Monday, 25th November 2013, 18:47 by shackleton
Hey guys, just wondering, aside from my spelling, is there anything I ought to change? Should the pacing be faster, or slower? More action, or less? Anyway, here's the next bit:
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JAN
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"Your problem is you don't have the motivation, the drive to succeed!"
Jan's father had not improved with time. Dorcas smiled with the corner of her mouth, and grabbed Jan's knee under the table.
"Uh, this is fantastic, mother-"
His mother started to reply, her thin and pale face washed out by years of his father's ruddy, ham-handed blustering, but her husband steamed straight over her-
"Your generation! I ask you, where is the get-up-and-go! Where is the gumption! You dress like a bunch of ragamuffins, and expect life to throw everything before you on a platter!"
Jan looked at his clean, almost-brand-new jacket and wondered what his father would have thought of his road rags. He was beginning to get an acute headache - the same he remembered plaguing him for much of his adolescence.
"When I was your age-" men ate rocks instead of bread, and built the Capitol with only the use of their pricks -"we knew what work meant!"-as opposed to nowadays, where you get drunk at mid-day, then nap for the remainder, snoring so loud you can be heard from the corridor outside your 'study'.
"Jan, could you show me to the toilet?" asked Dorcas. Something was up. He'd pointed it out on the way into the house.
He stood, and they edged out of the room, his father still booming forth to a diminished audience.
"Are they always this bad?" she whispered.
"You know, I don't think I ever missed home."
"Screw it, let's just get out of here."
"How? They're guarding the only door."
She grabbed his hand, and he recognized the look of concentration on her face she got when she was about to blink.
"No! No! We can't just disappear!"
Her brow relaxed.
"Why not? They're assholes. Your father's been one hair away from calling me a whore three times now - next time, I'm warping him into the Eber."
Jan paused, weighing up the diplomatic damage of Dorcas losing her temper in the extremely likely circumstance that his father insulted her again, against that of disappearing into thin air.
"Alright, fine. But we go out the front door. You have contractions. Look like you are in pain."
"Bit early for that, isn't it?"
"Got any better ideas? Any port is good anchorage in a storm."
He looked down at Dorcas' growing belly with a weird surge of pride he could frankly say he'd never felt from anything else.
He hoped it was a girl.
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Jan's life was, for the first time in his life, something close to blessed. He and Dorcas were coasting on the weregild Purves & Grimes had paid on the event of his death, which was, as Augurs rarely die in the line of duty, very substantial, and had luckilly fallen into the hands of his mother, who had squirelled it away, then given it to him with a whispered lament that, if she had kept it, it would only serve to redden his father's nose, which was -on his generous civil service pension - very red.
They lived in a flat that had tall sash windows above a busy market square, in a shabby neighborhood populated by artisans, scientists, students and artists, and Dorcas had decorated it with dried flowers, while Jan had developed a talent for baking.
He had contacted his old friends from university, who had been delighted to see him alive, and who were far more interesting and fun than how he remembered them. They were constantly engaging in one or another conspiracy in the lively political sects that filled the Capitol, talking at the top of their voices about revolution and liberation for all, producing pamphlets and holding meetings that turned into dancing before anything much had been decided.
Dorcas spent her days studying Thorsen's old books, or wandering the backstreets of the Capitol, admiring the strange and labyrinthine architecture, or blinking to the tops of tall spires. One night she came back flushed and laughing and told him that she had been chased by a ghoul in the Shudders, but had ported it into a sewer.
Jan felt a strange twin flush of pride and horror - pride that Dorcas was so fearless, fear that anything could threaten her. He had offered to come and walk with her, but he only got on her nerves, worrying about every dark corner and every shifty gang of youths.
Dorcas, with the ability to sidestep danger so casually, was free to explore the city in a way that Jan had never dreamed of. She could wander blithely into the depths of the Shudders - the favela that wound filligree through the depths of Muna's library, houses built into stripped bookshelves, children barefoot in the drifts of dust - and simply blink past any threat.
She was learning a strange city, a city that most tried to ignore, a city of mystery cults and strange music, desperation and multiplicity. The ghettos of the tengu, sprouting from the godstone spines that hung over the Eber, and the gangs of kobolds that haunted the deeps of the Shudders.
The city that woke after darkness, shadowed figures cloaked in mist, shambling ghouls, and strange, disfigured men that stank of sulphur, all living their lives side by side with the ordinary, working wherever would employ them, drifting from quarter to quarter, melting away at the approach of witchunters.
Jan too felt like he was discovering the Capitol. He walked with a new-found confidence, through a place that seemed vibrant with possibilities, exploding at the seams with energy, barely constrained by the dead hand of the Senate. He climbed the spires to the places where strange winds blew through vertical streets of derelicts and squats, and watched St Elmo's fire crown the Spires with gold.
In the South, the war with Genoa was raging, but it barely touched the Capitol. Here, the soldiers were merry and drank with youthful enthusiasm, not traumaticc desperation, and their brawls lacked the hard edge of men accustomed to casual murder.
He wandered down to the bakery to buy fresh loaves of bread, and carried them in the crook of his arm, stepping over gutters and through the street-markets bustling with smells of spice and shouting, past the group of rakes, drunk as shit and boiling out of a bar, past the young Egypta street organist, who was getting really very good, and up the old pine stairs into the flat.
He was going to another meeting tonight. He used to find the meetings boring - the endless rehashing of vitriol like a farmer's dogs barking at nothing, a sound devoid of all meaning. It seemed more interesting, now. Perhaps it was just a more interesting time. Perhaps it was, when they said words like 'war', or 'hunger', he had pictures to put to the words. Different kinds of people, too. The senate was stretched very thin with the war in the South. The Batholith Milner's guild had forced them to ban child labour in the Capitol just two months ago, after weeks of strikes and marches. The instant population of joyful, pinch-faced children brightened the streets.
Wafting in from the street, he could hear somebody singing on the square. A man. The market was closed, quiet, and their voice was good. Dorcas had left her clothes scattered through the living room.
He leaned out the window, and saw the singer. A young man with a mane of white hair, perhaps bleached, with a very tanned face, swaddled in grey rags. He was sitting crosslegged on a bench, a flute held in one brown hand. The song was strange, full of atonality and syncopation, but mesmerising.
He turned back to the meal he was preparing, and the music wafted into the room, into his perfect life.
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LUCAS
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"Keep him still." said Gorg. He sounded almost bored. Lucas struggled, but the others were much stronger than he was, and they were holding his blanket tight over him. The unnoficial policy of the Academy was that such practices bred tougher graduates. Maintained discipline. Gorg hit him in the stomach, hard, but not hard enough to do any permanent damage.
"I want you to count to ten. Ten strikes. If you miss a number, we'll start again at the beginning. Do you understand?"
Lucas spat at him.
Gorg's face was blank and impassive as he wiped the spit off. It was bloody from that clip Lucas had got in the mouth.
He hit Lucas in the stomach, and Lucas' gorge ran up his throat.
"Do you understand?"
He hit him again. It felt like he couldn't breathe.
"Do you understand?"
Lucas tried to writhe away, but he was trapped. The fist felt like a hammer in his stomach. He vomited in his mouth, and blood and vomit rand down his cheek.
"Do you understand?"
Lucas spat a gob of saliva, blood and stomach acid in Gorg's face, and Gorg screamed as the sick stung his eyes. He turned away, hands held to his face, then turned back towards Lucas. Gorg Mask, nicknamed so because he never smiled, never frowned, never twitched his black, dead eyes - a face so impassive it was no face at all, no more expressive than the back of his head.
Right now, though, there was a shock of rage, then of joy. Elation. Like the first rays of morning sun on a mountain-range.
His hands closed around Lucas' neck, and suddenly, Lucas couldn't breathe. It hurt, like a grip of ice, like broken glass in his throat. His vision was dimming. He was going to die. Better late than never, thought Lucas. He wished he could die with a smile on his face. That would really piss them off, but his body, ever rebelious, continued to struggle and choke for air. The other boys had let go of the blanket. They didn't want to be part of a murder.
Suddenly, the pressure stopped. Gorg looked down at his hands.
"Just wanted to see the look in your eyes," he said. "I wasn't disappointed."
Gorg the experimentalist. This was the fifth night in the dorm. The first four had been simmilar, although, it seemed tonight Gorg had found whatever it was he had been looking for.
This wasn't bullying. There was no laughter, the humiliation was incidental. This was a test, of some kind. Lucas thought that Gorg was probably mad.
So did some of the others. He could see it by the way they looked at Gorg. But they were also afraid, and the smouldering embers of their sadism were blown into fires by the power of being on the stronger side.
And Gorg would always be the stronger.
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DORCAS
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She didn't realize how late it was, until she climbed the twisting stair that led out of Minos' Gorge. The cave-moss that grew on the gorge walls gave off a deceptive brightness, lulling the passage of time, and illuminating the bank of fog that rose off the Eber then descended between houses of the gorge to give it a false ceiling.
When she had descended, it had felt like the houses at the top of the crevasse were built on clouds. Now, it appeared like they were built on a swirling abyss, a sinister membrane pulsing with gaslight and strange, fogged sounds.
It was late. Jan would be upset. She stopped off by the late night market on Holgastrasse to pick up some flowers, to try and make up for it. Dorcas didn't even know if Jan liked flowers, but she was new to romantic gestures. 'Flowers are romantic,' thought Dorcas. Plus, Jan always seemed to like them, and they were beautiful. Flowers of all different kinds, from all over the old empire - fireblossom, from the Urals, delicate white Slothbane, from the Scanda wastes, blooms shepherded for generations next to flowers plucked from untended fields and hedgerows.
The bunch was wrapped in tissue-paper. She sped her steps. Perhaps, if she hurried, she would catch him just as he left the meeting. She had said she would go, but she found the meetings hard to follow. They made her feel like a yokel.
As she grew closer to the bar, where they had the meetings, she developed a skip in her step. Never in her life had she been so stupid about anything as she was about Jan, she thought to herself, with a wry smile.
Suddenly, a figure burst out of the darkness, to grab her by her lapels. Dorcas almost hit them, but it was Rosalind, the landlady. She also attended the meetings, sometimes. A sweet lady - they often had dinner together, like a familly.
"They've taken them! You can't go!"
"What?" The woman's face was shiny with cold sweat.
"They've taken them all to the tower!"
Dorcas' stomach dropped.
"Who?"
"The ones at the meeting, Fredrich, Hols, all of them … Jan."
Dorcas tried to push past her.
"They'll be watching the bar. You can't go." The woman held on to her lapels.
"Let go of me," said Dorcas.
"Listen, you can't go."
"I'm not going to the meeting-house."
"Where?"
"The Tower," said Dorcas, again trying to strug off the woman's hands, trying to restrain herself from punching her.
"It's suicide," said Rosalind. "They're gone."
"Let go of me," Dorcas ground out.
"You can't go."
"Get the fuck out of my way or I swear I'll make you."
The woman's eyes widened at the look on Dorcas' face, but didn't move.
"No."
Dorcas almost hit her, then caught herself. Rosalind was right. Going off half-cocked would be suicide.
She looked at the flowers in her hand, all squashed and spread in all directions by her clenched hand, and began to weep.
Last edited by
shackleton on Friday, 29th November 2013, 17:46, edited 1 time in total.