From a distance I heard the shrill shriek of bellhorns, the crashing of cymbals, the tremendous uproar of a platoon of kettle-drums. When I drew nearer I saw my route blocked by a horde of marchers wearing nothing but loincloths and sandals, striding along with their heads upraised to the sky. There seemed to be millions of them. The people of Sippulgar are dark-skinned, mostly, no doubt some adaptation to the intense sunlight, but the sweat-shiny bodies of the marchers were streaked with bright splotches of red and green and purple that echoed the gaudiness of the shrubs in bloom all about them. There was no hope of crossing the street. I stood and waited. Eventually a group of weeping, chanting worshippers came down the boulevard pulling a massive platform on which stood the wooden image of a winged serpent that had the frightening toothy-snouted blazing-eyed face of a jakkabole, that ravenous, angry beast of the eastern highlands. I turned to the man who stood beside me. “I am a stranger here,” I said. “What god is that they worship?”
“It is Time,” he told me. “The devourer of all.”
Yes. The winged serpent that flies ever onward, jaws agape, engulfing everything in its path, as even the maddened jakka-boles do when they descend on the farms of the Vrambikat Valley in their ravening hunger. I watched the good folk of Sippulgar, lost in their madness, march on and on and on until at last the boulevard was clear, and I went across to my hotel and sank down gratefully on the softest of beds.
What I knew about my brother-in-law Melifont’s life, and of his supposed fate, was this:
He was one of those unhappy men fated to fail at every enterprise he turned his hand to, despite the advantages of intelligence, zeal, and energy. At an early age he had left Sisivondal for the southlands to seek his fortune. He involved himself first in a mining project in the lava country back of the port of Glystrintal, where since time immemorial bold fools had sought for rumored mines of silver and gold. Melifont found neither silver nor gold, and when he moved on to search for the equally fabulous iron mines of Skakkenoir of the red soil, he returned so damaged from his adventures that his recovery took over a year. Hoping then for a quieter life, he settled next on the Stoienzar Peninsula, where he worked for a time as a tavernkeeper but appears also to have helped to found a bank that prospered greatly for a time, though ultimately it came to grief in a spectacular way. It was during his period of prosperity that I married his younger sister, and he returned to Sisivondal for the first time in many years to attend the ceremony. He was then about forty, a tall, handsome man with a florid face and sleek black hair, who limped a little, a souvenir of his mining project in Skakkenoir. I found him charming—magnetic, even—and Thuwayne, who had not seen her swaggering brother since she was a little girl, looked at him constantly in wonder and fascination. He presented us with a wedding gift of surprising generosity, which I put to good use in the expansion of my warehousing business.
Next we heard of him, his bank had failed—the malfeasance of a conniving partner, we were told—and he was off to Zimroel to sell rope to the Shapeshifters, or some such thing. Very little news travels from remotest Zimroel to our part of the world, and I have no idea how Melifont occupied himself for the decade that followed; but then he turned up in Sisivondal once again, looking very much older, his hair now gray and sparse, his limp more pronounced, but he was still charismatic, still full of ambition and optimism. His new endeavor was a shipping company that proposed to run a ferry service across the Inner Sea between Piliplok in Zimroel and the port of Tolaghai in our sun-blasted southern continent of Suvrael. I thought it was a crazy idea myself—Suvrael is a terrible place, and produces almost nothing useful—but in my relief at not being asked to finance his company out of my own pocket I gladly introduced him to several bankers of my acquaintance, whom he charmed into putting up a huge sum to underwrite his shipping operation. That was the last I saw of my brother-in-law Melifont. Now and again I asked my friends in shipping circles what they had heard of his ferry company, and in time I learned that it, too, had gone bankrupt. We heard from him only once more: a letter, three years back, that let us know that he had settled now in Sippulgar and had some interesting ideas for capitalizing on business conditions there. After that, only silence, until the puzzling next-of-kin letter from the Prefecture of Sippulgar inviting my sister to collect her brother’s effects.
The letter did not actually say he was dead. He was simply “no longer in Sippulgar,” she was told, and there was unclaimed property which would revert to the province if not collected by a member of his family. Certainly the implication of death was there, but not the certainty. I made inquiries in official circles and learned, after much patient probing, that Melifont Ambithorn had vanished under mysterious circumstances, was not expected to return, and his property in Sippulgar, such as it might be—undescribed—was formally considered to have been abandoned by him. Further inquiry yielded me nothing. “Mysterious circumstances,” was all anyone would say, and though I used my best political and commercial connections to get some more detailed explanation, the mystery remained a mystery. He had disappeared, and so far as the Prefecture of Sippulgar was concerned there was no likelihood of his turning up again, but no one would say explicitly that he was dead. Thuwayne could not accept such vagueness. Thus my journey to Sippulgar.
My first call was at the Prefecture. I bore documents establishing my family connection with Melithorn and informing me of the procedure I was supposed to follow when in Sippulgar, but even so it took me two hours to reach any official with authority to assist me in the case. He was, of course, a Hjort, puffy-faced and rough-skinned, with an enormous toadlike head. I do not like those officious creatures—who does?—but Hjorts populate our bureaucracy to such a degree that it is impossible for me to avoid frequent contact with them, and I have learned to be patient with their superciliousness and coarseness. The Hjort spent a long time pondering my papers, muttering to himself and jotting down copious notes, and said, finally, “Why are you here in place of his sister?”
I said with some restraint, “His sister—my wife—is not in a state of health that permits such a long journey. But I believe these documents make it clear that I am her officially designated representative.”
The documents I had shown him said so in the very first sentence. I refrained from pointing that out. The Hjort muttered to himself some more and at length, scowling—and when a Hjort scowls, it is with a mouth that stretches from Alhanroel to Zimroel—he scribbled something and applied his stamp of office to it and shoved it across the desk to me. It was a permit to receive the personal effects of Melifont Ambithorn, citizen of Sippulgar, legally presumed to be deceased.
His effects weren’t to be had at the Prefecture, of course. I had to cross half the city, a journey that entangled me in two more religious processions, noisy and fervid, before I reached the government storehouse where Melifont’s things were being kept. After the predictable official delays I was given three goodsized boxes, which I took back to my hotel to inspect.