Requiem for the Sun

TILE FOUNDRY, YARIM PAAR, PROVINCE OF YARIM Just as rivers flowed inevitably to the sea, in Yarim Paar all knowledge, public and hidden, all secrets, made their way, sooner or later, to the ear of Esten. And Slith knew it. Whether the secret was uncovered in the bright, unyielding sun of Yarim Paar that baked the red-brown clay of the crumbling northern city to steaming in summer, or in the dark, cool alleyways of the Market of Thieves, the opulently decadent bazaar in which trade, both exotic and sinister, flourished at all hours of the night and day, Esten would eventually hear of it. It was as unavoidable as death. And since death could come from standing in the way of such information, it was usually better to be the bearer of the secret to Esten than the one who might be perceived as trying to hide it from her. Though not always. Slith glanced up nervously. The journeyman who was overseeing his work and that of the other apprentices was stretching out in the shadows of the large, open kilns, seeking relief from the blasting heat, paying the boys no mind. Bonnard was a corpulent man, a skilled ceramicist whose touch with tile nippers and mosaic tesserae was unrivaled, but he was not much of an overseer. Slith exhaled, and cautiously reached into the greenware jar on the lower shelf again. What he had found was still there where he had seen it yesterday, wedged at an angle in the unfired clay at the bottom of the urn. Another backward glance reassured him that Bonnard's attention was otherwise engaged. With a smooth movement, in the attempt to avoid the notice of the other lads stoking the dung fires and stirring the slip, Slith plucked the clay container from the shelf and tucked it quickly under his arm, then made his way out the back door of the tile foundry to the privies beyond. Slith had long been accustomed to the stench of waste that stepped him each time he drew the rotten burlap curtain open; he ducked inside and pulled it closed carefully. Then, with moist hands that trembled slightly, he reached gingerly into the open mouth of the vessel again. With a firm tug he pulled out its contents and held it up to the light of the rising moon that leaked in through the gaps in the privy curtain. A blue-black gleam stung his eyes in the dark. With great care Slith turned the circular disk, thin as a butterfly's wing, to the side, catching the moonlight that ran in ripples off its pristinely balanced rim. The outer edge was razor sharpSlith had shaved several layers of skin from the back of his hand the previous day when he reached, entirely by accident, into the greenware jar while moving the older urns waiting to be fired from the dusty storage room to the kiln area. He would probably have limited his curiosity to the curse he had muttered under his breath and assumed that the odd metal disk was an unfamiliar scraping tool of some sort, except for the dark, tacky shadow that marred its surface. Slith's hand shook as he turned the disk over. It was still there. The shadow of blood, long dried. A memory flooded Slith's mind. Three years before, he and the other first-year apprentices had been jostled awake in the dead of night by bells ringing frantically deep within the foundry. He and his fellow novices in the art of tile-making had crept out to see what the emergency was, only to be shoved roughly aside by the journeymen hurrying to respond to the alarm. What they all had found when they came into the kiln areas had kept him awake every night for months afterward. The huge vats of boiling slip had been upended from their fires, spilling a sea of hot, molten earth in lumpy waves throughout the vast foundry. Three of the apprentices who had been working the late shift tending the slip and kiln fires had vanished, though one was later located, under a hill of cooling slip, drowned in the wet cHaydon, Elizabeth is the author of 'Requiem for the Sun', published 2002 under ISBN 9780312878849 and ISBN 0312878842.