The Testimony of Kalitar Vesh

Us tippers at the garbage dump get our share of scavengers – seagulls, rats, and roaches who swarm over the trash like it’s a buffet table laid with pillows of pavlova. They’re not picky. We tippers are, because even we venture into the pit on occasion, to salvage what remains salvageable, clean it, and donate it for charity. Even you, if you have ever bought from a charity shop, have doubtless touched something that’s been in the pit.

Our most interesting scavenger is the Tax Collector. We’ll get to him in a minute. All us tippers are connected by the same wastebin we plumb; so let us first glorify that.

It’s Amsherrat’s landfill. It’s massive. The smell is also horrific. You could fit a small town inside it, and the amassed weight of all the garbage likely could crush that small town. I’m Kalitar Vesh, a tipper there, and every day I go into that place to dump off new mounds of garbage. It’s an unglamorous job, but we tippers get anointed at first-level for doing it. I was never sure if that amounted to more than a justification for higher pay, and stricter regulations, but at least God thinks we’re alright.

The right way to enter the pit is with a camphor paste rubbed under your nose. You don’t want to be able to smell. For most of us, our nostrils are shot, and odours that topple the greenhorns tickle us as the breeze of a fart. It has robbed our Joys in many aspects – no more basking in the sweetness of flowers, or savouring the tastes of rich roasts, but again, we are compensated with first-anointing. The sacrifice is made very clear once you enter this job.

Our fellowship here is seagulls, rats, roaches, us, and yes, the Tax Collector. He often skitters around the rim of the tip and pulls from it unsalvagable, but broadly clean items, which could be washed pure in the Katani; old clothes, rusted machine parts, broken glass. He eats them very gingerly and with embarrassment. When we pretend he’s not there, he seems happier. Though we usually leave him, and have accepted his shadowy presence as much as that of the seagulls above, curiosity does pique around legends like him, and here and there we’ve had conversation.

“It’s just to tide me to tomorrow. There’s—I know who I’m getting, but I already ate a few days ago, so... the hunger’s, really, not that bad yet.”

It’s bad enough that he’s eating from the tip.

I never understood that. If he’s hungry, shouldn’t he eat? But he just waits.

He waits long and he waits brutally. I wouldn’t wait that long if it meant eating from the tip. I don’t think he enjoys either; the waiting or the munching from the tip. But he has a strange sense of timing, that things should align ‘just right’, even if seizing that ‘rightness’ pains him in the meantime. I’ve heard he’s really smart. Maybe he’s just a perfectionist. It’s all questions better asked to my brother. He’s a doctor of psychology who works at Nine Columbines—yet between us, he says my work is more blessed.

“I’ve realised, even the Tax Collector, who was hand-picked by God—of souls, yes, but he’s a tipper. He cleans the cities of sinners and puts them in a pit. That was the first job Czjeir selected as pivotal.” That’s what he said. I never liked the thought as much as he did.

“Wonder if there’s any more jobs Czjeir’s got to give to some people,” I replied.

“Perhaps!” he chirped, like it were brilliant. “And if Czjeir will exalt tippers, I’m sure it’s not ones that people expect! Praise Czjeir! Kali, you’ve excited me for the wonders even of the Long Night!”

My brother likes the Tax Collector, though he’s only heard about him in stories. He likes everything mystical and miraculous. But he likes the Tax Collector most because he wasn’t already anointed as anything holy. It’s because he was average, maybe even unholy. He always likes it when I yaw my stories of the Tax Collector. But here’s the story he didn’t like.

On that day I was shovelling new garbage into the tip. The cloudless sky above was pallid blue and the seagulls fought up a fuss. Some rotting tidbit in the middle of the landfill excited them, and pointed my attention that way. Past all their squabbling, behind mounds of filth, in the eye of what we call ‘the cess’, which is the divot all the liquid stuff runs to, was a corpselike flash of white, and the distinctive shape of a human hand.

“Shien’s Night—someone’s dumped a body,” I exclaimed.

Us tippers panicked at that. I snatched up a spyglass. Through it, I saw the motionless white body of a person, left to rot in the cess.

We had protocol for this situation, though this was the first time it happened to me. We didn’t know whether there was still a soul attached to that body, if it got severed, or if there’s a ghoul gestating in the sludge that the assailant thought defused or didn’t think of at all. We laid boards over the stable rubbish and trekked down to the body, with shovels and a cloth gurney. With all hope, we’d retrieve the corpse in a solid enough condition where someone could identify it.

We needed not worry about meeting a zombie or John Doe. With his sallow face and matted hair, it was the Tax Collector.

He shuddered upon the waste as if poisoned. Unmoving, he stared at the sky with wide eyes that saw nothing. Even as we lifted him onto the gurney, he remained frozen like quivering brass.

We had never seen the Tax Collector so deep in the pit before, among the sludge of putrefied food and cess filth. It flushed off of his form when we took him. To us he appeared austere, not in any rich cloak, but a simple white shirt that melded from flesh to fabric; there was no neckline. His mouth shuddered open and shut as if whispering, but it may have been his teeth chattering.

At the worker’s station at the root of the landfill, we laid him down upon the floor. His paralysis had crossed into a concern; he would not move to depart, and we needed the station for our own respite and supper. For him to lay shivering in the corner, with a vile stink, and outwardly pale but not cleaned with water, both seemed uncharitable and uncleanly.

“I’ll wash him up,” I offered.

The incident wouldn’t need a Bishop’s attention, but a part of me wished that it did. To pawn it all off to someone more knowledgable. Looking at the Tax Collector, curled in my arms, I saw not the anointed wizard I understood him as, but a young boy even younger than the young man that he looked. It was then I started to wonder about the identity of the Tax Collector, beyond the legendary mythos of Czjeir’s perfect reaper.

We descended the landfill’s outlying valley to the Katani river. On the riverbank in the lee of the mountains, mildly distanced from the ports of the city, no boat traffic interrupted us, as I took a bucket and a rag to wash him.

The Katani’s water is purified. It doesn’t even keep soap. Any filth that contacts it melts, without need for chemical supplement—we tippers wash our grubby clothes and bodies in the Katani after a shift every day. I started on the Tax Collector’s goatlike legs, all covered in fur.

It was filthy. With each press of the rag, black water poured out.

For several minutes, there was a peace to the work. I scrubbed his ankles and shins, when he flinched and jerked out of my hands with an affronted look that was not quite a glare.

“S-s-stop that,” he insisted.

I wrung out the rag in the river and looked at him sternly. “You’re not clean.”

“Okay? Yeah? Yeah I’m not—I don’t need it,” he said.

“Oh, you do. Look at what has come out already; and you were in the cess. You were shivering.”

He looked away and crossed his arms over his chest, hugging each shoulder.

I scrubbed down his arm. More black water poured out. “Were you eating from the cess?”

“Yeah, mm,” he choked. “It’s real. I’m dead, it’s real.”

I shook my head, appalled. To even imagine anything like a man—or exactly a man—could put anything from the cess into their mouth repelled me. A rusted machine part, I could comprehend. But the swill of the cess—there were swaddling linens and surgical blankets in that.

I vomited into the Katani.

“I really kind of wish I could do that,” he mumbled.

“Why?” I exclaimed. “Even the outskirts, are atrocious enough, but why go in the cess?”

“Well, there’s like, blood in there...” he cringed at his own words. “So—so, it’s attractive to the uh, Hunger... I know that it’s, awful, so I’ve tried to avoid it for, a while but... I’m hungry,” he finished dumbly. There was more he could have said, but that summed up everything.

I shut my eyes. “This ‘hunger’ is terrible.”

“It’s so bad,” his voice quieted near to tears. With head bowed and hands crossed, it seemed he should be weeping, but no tears truly fell.

“Well, I’d happier see the valley burn than see any man eat again from the cess. Is it only blood you take? At home, we slaughter goats and spill the blood to the gutters, but we can give it to you.”

The gutters ran into the Katani, which scoured such waste into clean waters. Yet if he would eat from the cess, should he not have first drunk blood from the gutters? Why not then drink from the crystalline Katani itself? Plainly, that was the nicer meal.

More, as the Katani purged filth on wanted objects, what landed in the landfill were not simply soiled things, but broken, unwanted, soiled things. Arguments over the poor air and stench kept the Church from igniting the landfill, and it becoming a second black Dahjimet. Back during the Heresies, landfills were fiery—now, like the exiled apostates, they are simply placed far out of town. But I was honest. For men to eat waste out of tips came from the Heresies, and if the Heresies would return, then let Heretical solutions also return.

“Like, like, in a dish on your porchstep? H-human blood, and it’s not really...”

“No, around a table. We’d make a fine tabbouleh and eat it with the meat.”

“...it’s not really about the blood, it’s about the soul that’s inside it. S-so unless you’re willing to sacrifice—I’m not even going to joke about it...”

“I certainly have one soul to sacrifice, friend! I give it to any who enters my door; I boil them the richest tea-leaves from my cupboard and cut the finest meats from my larder; if they are naked, I clothe them, and if they are dirty, I bathe their feet. Not from being any great servant of Czjeir’s; Heaven knows I’m not fourth-anointed, and not a scribe to read any scripture. It leaves my friends happier than before they met me, and that is lovely enough. So if that grace is what you eat, gladly, feast upon me.”

“Hold on, hold on,” he raised his hands. “Stop, stop, stop, really, don’t offer that.”

“I will offer it five thousand times, Tax Collector,” I said, “Or Mephi, I’ve heard that’s your name.”

“Oh my God,” he exclaimed. “Why do I keep meeting sinners or saints? Are none of you normal? No—don’t come near me!”

“If you need a human soul, that’s what I’ll give! I am Kalitar Vesh!”

With the rag in hand I dove to wash him, because if I would drag him into my kitchen for supper, he would not come in unclean, nor as an animal or a dressed-up myth; I wanted the man unembellished. By the foot I caught him and he wriggled beneath me, tossed, then his body morphed into a watery mass that bucked me off and slipped away. Like a snake, he winded into the water, and upon touching the Katani, his body became a finned reptilian thing and he disappeared upstream in a blink.

A storm of filth remained where he had entered the river, which dissolved by the seconds into pure water. Soon only my memory attested to the encounter. But I knew well what I saw.

“He’s alive now, but he isn’t well,” I told the tippers, once I returned to our rest station that afternoon.

“Yes, it was the Tax Collector—though I’m sick of that name,” I told my brother, once I returned to our house that night.

Soon by habit I placed a bowl of sheep’s blood, or cow’s blood, or goat’s blood, whatever we had eaten for dinner, upon a table outside our house every night. To lure him, I mixed in a drop of my own blood, and within the week, on one parched morning, I woke to find the bowl emptied. Then it would be emptied every night, even when I added none of my blood. He’d found my treat.

“If you won’t take the blood, give it to the Tax Collector. He’s very hungry,” I told others on my block, and the custom spread across the neighbourhood. More bowls than ours came out empty.

He never knocked to invite himself in and we never sighted him on the street, though my brother peered agitatedly out our window every True Night—even atrociously plotted to hunt him outside through dusk’s curses. I did see him again at the tip. He skittered around the edge, always far across the landfill, but he never again entered the cess—or I never again saw him enter the cess, as every time he neared it, I glared at him, and he scurried away as if struck by a cudgel.

I heard that other tippers saw him bundle up waste and take it to the Katani, to clean it before he would eat. Others saw him indeed on the bank of the Katani, staring at the river with his palm upon his cheek. But I never caught him myself and nobody else would interrupt him.

Frankly, I think more people ought to interrupt him. It shouldn’t take a dip in the cess to bring anyone to jump into the Katani. Isn’t it a simple thing that we teach even clean children to bathe every day? And who didn’t teach him? Blessed we are to live in a land with good food, good friends, and good water, and yet this one is crazed that none of it can be found; he, uninstructed, grows grubby, alone, and famished. Or he puts on his cloak and becomes the Tax Collector.

Lately it’s been that nobody’s seen him. Not at the tip, and not at my porch. I still lay a bowl out every night, though for weeks, I wake to find it untouched. One by one, like stars blipping dark, others have stopped placing theirs. But I continue, for it’s no strenuous thing to pour it out on the morn, and I’m sure he has just left Amsherrat.

If he returns, when he returns, no matter how awful his hunger, I will force him to know that he will never, ever, need to return to that filthy valley for love.