You arrive in the morning, filthy, red-eyed, a single donkey and a
single days-worth of food left between you. As the sun just begins to
reach its fingers above the horrible headache-inducing violet haze which
rings the eastern horizon, its first visible EM emissions of the day
illuminate your destination –
GONT: The Rainbow confederacy’s
westernmost interest of any considerable size, kept alive mainly by
passing Hexad-sponsored mule trains and dwarfen die-sel vech convoys, a
glorified mountainside truck stop before grander, more profitable
locales in the wild west. The township squats inside an ancient
earth-toned ringwall of dryland coral, twisting in post-modernist,
spike-covered branches, built around a deep natural spring. Before the
east-facing gate and arcing left and right are patched and re-patched
polytarp hobo tents, the majority abandoned, a few small barrel fires
marking continued habitation. Would-be adventurers. A couple of career
caravan bodyguards patrol the outskirts on camelback, mostly
Bluelanders, escapees from prejudice.
This is a stronghold of
Eastern habits and culture in a sea of endless grass and ruined wonders.
That Gont is a shithole barely held together by the mutual interests of
faraway Rainbowland oligarchs is a secondary detail; they have an
IDENTITY, they go to CHURCH, they’re going to make MAD STACKS OF CASH
out here in the middle of nowhere, FUCK YOU.
The cold dry season
is in full swing, and the desiccating wind carries dust and tiny razors
of ice straight into your eyes. The needlegrass lies brown and brittle,
close to the cracked earth. Just inside the gate, mudbrick and concrete
walls, wooden beams but not many, trees being relatively rare; mud
streets, deep tire treads and wagon furrows, only ~90 permanent
residents but the population swells by hundreds with the passage of
caravans, state officials sent to speak with the khans of the steppe
clans, fugitives, members of the Fifth Estate (undocumented ghost
people), ETC.
YOU AWAKEN in the room at L’Ultime Motel you
had rented the night prior. It was the cheapest one they had so there’s
only one bed and a battered tin samovar bolted onto the floor in the
middle of the room, a fiberglass basin w/ bucket of cold water, rugs,
tapestries, bars on the window. This room’s only 6 sp a night; there’s a
two-bed for 12 sp and a four-bed for 20 sp, plus 1 sp per day for
taking care of your donkey.
L’ULTIME MOTEL is a three-story pile
of shacks on top of a garage. The in-house vech-tech Adipose Jellyguts
bangs his articulated porcelain multitool arm around in the depths of
some rusted out dwarfen road yacht, screaming at underlings.
The
woman who runs the books (Assolta Pistola) and gives you your key
(bright brass with a bulky plastic gnome hanging from the keyring) looks
like a spider trying to impersonate a human, long and haunting,
pregnant pauses, constant calculations, constant activity, but in
between bookkeeping she emerges from her administrative web and makes
her rounds, checking on boarders, listening at doors, making sure all is
well in an accidentally very unnerving way.
The rooms are small
with iron bars on the windows, but soft, warm, tapestries and rugs, a
samovar each, paper talismans tiled beneath the mattresses, folded into
squares, to prevent bad dreams. A nomad custom; when you sleep on new
grass every night, next to unfamiliar ghosts, such practices are
important.
The attached and jointly-owned public house, Obol’s,
is half-underground, serves warm beer with little limes, and boasts a
menu of traditional steppe-nomad cuisine altered subtly for the tastes
of Rainbowlander caravaneers (more salt and far fewer invertebrates).
Pilaf, sausage, lots of horse meat, soft bread. Everything is served by
Alka One-Arm, radially-symmetrical nine-armed symbiote-junkie, nervous
system replaced by mycelium, smiley, cheerful.
The Plaza Mercat,
yurts, always in motion, everything either setting up or tearing down,
loading or unloading, surplus goods or trinkets picked up along the
route, cherenkov cherries too close to spoiling to make it to the
cities; steppelander stalls, marked by the sigil of the Yuzu or the
Pomelo, cultural envoys, they’ve got:
Tinctures for health and enhancement (half-functional nanite slurry
drawn up from oldtech reservoirs by crude man-powered pumpjacks,
tinctures of yuckwheat)
Fragile pearls strung on cords and
made into bracelets (they form in the bellies of the magical barnacle
snail around irritating flashes of half-real cosmic particles as they
are caught by the karmic lining of the beasts stomach, crush them to
bewilder ghosts)
Good-luck charms of sparrow skulls and porcelain carvings of the same, alternating, can barely tell one from the other
Bullets, bullets of every caliber, every shape (each one crafted by the
clan gunsmith, or more likely their apprentices, old forge-devices and
magics cajol explosive elementals into lead and splintering iron, they
are sleeping now, but the spark of the gun-wand is all it takes to begin
the reaction and if you listen carefully you can hear them dream as you
reload)
A few expensive guns, locked tight in translucent
plaz cases, bound with charmed copper wire and three tiny padlocks each.
Their names are written on little slips of paper stuck on the front;
“STONE COLD,” “VIOLENT REENTRY,” “WIDE SWATHE” (Rainbow names; the guns
are multilingual, and will understand if you cannot pronounce the nom de
guerre inscribed in their hearts upon the machining altar)
Oils and sauces, a thousand spices, a million ingredients, years of
quiet slow fermentation produce viscous substances of shocking color,
seen through perfectly clear jars of glass; remove the lid and be
careful not to faint as the transcendent odor washes over you,
meta-umami, the flavor OF flavor
Strange meat, curlicues of
sausage, shelled spring rabbits, skins and furs, the meager bounty of
the steppe; nacrepede and sunscarab roasted, sold by the bag; dried
yonderpods, lemongrass, ampules of concentrated honey
There
is also, always, an ongoing wrestling match happening in the circle of
white stones in front of Grandma Soolie, the retrofitted rickety pump
system that draws water up from some deep aquifer. The clans have
brought their sport of choice to this place: wrestling. Two unadorned
human beings enter. No pouches, no kicks, no weapons, nothing but
grappling and throwing; This can go on for hours. Anyone with a score
to settle with you (or who just wants to prove themselves more manly)
will challenge you to this endurance sport before a more deadly fight.
The pillories lie not far away. Old blood stains the wood in splotches.
The
chapel is old, looks like it was carved from a single rock, tessellated
polygons like turtleshell plates or fractal geometry, obvious signs of
petromancy —
(in which the
provided stone is imbued with animating spirits pre-programmed with
mnemonic blueprints and set in motion by the wizard/astral foreman, then
directed to produce repeating shapes (more stable generation that way,
requiring less attention from the caster, and therefore the mark of a
great petromancer is the appearance of complex, non-similar facets in
the grain and pattern of the final product), smoothed or textured
according to the client’s desire, trimmed and edited at corners,
crenelations, buttresses, etc., to finally produce a finished structure,
onto which doors, windows, and additional flooring or paneling (if one
were so inclined) are added, the entire process taking months or years
according to the scope of the project, the skill of the wizard, any
alterations made to the design, or any inauspicious astral occurrences
which might distract or otherwise hinder the constructive activity of
the spirits; to prevent this an active petromantic zone is often guarded
by birdskull good luck charms, jadewood totems, notched silver rods
driven into the earth, or more commonly (especially in Safranje and
Oranje, where the art is most honored) blessed origami strung on white
twine.)
Inside is sparse, prayer mats on the floor, fading
tapestries on the walls of various scenes from historio-scripture
(traditionally the first tapestry is black, for the Forgetting, then the
fabrication of the First God of Man, Corpus Mundi (the Needle in the
Eye of the World), the creation of the sacral calendar, then various
depictions of the saints and their good works).
