A parade of the scarcely living shuffled across the flagstones of the Causeway Al-Koji.
For weeks, it had trudged across the sweltering tropic
glades of the inner Oman Caliphate: bound to unmarked gravel roads constantly
washed out by monsoons and neglect. Ague stole elders, snatched children,
plucked at the healthy to mark them as refugees. Sallow bones and rotting gums
adorned once-swaggering bazaarmen, gruff paddy farmers, longshoremen, scribes, thieves.
It marched in a silence stifled by the creak of
ungreased axles, the tramp of footfalls. Hundreds of mud-splattered cloaks
obscured the Causeway's marble surface in a woolen canopy. Around the edges,
several serpentine icons of Koki slipped over the edge and into the ocean's
froth below. Few noticed, and none cared.
The Legion was inching southward, thirty miles a day.
Seven fortified towns had fallen since they took the south road to Oman-Ah. Their
infernos transfixed them at dusk halts, promising thirst and twisted ankles the
following noon.
Southward, past the sunken ohawood bones of the
docklands. Around barricades of vanities in the Old Heart district. Between the
vicious food queues at the inshore jetties and caravan-ports. Through the half-feral
phalanxes of rogue Levy companies, waiting derelict for the treaty. Over the
heaps of dead that followed.
And now, a windswept morning simmered in grey and
soaked with rain, across one of the House Causeways.
Salvation would be a caravel or zigger-ship. And if the
Hoard Coast had not blocked their escape this morning with a titanic gale, the
mob might have simply marched into the sea with bowed heads. Oman-Ah, the Treasury
of a Million Hearths, had thrown them nothing but bones.
So, onward.
The living staggered onwards, leaving black cloaks and silver shards to swirl
and scatter under the Causeway's curves. Overhead, the gongs of the Al-Koji Basilica crashed out a warning.
Work in progress. Intro to a Deadfall section I'm working on. You'll get more as the weeks drag on, and my patience for the draft of a certain Terraform submission wears thin.
***
<work> "Leak", "Sanctuary", "arachnae.we"
<words> "The Armour of Contempt"--Dan Abnett/"Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse"--ed. John Joseph Adams
<noise> Perfect Confusion (first incarnation of Cage The Elephant)
<screen> N/A
<levels> N/A
<food+drink> French toast, water
<quote> “Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, perhaps
even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life
that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with
autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us
next."--Juan Gabriel Vasquez, "The Sound of Things Falling"
