The night ship Desod slipped out of the æther and appeared as an absence over the still surface of the Gasfan Sea. The pinprick canopy of stars, faithfully reflected in the water, obscured the ship until it fell as a black shroud over a distant nebula, which revealed an oblique silhouette that seemed to merge with its rising reflection, obliterating the border between sea and stars. Watching from the docks, seven members of the Pax Regarda stood uncomfortably in their heavy robes as the black-hulled Desod finally broke the surface. Its keel split the water and stars churned in reflection, as if the vessel’s arrival had disturbed the very universe. But the seven Regarda did not stir. Their immobile gazes, hidden by heavy, pointed cowls on which a single open eye was stitched, never strayed from the hold, even as the ship’s three large booms passed overhead, sliding dangerously close to the buildings near the shore.
When the Desod finally settled as a black wall before them, silent and still, the stevedores and longshoremen—some animal, some mineral, some machine—came forward to open the lok-latches and hold fast the mooring cables, and the heavy ship was fixed with a loud clang that echoed faintly off the walls of the neighboring city. Long poles were raised and special hooks opened hatches that fell as gangplanks to the dock, where passengers and crew assembled to gather their belongings. None of them wandered within ten lagats of the Regarda, whose presence, along with the late hour, suggested to all present that the ship carried a precious cargo.
In fact, it contained three. The first was a High Mendicant, a robotic saint of the Sibelline Order that had been meditating for four hundred and fifty-three years, during which time it had not once moved or spoken. It simply sat cross-legged, horns still, six hands open in perfect, immovable repose such that it was only by faith that the machine’s Atishan attendants knew it still functioned at all and was not a gilded mantelpiece. They carried it by means of a large divan whose tasseled roof swayed mightily as it was hauled over the hatchway and down to port. But the Mendicant stayed still as a statue, even as it nearly fell into the water. Its attendants reached with panicked shouts and held it fast as the divan was righted from a precarious tilt. When at last the motionless machine reached the cobblestones safely, the monks bowed and made penitent gestures before lighting candles and carrying it in holy procession to the Birzkirk, where the Mendicant was to be enshrined for the next century on the hopes that the honor of receiving its awakening would fall while under their care.
The second cargo was the egg of a giant corcoran, which would, if incubated correctly, hatch in 19 years. All seven members of the Regarda lifted their pointed cowls as a large boom turned in the air overhead, reached into the black ship’s hold, and removed a speckled mass as large as a house. Because corcoran birds were massive, flightless, and distasteful, their only practical purpose was the laying of eggs for sale to investors, who bred the birds in the hopes of producing ever larger eggs. The ocean-green specimen removed from the Desod contained a female, which meant it was far too expensive to be the property of any one individual and belonged instead to a consortium of interests formed for the very purpose of buying it, including a wealthy Incomium dye magnate, the machine-worker’s union, the local Rookrip, and—if the rumors were true—one of the surviving members of the Tarquin family. Felt straps hugged the speckled shell as it moved over the water and was lowered onto a steel-sided conveyance, where it was locked behind four inches of cold-pressed metal. A whip cracked and a train of long-haired bushieks, each at least seven lagats from nose to tail, pulled the wheeled fortress away with the clatter of iron hooves.
Silence fell as the last of the ship’s tired occupants wandered into the night in search of sleep or companionship. Somewhere in the nearby sailor’s quarter, a gaggle of drunks sang sea shanties and lied.
And still the Regarda waited.
After the last batch of prisoners were pulled away in chains, and the ship’s Cyclopean captain wandered down the causeway, yawning and rubbing his eye, a heavy door shuddered shut, lights and lanterns were extinguished, and a deep stillness fell that heralded the approach of dawn. Alone in the darkness, the seven cowled figures finally stirred. One whispered to the others in a guttural language only they knew. The last of the three rare cargoes was nowhere to be seen. Had they missed it? It was impossible to say. For none of them had seen a Mysterian before. It wasn’t even known how big they were, or whether they walked on two legs or four.
When the muezzin finally called from her tower and the sky began to lighten in the south, the Pax Regarda retreated in a rare defeat. In their wake, they left only the lapping water, the gargantuan night ship, and a flitting shadow on the cobblestones.
I’ve been living with land of Oth for the last 25 years. It came to me in college, and like a favored vacation destination, I keep finding myself back there. It’s changed since I first visited. But then, like Jan Morris’s fictional city Hav, that is its nature.
Across its long history, Oth has seen everything under its shifting suns. (Is there one sun or two? Does a third occasionally drift by? Is that a large asteroid in orbit?) It’s been home to wars and conquests, romances and betrayals, magic and science, earthquakes and calamities, poets and prophets, pirates and priests.
Chiefly, there are three things to know about Oth.
First, it is very far away. The peculiar geometry of the Strand ensures that no matter where you are, there is nowhere further you can go. This was proved in QV342, when a pair of sternriders were dispatched from the garrison at Terrebrento, one in each direction. Despite having nothing between it and its destination, the second ship arrived in Oth on the 44th Vernal, a full 37 days after the first reached the capital. This remote distance ensured that Oth was the last territory to be conquered, and it is widely believed that it will also be the first to go.
Second, Oth is very old. Evidence of habitation predates the rock mazes of the Minai by 17,000 turns. Although this is not a secret—any graduate text of archeology will present the evidence—if you stop any citizen and inquire about the first peoples, they will mention the Minai, because that is what they were taught in school. That is also where the Presidium of Antiquities Museum begins its collection, briefly, before exploring the riverlands of Plantatia, despite that the Presidium possesses in its archive several spectacular specimens of gilded Gasfan potsherds dating between 85,000 and 107,000 QI. The Tarquins, proudly bearing witness to the antiquity of the lands they formerly ruled, have long claimed that the federation of clans they replaced was of such remote origin that no one knew the names of the first kings, despite a roll of at least 800 on the Codex Annuilii.
Third, Oth is unstable. The peoples of the interior will often speak as if the geologic vacillations of the Gasfan Basin were due to the political and that if only the Gasfans would put their government in order, the land would no longer shake, the floating islands would settle, and the Comi River would fall into the sea rather than leap spectacularly from it. In truth, it rather goes the other way. No sooner had the Tarquin queen Ilsapeth finally and brutally conquered the Samui, where seven generations of her ancestors had failed, than a great earthquake leveled her fortress at Fauntleruud and the plains of Osterroth were again overrun. It would be another seven generations before Holuphred the Great repeated the feat. (For the modern political struggles in Oth, see Chapter Four.)
To these three facts, we add a rumor, ridiculous on its face but so often repeated on Oth, and with such enthusiasm, that any responsible guide must mention it in advance, lest any of our readers be led astray by local folklore. Oth, it is said, is not the end.
Each of these snippets is something I wrote on a whim, often with years or even decades between. Some of the passages bear little relation to each other, but they are all distinctively Oth.
North from the capitol, along the Aquiline Road that followed the arc of the sea to the City of the Tarquins, there was a long, steep ridge down which travelers in the time of the Restoration would often discard whatever extra weight burdened their carts and pullcars before attempting the climb to Red Wind Pass, which was notoriously difficult before the arrival of the reflex engine. Over the centuries, as more waste accumulated, the stretch of steep slope, like a dam opposite the water, became the place to discard everything, large or small, until there was such an accumulation of broken tools, wagons, engines, axles, tires, trailers, tanks, refrigerators, reclaimers, and parts of nearly every machine, sentient or otherwise, that the slope shallowed enough for human habitation, and a complex society emerged inside the tunnels and trolleyways, largely hidden from the travelers above.
Since it was nearly impossible to reach the northern and eastern shores of the Gasfan Sea without making the pilgrimage past The Junket, as it was called, a menagerie of travelers was assured in all seasons and the lawless cataract briefly became a platform for piracy. Fearing they would be cut off from the port to the south, the Tarquins waged a brutal campaign. Although they were never successful, the highwaymen were expelled in exchange for certain rights, including independence, which a representative of the Tarquins was to re-proclaim every High Solstice. Although those rights did not survive the fall of Tarquin rule, the Empire wisely continued the ancient practice of proclaiming them, and every grey season, when the twin suns briefly shared the same sky, a robotic priest of the Sybelline Order would descend the precarious mountain steps and stand in robes on a great stone outcrop and drop over The Junket echoing words that no one could anymore understand.
Never has an actual story come to me. The passages seem more like pages of a Baedeker left in our universe by a traveler from another, stuffed with notes and banished to the dusty bottom shelf of some old used-book store, waiting to be discovered by that most patient and intrepid of explorers: the reader.
"Bilious" Ruben was not a well-liked man. Hated by the Celfs. Depised by the Sibellines. Wanted by the Magistrate Ren on numerous charges that included, among others, public defecation on a statue of Lord Aldous Horsefeathers. His mother, before she passed of rupturous gall stones, could only say of her son that he had paid her a courtesy by being so difficultly born that she was unable to have child again, a welcomed disposition after bearing thirteen. In fact, in all the cities of Oth, and in all the lands beyond (as far as his name was known), it was only the whores of Maynard House who would speak kindly of him, no doubt due to his frequent and generous patronage. It was even said the Provincial Governor himself, the Emperor's very representative, spat on Ruben, twice: once when he crashed a state dinner disguised as the Marquise de l'Or, a woman of some girth who, it turns out, had passed the year before, and again on the Governor’s way to the gallows, when Ruben stopped to gloat. Provincial Governors in Oth have very short lifespans, Ruben shouted down to the man, followed by the observation that Ruben had survived eleven.
Thus it was that a sense of justice rarely felt in the outer provinces (and particularly in Oth) settled around the Gasfan basin as the word spread, appearing first in the port of Gasfa before spreading up the coast to Poliferous, through The Junket, and finally to the home of the Tarquins and their silent towers. Bilious Ruben had been killed. The immediate glory quickly faded, however, as the circumstances of his death became known. It wasn't that he had been brutally murdered. In most people's minds, that would've only salted the cold dish of revenge he'd been dealt. It was that he'd been murdered in Ith, across the mountains that rimmed the eastern arc of the Gasfan Sea, and that was wild elf country. And that made it wholly different. Bilious Ruben, no matter how despicable, no matter how despised, was still human, and in the lands beyond Oth (rarely in it) any human—even the filthy and the wretched—was infinitely more worthy than the pointy-eared vermin of Ith. And so it spread along the Strand, not that one Bilious Ruben had been killed, the very same Bilious Ruben who was widely suspected of masterminding the desecration of the Sybelline Chapel, the Bilious Ruben who was equally well-suspected of starting the great Turnip War, but rather that a human had been killed by an elf, and a wild elf at that.
So it was the fleetingly glorious death of Bilious Ruben was overtaken by that most intractable of political maladies: the much discussed, much debated, and utterly perennial “Dark Elf Problem.” In any normal province, which is to say just about anywhere besides Oth, such a matter would've fallen to the Governor and the local Lord's Council to be dealt with swiftly. But Ruben hadn’t lived, or died, in a normal province. He had died in Ith, which was wild land, and he had lived in Oth, which was at the time of his death (yet again) without a Provincial Governor, and which had been unable to hold a Lord’s Council successfully in seventeen years—discounting the brief but tragic Council of 793, where the previous Lord Horsefeathers ran naked and raving through chambers.
And that is how it came to be that M. Malagaster Shagash, Esq., Most Special Investigator and High Succedaneum to the Emperor, found himself sentenced to Oth for the full term and, as he called it, agony of the inquest into the death of “Bilious” Ruben Bane.
With so little time left to write these days, I suppose it’s natural to wander the halls of the Already Written. Lining up the fragments like this—and there are a handful more than I have shared here—it certainly seems as if I’ve been getting letters and postcards from another world.
“On every planet I have lived, and in every time, there have always been women chasing the broken wastrel. They make no secret of it. In fact, the more a man sings of his pain, or writes bad poetry—and the more people hear it—the more falsely cocksure he is, the more compulsive, the more addicted, then the higher the bounty she can claim. For the trauma must always be in greater proportion to her own, lest it fail to serve its purpose, as if it were possible to grow one garden by tending another.
After a time, when her youth has faded and she can no longer command a high crop, she will tire of her sterile toil and seek a man whose garden is well fruited, and thence populate her own barren plot with seeds and cuttings until his is not half what it was.
Seek not, my son, such women as these, for there are ample others. Though she be less susceptible to your flatteries, oftentimes less comely, her deficits will match your surpluses, and contrariwise the same. Seek her in places high and low, where she will often be reading or otherwise keeping her own company. Do not sing of your weaknesses, but do not hide them either. Rather, provide her reason to notice your strengths. Do good, such that you may be a candle to the beneficent.
And do not—ever—consort with liars, even those not maliciously so. She may call it innocent, a game of hide-and-seek with her self, the setting of a travail through which you must pass to discover the secret flower at her heart. But no matter how enchanting, a cavalier woman is reckless and shifting, and can do naught but pour ruin over your soul.”
—advice from the Grand Dame of Alturth to her grandson on the occasion of his father’s cruel murder at the hands of the Asteroid Witch
Will anything come of it? Will the lost and forgotten book finally be discovered?
It is still a mystery.
Six hours along the coast from Incomium, where the Comi River makes its spectacular leap from the sea, rests an inlet at the far edge of the Western Expanse. There, nestled amid the cypress trees atop an urn-shaped hill, the City of the Dead lies in permanent repose.
Neither peninsula nor island, the hill is surrounded on all sides by an immense intertidal flat. Once a day—thrice in the high season, when the calcareous asteroid joins the moon in the sky—the muddy flat fills silently with seawater. Never more than half a lagat deep, the dark water, laden with volcanic basalt, gathers slowly, as if marching in solemn procession. At high tide, the locals call it the Black Lake, and its dark expanse is never crossed. For several centuries, until the time of the Tarquins, the water was only ever touched by the Incomium dye-makers, who sifted it, squatting on the shore, at the noontide. Tiny granules of “black salt” were separated from the mud and roasted in a furnace before being ground into a fine powder to make the infamous dye of St. George, which is said to absorb all light. So deep and ominous were the garments made from the dye that the Tarquins banned its sale, taking the monopoly for themselves. Over generations of rule, the Tarquin kings and their heirs filled immense wardrobes with fine silks and linens—all black. They draped their beds and windows with it and dressed themselves from head to foot. To this day, the charcoal-fingered tingers at Incomium are still required to make their annual trek to the city, there to deliver three hundred and thirteen leks of dry powder, packed into single-lek spheres wrapped in oil cloth. Although hard to the touch, the spheres dissolve instantly in liquid which thence permanently stains whatever it touches.
The crossing of the flat costs seven silver guiya and always takes place at low tide, when penitent pilgrims, their mouths covered in bulging leather muzzles, ascend long-legged Kadlian mounts, the only beasts capable of traversing the deep mud (all machines being banned). The lanky animals walk disinterestedly, chewing the cud, in single file along an ancient stone-post path to the sole scalable ingress: a steep, staircase-like crack in the cliffs marked by a simple white arch. (The stone posts being no taller than the high tide, the arrival of the Black Lake erases all evidence of the path.) No seabirds nest on the hill. No squirrels scamper among the cypress. There is only the silently growing grass, the odd blooming flower, and the city.
Simple stone cairns dot the lower reaches of the hill. Built before the Septuacaust, no one knows why they were erected—or even if they are tombs. Cut from the local rock, they are little more than low caves chiseled in a faded and forgotten script. Centuries later, after a pale and lustrous marble was quarried from under the nearby Comi River, cubic mausolea of either two or three lagats a side began to appear amid the cypress. Cobblestone pathways, large enough for a carriage, were added after the Second Restoration and gradually expanded until they rose and fell, joining stairways or escaping from them, in a network that stretched completely around the false island. Rich merchants from Gasfa and realms across the Strand, dissatisfied with such simple memorials, were allowed to construct grander structures, provided they were available for all. The Rothwiecz of Honenfeld built the first open-air market, still the largest, atop the north cliff. The Roscovians erected a town square—or rather circle—with an obelisk at its center, whose gradually turning shadow marked both the time of the day and the season as it moved across swooping grooves in the floor. At the very crest of the hill was an open-air temple, built by the Tarquin king Holuphred I. Its four-square struts held no roof but the sky. Its columns surrounded a deep, round hole in the floor that descended at depth into the earth: The Well of Night. According to tradition, those dead who tired of eternity could ascend to the temple, there to be judged by Othos himself and either raised to heaven or cast into the Well.
It was Holuphred who allowed poorer folk, unable to afford the cost of construction, to leave their honored dead in the newly erected common places, provided all the same rituals were observed. No body could be left exposed. If not cremated and encased in an urn, remains had to be cast inside a statue of stone or quarter-pure metal. The oldest had heavy, inhuman faces and stood rigid under archways or were built into walls. Later patricians, seeking a more distinguished patronage, began commissioning graceful statues in lifelike pose, and gradually the whole of the silent city became populated with the stony visages of the living dead. They walked down thoroughfares, bought flowers in the market, and sat on benches contemplating the sea. They hugged their children or bent in prayer. They danced silently under the obelisk or played the lexican flute or chatted genially with each other inside the simple square rooms of the family mausolea. Whenever a broken statue was found, the soul was said to have “gone to the Well,” and whatever remained of it was thrown inside by the eldest male child, or else a priest of the Sibelline Order.
And so was built an entire vibrant city where not a soul stirred and not a single word was uttered. For all of the living who visited the City of the Dead had their mouths muzzled and their pinky fingers bound with needles and swore upon pain of death not to disturb any of the eternal citizens upon whose domain they trespassed. Special tortures were reserved for he who took from the still and silent island any part of it. No pebble, no twig, no stray seed was removed. Each visitor, no matter how wealthy, was thoroughly searched—or was supposed to be—before once again mounting their three-kneed Kadlian and trekking home across the mud.
By simple irony, only the greatest transgression required no punishment. Not one of the seventeen legal scrolls that governed visits to the city in the time of the Tarquins ever mentioned the missing of the tide. It is said only three were ever trapped on the hill past the procession of the Black Lake, and that none were heard from again. But as to the truth, only the dead can know.
Getting the most out of your subscription
I want to remind everyone that there is a lot to read on this site. If you haven’t yet, you can check out what’s new on The End of the World Almanac.
Or, you can read about zombie-cyborgs.
Or catch up on the latest installment of ANACHRON.
Here is this week’s picture of Henry: When a good boy becomes a good ol’ boy.
That’s it for this time. Thanks so much for being here.
Songs from Oth I
Rick, I'm sorry that it's taken me so long to do so, but I felt compelled to leave a response after your latest post.
I've been reading your work for almost 2 years now, ever since I came across the Minus Faction online. I mean it when I say this: I don't know if I've ever read an author that matches your capacity for imagination and creativity in world building. Though they sometimes border on the outright strange, there is no one out there writing stories like you do. I firmly believe the world would be a lesser place without your work in it.
My heart hurt reading your "Mystery & Absence" post. I am likewise no stranger to the crushing pressures of economic necessity winning out over the desire for meaningful and fulfilling work. It would be utterly selfish of me to implore you to not give up on writing in the face of such circumstances, so instead let me say this: Gods, I would love to hear more about the world of Oth. It might not mean much, but as long as you're writing, you'll have at least one person reading your work.
(I'm a firm believer in putting my money where my mouth is, and I've been fortunate enough to recently start a job that I'm not only passionate about, but affords me a small measure of financial security. I know it's not much, but I signed up for your annual subscription today. I wish you the best of luck in whatever endeavors you choose to follow.)
I really enjoyed reading your comments interspersed between the narratives. Also, more Oth.