The Caps: the Great Rocks of Dalar ken Halvar, the minor mountains which arise from the flat red dust of the Plain of Jars and dominate the landscape.
There are five Caps. On the city's southern border lies Cap Foz Para Lash, home of the Combat College. On the city's western flank, Cap Uba, the Frangoni rock. North of Cap Uba and south of the fishflesh quarter of Childa Go stands Cap Ogo Botch, on which is built the palace of Na Sashimoko. East of Na Sashimoko stands the elite residential area of Cap Gargle. Further east, on the far side of the Yamoda River, stands the steep-scarped double-headed mass of Blogo Zo, which is universally counted as one of the Caps even though its Capless name has led some foreign geographers into denying its status as such.
Yamoda's ashes die In the Weather of Never, So I must live by perishing:
Eating the dust of the Plain of Jars,
Sleeping in the bones of the sun.
In Dalar ken Halvar's wormlight dark, the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch made his way homeward, journeying through the familiar dooms of night to House Takabaga, his home atop the Frangoni rock.
At the door to House Takabaga, Hatch was met by Scraps, the small white dog which the Lady Iro Murasaki had given to Onica on the day of the funeral of Hatch's father. Hatch entered House Takabaga, a humble place with walls of interwoven split bamboo and a roof of similar make, with floors of beaten earth and the simplest of bamboo furniture.
"Onica?" said Hatch.
"She is not here," said Talanta, emerging from the backroom which served as a combination storeroom and kitchen. "She thought you'd be angry."
Hatch observed the studied expressionless features of his wife's face. She had made her face a mask which hid both her growing pain and her true emotions. They had become estranged from each other in these last six months. Faced with the fact of his wife's worsening illness, Hatch had withdrawn from that fact, spending more and more time in the Combat College, not just training but over-training. Or, sometimes, sitting alone in a paralysis of indecision.
"So it's true," said Hatch.
So his daughter Onica really had mortgaged herself to the moneylender Polk to buy peace for her mother. In the face of this disaster, Hatch found himself unnaturally calm. It was the calm which came upon him when he had decided to kill someone. As yet, he was not quite sure who he was going to kill – himself, his daughter, the treacherous moneylender, or all three. But someone was going to die for this, that was a certainty.
"She did it," said Talanta, "she did it because – because she thinks you could do more."
Could Hatch have done more? And could he yet? Maybe. He just didn't know.
Talanta spoke into his silence.
"There is fish," said Talanta.
"Thank you," said Hatch. "I will eat."
So Talanta went to the kitchen and shortly reappeared with a dish on which catfish was arranged with steamed polyps and baked yams. Hatch ate slowly, too tired to make smalltalk, too tired to ask any unnecessary questions. Talanta knew his moods, and let him eat without interruption.
From time to time, Hatch raised his eyes from his meal and studied his wife. Was she in pain? Right now? Or had she taken the peace? He could not tell. She had learnt to hide the pain. But certainly the pain was growing worse, and it would become an unspeakable torture, for Talanta was dying of pancreatic cancer.
This at least was the opinion of Paraban Senk, the Combat College's Teacher of Control, to whom Hatch had submitted a detailed account of his wife's history and symptoms.
And in the face of that illness – The Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch, he who was every forward in battle, he who had often killed casually and who claimed to have no fear of dying himself, was hard put to endure the drawn-out suffering that his wife endured, and to contemplate the living death which yet awaited her. He was glad, in a way, that the need to pay for her peace forced him to ruthlessly prosecute his own career in the Combat College, and so compelled him away from her presence.
While the disease had yet to enter its worst and final phase, Talanta still required opium of a regularity, for in its absence she would have endured the agonies of one of the minor hells while still incarcerated in her flesh. There was in Dalar ken Halvar no charity which could sustain Talanta's necessary habit, for Dalar ken Halvar was a city of poverty, a straitened city in the dusty heartland of Parengarenga, poorest of continents.
Though Dalar ken Halvar was the capital of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga, it lacked wealth commensurate with the pretensions of that designation, for the empire was a wasteland of reddust barrens, of mountains where gnarled machines ground shadows to shadows, of shores of eroded rock where the crabs of the sea picked their way over the bones of millennial civilizations long since fallen to ruin through war.
Shadows. Wind. Dust.
That was Parengarenga.
Yet once, if the records were to be believed, this had been the most fertile continent of the whole planet of Olo Malan. Olo Malan – so the Nexus had called it, though by certain subjects of the Golden Gulag it had later been named in derision as Skrin – had once been a globe of butterfly forests and flying fish oceans.
And Parengarenga had been a realm of veritable vegetative glory.
But, while the flying fish yet remained, most of the forests were long since gone, for millennia of systematic abuse had seen the land damaged beyond reckoning. For centuries the planet had been punished by humanity. Hatch and his people came at the tag-end of those long centuries of disregard, reckless exploitation and wilful wartime damage, and all which was left to them was the leavings of dust and of rock.
Hence the poverty of Dalar ken Halvar, a poverty not to be relieved by any application of knowledge, for no wisdom wrung from the Combat College could fish from the seas the eroded soils of an entire continent, or recall to existence those lifeworks – plants, birds, insects, fish – so casually extinguished by the abusers of the past.
So Asodo Hatch lived in Parengarenga through the days of its poverty. But at least for the moment he had opium. In the peace of that peace, Asodo Hatch sat with his wife, and they talked a little. But it was not exactly satisfactory, this talk. For both left too much unsaid, for they had got out of the habit of intimacy – the easy intimacy where talk is effortless.
Nevertheless, they talked till late, and then at last Hatch slept, and dreamt of burning seas and transitional suns alive in the bright gold of their momentary glory.
While Hatch spent more time than he should have in the Combat College, running there to seek respite from the problems of his home, he had resisted the temptation of making a final and permanent retreat to Cap Foz Para Lash. Hatch could have stayed in the precincts of the Combat College throughout these vital examination days, eating there, sleeping there and exercising in the gymnasium. But he chose instead to spend at least some of his life out under the sky, and – unless detained by the Lady Iro Murasaki – he usually slept in House Takabaga.
That night, in House Takabaga, Asodo Hatch slept through dreams of seas of fire and suns of gold. Later, lost in the warps of night, he dreamt of his own murder. He saw his own eyeless head lying in halves upon a silver platter, and dreamt that Lupus Lon Oliver wore his scalp as a wig and danced with a bloody spear upon Penelope's tiger-headed skin.
– But what is a tiger?
Thus thought Hatch to Hatch, and in his dream he named the tiger as a species of buttercup, a dragon-bewitching plant said to grow beside the shores of X-zox Kalada, the nowhere land of outright fantasy of which Lord X'dex Paspilion so often babbled in his beggarly ravings. And in his dreams, Hatch then became a beggar himself, a thing of starving bone and rags Unreal; and he endured that state until the moment of his waking.