In Pankech: the Supplicants
a Jakko Orange and Tam-tam story
So it was that Tam-tam, Jakko Orange, and the he-devil Gadt came into the city Pankech. The mayor herself greeted them, a slight and energetic person in ivory robes of state, waving her attendant puppet-priests impatiently aside and presenting herself to Jakko Orange with a candor unbefitting the dignity of her position. She knew them, Tam-tam supposed, by some story told of them and their escapades, though which of such would command her to such eager attention Tam-tam wondered. To Tam-tam their endeavors were normal enough.
But here the mayor was, nevertheless, meeting them at the apex of the great Pankech Bridge. She held in her hands a silver platter of candied drug, from which they must take and chew. She fell into step at Jakko Orange’s side as they continued down the bridge’s span, and her attendant puppet-priests fluttered along behind, unsettled and dismayed.
Pankech was a high and gracious city, built up upon the tops of the cliffside where the wide Tabic fell in thundering cascades into the Bay of Bau. It was a city of towers and bridges, all in pale marble pink and blue slate. Some of its towers were levered giddily out over the very falls. The ways of Pankech were labyrinthine, its customs as well as its streetways, for the foremost of Pankech’s families were wealthy beyond comprehension, and must treat one another with ever and ever more delicate nuance.
“But it cannot be that you have come before to Pankech,” the mayor was saying to Jakko Orange. “Such would have been known to me. No — I will indulge no contradiction on this point. I welcome you, for the first time in your life, allowing no possibility of error or oversight, to my city, as my personal guest.”
“Then I must accept your welcome, exactly as so,” Jakko Orange said. “I accept it on my own behalf and on behalf of my niece, Tam-tam, here at my side.” Tam-tam was not his niece at all, but his companion in adventure, apparently a young girl but in fact a monster, capable of prodigious feats and unreluctant to violence. Jakko Orange further did not accept the mayor’s welcome on behalf of the he-devil Gadt, Tam-tam noticed, though he also accompanied them. Tam-tam reminded herself that Gadt was Jakko Orange’s slave and must therefore warrant no such consideration.
The he-devil Gadt had been made to put on an unassuming form, human, drab and plain. He wore it with a certain begrudging and betrayed it occasionally, by flashing his red eyes or stepping a step with his own backward-kneed crane’s walk, awkward and precise. He had proved sullen company since Jakko Orange enslaved him, but he carried their possessions, which Tam-tam considered an improvement upon their travels heretofore.
The small parade proceeded down the arch of the great Pankech Bridge toward the city itself, but there was a developing commotion at the foot of the bridge before them. A half-dozen men and women of the city, then a dozen, then now twenty, assembled. They were saying strange words, reciting names or incantations of worship. One by one they fell to their knees.
“Citizens!” cried the mayor. “Arise! Depart! What do you mean by this display? It is untoward!”
The small assembly did not arise or depart. The mayor was surprised by this, but her attendant puppet-priests considered it an affront beyond their comprehension. They began to screech and flap their hands. They rushed forward, barking and bellowing, thrusting at the kneeling citizens awkwardly, trying to force them to rise but incapable of sufficient motivity.
Behind Tam-tam, the he-devil Gadt began to laugh. “They are yours,” he said quietly. “Tam-tam, they are yours.”
Tam-tam scowled. “I did not ask for them,” she said.
“Nevertheless, they are yours.”
“You must bid them disband!” Jakko Orange said. His eyes were wide. “They must disband, not only depart, disband! Niece, Tam-tam, you can have no cult!”
“Lift me,” Tam-tam said.
The he-devil Gadt, laughing still, lifted her. He lifted her smoothly and unstraining over his head, with one hand. At her appearance above the heads of her company, her supplicants began to groan, reciting their strange words with ever more passion, even anguish. They writhed in the streetway before the bridge.
“You have chosen me,” Tam-tam said to them. She did not plan what she would say, only said what came to her mouth, word by word. “I am yours to choose. Go from here. I will come among you in the darkness.”
“Tam-tam, no,” Jakko Orange said.
But her supplicants had already risen and were already going. They abandoned their assembly and their worship abruptly. Few remained, then none remained, only the puppet priests with their gawping and fluttering.
The mayor led them into Pankech. Jakko Orange did not chastise Tam-tam further, and the mayor, greatly disturbed, did not speak at all.
Whatever endeavor had brought Jakko Orange to Pankech, he set aside. Instead he undertook together with the mayor to discover and exterminate Tam-tam’s cult. At his insistence, the mayor imprisoned Tam-tam in an apartment in a tall tower of her mayoral residence, under guard and lock, which imprisonment Tam-tam calmly indulged. She knew that she could murder any guard she chose, break any lock, and that her supplicants would not be easily caught out. She dined on the fine meals the mayor’s master of kitchen sent up to her, crustaceans from the bay served raw and glistening upon beds of minced fruit, river fish wrapped in leaves of herbs and grilled upon hot stones, morsels of pounded pulse in spiced vinegar. She looked out her high window at the sea. She napped, and dreamed. In the city Chashiv she had remembered her ancient taste for cannibalism, and she savored the memory now, and looked forward to indulging it again.
On the eighth night of her captivity, she judged the time proper. It was deep night. She braced her shoulder against the delicately carved lattice that closed her high window and forced it open, cracking its mounting. She lifted it inside, to replace when she returned.
The mayoral residence had four towers, and this one, in which Tam-tam was held, stood far out over and above the mighty falls. Somewhere in the darkness below her they roared. Tam-tam circled the tower around an external sill, untroubled by the height, the possible fall, the slickness of the marble she clung to. She peered into another window and looked at the guard at her post. Tam-tam had in her hand a hooked lancet of copper used to tease morsels out from the carapaces of crustaceans. The sharp end of this she could slam through the guard’s ear into her brain, if she chose, or her eye, and at the same moment she might crush the guard’s voicebox with her elbow, so that she would die gurgling instead of screaming and make no alarm. Instead Tam-tam found a seam in the marble wall. This, she slid down, her fingers barely hooked in the shallow track it made, until her bare toes caught grip on the slippery sill a story below. By this means she descended the exterior of the tower, story by story, quick, fearless, silent.
Once down in the streetways of Pankech, Tam-tam ran where her instincts took her. She passed by night-open foodsellers, houses wherein one could eat, drink, recline in drugged dreams, temples to the vast and patient divinities of river and sea, to the alien planets in the sky, to the pillar of exalted souls upon which the mayor was supposed to abide. From one doorway, a child called out to her as she passed, but from another, a pair of mercurial instrumists made superstitious gestures. She thought that the he-devil Gadt was nearby, spying on her for Jakko Orange, and looked for him, but did not find him.
In a twisting streetway, overshadowed from the stars, she found a home wherein some lived who were her supplicants. A family, two men, a woman, a youth, their domestic arrangement opaque to Tam-tam, or opaque to the being that was Tam-tam, for she did not experience herself as herself tonight. In this city where a secret cult chose her to be their own she was free.
She dined very well in that house, prodigiously well, inhumanly well, eating and eating until a company of dozens would have groaned satiety. She dined on raw meat and hot blood. She ate all that her supplicants had for her, indeed, the entirety of their offering, leaving them nothing at all to keep as their own, and no selves left to value it. They lay down before her, groaning, compelled by some inner requirement that Tam-tam did not question. She butchered and ate them one after the other. Even their bereft bones she did not leave them, but cast into the sewer of the house, which ran to the river, which ran to the falls and the sea.
The he-devil Gadt was waiting for her in the streetway when she departed the house. He had set aside his human disguise and appeared as himself: a creature nine feet tall, with upsweeping antelope’s horns and long crane’s legs, grinning with a muzzle of jutting fangs. The streetway was otherwise empty. Tam-tam had never feared him and did not fear him now.
“Where is your master, my uncle, devil? Is he near?” she said.
“I go to him now, to tell him what I have seen, as he commands me,” Gadt said. “Which I think perhaps you would not prefer. Nevertheless, I am bound by his sorcery to obey him. I am also bound by his sorcery to will him no harm, nor plan to see him to harm. Yet I wish myself free of him, and I observe that you are not yourself bound to such innocuity as I. Were harm to come to him — attend! I do not plan such — I might find myself grateful to one such as you.”
“Might you?” Tam-tam said. “Yet he is not my master, but my friend. He did not bind me, but released me from bondage. I will not see him poorly repaid. Still you are correct, that I would prefer my night’s doings kept from his ears.” She leapt up upon the he-devil Gadt, and plunged her sharp crustacean-hook into his eye. Gadt kicked with his long legs, and ran headlong, but Tam-tam clung to his neck and worked the lancet in his eye’s socket. His screeching brought no one from their homes to see. Soon his heedless run brought him cracking into a stone wall, and he stumbled, and as he struggled to rise Tam-tam drove the lancet to its full depth into his brain. The he-devil Gadt was not eager to die, even still, but as he thrashed Tam-tam was able to drag him to a bridgeway where the river passed by below. She lifted him over its side and he fell. She heard him enter the water. The current carried him away. He would soon be swept over the great Tabic falls and smashed into pieces in the Bay of Bau.
A few nights later, Jakko Orange came to Tam-tam in her room in the mayor’s tower. He was frustrated, and baffled, and weary. He sat on the soft rugs with Tam-tam beside him, drank soothing steeped dulce, ate the broiled snails she had left untouched in her bowl.
“Gadt is gone,” he said. “My spells do not allow him disobedience, so I think he must be destroyed. Is there some sorcerer in the city who would undo him, recognize him for what he is, some exorcist sworn against his kind? Perhaps it is so.”
“Perhaps, uncle,” Tam-tam said.
“In a city so large as this one, with so many secrets, it is hard to find what I seek. The great families vendetta against one another, conduct secret murders, and strangers come constantly and go again. I can find no certainty in Pankech. The mayor’s puppet-priests are useless or worse. Her informants and agents turn against one another and feed one another lies.”
“A pity, uncle,” Tam-tam said.
“Of those who would make themselves your cult, niece, the mayor and I can find nothing, no sign. You understand that you must have no cult, such as you are?”
“I understand that I must not, uncle,” Tam-tam said. “I think you need not worry. I think that if I ever had a cult here, I will not have one long.”
Jakko Orange frowned at her, troubled, but soon worried another snail from its coil and ate the small tender morsel of it, sipped its brine. Tam-tam watched him eat. She would eat tonight instead, and smiled a little to think of it.
So it was that, when the time came for Tam-tam and Jakko Orange to depart Pankech, indeed there was nothing left of her cult in the city at all, not one supplicant soul.
