It was well beyond midnight. The moon was hanging at its brightest, baking her toy set in ghostlight. Plaster and limestone walls stood faintly luminous in dim memory of the sun while Jakannes walked in the dark places where shadows ruled. Mice in the night obeyed their omnipresent overlord, darting in search of more, stopping at the borders where the shadow ended as if they stood at the world’s end.
He searched the entire city for the Street of Yarri, bearing no fruit, until he began to accept that the one in black had lied to him.
Just when he’d given up hope, he found it purely by chance. By now, it was so late the sky was beginning to contemplate the light of dawn. On the outskirts of the city, alone and free of metropolitan clutter, the Street of Yarri lay in unimportant simplicity; a badly constructed road of trodden soil and loose pavers connecting thirteen mediocre houses and a few trees of a kind Jakannes had never seen in his life, probably foreign. It seemed the area had been half-built, then abandoned, along this western strip of Hedgewall. The wall here was missing in random chunks. Great cubes of white stone filled the gaps instead. Jakannes saw the leaves were hanging heavy and sick with neglect, awaiting a pruning that would probably never come.
Behind the houses, wire fences with tilting posts kept gangs of domestic animals enclosed. They swung bored heads to watch him pass. He counted twelve houses along the street and stopped at the one facing the hedge-wall. He stepped up to the platform and stood at the door, which, as he awaited an answer, he hoped was Aese Asheel’s. A window beside the door framed nothing but for a yellow, scummy layer of frost. He stepped down to the street again and thought about what to do. It was too late, even for a reveller.
The animals observing him from behind the wire lost interest and began to drop their gazes one by one and drift away. Jakannes looked up at the ocean of clouds and decided he had two hours before light broke properly, three before anyone rose from bed. Now and again, upon stray gusts of breeze, the sound of the inner city carried to him, from somewhere eastwards. He stood caught in indecision. Here he went again, starting to feel the beginnings of a decision put on hold by Boredom and Emptiness who were deciding to pay him another visit. But before they could jump on him in his vulnerable state, he made a decision and hopped Asheel’s fence.
Ignoring the grunts and whimpers from alarmed beasts, he explored the yard behind the house until he found the ramshack pen where the animals slept, hoisted himself up onto a set of haystacks from where the animals ate, and laid down to sleep among the general stink until morning came.
When he woke, he could feel the glare of morning light inside his skull. He squeezed his eyes against the light, the sun’s radiance turning blood red behind his eyelids. There were things to be done. Sitting up, he waited a moment until his eyes adjusted, trying to lubricate his mouth gone dry from sleeping in the stink. Brown pigs laying in their own shit watched him with complacent eyes as chooks gossiped in the pale sun. Jakannes took a breath of ill air, then spun on his behind and slid down off the haystack. The pigs grunted at the thud of his feet, snorting to each other as he wandered away.
Hopping Asheel’s fence, he nearly kicked one of the lopsided posts over with a morning-clumsy foot. Under the front veranda, he looked at the house in daylight. The door was yellow, and on it hung a bell. He pulled the string, hearing a vaguely sad and weak ring from behind the door. Which soon cracked open. Inside it was gloom, and in that gloom stood a man in morning dress. His hair was long and ochre hair, and he had a fine face, but there was nothing else that seemed worth noting about him above any other pedestrian he’d come across.
Without bothering to make a greeting, Jakannes said, ‘Are you Aese Asheel?’
The man’s eyes narrowed. Gradually, he nodded. ‘Y…’ he began, then stalled. He leaned forward with one hand on the door frame and looked past Jakannes to survey the street. When he saw nothing, he said, ‘You’re covered in hay.’
Jakannes did not respond.
‘Well, yes, I am,’ the man offered. ‘That’s me, but… why? Actually, no, tell me— how did you find my house? Why do you know where I live?’
‘Someone told me.’
Aese looked ready to bolt. ‘Who.’
‘I don’t know,’ Jakannes lied.
Aese eyed him some more. ‘You should go—’
‘A lady,’ Jakannes admitted. ‘She sent me here. An immortal one.’
‘…What?’
‘An eternal woman sent me to find you. Said you knew about the “Monolithian mountains”, and how to get there.’
Aese blinked and looked to the side, perhaps at some distant memory he had up until now been trying to avoid recalling. ‘Are you… You’re not talking about…’ Aese looked back at Jakannes, more directly this time. ‘Who was she.’
‘She was called Varllee,’ Jakannes admitted.
‘Varllee? Varllee who will never die?’
Jakannes nodded. ‘Ye.’
Aese’s shoulders sagged a little. He sighed. ‘She’s told you she’s immortal, hasn’t she?’
‘Said come to you. So I did. Now, can you tell me?’
Aese shut his eyes. He put two fingers to his brow and pressed, massaging some sort of minute pain. ‘You may very well perhaps be most possibly an idiot. Does that make sense? I don’t know you, and I already think you’re not so clever. Varllee is not immortal, my friend. She is supposed to be dead by now, very soon, anyway. She was— is sick. She was… she was making fun of you, because she has nothing else to do or make her happy because she couldn’t face it. She… I don’t— look, who are you? How do you know her? And when? No one’s seen her in two years. People thought she was dead… When did you see her?’
Jakannes sniffed. ‘I escort people across borders—’
‘When?’
‘Not long ago.’
‘Where?’ Aese demanded.
‘I escorted her to the border. Over Sidiel. Left her at, uh… actually… I ain’t supposed to tell, for it’s confidential.’
Aese began drilling the toe of his shoe into the floor. ‘Why…’ he was muttering under his breath, perhaps to himself. ‘Why, why…’
‘Because I get paid for it,’ Jakannes answered anyway.
‘No, I mean…’ Aese looked up. ‘Why would she… See? forget it. It’s the truth that she was having a joke on you. There’s no “mountains”. Not where you can become “undying” like she says. Forget it. Not here, anyway. She was playing you, and you fell for it, for some reason.’
‘But she told me to come to you.’
Aese dug his toe into the floor again, with irritation this time. ‘Course she did,’ he said. ‘She probably thinks… See, listen here. I don’t know about any Monolithian mountains, okay? Or immortality, or whatever. Not anything about those kinds of doings.’ Aese rubbed his face and looked at Jakannes with something undecided between sadness and anger. ‘If you really still believe it? Then all I can say is that you got pointed to the wrong person. Go find the Sect of Knowing. Anyone knows about it, they might. But… Even then, they’ll probably tell you it’s just a fun little conspiracy to get excited about. See, you got to know, I feel bad for even telling you to keep going following through on this.’
‘Where are they?’ Jakannes asked.
Aese’s shoulders sagged. ‘Other side of the city,’ he sighed. ‘Outside the Hedgewall. Rent a city-guide if you really want to waste the currency. Expect to be laughed at.’
‘Fine.’
‘Okay.’ Aese began to turn away.
‘Something else,’ Jakannes interrupted. Aese turned back. ‘Ye got anything to eat?’
‘Me?’
‘Haven’t eaten in a while.’
Aese eyed him. ‘No,’ he said.
‘But… alright. Fine.’
There was a tense moment of silence in which they waited for the other to make a move.
‘I have to get on with my daily tasks, now.’ Aese hinted, implying he needed Jakannes to go now.
‘Fine,’ Jakannes said. He turned and left.
Some of the men and women of Newnettan cities are either too busy with their jobs, too old, too grim, or would outright prefer not to spend entire nights partying due to characteristic inclinations. These few citizens, more and more becoming a minority with every generation since the cultural zeitgeist began its downward slide into unchecked erotic hedonism, you would find awake during the modest hours of the morning, populating modest places, and doing modest things, just like anywhere else in the world. As a tourist abroad, visiting cities like Eslasta, you might’ve felt you were walking through a ghost town during the hours of the day that are meant to be filled by the traffic and activity of commerce.
Before he went looking for the Sect of Knowing, Jakannes stopped in the Central Zone. Here, a few citizens found occupation for themselves in running establishments to house those too exhausted from the night to do anything by the time morning came around. The upper floors of these establishments were lined with beds from wall to wall, caterers providing services for the exhausted revellers. On the ground floor, breakfast services were open all. Jakannes walked into one of these. The faint odour of vomit failed to hide under so many incenses his nose ran the moment he stepped inside. He asked a clerk what they offered to eat, grew tired of hearing a list read out to him, then carelessly handed over an arbitrary number of coins and said, ‘I’ll have whatever this can get me.’ Thenhe sat at a stall with his back against the wall, from where he watched and listened as people moved around him.
Two women sitting at a table nearby, he could overhear. One was leaning over a piece of paper, holding a bone-pencil, her hand hovering above the page as she waited for something to be said by her counterpart, who was evidently thinking very hard about something.
‘Come on,’ the writer was urging.
‘Wait,’ the thinker said, holding up a hand.
‘No,’ the writer declared. ‘I’ll wait when I want. I have no time to wait, but you had all the time to think, so let’s hear it, come on.’
But the thinker went on thinking, nevertheless. Then suddenly she nodded to herself, and said, ‘Alright so, next point should be that Sidiel have state-monopoly advantages no one else does. We don’t. So where are ours? Why do they get to set absolute regulatory statutes on produce across all the Newnettan provinces? Why do we only get to set regulations on copper mined inside TorlondeSiva, inside our own state?’ Leaning passionately forward, now. ‘They get to set regulations on everyone else’s produce, our produce, but we don’t get to stick our hands in their copper and make demands on how much it is sold for? How has nobody noticed this, or said—’
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
‘Hold on, slow down, let me catch up,’ the writer snapped, scribbling. So the thinker paused with great effort, as if ready to erupt out her mouth, but the writer went on writing. ‘Okay,’ the writer said, using her free hand to prepare a blank page. ‘Go on.’
The thinker leaned forward and jammed her forefinger into the table. ‘As I was saying, how has nobody noticed or said anything about this? And huess what else? Guess how many lockdown-tier engagements Sidiel has across their entire section of Frontier?’
‘I… don’t know, actually…?’
‘Guess.’
‘Uh. Two?’
‘No. Guess.’
‘Four?’
‘No.’
‘One?’
‘Precisely. And us? How many do we have to deal with? And what about Torlondel? And Newnetta-Proper?’
‘Us? Two, I think? Three, if you count the lockdown we share with Torlondel.’
‘And they have?..’
‘Seven?’
‘No. Nine. In total, nine.’
‘I... didn’t know that.’
‘Now you do. Write it down.’
Jakannes watched the writer hesitate for a moment as she clearly had another question. ‘But… Newnetta proper only has one lockdown. And Tallydel only has two, so why…’
‘Uh-huh, but Newnetta support Torlondel at the Frontier as much as we do,’ the thinker explained, ‘so that counts for half. In fact, maybe more than that. Don’t write that, though.’
‘Okay, look.’ The writer put her bone-pen down on the table. ‘See, I know what we’re trying to do here… but Sidiel sends its protectors to other frontiers just as much and as we do—’
‘Hardly. They could do more. Much, much more. We have two rank-three lockdowns on our doormat for Deep Pit’s sake! Rank three! Sidiel has a single rank-one! Torlondel, they have five rank-threes. Five. Then four rank-twos on top of that. And what do Sidiel do?’
‘I know, I know; they fight with each other because they don’t like work, blah blah. I know that, okay, but we’ve already written it. Everyone else knows it, as well. It’ll just be redundant at this point, and we need to be cutting to the—’
‘Sure, but write it again.’
The writer blinked, unsure.
‘Do it. Write it again.’
Scowling at her counterpart, the writer nonetheless obeyed, bowed her head and resumed scribbling on the new page. For a moment, as Jakannes watched from the outside, the ball of spite that the two women bounced between each other made Jakannes feel like retreating inside his own skull, away from the conflict. But by the grace of chance, a saving wind swept Jakannes back into his place of aloofness, and once again he regarded those around him from a distance, unscathed by anything resembling sympathy. He blinked at their pettiness. The two women hadn’t noticed him watching. They were arguing about something else, now. If Jakannes’ child had ever been born, they would never have gone to the Frontier, never become a child soldier. And he was glad of that, simply enough. At times it got him through. But he dismissed the thought, like most other times it came up. He knew that thoughts about nothing are only thoughts that are wasted.
A caterer brought him his meal, placed it in front of him, made the Gratitude sign with his fingers and went away. The beef on the plate did not steam. Jakannes ate it anyway. As he chewed, he looked over at the center of the room, where a scattering of people stood watching something. On top of a wide, hip-height platform ringed with decorative cloth, fake translucent projections of hunched beasts as pale as moonlight were making stabbing attacks at each other with various objects. Someone was keeping score. As he watched, more and more spectators were closing around to watch the projected spectacle. He overheard some comments here and there. People in green hats and shoulder-bells were saying that this was one of the first successful attempts at “remote brawl projection”, ephemeral images channelled through space and time by a Dreamer who sat cross-legged nearby in meditative pose somewhere else.
Jakannes, straddling the border halfway between interest and disinterested, eventually tipping over onto the “not” side, finished the last of his meal and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. When he was done, he left with a great sigh. He knew that if his mission was to fail at any pint, he may never see so many people in one place ever again, and he could not tell whether or not he was glad of this.
By the time Jakannes located the Sect of Knowing, he’d wasted an entire day bumming around with some overbearingly talkative stranger just to find himself left in the middle of the very same crowd of directionless ascetics who sat around smoking the same pipes, gathered en masse between the same outer hedge-wall under the same cliff face he’d visited the day before. Through mid-day, it appeared that most of them cose to sleep, either cocooned in blankets, prone on carpets or even pavers, while others sat in groups eating fruit on pale disks of bread and sipping from wide bowls of water, all in patient communion with each other and nothing much else to do. Jakannes blinked, his tongue writhing against his teeth, making frustrated circles much like the one he’d just been led in. He doubted there’d be any answers for him, this morning.
The city guide he’d travelled with had brought him in from the outskirts of the area, this time, instead of crawling down the secret and clearly illegal tunnel through in the Hedgewall. It turned out that this community’s borders were delineated by a more or less functional picket fence made of whatever materials people found usable, laced together with ropes and rags and even locks of hair. Spears, poles, planks, rails and cart-axles with wheels still attached, spinning in the breeze to power makeshift irrigation systems that did nothing much unless you waited a day and a half for much of a result. Not that anyone seemed to care. When he was caught scowling at the lack of effort evident in the craftsmanship of the fence by someone over the other side, they told him that the only reason a fence was built in the first place was because there was once a woman who’d been one hundred percent convinced that spies wanted to get inside the community to see what was going on, and that crudely made fences would frighten the spies’ better sensibilities. But, weirdly enough, she would never, ever say who these “spies” were, or where she’d seen them, lest they catch onto her savviness and alter their appearance. Gritting his teeth, Jakannes ignored the storyteller midway through their fable and began to slip under the ropes. He was only halfway through when ten of the ascetics shot up from where they sat nearby, and ran at him screaming like a gaggle of nightmare harpies. He stepped back out, and immediately they calmed down as if a switch had been flipped. He asked how to get in, but was told to simply move on.
Jakannes went along, skirting the perimeter, but could not no find a way in except for a small gate that was missing a few of its planks, the frame itself obviously stolen from someone’s else’s garden and attached to this fence. There was no latch or lock. He put his hand on the gate and it swang open at the slightest touch. No one lunged out at him this time. He stepped in, looking about.
As he came through and closed, or rather flopped the loose gate shut behind him, he found himself standing in a little herb garden. Green flowers grew in neat little rows, little red buds of eyes blinking up at him from their centre. He felt watched as he passed.
Squatting before a patch of upturned soil, digging a hole, was an old man with a tiny square of grey cloth on his head as a cap. At first glance, the old man looked about to shit on the ground, by the way he was squatting, but he reached out and began sifting seeds through his fingers over the hole in the dirt instead. His old hands were jerky and cumbersome, sending hundreds of seeds spilling out in all the wrong places, but he seemed to care not. Jakannes went up to him, crouched nearby and watched. The old man stopped what he was doing to look up at him with milky eyes. Suddenly the gaze retreated back behind wrinkles and folds deeper than deep. His jutted-out lower jaw slid from one toothless side to the other. ‘Yeth? Hi dere young man.’
‘This the Sect of Knowing?’ Jakannes asked. He couldn’t believe it really was what he’d been told it was, not just yet.
The old man’s lips compressed as he contemplated the question. ‘I think it-so.’
Jakannes still did not believe. He rubbed his eyes. ‘Who here knows about Monolithian Mountains?’
‘The what-so’s?’
‘I said the Monolithian Mountains.’
‘What’s said they-so’s?’
Jakannes did not want to repeat it a third time. ‘Ye go there to get something that will make it so you never die.’
The old man chewed on what he was about to say before saying it. ‘Where’s Lagma’s-so abouts?’
‘Wh…’
‘Where is Lagma-so?’
‘Dunno. I was askin you a question first.’
‘Where’s Lagma-so?’ the old man repeated.
It was about now Jakannes noticed that, while one eye was looking through him, the other was looking for him. So he told himself the man was gone in the head, and got up to look for someone else. The old man squatting at his feet started to stare at something far, far away, so far that not even Jakannes could see it, perhaps did not exist in the first place. Then he seemed to forget anything he might have known in his brief time, pondering, and went back to filling the hole with seeds, which was now overflowing onto the ground around the hole by now.
‘You only need one seed,’ said Jakannes.
The old man would not look up, though. Said, ‘No no no, one grows-so and all the others help it-so grow, more-so, no no yes-so,’ then dragged a bucket of water towards himself and tipped it wholesale into the ditch. Thousands of seeds floated to the top as too all the water flooded across the ground, spilling past Jakannes’ feet and onto the path.
‘That’s not how you do it,’ Jakannes said one last time before turning away, leaving the old man to his playground of disconnected cause-and-effect.
After a time of wandering around and asking people, only to get nothing, he came across the same group of friends he’d met the previous night. He stood over them and waited. They ignored him. He had to cough to get any attention. The green rain-poncho man noticed Jakanne’s shadow on the pavers and twisted around to get a look at the shadow’s source. So did the bald one who was without a shirt, holding their hand over their brow to shield against the sun. Then the third one looked as well; a short man with a hunched back and a head shaped much like an eggplant. The rain-poncho man said, ‘Yeah?’
‘Anyone around here know about any Monolithian Mountains?’ Jakannes asked straight up.
The bald man squinted at the sun. ‘The what?’
‘Said the Monolithian Mountains.’
Rain-poncho man narrowed his eyes, a smirk beginning either side of his mouth. ‘Is that the place you go to become immortal?’
Jakannes nodded.
Nobody made a move.
Not until the rain-poncho man blinked, a snort breaking loose from his nose. Now his smirk became a laugh, and the two friends joined in with chuckles around the edges. The hunchbacked man stopped laughing so abruptly that Jakannes had never seen something like that in his entire life. ‘Are you an idiot or something? Why would you ever want to drag your feet through life so long and shit as it is? What’s wrong with you? Get a life and die happy.’
Jakannes tried to put together an answer, but it fell apart before he could say anything.
‘Are you actually a fool?’ The hunchbacked man went on. ‘How far under an illusion must you be to think that would be a good idea? Do you know, do you at all begin to comprehend, the immensity of what it is to never die? To be eternal? Is the notion stifled in its horror to you? Do you at all seize even a mere mental glimpse of what “eternity” really is? Do you—’
‘Hey,’ a woman’s voice rose up from the crowd. Jakannes searched for it. ‘Hey, man, you over there. You talking about the place of the longlife? Yeah, you. You want to find that place?’ The voice was from behind him. He turned and saw her. She sat cross-legged on the ground just like everyone else, but she looked so far out of place that, even here among the hundreds of ascetics smoking things, staring into empty space, she had all the conformity of a stick jutting out of the ground in a field of grass.
Slowly, Jakannes nodded. ‘Ye. I am doing so.’
The woman stared at him for some time, as if making a decision. ‘Do you know where the Loranshy mountain range extends?’
He thought about it. ‘I do.’
She looked surprised for a flash in time. ‘Well. Just go south from there until you come to the next mountain range. Get your bearings and you’ll figure it out from there.’
The whole place had become silent with observation. All eyes, whether seeing or unseeing, were directed at him. He stood awkwardly, and knew it too. The woman scratched her ear as the silence pressed down upon everybody as they waited for something to happen. Shrugging, she simply said, ‘Good luck, you stupid fool. Go to it. I’ll see you one day maybe.’
And so, as a fool, he left the place. And as a fool, at least with some direction, he went to the rent-stable, paid the surplus for the overdue collection of his mule, and took the animal away. Thus given his starting point, Jakannes left the city of Eslasta behind in all its strangeness.