Excerpts From A Travelogue: Huskland Hounds.

...

"Their leader had served as a guard in the city of Mendel, my translator told me, but had been discharged after mauling a rioter during the long eclipse. His fur was less thick than that of the other Molossi in the band - the loud Free Jaw mercenaries and the quiet tribal trackers. It seemed to me that he had something of the street thug about him, the smooth calm of the gutter Hound."




"It is a bleak land: a parade of shadows in the mist."

"It is the belief of some natural teleologists that natural systema - among which are counted forests, deserts, lakes and even cities - are always moving towards perfect stability. There is a goal, a best possible arrangement, and when the systema has reached this goal all change will be impossible: change would be movement away from the goal. This vision of an unchanging, dusty world -  with every tree and animal trail in the perfect place, forever - has mockingly been called the museum of life by the theory’s detractors. 

There is something of this museum about the Husklands. When the Molossi hunt here it feels like they are disturbing a grave. I am reminded of an argument against the museum theory - that moving towards stability only means moving away from life. A living thing is of course at its most stable when it is dead."

A Proposal.

"So it was that Dor Moshash the geometer king came before the she-worm Brigadora of Garm: for she had taken the city and ruled it wisely as queen. 

And the king said to her: coiling worm, who lights the sky with her fire at night. Make me your man, and yours will be the secrets of the curves and the lines and the motions of the stars. 

And the dragon answered. You will be my husband and rule this city by my side. But keep those secrets and guard them well. For I already have the secrets of the hunt and the flame and the motions of animals, and I fear what I could become."

Excerpts From A Travelogue: The Coiling Road.

"I admit to feeling strangely guilty when the schildbok bounded
so desperately away from me."

“It is my belief that the blood of a beast is something like a rememory engine of old, storing every cruelty committed against the animal’s ancestors and reminding it to run from men. I admit to feeling strangely guilty when the schildbok bounded so desperately away from me. To the antelope I was, apparently, surrounded by the ghosts of long-dead hunters.”

“Hidden under moss stood a marionette drone..."

“Hidden under moss stood a marionette drone, great red ape of Murnican machine clay, inert for centuries. The drone would have been a fearsome thing in its day, its slave nodes glowing like coals and the clay screaming to match the operator’s movements. It proved exciting to me, romantic even, imagining that this place was where the kingdom ended. The last doomed soldier holding back the hordes with his drone, striking the paladynes down from their dromedaries with the strength of fifty men. A single operator finally overrun, taking a sword through the heart and dying along with civilization. But even as I pictured this last hero's last sacrifice the caravan moved on, and an hour later I did see another marionette standing mossy and cracked by its fort. Like the first one: not frozen valiantly clutching its heart or throat but left behind in an indifferent pose, forgotten like an old cart moldering in a barn. In these observations, I think, lie some of the truth of the fall of Murnica.”

Excerpts From A Travelogue: The Tomb City Of Nyxa.

"As we forded the Black river, the Tomb City of Nyxa did rise in the distance..."

"As we forded the Black river, the Tomb City of Nyxa did rise in the distance, carved from the rock of the mountain called Night. It gleamed in the sun to greet us, the fabled Bronze Gate through which the conqueror Tomas Radax could not ride without weeping for all the beauty that would be lost to war. But the gate still stands and is beautiful still. Banners flutter from the old watchtower, melted like a candle by some calamity of a long-forgotten age."

"Bright blue guls soar over Nyxa."

"Bright blue guls soar over Nyxa. They nest in the highest places of the city. Even the air here, just below the cloudline, is too heavy for mountain guls, but the presence of people have drawn them down from the pinnacles. In the city of Lubba I once saw birds like these in a sierrarium, where the air is kept thin through the use of rotors. But the guls in that crystal hall were small and smoky and used to eating grain and seeds, very different from the Tomb City’s bright scavengers. I did not once see a rat in that city, but the birds were everywhere (the very comparison would offend a Nyxan priest, I know this from experience). Guls are holy, they claim, for they help free the newly dead from their flesh."

"Each day another bone is replaced with an exact replica of
polished black gemstone..."

"I have been told that the ritual of coronation takes two hundred days. Each day another bone is replaced with an exact replica of polished black gemstone, starting with the heartbone to which the ribs are attached. Feasts are held for the larger bones: the thigh bones, the pelvis, the scapulae and the bones of the upper arms. On the two hundredth day the skull itself is replaced. The priests of Nyxa believe that this calls the essence of the prince back from the bright lands to rule as king. When his heir dies he will take his place on the black chair, and the old king will return to continue his ancient house’s wonderful conquest of heaven. The king never moves, for such things are below him. He only speaks to the high Priest and his council, who are elected every ten years by the city’s free dead men and women. When the Priest bent over with his ear to the king’s mouth I heard nothing, so very subtle - perhaps - are the mysteries of government as to be imperceptible to one such as myself."