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Uh. So, this is my first ever stab at fantasy. And for some reason I decided to go for a kind of strange and larky pulp-Western, set in a colossal and endlessly-shifting favela city of aluminium and wire. And so if there are any kindly souls/committedly vicious critics in here, I'd love to know...does this hang even vaguely together, so far? Or do I need to unpack the weirdness to make it all more coherent? Many, many thanks to anyone who does have a read x ______________________________________________________ “Who is Tyman Watker?” the first rider asks - politely enough. The trackers put an end to yelling at one another and turn in unison to glare upstreet, toting their rifles. “A killer,” says the bearded tracker. “A dead man.” “You, maybe, beneath that hat of yours.” The two riders wait patiently for a better response. Their steers harumph and tramp their six-toed feet, enjoying the cool wet air of the early morning. The rain is clattering down the aluminium rooftops stacked high, tipping and dropping, along either side of the long and empty street. “Tyman Watker,” the bearded tracker says, “is the man who murdered and raped a sweet young pearldiverboy - Widegesser here’s cousin, Ro - down in the suburban waterways no more than four nights ago. We plan to find him - catch him - set him alight in a Jingo’s Tyre. There’s money in it, too, twelve hundred tender.” He squints suspiciously up at the second rider. “You’re a woman,” he adds, blinking in surprise. “I am, sure,” the second rider says, tilting back her head and watching him through a mask of filth and dripping water with absolute calm. “So you can eliminate any possibility from your minds of my being Tyman Watker.” Her eyes are startling, bright and green. The bearded tracker twitches a hand up to his leather mackintosh’s hood and tugs compulsively at the brim. His two comrades follow suit. “Gentlemen,” the first rider says, clapping his fat little hands, “I’d like to avoid any further suspicions of my motives, or my companion’s motives - which is after all only reasonable, out here on the street on borough’s edge, and with a killer-cum-rapist running wild - by naming us now, in sight of the Defined God. My name is Medico Rottentoe Wade, and this is Miss Mallory Candish. We’re just headed into the borough.” “Ah,” says the bearded tracker. “Well, ah, I’m Mico Carmiko, and this is Mister Dal, and this is Mister Widegesser.” “Ro’s cousin. I most certainly remember.” Dal beams; a round and windburnt face with a mouthful of broken teeth. Beside him, Widegesser scowls, his eyes fixed downwards on the soil and broken glass and foundation-metal of the street. He mutters unpleasantly from out of the corner of his mouth; “Mico. They still haven’t told us what, mm, business they have being here in Saint-Stock, Mico.” The medico grins, and shrugs his shoulders, and leans backwards to slap the heavy satchels flung over his steer’s hindmost legs. “I’m sure I’m right in thinking that you must surely already have a resident doctor,” he says, “in this most reputable neighbourhood - where are we, Idolplaz? - in this most legendary of all the Southernmost boroughs.” Laughter from all assembled, save for the second rider. “This old white crow’s-bow,” Carmiko says, raising his sleeve to reveal pale white skin, “this gross lump, this was just a knucklebone graze before Medico Fresca got his hands on it. Dal has a whispering hernia which he swears never spoke a word until he wandered into the medico’s berth in want of aspirin. And as for Widegesser here - show the man, Widegesser, don’t mumble-” Rottentoe Wade shakes his head sorrowfully, inspects every scrape and disfigurement in turn, and clucks with kindness. “It’s clear enough, then,” he says, “The first article of my business in-borough will be to go about filching all of Medico Fresca’s business. How does that sound to you, gentlemen?” Dal makes a gesture as if to toss up an invisible hat and hurrahs; Widegesser looks at his feet again and spits in an amicable sort of way. “Mr Wade,” says Carmiko, “we’re sure to be gone for a few dark nights at least. Have you considered where you’ll be berthed? Because if you can outperform Fresca, I’ll most surely be coming to pay you a visit.” The medico spreads his arms wide and gives them a steady and honest, almost fatherly look. “Gentlemen,” he says, “when it comes to digs, I’ll gladly take suggestions from the floor right now. But I can make you a promise. Should you return in a pocketful of nights from the uncharted City, with the fiend Tyman Watker slung over your back and bearing the scars of momentous battle, I’ll usher you right on through the door. Scratch-that. In ten years’ time, should business prosper and I be comfortably set up in four-storey digs overlooking the famous Semicertain River, you’ll come to the waiting room and take a seat and some beauteous helping-hand fresh from the Department for Vice will tell the rightfully next in line, ‘I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait. These here are Misters Carmiko, Dal and Widegesser, and they take priority. Why, they’re the very first friends Medico Wade made when he arrived in this borough, and they’ll be getting preferential treatment from now until City’s end.’” “You most certainly have a way with words, Mister Wade,” Carmiko says, in a dull kind of wonder. The medico bows his head in thanks. “My great-grandfather was renowned for his grasp of street rhetorics,” he says, “although I make no claim to the craft myself.” He makes as if to ride on, and then doesn’t. “Anyhow,” he adds. “A most happy pursuit to you, gentlemen, and if we happen to collide while in the tea-lounge, it’d be my delight to treat you all to a kettleful of syncopatic and a bloody knee or five. Oh - and if you want my advice, you’ll agree to split the twelve hundred three ways and make a start while it’s still good and early.” The three trackers see them off with one final bout of hood-tipping and enthusiastic, largely conflicting advice concerning the best digs to be found in the borough at any sort of reasonable price. The riders pass around the turn of the street, ducking under sodden laundry and dangling bulbous cactus-vines, and all the world is lost to rain once more. Rottentoe says, “Think they’ll remember the steeds?” Mallory says, “Unlikely.” “We sell them on fast enough, they’ll be riding on out of borough within night’s end and nobody will be able to prove a thing.” “Certainly.” Rottentoe sighs. “Well, then,” he says. “Watker?” “I heard him, albeit faintly. A mile or two back, just as we were passing the candlelit shrine on the northernmost side of the shanty-bridge. He’d twisted his ankle or he’d broken his ankle, and he’d been crawling on it in agony for some time. He thought his pursuers were close by. He believed he could hear their voices and see their lanterns. He’d dragged himself up to some hidden place, a crevice of tin and aluminium and muck in amongst the abandoned shacks on the lowers and it was there as he was pulling himself forcibly into safety that his wrist had slit open - one smooth movement, sssssssh - on the edge of the rusted metal. He was lying there then for a while longer, bleeding out, clutching at his opened-up arm and trembling in fear of the pursuit and praying to Temb to give him the chance for life he’d always been owed. Eventually he went.” “Should’ve told them where the corpse was. Said you’d seen a shadow moving through the lowers or somesuch, led them to the right spot via implication. We could’ve argued for a share of that twelve hundred tender.” “If Watker had in fact raped and murdered that sweet young pearldiverboy,” Mallory says, “I might have considered it. But no. He’ll rest and rot in the muck and uncharted City. No good could come from letting them return him, triumphant, in corpseform. Judged in absentia, desecrated, burnt.” Rottentoe makes a face. “I don’t suppose,” he says, “that you can offer any tangible evidence that he was not in fact culpable.” “It was all in the tone of his passing. Sorrow, fear, and pain. He was an innocent man.” “Out of curiosity, now - and how does a guilty man die?” “Pain, fear and sorrow,” Mallory says, “but all of it wreathed in shame.” “Ha!” “I heard him singing a hosanna to Temb as he bled away. Not one of ours, not one I recognised, but the tune was from the Book of Quiet And Tearful Exclamations. He might have learnt from a tutor when he was young himself. It was-” She hums a verse softly to herself, in a low and toneless key, and then stops. “All right,” Rottentoe says. “You heard him right. I believe you did.” “I know how it sounds when a good man dies.” “I’ve already confirmed that I do believe you,” Rottentoe tells her, but kindly. He itches at his faint and stubbly beard, and then plunges the same hand over the curve of his belly and down beneath his trousers to scratch at his pink and ridesore crotch. “So the man they wanted is dead,” he says, “and he wasn’t the man they wanted. Perhaps we should tell them as much when they return. That’s surely a development.” “Best not to.” “Probably you’re in the right.” They’re on the uppermost turn of the street now, and the borough of Saint-Stock begins to open up out of the murk before them like a vast and seething blister of metal and wires and great turning iron cranes above. Mallory leans forward and itches at her steer’s ruddy scaled neck with her fingers. “We’ve travelled to the farthest ends of the City,” she says mildly, “and they still murder here, and they still rape.” “True,” says Rottentoe, riding on, “that’s no development at all.” *** The City shifts its weight. The settled rainwater is flowing powerfully now, ploughing pathways through bazaar stalls and apartment walls, nuzzling down into gutter canals before forcing its way back upwards, uprooting entire houses, making soggy open wounds out of trim and neatly mowed courtyards. The street of Weldersplaz, just off the Avenue of a Thousand Severed Fingers, breaks loose from its foundations in the early afternoon, drifting southwards, before slamming hard into the intersection of Steersbloodplazzet and Rower’s Way, shaking the high canvas scaffolding of a half-completed tannery which creaks, screams, and careens away from its own flailing construction workers. A man falls. And while some marshals and civic-minded citizens at first splash a path forward through the torrent and put their shoulders to the front walls of their own shops and homes, in a heroic effort to forcibly drive them back into place, it quickly becomes clear that as more weight accumulates behind the streets, their forward motion is transforming into something quite unstoppable. Wheezing and shaking, ripping up cobblestones and churning mud, Saint-Stock veers into Cambend, borough of cabals and tinpot shrines, shattering the boundary gas-lanterns hung from post and line, smudging the white chalk-lines sacred to Liloah, goddess of Limitations. Street bleeds into alleyway. The black matted water encircles the tiny and irrelevant borough of Ruth, a hilly lump of raised earth spotted with marble tombs and makeshift homes, caught between two City giants, tearing around and around the edge but unable to find a pathway inwards. As always, it’s the living who suffer most from the City’s perambulations. A grandfather is last seen waving his arms frantically as two enormous street facades - Formersplaz and Dentisplaz - converge upon him from either side, and then with judderings and shrieks of aluminium and plaster, clash. Entire gardens of cacti and tea are swallowed up. Presently the rain stops, and the people come splashing outside into unfamiliar neighbourhoods where their homes have freshly settled. Inevitably, it isn’t long before violent skirmishes - revolvers and rifles flashing in the reflected water - and legal disagreements begin to break out. The City settles in, once again. *** The cabal of the (ironically, unnamed) Defined God is as a matter of tradition held responsible for the creation of the City's yearly calendar. A brother or sister, chosen by ballot, ascends to the highest platform of the tottering steelwork of the Sure And Certain Spire, straps themselves in to the telescopic chair - and three novices take hold of the rotating thirty-hundred-and-sixty degree aluminium sphere by its copper handles and spin it, hard and fast. A moment later - when all is still once more and the lucky brother or sister has regained control of themselves and possibly stopped vomiting - they will peer down into the churning depths of the City through the looking-glass and their eye will fall upon something, anything. The night to come will be named after this most random of observations, and a quiet announcement will be made on-street. A few important dates from Formerly times, for the sake of providing a frame of reference; The Night of the Frightened Goose The Night of the Woman In Blue, Who Knows I’m Looking Down at Her, Who I’ll Seek Out Once I’ve Been Unstrapped, Who I’ll Seek Out and Tell Her this Entire Night Belongs To Her, and All Thanks to Me. The Night of the Possible Murder The Night of the Blackhead on the Neck of Someone I Think I Might Have Met The Night of oh Look oh Look You Have to Look I Think I’m Crying oh The motto of the cabal of the Defined God, famously, is this; “You were nothing until I called you.”
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Jun 12, 2014 11:51
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What is this? Is it a fragment of a novel or a short story or something else? I just don't understand how the different parts relate to each other or what the point is. To answer your question it doesn't hang together at all. Sorry that was from my phone so I didn't go into much detail. The first part seems like a western where nothing happens, or where you meant to write a lot more and just stopped. The second part seems like a completely unrelated story about a city that moves around in some way that is unclear. Mainly it's just a string of street names. The third part didn't really seem to do anything at all. It's just some extraneous world building that doesn't make any sense. The last thing you should do here is try to 'unpack' anything. If this is supposed to be a single short story, then you should jettison everything after that ends and just work on writing a solid, much less ambitious, story about those characters, spending time making us care about them, polishing the writing a lot, and making something interesting happen. A man-hunt in city that is always changing around sounds pretty interesting to me, but you sort of gave up on that. newtestleper fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Aug 30, 2014 |
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Aug 30, 2014 09:18
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