the common street and few noticed his coming forth by day in the predawn hour, night clinging as long as it could to that city which stands upon the neck bones of the First City.
Not knowing what else to do, he sat himself on a stone slab with a good view of the water. Before long he was contemplating the sun and the sea and what it means for the human mind to output signals that go beyond their expected range. Somehow his attention turned to one of few remaining domes of the old City that were still visible there on the crest of the acropolis.
Every aspect of it’s exterior had been subjected to some sort of ablation. Most of the whitewash had begun to crack and crumble. Any rendering that remained in relatively good condition had been protected by what was now a disordered motley of flaking paint. Most of the ornate stone carvings had been crudely broken off, presumably to be roughed down into approximate ashlars for use in more mundane buildings nearby. The ghostly outlines of bas reliefs eroded by the scratching of the scattering winds still attempted to provide some measure of ornamentation. Despite this shabby exterior, the building itself retained the harmony built up from it's foundation by the architect and it's magnificence could not be diminished by mere neglect. That didn't mean, though that it was free of ugly additions. The portal where the door should have been was walled up with rubble and lime, evidently blocked in by someone wishing to deny entrance to barbarians, not realizing or uncaring that sealing the door was dooming it to irrelevancy.
Adjacent to the door, however, was a little nook with a scene carved in stone, untouched by vandals and unblemished by the elements. The scene depicted a tomb, flanked by two howling canines, a coyotl on the left and a fine coursing hound on the right.
Under the coyotl was carved a partially unrolled scroll with an inscription that read:
The night is never dark for those who look up.
Likewise underneath the dog was inscribed:
The entrance remains beneath your hubris.
As I mentioned before, he was an initiated man of a sort by that time and it was not long that he stared up at the Dog Star and the waning crecent before he unravel the riddle. And so it was, they say, that he entered the old City. Crawling like a cur through a small opening, not hidden but certainly unobvious, under the carving of the tomb.
I tell you this tale, O longsuffering traveler, not for your entertainment, but because I am old enough to know what it is that your oblique line of aloof questionings wishes to uncover. Regretfully I must inform you that the old leatherbound sheaf of rustic paper with the faded words that first opened his mind and later opened the Door of Doors has long since passed into the hands of other traders. A simple man such as myself has little use for lofty learning unless it can put bread in the hands of my wife and shoes on the feet of my children. If you will heed an old man's warning though, I will save you the long and hazardous journey by sea that will almost certainly be necessary should you insist on your desire to acquire it. There is little left in that journal that will assist you now. The world has changed too much. I do remember, however, one line in particular, and I will gladly recall it for you. It is cramped into one of the few blank spaces towards the end of the manuscript and written in his own legible hand with a fine lazuli ink. What it says is this:
It is not those full of knowledge, but those who make themselves slender like the crescent and empty themselves like the new moon who find their way into the Forgotten City. After all, a moon is merely a body of dirt that has been illumined by the Sun.
What you may have heard is true. At the end of his life, his greatest treasure did not lie among the many curious mechanisms which he had pulled up from shipwrecks, or the enameled works of exalted beauty that he uncovered beneath the red sands of the hidden desert ...
Ah, but enough nostalgia! You have come here to purchase rare artifacts and embodiments of the Olde Artes reworked for new hands. Something to assist you in your trials as you plough the seas and fish in the dirt. Do not fear, my foreign friend, for you have indeed come to the right place! Might I suggest though, that instead of some tarnished old ring of dubious magicality, or a vorpal mace handle fashioned from the xylospongium of some forgotten tyrant of outremer, perhaps you might consider reframing your personal preparations and look instead to this lovely bag? Woven of yucca fibres and embroidered with marabou quills — it can hold more than you might think! And of course one never knows what kind of surprises you might pull out of such a bag as this when you are most in need of help unlooked for!"
At this point, a scratchy noise overwhelms the voice and the flame wanes. It begins to sputter as the billowy voice returns to make the customary valediction:
"So I have heard and so I have told. My obligation is now fulfilled."
And with that the flame goes out and color returns to the room.
As you consider how this new information affects the plans for your Opus, you use a small brass hammer to break the cooling earthenware disc and begin separating the hard pieces of fired clay from the lump of Galena that now rests at it’s center.
And to try out a theory of fiction mentioned to me by Aunt Ursula over a nice warm bowl of oatmeal.