TokyoPewPew

Smoke and Steel

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𝕿he good colonel, despite a disposition mostly hale, and all manner of courtly airs, had most evidently met some difficulty on the long walk from his summons; the dung-strewn fields, and, thereafter, the motte (beneath its murder holes, betwixt its chokepoints, up, up the merciless road which snaked the hillside to its apex). He wore his suffering all about him: red of complexion and clammy of skin was he, throttled at the neck by a wrinkled ascot, at the waist by belly-cinching belt. Sword and baldric troubled his one shoulder, while the other itched and fretted beneath a warm-colored halfcape. Perhaps most useless of all, however, were his gauntlets, of fine, worn kidskin stitched; and tucked at his waistbelt for ease of reach. As if he should have sudden need on that festering midsummer's day to warm his hands. As if among thirteen thousand allies he should so soon find a knave to quarrel with, and grievances to bear against him, and such ravenous indignation that he should start sending Inburians to the very same hells as he'd sent four Elga during the battle. He pinched the crown of his hat where he always pinched it, three even, greasy creases worn in where thumb and forefingers had crimped the aged felt. This he plucked from sweaty brow and tossed upon the table, baring his damp scalp and stuck locks in deference to the higher ranks; while also claiming, by its placement, one of the empty chairs ere he'd stridden over to it. Handsome and stout for his advanced years, with a sturdy gait, and a lordly demeanor despite his lowborn standing and no matter the weather; but whether under shaded brim or candles' glimmer, his eyes always shifted. At present they leered suspectly from general he did not trust, to financier he did not respect; and back again to the general; from the rows of gormless faces which were his fellow good-colonels, to the deafening

absences resounding from the gaps, the other empty chairs. Particularly the chair at table's head, which it begrudged him deeply to see so, as that particular absence meant he had worn his Sunday finest through the stink and the shit and the heat all for naught. Just as well, perhaps, that Szaalm had brought his gauntlets, then. Evidently the rest had already started up with their squabbling, and expected his own partaking in good order. They spoke courteously enough of each other while describing their dilemma, but the syllables thus uttered were only a mask to the slithering thoughts beneath; their inflections told the true story, their intonations, their emphases.

"Godsgrace! How should I know?" said Szaalm with an insincere modesty as he threw himself into the creaks and protests of the chair, and purchased his feet upon one of the table legs that he might sprawl his own, and rear back his seat onto its hindlegs in such a rakish way—getting himself most settled and comfortable, or near enough as he could manage in the smothering heat—"mayhap abandon any thoughts of Inbur altogether?" By careful inflection and cadence had he fashioned this suggestion like a jape, and for his efforts garnered a good few chuckles from the table. But for as preposterous as this suggestion was—and it was, to the rest, quite preposterous—warring with his jovial tones were his countenance, and, again, embedded within it like gaping wounds, his eyes—gravely earnest all, and studying the others for their objections.

@

@Dyelli Beybi

Book Quotes

In private moments I take up the volume and the rough, thorny binding hums in my hand like a beehive. As I turn the pages coniferous sap sticks to my fingers. In the rustle of its paper I hear the nocturnal stirring of owls. Letters become iridescent beetles that uncase their wings with a click and whir into the air. This book is a wild tangle of words, a shadowy ravine through which unseen beasts prowl, rustling the pages as they pass.

— Thomas Wharton, "The Paper-Thin Garden"

Book Quotes

Her soul brightened with the nostalgia of her lost dreams. She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst, and only then did she discover how much she missed the whiff of oregano on the porch and the smell of the roses at dusk, and even the bestial nature of the parvenus. Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.

— Gabriel García Márquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude

Book Quotes

When they got up in the morning, Jurgis was sent out to buy a paper; one of the pleasures of committing a crime was the reading about it afterward. “I had a pal that always did it,” Duane remarked, laughing—“until one day he read that he had left three thousand dollars in a lower inside pocket of his party’s vest!”

There was a half-column account of the robbery—it was evident that a gang was operating in the neighborhood, said the paper, for it was the third within a week, and the police were apparently powerless. The victim was an insurance agent, and he had lost a hundred and ten dollars that did not belong to him. He had chanced to have his name marked on his shirt, otherwise he would not have been identified yet. His assailant had hit him too hard, and he was suffering from concussion of the brain; and also he had been half-frozen when found, and would lose three fingers on his right hand. The enterprising newspaper reporter had taken all this information to his family, and told how they had received it.

Since it was Jurgis’s first experience, these details naturally caused him some worriment; but the other laughed coolly—it was the way of the game, and there was no helping it. Before long Jurgis would think no more of it than they did in the yards of knocking out a bullock. “It’s a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow, every time,” he observed.

“Still,” said Jurgis, reflectively, “he never did us any harm.”

“He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could, you can be sure of that,” said his friend.

— Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Book Quotes

Abelman’s Dry Goods
Kansas City, Missouri
U. S. A.

Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:

We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.

“Why? Why?” you are, in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.

The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)

We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, may you feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.

Yours in anger,
Gus Levy, Pres.

— John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

Book Quotes

I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.

I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.

Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.

So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.

Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with nought but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.

— Alan Moore, Voice of the Fire, "Angel Language, AD 1618"

Book Quotes

_ Life is an ever-rolling wheel And every day is the right one. He who recites poems at his death Adds frost to snow. Mumon Gensen _ Empty-handed I entered the world Barefoot I leave it My coming, my going— Two simple happenings That got entangled. Kozan Ichikyo _ My sword leans against the sky. With its polished blade I'll behead The Buddha and all his saints. Let the lightning strike where it will. Shumpo Soki _ No sign in the cicada's song that it will soon be gone Aki-no-Bo _ In all my six and fifty years No miracles occurred. Doyu

_ Give my dream back, raven! The moon you woke me to is misted over. Onitsura _ Raizan has died to pay for the mistake of being born: for this he blames no one, and bears no grudge. Raizan _ Time to go . . . they say the journey is a long one: change of robes. Roshu _ I borrow moonlight for this journey of a million miles. Saikaku _ Katsu! Katsu! Katsu! Katsu! Kogetsu Sogan

— from Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets at the Time of Death, compiled and translated by Yoel Hoffman

Book Quotes

“Oh! I wanted to ask you—”

He remembered that she probably did not know his name, and expected the question to be put to him now; but after a moment of hesitation she went on:

“Why was it that you told me to smile this evening in the concert-room there—you remember?”

“I thought we were being observed. A smile is the best of masks. Schomberg was at a table next but one to us, drinking with some Dutch clerks from the town. No doubt he was watching us—watching you, at least. That's why I asked you to smile.”

“Ah, that's why. It never came into my head!”

“And you did it very well, too—very readily, as if you had understood my intention.”

“Readily!” she repeated. “Oh, I was ready enough to smile then. That's the truth. It was the first time for years I may say that I felt disposed to smile. I've not had many chances to smile in my life, I can tell you; especially of late.”

“But you do it most charmingly—in a perfectly fascinating way.”

He paused. She stood still, waiting for more with the stillness of extreme delight, wishing to prolong the sensation.

“It astonished me,” he added. “It went as straight to my heart as though you had smiled for the purpose of dazzling me. I felt as if I had never seen a smile before in my life. I thought of it after I left you. It made me restless.”

“It did all that?” came her voice, unsteady, gentle, and incredulous.

“If you had not smiled as you did, perhaps I should not have come out here tonight,” he said, with his playful earnestness of tone. “It was your triumph.”

— Joseph Conrad, Victory

Smoke and Steel

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𝕹o doubt the vultures of Rodelkog had not feasted this well in decades—maybe centuries. Even a single skyward, squinting appraisal said as much. Lazily they circled overhead, yawing on lethargic breezes, their bellies seeming to slosh with every pitch, every shrugging tilt. In disposition they such resembled men, stumbling from taverns at indecent hours—gorged and bloated, sighing and groaning, their gluttony straining them at the seams. But a great many beasts and creatures called Rodelkog their home; the outskirts and, for a time, when the silence and the absence had stolen in, the streets soaked in shadows, and the very walls which cast them. Voles and finches scratched at the wheelbarrows, the granaries, the trampling and the burning having crushed the fallow, broken the seeds from their blackened hulls. With them came stoats patting along on noiseless paws, owls on moonlight-dusted wings. Ratsnakes and foxes and kites, all drawn to the city's smoky emptiness, drinking deeply of its stillness. The din of hammers soon enough had chased off these trespassers; the unshuttering of doors and windows, the protests of ungreased wheels. As the people returned to the still-smoldering streets of their city, so too did routine, and even a vestige of normalcy. They churned the fallow and buried again the spilt seeds; repaired the doors; cut new bricks for the walls, and stirred their blood into the mortar. There was grieving, of course. Cries and wails which went unheard by the beasts of the earth, returning to their burrows, their brooks, their copses. For while one world came unraveled and undone, another carried on, without very much interruption whatever. Hawk still ate fox ate owl ate stoat ate vole ate trampled wheat. And while the people wept, only the vultures seemed to hark.

Szaalm reckoned this to have been, at one or another time, a royal forest, or the erstwhile elf-lord's approximation of such; for how else could the trees, tall and aged and beautiful, have for so long eluded the lumberman's blades?—and how was the stream not infested with washer-women, with water wheels, with grazing herds and all their refuse?—......but no matter. It belonged to no lord now but to God, and that which belonged to God belonged to all who needed the shade from those estimable cypresses, a sup from clearer waters.

Young was the morn and still it gilt the groves from on high, still bejeweled every blade with dew; and stood the man before his congregation: the five hundred who had half a fortnight past returned from the walls of Rodelkog (and, perhaps, at least in memory and spirit, the hundred-and-fifty who had not). They who hadn't yet broken their fasts stood a slow-moving vigil, these queues ending at great copper cauldrons, where ladled into their bowls and cups by silent, oxen cooks were forcemeat puddings boiled in broth. Those who had not cut seats for themselves from the cypresses, or claimed for themselves various stones and logs scattered about the clearing, sat dutifully, attentively, in the damp grass. Half-dressed were the five hundred, some without their doublets, others without cravats or hats (though they doffed their hats who did wear them, for the name of God was already present and spoken-for at this assemblage). A mild breeze kicked up the regiment's flags¹, rippled against their oilcloth tents.

As it happens, Szaalm had with great strategy and choosiness selected this place for the laying of camp. Though the battle was already won, the elves already ousted like so many vermin—though Ariana's wine-and-milk standard already billowed high from the ramparts, and the city was, by all accounts, now safe for its new inhabitants to enter—by his estimation another war still ravaged this place; a war not won with shot and steel. 'Twas the war fought by the bilberries, pushing hard to burgeon forth their tender flowers, small and pale and bell-like. 'Twas the war of the foxgloves, their fiery-purple blossoms stealing sunlight at the clearing's every edge. 'Twas a war of sparrows pecking at seed and unripe berry, of warblers combing the grass for caterpillars. Of rustling leaf and babbling water. 'Twas the war, in all, of every heart and every spirit against fear, against remorse, against pity for the enemy, against dwelling on the dead; indeed, against all pause and falter. The war of all life's little beauties over the unsightly desolation of battle. Less than a mile away stood the shattered ruins of Rodelkog and yet no man would know it hadn't he climbed the battlements himself, hoisted the flags himself, himself cut down the scrambling defenders and pried the gates. Not in a place like this, alight with the song of birds and breeze and petals.

Held he in his right hand his breakfast half-supped, the colonel; in his left (closer, as it is, to the heart), his copy of The Inſurgente's Liturgie, which he held high aloft (for he had long ago memorized its contents, its worn pages serving better as symbol now than guide). And so, breakfast's prayer already issued, and the day's first song as well, the catechism continued thusly:

"I, flaming Life of the divine substance, flare up above the beauty of the plains," called he.

Answered those among the five hundred who knew the words, whether by heart or recitation: I shine in the water and blaze in the sun, the moon, and stars.

"And with an airy wind, as if by an invisible Life, I arouse all things to splendor."

And so I, the fiery power, lie hidden in these things.

"And they themselves burn by me, as the breath unceasingly moves the man, like windy flames in a fire."

I am life.

"Whole and entire, all that is living is rooted in me."

I am life.

"For reason is the root, and in it blossoms the resounding Word."

Amen.

Six hundred and fifty voices. He had known so well the admixture, the texture to their harmonies, before the battle had stolen away with a hundred from his choir. Then, of course, about one lad in three actually knew how to read; the other two murmuring along in mimicry of the first until they learned the words through rote alone. So many men he'd learned to recognize just through their birdsong. An eight-fingered, barrel-chested baker who crooned like a milking cow; a repented thief turned butcher, a twiggy little creature with a brittle, reedy tune. A drummer boy, just turned ten-and-seven, with a head of hair like goldcloth and a voice like an angel's clarion. Aye, just a fortnight ago he'd known all the brightest, boldest voices, could pick them out from the choir like eggs from a low-hanging nest. Now Szaalm strained and pored over the sound and still he wasn't so sure. The texture had changed. Six hundred were too many names to remember but he knew every face and which faces laid nose-down in the muck now, which faces would he not see again around camp?

But in the congregation's front rows, still those drummer boys sat in a circle, scratching the bellies of the hunting dogs. Two, three, five men still huddled all around each copy of the Liturgie, stumbling over the words as its more learnèd owner read along, guiding their eyes with the slide of his fingertip across the newsprint page. Life commenced and continued, even for soldiers, there when the thick was thickest.

He lowered the Liturgie, stowed it, for the time, in the crown of his hat, upturned upon a table cut from the saplings of this place. "Amen," he concluded fondly. And just as he raised again his hand to strike up the next song, a noise. Footsteps. At first Szaalm paid them no mind—he assumed it a local poacher skulking for roe deer, or a goodwife collecting potables from the stream—if, of course, it was not a man of the regiment, returning from making his morning water behind a tree—but—along with the footsteps, unmistakable was the sound of steel slipping over steel; the shifting and clinking of armor. He turned, and standing there was a soldier of the 1^st: a grenadier of Ariana's honorguard. The man had left his halberd elsewhere, but the tabard and the hanger and the morion left little to the imagination. And how he glowered. Not curiously, not (in truth) as a matter of any sentiment at all, but expectantly all the same. Szaalm knew at once who he was here to collect.

Went he just abreast of the nearest chaplain, a Mittelman by the name of Chlodowig; grasped him by his black-caped shoulder, and charged him with the ceremony through to its natural conclusion. He scooped up his capotain, and returned to his tent. After all—on that fine, mild morning, with only the men for his company, he was hardly dressed to stand in the presence of royalty.

¹

Smoke and Steel

Race Human (Doelishman) Sex Male Age 51 Court Alignment Red Role Colonel (2nd Regiment of Horse—"The Firestripes") __________________________________________________________	Untitled by Andrey Shishkin

Divine Right. Despite his common origins, "Old Vic" in just a few years has proven himself a capable soldier, roughrider, and commander of men, an invaluable asset to the Inburians' peasant revolt. Equally adept in both the dragoon and the harquebusier styles of warfare, on the field he deploys with sword, carbine, and a brace of two Reiterpistolen; whereas on the street he carries a mercenary's Katzbalger—short, broad, and in all more suited to tavern brawls than proper dueling.

Ironsides. First to engage and last to withdraw, Vicquerno himself sets the 2^nd's example in battle. As composed among enemies as allies, and unflappable under fire, he does not retreat until he's received the order; and even then, not until the last of his boys has gotten out first.

Similis Simili Gaudet. Handpicked not for their individual skills and strengths, but for their devotion to "Commander, Queen, and Cause" (purportedly in that order, ascending), Vic's "Firestripes," so nicknamed for their distinctive orange sashes, have cultivated a unit cohesion not achieved elsewhere but by the very most prosperous leaders. They do not rape; nor break ranks to run down a routed foe; nor whore or gamble at quarters; nor loot the houses and baggage of human foes, regardless of allegiances. (The colonel does condone the pillage of elven property, however.) Their discipline is admirable, their personal loyalties enviable, their repute as yet unrivalled.

Demagogue. That most of the 2^nd began the war as common workmen—hunters, militia, and other decent shots, perhaps, but unskilled in battle all the same—and now command the renown they do, speaks to the methods of van der Szaalm and his serjeants. This begins not with the ruthless drilling of their bodies and horses, nor even with the communal prayers and catechisms in which all the men share between battles; but with recognizing in each man all the qualities beseeming a soldier of freedom.

Knave of Hearts. One would not expect the man who has forbidden gambling among his ranks to be so adept at games of skill, but especially cards and billiards.

Anguis in Herba. The Firestripes' personal devotion to their colonel has brought some of Ariana's councilors, and perhaps the girl herself, no small degree of anxiety in recent days. Why, for instance, this insistence on garbing the regiment in a color besides Ariana's scarlet? And why does it draft its own poems, its own songs and slogans ("We Remembre Grendell," "Be Thou of Good Couraige," "The Gunnes of Rodelkog" et al.), rather than join the other troops in their catechisms? Some cannot help wondering whether the good colonel's personal ambitions supersede his loyalty to the pretender-empresses...

Sanguinarian. Though marked by temperance and measure in most things, if one vice colors Vicquerno's decisions it is his rage. Slow to forgive and quick to avenge, it is little wonder that he's fallen in with the camp which promises the decimation, humiliation, and ultimate expulsion of the elves from Old Inbur. At times to the detriment of the war effort (inspiring those to fight to the death who would otherwise have lowered their arms and surrendered), those who have crossed the 2^nd can expect no clemency; no quarter. And the grudges their commander keeps are strong as steel.

Son and heir to a family of poorters and husbandmen, relatively modest of means, Vicquerno even from a most tender age was spared the indignity of an idle life. Expected from the start to earn his daily bread, he had a small hand in many of the family's various enterprises—a tin smithy, a heraldry office, a small paper mill, all of these situated in the levee-town of Valtrecht—but his true duties were to the estate, where with godly grace he took to pick and plough and scythe, same as the sharecroppers who worked his father's fields. When there were no troughs to till and crops to tend, especially in wintertime, Vicquerno also enlisted with the town's standing militia, walking its dams and walls and sea gates, arresting the occasional robber-knight or burglar—a privilege afforded only to the wealthy of the city, as the stadtholder, Rodon Van Ecklingen, expected the men to supply their own arms. But with such exclusivity arrived opportunity. Enough service years in the Free Watch all but guaranteed one an eventual city government position, and Vicquerno van der Szaalm had been well on his way toward one such position when the wars broke out, studying as a solicitor. Oft he wonders what his life would look like now, hadn't he answered the chance for glory and adventure when it knocked; quiet, t'would seem. Quiet and comfortable and ignobly dull.

The other ignominies—the noxious fumes of the smithy, the drudgery of heraldry, the odoriferousness of the pulp, even the stink and the calluses of the fields—these he suffered graciously enough but not the courtroom. The courtroom drove him very nearly mad. Perhaps those ink and pounce-stained hands, unstimulated by the quill, yearned for the hoe and the hammer once more. Perhaps, given his first glimpse into Valtrecht's inner workings, it disgusted him just how much money the Doel was paying for Orrian's "protection"; how prosperous his household and his choice familial friends and his people at large could be, were they not racketeered by plumped-up horseback brigands. Then again, it may be the bills of lading, the manifests and the charterparties which so incensed him; inventories counted not in bushels or ingots, but heads. Names. Whole families and tribes branded, fettered, auctioned off to offshore mines and plantations, then squabbled over like goats and capons. Everyone knew Orrian's "Western Empire" did not exercise a chattel system—they justified their slave trading by convicting a person of a crime first (often enough a fictitious one), then calling it punishment—may be the aging Doelishman began to wonder when he would recognize a name on the list.

Regardless of the cause, his defiance started off small: first earning a few more guilders renting out the family's press to populist pamphleteers; later on penning and publicizing his own (albeit anonymously). Finding himself in their backroom beer halls, attending their speeches, their debates. Little arsons and vandalisms, especially of shipments bound for the treasurers of Orrian's court; his "tributes." The fourteen months Vicquerno spent in the Salaissant for such offenses were meant to dissuade him thereof. Instead they galvanized him all the further, giving him time aplenty to pen all manner of anti-Haltian verses and fictions, several still popular today among "Ariana's Ardents"; and making him a few lifelong friends among his fellow prisoners besides, several of whom have fought and died already for the Reds.

Only Vicquerno's time in the Free Watch saved his estate from confiscation, and himself from the very worst conditions inside the prison, cramped and packed and rife with disease—not even mentioning, besides, the aforementioned indentured servitude on some fever-ridden plantation somewhere across the sea. Of course, only God knows whether it was redemption or recidivism which laid coiled in van der Szaalm's heart of hearts when he walked free that fateful day; whether he intended to navigate the straight and narrow, or fall back into old habits. For in just a few short months the revolution had swept through Doel, and, most courteously, robbed him of the choice. Though whether they sought him out, or the inverse, is as yet lost to time, known only to the Red Empress and the man himself.