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The Honest of Abekabar
Tomes of Amaxathroth > Ink, Blood and Parchment |
In life, Bagad-Tul gave voice to malign and inventive sorcery within the Folded Palace of Abekabar; in death, a long and lesser line of the worm-hearted have used his name and engraved ruby to raise fear enough to occupy the Palace. But rule? None had the true hatred of all men and women as still burns within the brittle bones of Bagad-Tul, cast into the Vision Desert and cursed mightily; no, even the Bagad-Tul who brought the stone tubes to the slave bazaar is but a shadow of the original.
Abekabar is a font of unthinking thieves, of base murderers who care not even for excellence in their craft, of nerveless whores and beggars who will not even look down to see the results of their mumbling. The sands have a madness in them, that weighs down men and women in the moment of the beast, without any vision of the heartbeat to come. They spawn and multiply like demons in the dust-choked alleys and brown shelters. Treat the diseased throngs of Abekabar as you would a pack of starving curcal; kick them, put them to the torch and blade, or feed them with flesh and wine - but expect neither understanding nor change.
The crumbling walls of Abekabar do little to mask this pit of vermin that walk on two legs; but such is fit for a place to which the Kreshi bring torture-maddened slaves, and is coveted not by the Ten Oasis Kings. Abekabar is a city of a hundred men afloat upon a sea of rats and lice - and those hundred are Bagad-Tul, a band of prideful murderers who guard the Palace, and avaricious merchants who trade and steal without care for any forbiddance of God, king or man.
Where then will you find men who are neither thieves nor murderers, women who have yet grace and will in Abekabar? There is one sure place. Those who push back and cry out, or call for honesty and guards against rogues, are thrust within the thin, hanging stone tubes of the slave bazaar, one apiece and behind great metal hinges, with but a thin carven notch to see that which so drove them to their own form of madness. Children of the slave bazaar slip angry spidrel and thrinlizards into the tubes most recently occupied, there to fight with black flies for choice flesh - but the laughter of rogues, slave masters and whores at the weak screams of the imprisoned is ever disinterested.
Not even cruelty rouses the sand-worn rabble; the present Bagad-Tul wishes it so, and it pleases him to watch the tubes through thin, high windows of the Folding Palace. The weighty stone tubes swing gently upon their great chains when the wind blows sand from the alleys, and every so often the bones of one unfit for Abekabar slip from the base-notch.
[ Posted by Reason on November 19, 2006 ]
