Salvated

The wagon stopped. “Come down, we are here.”

I blinked.

Wisps of a dream of the looping savannah escaped, and houses resolved from the haze. I turned, found the sun at its apex, the wagon parked behind a building, and the camel unbridled to chew cud on the kerb. It returned my gaze as if challenging, ‘what?’

The palatines stood on the dirt; they had alighted and now looked at me. I unclenched my hands from the rim of the wagon, and from the depressions of my nails there fell splinters. My muscles untensed as I eased my rear to my heels. I’d been kneeling on the bench, staring along the gradient for some hours.

“Come now,” the elder palatine urged gently, as though inviting a lamb to a roadside fence.

Towards the gradient’s static tether, my gaze drifted.

Then knifed back to the palatines, their presence as solid as ice down the forehead. I stumbled to rise against the renewed batterings of my subcutaneous prisoner, its vector secured and desperation roused by the guide of my navigation and the highly proximal stimulus of the men.

The palatine’s smiled died, as though he had just watched a puppy disintegrate into a mound of dung.

Well, I already knew the guy didn’t like me. I just had to wonder if I was really that obvious. I let my irritation for his switch fade as I hopped to join him in the dirt.

The building before us was the town’s internment office, to assess the sin of a transgressor before their referral to a penitentiary. Were it not for the sign announcing so out front, it would’ve vanished into humble irrelevance alongside the other bland townhouses, repurposed to printmaking studios and sect-order halls that neighboured it on the block.

From every square of parched grass outside these establishments there rose the emaciated arm of a palm tree. I supposed we might be in Yeshimar, a broadly insignificant town whose existence I knew because it had twice the population of Vamu, hence twice the relevance, and would show up more often on regional maps.

Not that it mattered if it was or was not Yeshimar, but the assumption stuck because it pinned me to a location. I was some miles north, then slightly east of Vamu, several backroads removed from the throughway to Amsherrat. South would be farmland, further north would be desert, and a ways west would be the river Katani. But then occurred the velocity required to travel overnight from Vamu to Yeshimar, minus some hours by camel. I concluded my suppositions very wrong. It could still be a nowhere town as equally forgotten by outsiders as Vamu.

The palatines' backs escorted me on. As I crossed the threshold of the office’s sign, with its quaint emblem of a half-submerged heart, then climbed its short run of porch-steps to a homely door with six little windows, I abruptly wondered if what I was doing wasn’t incredibly stupid.

An internment office was where I was figuring to wind up at the start of all this. With complications of goety factored, I could no longer answer why I hadn’t run to the Church.

Then I considered that maybe I had not made my situation actually clear, but the palatines’ stride to reception choked my nascent objections and I merely knelt to deposit my shoes.

Sorry, should I explain what makes jailing me pointless? I’d break out and reoffend. Penitentiary amounted to a purgatorial pitstop until I brutalised the system enough to force myself out of the bureaucratic shuffle and secure a genuine diagnosis, by which, when I divulged compulsions to snap open my blockmate’s ribcage and guzzle his heart like a goose’s liver, this did not mean I wanted to talk, but that I needed to be shot, and my corpse stuffed with monkshood.

All the same...

The musty ochre carpet scratched my feet as I wandered back to the palatines, just in time to watch one of them depart outside with a grunt of “...the other one...”. Across the desk, the receptionist woman chattered to the other her 'helloes' and 'who’s-thises', with pen and paper swept quick to her hands.

The flag hung on the wall, over a mural of Kittja and Kitthaya with their children drawing water from the Katani. A bold serif title named the scene: YESHIMAR.

It did discomfort me.

I suppose, when you’re too backwater to hold any mythos but the national...

Pen thunked to paper in pronouncement, full stop. The receptionist’s voice followed. “Hello there, my name is Savani.”

“Uh, uh—ah, t-th-thank—” what? Come on. “I, I, I’m.”

She dipped her head with her neat posture swivelled to regard me.

It had actually been over six years since I last told anyone my name.

“...It’s Mephi, tel-Sharvara.”

The nib of her pen bounced up with her chin.

“My dad—”

“Sharvara?” she asked.

“—dad was, the uh, finance minister for this region... a while back. I don’t know if you’d... you’d have known him.” She looked rather too young to be his contemporary, with her sharp pixie chin and dangling tigerseye earrings. Still, if she knew the name, maybe he’d come up in passing.

This receptionist woman, Savani, looked to the elder palatine for help. He conceded a mirthless grimace and quirked his head as if to tell, yes, this was the wretch he’d put on her porchstep.

She adjusted her glasses and blinked to fix her smile. “He sounds very impressive—”

“Mm. Yeah, he... s-sorry, I just, I just interrupted... you.”

She shook her head. “That’s alright.”

“I can do penitence for that,” I laughed. The palatine shifted his footing.

“That is far too strict, you don’t think?” she laughed back, in bland veneer.

This woman was inflexible. Amicability and compassion founded her regime in coaxing intimate confessions of rationale for sin, alongside honest revelations of its extent, the success of which had frozen her with a skillset that could as much access me as could a badger fit in a midge-hole.

My gaze drifted to the mural, then to the floor. Who had installed this carpet?

“It is hard for everyone to stay always on the good path,” she began, “but it is in facing out transgressions that we may—”

“Yeah...” I sighed such a vile wind.

“Ah, sorry?” she leaned in.

“Sorry. Thanks, I...”

“Savani, this one cannot hear you,” advised the palatine.

As though yanked up by the hair with a blade set to my neck, I glared at him without thinking. Hunger flares pricked my shoulders, bile seethed on my breath. If I could slaughter the man, smother the woman...

“You do not seem comfortable, Sharvara,” the receptionist observed, backing off with just enough caution to show the palatine’s warning had worked.

“I, uh, o-occupational hazards, should—should I maybe go now?” the fear struck me inexplicably. “—N-n-n-no, I, take that back, um.” But as my vision flicked from the wall to the mural to the desk’s paperweight trinkets, those harmless enough things that I bit my thumb to distract from the temptation they offered, I found myself abruptly uncomprehending of how I had come to be in this room.

“See this confusion,” the palatine muttered to Savani, “this is thicker witching than any I have seen.”

“I am seeing. I scarcely...” she removed her glasses momentarily to rub her eye. “...are you certain, this is the young man they are seeking out of Vamu?”

“We all pray that your talents may measure the breadth of that...” the palatine grumbled into his fist.

“T-that farmer m-man said you could help me,” I gasped as if breaking water, remembering. The shudder as I gripped my sleeves choked me, tight as the screamers’ fingers grappling around my neck. “Please! I need to!”

Die! I need you to kill me!

kill me kill me kill me kill me kill me kILL ME KILL ME KILL ME KILL ME KILL ME KILL ME MEPHI YOU TURGID FLEA SKITTERING THROUGH TRASH YOU WATERY DRIPPING OF SHIT FROM A CHIMPANZEE’S HAEMORRHOID DO THE RIGHT THING AND DIE NOW! You cause so much hurt and so much pain and your inaction only exacerbates it. To fix this you must stop existing. As is your moral imperative! But the palatine’s sabre, it was still in its scabbard...

Savani’s hand paused over her chest, her eyes wide as if smacked. Wow see, case in point. There’s another casualty of you being a maladjusted dunce who effuses needless shit. Why on earth had I been so dramatic.

A timepiece ticked on the wall opposite the mural. Noon had passed.

Savani swished her knees back to her desk. “We are confused what has happened, so we must ask from you several things,” she twisted her pen to tap the paper once, “to know who you are, and once we know this, of the reasons why you are here.”

“No, well, I mean,” I paced back from the palatine, stumbled, spread my hands in a shrug. “I’m here b-b-b-because I guess, I want to be here? This uh, this uh... circumstances, your bladesman maybe should know what they are, that I am, ahm, not alive, currently, so, s-s-so... get out the pitchforks! I think, soonish, kinda...”

Savani’s pen stood grimly erect. The palatine’s palm sunk to rest again near his sabre.

“...or, or, I don’t mean to... break protocol, am I, I-I-I-I ran in occult circles, in Amsherrat, but uh, if that’s supposing a situation that garners t-to be, to be inquisited, that’s all... I was just always into that kind of thing. There was—I think there’s been made an abominable mess in this whole incident, and it should be... twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, maybe about there, that kind of vicinity, it’s just, it’s just—wow! How come I attracted... uh, do you need my date of birth?”

As it had been with the farmer, the whiplash of my lucid question rattled them the most. Chest to tabletop, Savani flipped pages to scrawl notes, pen scritching.

I traced my thumb down my forearm, then glimpsing the palatine in my periphery, fired a thought at the emptiness between me and the ceililng.

“Do you think the way Czjeir selects his prophets could be coincidental?”

“What do you imply of Czjeir?” the palatine challenged.

“I’m... I-I, just say, things, sorry.” A shrew had more nerve. “Maybe he’s mad that Kitthaya has orphans...” I knit my fingers into a mock church, grinning, “or enjoys revenge on an apostate.”

What an arrogant bladder of piss I was being towards an anointed soldier. Now I remembered why I’d ever banned myself from humans. I liked spewing pugnacious sludge.

The palatine’s face hardened as flat as a stone, and though yet tensed to draw his blade, he did not move further. Alongside his inaction, the electric fuzz in my synapse burned back into cold, reasoned, detached sobriety, as though my soul was molten steel dipped blandly in water.

Solve this equation, Mephi. Already the palatine’s expression sterilized itself into a datum, what does that imply, what has he perceived, what he knew, what he didn’t...

A small glass orb, streaked with midnight blue, laid on Savani’s desk. Czjeir’s holiest holies something anything needed to get in my stomach right now and if I could just swallow it down...

“You don’t have any imperative to uh, help me, now, do you,” I said, twisting my cuff.

The palatine clenched his sabre’s hilt, thumb upon its pommel, moreso for reassurance than action.

Savani raised her hand and said, “you cannot speak well—I do not think you can talk.” She looked to the palatine, “what we shall do,” then to me, “is, we shall speak with the Abbot...”

My fingers paused.

But what could a nowhere-town abbot do? Once he exhausted his piddling thaumaturgy, which I already figured weaker than my kabbalah, he’d pawn my case back to the penitentiary system...

“...to make transport, to Amsherrat, that you may appeal the Pontifex.”

I jolted up.

—My god, thank you.