Speculative Fiction: 2003-2015 by Lavie Tidhar

Author:Lavie Tidhar [Tidhar, Lavie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

Part Two

Mother of Jade

The city of Falang-Et sprawls along both sides of the river Tharat, a pleasant, low-lying settlement dominated by Wat Falang at its heart. At night, during the wet season, there are often storms. On such a night, with the heavens flashing in silent explosions of light, with jagged lightning slashing open the sky like a cutthroat’s knife and delayed thunder bursts follow it—on such a night, with the rolling thunder echoing, magnified, between the hills, Gorel of Goliris came to Falang-Et.

He came stealthily, avoiding the river-approach and the main road. He came like a thief, which is what he was, or hoped, at any rate, to become.

He came to steal the Mirror of Falang-Et. His companion and fellow thief had gone ahead of him, by air. The third member of their party came by water. Thus were the elements preserved. It was, in the way of the thief, a gesture of tradition.

The thief-scholar Soth Bell, who lived in the Third Spawning Cycle (as counted in the falang calendar) wrote, in his great treaty On Thievery and General Pilfering, that the “ideal number of an expedition set to capture a mythical object is three. In that,” said Soth Bell, “the elements that, together, join to form the world and with it men and their gods, are met. Water, air, and earth, the three roads upon which mortal kin travels the World.” A fourth element, fire, was said by Soth Bell to represent “the gods, and in this analogy the object of theft. A thief once burnt is in future a more careful one. Or dead.” Gorel, who had little time for books, and who in any case would never have heard of Soth Bell (who disappeared in the far reaches of the north of the World on a quest whose purpose he had never divulged but who, by his supposed demise, was later to birth a new cult of thief-monks called the Order of Om-Gan), did not plan on remaining in a set of three indefinitely. He was, in fact, thinking that a bullet between the eyes of an unwanted accomplice can solve a lot of problems. And that a more accurate representation of the old four elements hypothesis could be summed up as urine, goat’s shit, smoke and intestinal gas. He was not much enamoured of poetry, either.

The third member of their party was an unwanted addition brought on by Kettle’s insistence. The way it happened was so:

A week out of Falang-Et Gorel and Kettle stopped and made camp on the banks of a tributary of Tharat. Kettle was perching on a high branch, sleeping. Gorel was building a small fire and planning to make eel stew. Kettle was good at catching fish. All was quiet. The graal was sitting motionless in the grasses, absorbing the last rays of the sun. Nothing stirred. Gorel’s few belongings were resting against a tree trunk close to the water’s edge. The water murmured as it bubbled past. Gorel added kindling to the small fire and shifted two larger branches close.

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