EDGE and Tesseract are imprints of Hades Publications, Inc.

Chapter One

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Clan of the Dung-Sniffers A Novel by
Lee Danielle Hubbard

Chapter One

In the dry season of the
Year of the Mandarin Turtle

At ground level, Glane and I were tallied by the green-robed monk at the reception desk. They liked to keep track of numbers at the Marble Tower, one sheet for arriving visitors and another for departing. They liked to make sure that the numbers correlated. It was meant to discourage rag-tags and beggars from spending their nights in the upper rooms. Glane and I looked like rag-tags. Besides all that, it gave the monks something to do.

I turned to Glane at the top of the first flight of stairs. He worried me. Last week he was stung by a bee and began to grow feathers. None of us knew what to do, how to stop the plumage. Not even Kem knew how, or the Bedouin Yaryk who pretended to know all things.

“Are you all right?” I asked Glane.

He mopped a hand across the damp of his forehead. He pushed the dark hair from his eyes. “Ksar,” he whispered, “I want to fly.”

“We have to check the door,” I said.

He pouted.

I tried to ignore him. The camel blanket itched on my head. Everyone told me that blanket was a bad idea. “Come on,” I said.

The Marble Tower soared above every spire of the City, and so we climbed more stairs, through the labyrinth of rooms where pools of acid, multi-colored, bubbled beside the steps. Over the pools grew almond, peach and pistachio trees, their branches bedecked in wish papers, scribbled and hanging on golden threads. As we climbed, we passed other early-risers, here to make their morning prayers. Many stared as we hurried past: Glane muttering to himself, and me with my cloak of curtains, rose petals painted around my eyes, a beard dyed blue and curled.

In the evenings the monks would gather the wish ­papers. They would pray and chant and invoke all kinds of powers. Supposedly the wishes would then come true. More likely they gathered the papers and burned them.

Glane and I no longer came to make wishes.

Halfway up the Tower we turned off the main stairwell and went down a corridor of twisting gray marble. ­Yellow veins pulsed through the walls. We climbed more stairs, ramps, another passage. We came at last to a door that was locked.

Glane rattled the handle. His pout became a scowl when the door would not open. He scratched his neck. “Is there time to go to the balcony?” he said. “For just a while? I want to see the balcony, Ksar.”

“A short while,” I said. “The others are waiting for us.”

We climbed to the top of the world, the balcony at the tip of the Tower, where a handful of other men stood around and gazed down at the view. The haze of the City stretched far, far below. We went to our customary bench and sat down. It was too hot to sit for long. If the City were not made of stone it would have incinerated by now.

Glane wore a jacket pulled over his toga. He pushed up a sleeve and picked at the inside of his elbow.

“Stop it,” I said. “You look like a dog pulling worms. I thought Kem got them all out last night?”

“Not all.” He dug his nails down into his skin. They emerged with a wet blue feather. “They grew back,” he said. “There are more in the other arm. Want to see?”

“Not especially.”

Glane leaned forward and dropped his feather over the railing. It unfurled, hovered for a moment over the void, and then it was gone, waving down to the City, one gust of hot air at a time until it was lost in the haze. He sat back on the bench and dug again into his skin. I tried to ignore him. He pulled out a second feather, a third. He sniffed the blue barbs. On a cord around his waist, Glane wore a pouch where he kept a family of miniature cobras. He fed them his feathers, one at a time. Some of the feathers he dropped through the railing instead, down toward the City.

Glane had been stung on the shoulder by a bee. Within an hour the mark swelled to the size of his fist. His eyes turned from green to hard gold. He began to grow feathers the following day.

Glane was gone a long time before I realized it, when I turned and found him no longer beside me. Two blue feathers, copper-tipped, lay on the bench. They fluttered in the breeze. Conversations buzzed around the balcony. I stood — a head taller than anyone there — and straightened my toga. Curtains separated the balcony from the Tower’s interior. They hung there beaded like the beards of the nobles as they ride through the streets in their hidden beds, carried on the shoulders of their slaves. Not slaves, says Leque, but servants. He worked as a litter-bearer once, several years ago in the rainy seasons, tramping from civilization to civilization, the acid sea forever beside him. He worked for the pay, not the scenery. It was hard to find men who would work through the mold and slog of the rainy season. My brother would always be one of them.

I parted the curtains and ran down the almond-lined stairs, down and down. I dashed across the marble reception room. The green-robed monk slashed a tally mark across his sheet. I skidded through the doors and out into the street.

“Glane?” There was no use calling through the City chaos. Caravans streamed past in droves. Donkeys brayed. Street vendors swarmed in the alleys, calling their wares. Perhaps Glane had at last jumped. I would find no more than a smear of red cloth on the stone.

But he had not jumped yet. I found him on his face by the side of the road. The camel-drawn carts churned through the dust; a breath closer and the beasts’ hooves would have spurned him into the gutter. He lay with his eyes pressed into a grate, half hidden in the lee of the curb.

“Glane, what are you doing?”

He rolled and squinted up at me. “I wonder what’s down there,” he said.

“The sewers.”

“But what’s in the sewers?”

“Sewage.”

“Where’s the proof?”

“The name is a fair indication,” I said.

“But not proof.”

“I call you Glane. Isn’t that proof enough that’s your name?”

“No.” He blinked at me through the rags of his hair.

I must have been a silhouette against the twinned light of the suns behind. Some say that there used to be three, and that the sea was once water. The third sun fell. It burned the sea. Everything drowned and seared to acid.

“Come on.” I hauled Glane up by the arm. “They’re probably waiting for us.”

He stooped, reached beneath the strap of his sandal and drew out a feather. “It beat us down,” he said. “Why do we bother with all those stairs, Ksar? There are so many faster ways to go.”

“Not a good idea.” I pulled his arm to make him walk.

***

Merchant’s Alley was stirring into life when we reached Skiy’s shop. Skiy’s shop was a cobbler’s shop, with tables under red and white awnings set out in the street. In the front room, Skiy himself sat behind his workbench. A tallow wand smoldered between his lips. He held a sandal half-finished in his hands. A scroll hung tacked to the ­opposite wall. He was reading. He was always reading. I always wondered if his customers noticed.

“Hello,” said Skiy. He scratched a bald patch behind his ear. He said: “Kem and Gyanin are in the back.”

As if I couldn’t tell for myself. Their voices carried through the curtain.

“Three sacks of narcotics,” came Gyanin’s voice. He always mumbled. Perhaps his beard was to blame.

“Ah,” said the voice of Kem. “How the City would suffer without your protection.”

“So true,” said Gyanin. “There are few who appreciate the work of us guards. You should see the illegal imports! We confiscate wagonloads daily.”
Who but Gyanin could talk with such zeal about so thrilling a topic? Yes, thank you Skiy, I think I’ve noticed they’re here.

Glane pushed a pile of shoes aside and sat down on a table. He took a handful of dead insects from his pocket and began to feed his cobras, each serpent the size of his finger and half as exciting. They ate. They wiggled. That was all they did. From a smaller pouch, hanging on a thong around his neck, he extracted an enormous dead worm.

“What in Stone is that?”

“A glass worm,” said Glane. The worm was twice the size of the snakes. He dropped it down into his pouch. A litany of hissing and squelching followed.

“A glass worm?” Gyanin appeared in the doorway. Incense drifted from his beard. He wore his uniform, the shield of his office glued to his arm. He peered at Glane’s lap. “Glass worms are illegal,” he snapped. “Where did you find it?”

“Maybe a store.”

“They are illegal parasites,” said Gyanin.

Gyanin and Skiy had been friends since childhood. Every day after duty found Gyanin here, lurking in the depths of the cobbler’s shop, as if he had no rooms of his own to return to, or as if he’d forgotten the way.

“They chew their way into the hearts of glass weeds,” said Gyanin, referring again to the worms. “They deplete the plants of their minerals. Without the fibers of the glass weed, how do you expect the fishermen to fish? How do you expect them to fix their nets? The City’s economy could flounder, Glane, because of your worm.” Gyanin’s breath smelled of lavender. It always did.

“So?” said Glane.

Gyanin pointed at the pouch on Glane’s chest. “Do you have more worms? Are you keeping them there?”

Glane shoved the pouch inside his clothes, up against his skin. “What pouch?”

Kem emerged from the back room, smoothing the folds of his toga. “Ah, Ksar, Glane, I’m so glad you’ve come!”

As if we had a choice. And as if he hadn’t seen us yesterday. We could not escape these meetings.

Kem worked at the hospital. He was Skiy’s third cousin, and the two of them were all but identical. Skiy the cobbler was thicker-set, perhaps, and his hair more white and sparse, but other then that they could have been twins.

Kem hurried over to Glane. “How are you doing?”

“I have feathers,” said Glane. “I’m not good.”

Gyanin rocked on his feet. “He has a pouch of glass worms,” he pronounced, solemn as a pillar of lard.

“They’re dead,” said Glane.

“They’re illegal,” said Gyanin. “I hereby confiscate that pouch.”

“No,” said Glane.

“Glane,” said Kem, “once the worms are removed, I am sure that Gyanin will return the pouch. Now please give it to him.”

Glane pulled the pouch off over his head. He did so because Kem told him to. He threw the pouch into Gyanin’s hands, still scowling. Duty complete, Gyanin retreated to the back room. There he would sit and say nothing. I envied his capacity for silence.

Kem rounded on Glane again. “Any changes in your arms?”

“More feathers,” said Glane.

“Does it hurt?” A pause as he lifted Glane’s arm. I could not quite see what he did. “Does it hurt when I do this?”

“Yes,” said Glane.

I tried to block out the conversation. Kem always helped. When he was not helping, he was trying to coerce people into joining one of his many social action groups. Kem was a member of every brotherhood, organization and clan I could name, with the exception of the Tower monks, and he possessed a reputation for doing everything and ­existing everywhere at the same time.

Kem finished his examination of Glane and turned on me. My time had come. “What happened to your beard?” he demanded.

“I dyed it.”

“And the yellow skin?”

“I can wash it off.”

“Do you know how harmful these toxins are? You—”

The door saved me. It swung open with a scream of hinges to admit my brother Leque, late as always. He and I shared that attribute: we could not be expected to keep track of things like time.

“I found a new job,” Leque announced, by way of greeting. “The Stone Masons’ Guild has hired me for the building of a new housing complex, over by the east gates.” He waved his arm in a vague westerly direction. Muscles rippled on his shoulders, thick as copulating snakes. “Is Blade here yet?”
“Not yet,” said Kem.

It was Blade’s father, Y’az Zeth Ven, for whom Leque once worked as a litter-bearer. There he met Blade (known to everyone outside our little group as Xavier Ven), the fourteen-year-old heir to the greatest family in the City. Leque could tell stories about lands beyond the City walls. Xavier knew nothing but wanted to learn. He fastened to my brother like a sand-fly leech to its host. My brother loved him. He carried him around every street of the City. He showed him every building he had helped construct. My brother talked of Xavier Ven at every meal.

Until it changed. Xavier met Yaryk. Compared to Yaryk and his Bedouin sagas, Leque and his little stories could no longer satisfy. I think my brother tried to hang on, but I don’t think Xavier even noticed his trying. Leque stopped working as a litter-bearer. He found other work. Xavier dropped the name Xavier and took up Blade, as a secret-code when he whiled the hours with us. Sometimes we forgot who he actually was.

“The wages from the Stone Masons’ Guild aren’t the best I’ve seen,” said Leque. He singled out Kem and came over to talk. “But I have the mornings off,” he said. “They only want me in the afternoons. The work is hard, but it’s steady.” He rattled the sleeve of his toga. The pocket there jingled faintly.

“Too bad you aren’t steady,” I muttered.

“I’m better than you,” said Leque. “How old are you now? Thirty? Thirty-one? Still living under your big brother’s roof? You could look for a job for yourself some day.” He turned back to Kem. “Ksar squanders his allowance on piercings and tattoos. He—”

Again, salvation arrived by the door. Yaryk made his entrance in a swirl of gray-black robes. He ushered Blade in before him, small and pale in comparison. Yaryk was late. If not late he would have been early, first to arrive. He did it on purpose, for maximum impact.

“Hello!” called Blade. He smiled. His face was thin, though I was sure he was well fed on sugar, grease and all manner of delicacies.

These meetings were always the same. Only Glane’s feathers changed the note of the day.

The noble-boy Blade shrugged off his cloak — ermine skin, shining — and Leque bounded to hang it on the peg by the door.

“Good morning, Leque,” said Blade. “Oh!” He caught my brother’s sleeve. “Do you know what one of my ­servants did last night?” Blade talked of his servants as if we all had our own. He told us their stories, and recommendations of adventures we should try, and dangers in need of conquering. As if he had ever stepped outside the City walls, ever done more than stand on his palace balcony, the wind in the beads of his silver-blonde hair, and stared down away toward the acid sea, the fumes rising up and the roads twisting far into the brink of forever. In fact he had never done more.

Yaryk pushed a table in front of the door. He turned the sign in the window from “OPEN,” to “CLOSED.” “We’re all here,” he said, as if we couldn’t notice for ourselves. “Let us begin.”

We filed into Skiy’s back storeroom. The storeroom was dim and smelled of smoke and butchered animals. We sat down on our cushions, Glane and I with our backs to the curtain-door, able to escape as soon as the opportunity arose. In front of each cushion lay a stick of incense. Yaryk always brought incense for Stone knows what reason. At the beginning of every meeting each of us lit his stick of incense to show he was present. Today Kem leaned over and lit Glane’s for him. Perhaps he feared the feathers might catch on fire. The sickly sweet reek of camel dung filled the room. I did not support Yaryk’s use of perfumes.
“We will now begin,” said Yaryk. He could hardly be seen through the smog. “Was the door locked, Ksar?”

“It will always be locked,” I said, and coughed. “We did discover, however, that feathers travel faster than we can.” I treated them all to an invisible sneer. Sometimes I wanted to kill them, I really did — all these solemn men, sitting around in the dark and discussing nothing.

“How are your arms, Glane?” came Yaryk’s voice again.

“Not good,” said Glane.

“More feathers?”

“Maybe.”

Silence followed. We weren’t usually this focused, but Glane’s condition frightened us.

“I blame the bee,” said Glane.

“But haven’t there always been bees in the City?” Blade chimed when he spoke, because of the beads in his hair. “There’s a nest in our stables. They’ve never caused problems before. Right, Skiy?”

“It’s true,” said Skiy. We always went to Skiy for ­information. His readings told him every statistic, from the year’s export figures to the exact date that the butterflies stampeded, more than a hundred years ago. He would tell you the truth because he did not have the imagination to lie.

“I know it was the bee!” said Glane. “Look at this!” He ripped back the sleeve of his jacket. We all bent close through the fog. Blue veins radiated from the welt on his shoulder. The red point where the stinger had entered now glistened a bloated red, like the entrails that hung in the backs of butchers’ shops.
“You should have that examined at the hospital,” said Kem.

“What do they know about feathers?” said Glane.

“It’s true we’ve never been faced with pinion growth before,” said Kem, who valued his hospital job second only to his life, “but new conditions appear every day for treatment. How else can we learn their care?”

“I’ll only go if Ksar comes.”

“Fine.” I shrugged. “I’ll come.”

“Why don’t we all go?” said Blade. He bounced on his cushion. “I’ve never been to the public hospital before. I want to see it.”

“You won’t say that in retrospect.” Glane bit his collar.

“What’s wrong with the hospital?” said Kem, indignant.

“Dead people live there.”

“The purpose of the hospital is to prevent them from dying,” said Kem. “I remind you that the City would be filled with much more death if it were not for the hospital.”

“The house of the dead,” said Glane.

“The house of departure from this world, perhaps,” said Kem, “but what’s wrong with being on the doorway between worlds?”

“If there’s a world that rains gold coins,” said Leque, “I’ll go.” He laughed.

“Why do you have such praise for money?” said Yaryk. “Money may be wasted, and then it’s gone, as you yourself have so frequently proven. Power is the real thing.”

“I read a book about a tree of power,” said Skiy the insatiable cobbler. “People would climb up into its branches to pick its golden fruit, and if they could find their way down to earth again their wishes were fulfilled. They became the fathers of kings and warlords.”

“Why would you want to sire kings?” laughed Yaryk. “Why not be one?”

“How could you climb into a tree?” said Glane. “The branches would break.”

“This was at the beginning of the world,” said Skiy. “Trees were stronger then.”

“And had golden fruit?” Glane took another bite of his jacket. “Is golden fruit edible?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter, Glane.” Skiy coughed up a wad of tallow and wiped his mouth. “It’s a legend,” he said. “It’s not meant to be believed.”

“Then why was it written?”

“Entertainment,” said Yaryk. “The power of a story well-told is phenomenal.”

I wondered if Yaryk considered his own stories phenomenal. He recited them enough.

“You should tell your stories to the stars,” said Glane. “Maybe they would stay still long enough to listen.”

“The stars have no need of my stories,” said Yaryk. “They come from the stars to begin with.”

“And they write them down, do they?” said Glane. He was more belligerent today than usual. “I didn’t realize they had hands.”

“Bodily features are immaterial,” said Yaryk.

“They seem pretty material to me.” Glane poked the swollen mound of his shoulder. He watched the pus, reddened, run down his arm. “That hurts,” he said.

“You really should come to the hospital,” — Kem sat forward — “before the infection spreads.”

“Do you have cures for double eyelids too?”

No one answered. What could you say to a question like that?

“I have the day off work tomorrow,” said Kem. “Why don’t we meet at my house for breakfast. We can visit the hospital after we’ve eaten.”

“If Ksar comes,” said Glane.

“I’ll come.”

“I can pay the physician,” said Blade. He produced a silk pouch and waved it.

“No, no,” said Kem. “The hospital acts from charity. But if you wish your money to go to a worthy cause, the ­Fellowship of the White Horse could use some help.”

“What do they spend their money on?” said Glane. “Soap to keep the horses clean?”

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