There was a mist hanging over Yuese, a thing unheard of even in the most bizarre legends. Condensation dripped into the deep cloven glass canyons for the first time in a thousand years, and at last the restlessly churning ash dunes had ceased to perfect stillness. The Jaqals were silent, cowed by the unnatural weather, and within their beaten metal domiciles humans stirred uneasily to their duties.
It was, they told one another, an ominous sign; the tears of lost souls, one claimed, wept as they seek to return to the lives they don’t know they’ve lost.
No, said another, it’s the pure blood of the Innocent Ancestors, the ones who had opposed the malice of their kind and been slaughtered in return for their wisdom.
Whatever the cause of the fog, potions of Cable Draggers or the restless sleep of the Dreaming God, the bazaar stirred uncomfortably to life. The market, usually filled with the racket of haggling voices and clattering carts, was today silent as a windless lake: necessities were exchanged for amicable prices with no discussion, and their purchasers returned to their homes as quickly as they could.
The Charm Maker’s stall alone was bustling, drawing great crowds from throughout the city to stand in hushed lines to buy necklaces and totems. Ancient motherboards slung on plastic and copper cables, idols made from speakers whose purpose was long since lost to antiquity. The people touched these reverently to their lips or to their breasts, invoking every god whose name they knew for protection…and they stared, unreservedly, at the cage in the center of the bazaar.
For inside of it was a jutha, an injured body and a deadweight to a scavenging team on the outside. Normally he would have been stripped and abandoned as nothing more than a threat to his party, but times were desperate. Instead, strongly against tradition, he’d been brought back and locked here, in a hanging rebar prison normally reserved for traitors and usurers.
His skin was pale, covered in sweat and condensation from the fog. He clutched at his fractured leg, shivering and staring at the ash-strewn ground through the bars of his cage, not noticing the eyes of the passing market-goers or their hushed whispers to one another as they walked. He mumbled to himself, repeating over and over again, “Not the Priests…oh by the gods and the magics of the Cable Draggers, let me be fed to the Jaqals or smothered in ash, cooked on coals or pierced with stakes and left to dry up in the sun, please, only spare me from the Priests!”
It was the day for the Priests, if ever there was one, some murmured to the others…and the braver added, about time as well. Their beasts had grown tumors and ulcers, lowing with pain in the fields by day. Their milk was muddy with blood and their offspring had been born dead or warped–missing limbs or with one too many. Wheat had risen up stunted, charred black and bowed with strange black berries that stank of rotting flesh. Famines and plague had spread throughout the city, the lasting wrath and hubris of the Divine Ancestors still exacting its toll upon their children centuries later. The Clerics of Famine and their practices were not pleasant to behold–but their blessing was necessary, before the last morsels of food were dried up from the storehouses.
Time passed, immeasurably beneath that dismal gray mantle. The sun’s rays, usually scorching, were diffused to meaninglessness in the hundred thousand specks of moisture, like the diamonds of a chandelier. The people watched warily from their doorways, knuckles wrapped tightly around their charms and totems. The dogs, skin stuck to ribs, lay across their feet, whining quietly to themselves. And at last, around noon, they came.
From the gate of the city, there was a shrill tone, a kind of alien chanting that straightened every spine it reached. The women rushed inside, taking their children with them, and the men stayed on with a sense of grim foreboding. The jutha in his cage looked up with wild eyes, then went completely silent as he stared.
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They processed in along the main road, led by a blind and naked boy. It was he who chanted, singing as he walked and bearing a loaded thurible fashioned from rusted metal. It leaked a noxious gray smoke to the ground that mingled with the mist, but smelt sickly sweet and caused those who breathed it to feel feverish. Through the foul incense vapor came the Priests themselves, stirring it with their black cloaks by their passage.
Their shredded robes swept across the ground behind them, dark except for occasional specks of whiteness: maggots or lice that writhed and swarmed between the layers of damp fabric. Their hands were folded before their breasts, each finger ending in a hooked black talon smeared with ominous stains…but most notable of all, of course, were their heads. Whether they were headdresses or the Plague Priests were the children of devils, onyx black beaks protruded from their faces, and no skin was visible through the pestilent feathers that covered their heads and spilled down their necks into the cloaks. When the light caught them perfectly, beady dark eyes were visible above the keratin, glinting with secretive, private thoughts. Three of them followed the blind acolyte, wordless and soundless as they processed to the center of the bazaar.
Once they reached the cage, the boy fell silent, placing the cord of his censer into the outstretched hand of one of the Raven-headed Men. The jutha stiffened, drawing back as far as he could from the foul smoke, but the Priest swept it towards him, wafting clouds of stinking vapor to him again and again. Gradually, the jutha’s resistance grew weaker and weaker…his movements smaller, his breaths deeper, until at last even his eyelids opened and closed and though leaden. The pupils had turned a milky white, and his jaw hung open narcotically, saliva spilling from the corner of his mouth.
The Plague Priest returned the censer to his acolyte, and then he began to sing. His voice was a haunting drone, a single note that seemed to have more depth than the human ear could perceive. After a moment, the other two joined him, and together they wove a song that stung the brain and confounded the mind. It didn’t seem to emanate only from the Priests, but to echo from the crowds, to fill the streets and spill out over the city walls. It would not have surprised the people to hear that a Jaqal a hundred miles away, prowling in a canyon would stop and raise an ear to listen to their infernal drone. With the smoke of the censer filling their lungs and the chant of the Clerics buzzing in their ears, the people’s vision grew blurry. It became difficult to distinguish the sky from the ground and the far from the near–only the black smudge of the Raven-headed Men was recognizable in the spaceless fog of their sight.
The Priests spread out, surrounding the cage and raising their arms to obscure the jutha from view. The pitch of their chanting grew, till it made one want to dance and vomit and drop dead all at once. In his hanging prison, at last, the jutha screamed. No man has ever survived to tell why the sacrifices scream that way–but none need to. From the sound, the sensation could be derived exactly: loneliness. It was the wail of an orphaned babe, the cry of a deadweight abandoned in the wastes, and the keen of a lost cub. It was the song of the whale that had not been heard in a thousand years, alone and echoing through the infinite void of water to–nothing, and no one. Between three Clerics, in the village that had bred and raised him, the jutha was entirely alone; and heartbroken.
With a crackling sound like a driftwood fire, the scream shrank into a gasp and a long, slow breath. Half of that breath issued from dead lungs, the exhalation of a corpse perfuming the air inside the cage as the maddening chant stilled and finally went silent. The Priests lowered their arms, folding their talons once again before their breasts. They paused for a long moment around the rebar prison, then turned as one. The blind acolyte took his place before them, and began walking, without a word, the way they had come. There was no sound but the rustling of the Clerics’ ragged cloaks across the ground, and presently, at last, they were gone.
Within the cage was a shriveled husk, wrinkled like a sun-dried fruit and shrunken over its bones. The leathery skin had split, bleached femurs and clavicles peering out through it like teeth in the dust, and the last of the jutha’s eyeballs drizzled from his sockets, dripping to the ground.
The cage was emptied into a glass canyon for the Jaqals, and then hung back up in the bazaar to swing on the eddies of the wind. Their beasts would bring forth handsome, healthy offspring and the next harvest of crops would rise tall and strong into the sunlight. Those bowed under the plague of their Ancestors’ wrath would recover, tumors subsiding and hair returning to their scalps. The life of a jutha for the life of the city.
And trade in the bazaar resumed.