He remembered what his source had said: just a handful of gilders. They won’t miss them. And then? You’ll get to escape Ascens.
"This be a furious gruff.” A bloodbuzzing voice circled the bird’s head, swattable like bloatflies. “Got a greedy mouth and a prick too big for the brain.”
It was a handful of gilders, the bird reconciled. Only a whirr escaped his truncated throat. And they ruined my arm, took my hair for it. At least I bit off that bitch’s finger. Calloused, wretched, gingery. A wriggled worm wrenched from the hook. A grin managed to form, imperceptible - a scoundrel’s didactic slyness.
Bared smallchest billowed in quick breaths, air trawled through half-collapsed pathways into his lungs. He glimpsed through kaleidoscoping tears: the blurred image of a sash-with-legs moving forward; sweat-wet hair on the stomach above it; a darkened hand grasping for his jaw.
“Kedvezö,” the name of the gone-god rang in his ears like a miserable mosquito. Their divine domain was that of Lucky Happenings (and Reunions, Morality, Opportunities of Power, and The Taste of Water After Thirst). To him, that domain was a barren field, a site ruined by harsher believers, a faith stronger than he could muster.
“Lucky day, luckiest day, the thief’s returned,” came the sash-mosquito’s biting words. Obsidian-blackened eyes widened, their vision remaining glassy. Inside of the domicile (single door, enough clutter, unequipped to deal with the city’s winter scorch), he felt a sickening cold set over him. One that only fevers or courts provide.
There could come no defence.
“Tewfik,” the bloatfly named the mosquito, “what do wedo with… this?” The dried straw hair drizzled over him like hateful summer snow.
Wedo, that unmistakable tonguestuck accent found about the hinterlands of Dotter-Grandtemps. A scattering of fortresses calling itself cities, recalcitrantly built on swamplands and coastlines. Technologically independent, producing windmills and conservatives. And here stood its wide and aged, red-haired example. ‘They’ll say wedo, never Ido!’ That remembered - and, not to mention, crass - saying surprised him. An imagined triumph bubbled up, and he immediately killed it off. A petulant fallback. That subject who interpellates me as no more than a swipehand, I, in turn, must explain to myself as a barbarian through common misrepresentations. If I could speak, they would feel a sectarian urge to kill.
The mosquito Tewfik continued: “That’s easy. We just ask for our precious tokens back.”
Hand met jaw. Grip angled up. Nothing in the bird’s sight saw above the square chin, fully bearded. Tewfik nodded: a silent order, an act of leadership at the bloatfly behind. She ruffled, then found, then pocketed the bills taken from their amphorae. Hidden under dried spring grains, far from pouch and purse. “Aye,” the man who kept birdjaw locked in his fingers approved. “Now that's settled… we ask the thief what sort of passions and motivations - what kind of ideas - this had to believe in.” Thumb split mouth. Nail sank cheek. “Speak, little chick. And live.”
What idea did I believe in? My survival above all. To exploit you, and to have your humiliation feed my furtive ego. My actions spoke for me. Do I have a category other than “thief”?
But. Lips parted for no tongue, gave nothing. A sooty fingerprint stained the inside of his cheek. The taste of labour and long nights..
“This does not seem to want to live.”
“It’s not easy to find words in the hand of mercy. Give it a while.” Tewfik let his digit dwindle in his mouth, purposelessly. That chest, grand and as behaired as a vine-covered doorframe, rose with concern: “How’s the hand, Idö? Find your finger?”
“Ja-wel. Got it back after I showed what nine fingers can still do.” She growled, which shook the room, clattered flasks. “Where is Lapasc?”
“Kedvezö. He’s in my forge, heating up the needles. Go see him, complete your hand. I can handle… this.”
Idö excused herself, finger pinched between fingers.
Not a bloatfly, but Idö the fucking Wolf. The voice-striker, the woman who yelled apart ten Sergeants. And I bit off her claw. A proven brute, though anything but, in her mercy to merely breaking me. And then this Tewfik must be… the Blacksmith.
“No tongue. Too many teeth. Ah,” the mosquito hummed. Inspection, followed by realisation. A pool of enough spit had amassed in the bird’s mouth to resemble a fountain bath. A clearwater lens to see how much the bird truly had to say. The blacksmith appraised such: water bowl, lined with cluttering ivory.
“Your wings bring no favour to your fate, little Misluk. Do you salivate for my thumb or for my pain? Bite down if you think you can escape me.”
A toying question - if I do, I will die. Escape is as unimaginable as I am, the idea of a dream. I cannot defy his authority without falling back on known repertoires, cannot conceive of any motions to prove I am anything but a captive. My wings, tied with bone, will not fly me away. My shiv, stuck to cock, will not cut me free. I cannot make him eat his words, so I–
“You’re leaking. It’s dirtying my floors. Swallow, chick.”
The chick obeyed, spit-sea receding, wolf-flesh sliding down.
“Aye. You swallow your greed, pride, nicely. I’m relieved - your eyes eclipse with the understanding of what you are to me. Now. Nod if you can see my left hand.”
Eyelids unshuttered in the attempt for focus, beergold eyes observing a giant’s paw in specific gesture. Thumb on index and middle fingers, ring lowered, pinky prominent. The head shook in the affirmative - left, then right, the thumb-in-mouth distending cheek like a hamster chewing qat.
“Understand more - does it mean to you what it means to me?”
Of course. The sign of a second gone-god, Megvetés. I know her well. Curses, death, and impermissible longing. In my recognition, it becomes a rejection of one half of me; the potential for redemption of that same half. Alturan. Angel. Vulture. Occupier. The remaining half is a discardable truth: that I am from this side of the sky, fled from both and fed by no one. Souslander, sect mattering none.
I, Misluk - a failure.
The chick nodded again, drawing mouthblood.
“Aye. I’ll tell you what this means. It means we share a world. Not the world my feet and your talon-toes curl against - Cel D’Altura wants you as much as the Souslands do. As much as piss off leather.” The giant strolled behind him, hand crawling inside until four fingers found an island of soft palate hidden between exceeding teeth. Hand pulled up. A gurgled whimper came from the grounded bird. Brown wings struggled against the second sternum, a pylon of bone grown over flight tendons - unique, and useless, to the spawn between Alturan and Souslander.
Hinging me open with a hand I can chew off. For what reason does he finger the ridge of my roof, cleave my lightless interior? Is my mouth so important to him, for him? Does this appear to be ritual, or critique?
“We share a world of idea-making. We, chick, happen to interpret, digest, and act in the same ways. A shared world, with our impulses leaning towards the criminal. A world of disgust, obstinance, plague-wishing. Of constant failure.” Fingers pushed deep against the ribbed flesh. “Some would write this off as artistic.” He chuckled, continued: “You understand our symbols. I understand your actions, in spite of your symbols. Understand these things you do.”
The mosquito sighed, placing a hand on searing shoulder.
“A difference between us, though, is that I’m not fucking stupid enough to lash out against two worlds while twice as weak.” The bird could feel the disgust - a professional one - burn into the top of his split-haired head. He heard: “you’ll regret that one last time,” before:
Crack.
He had assumed his head had been pulled off his jaw. A peacefulness, the body emptied of thought, a moment of being an unfinished, or broken statue, or something people passed by. Peace did not prevail, followed by sharpest pain as bone was shoved back in place. The blacksmith, with technical skill and no medical concern, had un-dislocated him, his body a tool for the forge. Hot breath streamed over scythe-like fingers as the bird’s shoulder socket received its joint-bulb back. Where a tongue would articulate voice into screams, here air burst out like a dumb animal. Until it weeded and withered, leaving the crust of a barren prayer.
“All spent? Aye. Listen, chick. You’ll survive the mistake you made. You’ll stay and we’ll patch you up, free of charge.” The taunt tickled in its insect-like humming. “Just understand: your attempted theft will cost you your signs and symbols against the Alturans. Then we set you free.”
Hand unsleeved itself from him, wet and dirty with loud slime. Tewfik’s torso appeared in front again, briefly, and he felt a salivated handprint plastered on his frail chest. Eyelids closed with exhausted complacency - and did not open for days. He had survived stealing from Babel, the cruelest rebels.
A sea of shock washed over him - no tears to fake. He was, for the first time, truly terrified.
I can’t fucking speak and now I can’t fucking see. I can barely think. I’m spit with blood, body with wings. It was just a handful of gilders…
She sneezed and he’d wanted to be polite. Mercy, he wanted to say.
“You’ll pay me back,” she swore. Danger scratched at his esophagus, her meat clumped in his stomach. Regardless, triumph flared in his nostrils: he would live to digest it.
He received care from a stranger called Lapasc, a poet and chirurgeon who he compared to a weevil. Little questions he could never answer about where it aches, how old he was, if he enjoyed the lychees. The weevil continued that he, a tired doctor, hailed from Ziyyerprau, a verdant town that grows tired doctors. Years ago, Tewfik had stumbled into his clinic with a big grin and a leg hanging far below the pelvis. After fixing him, he decided to travel with this grinning man to Ascens - the blacksmith can apparently hand anyone a reason to leave with him.
'Tonight, we dream of victory. Tomorrow, its taste spices the wine.'
Ascens, lower capital of the Souslands, port d’entree for the Alturans, where Commander-Exodant Adelheid the Undenied cracked open the clouds and claimed all that they revealed. Adelheid, who Tewfik had tamed in the selfsame forge. Adelheid, a name he cursed as many times as he breathed. The weevil taught him the city’s proper title, the gone-name of this city: Minden Ugyanazon. Its sign: a thumb against index and middle fingers, pinky raised…
A dual-sign, he realised. My dumb luck, he realised.
Left to privacy, he decided it was time to relocate his trump card. His useful arm slid down into the damp plumage, the unkempt bristle under his wraps and between his legs. Four limbs, all claw, and who’s the prey? He chuckled at his anatomy, at the honed care with which he touched himself. His phalanges brushed away the lucky coin by his cloaca, and met the shiv’s steel. Plucking it free was easy enough, and he hid it in his mouth. The heat was not unpleasant. The ingredients of his musk alloyed into pungent metal, salted flesh. A perfume rock to suckle on, the mixed scents filled his nose’s interior.
He tasted.
Continuing to inspect himself, skin numb to blade and talon, there were three scabbed-over lines he could feel. He searched more, exploring his genitals within blindness, enjoying the weight and warmth on his claws. After relief dispelled the worry of disrepair, a sensation flooded into his loins like how the river ambushes a dry bed. He had rehearsed to loosen his pleasure, strategic about leaving no traces or delays - interruptions to the work of survival. So now, hardening, he tried to understand his body as if it were disappearing in an hourglass. He was too late for furtiveness. The blood-thickened flesh asserted its place, escaping the confines of his loincloth. The surprise of bliss reared its dark purple head, gliding through the constellations of his shifting grip, requiring utter attention. Cock gripped frantically, only three fingers with which to make a gone-god gesture. The sign missing two fingers; an iconoclasm he could not hide.
He masturbated in profane confusion.
He focussed on memories: on his digits dove deep in that amphora, on Idö’s bloody pinky between his overabundant teeth, on the sound of his hair being stolen - his un-feathers. Inside his mouth, the shiv pointed at the mosquito’s nailprints like a compass needle. It directed him further to Tewfik’s mosquito voice, the sash, the torso, the grip on his jaw, the warmth of the hand inside him, the fingers fingering his flesh. He came hard - he had to -, streaming volcanic jets from an insane arousal almost too hot to bear, coating his talon, his plumes, his stomach.
There was a low laugh from the doorpost, and a cotton rag landed on his stained belly.
“Aye. A fine symbol, Misluk.” Footsteps led away, dimmed the room.
He knew who it was, and the forge-fires in his blood-rusted, cum-stained cock would not subside until after a third, painful shudder-orgasm.
The days that followed granted silence. The kind of silence that exists in rumour. The kind that those in the hairy underbelly of a city will hear and read about it, but can never get to. No longer the sounds of crowds to blend into, of insects congregating near summer rivers and winter cesspits, of the blood’s always-thrum in the inner ear. It was so quiet that thinking became a pastime, not a survival technique. An action, not reaction.
Without a hand in my mouth, escape is no longer a taunt. My body reads as a cripple, bow-legged to an overdrawn degree, bruises as yellow and purple like a meadow in bloom. And that will bring into consideration and consensus that if I run, it will not be far. In ideascape captured and bedridden - indebted to my captors and caretakers with the price of mercy. I mistook their symbol, and they mistook mine. But what remains is that I wanted their money - they want me healed. Bracketed considerations, a bad algebra - it does not make sense!
Some nights, especially the ones after he masturbated, Lapasc drooled on him. Tongue out, slug-like, dropping slime trails from the branches. It softened the crusty, parchment-like remains, liquefied him, dissolved the ink from his loins. Nutrients for the weevil’s instrument. Doctor kissed, sucked, lapped at his fertile pastures, believing the narcotics within the lychees to be effective. With a natural resistance to poisons, and that undetectable scoundrel’s smile, the bird enjoyed being cleaned. To feel a tongue heave through the down of his stomach. What did he taste like? What did the idea of him being asleep grant to that taste? And, must he be asleep to awaken the weevil’s arousal? It became scientific, and he decided it must be for the doctor as well. Lapasc, every time, kissed his member goodbye.
Understanding himself as patient, grateful patient, wasteful patient under doctor, tired doctor, weary doctor, no breathing quickened and nothing trembled.
Sight eventually returned to his bruised eyelids. He was given chalk and a plate to write on.
He knew letters. The first person to call him a Misluk had taught him. That father refused to grant pronouns beyond a designatory “this”, designed and decreed a grammar for the misbegotten. That idea meant that he would recognise, then interpret, then internalise his station appropriately. This. Right here, never there, never beyond the space of his body, strange body, mismatched body. So when he saw the Alturan clerks finish their census-taking, he bowed, bounced, to the classification. He was, after all this time. Lowly, but in the hierarchy.
That only made it harder for him.
He had written furious scribbles, wherein lay what he truly thought about this. Goings-against the symbolic order for which he had to exist as a lowly, single sign. Those encountering him and his tongueless mouth smiled without wasting words, any word, on him. He knew the letters of their silence. He torched novels’ worth of rage in their name, on the altar of Megvétes. All that he burned, he inhaled, praying for a string of deaths as specific as a sentence. Each letter swapped for a wound.
The lack of blood said enough.
The bird, close-lipped and thin-eyed, shook his head up and down - he did not know letters. So, to his surprise, Tewfik assumed the responsibility to teach him how to write.
It was difficult. How to hide the slight assumptions in his own body, the automatic processes that link chalk-in-hand to claws-like-this. Turn off one instinct, and assume another: he had to perfect, no, pretend willingness. That he did not mind a hairy-knuckled hand kneading his talon into the proper way to hold, press, apply, draw, connect, sign, and finally, exist without its touch. He’d copy what was gruffed at him, expertly hiding his own practised handwriting while tracing Tewfik’s terrible scratchings.
The bird in him noticed everything about the process: a stage, a sequence, a sentence. How the downstairs forge enwreathed him in an enduring, sleepy heat. How the sweat treacled from Tewfik’s burly arm onto his body as it moved and showed, as it directed him to write false understandings. How the friction of dark-leather skin to his papyrus paper felt like rubbing the scab-lines on his cock, over and over. That Tewfik’s voice was not like thunder, that the ringing had disappeared from his concussion. His voice was middle-bodied, high in the throat and gruff through practice, loose with exhaustion, instructive and patient. Slow. Slowly, slowly resisting sleep himself (but, he imagined, still mosquito-like).
“And now you know how to write ‘yes’ and ‘no’.”
Hand released his hand – he had thought of it as a hand in that moment – and returned to claw, attached to talon, imbricating up to a fleshy upper arm, tucking away a wing only capable of signalling and decaying. ‘Yes’ and ‘no’ interpellated him as a subject with agency. A rank in the vocal ranges capable of and being allowed to appraise consent and intent. It was something he had heard about, never read.
And I’m in a position to use these words? Ought I be grateful? Does he believe that, now I’ve been taught, I’m grateful? Vessel-like? Violable?
So, “yes”, he wrote.
“And now you can answer some simple questions.” There was no hostility in Tewfik’s voice, but something chilled the bird’s body like Minden’s summer-freezes. A recall, a flash, back to when everything signifies danger, or worse, unsafety. Seized by his own body, held inside his brain. His years with that father were like this.
The teacher had stopped teaching and he had come to demand.
It had not set the bird free to know all this.
So, “yes”, he wrote.
“Aye. You understand, do you? Now answer honestly…”
The reason for my captivity, held against all my arteries. Their efforts, my usefulness. Hinging on the tip of a tongue, the fragile chalk.
“Little Misluk, do you want me to suck your prick?”
His vision trawled up the body leaning over him in his convalescing bed. A blacksmith’s masterpiece, an oeuvre of work, dark-made-darker by forges, work, and blood. The toned stomach, fat as though lyed, peeked over the tightness of his waist-sash. The pectorals canvassed with labour and its struggle, burn marks and slash scars. The shoulders shone with sweat-light, holding up the neck: a crooked, bulged, and certainly accommodating throat. Then there came the face, rising from that wide lower jaw. A face that had a grin grimed into it like soot on a furnace. An ill-suited nose, jewel unfit to a ring. Swamp-green eyes, parted a single seam too wide. All of this hung over him, like a uvula, like a bell. The question flooded his senses.
He did not notice the saliva slipping from his coffer-shut mouth.
“Answer, chick. You’re drooling.”
Answer…? Answer who? To you? Do I have a choice, either way? Broken bird. Chick to care for. Youth to discipline. What am I, in our shared world? Pretending is not an option…
So, “no” he wrote. And regretted the decision without any sense of triumph.
“Ha! Right answer. I’m not coming near that chunk of yours till you’ve been washed. You stink up my bed, cum over my sheets…” Eyes flicked at him knowingly, sardonically, “...and no, Lapasc’s tongue doesn’t count. You’re coming for a dip.”
Embarrassment gulfed over him. Not at his hygiene, but at being found out. Subtlety, his one protection, had failed. In Tewfik, he read the utter joy at such futile attempts, that there could be some fight left in the bird. ‘Kedvezö, this still retains an idea opposite to being tamed!’ Did Lapasc know? Did that even matter? Did the fakery fulfill the role, anyway? …was he disappointed at that?
Cleaving the thought, a bloatfly entered the room, shirt-loose and bottomless.
“So, what do wedo about this trickster?” Idö took two steps to reach the foot of the bed. Her voice, he noticed, had unbloated. It sounded hoarse and dented, carrying within it a time where softness had to be petrified. To his surprise, but not Tewfik’s, she grabbed the blacksmith’s ass. Hand ran deep into the grooves on his linen-covered backside. Joints stretched and cracked, the sound of spreading fingers toward their destinations: thumb circled his crater, fingers fondled his fabric-wrapped testicles. Only a quick flick of those green eyes to the side hinted at Tewfik’s accession.
“We take him to the sea, wash the stains away. Then we ask our questions.” He exhaled, dog-like, and added, “I’ve already washed.”
“Couldn’t care. Ido what I want with you, anyway.” Slipping that statement, Idö’s thick hands pulled the bottoms half-way down the domes of his full rear. Arching himself toward her, a loud smack filled the room, eliciting not a single reaction or motion. The wolf left her prints on him as she took what was needed. The bird could only watch, could only see his face, as she entered him with her tongue. Above him, his captor-tutor retained eye-contact; the wolf he had commanded pounced on him so willingly.
The spit. The slaver. The peaceful rote of it all. As Idö continued her meal, he watched Tewfik’s hardening member raise the linens of his pants like a shipmast, or a flag of conquest. The smacks resonated, filling up time, space, and body. The bed-kept dreamer could clearly imagine the triptych he was in. Himself, neck and chest coated in slobber. Tewfik, grin unbreaking, at fountain’s edge. Idö, over-looming shadow, predator lapping creek.
Mouth spilled over. Hand struck ass. Sound changed form. Her strikes left red pigment on painter’s practised roundings. They spilled over, animated, the triptych’s frame, splattering and disrupting the composition. An artist’s uncertainty climbing higher, the act resolving amorphously, yet arriving. With each hit, she invited a free radical - the new -, and he could not believe in anything but that which was in front of him. She grasped the tented member, pointed at him, choked as a market chicken. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. Cock crowing for him, just him.
Bang. The strikes continued.
Something changed as Idö acquired her precision. She recognised the correct input - the required act from which confidence spills forth. The perverted, scoundrel-like intent to upset façade through obscenity. The middle part, the centrepiece of it all, broke its own static composition. The impossible had been achieved. The face that Tewfik kept painting-still broke down with a moan. It was gorgeous. Like gravel spilling into glass. Like armour breaking through. A ribcage giving way. There was no left-to-rightness, no order of operations, not anymore - she had given chiasmus.
The bird imagined the blacksmith, clenching and opening for her, his puckered mouth permissed to gasp and shut. In him, the desire bloomed to see Tewfik, gasping Tewfik, acquiescing Tewfik, from the wolf’s perspective. His cloaca wept for a presence. A finger had not been enough to fully inhabit her flesh - what did he have to swallow to become the cause of these reactions? But, he realised, all his mouth carried was a weapon. He let the fantasy flee, drinking down his metal-rusted drool.
Can I be anything without a hand or a tongue? Is the power to which I am made subservient only accessed through these accidents, through these knacks of the body? Is there speech in me, or simply understanding? Is there action in me, or merely reaction? Dependency on tongue - craving for hand. I must opt for: awakening through teeth - addiction to claw.
Tewfik’s club-like cockhead pulled his pants taut, now stained with several blotches like spit on a chokerag. It burgeoned closer to the curious bird, an enormous pressure asserting its way as if oedema through skin. Idö swayed her body, full body, hulking body against his crater, rocking the rebel leader back and forth, back and forth, right over the chick’s lap.
“Shit, Idö, you’re really showing me off here. You get two more hits and you can stand to fuck off, I’ll come to your house later.”
“You have got a big mouth, boyling. Do not make me wear you like a glove. I will drag your pride out of you.” She bit him and he bit his lower lip, wave rolling into his mouth under the strain of pained pleasure.
“You are looking ready for a fistful. Once inside, you will listen. I directly transfer what I mean into you, and turn you into what you should be for me. With my tongue and hand, I can make you an honest man. Ido this to reach the truth in you.”
Blacksmith looked back, breaking off the eye-contact to attend to these threats.
“Books got fewer secrets than I do, Idö. And it’ll be a while before you get it all out of me. Now stop gnawing my asshole and give me a duology.”
This is Babel? This is how they act? Taunting the bed-ridden boy, forcing him to answer to their luridness? And not even wait for his response? Is this even a threat to empire?
“One.”
No, this is not a taunt. Nor is this a triptych. They are… ignoring me! Gloriously ignoring my presence! Engaged with each other and with nothing else? They are giving me–
“Two. Alright, ol’ yeller, you’re done here.”
–the luxury of invisibility…
The rocking had stopped. Tewfik stood up, cracked his back, and pulled up his bottoms. He pushed his cock down into the right pantleg, fabric distended by meat and blood at its most violent. Returning hammer to toolbelt, placing down cane, pushing back dislocated arm.
Holstered in his viewing bed, the bird’s eye twitched uncontrollably. The winter-like heat receded from his softening prick, its throbbing waning - the promise of an orgasm washed back into him.
No, he’d wanted to yell. Write it out. Anything to speak. A little more. Please.
But. Mouth stayed shut.
Idö, softly stroking between her folds, retreated to a nearby coffer. She rocked on it, beautifully splayed out, river showing. Her open shirt clung to her body like paintstains. Her husky, pinkish legs landed on the floor like two raised bridges. She sat: rife, complete, with power and paunch. Then she looked at the grounded bird. Her grooved, hairy face had passed its prime of pride, and its forward angle resembled the curve of his face in the slightest. Deep-brown and cloudy eyes gave off an amused fury: her reattached finger rolled over a clitoris as big as a pebble.
“Go on and wash him then. I… will be here for a while.” She pinched herself and the room shook with her growl. Bell-thrums resonated louder - from mosquito to wolf. With unparalleled clarity, he wished for a tongue. For a place at the bridgehead. For a repertoire to crawl over. Start and finish her. There, he could begin anew. The new diptych he imagined was beautiful: him low, she high. He would be the criminal, she the priest, and that station he would take with pride. That wet finger trailing down his forehead in the forbidden act of benison - no Alturan would know, their laws burned in the heat between her legs.
Madden me no further. Let me be as free as you act. Ignore me, negate me, have me…
Mercy, he had wanted to say.
“Come on, birdling. Out of bed you go.” Tewfik tugged crassly, retrieving him from the bed for the first time in days. He felt tears, genuine tears, painful tears welling up as he was dragged down to the forge, watching Idö push into herself.
He noticed. In lust, they called him ‘him’.
“Put this on. It lets me hide you from being free. Not my finest work, but it’ll have to do.” The blacksmith’s bravado seemed cracked as he handed him a large, brass ring. “It’s… not an idea that I, or Babel, believes in. But it’s believed in by a lot of other people. My people. Yours. Eh, both of yours.” He gruffed, a familiar, by now soothing sound. “Reintroduced by the vultures, and swallowed by this city’s burghers like a breakfast banquet. They were waiting. Hoping. Working. To have that collar mean something again. Gon’ be a long, good time looking for profiteers. After we’re all free, I mean.” There was a gust to the man that drafted him towards hope, or towards a neck to choke out. One of his nails, the one he used to mark his cheek, split on the metal. Back from reverie: “Well. Understand?”
Tewfik had taken the chalk and board away from him.
The people seek a hero and I am the task to complete. The answer has always been both. It is ritual; it is critique. But is it role? Is it anyone? Is it me?
He’d accepted the instrument of surrender like a garland. The honour of being the chosen miserable at the end of some backwards festival, tolerated for its longevity. Rust colours caked the inner rim, and he wondered whose of his half-kin it was used on prior. His prideless pride, his thief-sign, willing to be anything if it guaranteed the nightly bellyful, waned.
The collar fell around his neck, clearly meant for thicker girths, and it pushed air into his lungs. Shoved it through the diaphragm until his belly expanded, passing the barrier of his body, dear body, guardless body. He filled up, dizzied and stumbling. Then, he emptied, feeling the yoke become the case of his display – crammed in like some curiosity, suspended in amniotic sewage.
Tewfik led him outside and he hobbled alongside him. He felt like he had become part of this man and his city, though no longer understood what he meant to him.
Winged cavalry patrolled overhead. Peacekeepers accompanied by steaming warbeasts trotted like museum-goers. These Alturans, their brown wings unfurled, all launched from the Farrat-Celge. A tower of discordant design (a concrete spine, built to last, an eyesore from the clouds) from which all new bureaucracy was written and dispatched. Soldiers sheathed in night-blue uniforms on bone-white skins, adorned with Cel D’Altura’s symbols of might and suggestion. An eagle’s eye, stark pupil shifted down; a sharp talon about to kill the field mouse.
What bothered him impossibly about his half-kin, was that they had no talons to speak of. They lacked his hunchback or packed-in skull with too thin, nearly translucent skin. He was brown, they were not. Yet was it not his three-pronged feet they used to signal strength? The claws that they lacked, which he had to hide, a reminder to all: fear our cloudborne order? How odd, how infuriating, that they chose the marks of misbreed to demand purity from the conquered Souslands.
Envy and hate, thick in the arteries, deep in the heart. With his talons, they could only hunt. With his claws, they swooped down on any escape he had.
The city with a gullet so deep he could not see the light of its mouth opening, closing, filtering, digesting. Its cesspools, amassed post-occupation, all had folk names. Out-jokes meant to destine the poor into discardable language - a metonymy of the lowly. He passed by the capillary alleyways where he lurked, hustled, and slept to avoid slinking deeper into the city’s shit. What was so funny about: Fontântjă (little fountain), Brassrina (eatery), aurgraf (gold-digging spot)? Rage sprouted, foul and mottled: he despised those who lived, had to live, near them. There were many Misluks like him discarded there. Tongueless and teethful, whose other defects were too much for a final pity. It recalled in him something vile. That he could feel triumph over them.
They’ll say wedo, never Ido. Pointlessly petulant.
In skylit surprise, his pupils fluttered dove-like toward Tewfik’s proud figure. That gruff voice panged in him: I’m not coming near you till you’ve washed. There, too, he realised, was petulance: he had always been knee-deep in muddy stagnancy, deprived of relief. That world he skirted, hemmed his entire being and made him that ragamuffin. The only difference, he realised, was that he was now dragged away from the cesspools, rather than back into them. And yet - here he was, resembling a prisoner in a column of war.
He noticed. People in the street were rowdy, smiling in schemes and exchanging handshakes to hide the plans. Children played everywhere, tooth-gapped girls beating on flat-capped boys, too shy to do anything else. Old men, voices as cracked as their skin, run dry as riverbeds, spoke to ancient friends over bottles and vacant glances. Women shaking their heads in frustrations that have taken lifetimes to cultivate. Hiding spots became local haunts. Peacekeepers strolled past, heralded as authority, because they did not, did not have to, hunt these people in these streets. The hundreds of daily disappearances became hundreds of love affairs - which were merrily allowed. Was this Ascens? Was this Minden? How big could this city’s shadow be? How dare this city change with someone to parade him through it.
I’m walking these streets, home in the masses. I am pacing in ways I have not before. My eyes are low, not flicking between any potential actor. My feet plant one ahead of the other, not from awning to shadow to target to escape route. My difference-being is passed over like an unwanted fruit at the market: nothing worse than simple disinterest. The passing glances regard this blacksmith as mine, and I as his, by way of this metal’s weight. No longer a symbol unto myself, but something that makes – no, something that supports this variation on – sense. Now I can contribute to the city, the city at the centre of dreams and hollow signs.
Tewfik tossed a beach-corner busker a small, light coin as they passed. Thoughts broke loose as metal met hand.
“You know they used to be heavier!” Both men ignored the clean, half-nude man. He played a guitar, 12-stringed, and sang through a voice as fluted as his skin. A song about tired doctors and escaped dancers, wings in the sky and fires in the night, homeboundness. Home-hidingness. Lyrics ignored, much like him. Their passing-by coincided with the concerto’s end, which begot the courtesy of some donation - not, in fact, a token of appreciation.
“You’re not from around if you didn’t know that!” The laugh was loud and taunting, so Tewfik ceased his gait like only a man with power does: theatrically. The bird, unused to such displays bumped into him, smearing his face on the blacksmith’s sooty backside.
“No. I came from Hüto Vödör, dragged in by Alturans that decided I should make swords. What’s heavier, you think? The coin or my blade?” A dark finger slipped under the creases of his waist-sash.
Hüto Vödör. A land of proud women, medical knowledge, and ancient caves where most Sousland cultures can be traced back to. Now: producing only refugees and, occasionally, a refugee with a reputation. The bird realised, immediately: his shared world, their shared tricks. The shiv bled his cheek further, having been hidden for naught.
Mouth stayed shut.
“Don’t threaten me if you're not gonna do it, gruff. I been trying the soldiers and they just lock me up. Prisons! What an indignity, contrary to a neat death. Can’t have shit in this city anymore.” Busker spat, clear liquid on sandstone boulevard. “Even the coin, even the coin’s shit. Before chicks like this got dragged out of our people. It was heavier.”
The man jumped down from his waist-level wall and stood up, towering languidly like a paper pillar. Absently, automatically strumming his guitar.
“They did that, they did that with a reason.”
“Did I give you money to fucking ramble or to keep your mouth shut? Make sense, man.” Tewfik’s furthest phalanx circled the daggerhilt, a hidden bulb by his pelvis. His voice sharpened, a mosquito’s labrum.
“You're gonna understand soon, real soon. Real Minden coin was heavy. Meant it was harder to carry much of it. Pouches bulged, you see, and there that meant you couldn’t go places with it. You were likely to pass it on, see, save yourself the strain. Help out a ‘lander in need.” He smiled, and in his toothless mouth, an articulating tongue wriggled like a fish on land. “Not because you were good at heart or in the head. But because you got frustrated.”
“Aye. I do remember, actually. And there weren’t any vagrants asking for more, ‘cause of it.”
“No. No! It meant people carried the feeling of value. And that it weren’t right to hold on.”
A callocolla pipe appeared from behind his back and he lit it without a spark. Bark from the night-blue callo-tree, dried and sliced as thinly as pencil-stripes, mixed with flake-red Alturan ink, capturing law in language: ‘colla’. Mothers warned about the resulting inhalant being so addictive, because it could burn through words alone. Inhale, and convince yourself of anything. No fire needed. Never believe yourself, mothers had said.
“The skies broke open and the coin got lighter. Lighter metal, worth less. But used as if to symbolise more - the heavy shit was used for armours, swords you make for them, gruff. Gilders, when it’s real valuable. Well, that got made out of paper. Soft little things, don’t want to rumple that. Value changed, felt precious. And that’s when we had to start begging. Start picking better corners. Start reminding folks about value again.” He spat: “With stories - entertaining people with a sob or a romp.” The final sentence exhaled, fumes of callocolla darkening his face: “So spare another coin, won’t you.”
In an almost hypnotised state, the bird shifted his loincloth aside on the boulevard. He plucked, swiftly, the coinpiece tucked under his cloaca. His lucky coin, dredged from Brassrina. Eyes widened and glowed with a ravenous recognition. The heavy coin resembled a ring as it slid over his talon.
“Aye,” the blacksmith smouldered. “Could’ve pawned that coin the second you found it.”
But I found it, the head reconciled. It is mine to do with as I please, it did not belong to commerce. It is still, first, the object, not already the mechanism.
“Well, fuck me sideways till I’m sober. History and respect, two things from before this got born.” The man approached - his sole vestment, a leather, sea-sucked vest clinging to his body. “You know what this means?”
Tewfik took on a sudden guard, oak-like and rooted, between bird and rambler. “Easy, man. You get any closer and it means you get a sting upside the head.” There it was: a dagger, orange in the evening light, heretofore hidden from him.
“Nah, Hütodo,” the man grinned. “Your wingling got more sense than you do.” With a scoundrel’s repertoire, he bypassed the slow trunk of Tewfik’s body with ease. Preternaturally fast, the man left only a thin trail of smoke. He lurched for the talon and claimed it: a single claw inside of a coin, held aloft by the squeeze of a full hand, ring finger hinged down.
Before his surprise came consideration: Minden, Megvétes, both?
The musician wrested off the coin, saying: “This ain’t right.”
Tapping the gorget with the coin, he repeated: “This ain’t right.” In a moment that seemed genuinely private, impossibly eternal, the man stared at him, clay-blue eyes ridden with worms, and concluded. “That’s all you need to remember. You live any other way and you’re just trying to fill up what’s heaviest with the lightest shit you get your hands on.”
Gawk-eyed, he remembered that it was only a handful of gilders.
“Now you,” the coin-teller turned to Tewfik. “You flung me a light coin ‘cause you think you worth something. Come on now, Babel. Where’d you get that idea from?”
“Old man, you just ended your own damn life. Megvétes says hello.” Tewfik swivelled with a dancer’s balance, knife clenched like a hairpull. The bladeplunge intended for the spoutmouth missed its mark, already having vanished in a loud, second puff of callocolla smoke. Instead, Tewfik’s arm barreled through a brown wing, folded neatly under the metal choker he had put on the grounded bird. Feathers rose up like children jumping into leaf-piles. Parts of him, skyborne.
He flew.
What… in the world did I stumble upon, the moment I touched their money? What does he need me to be? What have I become?
The blacksmith, so used to billow-smoke and forge-fires, hacked through a collocollo coughing fit that would worry any mother. Meanwhile, the bird gingerly assembled his feathers and considered the hole in his wing. A woundless cut, disfigured further. The beach breeze outlined his missing parts - the world felt different, somehow.
Done coughing, Tewfik sheathed his blade. His expression revealed a dog-like confusion, provoked by a piece beyond argument. Something inside him was stirring, his idealism was pulled into an economy, his grand denial was given the smallest tear. Perhaps, though they shouldn’t, all ideas end up there, on the market streets, trampled underfoot. In a gleam, his eyes lacked their innate demand of control, of understanding, while he considered that brass gorget.
“...well, think of that as you will. Nostalgia-men like that will make a lot of sense if all you got is history and no future. Babel got a plan. An idea. And we need those gilders. What’s worth more can make any war equal.” Another coughing fit seized his frame. “Shit. Hate that smell.” Holstering his blade and eyeing the water, he inhaled deeply through his nose. “Now I need a wash, too.” Undoing the knot on his sash with his thumb, Tewfik released the first latch to his loins. “Go on,” he gestured to the bird. “Enter the water.”
He did so, feeling no reason to resist this. Before capture, he’d bathed and longed for the beach as much as any burgher. The last freedom only an ocean affords. Sought after more preciously and more frequently than defending a sleeping space or sifting through cess. But now, he noticed. The constraints on his body, the vulnerability of what he wore - smallchest hung with a collar, loincloth loosened by the coin he gave. The sand felt like punishment, remembering his trail, absorbing his little trident marks. Trudging into the lukewarm winter waves, he felt as though he had been robbed. He could not dissolve in the salt, there was instead some slow, sad emulsion - a block of lard, holding mismatched shapes.
Ah, he realised. A wet bird will not fly.
Undoing more, Tewfik joined him. Closely. Patiently. Proudly, he let himself wash up against him. Half as high, the bird’s feathers caressed his stomach and loins. Built arms came down on him, sculptor creasing the smallest statue. Arms travelled over his shoulders and back, and pulled him close. Utterly fragile, his marble fragile to the grasp. Underneath the water, Tewfik’s member brushed against him like driftwood. In the water’s reflection, a bird wondered about where its feathers had gone.
He sought eye-contact and pointed at his unusable right arm.
“Aye.” Tewfik confirmed. “Idö showed you the meaning of what we… do. To get to the heart, you need a hand. To get the truth, you need to hurt.” From the water, he looked back at his city, at the Farrat-Celge. In those stillwater greens, the bird gleamed both Minden and Ascens. A man who saw and lived in both worlds - just like he had. “You’ve never had to hurt, chick.” His lips pondered to the side. “I’ll clean you.”
Body enveloped him with what he missed: homeboundness. An ocean that belonged to his city, to his country, to his folk. Scooping up the water in a cupped hand, Tewfik let his ocean pour over bird.
Wet hands combed through his frizzy, shortened hair, dragging free any accumulated dust and mites. As cleaner knuckles clenched around his jaw again, a strict palm wiped his gaunt face. The sands from his tear ducts picked clean, with care not to splash salt into his eyes, and flicked in the water. A thumb, that god-gone thumb, lingered over his lips - there was an oral urge he could not deny. A feeling of receiving, the fantasy of the larger man’s taste. Still he kept his mouth shut. On his bent body, hands swatched away dirt and heated stains like chalk on a writing board. Hands that could tear him apart, hands that have been inside of him, hands that have never hurt him pushed into his sides and edged his ribs. It felt like he was being rearranged. His breathing unsteadied, his stomach distending with air. The blacksmith held the bird aloft to a shining sea and sun, giving him the same height, another view of the city and the city.
Shown off, gorget and all, by a proud, too proud, smile-proud giant.
This is where I have to make my move. Kill him and get it over with. Let him wash up into the sand, a bloatflied corpse to scare the peaceful and puzzle the wrathful. A single proof that I am not patient, not student, not invisible. Not a thief. I can be better than the role they shackled me into.
Peatland eyes, canvassed under wet, black hairs, gone loose from tide and pull, sought eye-contact with the self-same expression as when they were in bed. Nothing burnt and nothing swayed in him. This builder, this killer, there were only the results of his actions to believe. That it happened anchored the truth of his matter.
He - his prick - was brought closer to Tewfik’s face. Bird flew high. Mouth parted wide. Breath was ocean. The bird shivered like a beast cowering under a starless sky.
Emulsion answering to the reactive, the closest comet to a new planet.
“Damn… look at you, getting excited. You could shut me up for a while with this. But, chick, this ain’t a sousland parlour, we’re at the beach. This is the one place nudity and sexuality switch places. Where the urges dissipate like sand through hand, a shared world where release happens the moment you enter.”
Open breath taunted him once more, and the resulting quiver almost bumped him against his lips. He tried, and tried, and tried again to reach them. Squeeze. Release. Squeeze. Release. Want in his eyes, panic in his waters, struggle in his blood. The slowest flyswatter and the biggest mosquito. Mosquito laughed, vibrations flying into him:
“‘course there’s the nude beaches. Everyone fucks there. But here, where I brought you, is the one place where you don’t mean anything.” Lowered slowly, the blacksmith returned his bird to eye-level.
One, he counted, shiv slick in his mouth.
“It’s clear to me what you’re thinking. You want to kill me. Get away right here and go back to the old routines. But you can’t, anymore. I saw that look in your eye a few times now. You’ve been noticin’. You've been havin’ fantasies. Lapasc tested your complacency. Idö gave you identity. And I got you ideas. You want to have that shit fulfilled. Who can put those fires out better than the people who started them, chick? Even now, I can tell you’re counting, because I’ve counted before you.”
Tw–
Within a sea-plume, the bird suddenly found himself under the waves. Body plunged into a severe suspension. Now his mouth was cock-level. Held against it, rocking against it, wave after wave after wave. It flushed with blood - tide coming forth, jellyfish resisting its undertow. He panicked: mouth opened for the first time in days. All his questions, all his pretensions faded, drool and ocean merging into the same liquid slosh.
Rushwater, Tewfik filled him.
A thick bundle, a buoy in his water-logged mouth. The hand toyed within him, plucking the shiv free from its gummy holster. Weapon at risk of confiscation, never having been at risk of discovery, but being tolerated.
The hand that touched him so much - too much, he decided. So he bit down. He had to. His excessive teeth found their purpose and carved their critique directly onto the hand. Through the water’s barrier, he couldn’t tell if Tewfik was yelling or laughing at this repertoire. He just knew that there was the truth of his reaction. There was an attempt to yank back, which he made fail. Sleeved inside him, no chance to escape the grip. The all-encompassing crunch resonated within his skull. It was the glorious sound of armour breaking, a ribcage giving way, the final way to get at the heart - a sound he would cum to for many moons to come.
The force holding him down released for a mere moment. Tide receding, followed by a fist crashing down on his avian skull. It made him loosen the grip, tight grip, desperate grip on the blacksmith’s hand. Dazed, he floated up again, raised past the sea’s surface. A single arm, deeply embedded in his mouth, held him high up in the evening light. Fingers in god-gone gesture pushed into the crater of flesh, garrisoned with molars, nails splitting more of him. Shiv almost out, slashing around the mouth, kept under the bend of a ring finger.
An aberrant catch, a wriggled worm, wrenched from the hook. A limp bird in a fisherman’s net. Dripped with drool and salt, prick hanging loosely.
He tasted. He flew.
A second hand trailed over his chest again. Grasped his flesh like a craftsman would a hammer, skin bruising exquisitely. Pounded him like orange-hot metal, begging for the same hammer’s return: needing it to be completed. Bang. Another strike. Another strike. In his life, just another strike. He found himself already accustomed - he recognised the man was holding back.
In the blur of his vision, he noticed a curious look on Tewfik. He’d managed to break that plastered grin of his. Instead, there was appraisal. Pure economy.
“You’d look good mounted on a wall, chick.”
Lower jaw chewed petulantly from below. The deepest remnants of tongueless voice massed together with words to say: release me, kill me, Hütodo brute, furious gruff, why and why, and why these ideas. All sputtered and sizzled out, words without letters, grease from a pan.
“But I don’t care about you looking good. I care about you understanding your place.”
Tewfik, with a dancer’s balance, turned around and flung his catch over his shoulder. Shiv spilled forth from the bird’s gullet, widened enough by the hammer of his hand.
Picking it up, holding it in front of beergold eyes, Tewfik grinned again: “Nice toy. Better to keep it near your cock, though. Strange for you to keep your mouth shut all the time, birdbath.”
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I’m going to die.
Dragged onto the beach, hook in the mouth, he gasped and whirred. He was horrified, not by Tewfik, but by the sea, as he came up from below - it had been a sanctum, a week ago.
Fish out of water, feathered fin yanked up by the angler, amused. He witnessed his shiv, secret shiv, useless shiv, stabbed through his talon, quill poked through paper. A searing pain made him burn up, the salt shed from his body, as if falling through a sieve. His ink blotted the sands and his screams received no aid. With or without choker, he would never be anything here; those witnessing heard no signs of help. No symbol he formed would ever be something requiring an intervention, as anything requiring. Words had always failed him, no, were always failing them.
“Question for you, chick. The one I’ve been brooding about.” Tewfik crouched down - seemed like an eclipse. A night to set on anyone’s city. The bird’s left side struggled in vain while his right side remained broken. He heard the question in disbelief: “Are you the spawn of Adelheid the Undenied? The man that started it all?”
To get his answer, Tewfik nudged the shiv.
It all comes back to that father. That man who made me. That man who taught me to abide ‘this’, and to live my life in pronoun’s accordance. He had used the power available to him to make me truly lowly, far below his Alturan sky palace. So then. Why is he still here, comet trailing me, sign so star-bright?
So, “yes”, he wrote. Blood on the sand. Washed by waves, erased.
“Do you mean anything to him? Does he love you?”
More a statement than a question, a clarification added for some bureaucratic purpose. My relation to that father obliges an assumption for love. A bloodline, lining out a family structure. What about me signifies that I have ‘father’ - received ‘family’? A line of blood, on the sand.
So, “NO”, he wrote.
“Capital letters.” A full minute of sea-tidy silence passed, occasional gurgles from a pinned animal. “Ain’t taught you that.” Half a minute - the bird counted, down, expecting his end. “You pulled one over on me after all.”
A laugh, and the face became tender. Like it had stepped on a pigeon nest and cracked the eggs underfoot, one surviving. Hand unsleeved itself from the survivor, shiv slowly drawn out of his talon; sensations of pain receding and becoming an aftermath, aftercare. The hole disappeared under a colourful sash, tightly wrapped to stem the bleeding. His gorget was taken over. On Tewfik’s neck it fit strenuously, cut into the flesh like a necklace of nails. Sharp hands around his throat. Resembling a prison-dancer, a fate he’d escaped through blacksmithdom, became builder-killer. A call to his Romungri nature, his Hütodi heritage, disturbed and molested by Alturan systems. A gorget could no longer be worn, not without signalling that power, strict power, absolute power had won control of their bodies. No access to the symbols, forced into a practiced idea. The victory of an opposing order.
Brass palmed into a bulged throat, choking him until tears and blood began to drip. Stains falling on this beach, on bird-body, Tewfik danced a long dance. He bent on his feet before him, crunched the sand underneath his soles, fell to his knees with his catch between them. The bird gawked at the art unfolding, a conjoined piece, a new diptych necessary to observe. To notice.
So “please”, the bird scribbled in his own blood.
“My prick or yours?” From the balls of his knees, he rocked back and forth, back and forth, rubbing his sagging member over the aerie of his face; in dance, his legs moved over the grounded bird, girding cock in a nest of calves.
No words were necessary to make that desire, himself known. Each letter, swapped for a need.
The tide set in, covering them both, the bird nearly drowning in salt and pleasure. The rocking of his body by wave, want, and, truly, a wicked man. Moving down, as if eb itself, Tewfik clamped his cock between his thighs, body’s hair entangling and encircling it erratically, vines climbing down a flagpole. Chest rose, body followed, pelvis rubbed. A mermaid perched on top of a birdman, the steady rock on which this maddening display manifested. His rock, too, was hard, and fucked the feathers over his loins like a tree branch parting leaves.
Eyes locked, the keys thrown out. Beer leavened by swamp, swamp drunk on beer. His left side struggled under the weight, at last finding his cloaca. Claw entered hole, and he would not mind any tear. The hurt was given, and he would not release it for any reason.
Tewfik moved - erection’s sticky proofs of excitement quickly swallowed by the sea. The bird fucked himself dangerously, profanely, and found his prick wrapped between worlds, two halves of the ass he had fantasised about entering. But he could never dream - had never dreamed - of this vesuvial embrace. Talon pushed prostate. Ass squeezed cock. Mouth screamed open.
It took only the moment, the instance, the letter of time which already exceeds its duration. His cockhead merely brushed against the blacksmith’s crater, and he had to cum. Painfully.
Golden eyes broke contact - eyes balling around in their sockets. The signs of his pleasure foamed on the ocean. As the sea receded, he felt as if he had survived a long, long war. Empty. Broken. Done.
Dance ended, as all dances do. As all wars do.
“Aye, chick. You did well,” mosquito voice still clamped down. Tewfik took off his choker, exiting the role of dancer - what did he enter into? Blacksmith? Rebel? Warmaker? - holding it as one would a coin. “So very, very well. Let this be a good, last lesson. You spill forth from pleasure.”
My… pleasure is a gateway. It brought me here. And it will let me leave. What a sordid, ugly thing to believe. What a terrible extancy, and still, it is what I can grasp.
He plucked the bird from the ground and held him against his chest. Naked, they returned to the domicile. Shivering from the chills and the pain, the bird clasped Tewfik’s chest hair as if it were the last strand of rope. The noose without its knot.
“Lapasc. Patch him up,” the order rang.
“A bird in the hand is how much, again?” Came the doctor-poet’s retort. He was naked, scribbling in his notebook, its cover stained with old drool.
“A pervert on the loins,” Idö bellowed from upstairs, still engaged in her own lust.
“You still haven’t come, old dog?” Tewfik's surprise sounded genuine; a sunset had blanketed Minden in an oily, lanternless black.
“No one can come anymore / Using the hand to perform that chore / Find a new mess, don’t bother the rag / too much work for a third lééééég!” With a bow, Lapasc received a tremendous conk on the head from Tewfik. “OW!”
“Yugh. Point of critique: spend more time dealing with the waking world. I had wanted to ask you for a fuck, lad - not anymore.” Exhaustion - and pain? - put his voice back in the mosquito’s register. “Anyroad, you’ve got ten seconds to repair the hand and the wing, he needs both from now on.”
“Doctor’s ordered,” the smallman sighed, loosely stroking his breasts. “Oh - your hand. You’ve been gnarled up pretty badly. Let me take a look at that when you’ve got a minute. That hand equals your job in the eyes of Ascens.”
“Aye. Can’t afford to lose my cover.” There was satisfaction in that play on words, dour as it was. “Take care of the chick, won’t you?”
“RAHHHGH,” quivered the wolf, clove oil spilled from a fallen flask. “You have found out who he is?!”
“Aye, found out exactly what he means to me. This, my friends, is none other than Adelheid’s kid. The Commandant-Exodant’s very own loin-swung bastard.” A scheme dawned on his, Lapasc’s faces. “Exactly the compeer we need.”
A bastard? No. A cast-off. What do you mean? What. Do. You. Mean?
“Idö, I’m coming up to fuck you proper. And I’ll be fast. Need you to run an errand with these gilders. No longer a lure, we buy ourselves the biggest fish. Secure the warbeast.”
“Come secure this cunt, boy.”
No longer a lure? So…
He was placed on the makeshift anvil-table like a market haul - hurriedly. With the same rehearsals of a music box, what repeated in his head was Lapasc’s silly poem. A constant reminder to sex and its ‘nots’. What was given to him - through the irruption of bodies and mechanics, intimate technologies to which the brain remains bound to -, was a reason to stay. A longing so fierce it defied the captivity with which he was granted asylum. Anyone would run, bloodied and panicked, after what he’d gone through. But running had lost all its meaning: he would stand out, he would be found, he would return to a symbolic order that, in his golden eyes, had cracked and split.
All what he deserved to be, he could find out now.
Oh, Kedvezö. I have somehow gained an idea.
“Bastards need a name, Tewfik.”
“All names will be his. All except Misluk.”
All except Misluk. Then I have succeeded. I have escaped Ascens.
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