A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire (2 page)

PROLOGUE

Long ago there was a jongleur-thief in Kier
, before Kier was yet a nation, and the name of the jongleur-thief was Jaud. Gla Taus, The World, was new in those days, only lately formed from the primordial slag, and in every situation in this new world Jaud acted out of the selfish center of himself. This was not unusual, for in the beginning the world was without law and the people had no word for conscience.

Jaud’s disposition was merry and cruel at once, and he chose to live by stealing. After each theft he whirled before his victim and deftly juggled the items he had stolen: rings, bracelets, coins, seashells, beads, digging tools, and even weapons. Often his victims applauded these performances. Only rarely did the aggrieved Gla Tausian try to recover his belongings, for Jaud was impatient of those who interfered with his juggling, and throughout the land his deadliness with knife and hand ax was well known.

In the infancy of Gla Taus, Jaud honored only Jaud and a few fellow thieves who served as his disciples and retainers, having recognized in him a sorcerer of chicanery and bloodthirstiness. For untold years, the Thieves of Jaud preyed upon the people of Kier before Kier was a nation. They made themselves a bastion in the Orpla Mountains, from which they undertook forays of theft, jugglery, and slaughter.

But as time passed, people drew together against the indifference of Gla Taus and the cruelty of Jaud. From these first feeble bands tribes arose, and from the tribes chiefdoms, and from the chiefdoms primitive states, and from the primitive states a nation that called itself Kier. Kier exercised dominion through the authority of the first Prime Liege, whom everyone knew as Shobbes or Law. Only Jaud and his fellow jongleur-thieves failed to acknowledge the preeminence of Law, for they were free spirits obeying no statutes but those written in the runes of their blood. How could they know that the superstitious taboos of the first bands had become the inhibitory customs of the tribes? That the customs had become ordinances, and that finally Shobbes had had these ordinances codified in writing?

In truth, Jaud and his family of cutpurses, clowns, and cutthroats did not know. Not until a contingent of Kieri soldiers captured one of their number after the fellow had robbed and slain an innocent citizen of a village on the Mirrimsagset Plain. For instead of ordering the beheading of the outlaw, Shobbes sent him back to the Orpla Mountains with this message: “Jaud, Shobbes has told me to say that at last the taboos, the customs, the rules, and the ordinances have become the Commandments of Law. And Law declares that no Kieri may steal from another or commit murder. Not even Jaud stands outside these Commandments. Shobbes demands that your thieving, juggling, and killing instantly cease.” The messenger bowed low before his lord, and Jaud struck off his head.

“It is not in the blood for us to follow Law!” Jaud raged. “Therefore, I ordain—not with my own voice, but with that of our singing marrow—that we shall continue to thieve, juggle, and slay! So be it always!” Shortly after Jaud delivered this impassioned speech, he journeyed alone out of the Orpla Mountains and down the Tarsebset Moraine to Sket, the summer capital of Kier.

Full of bravado and curiosity, he had determined to breach the fortifications of the Summer Palace and behold the upstart Prime Liege whose name and word were equally law. By stealth and cunning Jaud got past the outer wall of Sket and into the buttressed chamber of the sovereign’s throne room. Soon he would meet Shobbes face to face.

A noise halted Jaud dead still. A host of helmeted guards set upon him. Although he struggled like ten Kieri and slew one of his attackers, Jaud was eventually overcome and delivered to Shobbes in halt-chains and wrist-irons.

Shobbes, Law, was an aged gentlewoman wearing starched black skirts and a black overtunic. Her mien was gracious and refined, her voice pedantic and precise. Never before in his life had Jaud seen or heard anyone like her. “You are banished to the Obsidian Wastes,” Shobbes told Jaud with no-nonsense authority. “You may not return until you find Aisaut, Conscience, in his dwelling there and bow before him in sincere obeisance as his vassal. Only then may you know again the company of civil, scruple-inhibited beings.”

Northward along the Kieri coast, in High Summer, an ice barge carried Jaud into exile. At Ilvaudset Camp he was put ashore and abandoned to his sentence. Facing inland toward the pole, Jaud saw beneath the half-frozen ground cover irregular veins of the extrusive black glass that gave the Obsidian Wastes their name. How would he survive the decree of Law and find amid such desolation the hidden dwelling of Conscience? The bigness of his task both appalled and invigorated him, and he departed Ilvaudset Camp and its small garrison of Kieri soldiers in an odd humor of elation and self-doubt.

For seventy days and seventy nights Jaud trekked into the hardening wilderness of the Wastes. He did not eat, drink, or sleep. At the end of the seventieth night he came upon the Escarpments of Aisaut, a maze of towering obsidian walls and interconnecting canyons of glass which none but the innocent or the penitential could traverse with ease. Jaud was neither, but he entered the daunting labyrinth and for seven more days and nights wandered through it in search of Conscience. On the morning of the seventy-eighth day he approached a wall of dizzying height and perdurable finality and could go no farther. Looking back, he saw not one opening into this compartment of the labyrinth but seven, and he could not find the one by which he had come to his destination. How would he ever return to Kier and the Orpla Mountains? Jaud gazed again upon the final wall, thinking that now, after all the merriment and bloodshed he had known, it would perhaps be sweet to die.

But a voice called out, “Jaud, you may not die until you have confronted me and sworn your allegiance!”

Although these words had the ring and tenor of authority, the voice conveying them sounded thin and distant. Jaud, both perplexed and irritated, looked for the invisible crier.

“Approach me, Jaud! Come toward me!”

“Where?” Jaud shouted.

“Here in my prison of glass, child!”

Jaud did not like being called child, but he approached the towering cliff face and peered into it like one looking for flaws in a jewel. “Who are you?” he asked the thing moving sluggishly within the glass. “What do you want of me?” He pressed his face and hands against the obsidian. The piercing light of three high morning stars revealed that the crier in the rock was none other than a second Jaud.

But this Jaud was dressed in starched black skirts and a seamless black overtunic embroidered with threads of a darker black, and Jaud was amazed to see that his double had no hands, only stumps that he moved back and forth through the channels he had worn in the glass.

“I am not your second self,” the creature said. “I am the half you denied. Shobbes has sent you to reclaim that half by bending before me and asking pardon for your crimes.”

“You are Aisaut, then?”

“Yes, I am Conscience, Jaud, and you must let me rule.”

“But you are not the half I have denied, Aisaut. I’ve denied no half at all. I am whole without you and always have been.”

“Shobbes decrees you outlaw, and unfulfilled. We were born when Gla Taus took shape from the matter of creation, but the lava flows of that anarchic time captured me in their searing floods and swept me into this great prison of obsidian. You—more fortunate than I—awoke in the Orpla Mountains, faulb blossoms dancing red and orange upon the hillsides and a paean of self-celebration coursing in your veins.

“All that has kept the Kieri from destroying themselves during my imprisonment here and your mad profligacy in the world is the fact that I took a precaution. Before the lava entrapped me, Jaud, I bit off my hands and summoned a pair of hawks to carry them southward into Kier. These brave birds dropped a bleeding finger at every place where people might have a chance to thrive, and my fingers pushed up through the earth in the shapes of great-boled mirrim trees. By every tree a village also grew, and when the villages merged each with each in the Mirrimsagset Alliance, Shobbes at last had a nation over which she might beneficially rule. She called it Kier. So I am cofounder of your country.”

“Over the Thieves of Jaud neither Shobbes nor Aisaut rules,” Jaud scoffed. “Law has sent me here, but she owns neither my followers nor my heart.”

“That’s because my absence is felt,” Conscience replied. “The nation of ten villages has grown beyond the ken of Shobbes, and, to your own and the Kieri’s coming sorrow, you have ignored her suzerainty from the beginning.”

“What would you have me do?”

“Release me from the rock. Let me lead you home.”

Jaud laughed. “Aisaut, you are wrong. I have never felt your absence. And by sacrificing your hands to found the state, you became less complete than I.”

“Law demands that you release me.”

“Where is Law, Conscience?” said Jaud, turning about. “I do not see her here. Nor any of her vassals, either.”

“The Obsidian Wastes are still untamed,” the creature in the wall admitted. “But one day the Kieri will come to subdue them. Already there is a garrison at Ilvaudset Camp. With these soldiers and pioneers will come the Commandments of Law, in full and magnificent panoply.”

“Why, then, must I let you go?”

“You must do me homage if you wish to see Kier again.”

“My mind brims with memories of the Orpla Mountains, which may be enough. Perhaps I no longer desire to return.”

The thing in the wall shifted uneasily.

“Further, Conscience, I am far older than you, for the Kieri recall in legends the upheavals that shaped the Obsidian Wastes. Of my birth, however, they have no record of any kind.”

Aisaut protested, “I am as old as you.”

“Not so,” Jaud told his despairing image. “But lacking hands and trapped in this wall, you are more helpless than I.”

“What will you do, then?”

“Await the arrival of those who come to tame the Obsidian Wastes. As in the old days out of Orpla, I will fall upon them as a thief. Any who resist I will murder before your eyes, even as you cry ‘Stay!’ and impotently behold my deeds.”

“Law prohibits these enormities, Jaud!”

Jaud glanced showily about. “Where is Law, Conscience?”

“She will come! Mind you, she will come!”

But Jaud turned his back on the creature, and Conscience knew that Jaud’s true name was something else. The jongleur-thief had fallen into Shobbes’s hands too late to alter his nature, and Aisaut could gain no hold on his heart or his intellect. The future, at least in the Obsidian Wastes, would unfold exactly as Jaud had prophesied: Conscience, crying out “Stay!” as he struggled to free himself, would witness both the banditry and the bloodshed.

And would weep because he could not intervene.

—A Cultural Sourcebook: Myths, Legends, and Folk Tales of the Kieri

Retold in Vox by Clefrabbes Douin, Minister-at-Feln, 6209 G