Men of Control and Concentration

Salbadore was reminded of old times by running into Stefane Flavius.


"I’ll not stand for this! I’ll not!" Sinchi was roaring with anger, his comically rosy-cheeks glowing with fury. "Your chin’ll cut – hear me Faney!" He shook his fist. "It’ll cut on my knuckles before you touch my Mags again."

"Jack!" the other man half-laughed and half-pleaded. "Sinchi, I mean! I had no idea she was spoken for!"

"You greased lob! You need not lay eyes on my angel!" He spat, "Fester of shite."

The other man was taken slightly aback. "Well! If you insist on the truth -"

Salbadore and Hungred simultaneously interrupted him: “Flavius!” “Be quiet man!”

"- I’ve scratched every woman you’ve ever fancied, lad –"

"Shutchyur mouf!," Sinchi snarled. He surged angrily against the shoulders of his classmates, Salbadore and Hungred.

"Every last one of them. I've seen you with Mags. Shalanne. Mabia. Rooly."

Salbadore pinched him. "Stand back Sinchi. I’m going to take this rat from your sight."

"Aye, jack! Me standing here, calm and collected and this petty little child raging and raging and wearing himself out. Feel a little bit like the lesser man, don't you? Fekking Mags make you feel important lad?"

"Wipeyur mouf ri-offayur face, I will! Cutchyur chin ri-open on me knuckles! Smashyur fruits . . ." Sinchi did not let up.

Hungred answered Salbadore. "Aye, do so Dorey." He seized Sinchi even more tightly, "This knot won’t untie itself."

Salbadore moved to sever the exchange between the rivals. He hooked his arm into Flavius’s. "You’re coming with me, jack."

"Am I?" Flavius asked as he casually turned with Salbadore. The pair walked away like a couple of sweethearts. "I’m telling you, Dorey," Flavius continued, "Sinchi has nothing to be so enraged about."

"Ah, then, it’s good to know."

Flavius patted Salbadore’s hand. "No, no, Dorey, I don’t think you understand. Of course I rode her. I was telling Sinchi the truth about that. I’ve already done everything I care to do to every Mary and Maggy what’s fancied him even a bit."

"But why speak so meanly to the poor lad? What's the use of rubbing it in?" Thinking of his own sweethearts, Salbadore continued, "All four of us would have been better off if the truth had not been revealed, Stefane. Sinchi’s rage has sufficient cause, I’d say."

Now quite some distance from Hungred and Sinchi, Stefane pulled Salbadore to a stop. Taking Salbadore fraternally by the shoulder, the elder apprentice explained. "I’d say not. Rage does not serve the skraft, we are men of control and concentration. Besides, what woman is worth commotion? Their nature is relaxation and leaking; ours is tension and retention."
He continued, "Mags is the daughter of a blacksmith, and she’s friendly with men. If I’ve opened her up a few times, will the flowers cease to bloom? Sinchi dreams of honorable, fair virgins – will they wilt before he gets his wish of ruining one for himself?"

Salbadore could only look at the ground and nod. "If you could only explain it to Sinchi as you do with me. Surely he’d see your wisdom?"

"Why should I, jack? He’s ready to tear my head off and fekk my neck."

"You know Sinchi –"

"I do not."

"He’ll burn hot for a day or two and then you can approach him. Faney, please, just have a few words with him. Hungred and I already know you well, so we’ll hold him down if need be."

Flavius laughed. "What have I to fear from him? No, I’ll speak with him myself in the next day or three. You and Hungred have already done well." Noting the slightly dejected look on Salbadore’s face, he suggested, "Dorey, you’re a good lad. Let’s have us some millet."

Three nights later, Salbadore crossed paths with Flavius and Sinchi again. They were walking arm in arm and singing a drinking song that had been popular among generations of young skraftsmen:

Not bird nor beast, nor creeping thing,
Not food nor drink, nor weeping dame,
No beating heart, no shining blade,
Shall route what get work
In His Excellency's Name!

The growls of wolves, the cries of babes
The groans of Father Time!
All these things – but bare life,
Ev’ry subject to our minds!
For what does life do to us,
But bend upon our kreis!

Borrowed Clothes

The Rough Orientation

Markus's skinless automaton tosses three full coils of the constrictor's body onto the cavern floor, keeping hold of only the tip of its tail. Salbadore gasps and -
the hulking patchwork of muscle whips the snake into the wall with such speed -
stumbles backwards, throwing his hands out -
that it whistles through the air -
once again forgetting to keep his nudity covered -
just before slamming into a prominently protruding knob of stone -
and he shrieks -
like the bare crown of a skull -
the first blow leaves a wide red splatter -
covers his gaping mouth with one hand -
but does not kill -
and starts to cry -
the snake writhes weakly -
as he catches one brief glimpse -
then is swung through the air, its head inches from his face -
of its scaled-over reptilian eye -
and then bursts against the skull-like knob.

Salbadore hyperventilates briefly and then falls against the cavern wall. He clutches his chest and spits.

He recovers only slowly.

Finally, he declares, "You - you must - kindly allow me to go up -" he pants for another moment and adds "- after the baby?"

[continued]

Arts Most Base

(Centuries after he helped to save Salbadore Cane from the bogeys of Lakewood, sages were still debating the most minute details of Orthos Sudlow’s life. This excerpt from Jipper Jungham’s little known heretic history, Magi Minori Vol. III: Mages of Tyritrius’s Golden Age, discusses legendary accounts of a meeting between Orthos and a god of self-destruction.)

Binders – those mages who draw their power not from spells, but from the residue left clinging to the planes by the old, disappeared gods. When we speak of binders, we inevitably turn to tales of Orthos, the "smyleful mage". . . .

After days of traveling, Orthos (as he was known in those times) dismounted and literally stood before the face of the mountain. It was a monumental stone relief, a giant motionless face carved right into the exposed natural marble and bound in living cords of creeper vines. To either side, massive stony fingertips protruded from the cliff. It was an exquisite treasure, carved by a gifted and purposefully anonymous sculptor, designed to become a part of a place so remote from any civilized country that only the hardiest or wildest sages would ever lay eyes upon it. Above the face of the bodhisattva, the crest of the mountain reached into the low clouds. The effect would have been something like standing before a god pinned beneath a storm cloud and lassoed into inertia by vines; or else, a mountain giving birth to a round-faced godling.

Orthos set his steed to graze in a field not far off. After four days and three nights of fasting in preparation to meet the remnants of the bodhisattva of Stillness, he drew an arcane sigil in on the readied ground and built a fire on it. He sat down in front of it there, crossed his legs, and closed his eyes.

The apocryphal record of the heathen scholar Bulfhen Hewn VVybulder records that “Orfos was plesede vvif his vverk and pleasede with the vvarmf and der didd he smyl.” Savant Leo of the Yellow Curtain notes that Orthos’s fire would have been fed with the barberwood pines that grow in the moist cloud forests of central Neruwae, and so the smoke would have been thick and greedy, pulling the moisture from brave Orthos’s lips, and making it impossible for him to smile comfortably. On this question, Silling the Bard remarked to me, “Anyone who has spent a night or two with a family of stony barbarians in the cloud forests during the wintertime will no doubt remember how swift the shift from daylight’s foggy steam showers to the evening’s dry winds can be. Even serene Orthos’s lips would have been cracked by leechlike barberwood smokepits.”

At this juncture it bears mentioning that all this debate about whether or not Orthos might have been smiling during his first encounter with the bodhisattva of Stillness has significance only to the rare practitioner of binding magics and the few, odd persons left in the world who consider the details of his life to hold theological significance. Of course here we subscribe to the former concern, and thus my recommendation to binder mages interested in using the topic of the smile in their own workings is to take note of the following piece from VVybulder’s epic account, beginning at the moment when Orthos would have begun “calling down” Stillness.

Brafe Orfos vvent a-smylin
Closede closede vverr de curtins uf lyt.
Grinnin he vvente.
Closed closede vverr de vvindos uf lyf
Grinnin he vvente
VVat, vvat chant mayd his vvurld felle?:

Here, sage VVybulder switches from his heathen dialect into what we must assume is the wording of the chant as it was passed down to him. At any rate, the chant is from the common tongues of neither VVybulder’s nor Orthos’s periods.

na’siddha na
na’bodhi na
jaar ha jaar hwa
om siddha na
na’nata na’sara
na’siddha na

Returning to the better known accounts, we can imagine Orthos chanting the mantra in a bellowing voice at first, as he was recorded doing in Bhaveena’s Third Book of Evolutions upon the occasion of summoning the vestige of a legendary king. But Stillness had never been a king, and those who would compose chants and sculpt mountains in his image would remember him as a suicide god, as a god of self-destruction. And so this chant called for a gradual softening of one’s voice. Quieting himself bit by bit, Orthos repeated the mantra for three more nights, until it was nothing but a whisper, a whisper of a whisper, a light exhale of inhuman subtlety, and then but a gentle trace of his own dimming breaths. Finally, it was the still background of the universe. Pitched into the emptiness between planes, Orthos confronted the Bodhisattva of Stillness.

The suicide god had once been a mortal man, who had pursued a strange quest. So disgusted with the inevitable pain and suffering of life, this man – his birth name has been lost to the eons – set himself to completely remove himself from the universe, as a final protest, to which even the gods and the planes themselves could never respond. He was at first a good man, but he soon shed all concern for aligning his moral inclinations. Amoral and driven, death would have never been enough for him: he wanted to completely escape from the responsibilities of life, from its entanglements, its corruption. The meditations and research required to uncover the secrets of Stillness, the powers of self-disintegration and nihilism, took him well beyond his natural lifetime to discover. Indeed, he spent centuries searching for ways to lengthen his lifespan, just so he could search more concertedly for the path to his ultimate demise, more complete than mere death: by utterly wiping all remnants of his physical form and all traces of his psyche from the planes.

Yet even after successfully wiping himself from the mortal plane thousands of years ago, there was something left of him, some odd bit that had slipped into the cracks in the ether, which fills the space between worlds. Stillness, here in the cosmos, but just an absence; dead but still alive. What Orthos met was the fragment of that being, a slight film of life that had been unwillingly nourished by nihilistic cults inspired by Stillness’s own inglorious pursuits. Cosmic ironies play themselves out in literary ways, and so the very devoted iconoclasts who revered Stillness's life achievements, in the end, built lonely monuments to him in the wastes of world. Monuments that would secure his inability to escape. This vestige was a most ironic aftermath of Stillness’s own will – nothing but a psionic anamoly in the elemental ether. Yet this anamoly, this little sick flame could only putrefy, forever unable to snuff itself out completely. Stillness had long ago gone mad.

But, as horribly incomplete as they were, Stillness's powers were nevertheless staggering, and that is what Orthos sought. He failed in the end. How the confrontation occurred, we may never know for sure. Here VVybulder writes in his typical heathen dialect about Orthos’s defeat:

Haytful vvill to nuffin
strikt and stiffed lyk a vvalle
rot and blacken da cuffin
“Iyam nuffin!”
Orfos smylede and den he felle.

So much for the smile, but a fitting end for this episode in the binder mage’s tale! Dehydrated, cold, and hungry it would have been long trip home for Orthos, and he would have had a long time to consider his options for his critical second encounter with Stillness, which I record in volume IV.

Two Baskets

The horde of flies had turned on and off seven times. One week. He hadn't touched a scrap of food for a week, not since the purpose of his captors' pinching and needling had become clear. That is, not since they had pried the old stage guard from his cage, and dragged that poor man screaming down the corridor.

One week. Salbadore suspected that whether or not he ate the provisions, the monsters would eventually grow hungry. They would come back, gibbering at a fever pitch, shaking with excitement. Would they even cook him?

Yet, there was a wretched little bit of hope across the chamber. Once the guard had been taken, the monsters - what else could you call them? - had no further use for his broken cage, and they dismembered it. Brutes! No taste for forethought. Now, however, Salbadore could see that there were two big baskets opposite to his cage. The baskets' purpose was made clear when two little fingers pushed their way through the sticks. The savages were keeping children - or perhaps pips. No, given a few days, an adult, even from one of the tiny races, would have managed to break through the rotty old basket, somehow. Salbadore noted that the smaller captives were accepting food. For the next five days, this fact gave him some hope for a period of reprieve. And, so, he continued fasting, starving, shivering, and counting time by the movements of shit-eating flies.

Five days. Two naked bogeys, covered in mange and dirt, came for the children. Oh, but they weren't just beasts, like animals, they were worse: they had dim intelligence in their eyes. They had hands, and walked on two bent legs. Deep within the earth, they beat on drums in a slow, rhythmic way that was unimaginably restrained compared to the excited, chattered gibbering of their speech. Worst of all, they laughed like little men. And, yes, their victims were human children, a boy and a girl in separate baskets. Unlike the driver and the guard - with a little shame, Salbadore realized he hadn't even bothered to learn his companions' names - the children went quietly. They weren't dragged. Instead, they were dumped from the baskets and led away by hand.

Those sickly green fingers: stroking the children's heads, pinching their cheeks, piling some kind of cruel affection onto them. Two loping green degenerates, pulling on the helpless hands of those pretty children. What a terrible sight! And so went Salbadore's last chance of forestalling his own consumption.

The bogeys laughed as they took the children.

Then there were drums.

The Pit and the Cage

[Describing events introduced by HomoDM here.]

The Scatological Evidence
His first guess had been that he was in an animal’s burrow. But the scatological evidence pointed elsewhere. The chamber in which he was imprisoned was caked with bones, rot, and feces. Most beasts are wound up, Salbadore thought, so that they never shit in their own hole. But his captors could not be people, either. Of course not, olchap! Rattled and abused; one’s kenning e’n’t perfect in such situations. I’m in a cage! No one bothers to cage a lob of shit!

A Fortnight, Perhaps
That was his best reckoning as to how long he had been held captive below ground. Salbadore’s ignorance on this count was one of several meager clues that he had gleaned about his whereabouts: here, in this hole, he could not count the days because daylight could not reach him. The first hours were nothing but a single intense note of pain and sound that shot through his consciousness like a metal spike splitting an old board. His judgment had been compromised. Naked as he was, with vision blurred from the slowly subsiding concussion, there was nothing to do but curl into a ball and wait for sense to return.

When they dragged the plump carriage driver away, Salbadore could barely withstand the sundering of his attentive faculties, torn in one direction by the hatefully singing scab inside his ear, and in another direction by the barely intelligible screams of the driver as he was slashed . . . raped . . . butchered alive . . . who could know?

Regarding the Kinds
Salbadore’s back cramped again, from being bent over for too long in this cage of scraps. Broken bits of furniture, one or two planks, but mostly sticks and bamboo: nevertheless the cage was sturdy enough. Right in front of Salbadore, one of his horrible little captors squatted on its feet and began to roll the copious lips of its filthy gash around with its own toes.

They were clearly not members of one of the so-called “beautiful kinds” of the anthropomorphia. The pale little demi-men were certainly of one of the lower genera – but which one? The males were easy to identify, for their enormous scrotal sacks swung back and forth, dwarfing their childlike penises. They were not slow-birthers, whatever their proper name. Not unless all the jizz that those offensive, shit-crusted eggs produced was unstable mucus. This was how to discern between the more perfect kinds of life and those that had not yet – and maybe never would – reach a stable form. According to the theories of the masters, kinds with weak reproductive potential, whether it be from slow ontogeny or degenerate seed, must either be very hardy or very randy. How to make your way through life?: By shyly hiding in the clouds, investing hundreds of years in each precious child? Or by fekking every filthy subhuman crack available and letting the strong spunk sort itself out from the weak?

Time Flies
It was only long after the horrible internal ringing had eased, long after he had identified his captors as Bogus abigus, that he finally came to a way of guessing the duration of his captivity. It was by the activity of the bottle flies that seemed to live commensally with the ugly little jackers – by their ceaseless buzzing when feeding on offal, by the foul and dimly shimmering carpet they formed on the dark wall when resting. That is how Salbadore counted time, and this is also how he came to realize that he could not be too deeply hidden from the outside world.

The Pinnacle of Humanity

"Huzzah gentlemen!"

"Huzzah!"

"With Master Connelly's calculations in hand, and with the materialogical evidence excavated by Master Jillhorne from the cliffs around Lake Manticore in the Duchy of Neruwae, we may now rest assured-"

"- but not easy! -"

"Aye, Foontint! But never easy! Hear!"

"Hear-hear!" cried out the young men in purple sashes. Their Umganglichetiere echoed them with a chorus of caws and hisses.

"But only assured! Assured in the knowledge that Human History Proper began no more than two thousand years ago!"

Hungred barked, "And our lot are the discoverers!"

"The Masters, you mean!" Salbadore interjected. "Mere plebians, we are! Embryos!"

"Ah, all the privilege we have extracted with our hard labors!"

"Hear-hear! To our privileges and our labors! May they be long!"

"And," added Salbadore purposefully, "short - respectively!"

"Hear-hear!" Glasses clinked, ale and wine sloshed onto the table. There were ten youthful, blushed faces now - three had already left. Passions enriched with drink, they toasted to their common bond.

"To our superiority!" proposed Sinchi.

Again, Salbadore interrupted the toast. "Nay!"

"Then what do you call it? What is it? Ho, Dorey, speak!"

"Superiority it e'n't," Salbadore hiccuped, "Where you and I may be content to stand in the shadow of the monolithic workings of His Excellency-"

"Hear-hear! To His Excellency! To the Formulae! To the True Genomancy!"

"Hear!"

"Yes, hear-hear, all!"

"Hear! Dorey, as you was saying!"

"Superiority it e'n't," and he hiccuped again, "For it still takes but a sharp blade to end my life! A trip sends my noggin to the dirt and I find my brains dashed on a rock. Smithy's sister's children are more practiced at the rocks and sticks than the lot of us, Skraftsmen!"

Roars of laughter. "'Cept Ruwen there," someone pointed out, "wot get has a thing for sticks and rocks." More laughter. Loud young men letting everyone in the tavern in on their jokes and, despite all their intelligence, never realizing that the locals - poor people, grimacing through their meals, gagging on the pretentious shouting of the novices - had heard it all before. Every three years, in fact.

"But not everyone can do this!"

"Hear-hear! 'Tis true!"

"Hear-hear! Here's to circumstance," said Ruwen, dragging himself back to the temple after vomiting in the street. "And the gift of wisdomry - er, the gift of wisdom and the circumstance of intelligence!"

"Yes, you boffer, hear-hear!"

"To Wisdom and Intelligence!"

"And this bunch of us here, this lot of us - well - we . . ." Salbadore choked up.

"What is it, Dorey? What of it now?"

"Well, lads, we're the keenest of all. I'm honored."

"E'n't we!"

"Hear-hear! To the Lebenskraft Guildhouse! Huzzah!"

And a rosey evening of carousing and singing it was.