Tric shrugged, befuddled at the strange turn in conversation.
“You imagine an oaf, don’t you?” Mia continued. “Someone so full of wank there’s no room for wits. A slow-minded bastard who struts about full of spunk and piss, completely ignorant of how he looks to others.”
An exhalation of clove-sweet gray into the air between them.
“Cock is just another word for ‘fool.’ But you call someone a cunt, well…” The girl smiled. “You’re implying a sense of malice there. An intent. Malevolent and self-aware. Don’t think I name Consul Scaeva a cunt to gift him insult. Cunts have brains, Don Tric. Cunts have teeth. Someone calls you a cunt, you take it as a compliment. As a sign that folk believe you’re not to be lightly fucked with.” A shrug. “I think they call that irony.”
Mia sniffed, staring at the wastes laid out below them.
“Truth is, there’s no difference between your nethers and mine. Aside from the obvious, of course. But one doesn’t carry any more weight than the other. Why should what’s between my legs be considered any smarter or stupider, any worse or better? It’s all just meat, Don Tric. In the end, it’s all just food for worms. Just like Duomo, Remus, and Scaeva will be.”
One last drag, long and deep, as if drawing the very life from her smoke.
“But I’d still rather be called a cunt than a cock any turn.”
The girl sighed gray, crushed her cigarillo out with her boot heel.
Spat into the wind.
And just like that, young Tric was in love.
1. The horse, not the captain.
2. She was bitten by three different horses over the course of her stay on the farm, bucked off seven times (twice into manure), and stepped on once. She was also pinched on the behind by a particularly daring stable boy named Romero (sadly, on the same turn she was first bucked into shit), who’d been misinformed by a traveling minstrel that city women “enjoy that kind of thing.”
The boy’s nose never quite healed properly, though he managed to recover three of his teeth. Last I heard, he’d been sentenced to four years in the Philosopher’s Stone for a brutal, and many said unprovoked, assault on a traveling minstrel.
3. The Empire of Ashkah ruled the known world for approximately seven centuries; a period considered by learned scholars as a peerless age in the fields of science and the arts arcane. Ashkah was a society of sorcerers, whose bold ventures into the realms of magika—or werking, or whichever term you please—not only dwarfed the weaker thaumaturgical rites of the Liisian Magus Kings who followed them, but also changed the shape of reality itself.
Sadly, as is often the case when mortals go fiddling with fabrics woven by the gods, someone, or something, is eventually going to get their noses put out of joint. No mortal scholar is quite sure about the exact nature of Ashkah’s fall. Many say their empire was scrubbed from the world by Aa himself. Others claim the werking of the Ashkah sorcerii caught the attentions of beings older than the gods—nameless monstrosities beyond the edge of universe and sanity, who gobbled the empire down like an inkfiend on a three-turn bender.
And then, there are others who say someone among the sorcerii simply fucked up.
Very, VERY badly.
4. Mercurio named these trials “treasure hunts,” and though they varied in difficulty and danger to life and limb, they almost always began with Mia awakening with a mild slumberweed headache in unfamiliar surroundings. Once, after a lesson in the principles of magnetism, she’d awoken in the pitch-black of Godsgrave’s sewers with nothing but an iron hairpin and piece of chalk to help find her way out. After six months of lessons in the tongue of Old Ashkah, she’d awoken five miles into the Godsgrave necropolis with half a skin of water and directions to the exit written in Ashkahi script.
Of course, while Mercurio called them “treasure hunts,” the only “treasure” to be found at the end of these exercises was “continued existence.” Still, they did make for a singularly dedicated student.
5. Though referred to by the few scholars mad enough to study them as “sand kraken,” the apex predators of the Ashkahi wastes aren’t actually cephalopods. They swim in sand as easily as their sea-bound “kin” swim in water, filtering oxygen from the earth through specialized gills. They eat anything not possessed of an above-average running speed, and are renowned for temperaments most would describe as “uncooperative.”
The undisputed expert in their study, Loresman Carlo Ribisi, theorized they’re a kind of desert worm, mutated by magikal pollutants from the ruins of the Ashkahi Empire. Ribisi postulated the beasts are possessed of canine-level intelligence, and to prove his theorem, captured an infant sand kraken, brought it back to the Grand Collegium in Godsgrave, and attempted to train it in simple tasks.
Ribisi constructed stone mazes, filled them with earth, and set the beast (whom he named “Alfi” after a much-beloved familia pet) loose inside them. Alfi would be rewarded with food if he successfully traversed the labyrinth. Ribisi introduced more complex patterns as Alfi grew in size (six feet long at his last recorded measurement), also incorporating simple devices such as latches and doors to prove the beast’s growing intelligence. Sadly, Alfi utilized this knowledge one nevernight in escaping his enclosure, murdering the better part of the zoology faculty, including a rather disappointed Ribisi, before he was dispatched by a cadre of baffled Luminatii.
Ordinances about the keeping of wildlife within college grounds were tightened considerably after this affair.
6. Though a cadre of ten can be found in Godsgrave, the mekwerk giants of the Iron Collegium are kept unfueled and unmanned, only to be operated in times of absolute crisis. Owing to Itreyan military might and the difficulties of assaulting Godsgrave by anything other than sea, the presence of the machines in the city is mostly ceremonial. In the last forty truedarks, Godsgrave’s war walkers have been activated precisely twice.
The first, during the overthrow of King Francisco XV—legionaries loyal to the monarchy attempted to storm the palace and rescue the king from his assailants when news of the uprising broke. The loyalist pilots (strictly a ceremonial position by that stage of the monarchy) surrendered once they discovered that Francisco and his entire family were already dead.
The second incident commenced with three bottles of mid-shelf goldwine and a drunken boast to a would-be paramour, segued into a stumbling crash into the sixth Rib (which broke at the base and collapsed into the sea), and ended with a swift trial and an even swifter crucifixion for the young man involved.
And the lass wasn’t even that keen on him …
7. If any horse born in the sight of Aa was actually capable of mocking laughter, it was Bastard.
8. Known as “the knuckles,” the gesture involves the raising of a fist with fore and babyfinger extended as far as the first knuckle.
The gesture has origins at the Battle of the Scarlet Sands, where King Francisco I of Itreya, also known as “The Great Unifier,” defeated the last Liisian Magus King, Lucius the Omnipotent.
After this defeat, it was presumed that Liisian resistance to Itreyan rule would falter. Itreyan occupation of its conquests was as ingenious as it was insidious—a small group of marrowborn Administratii would move into the power vacuum created by the destruction of the ruling class, and through coercion and bribery, establish a new local elite with ties to Itreya. Local sons would be sent to Godsgrave to be educated, Itreyan daughters would marry local men, wealth would flow into all the right pockets, and within a generation, the conquered would be wondering why they resisted in the first place.