He knew the name at one time. It was patently obvious to Hoab that the end of his belt was a …lingua… but that was patently ridiculous, because here in Rhiada he didn’t speak Velspean. he doubted anyone here, outside of some tradesmen, a few dull scholars, and several sailors, spoke it. It was as familiar as old socks, he thought. Just not MY old socks.
This diverted Hoab’s attention from his belt to his socks, and had him sitting on the side of the street, removing each shoe to prove to himself he wore the correct socks, and if not the correct socks, comfortable, and well fitting socks. He knew an army needed to take care of their feet, after all.
How else would we reach the front in any shape to fight…? Oh, look… a thorn. A big thorn… he removed the finger length of tapered wood from the upper edge of his sock. Glad this thing didn’t pierce my ankle. Wonder where I picked this up… it looks lumpen… ill shaped… like it has grown as a part of a gall…
He stared at the twisted and misshapen thorn in his fingers, and noted the darkness of the wood… prunus zingibi …his bubbling and chaotic mind tossed up to his waking thoughts from their churning depths. Ah, a ginger plumb thorn… we used to have the plants growing around the Mages’ Campus in Velacci. I miss southern Velspe some days. Such kind weather. And Iztha and I used to walk along the market streets as we would talk about training schedules for the stu…
The pain behind his eyes flared widely enough to make his vision blur as the tears warped his vision before they trailed down the wide planes of his hard-edged cheeks. Hoab could just hear, at the very edge of what his body would allow him, the sound of something cracking, sundering, and popping like the tiniest campfire crackling away in the base of his skull.
He focused suddenly on the world around him, noticing the street traffic had ebbed and moved out from where he sat rather than risk coming too close to the razor thin man who sat, tears on his face as he held his shoes and stared at his mismatched socks.
With a moment’s effort, he had his feet reshod and stood again. Within the first three steps he felt the tugging, bump and swaying movement of the trailing end of his belt where it moved against his upper thighs with each long, crane-like step.
“È un'estremità della cintura. AYAAII!” he said to the open air, and clapped his hands over his mouth to stifle the scream of frustration that ejected itself from his wriggling lips. The voice was unexpectedly smooth, and not at all like that of his normal, raspy way of speaking.
“When the fuck did I learn Velpse?!” His head whipped back and forth, making sure no one was near enough to hear his unexpected polylingualism.
It was naught a popular language. Not here, he knew. So why did it bother him that as he walked along the lane in his comfortable and stylish Ghorma coat, with only a few small stains on one sleeve, and around the collar, when the long…endy-bit of his belt swayed with each step, could he not recall what the endy-bit was called?
I need to lie low until this evening. I need to be calm, and prepared, and I need to know which language I speak, and I need to know what the dangly-endy-bit of my belt is called. His mind raced as he sedately wandered along the street, coming to the little tavern where he had eaten before, and knew the owners knew how to make real Strata, like they did back home.
With that thought, the wave of pain returned again. And from what Hoab could feel, the pain didn’t arrive alone. He saw memories that he both knew were his, and also couldn’t accept as his.
There was an abrupt movement in the world as Hoab perceived it, a stumbling, tripping sensation that any other day might make anyone think they had just stubbed the toe of a boot on the cobbles as they strode along on their way.
Now, as if opening his eyes after a gummy-eyed blink, he found himself sitting in a comfortable chair near the cozy, crackling fire in the corner of the tavern he had been headed to. There was an empty cup of wine, and a large bowl with the remains of half a particularly lovely looking strata, brown edged layers of cheeses, beans, tubers and vegetables alternating in delicate sequences of flavor and texture. Hoab noted his breath he exhaled through his nose was particularly red-winey, sharp, rich, and dry. Just as he could feel a particularly tasty mash of that same strata moving toward the back of his throat, masticated and beginning that most instinctual step towards his stomach, and he swallowed.
In his cracked and rasp-like voice, he said, “Skipping directly here saved me some steps, I guess.” The innkeeper, a small bodied elderly man the locals all called Louie, stepped up to Hoab and spoke in rapidfire Velspean. “Signore, gradisce dell'altro vino? Abbiamo un'altra bottiglia di rosso da casa.”
Hoab noted that he, against all his many protests, understood every word. “Sir, would you like some more wine? We have another bottle of red from Home.”
HIs eyes bulged slightly, and he considered. Then nodded, holding out his cup to the old man. “Grazie. E per favore, ricordati di me all'Alba.”
Thank you. And please, remember me to the Sunrise. He replied. It had come out as if spoken by wrote. A common saying from…somewhen in his life.
The little man scuttled away, and returned with a smile and a full cup of the dry red wine. Hoab slowly sipped as he alternated eating the savory meal that sat before him. There was something before this… something I was doing with Iztha in… Velspe? No. Not in Velspe. For Velspe. In… Hamuria? Why would we go to Hamuria? All those paganos have is grain. His mind wandered along leisurely paths as it sought what had caused both he and the woman he loved more than life to leave their homeland and… invade? Did we invade?
Pain exploded from his mind and enveloped his body, bright lights .
The late afternoon light slanted through the front windows of the little house Hoab shared with Iztha, and the waning light played across the forms of the deflated and mostly emptied skin bags that had been his helpers the night before. Most of the rents and tears he remembered seeing in the loose skins earlier in the day were gone now, though the blood that had coated the men’s bodies was now dried, dusty, and darkly brown in the fading afternoon light of the winter’s day.
As he stared at the deflated and torn monsters littering the first floor of his home, he saw that they all still breathed. Listening closely, Hoab could hear the weezing, snoring, heavy breathing of all five of the men he had used the night before.
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But something was missing. Someone… He remembered two youths had been brought back after the revelry of the previous evening. One had been used.
But the other, and Hoa knew there HAD been another. He would swear on a priest's skull!
And there it was. Hoab could hear, just at the very edge of his hearing, heavy breathing, and slight, repressed, sobbing. Stalking slowly around the room, long legs lifting and carefully and soundlessly placing each footfall. Once around the wreckage, and nothing but the five not quite corpses of the changed men.
Rounding the ruins of the back of the large room that made up the house’s kitchen he heard a hitch in the muted sobbing. The larder, its door had been torn off days before, now stood closed, though not by any reasonable stretch securely.
Moving closer, he could almost feel the terror of the occupant seeping from around the hastily replaced door. Bending his knees, Hoab crouched by the broken, and cracked wooden door. As he huddled by the broken thing, he noted its faded paint, and lovingly carved wooden handle. It looked like a bird sitting on a vine of some sort of berries. The wood of the handle had once been painted, much like the door, but years of fingers and palms had brushed aways most of that paint, and burnished the remaining wood a lovely golden brown, like the darkest of honey.
As the sobbing slowly decreased back down to that of a staccato, stuttered heavy breathing, Hoab smiled.
He whipped open the door, nearly throwing the thing across the room behind him in his rush to pull the crying boy from the rubble of the little larder. Hoab let out a shriek of triumph. The teen had stuffed himself down under the bottom of the lowest shelf, and was curled into a large wooden box that had held red and yellow tubers of some kind.
Hoab’s scream had been met with an outraged and terrified screech from the teen who had been huddled in the dim recesses of the little home’s food stores. As Hoab hauled the boy loose from the box of root vegetables, the child thrashed in fear.
A horrible smell assailed Hoab’s wide, flaring nostrils, and he took a moment as he stood, holding the wriggling form of the boy aloft, he checked for the telltale signs of a gut wound to explain the odor. He knew that cesspit smell all too well.
Most often in his distorted memories from cut bowels.
Every now and again, as was the case here, it was a lack of control on the part of the young and untested members of the brigades who befouled themselves when battle started. He and …and here his mind skipped around on the surface of his thoughts like a tern dipping over the newly exposed wet sand in a tidal pool, looking for small clams and crustaceans.
He gave the boy a shake in the air that whipped his head about, causing the boy to bite his lip, and which made his ragdoll-limp body shake like a sheet drying on a wind whipped clothesline. The child let out a bawl of protest at the treatment.
“Silence!” Hoab’s ears were now ringing with the child’s tearsoaked crying, and he was now done with entertaining that nonsense. His own shouted command hurt his ears more than he had anticipated. With as gentle a heave as he could manage, Hoab set the boy down on one of the few remaining intact benched on the lower floor of the house.
The boy became a sniveling mass on the bench where Hoab had set him.
As Hoab straightened his new, warm coat and not as new but still serviceable tunic, he again found the gall sticken plumb thorn, and twirled it in the fingers of his left hand. Pulling himself up, he addressed the boy. He was slightly distracted by the slapping of the end of his belt into his thigh as he adjusted his tunic and resettled the buckle of the belt. He pushed the misshapen thorn through a hole in the intricately pierced workings of the leather belt he wore.
“Your name?”
The lad looked like he was going to pass out as he tried to get his breathing under control. Finally he said, “Rodlum, my lord.”
Hoab’s eyelids flew open to their widest, as his head spun to take in the boy sitting on his bench. He stared at the boy, the shadows slowly making their final push to envelope the room as the sun began to set. “And why, my tear and shitsoaked Roddy, do you call me ‘Lord’?” His voice was edged with Will and Intent. He could feel his Talent trying to assert control.
And pain.
His Talent always brought him pain in recent days. It started at the base of his skull, and slowly covered his head, just as the shadows in this very kitsch strove to consume the last of the sun's fragile rays.
“You’re…” Rodlum looked confused be Hoab’s outrage, and didn’t want to suffer any further. But he also knew he had to answer this mad thing who had taken him from his father’s shop the night before. “You are obviously a Lord, m’lord Hoab. You dress finely, and in many colors. You have a jewel on the pommel of your belt knife. You kept the beasts from eating me last night… I… ” He didn’t know what else to say, and so he sat, staring at Hoab, his mouth slowly working open and closed like that of a landed fish.
“WHO TOLD YOU MY NAME!?” He yelled into the boy’s snot and tear moistened face.
“You did, sir…” the child began.
“Do not presume, boy. My King would punish any soul claiming to have Royal Blood without such a writ of Regal Birth having been issued.” Hoab knew that was true. But he didn’t actually know why he knew this was true.
“I am a Master. A professor. And I am…” Here he paused in his litany. Hoab knew there were some other forms of rank he was supposed to have used after ‘Master,’ but on his very soul, Hoab couldn’t recall what they were. The term captain sprang to mind, but Hoab dismissed it as idiotic. Who, his spinning mind reasoned, would make a Master Mage and an avowed academic into a “Captain?”
“What is this typing called, boy… uh, Roddy?” and here Hoab held up the loose end of his ornate leather belt, with the bronze worked end shining in the dying light. A low moaning came from the other room. It was answered by four other low, moaning voices.
“A belt…?” Roddy ventured.
Hoab grabbed up the boy, and shook him for his impertinence. “THE end part! THIS PART!” He gestured again to just the last foot of the ornate leather that hung, and now swung, from the buckle. “THIS?!”
“That’s the tongue, sir!” And Rodlum flinched back from Hoab’s hand as it rained several open handed blows to the side of the boy’s head.
“That’s ridiculous! Why call it a ‘tongue!?’ What kind of beast has such a tongue?” He pushed Rodlum hard to the floor and followed him down, crouching menacingly over the lad. “What kind of man goes about his day with a tongue flapping about on his thighs? Are my clothes tasting me? Seriously?! What a gross concept, pervert! You disgust me, BOY!”
With that, he gave the boy a final shove, and fingered the ‘tongue’ of his belt. His hands found the twisted thorn he had placed there earlier. Hoab removed it, smiling.
“Call me Gallthorn!” He was holding the knotted, twisted thorn in the palm of his hand tightly as the joy of the moment washed over him. He had never thought to come up with a name for himself beyond what either his parents named him, or whatever nicknames Iztha came up with to tease him with.
“Okay, Mister Hoab…” Roddy was, if not too fast to adapt to new circumstances, at least he was obedient and respectful.
“It’s MASTER GALLTHORN, you disgusting cretin!” The moans from the other half of the large wrecked room began to coalesce into almost words. Painwracked and malformed mouths called out from the now sunless space.
“We have an appointment at the palace, boy!” With that, Hoab grabbed the boy, and dragged his writhing form toward the loose-skinned nightmares that lay limp in the shadows, and he dred out the silvery pendant as he did so.
Throwing Roddy into the middle of the room, the newly minted “Master Gallthorn” drew his knife with one hand as he began the ritual chant to Arluan, the God of the Largest Moon, and First Son of the Sun Goddess Rhoona.
The five beasts who had once been men of the city of Ghlow slowly, but with ever increasing vigor, converged upon the freely bleeding and shaking form of Rodlum where he lay crying.