“Who gleamed ere morning's light could glance his helm”
The young man pauses and scrunches up his face.
“What’s next?” shouts one of the drunks.
“Speak up, lad!” says the graybeard whom Morte identified. His eyes have a positively diabolical merriment in them.
He turns from the stage to face Morte more directly.
“I did have one other question for you. Walking about this city, seeing the mess everywhere, it made me think of something I must have heard long ago.”
“They say that once, much of Sigil was extremely well-mapped and orderly. The portals never changed, and it was fully cataloged which keys and which gates under which arches or in which cupboards led to certain other planes and cities. A handful of different trade guilds got together and mustered armies to patrol narrow corridors of traffic all throughout Sigil, where beeswax or indigo would pass in wagon trains.
The story is the trade guilds grew so powerful that they began to build barracks and covered tunnels directly from one portal to another. There were spotless manicured lanes that spanned miles, cut off from the rest of the city, and upon them horse drawn caravans raced day and night. And the guilds would either throttle entirely or else charge a monopolist’s fee for passage through their portals.
Then at some point this irked the Lady into action. In a single night she smashed all the newcomers’ renovations, and in living flesh she roamed about the city, flensing alive any who bore the symbols of the trade guilds. The streets ran red with blood, supposedly, and not just in The Hive. She let loose a plague of small biting insects whose venom was harmless to the mortal citizens but instantly deadly to beasts of burden. She made the gate keys more obscure, and she began to periodically shift the locations of important portals, so that one might be lost for a century or more. And it was only the least organized groups, the factions who had not enough coin to alter any part of Sigil to their liking, who were spared. And to this day there is a constant paranoia among the faction heads to never rise too far nor exert too much order, lest it erupt the whole city again into a great holocaust.
Do you know that story?”
“Of course. Yours is probably a bit more colorful than most of the histories, but it did happen.”
“The Lady doesn’t actually do much flensing. By act of will she has complete power over every portal that links to Sigil, and she also keeps an enormous number of mazes which exist outside space and time, beyond even the ability of deities to empower their priests. If you ever really get her goat, the first you’ll probably hear of it is you open a door to the privy one day and fall into an infinite jail cell full of other nasty creatures she’s already thrown in there.”
“Of the trade guilds? Somewhere between five hundred ninety and six hundred ten years ago is when she sent the proclamation to the factols, depending on who you ask. Bloods in these parts didn’t use the same calendar then, and I can’t make any sense of all the different accounts.”
The name blindness in his memory doesn’t directly apply to great historical events, but he still feels more hazy on this than he would like. Certainly six hundred seems like too many years ago. It should be five hundred years, perhaps? He has never been given to historical scholarship of that kind.
No, probably a bit less than that.
Morte turns and looks at him blankly for a few seconds.
“Erm. I congratulate you on your beauty routine. You don’t look a bar fight over forty-five.”
“Hold up.” He faces the stage.
“This is the part where the barbarian king from one of Damelin’s dominions withdraws support from the battlefield because the emperor snubbed him in the procession of colors, creating a hole in their lines.
The whole scene hangs on this delivery.”
The young man is doggedly continuing his ballad.
— thus spake king Thaddorix.
What signal this? Oh hie to me mine host
And fetch me camphor with thistle water
And such physick you have conveyed with you
Your stricken general to remedy
Whose counterfeit senses have so confused
Our horn of summons with a dinner bell.
That we in servile pose should wait upon
Their self-loving pomp as woman of camp
To shrive or wive at will while twice armed men
Do sally forth to make their manhood’s test:
If heat of blood and steel be hot enough
To brand the firmament with greater fire
Else gallow their names in oblivion
More years than arrows in our quivers stuffed
And ten times that ago by common count
Did Damelin’s forebears invade our plains
Their thundrous horsemen in percussive charge
And won of us a manacle of love
To populate their vanguard legion’s ranks
And strike in distant lands beside their spears
But disparate winds with all capricious bent
Have scattered the dust of their issuance
And so their kingly temperments dilute
Throughout the vast expanse of their command
Till stunted cowherds do but boy the part
And fail to fill th’ inherited codpiece
Form up then brothers, with no hair amiss
Thus dignified withdraw we from this fray
To spoils more befitting our natures
The just nobility of beast-skinned tents
Where tongues speak true or swiftly cloven are
With all our hard won proc- proclivities
The youth’s voice cracks.
In a booming voice he begins to sing.
“With all our -”
He spreads his arms out, palms upwards, and begins pumping them up and down, looking to his fellows.
“With all our hands up, revelry, sing soldiers from the land - ”
It’s a familiar tune, an anthem or battle song from Gleewood.
With all our hands up, revelry, sing soldiers from the land
Good kinsmen of the Gleewood realm, your country calls to thee
Arise! Arise! And see withal the morning’s light does bring
Defend we this land evermore and keep her wholesome gifts
At least half a dozen patrons join in the song and get to their feet. By the time of the verse’s climax, they’ve surrounded the stage and begun to paw roughly at the young man’s silk stockings.
First mortified, then angry, then fearful, the youth steps quickly backwards to avoid their grapples. Then, seeing himself cornered, he takes a brisk few steps and leaps clear over one of the drunkards’ heads and lands upon the floor.
He raises his hands in sloppy fisticuffs, but none of the men pressing him are interested in fighting. Instead they form a semi-circle to husband him along the wall and eventually out of the alehouse.
“A round! A round!” cries the graybeard. “For the triumph of Gleewood.”
The patrons move to press up against the bar, where the tapster has remained during the whole episode, apparently indifferent to the running out of the unhappy poet.
He checks the soundness of his axe’s rigging, lest by jostling he injure one of these dottards. Then he strides to the graybeard - he towers over most of the men in this room - and brings a hand to his shoulder.
He leans towards his ear. “Well done, that. You’ve earned a pint of me.”
Then, after a pause, “I would speak with you a moment.”
He looks up at The Nameless One. His expression breaks into one of delight. “A popinjay! A philosopher!”
“I’ve seen your kind play in the theater. It’s all in good fun. There’s a thing you must do for me. Brew-maestro!”
He slaps a handful of coppers onto the countertop.
Suddenly, he takes two quick steps backwards from the bar and turns abruptly to face The Nameless One. “What was that?” he says. Judging by countenance, he is both drunk and manically alert.
He raises the volume of his voice above what should be necessary.
“I’ve only just arrived in Sigil. I need a place to stay. My friend the skull spoke with you - said you knew of a room to be had nearby where terms are not dear. Something about a gith woman.”
The graybeard’s head turns on a swivel towards Morte, and then back to The Nameless One.
"Oh rot that night hag. She’s got places enough, sure.”
Then he swivels again, this time to his fellows. He gestures upwards at The Nameless One as if displaying a prize. “An anti-calliopist! A valetudinarian!”
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