Chapter Seven
She was a scholar.
Carza vo Anka was a scholar. She'd achieved her lifelong ambition of becoming a bright young thing, who could be a bright old thing after enough time had elapsed, and then could be a bright dead thing - after a long life of smoking and reading and gentle eccentricity. By the end she'd be a doddering old woman who took long walks in the countryside and had a habit of talking to herself. A lovable eccentric who cultivated one or two faintly tolerable habits once people were used to her. If you acclimatised people to yourself, you could get away with anything - piece by piece, intruding more of your actual self into the world, until eventually you were whole, in all your undeniable freakishness. But the world needed to be primed before that could happen, and she had time to get on with that particular job. Had a few years to crack at it, right? She had a life plan. But as she slipped her robe on, lit up her morning cigarillo after a moment of pitiful resistance, and stumbled over to the nearest samovar...
The plan didn't seem as cohesive or coherent as it once had. For all her time in the studium, it'd felt... good, she supposed. Reasonable. Realistic. And now... she was staring down the barrel of the future, and the passage of time was a finger squeezing around the trigger. Founder, a few decades ago that phrase would've been meaningless. Barrels were for storing wine, and triggers weren't a thing at all - the term was of foreign origin, that combination of sounds simply hadn't occurred in ALD IOM until modernity had rushed in. Until it rushed to crack the shell of her protective egg.
She didn't want much. Just to be left alone with her books and do just enough work to remain sane.
But here she was. So stressed that she hadn't even woken up in her bedroom. She slept in her office half the time. A small cupboard with a tiny window facing onto a barren courtyard. Carza stretched like a cat, trying to excite some sensation back into herself as smoke boiled around her head. She was functional, she was fine. Had a comb and a washbasin in here for this exact reason. She wasn't awful, she just slept in her office half the time because it was easier. Nice to wake up in a place that keenly reminded her of her own accomplishments, that was all. With a shambling air, she stumbled back to her desk. No secretaries to worry with her actions. Just a typewriter which did a secretary's job. But it didn't make her tea. Or biscuits. Or pies. She was very hungry right now, and she glared at the typewriter like it had personally made her hungry, injecting her with hungriness serum, or using those long, thin ink ribbons to grab food out of her stomach while she was sleeping, and...
She puffed harder at her cigarillo, absorbing that vital, vital, sanity-restoring smoke.
She was sane. She was fine. Carza vo Anka was a registered normal person. And now she was going to do work. Hunger made her mind sharper, if she ate now she'd just fall back asleep, and at that point most of the day would be wasted. Founder, she missed just having essay titles handed to her, a pile of reading, a few mild suggestions on which libraries were of use to her, and let loose. She missed revising for final examinations, she missed researching for a thesis that had been approved by her superiors before it had even begun to be written. She'd made the mistake of looking over her thesis again, just to grab some inspiration - loose threads of research she'd left dangling tantalisingly, that could be the subject of a book or two, at least an influential essay...
Mistake.
Big, big mistake.
She noticed errors. Leaps in logic that she could no longer quite explain. Problems with formatting, even a few spelling errors - the peak of humiliation. And the words of that man from the Court of Horn, Asykh... they kept hanging over her head. The calm, assured superiority of Miss vo Larima from the Court of Salt, with her immaculate suit and tastefully expensive office... despite barely being older than Carza. And the long-suffering humiliation of Tanner from the Court of the Axe, parading around in her costume while suffering under the weight of growing alienation and irrelevance. The feeling of modernity's wheels crushing her into the tracks. Into a smooth, slightly asymmetrical pate. More tobacco should calm these strange thoughts... sure, the thoughts were fading, but the feeling wasn't. Some of the Courts she'd seen had been irrelevancies which barely kept up the act of courtly life. And some were simply beyond her. They had futures. And she wondered if she had one.
More tea.
Helped. A bit.
Right. Work. Time to do a job. Her job. She got room, board, a handful of bank notes reluctantly handed over to buy more cigarillos... rumblings about making the scholars pay for the kindling in their own samovars, which felt unnecessarily mean. Alright, come on, work. She stared down at the books in front of her, most of them propped open with the mats she used to stop her (inherited) desk from being destroyed by the mounds of teacups she was rapidly accumulating. Something, something... right. Found it. She'd been intending to do a little work on another dead culture that she could judge without worrying about insulting anyone, or getting into debates with any stakes. Coward. But cowardice could be a very safe place to live, so... right, looking at the Spiral-Beaker Culture, which had presumably occupied the region of ALD IOM known as the Drum, where the Court of Horn now held sway. This was before the word 'Court' had passed anyone's lips, and the only data was yielded from archaeological speculation that she borrowed from others, and old literature that almost no-one read. She thought she could get something out their middle palatial period, when the culture organised itself around a central feasting complex which seemed to act as a pulsing heart of resource redistribution, taking from one group and transferring to another, taking a little during the transfer. Defence against famine... no, not anthropological enough. Needed to talk about bonds of loyalty and friendship, bonds which could sustain this society for longer, and... if she could maybe posit a connection with some modern-day Courts, she could get some better data, and... and... and...
She hadn't set foot on the Drum. The literature was in languages she didn't know and would need assistance on. Archaeology wasn't remotely her field. She knew nothnig about the cultures which had surrounded the era, and she did have a mild belief that you should probably know about the whole context before analysing an element of it. What passions did this culture feel? What did they worship? Who did they fight, and who fought them? Was this palace raised in this particular place for a reason? And if she brought people in, then she'd have to hold herself to their standards, which would indubitably be high, and they'd see her as the fraud she was. And more than that, she just couldn't see a link between anything. The work seemed good, it could consume time, but... could she muster a real research proposal?
Pay me to sit my office and read, and you might get an article after a year. Put it in one of the more obscure journals and then give me a nice bonus so I can read other books until I need to renew my cigarillo budget.
She tapped idly at her typewriter, shunted off to the side of her desk.
'Before embarking on any discussions of this nature, it is always wise to engage in a certain amount of cautious mapping of the territory we wish to cross. Certain caveats must be presented for this data, which limit its usefulness to a narrow range, and mean that all conclusions must be read as mild suggestions rather than absolute axioms - invitations to further research in time...'
She was bullshitting on instinct. Those lines could go anywhere in any work she ever wrote, if she felt like basically rambling for a while and then getting paid...
The samovar pulsed out warmth from its sturdy metal body.
She sagged back, and stared at the feeling with an ominous pit in her stomach. They said mutants developed those. Lumps in their stomachs. Big accumulations of impure subtances which crystallised in portions of the digestive system - gorge stones, they were called. One of the signs of mutation - constant scratching at the stomach. Some mutants just vomited them up, if they were lucky. Most just had to grin and bear it.
She stared.
And Hull burst into her office with barely a knock to announce himself. He looked serious.
Oh thank the Founder. She was already yanking out some brandy from under her desk, fumbling for a pair of... Hull pre-empted her, slamming two glass tumblers onto the desk with a thump that disturbed all the piles of nothing she'd been getting on with. Oh, and it made her typewriter ding merrily. Two fat glasses of brandy, golden-brown and wonderful and she was already drinking it. She had drunk it. And Hull clicked his glass back down with all the delicacy of a man playing a game piece in some high-stakes matter of deep consideration. He finally locked eyes with her.
"Morning, Carza."
"Morning, Hull."
They were mates. She had a mate. She had mated- no, wait. He grimaced.
"You're having it rough, too?"
"...glad I'm not the only one. Any luck with your work?"
"No, no... had lunch with one of my old tutors a few days ago, haven't really been able to sleep since then."
"Really? Why not?"
She leant back in her chair, and grandly gestured for Hull to take one for himself. Both of their chairs squeaked loudly with any sudden motion, had tufts of fluff poking out of split leather, and had been scratched so often that they looked striped, like they were from the skin of some exotic animal. Hull's grimace only grew as he took another pull from the bottle - Carza had been meaning to buy a decanter so she could pour cheap brandy inside and then pretend it was good, but... well, never gotten round to it. And presumably the idea was to have a good decanter, which she really couldn't afford. So they sipped from something imported and awful. Neither cared. Already Carza felt a bloom of warmth in her chest, and the world no longer seemed quite so meaninglessly strange.
"...he was suggesting a line of work. Something we could work on together, me and him. Could keep me occupied for years, really..."
She leaned forward suddenly. Work. He'd had work. She was still struggling to put together a single research proposal.
"And? Go on. Don't stop."
"Steady on, mate, getting to it. So, my tutor, he... thought we could work together on this project involving that new church all the foreigners are obsessed with. Church of the Daicaval, that's it. So, he was digging into the cultural influences which had built that church up. It's new, he says, so that means all the influences are still raw, present, bleeding. And that means we can find some wonderful stuff... and as foreigners, we'll be able to probe where the faithful wouldn't. And I was intrigued - he can intrigue anyone, he's good at that - but... then he talked about the workload."
Her heart sank momentarily.
"And?"
"Six to eight languages. The expense of the project would be such that he wanted to keep it to a small number of people, small as possible, but... he was consciously aware that I hadn't been getting much work, he wanted to me to ditch this Horn-Era Studies business years ago... anyway. Small team, so each person needs to be a damn good polyglot, he thought I could at least give it a whirl. Then, there's sources that we'll need to hunt down, huge numbers of the things..."
Her small smile had vanished, and her voice had a dry weariness to it.
"Rickety carriages and travelling cloaks."
"Rickety bloody carriages. And disease. And danger. And death. The lunatic thinks this would take years - up to a decade, likely more than a decade. Most of our professional careers - he wants young people along so he can pass it on if he croaks before it finishes. We'd be going all over the continent, looking in all sorts of places - and here's the bloody capstone to this pyramid of nonsense, he wants to head for the founding city of the church. Which no longer bloody exists. It's a heap of infested rubble that no-one goes near, most people don't even know how to get there. He was thinking about an expedition into Kho'Shar, see if we could drag anything out of that wasteland."
Carza slumped, and Hull sighed. A long moment, and she dully asked:
"Did you take it?"
"Take it? Take it? I couldn't. I don't have the skills, the fortitude - I can't bloody ride a horse, how am I meant to go on expeditions with this ancient man to see if we can milk some blood out of a series of stones. Would you take it? You're better at languages. You know cultures. It's right up your alley."
It was. It really was. And... she'd get gangrene, tetanus, rabies, she'd be exposed to awful things and become a mutant, not allowed within a certain distance of water purification systems or food production centres. Hunger, thirst, cold, heat, all extremes of unpleasantness. She looked at her own hands. Skinny and weak. At maximum, two decades of work on that project. Leave, and she'd leave without a single author credit to her name, and a whole mass of years consumed. She needed a few small jobs, that was all, just enough to build a reputation for herself. She poured herself some more brandy. Founder, it was early, and she was already drinking...
"I couldn't. I wouldn't be able to stick it through. If I get ill, if I'm left behind, then..."
Hull shrugged.
"Then it's years down the drain, and no damn credit. I'm not lazy, I promise I'm not, but I just... can't stomach the idea of something that gruelling and dangerous."
"Nor can I. I just want..."
He finished.
"...to have a quiet office, plenty of books, and work that interests me."
Carza smiled blearily.
"Is that so much to ask?"
"Apparently."
A long pause stretched between them, laden with meaning. Carza rested her head in her hands, feeling the slight change in texture where her tattoo began. A groan escaped her lips.
"Are we being entitled little twats?"
"Possible. I mean, times are hard."
"I know, but... we studied. We did good work. We have qualifications. What about... about consultancy work? I heard some of us were able to get hold of that, and..."
Hull groaned even louder than she had. Great pair of lungs, this guy.
"Not for me. My subject's useless for them. Anything from my era is better discussed by someone else. Appraisals? Get an archaeologist or an antiquarian. Languages? Get a linguist. Land surveying? Get a geographer. But don't get me, not unless you need a consultant on obscure poetry from centuries ago."
Carza tried to look sympathetic instead of self-pitying.
"Same here. I... told myself anthropology would be useful - useful for foreign things, you know? But... well, turns out it doesn't really matter. Why not just hire someone from the place you're working with, they'll know things better and can be paid a hell of a lot less."
Her eyes were dark.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
"We've educated ourselves into redundancy."
Hull clunked his glass against hers.
"And isn't that just the truth. Feels like you'd need to work to find this kind of... total irrelevancy. But the prodigies that we are, we stumbled into it by sheer natural talent."
They remained there, in a self-pitying, half-drunken stupor, for much longer than was really healthy. Carza's eyes flicked over her documents again. A culture she barely understood and could claim no special insight into. The sources she wanted to work with had been pored over in the past, so she was really just... rearranging evidence into a slightly more attractive pattern that had no functional differences to old patterns. She added nothing. Just... shuffled. What could she offer? Really, in her heart of hearts, could she offer a single new piece of information to this matter, beyond just 'reconsidering the evidence in the light of itself'? Nope. Not remotely. Neither of them could. She was clever enough to study her subject, and not remotely smart enough to make a career out of it specifically. Well, that was a lie. She could dedicate her life to someone else's project, probably die along the way, and all for something she knew very little about and couldn't really be said to be interested in. She would be entering as a novice - going through a whole new education simply for the sake of one topic. And doing that felt like... almost like she was giving up, saying 'yep, this was a lost cause, better start again with something more practical, I can always adjust course and develop the experience of a recent graduate by the age of twenty-five'.
Her voice was low and quiet.
"...I heard they're considering making scholars pay for their own heating, now."
"I heard the same. If that happens... would you be alright?"
She sighed.
"I get room and board, so that's fine. But I'll... need to cut down on everything else. Maybe share an office with someone else, split the bill."
"No luck with research proposals, then."
"None. I can't... well, I can. I can get some ideas going. But... the issue is that I'm not experienced enough to teach, which would occupy my time. Nor am I prestigious enough to get funding for the research I can see making me experienced. And I'm not experienced enough to acquire any prestige, which could get me any experience."
"...so you're pinned on all sides. Entry-level stuff... hard to find, I suppose."
"More accurately, it's all being taken by people that studied something practical and useful. And they're going to keep coming, each cohort producing more of them..."
Carza groaned.
"And we get older and less appealing for any junior positions. After all, who wants a thirty-year old research assistant with barely anything to her name?"
They looked at one another. Hull spoke.
"...there'd got to have been others like us. People who did less-than-useful, but still enjoyable subjects, and wound up... like this."
Carza smiled sadly.
"Probably. But back in the day, we didn't have competition from cheap hires outside of ALD IOM, or increased numbers of people in each cohort, or the risk of being made redundant by all the changes happening, or an overabundance of senior scholars who aren't interested in giving up their positions, and occupy their time with consultancy work."
They both sagged. Carza took a second to gather her strength, to lean forwards and review everything again. So, there was the palatial Spiral-Beaker culture research... but there was other stuff. Other things she could look at. One major issue was that she hadn't really... made a network during her time as a student. Her colleagues didn't really know her, there weren't many opportunities to get to know them... she'd missed the boat on that front, so now she had to move forwards under her own initiative, working on her own. Assembling a team would require connections she simply lacked. So... right, if she was to... hm. Maybe she could do a small piece of work, very narrow focus, very specific. Just something to make sure she... well, had a job at the end of the day, and could afford to keep her office heated and her samovar operational. Her thesis had involved discussion of certain religious rites... maybe if she could try and arrange a little work with the Court of Wax, something to do with their trophy piles, she could get enough data for a quick article. Then, she could go through her thesis again (she suppressed a shudder at the thought), maybe start making amendments, develop it from a thesis into a proper tome, maybe several tomes... hm. Hm. That... could work. It very well could. But she found it harder and harder to stare at her thesis for long. Those words kept echoing in her mind.
She knew nothing. She had never gone beyond the city - never even really gone beyond her corner of the city. And... it was ridiculous, but she imagined that Ashykh had been voicing the unspoken opinions of everyone around her, not just his own thoughts. And she thought her tutors had known about all of this. Had been too polite to say. Too lazy. Too unconcerned. Or they thought she already knew and had a plan to compensate for the difficulties she was setting herself up for. Point was, she... wasn't really an anthropologist. Not at all. She'd bought a few books on modern languages, trying to put her training in linguistics to the test, and... she'd found some headway, to her absolute relief. But she needed a purpose. ALD IOM alone had over a dozen dialects, and no fewer than four sacred languages. And all of this was confined to one city. The continent had hundreds of languages, some localised to single regions, or even single villages. She couldn't learn them all, so she needed, desperately, to have a purpose to orient herself towards. Translation work was already being handled by more senior scholars, or she'd have tried to get something there - but those lot guarded their work jealously, and largely just admitted their own friends, or linguists who'd specialised in a single, foreign language - not a raft of languages she intended to learn to the point of easy communication.
So... she needed work. She needed research to contribute. She needed to prove herself - get her foot in the door, and establish her name as a scholar. Once she had that done, the rest would be easy. She'd have made the prerequisite connections, and...
She knew no-one in the Court of Wax.
Her 'connections' at the moment were Hull, who was as hopeless as her if much more sociable, and... that girl from the Court of the Axe, Tanner. Who she... only really knew by name. Oh, hold on... if she was going to expand this list to include mild aquaintances, then she 'knew' someone from Salt and Horn. But the former had lost interest the second Carza admitted her subject, and the latter was mocked her for being so hopelessly inexperienced.
She wasn't some shrinking violet who tumbled over at the first sign of criticism - but it had come at precisely the worst time. The only reason she had a room at the moment was because the Court of Ivory didn't like seeing its scholars turn to vagrancy or embarrassing clerical work. Seeing the world beyond the Court had already left her feeling a mite bit shaken, the loss of certainty after finishing her course had left her on shaky footing, and then someone had told her she was an inexperienced fool... right before the work dried up and she was stuffed into an office to try and claw together a research proposal.
Nor was she arrogant enough to think the world owed her a silver spoon. But she had... she was immature. She'd always seen it as a clean progression from being educated to being a scholar. That was it. It was childish, but that was how the world worked in her eyes. And to her credit, she'd given everything to being educated - pushed herself, endured sleepless nights, done everything in her power to achieve the best results. But once she was left to find her own goals, she just felt... unmoored. Lost.
She was a person with a vocation. A job that had called to her. And she intended to answer that call... but it had ceased just as she reached out to grasp it, leaving her stumbling blindly in pursuit of something elusive that darted out of her grip whenever she thought she'd caught it.
"We need to get out of here."
She murmured. Hull glanced sharply over her desk.
"What?"
"We need to get out. We can't get work here, not without our feet in the door. And we can't do that by just... sitting around. We need to get out, do something big, and then come back with all the work we could possibly handle."
"You're not thinking of taking that job with the church, that sounds-"
"No, no, that sounds like career suicide, more than anything. I mean some independent scholarship."
She leant forwards, her eyes bright. Inspiration. At last.
"So, let's think. What can the two of us do - two scholars with a research proposal is twice as convincing than if we do it alone. What can we do, that contributes something to our chosen fields, and will give us vital experience which we can leverage. We need to produce data, if we can't do that, we're dead in the water. So?"
Hull blinked lazily... and Carza snatched the brandy off the desk, stuffing it back underneath. This was a time for sobriety. Her robe was pulled on firmer, and she slipped on some of her more sturdy slippers... Hull was struggling to get up, and she didn't hesitate before grabbing his ear and hauling him upright. Worked on her when she was younger and weaker. He was larger than her, but... well, ears hurt. His yowl was faintly pathetic as he was dragged to his feet. They needed circulation, that was what they needed. It'd been a month since their graduation, and they were sitting around letting thier souls congeal. They needed movement, they needed action, they needed dynamic energy flowing into their livers.
"Come on, think. We need work we can do together, of course."
"...well, yeah, that's a given. And it narrows it down. I study one particular era of the city... I suppose if I focused on learning how to speak Tralkic, then I could maybe go to the Court of Horn, see if I can extract some information out of them... and you could-"
Carza poked him viciously.
"No! No, that means we stay in ALD IOM. In short, a place where we don't have remotely enough connections or experience. We'd be blocked at every turn, we wouldn't achieve a damn thing. We need somewhere... somewhere foreign, I suppose. Untrodden ground. If we find that, we'll find huge gaps in our data, enough to... enough to milk a few books out, I suppose."
Hull hummed thoughtfully, finally getting into the swing of things.
"...we could go to a foreign country, then. A lot of people are doing that. We could go out there, and... maybe we could look at possibilities of cultural cross-contamination."
Carza interrupted.
"Cross-contamination sounds too infectious, anthropologists don't like the term. Use cross-pollinate."
"Fine, fine, but... the Court of Horn invaded ALD IOM from the west. And that dominated things for a while. But, maybe there were foreigners from beforehand, foreigners who had some influence before the Court of Horn screwed it all up. And if those foreigners existed, then we can study them, go to their original starting point, and publish something on... well, them."
Carza mulled it over.
"...it could work. The issue is, that sounds eerily close to just... translation work, really. We're just taking records from somewhere else and translating it. Not so much a gap in knowledge as a lag in knowledge making its way to us. Possible someone else is already doing that, if unintentionally."
Hull grunted.
"Possible, possible. Alright, adjustment then - we refine further. Most translation work is hovering around the cities, not villages or small towns - if we can get out to one of them... it wouldn't be too dangerous, not if we choose our target properly and take a lot of money with us to hire guides and protection. But at that point it's just a matter of finding the right village, the right town, the right people, and mining them for data. It's all rural stuff, so it's unlikely to be well-recorded in urban centres... we might be able to get something there."
Carza charged for the door, yelling as she went:
"To the library!"
Hull stared at her retreating form for several seconds before following her, muttering something incomprehensible under his breath.
* * *
The library was wonderful. Specifically, this was the... Theris Memorial Library. Like all the others, it had the sacred language inscribed above the door, was a towering room of books and dust. Stack after stack, with ominously heaving piles of tomes, some of them hand-copied, some printed - and it was easy to tell the phases of printing, simply by the quality of letters, any irregularities in the typeface... and it was suffused with old-book-smell. Carza loved it here. She'd been illiterate for part of her early life, and once she'd learned how to read, had devoured books with greedy eagerness. Loved them, loved them, loved them. Loved the way her mind could fill up with new ideas and figures, new vistas she couldn't have imagined before. Maybe that was where the trouble began - the conviction that she could learn about the world from books, and books alone. The imagery she found from them had been so vivid that... that it almost seemed superior to the world. She'd looked at antiquarianism, but the sight of earthy pits full of broken pottery had just... shattered her. It wasn't at all like the books had made out. Anthropology, at least - historical anthropology specifically - had scratched the itch. People were made into simple drawings, cavorting across the page in prescribed fashions. Humanity became organised into neat cultural categories, even the messy bleed-over between categories could be studied and rationalised until it seemed as clear-cut as any idealised form.
People were messy, and anthropology made them simple.
She felt suddenly very strange as she sat down at one of the scratched brown desks, surrounded by rich mahogany shelves and the occasional sleepy scholar who was more successful than these two interlopers. She felt collision. She felt like something was about to start which couldn't be stopped. But when she tried to put a name to it... she failed. It was a sense she'd had when she was much younger, and it usually meant Bad News. It was a sense that a bagman was around a corner and was going to try and cart her off for something. It was the unmistakeable feeling of a leper about to reach out and run his fingers over her face, planting sores like the old gods had scattered flowers over the earth when it was a brown mud ball in the heavens.
She felt unsteady.
But the books began. And her focus adjusted. Hull had a good eye for this sort of thing - he plucked out the right texts, the right documentation. He was sociable, but apparently most of his old friends and acquaintances had moved on with their own work. He'd declared, strongly, that people eating in thier own rooms had destroyed his social life. Because of that, there were fewer opportunities to socialise. Carza had simply blinked owlishly. She ate in her room because she was awake at weird hours and needed the energy when... well, when she needed it, not necessarily when food was being served down below. Developed a fondness for pickled stuff as a consequences. Loved her some pickled eggs. If she had a big jar right next to her, she'd feel several years younger - books, pickled eggs, a sense of promise...
History. The telling of a story about a people long-gone, using their remains and relics as inspiration. Anthropology. The same thing, but the people in question were alive. Hull studied the Court of Horn, the poetry that had emerged after their invasion. She studied the culture, he studied an emanation of that culture... and both had a decent grounding in history as a consequence.
The Court of Horn invaded centuries ago. Unsure of the exact date - do you count from when they arrived, or from when they started settling into the Drum, or when they waged war against the other Courts? ALD IOM was more sparsely populated back then, so it was easier to just find a patch of land to live in where no-one would bother you. Anyway. They invaded, declaring that this was the 'Second Riding of the Heaven-Made Tralkaa'. Tralkaa was their term for a war-leader of sorts, apparently. And as for Ridings... maybe a term for invasions? But no records pointed to an earlier campaign against ALD IOM, which made it seem like they'd invaded somewhere else before... regardless, they'd invaded, established themselves, and been firmly domesticated by the other Courts. There were stories about their arrival, though. When they hadn't yet been tamed. She had never been too familiar with them... but Hull was. Their Tralkaa, their war-leader, a man named Kshykin, had once lost a son to a battle with the now-extinct Court of Beaks. He had asked his daughter-in-law, now widowed, what punishment she would extract.
She hadn't been kind.
The invaders had believed that spilling blood was ritually impure - insulting the earth and sky alike - so they had decided to punish the Court of Beaks... appropriately. The slain son had been killed by a right-handed man. They said that the act had spiritually poisoned his kindred... so they would be purified. The eyes which had fixed themselves on Kshykin's son would be removed. The right hand which did the deed would be severed. The tongue which rejoiced in victory would be plucked. And finally, finally, Kshykin remembered that the killer had screamed the victory to the gods of his Court. And so he pledged to kill the gods who had allowed this to happen, at the behest of his son's widow.
The Court of Beaks had been disassembled. Quite literally. Their eyes were mounted on thorn bushes. Their hands were hung from trees. And their tongues were used to choke the sacred wells, their blood was used to corrupt every shrine they held. By the end, their gods were dead - for there were no tongues to worship them, no eyes to behold the ruin of their shrines, and no priests left alive to resanctify. Their gods were dead. And the Court of Horn moved on to their next enemy, certain that not a drop of blood had touched the ground to insult it, and the trees had shaded the butchery, meaning the sky was unoffended as well. Hull had grimaced when he read this. But it was necessary - they needed information on the Court of Horn, enough information to milk a book out of. Maybe more than one book, if they were very lucky.
Thus did the barbarian king, in his warlike aspect, render vengeance upon those who fought him. He pledged his loyalty to his heathen gods with this gruesome act - a sacrifice to support his conquest. The Sky and the Earth were the two forces he worshipped. A Sky that had taught them how to speak, and an Earth that had taught them how to live. The barbarians declared that they always had two flags - one for war, and one for peace. One from the Earth, and one from the Sky. And they roared that they had abandoned the latter, leaving it back in their homes across the mountains. Until they had their fill, they would make war. Until their saddlebags were rich with silks, gold, and gems... they would plunder. They said that the Court of Beaks would be forgotten - and given the fate of all forgotten dead. To roam the land, listless and aimless, until someone performed the correct rites and learned once more their names, their faces. The Court of Beaks, he decreed, would be known as the Court of the Faceless - the forgotten, the profane, the nameless. Cast from every hearth, and left to prey on travellers.
They said the forgotten dead have no tongues. They said the forgotten dead replace their tongues with the burrowing snakes that form in the corpses of the honourless and forgotten. That their skin wastes away, and all that remains is a hissing tongue and long, black hair formed from corpse-fungus, theri stomachs bloating with rot, with decay, and with the lineages that they will never create. They say that these bone-women roam the halls of dust, and consume the infants who did not survive to be named, to seek some mockery of a legacy. Bloated and trembling, they will pick their way into the homes of the Courts, and weep burning tears into the cradles of those they cannot devour. The barbarian king said that he would unleash our dead upon us. And that when his armies had returned to their home, far to the west, the dead would torment us still.
Such the curse of a princekilling people.
Carza stopped reading, her eyes a little wider. Hull shrugged helplessly.
"This is why I like reading the poetry. At least that has some nice imagery. The prose is all bloody miserable."
Dark-haired rotting women with snakes for tongues and bellies swollen with nameless children.
...the Court of Horn really didn't do things by halves. She coughed, and kept her voice as steady as possible.
"...I think I can see something here, though."
"Can you?"
"Oh, yes, definitely. I mean, I... I suppose we'll need to find some new data. And there's a good few lacunae right here - two gods, Earth and Sky. War flags and peace flags. An emphasis on plunder, a negative emphasis on bloodshed. Which, I suppose, raises some interesting questions - the Court of Horn is what stayed behind, so... theoretically, if we talked to them, we might be able to get some information on what happened afterwards - how did they deal with the fact that their 'peace flag' was apparently back in their home?"
"Hm. Hm. You don't think that just... falls under the issue of 'we're staying in ALD IOM and doing nothing of value'?"
Carza smiled wearily.
"Maybe. But I feel that... the overlap in our areas of expertise means the Court of Horn is going to be important. You have a grounding in their history in ALD IOM, and I have a grounding in more generalised historical and present-day anthropology. So... combining the two, we could look at the relation of the historical invading horde and the present-day Court of Horn, with specific reference to a scattering of historical phenomena."
Hull grinned.
"That sounds like a research proposal, right there."
"Does it? Do you think so?"
"I mean, probably. Not like either of us have... really done this before. Sounds right."
Carza slumped.
"Oh. Yes. Good point. Well. We can... do that, then? Talk to the Court of Horn, maybe... one of their representatives? Not before confirming that no-one's researched this before us, of course. But I think we might be able to get something good here. 'Cultural complications of migrations and interrupted traditions, the case of the Court of Horn's peace flag' could be rather fun, don't you think?"
"Sounds lovely."
He paused.
"Lunch?"
"...I don't want to eat after reading any of that."
"Fair. Drink?"
"You're on. Smoke?"
"As long as you provide the cancers."
"Done. But you pay for the drinks."
Carza hesitated after asking that. She had an idea.
"...alternatively, we both get a giant bag of nuts, warm up that samovar over there, mix a lot of brandy in with the tea and some cinnamon, and we try and power through this tonight."
Hull grinned.
"You know, Carza, for someone who's basically an old man, you're surprisingly fun. I'm honestly surprised I didn't see you at parties when we were students."
"I am not an old man."
"Mate, you live off pickled eggs - I only know toothless old men who do that."
"They're healthy and filling."
"And you smoke, which isn't healthy at all, don't pretend health is a priority for you."
"And don't you pretend to lord your superiority over me, we're both broke and irrelevant."
"Yes, but I can always make a living by seducing elderly widows."
"I can too, I just have a sense of common human decency and wouldn't presume to exploit them in such an awful fashion."
"Is that why you keep complaining about how you don't have any secretaries you can order around?"
"That is entirely different, and I told you that in confidence."
"It's fine, it's fine, you're bone-thin and off-putting, anyone in your position would want someone to order around, no shame in it."
"Alright then, I'll start - you can go and get the nuts, and you can fill up the samovar while I fetch the books."
"Sounds grand to me, you probably would collapse under the weight of the bags."
Carza hissed.
"You're awful, and your taste in theatrophone comedies is vulgar."
"I think you mean 'cutting edge'"
"I mean vulgar. Now get out and make me some refreshments, boy, before I find a typewriter to throw at you."
"Would you like me to get you some false teeth while I'm out?"
Carza, lacking a typewriter, glared pointedly at the samovar. It was large. Heavy. And would probably kill someone if thrown properly.
Hull got the message and scarpered.
And Carza sat back in her chair, a bleary smile on her face.
It was nice having mates. It was like having a secretary, but she wasn't paying their wages, so she could demand them to get alcohol and snacks for her without basically pickpocketing herself.
Was that a healthy approach to take?
Eh. She was going to get a boozy samovar and piles of nuts, she was clearly achieving some kind of success in life.
Everything was coming up Carza.