Winds blow, bells toll

[Vilhelm Benkern]

WIND - I

"Change is coming, from the west and east." So said the wall of the Newest Palace.

Musica was, as ever, in the midst of things, where it belonged - where its civilians could most profit. This was the inherent way of the city. 'Twas ever thus. 'T'would ever be, too. Whenever the lower orders attempted to overthrow the mercantile middle, one of a selection of old records played - the one about the poor boy done good; the one in which the dream dissolved in fire; the one where nothing really happened.

It was a resigned urban mass culture. Songs were sung of revolutionaries who were brave or cowardly. Poems were recited of princelings, praising them as if they were of the people and for the people. Whispered stories and vernacular turns of phrase referred to the countless families and individuals who had all left their mark on the place.

And yet, much like the hooves of the great morass of oxen that used to drag goods through the Old-City Walls (no, not the Old City Walls - these were the walls of the City-before-the-City, long purged from physical existence by fire, but extant in the memories and muniments of city insurers who never forget) - they each left their distinct imprint on the ground, and yet the result was formless.

The dark, almost purple blood painted to form elegantly-shaped Shirerithian English words at least nine feet high on the northern perimeter barbican of the Newest Palace insisted to the contrary, however, that change was not only possible, but imminent. The brutality of the vital liquid was completely subverted by the neatness of the mega-calligraphy - on considering this, for some reason this conjured the image of an impossibly stable upside-down pyramid in the mind's eye of Constable Laqim, who was investigating "the disturbance of the peace of the barter" which this sublime graffiti constituted in law. He unconsciously sketched the geometrical basics of this notion in an empty corner of his notebook before resuming to record sundry facts and features of the scene of the crime.

[Vilhelm Benkern]

BELL - I

Irritata fingered an ancient coin. It was tiny but unusually heavy, its once-proud mint imprint now faded, and was one of the Muscart family treasures. Hers was probably the oldest merchant family in the city, and certainly one of the richest. Legends held that their family founded the city, hence their name. The stories said they were part of the primordial elite of the Musican Empire which existed before the crowning of Raynor. They were the true inheritors of fire and of Agni, the mythical first founder of Khaz Modan, still revered as a Cedrist deity. The Wars of Unification finished by Raynor brought the first and greatest destruction of the city. Ever since then, many destructions have been wreaked upon the city, but none could root out the Muscart line. They were the eternal rebuilders of this preternaturally regenerative polis.

That was naturally almost all untrue. In fact, some distant bastard founded their line, and, like many of his kind throughout the ages, took the name of the city as his family name. Did he even come from Musica? There was a possibility, it must be conceded, that the progenitor had been an ancient Musican himself. The question, mused Irritata as she felt the weight of the familiar metal disc, was merely academic. The fact of their continued prosperity was all that mattered. She placed the coin back on its velvet-covered mount and closed the display case. She had often erred on the side of indecision. She sat back at her pewter desk to bring an end to the procrastination.

The question before her, laid out on the finest seaweed vellum which was utterly non-traditional but had lately caught on as a court fad, was whether to agree to the redeployment of further capital and part of the family fleet to their trade post in Aqabâ. Theirs was a trading empire on which the sun never set, and while usually the chain of supply and resupply displaced risk disproportionately among the other parties with whom they did business, the Muscart family had taken a gamble on this one. Eura was well-known as an ungovernable, unyielding continent. When they disappeared with a bang, not a whimper, the great empire which had once ruled it, it was said, took with them from Micras not just their government of Eura, but the idea of government of Eura. There could be none now. It is a lost art, a mechanism for which there iss no design or specification and of which the last extant prototype has been smashed into pieces.

Still, that did not diminish the lustrous draw of the great valuable jewel of opportunity which this colossal landmass presented to the merchant adventurer, least of all those in Musica. Minerals, fuels, slaves, furs, jewels all flow as freely from that land as water does from the Tower of Araxion, without limit. And in the centuries following the collapse of civilisation there, all manner of salvage had been recovered from the last bastions of craft to be traded at bazaars wherever safe havens could be provided by local warlords or external merchant powers. Millennia of technological and cultural innovation boiled down to excellent deals on, for example as the Muscarts had recently achieved, one thousand antique pornographic water-clocks.* In that desert land, the water-clock became during the golden age a symbol of the success of technology over drought. Now, as the desert reasserts itself, no water was to be wasted on such frivolity. But the profit that was made on such finely crafted unique items outstripped that of their thriving semi-precious stone concern. In fact, the excellent ones and trendsetters of various places throughout the Imperial Republic had been so taken by these water-clocks that the family had established a factory and was producing them for the mass market, though they were a mere shadow of the originals which had been imported from a foreign clime and a past time.

Inspired by the riches recovered by the countless ventures such as this, a lesser cousin, Guibert Muscart, had requested permission and money from the family court over which Irritata presided as matriarch to establish a formal trading post at a ruined port city on the west coast. The capital investment required, as well as the military power required during the founding and maintenance, made such a proposition a hard sell for a region as unstable as Eura. Against her better judgment, she agreed. Thousands of erb and men later without sign of profitability, and now a fresh petition had made its way across the sea requesting more money and more ships. In her younger days, she would have left Guib to 'profit or die' (the family motto). But she had grown softer and more reflective with time, and so scribbled down her decision, stepped out of her office and handed it to an attentive scribe for conversion into a true court document. It read, "Ships, yes. Money, no. Guib coming home. Order to asset strip and prepare to shut."

* They were, fascinatingly, based on a technology developed on a short-lived volcanic island in the Shire Sea. It builds up... the water pours out as it crashes down... and then back up... ad infinitum, much to the envy and delight of nobles and noblesses of Shireroth. Forgive me!

[Nostalgia]

Profit or die!