This foray into OSR dnd comes by way of my fiction writing. CatDragon, of Glass Candles, recently asked me about the empire from the Chemical Courtesans post, and I thought I would post up a chapter from something I wrote a year or so ago that properly gets into it, since it is assuredly a fever-dream close to my heart.
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SIX
L wakes up alone on a straw pallet, in a strange room. The walls are whitewashed and light filters through a small, high window. The space is brushed obsessively clean. She checks quickly across her body and sees that each of her wounds has been sewn neatly shut. She tries to rise and grimaces in pain as she makes the movement. Decides to lie back instead. After a couple of minutes P enters the room and smiles happily when she sees that L is conscious. The long cut across her face is raised, bruised, swollen, scabbing over. She says “can I touch you?” and L nods and they embrace for a long time. P buries her face into the seam at L’s pectoral and shoulder and her breathing becomes deep and extremely slow. L realises that she is crying and smiles and closes her eyes and tightens her embrace. As P nuzzles into L’s armpit she explains in detail how they were able to escape after L killed everyone and collapsed into unconsciousness.
Afterwards P leaves the room, and then returns after several minutes carrying two bowls, one filled with steaming soup and a wooden spoon, and the other with water. She places them next to the pallet and sits down on the floor, crosslegged, with her back to the wall, and watches as L slowly reaches down and begins to eat. It takes a very long time for her to reach the bowl with the spoon, and then even longer for her to raise it up to her mouth. She blows on the hot, stewed meat before eating it. After the first spoonful she makes an ‘mmmmm’ noise and says this is really good, and noisily slurps her way through the rest. P sits, silent and relaxed, staring up at the light falling through the window, at the spotless stone floor, at the other woman eating and drinking with loud gulps and mouth smacking. After a couple of minutes the bowl is finished and P rises to get another. It is placed by the bed to cool. L asks absently what happened to her armour and weapons, and P says that they are stacked outside the room, badly damaged but all accounted for as far as she can tell. L is silent for a minute or so and then asks P if she can bring her jewellery into the room, as she would like to see how the chains and pendants have fared in the aftermath of the bloodbath in the stone room with the table. P does so, and it takes her several trips, since the complex ornamentation is quite heavy— it is also difficult to unhook from the armoured breastplate and pauldrons without practice, and P has never done this before. She apologises and explains this to L as she brings the long chains heaped up in her arms, and dumps them on the floor in a tangle before carefully teasing each out to its full length. L watches her work, and explains that these honourifics were earned in the country of her birth, and that they are made from lead, tin, and cut glass— that they are like fairground trinkets and worth nothing to anyone, but that she and the other slave soldiers that she grew up with fought and killed for them and nothing else, because they had been taught by their owners since birth to value them above all things.
P thinks for a while and then says that she cannot imagine someone owning L, or more— she feels around words and concepts, trying each in turn— that she cannot imagine L acquiescing to status as property. L smiles and explains that for most of her life she was a slave, raised from birth in a great imperial palace barracks, alongside her orphan brothers and sisters, who were also her lovers. They acted as assassins and secret police, answerable only to the emperor, and also as terrifying shock troops at the front line of his most wretched and hopeless battlefields. It was, strangely enough, a position of great honour. She says that they were the progeny, in essence if not in blood, since it was the custom of the empire to sterilise its palace guards, of the first slave knights, who were giants, and on whose legacy and myth the imperial project was founded. She and her siblings studied— as their titan progenitors did hundreds of years before them— poetry, geometry, alchemy, sorcery, and every other doctrine of pragmatics, which she says, with only the softest shadings of irony, is the only truly noble science.
P asks what she means by giants, and L says you know, giants, like humans but bigger, stronger, smarter, hungrier. Impossible to kill. In the empire they tell hundreds of stories about them. They were slaves too, defined by their privileges at court, by their status of exception. They were separated from the structures of power and influence that bound up the rest of the court population like a steel trap. While they lived they were the emperor’s ultimate security. The only things that they could not have were the will to disobey, leave, or die. A terrible life if you could not reconcile it with the shape of your inner soul, or a simple and luxurious one if you could. They were students of rhetoric, of contradiction and debate. The first contradiction was in their obvious capacity to win their freedom by violence, at any time and without issue, since they were giants and could not be stopped by humans. Between the ten of them they enjoyed discussing this above all things, and the conversations were apparently intense and circular. Of their arguments we sadly have no record, and they guarded their interpersonal communications jealously and wrote nothing down, but their relations have been well preserved by the scribes of that time. We know that they were organised into five pairings, and in each of these one took on the dominant outward facing posture, and the other the mute/visionary/internal facing. We know that at night these positions were reversed, and that the relation of the body of the giants and the emperor was also reversed, so that after sunset they became a ten-headed sovereign, and their boyish suzerain was stripped of his executive powers of ideation. We know that these nightly transformations were produced chemically, and it is the legacy of chemical and alchemical transmutations that make us such ferocious killers. P asks who are you? When you say ‘our ferociousness’ who are you referring to? She is staring at the floor. L says we are called ‘hounds’ or ‘dogs' in the empire. There are about a hundred of us now, and we are still warriors and we still read philosophy, but we are no longer giants. Our equipment and training have been standardised, our access to chemicals, steroids, stimulants, the doctrines of their use, our sexual explorations, all of these have been stripped back to their barest essentials. It is an effective programme but a brutal one, and it produces brutal soldiers. Here I am, she smiles, a brute. P is still looking at the floor. She asks whether the giants had names, and L says yes: the first, who were discovered at the foothills of the mountains by the first settlers, and who gifted them the secrets of wall building and animal husbandry, were named Gilgamesh and Enkidu. After them were Lamassu and Lamassu, who were identical and spoke rarely, and who policed the behaviour of their brothers and sisters and watched them closely for early signs of mental illness. And then Gog and Magog, also called The Ruiners, who were many times larger than the rest, and who looked like mountains when the lay down to sleep at the edge of the city walls. Gargantua and Pantagruel came next, and they were fashionable and erudite and had an intense enjoyment of nonsense and theological argument. They lived in the palace (their old apartments are still accessible, though obviously much too large to used by normal humans) and enjoyed eating horses and cattle whole while they gossiped and bitched with one another about the other giants, about the emperor, about the quality of the cooking, about how one ought to be treated when one is kept in an imperial palace, and about how one was, in actual fact, being treated right now, ‘oughts’ notwithstanding. Finally there were the Knight and the Lady, the youngest of the group, only slightly larger than the people who live now, who actually went under many different names, and who each had the power to transform their bodies into any form that they chose, so that their stories of devotion, love, insanity, rejection, mistaken identity, face-swapping, role-swapping, useless courage, unbearable loss, etc. etc. could be remixed and reformulated into different formats into perpetuity, and also so that neither could ever truly damage the other in any lasting way, no matter how sincerely they tried.
L is smiling as she talks. The bowls lie empty on the stone floor, where P is now lying stretched out on her back, hands behind head, staring at the ceiling and saying nothing. L says “Who could contain desire? How big would a body need to be? How tough, how flexible? How many transformations of that body?” She is still smiling.
P looks at the other woman and her strange eyes sparkle in the evening light. She imagines the giants. She imagines L’s body growing larger, to the size of a building, the size of a mountain; sees the chains and cut glass adornments multiplying across the surface of the body, its surface covered in shifting, sparkling layers of lead and pale crystal. A face like something in a nightmare. Staring eyes the size of houses that boil whatever falls under their gaze into vapour. A mouth like a pit in the earth filled with black smoke, hiding ridges of filed and sharpened teeth. A figure from the centre of the earth. It brings stories and strange technologies, and it kills and eats everything around it. When it has slaughtered those in the settlements close by it will begin the construction of boats, arks, and vehicles of all kinds, whatever it requires to become mobile, to move on to other feeding grounds.
After a minute or so L says that there is something in any person that is invulnerable. P comes to herself then, and when she thinks about what L has said she laughs. She has a pleasant, natural laugh, and L realises that the last time that she heard it they were dancing together, and she remembers the dress that P wore and the feeling of her thin body pressed into her own. P says that she has never seen any evidence of this invulnerable thing, has never herself experienced it, although she has known a few people who, like L, seem to hold its existence to be self-evident, as though they have been in contact with their own fragment of invincibility their entire lives, and need only spend a minute or two stilling their thoughts to apprehend it directly. She says it feels to her like a mystical feeling, and that she has difficulty trusting it when it begins to make demands. It is L’s turn to laugh. She says that this is probably wise, and then asks if there is any more soup. P exits the room and returns with the whole pot, which steams in the sunlight and smells delicious. Then she curls in next to L on the straw pallet, careful not to press into any part of her body that has been recently sewn shut and says “Tell me more about this city you were born in.”
“It is a very large city. The palace complex alone, where I spent the majority of my life, was larger than the entire keep and surrounds of the king that we now hide from. To walk its perimeter would take many hours, and its defences were like those of a fortification, although invisible to most eyes since the palace’s first purpose was the temporal glorification of the body of the emperor. In some sense the city was similar. It was like an elaborate portrait of his person. Perhaps a million people live there. The official censuses put the number at half that, but the rough calculations that we made in our barracks when playing war-games told us that this was unlikely. The construction of the city is mostly in a light coloured stone, hard and polished, which is mined close to the walls. Every building is built on several levels, and they line wide, paved streets, which are flanked by tall, shady trees. The most illustrious and wealthy citizens live in spacious apartments, built from this same pale stone. The climate is bright, windy, and open; it rains, but only in season, and the summers are viciously hot. Those that live in my country have a character which is distinct from the people here, but it is difficult for me to describe how exactly. In some ways they seem silly, even immature, like children who have been raised without any hardship or difficulty. There is a general fixation with what we call ‘culture’, which can manifest in many ways: in fashions of clothing and jewellery most obviously, but also in modes of speech, in expressions of loyalty to or disdain for the political and religious/magical factions of the city, in tics and affectations, in acts of charity or cruelty. In the city, everything has the potential to be put to use in the culture and its game. The specific thing or the specific image are not important, but the rule beneath the play is something like this: if someone can show me an image, I can show them an image that is its opposite, but that also contains the original image within itself, like a proof that the two are actually identical; that they were always identical. This is not a simple operation, and play is recursive, in that each image produced in turn must be met with the image that will move beyond it and dissolve it. The tricks that allow this are both optical and rhetorical. The images can take a million forms, and the players are very subtle; most play naturally and without excessive conscious thought, since it is generally acknowledged by players that conscious processing is incapable of making the fine-grained and lightning-quick distinctions necessary for the real-time production of these functional images. There are various postures that are very difficult to dissolve, around which the most successful images and players arrange themselves. Images of cruelty, love, equivocation, entropy, humour, ambivalence. Even these are constantly ground down and recycled into new forms. The players form into gangs and tribes, groups whose loyalties are volatile, and, though violence between citizens is forbidden and policed by the emperor’s soldiers, they often organise the harassment, intimidation, abduction, and occasionally assassination of rivals. They meet and fight in public and in secret, and the secret conflicts are generally the more vicious. Torture and killing are postures like any other, although it is uncommon for game players to actually risk prosecution by enacting these on their enemies. They are not difficult to conceptualise or enact, merely risky in a concrete, legal, punitive sense. Naturally huge amounts of money exchange hands. The wealth of the empire is difficult to guess at or even imagine. It is not measured in gold, grain, tax, or the rivers of tribute that flow in from foreign vassal states. The wealth of the city is like a system of magic, alchemical, transmuting base materials; a captive demon that squats beneath the streets, fluid and possessing a double face, and powering the frantic movements of the city’s inhabitants. Game players are ruined and then wealthy again from week to week. All serious players keep around them a close company of professionals whose loyalty is understood to be absolute, and nonetheless make plans for their betrayal. There are great channels of hatred and compassion. All relationships between those that play the image game are treated as though they will stand for all time, as though each utterance will be truly final, and will cleave itself from the chaos that surrounds it, becoming irreducible. It is possible that they are indeed edging closer to this final posture; that the images are becoming more and more difficult to dissolve into one another and reduce. The great bonfires of equivocation. The pale boulevards shine slickly in the evenings after it rains. It is a beautiful country, and I miss the weather keenly. The stone streets are easily washed clean of blood and shit. There are great irrigation works that flow from building to building, there are channels of pure, clean water that run down the centres of the boulevards, there are imperial harbours which shelter hundreds and hundreds of ships, markets where you can buy the produce of the entire world. The people that live in the city are not like the people here. If you were to raise your hand against them their hostility would annihilate you. It would not even be a question of armies and powers— it would be their hostility and their facility with the playing of games. You cannot imagine the subtlety of this system. There are thousands and thousands of them, and each aspires to the exact status of a god, a secular god stripped of its powers of miracle, but not of its essential nature, which remains divine. Each believes in their own inscription for all time. They search for images of themselves that cannot be dissolved.”
“The city also has a military, which act as its police; the two institutions are the same. The soldiers are formally forbidden from playing the games of the capital, but since they are themselves wont to appear as images in this game it is difficult to police this. Each member of the corps is ranked by how many humans they could reliably be expected to kill in combat before dying, which allows the emperor to indulge in relatively simple calculus when planning out his various campaigns of extermination. The first positions, newly minted soldiery, are known as ‘killers of one’, ‘killers of two’, ‘killers of ten’, etc., and they are trained in every technique that would allow them to act as such. It is not so hard to imagine that anyone could reasonably be termed a ‘killer of one’ in theory, but it is quite another thing to be practised enough that you can be relied upon to carry them out without fuss, as a professional. Rank in the imperial military follows two tracks— there are the killers, whose rank goes up as described, and group commanders, whose responsibilities are in acting as multipliers of the respective killer-ranks of the soldiers under their command, via the study of pragmatics. Their bands of soldiers are then classed in similar but less-precise terms: massacre squads, city-killer squads, genocide squads, etc., with each being entrusted with tasks, abroad or at home, that correspond to these capacities.”
It occurs to L as she speaks that she knows nothing about where they are at the moment, nothing about the nature of this white washed room with its soup-producing kitchen and spotless floors. When she asks P says that these rooms belong to a friend— to a woman called R, and that they are safe and protected, outside of the king’s city and beyond his reach. She says that the building is actually a library, which is also an entire fortified community, like a monastery, and that L can relax knowing that she is safe.
P wants to know what a city-killer or genocide squad might be, how a small group could expect to kill so many people, and L explains that when she refers to the study of pragmatics in this instance she is mostly talking about the training of these soldiers in mass poisoning and ecosystem destruction, in spreading plagues, fouling rivers, salting fertile earth, engineering starvations and mass psychosis, and also in the application of mass human psychology to divide their target populations against themselves, again and again, to refract and double any group identity until it can no longer coexist peacefully with the others around it. “Given enough time and favourable circumstances you could engineer an event of no return, a cleavage; and then all of the assurances would collapse, everything would be thrown into doubt, and the old tactics, the murders, abductions, rapes, and tortures, all of these would resurface again as the terror-spreading weapons that enemy populations would bring to bear against their own. It could take a long time, and there were other, quicker methods at the disposal the soldiers of the empire.”
“And what were you?” asks P. “To what level of human slaughter did you aspire?”
L says that she was briefly an advisor/attache to one of the three currently existent genocide squads, but that the inclusion of a slave like her in these military bodies was quite rare. The slave troops were bound to the palace building, and served as courtiers, assassins, and personal guards to the emperor. The surgical and chemical techniques that produced their over-muscled bodies were secrets that had never been revealed beyond the palace walls.
“Like most of the institutions of the empire, the distinction is one of affected and artificial separation— we police the military, who police the population, who police one another and especially the non-citizens who live amongst us. These separations must be concretely enforced, and so the bodies of the slave soldiers have been changed over time, as I have mentioned, using the giants as template, in order to disrupt and nullify the calculus of the military assignments. There is no good model for calculating how many soldiers one of the emperor’s slave killers might be worth in a fight, and as such the military are forced to understand our worth as effectively infinite, at least until a better number can be produced. Which means that they fear us more than they fear enemy nations, and defer to us often for advice during their campaigns. These are purely mathematical problems. If they ever did find a good number to substitute for their small infinity, an accurate representation of our worth, then the balance of powers in the capital would be overturned in an instant. For this reason it was, for many decades, one of the great pastimes of the slave soldiers to discover whatever working number the military had come up with, and then to show publicly its inadequacy. If they produced the number ‘seventeen’, one the soldiers would volunteer to overpower and execute eighteen soldiers in a public place. They would be trussed up and disembowelled, they would die screaming. If they produced the number ‘forty-five’, one of us would embark on a campaign to assassinate forty six of their officers. They no longer produce these numbers as far as we know, and have defaulted instead to the small infinity. There has been a peace between the institutions since then.”
P says “these games of yours are bizarrely artificial and mathematical. I have just watched you kill many people; you are obviously a powerful warrior, well equipped, and without any fear of death. But I don’t believe that you could kill forty six people. I don’t believe that your worth as a killer could be accurately represented by the small infinity.”
L smiles and says “You might be correct in a literal sense; in fact you probably are correct. You see that I can be wounded like anyone, that I require time to heal, and also that I can kill many, many people before succumbing to my wounds. But nonetheless, as you say, the small infinity is most likely not the actual number. It exists, it is concrete, but we will never know what it is. These abstractions hold value within the systems that honour them. The small infinity must be maintained to hold in place the political balance between the slave soldiers and the military. It is like a contest of wills: if the soldiers decide to match their will against ours, if they propose any other number, we must systematically ground them down to nothing. If they proposed ten thousand then each of us would attempt to kill ten thousand and one of their soldiers, until we succeeded or there were none of us remaining. Each of us is absolutely willing to attempt this, and the soldiers are afraid to call our bluff, since we have never failed to make good on our threats in the past, no matter what number they propose. They must be made to represent us on these terms, on our terms; our symbol in their equations must be the small infinity.”
P thinks a moment and then asks “Could you kill ten thousand of your nation’s soldiers?” And L laughs and says that she has thought about it often, and would be curious to put her designs into motion and test her various theories of how it could be done, but that this would depend on the soldiers and their calculations. It would depend on them drawing together their courage, which is shrinking, inadequate, and proposing a number. And it would depend on the precision of their calculations, since of course the numbers seek to accurately model a series of concrete capacities. “But actually,”—she says—“I am no longer in the empire, and no longer a slave. These strange equations that I would discuss endlessly with my brothers and sisters in the barracks at night belong to a world that is now long behind me. I fight as a mercenary in a small, backwards country a million miles from the city of my birth. And I am alone. These discussions now have the flavour of intellectual games, with no bearing on me or my life.”
P asks do you still make your plans the wipe out ten thousand members of the military? And L responds that actually these days she most often thinks about how she would destroy the empire in its entirety; the military, the game players, the slave soldiers, the emperor himself, the tall buildings and the pale streets, the boulevards, the aqueducts, the stories of the giants and their philosophies, all art and artifice; how she would wipe them all from the unhappy face of this world, expunge their memory, destroy completely their histories and courage and cruelties and their entire culture of images and games. That this is how she keeps herself amused, sharp, and occupied mentally as she hacks and slaughters her way through the provincial shithole that they are at this moment unfortunate enough to find themselves living in.
As she listens to L speak, P begins to see the white city, the blood running through its streets, the white stone and hard sunlight, red earth, wind moving through the broad and shady trees. There are other images that accompany it. They are like the city in the same way that the giants are like L— alike, but separated by degrees of intensity, or maybe by vast gulfs of geological time. She can see a dark shore. The light is dim and grey and even, and there are no shadows. Black shapes move slowly along the edge of the water, which laps feebly and leaves a thin white residue on the sand. Flakes of snow and ash fall, and the air is very cold. The sun is obscured almost completely by black clouds, and its feeble light is dark and red as though seen through smoke. The shore is wet earth but not clearly so, not clearly a demarcation against the water of the sea or salt lake which surges forward and churns up the silt into something semiliquid. It boils with an infernal heat from below, and pressures from deep beneath the earth push huge bubbles of gas to the surface, so that they escape and explode at random intervals, hurling tonnes of sand and water high into the air. The sea is vaporised in contact with the molten stuff that spews forth. It flares briefly red and then cools to a wet glistening black. The sky above is frenzied. Storms chase storms from horizon to horizon, each engulfing its weaker neighbours and consuming them and growing larger and stronger. Lightning and fire are generated by the movements of pure air. Cold and heat generate endless disparity. Behind all of this fury there are shoals of grey mist and sleet where the storms have spent themselves and left behind a great dissolution where life can continue. Life has adapted, even where humans and other mammals have found themselves incapable. Bacteria, spiny brittle crustaceans, aquatic insects, slimes, acidic jellies, they crowd the mouths of submerged volcanoes or track their blind way through the mud, fighting for mineral sustenance and heat, fighting and killing, tearing one another apart without hatred but with incredible brutality. Any limb substitutes for a mouth— is tipped or ridged with teeth that tear flesh apart— any membrane of the skin will digest the body of the other— any sensitive section will stand in for the eye and inaugurate its own apocalyptic regimes of visibility. Forms of life at once atrophied and specialised and pumped up with intense precision.
It is now late in the day but still bright. The pure sunlight outside and the wind are like a happy shout, a shout across the entire country, and the clouds are very far above them, small, moving quickly in the enormous wind. The sky is a deep and pure blue. P is still propped against the wall. She says that these stories are like hallucinations, that they curl around the brain like madness. They feel like madness, or like hell. The scales are wrong and they reek of mania. She says that people could not live like this except in the hold of a collective mania, and that nobody could maintain it for long. The city must be built on the bodies of those who were not able to maintain it. Who fell away from these stories in horror; who needed to rest and, in resting, were crawled over and dismembered by those around them, burned up like kindling to power the greater insanity, since of course the ones that fall away would have their own place in this hellish system; they must have their own sad roles to play. The foundations of the great city must be bodies crushed together, human refuse, the earth beneath the streets must be bones and blood and human meat packed tightly together like earthworks. Her voice is quiet in the bright room.
L says nothing. She is lying back and staring at the ceiling. After some time P crawls back to the pallet and they doze off together into exhausted, fitful sleep.
