Salamander

Ash rains down on Tal Mallan slightly less frequently than water does, and on occasion they mix together and the grey, sticky rains happen.  To the north there are volcanoes and heavy geological activity, and though Tal Mallan sits on a peninsula, the sea between here and the mainland is not enough to prevent ash clouds blowing over and depositing their load.  The volcanoes were erupting today, and up in the sky, in the distance, the cloudbase had turned an angry orange, reflecting in the heavens the fires of the earth below.  Without a doubt it meant that we were in for another rain of ash in the next couple of days.
The guards were out in force in the streets in the first and second zones as well; in their dusty ochre and brown uniforms they blended in well with the walls of the houses.  They were walking around alert and bright-eyed, hands resting on the da they carried at all times, and their eyes scanning the streets for disturbances.
A sudden scream, cut off in the middle energised all of them, and they broke into a run, converging towards the place the scream had come from.  I was sat on a balcony three stories up, drinking cha and listening to the proprietor of this little café bore another patron with tales of his time as a scrimshaver, so at the sound of the scream I set my cup down on the little ceramic-tiled patio table and went to the balcony to look out.  From my vantage, I could see the salamander in the Square of the Third Soldier, and the char-grilled remains of the screamer.  I admired the guards then; if it were me I would be running as fast as I could away from the salamander, not towards it armed only with a knife.
The salamander was a kind of lizard, its skin ash grey and reportedly as tough as old leather.  Its eyes, and it had six, were spaced equally around its lumpen head and were glittering amber orbs with split pupils.  Below its eyes were pits, which few people knew about, which detected temperature and effectively allowed it a kind of thermal imaging, an ability to see without light.  Natural philosophers up at the university in the sixth zone hypothesized that in the volcanic caves being able to tell which way is hotter is important, especially when the difference is between intolerable and barely-tolerable.  It's mouth was still slightly open, and I could see a grey tongue flickering from side to side as it tasted the air.  It scrabbled for a moment on the cobbles, trying to dig a hole with powerful, spatulate feet, and then the first guard arrived.
The salamander turned its head alarmingly fast, and exhaled in the guard's direction.  A blast of scorching air hit her full on and her hands flew up in front of her face as she turned away, taking the brunt of it on her back.  Her uniform, padded and treated to withstand heat, still began to smoulder, and she collapsed to the cobbles and didn't stand up again.  While the salamander was doing that though, more guards had arrived, from several streets now.
The salamander's eyes prevented anyone from sneaking up on it, but now it was swinging its head heavily back and forth, trying to evaluate the danger and decide who to attack first.  The guards, now that they could see each other, advanced steadily, keeping pace and closing a human net around the creature.  When it finally chose and exhaled again, going for a young man directly in front of it, blocking the most direct escape, he was ready, ducking and turning, finally barely touched by the flame-hot air at all.  And as he did so, the rest charged, leaping in, stabbing with their das and ripping through the salamander's hide.  The blades, like skinning knives, had a hook at the end for ripping, and as the guards pulled away again strips of skin tore from the salamander like a banana opening.  Oily pink flesh glistened momentarily in the sunlight, then was covered over by a green ichor that oozed out and puddled on the cobbles.  The salamander howled and thrashed, its tail swinging wildly and crashing into a shop-front destroying benches holding tableware and scattering household goods everywhere.  It lowered its head, readying to charge, and the guards, moving almost as one, ran in again, leaping agilely, dodging the ooze even as the salamander shook, spattering it everywhere, and drove their das home once more.
The salamander roared again, hot breath playing over the first, luckless guard once more and its legs drove it forward anyway, but the damage done now was too great and at the fourth step its front legs buckled and it collapsed to the ground.  The guards, still wary, approached it from behind and quickly cut through the corded muscles in its back legs, ensuring that if it wasn't dead it wasn't going to get up and start again.  Then, and only then, I noted, did they attend to their fallen colleague.
And no-one paid any attention to the salamander's first victim, now a blackened effigy on the cobbles, amazingly untouched by the salamander's death throes or its ichorous blood.
I returned to my seat and sipped my tea.

The Imperial Bridge

Tal Mallan, City of Walls.  Two rivers run through it, both are wide and tempestuous by the time they reach the city and they force their way through to the sea like bullies in a bar.  There are high and wide levees in the richer parts of the city; there are streets that function as flood-plains and houses that are regularly filled with mud and water in the poorer parts.  There hasn't yet been a winter where people haven't died, either because the melt-water caused freezing floods or because the icing of the rivers split the barricades set up to hold them back.  Their names were Twivix and Lernal, and they were named after fractious twins in a local legend.
I was on the Imperial bridge which crosses the Twivix, having been walking for half the night.  I'd been woken by noises; the scraping of chitinous claws against the fabric of reality, the sounds of frail curtains tearing, and the heavy, wet breathing of things that shouldn't have lungs, shouldn't have dragged themselves out from the depths, things that are jealous of the brightness and the warmth of the life they dimly perceive just out of reach.  I'd been eating haruspice the evening before, Tal Mallan's most important spice, the one you have to cross the seven walls to find.  The one that is policed and regulated so fiercely that almost no-one will attempt to smuggle it out or deal in it.  The one that allows a limited glimpse of the future and demands payment by later on showing you the present as it really is.
I shivered, my skin was still clammy and I could taste the aniseedy, cinammony headiness of the haruspice again.  It was slowly seeping out of my pores, and I knew that I should be alone, washing regularly, not contaminating the outside world with it, but I couldn't face going back into that house and seeing the things on the other side of the walls; well, the other side if you could count your dimensions correctly.  I leaned on the metal railing that edged the Imperial bridge and looked down on the Twivix.
The water was foaming and racing, building up momentum as it approached the shallow falls, a twenty-yard drop that coincided, not at all coincidentally, with the second of the seven walls.  You could try and climb the wall, persuade the gatekeepers that you should be allowed passage, or try and find a wall up sixty feet of angry waterfall.  Or you could turn back and learn some common sense.
I had walked out from the fifth wall to here and I could get back again; my badge of office would get me through the third and fourth gates, and I could command the guardians of the fifth gate though it was painful and difficult.  Which was, of course, why I couldn't venture through the sixth or seventh gates, the guardians would seize me and consume my soul, slowly over the years, luxuriating in my pain and prolonging my death.
The Imperial bridge was a filigree structure of bronze, tantalum and carbon-fibre that glittered in the afternoon sunlight and was like a bridge of white fire in the stronger morning sunlight.  Here, just after dawn, the bridge was drinking in the light as the sun rose, and I could feel it getting warm beneath my fingers.  I estimated that I had perhaps another hour before it was too hot to stand on, and perhaps an hour and a half before the bridge was lethal to approach.  But here, above the Twivix, surrounded by air, surmounting water, embracing arising fire, and with pockets filled with grave-earth, I could direct the haruspice hangover, free myself from the visions of what really was and wander astrally for a time, seeing what was to come.
Of course, as is always the case when I've come prepared, the only vision of the future I could see was me leaving the bridge in half-an-hour's time, walking calmly down the steps on the left-bank and heading for my favourite coffee-house where I would buy a coffee and a buttery, flaky pastry.
I shook suddenly, leaving the vision behind.  The water beneath me roared hungrily, and I stared into it, wondering what had shocked me.
Then I realised: my favourite coffee-house had burned down three days earlier during a riot in the second wall district.  So what on earth was the vision telling me?

Harmony

She stands up from the Go board, scattering white and black stones carelessly across the carpet. Her head drops to her chest and she clasps her hands in front of her, demure as a china doll. She is wearing a white dress that falls to her ankles and wraps almost chokingly around her throat, with sleeves long enough to almost cover her fingers. In some ways she reminds me of a nun, but then I went to a religious school.
"Harmony," I say, and then I stop. I don't know what to say to her.
"Yes," she replies, not looking up. I open my mouth, hoping that the act will inspire me with words, but then I hear the familiar rattle and slither, and looking down I see the Go stones skittering across the carpet like water boatmen across the surface of a lake.
"Oh Harmony!"
I turn at the high-pitched cry of disappointment behind me, and there stands an elderly woman, tall and proud as the now-fallen Statue of Liberty. She gazes at both of us, her disapproval radiating like heat from a pizza oven.
"Sweet Mother Mary," I say, crossing myself. My knees shake a little, though I quickly control them, and a cold sweat breaks out on my brow. Mother Mary, sweet or otherwise, was my teacher at the Immolian School. She died thirty-one years ago.
"Harmony, control yourself. You were named for a purpose."
Mother Mary fades away.
Harmony still stands there before me, her head down-bowed, but the Go stones have stopped moving.
"Harmony?" I ask, not certain of what has happened.
"I have a purpose," she replies, and pushes past me.

Bath-house

The chick-shaw dropped me off outside the bath-house and skittered off again, claws rattling against the cobbled street. A few seconds later the driver's howl of fear reached me; the street was so steep that I thought I'd been horizontal coming up it at one point so going down again must be far worse. I always walked down the steeper hills in Tal Mallan, and occasionally I wondered why they'd been so perverse as to build on them.
I entered, and in the vestibule was a cedar desk as fragrant now as it had been when it was first cut. It stretched a good twenty feet and was pristinely empty, not even dust dared rest upon it. A young lady sat behind it reading a book, and I noted that there were fourteen columns of characters across the double page. Almost certainly that meant it was written in Haruspic, the language of the Haruspice-eaters. She closed the book before she looked up, and she smiled at me dreamily.
"I'd like a bath, please," I said, and she nodded. Standing up, she moved further along the desk and produced a register which she proffered. A pen was attached to it with a blue silk ribbon, and I signed where she pointed. Two towels then appeared from some hidden container, along with a discreet bill slipped on top of them. I read it; it was written in Elatinate, the common language, and swallowed as discreetly as she'd passed me the bill. I paid anyway, as I had reasons to be here other than the bath. She pointed to a door in the wood-panelled wall, and I departed the desk.
The changing rooms, or deshabillation as the Mallan called them, were simple: some large wardrobes with plenty of hangers, some stacked footlockers with heavy iron keys, and a low bench running the length of the room. I disrobed and hung my clothes up, putting my wallet and the sealed package under my spare towel in a locker. Then I passed through.
The bath room was a large, cedar panelled room with high, broad windows that started thirteen feet above the floor and went up to the ceiling. There were twenty four baths laid out in a rectangular pattern, each sunk mostly into the floor. A lip, raised about six inches all round, stopped the unwary from walking into the baths, but not from tripping over and falling in face first. I imagined, knowing the Mallan temperament, that that would be a cause of much hilarity. Fragrant steam billowed and gusted in the air whenever the door opened or closed, and I could smell meadowsweet, wild violet, gentian and Attic rose wreathing around me. Almost immediately I felt myself relaxing.
I slipped my towel off and stepped into the second bath in the third row. The bath-house had only two other occupants, so getting the bath I'd been told to take was thankfully easy. I'd had no idea what excuses I could have made for waiting for a particular bath to come free. The water was hot enough to make me catch my breath, but I acclimatised quickly, and soon the only evidence was the beading of sweat on my brow. I laid back, relaxed, and waited for my contact.

Travelogue 3: Tal Mallan

Haruspice is farmed on the hills within the walls of Tal Mallan and nowhere else. As the name suggests, it is used by diviners and prognosticators to accurately see the future, and Tal Mallan jealously guards them so as to take best advantage of this unusual spice. I came to Tal Mallan by the only safe route, on board a ship that had left from Port Sinistrex under license from the Emir of the city.

Tal Mallan is on a peninsula, and is surrounded completely by walls that are ten feet high at their lowest point. The walls are well maintained, built from the dense, egg-yolk-yellow-veined grey rock that is quarried from higher up the peninsula. The cubic blocks cut from the quarries are each half the height of a man and are either dressed, if being used for the foundations of the walls, or carefully carved if being used for the visible area. The carvings are images taken from the Tal Mallan religious beliefs, and hard to describe and unpleasant to see. The Gods of Tal Mallan are despotic.

Guards in uniforms of ochre and brown patrol the walls both inside and atop and are fiercely loyal to the Emir. Although no human agency has attempted an assault on the city in two hundred years, there are periodic incursions from the large phlogistonic mammals that live further up the peninsula, beyond the quarries, and where the land is in a constant state of tectonic upheaval and volcanic activity. Looking north at night you can see a dull red glow on the horizon from the active lava lakes and rivers, and when the eruptions are in full swing the sky sometimes seems filled with fireworks. Rains of ash over the city are commonplace.

Tal Mallan is annular for visitors. You enter through the port and pass through the customs house where there is a simple visual inspection to check that you are not on a list of people banned from the city or wanted for crimes. You may bring anything you like into Tal Mallan, but you leave with almost nothing. If you look across the customs house to the queue of people leaving they are empty handed and all wear the same ivory shirts and trousers. These clothes are provided by the grace of the Emir to replace your own, and are soft and comfortable, though not entirely suited to a sea-voyage as they become see-through when wet.

Visitors may travel anywhere between the outer and inner walls, but not beyond the inner walls. Inside those walls are the central hills of Tal Mallan where Haruspice is farmed, the temples to the pantheon have been built, and the Emir's palace stands.

When I entered the city for the first time, I was warned not to stay any longer than two weeks. The guard who warned me was a middle-aged woman wearing a brown and ochre uniform and carrying a bone-handled da, the weapon they use to kill the alligator-sized salamanders when they swarm in the mating season. She had a lined face that made her seem older than she was, and hazel eyes that never quite focussed on me when she was talking, but constantly slipped away and looked over my shoulder. Haruspice, she told me, permeated the air and the water of the city because it was farmed from the centre. Haruspice is addictive over long exposure times, and the longer I spent in the city, the harder I would find it to leave.

I stayed only four days that time, but she was right, and I've not been able to stay away for longer than eight months at a time. I woke last night to find I was sweating blood and my fingernails had turned a deep green, like the colour in the depths of the abyssal ocean just before the light gives out. I could remember fragments of a dream about things I would be doing today, and I've been experiencing deja vu all day. I've been expecting it, and so I walked down to the Sinistrex harbour this morning and booked passage on the next ship. It's time to return to Tal Mallan.