Ilixander Quicktongue and the Shrine of the Sphinx

⛩️⛩️ DjinnDay 🏮🧞‍♀️ 31 Decemboriel 2024 🌲❄️ New Cold Moon 🥶🌑 11 Nivôse CCXXXIII ❄️🌨️ Earth Snake · Fire Rat · Wood Dragon 🏞️⚕️🎆🐁🍁🐉 Day 10,426 ⛩️⛩️

I

Ilixander woke to the scuffing of furniture over rough unfinished cobblestone, a sound which always made him want to vomit lehr. he almost struck his head on the scroll of a colomn he'd been sleeping on, but he stopped himself just short. he'd like to run out of the building for a moment until the rearranging was done, but with only six elders and two juveniles huffing and gasping over the props that would take a long time, and be has no desire to return to the crowded, slush covered streets. so instead he nimbly climbed down the ornate capitol of the column, slid down the 12 feet or so of the body and landed delicately on the soles of his well stuffed boots. his landing would have been perfect but for a particularly rough thud which rang out while still in the air, which resonated through his whole body and made him land just slightly sideways.

"Märduuk's breath" he whined with a puff of visible breath like a boiling kettle.

"you alright, Ilix?" one of the juviniles took the opportunity to drop their end of a very dusty bench and look over. Taj, xe thought their name was.

Ilix shuddered, pulled off his boot, and turned out a small pile of sharply fragmented glass. the whole work team gathered around, the elders tut tutting. Ilix had broken off his sixth toe.

"well, you'll be needing hot rocks and sandstone. no don't get up, we'll bring it to you over. last thing you want is to catch a snag on the fracture's edge and turn your whole leg. by the forest prophets Ilix, why do you have to sleep up there in the rafters, there's room in the grotto or the closet.

Ilix didn't bother replying. he was looking over his foot grim fascination. between his face and dancing firelight in the brazier, five healthy toes stretched and flexed stiffly, as if on pins and needles, as if shocked and nervous at the absence of their countryman. on the outside edge of his right foot, drizzling translucent, almost clear except for the slightest speckling of blue, the sharp edged shattered stub of his broken glass toe.

"sit down, sit down, don't poke at it, don't prod, stop the bleeding, don't just stand there, get out of my way I'll do it."

Moxipardeaux was already hustling back from the otter skin medicine bag feyr had left in the corner grotto, the much more sensible place for sleeping where fey had been holed up since early evening of the prior day until waking for feyr pre-dawn ablutions. fey lay a cornhusk mat twice folded on the cobblestone beside Ilix and kneeled down with no small ceremony and growning though fey hushed Ilix's own exaltations of pain with an angry glance.

"city ain't any place for fancy jumps and colomn climbing monkey business. Aja, attend to our guest, they'll be wanting their candle." only now did Ilix notice the cause of the particularly awful noise which had distracted xomthem and spoiled xir landing: their guest, a human perhaps six or six and a half times taller than Ilix had swung the half unhinged, low-dragging door across the step and now stood awkwardly in the doorway, not sure whether to give the glassmen privacy or exhibit concern for an injury so proximate to their arrival. Aja, the other juvinile glassling, broke away from the scene and went to human with an obsequious bow, grunting and belching the slow nasal tongue which the big people usually employed, so unlike the quick crisp languages which both the glassfolk of the city and of the marshes where Ilix's people lived.

"stop that bleeding, stop that bleeding. you want to drain out or what?" before anyone else could move Moxi hurried them out of the way, bringing gauze and holy salt and twine and soft clay from faer bag and dressing the wound feyrself.

"bleet-ting?" Ilix repeated, the obviously foreign word like marsh scum on his tongue.

"bleeding. blood. it's what the big ones say when stuff goes dripping out of ya."

"you mean axlir? lifeglass?" xe asked, first in the city register, then xis home dialect. "why do you use a human word?"

"because I been training with human doctors 12 days in 9 for the last two months and that's the word I've been using all that time. axlir, yes, or axlír, rising tone, when you let it go gushing out all like this. put your foot up, higher, above your stomach, above your head if you can do that without falling over, did your village's doctor teach ya nothing? here, suck on this--don't swallow it, not all at once anyway, it will help form new bonds. you'll be fine. how old are ya? 25? 35? you youngans always mend up faster than two shakes of a war-priest's rattle. oh to be seven decades younger, you don't know how good you have it."

"36," Ilix said, but Moxi wasn't listening, having begun half speaking, half humming an old mountain tribe yarn about the perils of cliffs and reckless youths, juvinile love affairs and glass eating blue tigers.

🧿

II

by the time Moxi had bandaged Ilix up with fresh twine and charms and swept up the circle of holy salt back into feyr bag and got Ilix settled with xis back on a table and xis foot two chest-widths above xis head and torn open the inside of xis shoe and resewed it with extra stuffing and a slight remodeling to accommodate the thick bandages, the meeting had already begun. a trickle of humans came into the temple to pay their respects, perform ablutions and purchase small parchment charms tied with silk cords for the birth of this one's granddaughter or for the wedding of that one's younger brother, but there were never more than four humans at a time. the meeting consisted almost entirely of glassmen, blue-clear and white-green, yellow and pink of dusky grey with veins of obsidian, even two that Ilix could have sworn were composed entirely of bronze. "coin-eaters," Moxi explained when fey saw Ilix staring, a little sadly but not unkindly, and before xe looked away embarrassed xe noticed one of the opaque coppery glassfolk, a rotund figure with sharp feminine features, was chewing on someone metallic she kept shifting from one side of her jaw to the other. by the time the chit chatting and rearranging of furniture had conglomerated into a single body the double moonlets Tiffan and Ziphus were rising in the eastern window, a pair of green-white and grey-green crescents barely two days and a day past new respectively and barely a quarter the size of the nearby sun's disk each, and the human presence had dwindled to one young child asking for a jar of holy water for his prize-winning hen who had woken up with a cold and a widow of a least eighty dressed all in black praying the mermaid's rosery under an icon in the largest grotto. besides the glassmen, whom numberd about three dozen, the meeting's delegates consisted of three other species: a pixie of very noble face and features who stood as tall as Ilix's thigh, eight gold and green parrots , one of whom stayed beside the pixie and wore a diminutive harness and saddle, and a pair of silvery white foxes, one which had two tails and the other with three, who huddled together their matching fur coats blending indistinguishably into each other as far as possible from the brazie. one always kept their gaze fixed on the flames and one always looked away at whomever was speaking presently, and though they rotated these duties often and irregularly, they always did so synchronously so that not even for a moment did they stare at the same thing.

"friends, comrades, kith and kin, I thank you for all coming today, and I thank the priests of this the temple of our lady of the rehabilitating grottos for making possible this important meeting." it was Moxi's cousin who spoke, a grey-blue glassman of altogether ambiguous gender. "whether you've crossed a single hazardous city street or flown from three islands over," here a respectful nodd to a parrot twice Ilix's height with green feathers so dark they looked almost black "your presence is valued and thanked for and mutually appreciated."

Ilix didn't pay much attention to the opening remarks. the pain in xis foot, initially dampened by shock and Moxi's numbing hexes, now throbed in exploratory tendons which raced back and forth from the cracked surface of xis foot to every other surface of xis body, though especially xis heart, hands, brain, and other foot. xe couldn't stop ximself from rolling the knuckle, or what remained of it, from the severed toe, which being one of the outermost pair of digits was semi-opposable and used to wife sweeps of motion even through xis articulated, mitten -like boots--or it had been capable, prior to the knuckle being dislocated during the fall and the boots reengineered on the spot to insulate the foot at the cost of dexterity. still, xe had a job to do and we had come a long way to do it, and even though xe knew Moxi would remember everything and repeat all of it at xim if xe seemed at all confused about the contents of what was said later, xe wanted to do the job well. so despite the pain and shock Ilix concentrated and took notes on the small lilipad paper journal Aja had fetched from xis pack and did what xe could to piece together the political situation of group as things stood in the city.

..

the scribes down at Basil's market are cutting their rates again, and they're passing almost all the costs onto us.

the constables at the plaza of the fountains are putting a new curfew in place, or starting to enforce an old one they won't clarify which. they shattered two elders a week ago for being out late, they were practically hermits as far as the big folk interactions go, didn't know how to read their signs or know what they were saying, just trying to cross the plaza from one ghetto to another.

another elder was chased down an alley for not taking off his cap when a count went by, he had to climb the wall to get away and someone threw a brick and shattered his leg.

two juviniles, one of them a cousin of Taj, were hulled before a magistrate and accused of stealing from someone's window garden. they were each accused of taking a tomato. the magistrate had their right arms broken off with a sledge hammer, and when he found out one was left handed, he had that arm shattered as well. that one is being cared for at another temple, the healers there aren't sure he'll last through the winter.

there were a few spots of bright news.

the chessboard makers guild and the association of game piece carvers were down on under the shadow of the Gold Sun Bridge had announced the successful conclusion of negotiations for a merger. going forward, the more liberal by-laws of piece carvers which provided for multi species membership would govern the workshops of both organizations, providing much needed employment and protection for glassfolk in those neighborhoods and perhaps, soon, the rest of the city if the other stonecutter shops and factories followed suit and joined the new guild.

also in positive news, there were good signs for the messege carrier's union, which was organizing for a strike throughout the upper neighborhoods of the city and through all inter-neighborhood fares. among there demands already was an end to gang system of work allotment and tolls for foot traffic and ostritch-rider traffic on all the lesser bridges, and to this they had also added a repeal of all species-specific curfews following the shattering of the elders as the Jade Fountains Plaza.

yet even these bright spots were bitter reminders of the oppression, exploitation, apartheid and cruelty visited upon the glassfolk and many of the other species inhabiting the City of Orr. where there were advances they were always constituted by contested, ambiguous progress, and where there were setbacks or barriers, they seemed as heavy and h

ard as the basalt which formed the city's walls and towers.