[Author's Note: Ethiopia pictures (cw nasty scarring on one of them); Dallol pictures.]
And so with one thing and another, the investigators meet up in an office to prepare to leave New York.
"I -- I'm not sure. I was... I don't remember. I was here... I think I had been going to read one of the books? And then I was in the dark, in the cold. It was a clear night and there were so many stars. I was in some park? In Pennsylvania? Thank god they were doing construction there or I probably would have never found my way back. The workers there saw me and took me to the train station. And then I came here."
On the way to the plane they see a newspaper:
The German cabinet issued twelve new decrees during its final session of the year. Several economic measures were passed as well as one providing a prison term of up to two years for those who "harm the state, its leaders, or the standing of the National Socialist party and its affiliations."
The plane flight is about two hours; they arrive at Miskatonic University in the early afternoon.
The secretary tells them Francis Hickering is in his office; while they're here, they can also check out Miskatonic's library, which is known for its excellent collection of occult books.
She feels like she would have been much more excited about that a month ago, honestly. Oh well.
"Who wants to check in with Hickering? I guess - none of us actually had extensive conversations with Henslowe, I think that was Lacie and Zoe... Although I'm really not that convinced that there is a direct connection from Hickering to Henslowe, it just - seemed like it was worth looking into, since it was nearby, you know?"
Every surface in Francis Hickering's office-- from the floor to the desks to the windowsill-- is covered with books, many of which are visibly Miskatonic University library books with a layer of dust that suggests that they were not returned in a prompt fashion. Papers drift around the floor in a manner that suggests that one could do a very interesting archaeological expedition.
"Hello!" he says. "--Oh, goodness, Mordred. It is absolutely wonderful to see you again! How have you been doing?"
"And those treasure hunters are coming! The Emporium of Bangkok Antiquities they're called. An 'independent research organization.' Pah! They'll melt down all the gold and break apart all the artifacts. No respect for academia whatsoever. Money-grubbing little philistines."
Francis Hickering belatedly realizes he was asked a question. "The Obelisk of Axum is one of the stelae of Axum. The stelae were originally erected between the third and fourth century AD. Some are rough-hewn stone blocks three feet in length; others are nearly a hundred feet tall."
"I've only scratched the surface of the ocean myths, mind you. There's material for an entire book there. You'll want to talk to Professor Sims if you're interested in the subject, I've been corresponding with him. There are legends of the finfolk. Sorcerers, half-fish and half-man, with power over storm and sea. Unparalleled swimmers."
"Acuna, yes. He's the other archaeologist looting the obelisks. Taking them off to Italy, if you can believe it. As if there is no research benefit from seeing them in their original location! I understand there is a war happening soon but surely they can assign soldiers to guard the Obelisks. This is history! The common inheritance of humanity!"
"We happened to come across a book about the cults in the ancient kingdom of Axum, and their potential spread from there to Europe. Is that something you might know anything about? It was something that the professor who went to Dallol was looking into before he left. I suppose you might have heard of him? A George Ayers?"
"I don't know that the cults spread to Europe. But there were cults that sprang up along the Red Sea Coast in the fifth century BC, and a resurgence in the twelfth century during the Zagwe dynasty. Very interesting cults! Particularly popular among the aristocrats, which is quite unusual for cults."
"Unfortunately, they were a mystery religion, so much information about their practices was lost. We do know a center of their worship is in Dallol. I hope you find George Ayers's notes and let him publish his paper. I was very interested in his work before he tragically disappeared. He was exploring fascinating territory. I am sure this is what he would have wanted."
"I see. I - believe that there may be some possibility that the Los Angeles cult we were investigating may be - connected to, or attempting some revival of, whatever they know about this Ethiopian mystery cults? And we've heard that they also have ties to some sort of criminal organization in Bangkok." She is not remotely sure whether that's a wise thing to say, but, uh, she isn't very sure how to put these pieces together, or what else might cause Hickering to give them more useful information.
"Unfortunately, I do not. Ethiopian cults were never my area of research. I know a little about the legends of the obelisks but they are all contradictory." He ticks them off on his fingers. "Some claim that they were raised by the Queen of Sheba when she declared Axum to be the capital of her kingdom. They are “sinkholes of ill fortune”; like giant magnets that collect bad luck. They were the last monuments raised by the heathens before Christ came to Abyssinia. Or they were the first monuments raised by King Ezana and Saint Frumentius after they founded the truly holy church. Rubbing the afterbirth on a monument will grant totemic powers to the child. Or a child who views the obelisks before their first birthday will be granted the sixth sight and be doomed as a witch."
She flips through her notes. "Nyarlathotep. The Liar from Beyond, probably one of the titles of Nyarlathotep. The Black Man, we think the same. Nephren-Ka. Azathoth. Ahtu. The children of the night. Bal Sagoth. The Thing in the Yellow Mask. Pale Death. The Akousmatikoi Proof. The Black Wind. The Crawling Mist. The Empress in Red. I can give more details if you think something might ring a bell."
"Nyarlathotep and the Liar from Beyond are mentioned occasionally in the Necronomicon, but they were not what I focused on. Nephren Ka is a legendary pharaoh and sorcerer who allegedly ruled for two hundred years; most scholars believe he is fictional. I do not know Ahtu. The Children of the Night are a legendary ethnicity associated with the Black Stone of Hungary. Bal Sagoth is an island quite like Atlantis. I don't know any of the others."
Huh, that's unusual. Is it the conspicuously pretending to not be vegetarian sort of thing or is it more of the incidentally vegetarian sort? She pokes around to see if anything looks palatable. And also to see if it's okay for to buy something given she neither studies nor works here.
"Yeah, it's easier to convince people of things if they already know who you are. Why not go to class? It seems to me like if you're that good, you could answer all the questions during class and then by the time they wanted you to prove you knew things you could just point to how you said all that stuff during class."
Zoe really does not understand how universities work. She is unclear what it even means to take a class and then not go. But apparently part of it is you still have to take a test.
"I want to be a mechanic. My father wants me to get married and have babies which will inherit the family fortune. We have somewhat of a conflict on this point. I was supposed to major in art history." She says this with rather the tone one would use to describe a cockroach.
Zoe makes sympathetic noises about having parental conflict, but does not fully understand because her parents are circus performers and she wanted to be a circus performer and they wanted her to be a circus performer and now she is a circus performer.
"What if you went to the professors outside of class to talk to them about how you already know all the things?" Zoe does not know what 'office hours' are so she cannot suggest them.
Zoe pauses for a moment to consider how to explain why she is here in an appropriate way.
"My friends and I are trying to stop a drug trafficking murder cult from summoning some sort of evil god that might destroy the world. One of the professors here wrote some books that make us think he might know things that could help, so my friends are talking to him now. I came here to eat instead because last night I woke up in a field in Pennsylvania and I still don't know how I got there, and I decided that on account of that I did not feel up to having long conversations about things like people dying."
Zoe has no idea what is appropriate and normally would maybe try to be more circumspect but she is still very tired and cannot think of a good cover story.
Look, she seems all right. And she seems smart, so if Zoe lets her know up front about the people dying then probably she will probably understand that she should not get involved.
"Well, one time I fought a ghost, and I guess someone mentioned that to this rich lady whose dad left a bunch of unfinished 'fighting a drug trafficking murder cult' business behind. And she didn't want to do it herself so she's paying me and some other people to do it. The pay is good but I can't recommend it. Apparently two of my friends died a couple days ago? But I can't remember it. It still seems fake but everyone else is very sure of it and honestly nothing seems very real these days."
Zoe does not remember what happened to Lacie, but apparently they did not get her back, so probably she's dead?
"Huh. Well, maybe if we knew how to explode things, we would have been able to save them? I couldn't say. But thanks for the offer. If I ever really need to explode something I'll come look you up. Until then, probably better to stay in school. Or run away and become a mechanic."
Meanwhile--
Okay, Anemone wants to look up, uh, anything about the children of the night or the black stone because she is currently ??? about those things.
It seems like if any library might have info on them it'd be this one.
Everyone should spend the afternoon in the library.
Is he allowed to be in the rare book section though. Does he have credentials and a plan for research that he filed with the administration. These books are rare and valuable and they do not let random people off the street at them.
Does he even know which book he is looking for.
September 14, 1924
Director Rossi:
You have asked for a clear accounting of our progress, and although it is tempting to paint a happy face on our experiences in order to reassure you, frankly, I no longer have the stamina for it.
Our progress, in short, is leaden. After our initial success and promising discoveries on the outer walls, our momentum has come to a complete halt. Our supplies have been interrupted time and again, our workers subscribe to an incomprehensible array of holidays on which they will not work, and I am beginning to believe the American, Ayers, is a drug addict.
In all frankness, it is as though we are cursed by conspiratorial forces acting always beyond our grasp.
That is my accounting of our progress. It is fortunate the Universita is not paying for these efforts.
Yours,
Bartolo Acuna
They stay over in Rome that night and in the morning do the three-hour trip to Massawa, Ethiopia.
They arrive at an airport about 30 minutes north of Massawa with a single paved runway. The dun-colored terminal blends in with the brown scrub and patchy earth of the wide, flat plains. It's run entirely by Italian colonial forces. There are chartered flights by Ala Littoria (Italian state-owned airline) available, but no civilian service.
As they prepare to leave, they are stopped by the entry inspector.
The Italian military presence in Massawa is overbearing, with soldiers and their transport, from cars and trucks to camels, choking the roadways near the port. Many local buildings have been commandeered for use as barracks, with many temporary shelters also having been set up both inside the city limits and outside it.
The architecture is mixed. Ottoman buildings are predominant, but they see some Western-style buildings, including St. Mary’s Cathedral and the Banco d’Italia.
Nearly all the hotels have been filled with soldiers. The investigators attempt to book a room at the Hotel Internazionale, which caters to Europeans, but discover that the soldiers have raised the prices well above their price range. So they must go to a cheaper hotel.
The Hostel Arido is located on the outskirts of Massawa. The walls are thin boards; the wind whistles through them night and day. The windows have no glass, letting in all manner of biting insects at night.
Anemone buys a map of the region.
Dallol village is a very small outpost of civilization — if it could even be called such — over the Eritrean border, in Ethiopia proper.
Mersa Fatma is a small port farther down the coast from Massawa. Like Massawa, it’s in Italian Eritrea rather than Ethiopia proper. It’s the next logical stepping-stone to Dallol, the site of the 1924 dig. Dhows travel regularly between Massawa and Mersa Fatma.
There is a railway from Mersa Fatma to Massawa.
The newspapers aimed at Europeans inform them that:
-Benito Mussolini demanded an apology from Abyssinia (independent Ethiopia) over the Welwel incident, a border clash between Italian and Abyssinian troops, calling it a "sudden unprovoked aggression."
-Parliamentary elections were held in Portugal. The National Union was the only party on the ballot and claimed 100% of the vote.
Anemone brought a motorcycle and four military-grade bicycles that are capable of riding on desert sand.
She has her two guns. She has some ammo for them. She has Magnificence. She has her tent because She Thinks They Might Need It. She has some very light stuff like her binoculars and her watch camera and her sewing kit and her flashlight and her small first aid kit. She has her forgery tools. She has a bicycle and motorcycle repair kit. She has quinine. She has a map and a compass. She is leaving behind the books except for the Kebra Nagast, the book on Aksumite Cults, and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. She is taking the warding stone and telling Frank to keep the fire extinguisher and stay with his plane and keep the entire library from burning down if one of the books catches fire. She has fifteen days' supply of water, gasoline, and food.
They wake up in the morning and take a dhow, which is a kind of ship, to Mersa Fatma. They disembark on the docks.
Mersa Fatma is a small town dominated by two large buildings: to the East, the large looming headquarters and warehouses of the Compagnia Mineraria Coloniale; to the West, an ancient nunnery. Most of the houses in Mersa Fatma are boarded up like no one lives there, and there are many fewer people than the streets seem to be built for.
(News stories of the day: Flooding of the Tiber drove 1,000 residents of Rome from their homes; death of Oemar Said Tjokroaminoto, a famous Indonesian trade unionist.)
"Yes, we are. We're looking for an archaeologist friend of ours. He came here quite a while ago, though, and hasn't written recently, so we're not very sure where to look for him. Last we heard, he was digging for something in Dallol."
Man, Anemone is kind of rolling her eyes at herself for wandering up to random people and being like 'Hi. I am looking for an archaeologist who was probably here idk a decade ago. Do you know anything?' but like what else are they gonna do other than just head straight to Dallol?
His lover burned to death in a volcano and he can't stop thinking about all the other people who DESERVE to burn to death in a volcano like SAMSON TRAMMEL and instead the person who burned to death was GEORGE who, admittedly, hurt kind of a lot of people but Lev loved him and that was the important thing here.
Mordred has a deeply uncomfortable amount of detail on what George Ayers was to Lev and elects to not share it. Instead he's just going to keep an eye on Lev, along with all the other things he's keeping an eye on.
Which is kind of a lot of things but hey it means he's not worrying about his brother or the cult or mouths so that's a plus.
Handholding is nice. There is an uncomfortable amount of modeling he has to do here about who can figure out that he and Oswald are-- the thing they are-- but that can wait until after he is not dealing with fact that his lover BURNED TO DEATH IN LAVA.
"Um. Probably we should go to the CMC? Or. It might be nice if I had a minute."
(He says this with the attitude of someone who expects to be yelled at later about it.)
"I think we still want to find out what exactly he came here for, and how it's connected to the cult. I'm honestly not sure whether we don't still want to go to Dallol, just in case there's some sort of evidence of what they were doing. Don't think Lev should come along, though, if we decide that's necessary. Probably isn't anything there anyway, just - I'd feel stupid if there was and we didn't even try looking for it. We should probably check with the CMC first, though."
She flips through her notebook. "According to Ayers's notes, he thought that Acuna had uncovered an ancient site of worship for a deity that he thought might be the same as the focus of the Los Angeles cult. That sounds potentially important enough that we might want to make the trip to Dallol anyway, even if there might be nothing there now."
"Uh, he said it was really weird? That it depicted structures many more stories tall than those known to be built by the ancient Aksumites? And he also said some stuff about another big monolith thing in - Hungary, I think, that might be connected with the Children of the Night, from one of the books we got from Ayers's stash, although those were legends from Mexico, so I'm not entirely sure how they're related, if they are - "
She pages through her notes for a while.
"Bangkok keeps coming up. If the Bangkok drug-cult sect is interested in it, it's gotta be important. They keep showing up any time there's something important. Okay, so, we go to Dallol, we see if there's a huge Obelisk, we look around the Obelisk for -- weird culty stuff? And then we see if we can find Acuna?"
"So... we go to the Dallol, see if Ayers' notes help us find anything at the lava-covered dig? And then go to Axum and talk to the ministry of culture and look for an Obelisk, and then we try to find and talk to Acuna? --Right, and the CMC. Which is here and we should go poke around."
"Yeah, that sounds like a plan." Mordred is still flipping through his notes. "Uh, other things Hickering talked about...... oh, he knew the name Nyarlathotep, it's in something called the Necronomicon. A Pharaoh who allegedly ruled for two hundred years called Nephren Ka. An island similar to Atlantis. At this point I'm writing down anything that comes up next to the things we already know about and I'm starting to wish I had a corkboard and string."
"I never spoke to him before but I ran into him while we were the city and he wanted an autograph. And he said his name was Nephren Ka. He had to spell it out for me and everything. I gave him my picture... I signed it and thanked him for being a fan. I figured Nephren Ka was probably a normal name where he was from."
"He sticks out of a crowd a bit. Especially when he's there in the midwest same as the city." Zoe is trying to wrack her poor mangled memory. "He... heck. I think he told me I ... shouldn't trust liars? Or something like that? Something about how I should have a shooting act?? I'm sorry, if he said something important I have no idea anymore."
It doesn't make sense for something to do with the cult to have been following Zoe for years beforehand, Mordred tries to tell himself.
Unless that's retrocausal somehow, unless they've always been involved in all this, shut up brain now is not the time to be anxious about Hickering mentioning Scottish immigrants from the Orkney Islands and small towns near Innsmouth --
"Okay so... this spooky immortal guy who has apparently been following me around for a decade showed up just to tell me to beware of the evil god that's trying to, I don't know, end the world or eat everyone or something???"
Zoe is starting to think that everyone is probably secretly in on the cult stuff. She looks around warily at passersby.
"It's possible that he was somehow trying to warn you. But it's also possible that - Trammel spoke of Nyarlathotep being a pharaoh, and also owned the book that identified Nephren Ka as a pharaoh who was - one of the seven masks? Whatever that means? And, uh - I think those things are probably connected. Or at least that Trammel thought they were."
"Oh, I see. Good for you, I guess. Ah - Mr. Aarons was a student of one of the archaeologists, and had been hoping that we would be able to learn more about what he was studying here. If you have any records at all regarding what his mentor may have been working on, we'd be very grateful for more information."
The Eritrean and Ethiopian desert in the area inland from Mersa Fatma is scrub desert lowland, hotter than hot. Foreigners — even Africans who aren’t from the local area — would be foolish or suicidal to travel alone in this wilderness.
Presumably they were not planning to do that, right.
They were going to get a native guide.
They can go to Adua by themselves fine but they really need a guide to go to Dallol.
They can probably find a guide in Kolluli, which is on the way to Dallol. Although black people are very lazy and you have to bribe them with liquor to get them to do anything. Savages.
"I see. We were actually still considering going up anyway, to see whether any traces of our friend's research have been left behind. I'm told it would be suicidal without a local guide, though, and we were thinking about going to Adua first. We understand that Acuna might be there right now."
Zoe, recently paranoid that maybe everyone is secretly in on evil cult stuff, tries to think of what the nun might be hiding and why she doesn't want them to go to Dallol. "It would be suicide" and "Everyone who goes there dies" are obviously just meant to scare them off.
Zoe tries to check herself. Surely not everyone is in on it. Probably this literal nun is just trying to dissuade the poor stupid foreigners from getting themselves killed like the last lot. She needs to stop being so paranoid.
...From her body language, Berhane is very clearly lying her ass off.
Or, well, she is not. She is technically only saying true facts, arranged in such a way that she is lying her ass off.
Mordred, as a veteran liar, recognizes what is going on. Although he does not say only technically true facts he just lies. Easier that way, you don't have to speak around things.
Welp here goes nothing. "We think that our friend Mr. Ayers may have gotten himself into something quite dark. He was researching ancient cults before he left for Ethiopia, and I believe he hoped to find more about their origins here. And I don't think his work was ended when he died, I think that others may have followed his example. And - I worry that he may have uncovered something. Something not on the side of the angels. And the fruits of whatever he was working on is causing enough harm overseas - deaths, I think, in service to this cult that he bolstered, that - we don't really feel capable of just ignoring the situation. Even if it might be very dangerous."
Berhane goes to the nunnery, leaves them in a room while she speaks privately with Mother Superior, then takes them to a quiet room in the nunnery. "Can I persuade you to leave Dallol alone?" she says. "There is nothing good for you there. There is a great evil, and the Ayers expedition tried to awake it."
"Unfortunately, there is a problem. It's not here where you can see it, it's elsewhere, but it's not sleeping. We have already lost two friends to it. One was killed. The other was - something else. Her mind was taken. And we can't stand by and watch that continue happening to people, not if there might be something we can do about it. But we won't know what that is without more information."
"I am saying that one month ago, I stood in the home of one of the highest members of this cult, and saw the room in which they cut up men to be fed to it. And saw the mouth. Heard its song. They're trying to force more people to bow to it, or to be fed to it. And I cannot go home until I have some idea how to stop it."
"The mouth killed our friend. It spat at me." - she shows where the acid burned her - "It killed people we love." She gestures at Lev and glances at Oswald. "We want to stop it."
Zoe is trying VERY HARD to remember literally any of the details of the night when she saw the mouth.
The details she is remembering... do not seem like they will be helpful here.
"We are the order of St. Frumentius. St. Frumentius lived in the third century and converted Ethiopia to Christianity. He founded our order shortly before he died. This much is widely known. What is less known is that St. Frumentius was one of the most talented exorcists who has ever lived. He founded our order to continue his work."
Berhane grows serious. "We have secret vows." She recites, as if a person saying something sacred. "'If we falter, none will stand against the Mouth. Its jaws will crush our animals, our families, ourselves. If we fail, none will bear to face the Fisher. Its claws will mark our animals, or families, ourselves. We must not fall.”
"We opposed the foreigners who came those years ago to dig at Dallol. Although our alarm was great at what they were doing, we opposed them quietly, sabotaging their supplies, undermining them among their allies, undermining their progress at every turn. But they were tenacious. Both their leader, Acuna, and the American, Ayers, were obsessed with penetrating the ancient chambers. When they finally did, we had no choice but to pray until God chose to end the shrine in fire."
"Yes. We were hired to investigate what had happened to someone who had opposed the cult just before Ayers's expedition here. Many members of the cult were killed, the night the summoning took place, but some survived. Mr. Aarons ended up in a mental institution. But Mr. Samson Trammel, in Los Angeles - he has continued the original cult, and expanded it. They have bases in Bangkok, in Mexico City, and in Malta, in Italy. We suspect that all of these locations have a mouth. The one in Los Angeles - we saw. Trammel kidnapped one of our fellow investigators - she was his foster daughter, she never dreamed he was directly involved in what she was investigating - and, ah, kept her in his basement, with the mouth, until she was - when we tried to rescue her, a week and a half later, she was very different. She told us that she was to become the daughter of Nyarlathotep."
"We know that they are harvesting the - drool, they call it nectar, from the mouths, and selling it as a drug. We're not sure what all of the effects of it are, but apparently it's getting quite popular. We know that the Mexico City team is attempting to record the - songs, that the mouths sing, in an attempt to control people with their music. We suspect that may have been part of what happened to our friend, the combination of the drugs and the music, with no way to escape from either."
"But there was that - one of the books that I read, one of the books that they had, it was about a group of Catholic priests who had been - it certainly seemed that they had somehow been in contact with the Mouth, and become more violent towards the Indians that the Spanish were conquering as a result - I'm not sure if it's connected, really, but it seemed like something to keep in mind, that perhaps the Mouth has infiltrated Christian orders before - "
"Right, that was it. - oh. Also we, uh, think that it the mouths might be, uh, infectious? They keep - the house of the man who had tried to stop the cult a decade ago kept forming water marks that looked just like mouths. And the mental asylum where Mr. Aarons was being kept didn't have the same visible signs, but - the other patients kept talking about the mouth. About mouths. We didn't know what they meant at the time. One of them tried to bite me, while he was talking about it."
"But especially given the priests in your book I don't think that means particularly much? They could still pray and hold masses, and things. -- to be clear I do trust you but I'm hesitant to extend that to everyone and anyone who can touch a rosary or holy water or take communion."
"Yeah, I think - it sounds like nothing horrible is probably going to happen to the Dallol ruins in the next few days, in which case we should first determine whether we can get any information from Acuna. He shouldn't recognize us. And then, after that, we can come back here and see if there's anything to be learned from Dallol."
"Afar in that area have become-- strange in recent years. They no longer travel their old nomadic routes and rarely leave the village. The other tribes of the area have come to shun them, uncomfortable in their presence. They avoid going into town to trade with them, even if it means traveling farther to collect goods that they need. It's best to stay away."
This will hopefully be nicer than the hotel and if so he's glad of it.
[For romantic plot tumor, click here.]
It takes three days to travel to Adua.
[For romantic plot tumor, click here.]
On the first day, Oswald gets heatstroke; on the second day, Zoe gets it; Mordred and Anemone both have heatstroke all three days. They are headachey, exhausted, and prone to fainting.
Their clothing is damp with sweat and sticks to their skin. It has to be constantly adjusted, much to their irritation and distraction.
They arrive at a busy camp preparing for war. Soldiers shout at each other in a dozen languages, carrying out a hundred incomprehensible tasks. Everywhere there is the threat of war.
They are directed to the tent of Bartolo Acuna.
"Yes, a memento from work in Central America. I'm sorry, I'm afraid I get quite attached." UGH do people have to go around telling the TRUTH. "We're from the University of Los Angeles, investigating whether any information can be obtained about the disappearance of George Ayers some years ago, and whatever became of his work. I understand the two of you worked together?"
"Those pinheads at the CMC cut off our supplies and we had to travel back up the railhead to Mersa Fatma to talk some goddamn sense into them. We heard of the eruption after having spent a completely pointless day negotiating with company men — the whole site destroyed, fallen to the bottom of a crater thirty yards across, awash in lava. Gone. Our associates dead, some of the laborers apparently blaming us for the whole fiasco, as though we could cause a volcano to erupt. Like I have control over the goddamn geology. Ayers told me he had to see the site for himself, so he went back up the railway." Long drink of whiskey. "Never saw or heard from him again. No sense speculating what happened to him. A thousand things meant us all ill by that point. Take your pick. Angry laborers, bad supplies, lava floes, the hottest place on the goddamn planet."
"We both had to work on those idiots if we wanted to get anything. Kept canceling our goddamn supplies. It's the way it is. We're stuck here in Adua because some numbskull got two contradictory orders and now I have nothing to do but drink for weeks. As soon as they put someone in charge of a bureaucracy they cut out their goddamn brains."
"The city of Axum is filled with stelae. The Obelsik of Axum is the oldest, about a thousand seven hundred years old. It was toppled onto its side and shattered into five parts during the sixteenth century. Could be an earthquake, could be because of the war. My research focuses on an ancient text that had been acquired by the Università di Roma, where I work, the Revelations of Dagon. Based on my study of the text, I believe that one or both of the “false” doors at the base of the Obelisk actually conceal a real entrance to a chamber hidden within the Obelisk."
"It was not. They built it strong.The other stelae in Axum were used to mark underground burial chambers. They were modeled on the Obelisk of Axum, but the Obelisk’s purpose was different. According to my research, it was built to serve as a sort of earthly pillar for the wall behind which the Prisoner of Dagon was imprisoned."
"A figure that they must have thought would need a very strong wall to contain. it would seem. Why build a chamber into it, though, I would think that would interfere with its function as a piece of a strong wall? Perhaps if their building techniques were advanced enough that this didn't seem like a problem - and given the evidence, they might well have been right about that - "
"It had been translated before, of course. But I did new work on the fragments concerning an ancient deity concerned with power and hierarchy and strength. Those passages, properly interpreted, suggested an ancient focus of worship at what I believed was Dallol. Naturally, I was vindicated when we arrived and we unearthed the temple exactly where I expected we’d find it."
"We'd love to hear about it. Was it a temple of Dagon? The notes Ayers left indicated that there might be a connection to something else. I couldn't make sense of everything he left in his notes - I don't think his drug habit was very good for his lucidity - but he said something about a deity he called Gol-Goroth?"
"Never. The reliefs we found inside the temple, in the chamber with the statue, showed the ancient people venerating some deity represented by the mouth, preparing themselves for its worship, making offerings to it, even feeding themselves to it. And.. there was... well, there was..."
Acuna takes a big gulp of whiskey. "There was a mouth there. A statue of one, I mean, it had to be, obviously it wasn't-- but it was carved in detail like you’ve never seen, made of some rock we hadn’t seen before, probably quarried in the brine fields before Christ, boiled off now, fallen beneath the crust. A giant, screaming mouth, all tongues and a dozen kinds of teeth and lips that were… well, obscene."
Acuna stands up and, swaying a little bit, roots around in the papers and records in the trunks outside of his tent.
Outside they hear the bray of camels being lead to a watering hole, and a fast-paced argument. (Araari can tell that someone seems to have stolen someone else's favorite girlfriend.)
He stands up and shows them a few pieces of paper. One is a sketch of what is recognizably the warding stone.
Anemone recognizes that the second page of Acuna's notes are a spell of some kind which appears to grant some sort of mystic knowledge.
"Have these been much help to you? I wonder whether I might find something if I compared them with the full version of Ayers's research before the dig. It was too extensive for me to bring it all with me."
Out of nowhere, wood cracks! The investigators jump, their eyes darting to the sudden destruction. Looking more closely, there’s a deformed bullet embedded there. It could have come from anywhere, could be from soldiers practicing, could be collateral damage from a firefight a mile away.
Hmmm. Might be worth going to the Dallol dig site still but if so she feels like she should probably not make that decision without half of her brain tied behind her back.
Maybe they can... rest here. for a bit. Vefore they figure out what they're doing. She sticks the spell in the pocket with the warding stone in case that makes it safer to carry.
Mordred is incredibly tired. "At Miskatonic there was a club called the - some very grand-sounding adjective - Order of Dagon. My impression at the time was that it was a group of Christians who liked feeling secretive and special, there were a lot of clubs like that, they invited me a few times but I turned them down because I was a strident atheist. Am. A strident atheist. I am, ah, less certain of that impression now."
Honestly at this point Mordred thinks of himself as an atheist at least half because there's nothing he would worship.
It is not that he doesn't believe there are gods trying to eat them but he isn't going to join any cults about it and he's still doubtful about an almighty omnipotent omnibenevolent force (although at some point he is going to consider the implications of exorcist nuns on that belief. Not right now though. Right now he's compartmentalizing.)
"Right, but - has there been anything since we got you out? I guess I'm - if some event occurred that caused you not to have asthma anymore, it would be nice if we could narrow down whether it happened recently or whether it happened in 1924 - I guess it might not be possible to tell."
"Yeah, that's... correct of you, I think. My memory of that night is still hazy but I get flashes of a mouth, large enough to take up the whole wall, snarling and spitting at me. I think it tried to eat me, but I ran. I don't remember what happened to my friend. But she's gone, and the others tell me she didn't make it. This mouth thing... it's bad and it's dangerous. And people are helping it. Feeding it. I'm scared that if we don't do something..." Zoe shakes her head.
“I’m sorry. I will pray for her soul. It’s—good of you, all of you, to continue fighting evil even though it is dangerous to you. I hope that I can be of some assistance, I just—I worry, about disturbing demons. I know that everything that happens is the Almighty’s will, and I trust in His plan, but that doesn’t always make me less afraid. I—truly am sorry, about your friend.”
“Yes. Several. Different amounts of...” She trails off, gestures vaguely in the air with her hands. “Only one where I was attacked.” Pause. “I can ask God for miracles, if I must. He has listened to me before. Are you believers...? It is easier to pray for miracles with a group. It is not something that should be done casually, but I expect your group might need one in the future, and... it is better to say now, yes?”
"I never thought much about it, before, but... I've seen demons with my own eyes, now. I sure hope there are miracles, too. --Anemone believes in everything. Mordred believes in nothing. I have no idea what Oswald believes. Lev..." Zoe scrunches her face. "I'm not sure he knows what he believes, anymore. They had him locked up on who knows what for a long time. He's only just starting to come back to himself."
Anemone thinks that maybe Oswald should go to the ministry of culture with Sister Araari and Zoe. For reasons.
And then maybe they can look up books about it or something.
And not tell the people from the Emporium of Bankok Antiquities a bunch of true things.
Actually it's not entirely clear whether the Axum Ministry of Culture is a place where you talk to people or a place where you read books? But hopefully it requires less lying either way.
Araari is also planning on not saying things, on account of she has a fast talk skill of "no" and a moral opposition to lying, which seems counter to everyone else’s general strategy. Also she’s still kind of trying to learn more about the group and what they’re doing without giving too much away about herself. Reading books sounds good.
"We're anthropology students from the University of Los Angeles. We came here looking for information about a dig site that was destroyed in 1926. We managed to track down Bartolo Acuna yesterday, and he seemed to think we might find this site of interest, too, as long as we're already here."
Hmmmm why would she be at the Cathedral of St. Mary. Probably the obvious reason is if she is not a cult member and is instead Catholic, but still, hmmm. "Thanks! I wouldn't want to interrupt people if they're in the middle of something important, d'you think the people in the tomb would mind?"
Savitree,
Unfortunately, the quick successes I reported to you in my last were a short-lived enjoyment that only served as a precursor to the rapid disappointments of the past fortnight.
A cursory survey of the Northern Field has confirmed that the other Axumite stelae are merely imitative of the original Obelisk. We have therefore focused our attention wholly on it.
Inaaya’s survey of the Obelisk has confirmed the presence of an unusual metallic network within the plutonic stone. She reports a “strange scuffling groping sensation” from this network which seems to be “reaching out for my mind as though my own thoughts touched upon it.” Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for Inaaya), the breaking of the Obelisk upon its collapse has also shattered this network. All of these seems to corroborate the strange crystalline structures evident within the mineralogical samples.
Reconstruction of the Obelisk may be possible, but my current recommendation is against this course of action. Measurements taken here strongly conform to those taken by Braunlich at the Black Stone in Hungary, including those sampled using non-traditional instrumentation. This suggests that this is merely another Fisher site. My frustration with those false seeds of the Forgotten Old One grows ever larger. They seem to have been laced deep into historical records and I am increasingly skeptical of any references to “earthly pillars” sealing the Liar’s prison. It is possible this iconography exists only to confuse the identity of the demesne spikes of the Fisher and to create false correlations between the Liar and the Forgotten.
We have not completely abandoned hope for the current site, however. Our local diggers have continued to excavate the tomb beneath the stele. It appears that the looting and defacement of the tomb was extremely thorough before the resubsimation of the complex. In addition to the inscription I described in my last (which appears to post-date the defacing), only two additional inscriptions have survived.
These symbols, however, have raised one possibility of potential interest. Before abandoning my work here, I am going to spend some time researching at the Cathedral of Tsion Maryam to see if the Book of Aksum will confirm my suspicions.
We are keeping the diggers on retainer while these researches are completed. This will no doubt infuriate Daniel’s purse strings, but it makes little sense to rehire them in a week if further excavations prove necessary.
Louise Fauche
"Mary Bell. We were initially here following up on what happened to George Ayers's expedition several years ago, but it seems that the entire dig site was destroyed in 1926. But we did run into Bartolo Acuna, who we understand worked with him? And he suggested that we might find some of the work you were doing here of interest as well. I wasn't aware that it was very secret, I'm sorry."
Something flashes across Mariam's face. She recognizes the name.
"Oh, it's not secret at all," Mariam says smoothly. "Joan here just wants to preserve Louise's right to publish papers. She can be a bit paranoid sometimes. Unfortunately, as I'm sure Anchisa has told you"-- slight laugh-- "there's absolutely nothing of interest in the Obelisk."
"Sure, that's why I wasn't sure. But Acuna's a scholar, you know, and I was under the impression that he'd been here, so - well, I guess if there's nothing to it. I'm sorry there's not much to be found here, then. Too bad the tomb is secret, it seems like even the tomb of a very boring second century Aksumite noble is still something you don't see every day. Be cool if I could, you know, at least give the people back home a description. But I guess if you're - keeping it secret out of, uh - courtesy?"
"Oh, we're not here on an expedition, you know, with actual equipment and an actual dig site? The anthropology department has been in a pretty sorry state since Ayers went missing. But they let me at some of his notes, and you know, it was this big mystery, what happened to him and what he found while he was here, so I talked the university into giving me enough of a stipend to get by on, and - well, I was hoping that he had miraculously survived all this time and would have lots of interesting things to share, but I guess that's just how it goes sometimes."
There are 120+ stelae, primarily found in an expansive field on the northern edge of Axum. They were originally erected between 3rd and 4th centuries AD and range in size from rough-hewn stone blocks 3 feet in length to a fallen tour de force that would have stood 97 feet high. Most of the stelae were, in fact, unstable and collapsed early in their existence. The common assumption is that the stelae are commemorative memorials signifying the various tombs in the area.
The stelae were carved from solid blocks of nepheline syenite: A holocrystalline plutonic rock that consists largely of nepheline and alkali feldspar and has an appearance similar to granite. The large obelisks appear to depict 10-to-13 story tall buildings, although actual Aksumite buildings never exceed 3 stories in height.
The architecture is accurate to the time (or perhaps inspired the architecture of the time). Stone doors carved at the feet of the stelae simulate wooden ones, some even incised with locks. Further up the monoliths, false four-holed windows have been hewn into the rock. Fake “structural supports” are recalled by the square beam-ends that seem to project from the stelae “walls”. The back of stele is completely plain except for one circle carved near the apex. At the center of the circle is four spheres grouped together, with a fifth sphere touching the group’s outer edge.
The seven kings are the tallest stelae in the Northern Field. They were all erected shortly before or after Axum’s court adopted Christianity. The Obelisk of Axum was 82 feet tall, but has fallen.
There are a LOT of contradictory legends about the Obelisk of Axum. Some claim that they were raised by the Queen of Sheba when she declared Axum to be the capital of her kingdom. They are “sinkholes of ill fortune”; like giant magnets that collect bad luck. They were the last monuments raised by the heathens before Christ came to Abyssinia. Or they were the first monuments raised by King Ezana and Saint Frumentius after they founded the truly holy church. Rubbing the afterbirth on a monument will grant totemic powers to the child. Or a child who views the obelisks before their first birthday will be granted the sixth sight and be doomed as a witch.
"So... the themes here... are... raised by some kind of religious group... at some point over a thousand years ago... and possibly able to... grant either good or bad powers to children. --It feels like there's some kind of connection between the buildings too tall to exist and the obelisks having mostly collapsed but I can't think what it could be."
Zoe still has no idea what to expect at this ritual and has no idea how long it will take or whether she will be expected to watch or to participate or if there's a special visitor's area to stay in or whether it will involve any human sacrifices.
These seem like important things to know about a ritual before you attend, but she is really not sure what to ask to get clarity on these questions.
Between the stelae, the tomb, and the cathedral, it seems like a LOT of the notable landmarks around here are big rocks about dead people.
"What about the baths?'
"A reservoir on the north edge of town which is reached by a stair of long, broad stone. Local legend has named it the bathhouse of the Queen of Sheba. In the ritual you're going to, water from the reservoir is mixed with water from the fountain of the Cathedral of St. Mary and 'painted' on King Ezana's Stone."
The first volume describes the founding of the Church of Tsion Maryam by Saint Frumentius in the 4th century AD. Ordained by Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, Frumentius returned to Axum and became the first Abune of the Ethiopian Church. He was later known as Kesate Birhan (Revealer of Light) and Abba Salama (Father of Peace). This includes the holy rites and services of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
The second volume dates to the early-17th century and contains a hundred or so historical and legal texts, many dealing with land grants and the like.
The third volume dates to late-17th century and contains various legal and historical texts regarding Axum’s history. These records were supplemented with additional documents in the mid-19th century.
As Oswald reads, he gets the sense that the histories presented in the Book of Aksum are clearly incomplete. Initially this appears to be merely a matter of old records being missing or damaged, but a deeper study quickly reveals that the records seem to have been deliberately expurgated.
Maybe that's better for his mind. Maybe a complete version of the Book of Aksum would drive him mad. It's still intensely frustrating.
And he doubts whoever redacted this had anyone's best interests at heart.
Nodnodnod. She's not sure she's thinking very well. "That'd - probably work."
She is kind of relieved that she has a reason NOT to talk to Mariam Soliman again, but also kind of worried that she might die because she never really grew out of having the disease resistance of a two-year-old.
Dying would suck.
"Mama said that when I was a baby everybody thought that I would die. I got very sick. Dunno what with. And later, I got sick again, and they kept thinking I would die. But I didn't. Mama said - maybe somebody was watching out for me. But I dunno if - "
She's quiet for a while.
"You know where the books are? The notes I took on everything? Most of them are in the plane, and some earlier ones in the office in New York, and then there's the journal I have on me. I don't want you to read them, but - they should be there, for people to read, if they - if I don't - "
Nod.
"I wonder what my brother would say, if I died of - nothing, really, no ridiculous mythical thing, just - malaria. What armies get for poking their noses in where they shouldn't. Maybe he wouldn't say anything. Maybe he wouldn't even think it was anything, just - too much borrowed time. You'd have to - Zoe'd have to be the one to find him, circus people are hard to find sometimes. But she'd know people who could."
"I guess. If I - I dunno what I'd even say to him. Isn't that weird? Always know what to say to everyone. But I can't think what - " She blinks back something that threatens to be a tear. "He'd want to know that - my whole life I was always poking into weird stuff. Always looking for things that we didn't understand. He'd wanna - consultant on an archaeological expedition into a great ancient mystery. That's not a bad way to go. Not a bad way to go if you find something."
"Sometimes. Sometimes it's hard. But we always survive, in every story. That's what stories are, you know. They're records of the ways we found to survive. Even when everybody in them is long dead, the story goes on, telling other people how to survive. They've just got to - find the pieces.
"They're telling us a story, you know. All the ancient peoples we're looking at. They survived. They survived, and left the thing in a way where it had to be awakened. So they must have found a way to put it to sleep. And then - no more eating.
"So if you put the notes next to the other books, then - they'll go with the other stories. A piece of how we're going to survive."
"Because we made them powerful. Because people refined them over hundreds of years, keeping the pieces that were powerful and weaving the stories and the symbols together to make new connections. We don't it the way we do because a god handed them to us. We do the things that people have found to do. The things that the scholars of the mystical and arcane have developed as wards against fear and despair. That's what we do, Mr. Aarons. We're an ephemeral people. Not like the gods. Not so old as them. But we change our stories from one age to the next, and they don't know how to do that, do they. Yesterday and today and tomorrow, always the same. Not like us. We grow."
"I was never any good at that. Always - see all the pieces, and want to make them all fit. Want to make them dance, find all the patterns you can draw through the muck. Everything that fits. But finding the truth - seeing through the chaos without nudging it to be neater than it is, seeing the real path, even with all its missing pieces - that seems harder. But I guess if anybody could do it it'd be you, right? Maybe you could see it. Maybe not knowing is the only way to ever really know, if you can accept that the way everything really fits together, without anybody's editing or flattening or smoothing out, might be - rough. Your outcome was the ace of swords. The last time I did a reading for you. Truth. Understanding."
"I bet you could learn. Might take a while. Be nicer if you could take your time about it. But I think everybody learns. How to look at things to make all the pieces fit. How to see the different ways they might, and not get stuck looking at things from any single angle. That's just - how we are."
"It's okay. I've told the story where I die plenty of times. So it doesn't - I just always wanted to make sure I left something for someone else to add to theirs. Wanted to leave more. Not just - bits and pieces. But people can make do with bits and pieces. Lots of stories are told in bits and pieces. --I'm sorry you have to keep losing people. I know it's not - easy. Even if things work out in the end."
"I'd never thought about it," she says, like she is vaguely surprised by this. She feels like she ought to have thought of something fitting long beforehand. "I suppose the ordinary thing to do is to bury people, isn't it. All that staying in one place. I've never stayed in one place in my life."
She thinks she might be crying too, now. "I think I would like that. Better than staying in one place.
"You could give some to my brother, and keep some with you, and then I would be going even more places than I was. And everybody who felt like they needed me would at least have a piece."
"Mhmm. 's a good idea. M'tired, though. Very tired. Dunno if I can think of good ones. I think I said some cool stuff earlier. Something about the gods. And growing. Maybe I can say that again. Maybe I'm gonna - doze for a little bit. See if I get any stronger, when I wake up, so I can put it right. You should see if you can remember it. The thing about - how we're not like the gods."
She can't remember how to put it right.
Hmmmmmmm, a monkey is Not Supposed To Be Here. He can hide, like he's supposed to, until he knows a little more about where Anemone might be. What else is around
Maybe he can steal something when they forget about the monkey. Or take a picture! Anemone likes it when he takes pictures. It's like stealing.
- oh! oh! this is a weird place! A place in Ethiopia! He should take a PICTURE.
Magnificence Finds A Very Pretty Picture and takes a picture of it. It is some WORDS and around it there is a CIRCLE.
It is a BEAUTIFUL picture.
Anemone will be so proud!
He goes to look for MORE PICTURES TO TAKE.
Magnificence cannot figure out what they are like. He is not a monkey who is very good at humans yet. Magnificence does not think he knows enough of the words to figure out what they are saying.
One of the ladies, the one with paint on her face, makes Magnificence VERY UNHAPPY. Magnificence does not like her at ALL. He should be very very quiet so she does not see him. She is an ENEMY.
Ooooh! - Okay first picture. Anemone wants him to take pictures. THEN steal. - No, first picture, then look whether there are any other pretty things in the tent, then steal what Anemone will think is the PRETTIEST THING.
Okay. Picture done. Anything besides the shiny tools?
Like PAPERS. Anemone likes papers. Or WATCHES. Magnificence likes watches.
The stone is covered in an inscription written in Ge’ez, Sabaean, and Greek (thus serving as an African Rosetta Stone). It testifies to King Ezana’s conversion to Christianity and his subjugation of various heathen kingdoms surrounding ancient Axum.
Since she reads Ge'ez, Araari can translate it.
Ezana, King of Aksum, Himyar, Raydan, Kush, Saba, Salhin, Tsarad, of the Ethiopians and the Beja, King of Kings, son of the invincible Mahrem, waged war against the Beja people and sent also his brothers Sha’azana and Hadifa to fight them.
And when they reached the country the six kings prostrated themselves before him with their people.
And when they prostrated themselves, they sent them away from their country with their children and their families and their cattle.
The number of the six king’s people was 4,400, the number of their cattle was 3,012, the number of their sheep was 5,224, and the number of their domestic animals was 677.
And they fed them from that day by sending them 20,020 spelt breads every day and lots of meat.
Afterwards they gave them lots of beer and wine to drink for four months.
And when they came to us in Aksum, we dressed their men largely and we adorned their kings.
And we sent them to live in the land of Maccha, a province of our country.
And they also used to feed them there and we gave each king 4,190 cows which was 25,140 for the six kings.
And we gave as thanks to Mahrem, who is our creator, one statue of gold, one of silver, and three of bronze.
And I induced this inscription and I established it and protected it for the heaven and the earth and Mahrem, who is our creator.
And if there is anyone who damages this stone, they shall be blind and harm shall be upon them. And their kinsmen and children shall be taken away from the country. And the one who destroys it, he shall be torn apart.
And because we established it, one shall acknowledge us and our homeland forever. And to Mahrem we gave Sowat and Bedih.
It is not Christmas yet, it is still Advent! The Julian calendar predates the Gregorian calender, you know. (Araari is fasting during Advent, which means she doesn't eat breakfast and is staying vegan, although she's doing this very quietly and will pick at food if the foreigners give some to her in the mornings.)
That night--
Araari hears a voice. Her voice. Wheezing out words in a language she can’t understand. But it’s not coming from her own mouth. Her shirt shifts at her belly, as if being pushed on from within. It dampens, more and more. Trembling, she tears her shirt away to discover a wide mouth, tongue probing, cut across her stomach like a gash, oozing pus and blood. It yells out alien words in her voice, and when she tries to call for help she finds her own mouth shrinking away to nothing, closing around her tongue, swallowing her teeth with flesh. She cannot exhale, she cannot breathe. And as she suffocates… she awakens.
Araari smiles at him. "Hello. I'm from the Order of St. Frumentius; I was sent by my order to accompany a group of travelers on their journey. We noticed that your library of rare books has redactions--" She describes an example-- "And were curious as to whether you were aware of this, or where I might find more information."
Oh, look, it's that thing Berhane was doing with the extremely precise language.
if you are going to have a religious prohibition against lying maybe you should ACTUALLY NOT LIE It is difficult for Mordred to be too offended about this because it is probably good not to be in the habit of sharing information about this with random outsiders but also he is in general irritated by hypocrisy.
Araari is not a random outsider but she is also totally unaware that the monk is doing this thing. "Perhaps! Where would you suggest we search in order to find further information? Or is there someone you would recommend I talk to for this purpose? Thank you for your help."
"Oh, he had an excellent reason, in the vast majority of cases one should not reveal to random outsiders poking around where that information is. But I'm getting annoyed with the number of people whose response to a religious prohibition on lying is to come up with a tortured justification for why it isn't a lie actually, this is the second time it's happened and I've only spoken to three people with such a prohibition including you."
"Yes. And none of the books even mention that he was an exorcist. I would guess that the details of his career as one is what someone is trying to hide; the question is whether they are doing it maliciously, to prevent others from learning how to fight evil, or if they are doing it with benevolent intent, so that evil cannot become better-prepared; or some third motive, that I have not thought of."
(She's talking very quietly.)
"Most of what I know is that the monk just now was doing the same thing Sister Berhane did, when she told us just enough technically-true statements to make a lie out of them. I don't have any particular insight as to why. - we should warn the others to be on the lookout for that, I don't want to rely on me recognizing it every time."
Oswald will do his best. There are three archaeologists, Anchisa, Mariam, and Joan. They are studying the monolith. They claim that it is boring and the investigators should go home, but they are lying. Also Mariam totally suspects something. Anchisa is bored and the niece of the Bangkok cult leader and kind of an airhead possibly. Mariam is terrifying.
"Okay so if Anchisa's related to the cult leader then they are like. definitely onto us, right? The Bangkok cult came out of nowhere to beat us up that one time when we were barely even involved yet. Are we sure that we should even go to this dinner and that it's not going to be some sort of trap?"
Mariam is terrifying because she went to great lengths conversationally to convey nothing whatsoever of note about the site and then immediately started asking leading questions that indicated she knew something was up and then asked them to dinner.
So yes it is very possibly a trap now that he says it like that.
Anchisa is apparently just there so she's out of the way and will quit sleeping around, her depth of knowledge seems to be that they might be going to Scotland next or something.
He's not clear if she's right about that. She sounded from the description very confused on the point of the mission and also geography.
"Okay. Right. Everyone who goes to this dinner is going to get super murdered. So I am not going to go. If you all insist on going I guess I will hang around outside with a gun to try to provide some sort of backup but there are so many ways for them to kill you that I cannot fix from outside the tent with a shotgun."
Well. He does not actually have to bluff his way through archaeology talk if he's telling Anchisa about New York.
He has no idea what Anchisa batting her eyes and biting her lip at him could possibly mean. He has never flirted with a random stranger in his life. As can perhaps be deduced from how all his stories in which exciting things happen seem to be cribbed from other people (his sister, he's cribbing them from his sister).
He has been the boring responsible person his entire life and he's not stopping now. They will go no further.
...They do actually end up achieving something pretty damn close to heterosexual sex. But not the kind with lasting consequences, so he feels he's managed some small victory today.
Meanwhile--
Mordred is seated next to Mariam Soliman and a white woman he doesn't recognize.
Mordred is unsure how much he doesn't trust that but he sure doesn't trust it.
Well, at least Oswald doesn't have to handle Mariam. He smiles as if he has no reservations about being here.
Mordred eats and makes meaningless small talk for as long as they'll let him do that. He doesn't really expect that to be long but hey worth a shot right.
"What languages do you study? I'm terribly monolingual myself. I know English of course, and Latin and French and Spanish and Greek and Hebrew and Arabic, and I am learning Thai so Mariam doesn't have to be the only one to speak to our employer, but there is simply never enough time to learn as many languages as one wants to know."
"As a show of good faith, I will explain our researches. We were hopeful that this could be a site related to the Liar from Beyond, our god. However, further study suggests it is merely another site of the Forgotten God, worshiped in Hungary. The Forgotten God is also, of course, known as the Fisher from Outside. Very little information of importance to our cult exists here. What are you studying?"
because we didn't have any other leads that didn't involve messing with the cult Mordred can't tell Mariam that. Nor does he want to actually give her true and useful information she doesn't already have. Nor can he admit that in fact he doesn't know shit and is in way over his head. This is so many constraints.
"One of our party was his student, and other things but student is what's relevant. And among the books he left behind was on the cults of the Aksumite empire, and especially given his later publications it seemed like an avenue of research that hadn't yet been explored or at least not in a way that the cult in Los Angeles ever learned the results of, and we had hoped he might have found more once he arrived. Hope that, evidently, proved false, but hope nonetheless."
Mordred has honestly only been paying attention to Oswald insofar as he needed to make sure they didn't contradict each other, when he and Anchisa started flirting Mordred tuned out in favor of obscure intracommunity auxlang discourse.
"Frankly I stopped paying attention to them at around the point I started talking about Esperanto. I'd be happy to try to help keep them both out of trouble in the future, if it comes up again."
Mordred knows approximately two facts about Captain Walker and one of them is 'I hate him.' This is slightly less true of Trammel but honestly Mordred just despises everyone who was involved with running the cult in Los Angeles.
"If I may be frank," he says, "I think I would prefer your employer to either of them."
"Is there a particular reason that St. Frumentius's career as an exorcist is being hidden? I knew it was talked about rarely, but not that it was actively being removed from libraries. I apologize if I have erred in discussing it too freely in the past. Or is it something else that just happens to be connected in your books?"
"I cannot be truly certain, but I believe so. The people I travel with, they have--brought news that the Mouth has awakened. Elsewhere. Sister Berhane spoke with them, and believed them to be genuine in opposing it; I was sent with them to aid them, as God has granted me strength to oppose demons before. Any information would be a great gift."
The Secret Book of Aksum is an eclectic collection of ancient documents purportedly revealing the “true history” of the founding of the Ethiopian Church, St. Frumentius of Tyre, and the reign of King Ousanas. Of particular note among these documents are the “Testament of the Kesate Birhan” and the “True Testament of King Ezana,” allegedly written in the hand of St. Frumentius himself.
Testament of the Kesate Birhan
(Bringer of Light, e.g. Saint Frumentius)
In my youth I walked often on the pilgrimages of my uncle, the great and holy St. Meropius of Tyre. In my tenth year we walked from the harbors of our homeland to the bleak peaks of Pannonia. We brought the word and the truth of Christ. Meropius sought to break open the shadows of the heathen beliefs which still clutched these murky hills…We came to stand before the flint-shaded monolith which we had been told the people venerated. It was octagonal in shape, some sixteen feet in height and about a foot and a half thick. Its surface gleamed with a darkened light. Characters our guide did not know and which even my uncle’s learned eyes could not decipher spiraled in a broken and yet unbroken line around the shaft to its very top. It seemed to my young eyes that the whole was merely the base of some long-vanished column…
Meropius brought workers to the monolith. They labored to break it or to mar its surface. But despite the mightiest of holy labors, their hammers did little more than flake off small bits of stone. The surface seemed thickly dented by their efforts, and yet its sepulchral gleam seemed somehow undiminished. One night, after the workers ceased their labors and the stars gleamed above, I entertained a thought that my faith might succeed where their labors had failed: I took a small vial of blessed water which my father had entrusted to me. Leaving the camp I approached the monolith, gave a lengthy prayer unto our Holy Father, and then cast His water upon it.
A dark ecstasy followed. And in that ecstasy I saw the master of that place: a huge, monstrous, toad-like thing which squatted atop the monolith…
I was found feverish and ill at the foot of the monolith the next morning. My uncle took me and retreated back to the capital and later that year we returned to Tyre…
In my sixteenth year, my brother Edesius and I traveled with my uncle once more, this time to bear the words of Christ unto the lands of Axum.
We were betrayed in the port of Batsi…
During the attack, my uncle and all of the ship’s crew were killed. Only my brother and I were kept alive, valued for our youth…
And I spoke unto King Ousanas and I told him of the many learned gifts I had and I told him how they could be used. And in his wisdom he saw the value of these gifts and all that my learning could bring unto him and his people. And so I pled for him to take back from his Twin King my brother. And King Ousanas went unto King Wazeba and paid for my brother so that we could both serve him together…
When I saw Wazeba’s Obelisk, I saw in it the same contours-- however different, however refined by human craft into something less terrible than the alien monstrosity of Pannonia…
Know now and know for all time that the blade which slew Wazeba was held righteously in the hand of Edesius. And no sin shall pass unto him for this, for in this deed he rid the world of an evil spawned from beyond holy countenance.
True Testament of King Ezana
The True Testament of King Ezana documents a secret history of his reign.
His widowed mother prevailed upon Frumentius and Edesius to remain and instruct King Ezana in learned ways. Frumentius, in particular, “taught me the truth of Christ and His holy ways” and began spreading Christianity throughout the Kingdom of Axum.
In the sixth year of Ezana’s reign, the “cult of Wazeba” attempted to assassinate him. In the aftermath, Wazeba’s Obelisk is pulled down and the cult is driven underground. Edesius returns to Tyre, but Frumentius journeys to Alexandria where he petitions for Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria, to send Christian missionaries to Ethiopia to help wipe out the cult. Athanasius consecrates Frumentius as a bishop and sends him back as the church’s envoy.
Frumentius returns to Axum and erects his Episcopal see. He baptizes King Ezana and comes to be known as Kesate Birhan (Revealer of Light) and Abba Salama (Father of Peace). The cult’s presence in Axum is completely suppressed.
Twenty years later, however, the remains of the cult of Wazeba have taken hold in the kingdom of Kush. King Ezana wages war on Kush, conquering the kingdom in order to suppress the cult once more. In the aftermath of the campaign, the Ezana Stone is erected. Of this, Frumentius writes:
The blasphemous statue taken from the inner chambers of that place was inverted and half of it pared back until it was a tablet upon which could be written as much of the Truth as could be safely known. And that other half beneath our Stone was buried in ground consecrated so that Truth might be above it and God’s grasp might be all about it.
Nod. “Thank you again, Brother.” Araari scribbles a short summary in Oromo, this being the one of her languages with the fewest speakers, so she can trust her memory of the book when she returns to tell the rest of the group, and then returns the book. “I will pray for your safety and intentions.”
Oswald, meanwhile, is sleeping in and regretting his decision.
He is trudging through the Georgia swamp behind Carrie when the ground opens up beneath her, the water rushing into a hole in the ground, lined with yellow, human teeth — dozens and dozens of teeth. For a moment, Carrie is falling feet-first into this hole, but then the mouth snaps shut, chewing her in half in three terrible bites. She screams, blood spraying from her mouth. The swamp-water-filled mouth gurgles out a scream. He snaps out of sleep with a start, all but screaming himself.
Mordred is going off to develop Magnificence's photos.
In addition to several blurry photographs of his own feet, the tent, and the desert, Magnificence took pictures of what is recognizably the inside of the Obelisk of Axum.
Mordred sees that there was once writing on the inside of the Obelisk, but someone had scraped nearly all of it off.
"She wanted me to cremate her body, so I did." His voice seems kind of distant, like he's reciting facts that happened to someone else. "So everyone can carry around a piece of Anemone with them-- us, and the circus, and anyone else who needs it. Her heart didn't burn, so I buried it in Massaua."
It does not even occur to Zoe to question it. It seems appropriate.
Carrie and Lacie and Anemone. All of them are gone now and Zoe feels responsible in some way for each.
Now she is responsible for... Magnificence. And carrying on Anemone's work, although she doesn't have the mind for it the way Anemone did. Mordred and Oswald and Lev will hopefully be able to do most of the thinking, and Zoe can just... take care of Magnificence. And stand watch with her shotgun and not let anything happen to anyone else.
"What she said when she died is-- This is how the story goes. The evil thing doesn't get to eat everyone. It eats two or three or four people, but it doesn't eat everyone, and the story goes on. The band finds a way. Sometimes it's hard. But stories are the records of the ways we found to survive. All the ancient peoples we're looking at are peoples who survived. They put down the Thing with a Thousand Mouths, and we can too. And her notes are another piece of the story. Of how we survive. All it takes is practice to make the story come out right." He starts crying halfway through the sentence. "We don't-- tell stories the way a god told us to. We practiced and refined them over thousands of years, like the tarot cards. We are ephemeral. Not like the gods. Not as old as them. But they are always the same. And we can change our stories from one era to the next. Make them better. Yesterday and today and tomorrow the gods are always the same. Not like us. We grow."
A few hours of crying later, the investigators meet up to take a look at what they've found.
"So it seems like there are something like rooms under the Obelisk of Axum, which I think was in doubt? Rooms which Magnificence was able to access. Araari, can you read this--" he shows her the cartouche in the unknown language.
"We are doing that yes. Or we are doing that for as long as we reasonably can, there is nothing actually preventing them from asking the cult in Los Angeles if James White and Michael Taylor and Mary Bell exist, but apparently Savitree and Trammel have never gotten along so hopefully it'll be a while before they do that. Also, apparently Trammel is dead."
"To be fair I have no reason to think he wasn't hiding cancer? It just seems suspiciously convenient and it's not like we can check and I am suspicious of any information that came from Mariam, or at least any information that came from her before she decided to tell me that she knew we were cultists and we should share information since we work for the same god. They know we're lying about being academics so we can drop that, I haven't given them any information they didn't already have because I wanted to check in with everyone first but if we're going to keep the lie alive we will have to at least look like we're helping."
"I don't actually have a plan, I'm going along with the lies they suggest so that we don't all die, if I had to come up with one all on my own right now it would be to tell them things I'm pretty sure they already know but there's a million ways that can go wrong so I don't want to actually implement it without talking to everyone else first."
"I am certain that if I tried to speak to them I would end up saying something incredibly stupid and getting us all killed and dooming the world to be eaten by slavering hellbeasts or something, I just. I don't know, we promised the nuns we were definitely not working with the cult and now you're saying the thing to do is to work with the cult but only for pretend, and... I don't know if you even can just pretend, what if even just being around them too much we... end up like Lacie."
"I --" God. He is so tired. "-- I am really tired and really scared and I have been keeping six metaphorical balls in the air for months and I am metaphorically bad at juggling, and I don't want us all to die because if we all die nobody keeps doing this and the world maybe ends, and the one thing I'm good at is lying to get people to tell me the things I want to know."
"If we do not have a plan yet, and Zoe does not like this one, and Oswald is not good at lying, and I am not going to tell the cult I am working with them whether it is a lie or not, perhaps the thing to do is come up with a different plan. I am--glad that nobody died at the dinner party."
"I'm glad to know what we're up against. I have no idea what options other than lying to them and working with them we have. Just go to Dallol on our own and hope they don't catch onto us until we can leave the country?"
Every plan she can think of has so many ways it will obviously go wrong and she wishes Anemone were here to come up with a plan that made sense and felt right but she's not and she's not going to be. Zoe is trying to focus on the task at hand but her thoughts keep veering into grief and anger at how wrong the world is.
"They're also planning on going to -- maybe not all the places we have leads but a lot of them, Scotland and Malta and obviously also Bangkok. I don't think we're going to be able to avoid them while also making progress on finding out anything at all. Uh. What else happened. They think this isn't a site of Nyarlathotep but instead of someone called the Forgotten God, which Louise also called 'the fisher' in her letter to Savitree which I was not supposed to have read and one of our books says the Fisher is Gol-goroth. There's something metallic in the obelisk and weird psychic scratching coming from inside it, which is definitely reasonable and normal and not terrifying at all, and which they don't know we know about because again I got it from a letter I wasn't supposed to have read. Also apparently Inaaya is some kind of psychic."
"It's not that I think Mordred is secretly evil or something. I think if it were just him that plan might even work. But I can't lie to save my life and it's everyone's lives that would depend on us being able to lie. And the cult does things to people. --What's in Scotland? Or Malta? I remember there being a thing in... Hungary?"
"I found out about the metallic thing from the letter I was not supposed to have read. Inaaya -- uh, how did she phrase it, Louise says she 'reports a “strange scuffling groping sensation” from this network which seems to be “reaching out for my mind as though my own thoughts touched upon it.”' And they're preparing to leave for Invermere, I don't know when."
"Also. Um. This is going to sound extremely stupid and I want you all to know that I know it's extremely stupid but. Louise seems like she's motivated by academics rather than actually wanting the world to end, and Anchisa is just here because her aunt's here, and I don't know the others very well but from her letters Savitree seemed reasonable in a way that Trammel really didn't and -- I really want to try to convince them to not end the world."
Araari is just going to pretend she didn't hear that, honestly. "On the topic of the monolith... Perhaps you already know this, if you were aware of the monolith, but--this morning, I was able to read of the founding of the Church by St. Frumentius. He had an encounter in his youth with the monolith in Hungary; labors were failing to break it, so he prayed before it and cast holy water onto it. He had a vision in which he saw a terrible demon atop the monolith, and the next day he was found to be ill. When he was 16, he came here to Axum, to spread Christ's teachings; and when he saw the Obelisk of King Wazeba, he noted it to be the same alien shrine as the monolith in Pannonia. He fought three with the King Wabeza and his cult throughout his time here, with the help of King Ezana, who he helped put on the throne; and all three times, the cult was successfully suppressed. After the last, the Ezana stone was erected; it was originally a statue taken from the inner chambers, but inverted and buried, so that God's truth might be made visible and blasphemy hidden."
Good plan, let's all pretend not to have heard him! He is pretending it himself! He was actually looking at the site report from the documents Mordred took, let's discuss those. "Uh, it says something here about a symbol? Um, 'In addition to the inscription I described in my last (which appears to post-date the defacing), only two additional inscriptions have survived. These symbols, however, have raised one possibility of potential interest. Before abandoning my work here, I am going to spend some time researching at the Cathedral of Tsion Maryam to see if the Book of Aksum will confirm my suspicions.' Does that sound relevant to anything in what you read, Araari? It, uh, it doesn't really say anything about what the symbols are."
Mordred flips through his notes on the books. "One of the books we stole claims that the Children of the Night were in some way chosen by the God of the Black Stone -- and yeah Oswald's right the Black Stone is the name of the monolith in Hungary, and Louise said in her letter that she thinks the monolith in Hungary and the monolith here are the same kind of thing -- I have really got to organize my notes better. Or, my and Anemone's combined notes, I didn't actually read that book but we pooled...." and he's not going to think about that.
Anemone's notes have a thing about this! The 'Children of the Night' have come up in reference to the Black Stone of Hungary (which may or may not be related to the Black Stone discussed in The Fragments of Bal Sagoth), but also in connection with the stories of the Central American peoples of the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico, detailed in Children of the Night and Nahua Legends
There is also some speculation about the things that might be connected to the Black Stone. She first encountered the term in Ziggurats of the Pre-Helladic Period, the book that caused her to scream in front of Mordred on the plane.
From the notes on the Ziggurats book: It then becomes clear that the dimensional diatribes – which at first seem a secondary characteristic of the text, wedged between lengthy narrative descriptions of each site – are actually of the primary and utmost important to the author: And in unwinding the strange cycles of his numbers, one realizes that he is making the bold claim that all of these disparate works of stone draw their ultimate inspiration from the preternatural dimensions of the “Black Stone” which the author ultimately claims “thrusts into the heart of every building constructed by man; thrusts into the very subconscious of our modern edifices of pride and hubris".
The second mention was found in The Fragments of Bal Sagoth, which describes an ancient island which worshipped Gol-Goroth, a civilization which practiced human sacrifices, and which at its height was said to be greater than Rome. It was eventually taken over by red-skinned "savages", possibly after the gods had ceased favoring their ancient city. A quote is scrawled in the journal: "Let the skin of blood ride o’er the sun, for above the sky shall they journey upon the wings that bear them, carried as they shall be by the Sons of Gol-Goroth; their legacies forever shielded by the Daughters of the Black Stone."
She wrote that she had no idea what the connection between these things and the Black Stone of Hungary might have been, but she certainly suspected that there was one.
Notes: "Fragments of Bal Sagoth also notes that the "savages" carried off the riches and "the favor of Gol-Goroth" when they defeated the great city of Bal-Sagoth. While a specific ethnicity seems impossible to determine, it may be that, if the account describes anything related to reality, that these 'invaders' are related to the 'Children of the Night' legends in the Yucatan, given that Hickering believes that some other 'Children of the Night' legend is associated with the Black Stone, which may bear some connection to Bal Sagoth and to Gol Goroth. How the Yucatan peoples might be connected to the legends involving the monolith in Hungary is beyond me, but perhaps some mystical connection would make more sense of the geography. If this is the case, these sites may be connected to further worship of Gol Goroth. I know that the cultists - Trammel, in particular - seem certain that Gol-Goroth is unimportant and that the only being that matters is Nyarlathotep, but it's hard to be certain of that from the information we have."
"The theme of cause-and-effect coupled to oceanic imagery, as established in the book’s epigram, is constantly repeated throughout the collection, coupled to another set of imagery revolving around the surface of the ocean being a “wall” and that, beyond this wall, there lies an imprisoned a lying behemoth (referred to as both the “Prisoner” and the “Liar”). The Liar features most prominently in the story “The Saffron Bee”, in which Paul seeks to steal honey from a colony of giant bees whose hive is as big as a mountain in the hope that he can use the honey as a bribe to free the Liar. But “the Liar is held by the lie of false history; of causality that cannot be” and though Paul gains the honey, he cannot find the gaoler. Also, what the hell, Paul Bunyan."
"It's in the book on Axumite cults too--"
He shows Lev where it is in his notes. "The last three dozen pages of the thesis are given over to a detailed symbological analysis of the “Prisoner of Dagon” and the “Wide-Open Mouth”, equating the two figures on a deep level through complicated Jungian metaphors despite the gross differences of their disparate mythologies."
"I think if we're listing the Prisoner separately we should also list the God of the Black Stone separately, because it feels like the Prisoner might be either Nyarlathotep or Gol-Goroth but we're not certain, and that's technically true of the Black Stone deal. --I am surprised you know that name. I think Berhane said something about not learning names?"
"And I had a vision... the night Carrie died. It's been coming back to me in pieces. But it was huge, impossible vast, filling the sky, and it had an eye... or many eyes? And it was swirling with destructive force. In the books. There's a lot about stars rearranging themselves, or dancing, or winking out one by one. And there was one book about someone that Azathoth chases from world to world to world endlessly. Nyarlathotep was in that one, too."
"I really wish I had a corkboard and string. -- wait, Sister Berhane made a volcano go off, or at least participated in a group effort of making a volcano go off, and I assumed this was some kind of geological thing at the time but now I'm less sure, Araari do you know how she did that --"
"-- uh. A thought just occurred to me.
"So, you guys remember Genial Brooker -- Araari would not remember Genial Brooker. Araari, when we were in LA someone told me that he had shoved a crucifix into a mouth and turned it to stone. And. It does not really seem like, like we live in the sort of world where an all-powerful force for good watches over every falling sparrow and cares deeply that everything be fine, right, so I've been wondering why that happened -- but if Azathoth is a name some people use for what they believe to be the Christian God, and demonstrably sometimes he'll fight Nyarlathotep on behalf of people who pray for him to --"
"That seems like a more complex explanation than acknowledging a miracle in which God protected you through His symbol. But I am--aware that we disagree on the sort of world we live in, and it is--good to know, if nothing else, that people may use the name of Azathoth for different things. Perhaps they use other symbols of God for other things as well, perverting them to their ends. I am-- unsure if we should be invoking a powerful name so often if we suspect it may be the name of a demon or false god."
"I do not know. I am only really familiar with the one name, and only as something I can use for protection in dire circumstances; but I have seen miracles worked under that name as well as the more common names of God, and overestimating its power seems-- safer than the opposite."
"The people I was traveling with--they seemed to think that Azathoth is the name of a great demon. Oswald's sister committed acts of human sacrifice in his name, and they had--strange books. I told them of my knowledge of the name; I know it is secret, but they did already know the name... I wanted to ask you for guidance on this."
"Thank you, Sister Berhane. I--wish it were not still surprising to me, what man is capable of. I will be sure to pray for the souls of the sacrificed and sacrificers both, that they might see the light of the true God and cast aside false idols. I will return to them now, but I thought you might wish to know such news."
As they leave Mersa Fatma behind, they have well and truly departed from civilization. The desert scrubland in the immediate area is flat. Towering mountains are visible in the far west, but only through thick bands of hot air rising off the baked landscape. Flora consists of grasses, shrubs, and several species of “dragon trees,” squat trees with thick trunks and stiff leaves. They are able to see zebras, gazelles, and wild asses in the distance, largely ignoring them as they pass. The perceptive may also spy leopards hunting these beasts, or packs of hyenas and jackals. Native birds range in size from larks to ostriches.
Their hair becomes damp, clinging to their neck and forehead. They must squint to see through dripping sweat. Flies buzz around their heads.
When they arrive at Kolluli two days later, they are greeted by a collection of curious villagers.
Men and women both wear waist clothes, the women's dyed brown, the men's undyed. Women have bare breasts and wear elaborate necklaces. Some of the women (mostly older) are wearing black headscarves, while others (mostly younger) have hair braided and woven with beads. The men wrap shawls around their torsos and carry staffs.
A dozen children run up to them laughing; Araari and Waletta hear the children talking about the pale ghosts.
“The children were very confused by you because they don’t have much knowledge of white people. They think you’re pale ghosts with strange hair. We tried to explain that people from very far away look different, but... children will believe what they believe. Then again, if they had asked if you were sick a week ago...” Araari is not making fun of them, that would be very rude, but it is taking a lot of effort to not smile or anything.
And with one thing and another the investigators go to Dallol.
As they draw closer to Dallol, they also begin to see strange and colorful geographical formations. Hot springs and centuries-old evaporation of seawater have left behind thick stratified salt deposits in extremely vivid yellows, tans, browns, reds, and even greens. Irregular fingers and pillars of minerals push up from the ground.
Even short exertion — as simple as a five-minute walk — requires the more out-of-shape members of the party to sit down for a short breather, which is not refreshing and is eventually abandoned for its futility. Their soaking clothing begins to chafe their skin, leaving broad raw regions. In some places, their skin begins to rub away and bleed.
If he was not stuck in the desert he might regard these strange formations with suspicion and unease but as it is he has maybe 30% of his brain online and so much of it is dedicated to telling him he is in pain and any not-wholly-negative aesthetic change in the landscape is a plus at this point.
On the fourth day, Zoe feels like she has never been so hot in her life. Her clothes cling to her body, no longer even wet— all sweat has long since evaporated from the husk her body is becoming. Blinking her eyes no longer lubricates them against the dust, so she leaves them closed for long moments, forging ahead blindly, listening for the motorcycle. Her head pounds. Her feet and bottom ache. Even her hands are stabbed with sharp pains in this—
Araari freezes up entirely, chanting prayers to herself. She feels.... distant, and detatched, and not much of anything. Probably she should do something? Eventually she manages to move again and help Sister Waletta bandage up Zoe's wound. She's very efficient at it and also for the rest of the day she continues feeling like she's somewhere behind, frozen, watching her body do things.
Oswald sees the man and also that [cw body horror] his entire body is covered with scars.
And with one thing and another they arrive at the Dallol dig site.
Dallol mountain is on a broad expanse of colorful salt flats periodically interrupted by mineral pillars and brine pools. The immediate landscape is similar to what they have seen so far as they’ve traveled around Kolluli and Iron Point.
The squat Dallol “mountain” rises only about 150 feet above the plain, a stretched oval roughly two miles by one mile. The southwest side of the mountain boasts impressive salt canyons caused by slow erosion over the centuries.
"Oloth-Waaq is a dream god that was worshiped by the obscure Carrom tribes that once lived in the area near Adua. The 'Dream-Scourged Halls' are a geological formation in the deserts near Adua, viewed with superstitious dread by a variety of local cultures. George was going to study there before--"
They find the following:
-Body fragments of some of the ill-fated workers can be found in the immediate area of the crater. They seem to have been chewed on by mouths.
-Fragments of the ancient structure can be found. Passage of time had their way with these fragments even before the explosion, but they are consistent with construction at other ancient African sites.
-What seem to be fossilized teeth can be found in the crater and its immediate surrounding area. Do not correspond to any known animal in the region (either modern or earlier eras). They all share similarities with each other, suggesting they came from the same type of creature.
When they finish for the night, Lev says, "I want. To go to the Halls. Because-- he left a note here, he could have-- he could have written--"
He could have said goodbye to me, Lev does not say. He looks pleadingly at Oswald and Mordred who might be able to finish that sentence.
“The Order taught him to stay alive and keep the mouth closed but—it is hard, the state of mind involved is fragile, he has to pray and fast constantly and— if it goes wrong, ever, the mouth opens again and he dies—I’m sorry for not telling you sooner while you were grieving but I’m not sorry for trying to protect Ayers as best I could from that which might put him in danger.”
“On his body? No, it was before I joined the order, I don’t know the details as well as some of the others.” Araari hesitates. “If you went just the once, just to say goodbye—he probably wouldn’t die. It is not an amount of risk that would be worth it to me, if it was someone I loved. But.”
Mordred does not want to send Lev off to maybe watch Ayers die but is really not happy with the idea of travelling ten more days but someone who is dedicated to making sure nobody does anything stupid should be there but he does not have enough brain for this.
"...I'll go."
The next morning, Araari and Zoe and Magnificence depart for Kolluli.
Zoe is quietly kind of pissed that Anemone DIED all because the nuns wouldn't just say "oh, yes, he's right over there, but he has a health condition that means he can't have guests, we could deliver him a letter though if you would like".
[Romantic plot tumor begins here.]
On the last three nights you're sleeping at the Dallol dig site, from somewhere on the wind, Mordred, Lev, and Oswald hear a voice reciting alien words, unintelligible except for familiar names slipped in between eldritch syllables. “Los Angeles. Mordred Orkney. Zoe Aletheia. Walter Winston. Lacie Ferrier. Gale Dulac. Oswald Ferrier. Agravaine Orkney. Anemone Silverstring. Lev Aarons. Savannah. Echavarria. Morgan Marsh...”
The night before they arrive, Mordred dreams:
He's back home in New York. Outside. It’s cool and clear. The ground trembles. At the horizon, this way and that, he sees apartment buildings shaking and tumbling over, skyscrapers falling toward him, and long yellow fangs lurching out of the earth, climbing not just skyward but closing around him, swallowing the ground, swallowing the sky, swallowing him and his home into long, wet shadows, down into a vulgar hole lined with suckers and barbs, oozing honey and blood, and just as he catches sight of the grinding and churning organ where he is headed, the mouth closes tight, blocking out the light. He awakens slowly, uncertain where he is at first.
...Well, there's another image that won't be out of his head for a while.
That morning they arrive at the Dream Halls of Oloth-Waaq.
It is a geological formation of vast, fluted caverns that were carved out by the harsh desert winds. Arriving at the canyon is a rush out of the beating, desert sun. Just when they need it, a spot of shade appears-- finally!
Ayers appears, at first silhouetted against the rising sun.
He is a white American of European descent, very deeply tanned and profoundly lean. He’s not starving, and although his ribs and bones are manifest beneath his skin, he does not seem to be unhealthy. Ayers’s hair and beard are uncut and unkempt, and have been so for many years. He wears no clothing whatsoever and no protective gear of any kind. His feet and hands are deeply calloused, his skin like leather.
Across his stomach, there is a calcified mouth. The thing is a half-open and lopsided sneer of unwholesome lips and teeth turned chalk-dusty. It is completely still, entirely inanimate.
George Ayers takes them to a place inside the canyon. He gives them water in a little hand-carved cup; there is only one, so they have to share it.
Fresh water has never tasted as good as it does right now.
Ayers moves with deliberation, never stumbling when he steps, never rushing to move, never distracted from the focus of his attention, rarely blinking. He wastes no motion.
"I buried the dead. Before I had... not seen them as who they are. I regretted that. The nuns found me and taught me. They could have killed me. Thought about it. Didn't. Thought I still had... a role to play in the divine plan."
These are the most sentences he has said at one time in eight years.
"Look, there seem to be things out there other than the Mouth that are seemingly opposed to it and that respond to prayer and cause natural disasters and have -- names -- that we've--" Mordred is this information licit or will the Order of Frumentius get mad. "And it'd be useful to have any more of an idea what's going on there."
"The mouth feeds on power and control. To control the mouth, you must starve it. You must fast. Give away your wealth to whomever passes you by. Obey your superiors without doubt or question. Spend hours doing utterly useless actions-- prayer works. Acts of self-denial and self-abnegation."
"You make yourself powerless." This is a fairly easy feat to imagine. Except-- "But if any kind of goal will feed it, how do you avoid feeding it with the goal of starving it? Or, I guess you could--" okay hold on
No wait this isn't relevant to fighting the Mouths, what were they talking about
This is incredibly tragic and he needs to keep asking relevant questions come on come on they wanted to know things they aren't just in Ethiopia for no reason. "..........The site -- it, um, there was some stuff left but not a lot -- and the, the Italian researcher wasn't much help -- and, um--" HEY GUYS HELP HIM OUT HERE
"Is Dagon, like, relevant to all this, should we be looking into him too-- uh, the Nectar does, what, it hooks you obviously and makes you focus and seek out sensation and also maybe worship it--" sudden flash of inspiration "--speaking of names do you know anything about Azathoth?"
"It takes away your goals. You take it to gain knowledge. To learn how to make someone happy, or love you. To make yourself safe. To make the world a better place. And... once you are on it for long enough... you stop wanting whatever it is you wanted before. You want power, so that you can use it to accumulate more power, so that you can use it to accumulate more power, so that..." He cuts off his sentence with a gasp of pain.
"Uh. Speaking of the ritual. I realize you were not present for it but, but, would you happen to have come across anything at any point that might explain, um --" very quickly: "Lev was the conduit for the ritual and he's been in supernaturally perfect health for ten years and it keeps feeling like the other shoe is going to drop and this will turn out to be really bad but maybe not?" Is this good news or horribly insensitive??? Good thing he's not tracking any of that!
"The Rituals of Self-Denial allow you to neutralize a Mouth. If there were a larger Mouth... as I had seen on the Dallol dig... Perhaps one could perform the Rituals of Self-Denial until their own body could neutralize it. And throw themselves inside, and perish. It is, I think, how the Mouth in Dallol was calcified, thousands of years ago."
Mordred HATES THIS. he hates this SO MUCH. He hates this and -- and --
-- and he has been keeping silent about something for years and years, because some things matter more than him getting every stupid selfish thing he wants, and that's kind of working towards a goal but it's also self-denial in the name of something higher, right --
The spell clicks.
Meanwhile--
Zoe is biking back from the Dallol site. It is incredibly hot. She has become gruesomely sunburned. Angry red skin one day gives way to peeling flakes the next day, and the day after that, raw blisters, as progressively deeper layers of skin become progressively burnt.
The heat shimmers in front of her; she thinks she catches a glimpse of something.
Zoe blinks in its direction. Is there actually something there? She keeps seeing things which turn out to be mirages.
"I suppose I'm all right with either, at this point." She is very much not sure which one seems more likely to her, either.
Zoe is not entirely sure what to talk about, here. "How... are you doing? Did you come to Ethiopia just to do magic to me? Not that I'm complaining. I feel better than I have in... weeks, I think."
Zoe's hand is starting to heal, but the ambient sand isn't good for it.
Zoe is constantly testing it. How is her sensation in it? How much she can get away with moving it. The idea that it might scar up into numbness and immobility scares her.
Right now she's more worried about that than whatever sickness these people think she has. She's been sick a lot, since she got here.
"All right. They used to travel, as we do."
Araari knows that most tribes of Afar are nomadic. Although some members of most tribes settle down in villages or cities from time to time, individuals often cycle back and forth from the nomadic group to the stationary place, on and off over their lifetimes.
"Now, none of the people from Dallol leave their village."
Zoe rummages in her pack looking for anything she can use to represent things. She finds Anemone's tarot deck.
"Okay. Let's say this card is you." She draws the Tower and puts it on the ground by Magnificence. "And this one is me, and this one is Anemone." She lays out the World and the Devil.
Zoe looks at the last card and frowns.
Zoe is increasingly distressed herself. "Lev said. She asked him to burn her body. So this is all I have. But he said she wanted us to go on. And finish the story."
Zoe wants to hug Magnificence but screaming monkeys are kinda scary also. She makes a tentative attempt at a pat.
Not possible that Anemone is dead. Not possible. Not possible. Humans are WRONG. Anemone is going to come back. Anemone is going to come back, Anemone ALWAYS comes back -
He looks up and sees that someone else is coming over! Anemone!!! Anemone IS back!!!!! He KNEW anemone was coming back!!! He should not have doubted her for ONE SECOND!!!
He bounds over to Anemone and crawls up and hugs her and hugs her and hugs her.
Can they leave the awful terrible desert now and never come back.
"There is a man. He told me his name is Nephren Ka. He came to every performance of mine, when I traveled with the circus. I thought it was odd, but that he might just be -- a fan. In New York, before we came here, I saw him on the street. That was the first time I spoke with him. He warned me about... things. Liars. I forget. He said he was Egyptian. I thought perhaps his strangeness was merely foreignness. I saw him in the desert. He appeared and waved his hand and the desert didn't burn me anymore. He said we were like ants, and he might crush us. He said he might be a figment of my imagination. He said I was lucky, and my friends were not. He said I should not go to Dallol. That I would learn nothing there, and that I was in danger. Then he vanished, and it was hot again. He... never left any footprints, as he walked. He said all places are one, to him."
"The heat has been playing tricks on me, but... before it was always that I saw water on the horizon, or a city, or a person far in the distance. Never someone who came up to me and spoke to me. But the other vision I had... that didn't speak to me, either. It just -- looked."
"Before I ever came here. The night when my friends and I tried to rescue Lacie from the cult, before we knew... she had joined them. I was hiding in the library, and trying to guess if any of the books there would be useful to Mordred, or Anemone. When I went to look at them, I had a vision. It was night, and the sky was full of swirling purple clouds and shining white stars. In the center was this... enormous eye. It looked at me. And it seemed like the whole world would come apart under its gaze. When I read the books about Azathoth, later, they described something much like what I saw."
"They... no. The first one I had felt like a vision, if that makes sense? It was like I was... suddenly bearing witness to something much larger than me, too large to really comprehend. In the desert, it just felt like... something perfectly ordinary. Like he was just -- there, and that was normal. It felt like it happened. The other one felt more like... something that might happen?"
"I think the vision with the eye was from... Azathoth, or ... his herald? I think Nephren Ka was also the name of some immortal pharaoh. I think we thought he might be Nyarlathotep? I should ask Mordred, how they were all connected. He would know. I thought they were different things, but maybe they're all the same thing? Or at least connected? I'm not as good at keeping track of it all as the others are."
“Alright. We will ask Mordred, then. Do you—Nephren Ka warned you against Dallol, just as the villagers here did. I trust the villagers; I do not know whether to trust Nephren Ka. But I saw what happened as you approached Dallol last time. My instincts are to heed his warning, especially if he might be connected to the name of the Watcher."
"I don't know whether to trust him, either. I'm not sure he knows. He keeps telling me to watch out for liars, that they don't have my interests at heart. But then he says maybe he is a liar, and I shouldn't trust him. And then the there's the cult of the Liar. Maybe he's the Liar. Even if he is, I don't know whether that means he wants me to go there or not, or that going there would help us, or not. But... everything I hear about Dallol, it sounds like the people there... they're not okay. They might be part of the cult. Like Lacie. And I don't want more of this." She rubs her bandaged part of her hand, and above that, where the acid burn scars are. "Or worse, some sort of mouth on me, like Ayers."
Araari prays by herself while she spins thread.
Zoë should not go to Dallol village; she is incapacitated by the heat, she gets sick easily, and the villagers had warned that it would be bad for—whatever it was that caused her to bite a chunk out of her thumb.
Sister Araari, on the other hand, is used to the heat; she is not sickly; she has God on her side, and can do an exorcism if needs must.
She packs her things. She leaves Magnificence with Zoë. She promises to return. And she leaves for Dallol.
Physically speaking, Dallol village is much like Kolluli village. Both have a few permanent buildings made from salt blocks, supplemented by about two dozen tents in the native style.
Several dozen people of all ages and both genders assemble near the edge of the town, silently awaiting Araari. Many of the locals here are bandaged, especially on their hands and arms, and, where they are not bandaged, many are scarred. By the same token, many of the villagers are missing fingers, and a few are missing hands or feet. This is even true of the children.
Many marks are consistent with biting, but also other scars and wounds are more consistent with cutting, crushing, whipping, and other types of trauma.
The villagers say something in Afar, which she does not speak.
Some villagers simply watch her go and then turn back to their daily business, but a fair number join what turns into a procession toward the salt-block building at the center of the village.
She notices several of the villagers hurting themselves — cutting themselves with small blades, bits of glass, or their own fingernails or teeth. Such actions draw reserved signs of approval from other villagers nearby.
A girl is jabbing at her arm sharply, and a glint of light reveals some edge of glass in her hand. Blood trickles down her arm and from between the fingers that grip the shard. An older relative, perhaps her mother, comes up behind her and takes the glass out of the girl’s hand.
The elder stabs the glass into her own leg. The girl rubs absently at the blood on her arm and then dabbles it onto the ground, making a sketch.
A man bites on his bottom lip so hard that blood streams down from his teeth. He absentmindedly wipes at the blood and smears it across his chin.
There's a child missing an arm, curled up with a mangy dog. He murmurs something in Orome under his breath over and over and over again: “Banished be the moon. Open wide my Rift. Stars gaze upon my might.”
At the building, two villagers precede her in, each drawing their hand across a block of salt in the doorframe in which many shards of glass have been embedded. This draws blood; many villagers have clearly done this in the past because dried bloodstains extend nearly to the ground on that side of the frame.
The villagers allow her to enter.
It’s clear that the building must comprise at least two chambers, from both its size and a doorway obscured by a hanging cloth that leads deeper into the building. The interior salt-block walls are covered in Ge'ez and myriad symbols in a haphazard, multi-layered scrawl.
The Ge'ez says: "Beneath the cloudless sky, the valley of the whisper shall open on the night of no moon."
A very old Afar woman sits on a stump of some native wood. Both of her eyes are gone, hollow sockets gaping where they once were. Both of her feet have been severed, and her entire right arm is gone at the shoulder. She says in halting Italian, "the Wind has shown us visions of your coming."
Her accent is... strange. It's hissing, and full of vowel sounds.
A deeply foreign accent, not one Araari has heard from any Afar before. It sends a chill up her spine.
"You were at the Obelisk. Worshiping a foreign god. Not the Agony on the Wind. Then Tshombe could not see you, for a time. Then she saw your friends. Talking to an old man. A weak man, who once had the Agony's favor, but has given up Its veneration and embraced his weakness. Tshombe could not see you. Then you left, and she could. Tshombe sees many things."
The woman stands and walks over to Tshombe.
She reaches out her good hand, groping blindly. Tshombe places it under her shawl.
There are strange and disturbing movements of the fabric, accompanied by a faint hiss and a wet tearing. The woman’s face is wracked with an ecstatic pain.
A moment later, rivulets of blood drip down Tshombe’s belly beneath what the shawl covers.
The woman writhes on her stump, tears of pain and joy leaving dusty tracks on her cheeks.
Tshombe speaks a language that is not Afar. It is probably not even human.
It is a hissing and sibilant tongue, and though Araari does not understand it she knows exactly what she is saying.
“Since I have learned to speak in the Tongue of Lies, I have seen the visions the Agony on the Wind says to me. The Agony on the Wind says you do not worship Him. I wish to show my power over our enemies. Even you must bend the knee. If you make the sacrifice, I will let you go, and you will know forever how weak you are.”
She holds out her hands.
Araari can’t make herself speak. She opens her mouth, then closes it. She shakes her head again, even though it doesn’t make sense, because she doesn’t have any control over whether she will die here or not. The world feels a little bit like it’s spinning. She prays to God, please, please, help me, please—
Blood wells up from Araari's skin. And the still small voice of God inside her says: even cultists have to run from a volcano.
It’ll take a while to call on God for something like this—but she can survive that long, at least. Probably. Hopefully.
He has a plan. She believes that. She has to.
Araari starts to chant prayers, over and over. God. Azathoth.
And cuts open up on Araari's skin, and bruises form, and it feels like her organs are rearranging themselves from the inside out, and she can hear the sickening crunch of something happening to her bones--
and she hears a cultist gasp and she keeps praying--
and the man drops her and starts to run--
and she runs too. She's not that far gone, she can hold on to that.
A few hours later she staggers half-dead into Kolluli.
Either he or Mordred is going to have to do that. Oswald might be better at the mindset that lets people do horrible miserable things without feeling anything in the moment. Mordred might need the practice, though, it feels like an abnegation thing to him.
"What else is left to be concluded?"
Packing. Packing is good, it's a concrete thing that needs to be done, Mordred can do concrete things that need to be done. At some point he is going to need to stop putting off having feelings but that point doesn't need to be now, and in fact can't be, because there is a concrete task that needs to be done.
Meanwhile--
Magnificence has decided to STEAL the six of swords, because it is Anemone. He is aware that this is not really how things work. But he wants it anyway.
Magnificence is TRYING to be STRONG and do what Anemone would want him to do, but he can't show any of his pictures to her, and it just makes him more distraught that she isn't here anymore.
Araari doesn’t move much while she’s in Kolluli. She sits with her back against the wall. She sleeps lightly and wakes often.
She doesn’t eat or drink anything between midnight and 3pm; she eats two (vegan) meals a day. She breaks her fast on Christmas.
She prays for hours. She doesn’t use the name Azathoth. It feels safer, like that. Sometimes she asks for guidance. Sometimes she thanks God. Sometimes she begs His forgiveness.
She spins thread until her hands ache and then she keeps going. She wishes she had a loom.
Zoe tries to keep her mind off of her worries by chatting with the people in the village. The language barrier makes it difficult, and she often resorts to pantomime, body language, and just being a companionable presence. She tries to help out, where her injury will let her. She tries to keep her wound clean and dressed and checks on its healing often, and wishes she knew more about how to help it. She spends time with Araari, but mostly avoids subjects like mouths and strange gods, often resorting to small talk or lapsing into silence. She does her best to care for Magnificence, but suspects he doesn't really want to spend a lot of time with her, and doesn't push the matter. She wonders how long the others will be, out in the desert. She wonders how Frank is doing, back at the airplane. She misses Anemone.
Araari has nightmares of the cultists. Of the volcano. She runs and runs. Sometimes she’s fast enough, and she has to watch their children die screaming, engulfed in lava. Sometimes she’s not fast enough, and she feels her flesh burn and crackle and melt.
When she wakes up, she runs. Not thinking, just moving. It’s hot. It is not hot enough. It feels like penance. Her feet hurt. Her legs hurt. She keeps running.
She runs for six hours before she collapses, gasping for air, on the hot sand. It hurts. Everything hurts. It almost feels like it’s enough, maybe.
"Araari! Where are you going!"
When Araari doesn't respond, Zoe worries. Even if Araari had decided she didn't want to wait here any longer, she wouldn't have run off into the desert by herself with no provisions. Maybe the thing that happened to her is happening to Araari?
Zoe runs to the bicycles and hops on one and goes after Araari as fast as she can.
Zoe is not actually sure how to overtake Araari safely. No matter which way she goes, Araari runs from her, and it's all open desert here. There's nowhere to corner her, and if she tries to stop her bike and approach her, she just puts more distance between them. Araari is very fast and does not seem to be tiring. Zoe despairs of catching her, and spends a moment torn between following her at a distance to keep an eye on her, and going back to Kolluli and possibly losing her completely.
Magnificence screaming is enough to pull her to a halt. She promised to take care of him and she can't do that if she gets them lost in the desert with no supplies. With a pained expression, she watches for a moment as Araari recedes into the distance. Then, she turns her bike back towards the village and pedals as fast as she can.
When she gets there she shouts for help, and tries to express across the language barrier how Araari ran off into the desert, how she has no water or supplies, how even when Zoe caught up to her she didn't stop running.
"We need to go after her, and find her! She's not safe out there!"
Zoe frantically begins packing.
Araari is not really talking. She is mostly just standing there while her eyes dart around looking for anything dangerous. Her back is firmly pressed against a wall so nobody can sneak up on her. This was perhaps not the ideal moment in her life for her to go to a foreign country for the first time.
The radio CANNOT bring Oswald back to himself. He cannot connect with the lyrics. There is something he's disconnected himself from and he can't look at it head on because he keeps flinching away from it and all of his feelings are very shallow and it's much harder to sink into music when you can't sink into anything.
Oswald goes to the library. The first time he went to this particular one was with Lev, just after they got back after -- everything. It felt like a place outside of time, then. A place outside of an increasingly broken reality, full of color and light in a way not particularly related to anything visually apparent. It still is, now, in a way, even here by himself. It makes him feel at ease.
Being with Lev does not, exactly make him feel at ease. It feels paradoxical, even though it makes perfect sense, that Lev is mourning and Oswald is twisted up inside and this isn't good for being able to find comfort in one another. And lately their time together seems eaten up by preparation and training, which is useful and good but it's not exactly stress-free.
Slowly, Oswald learns how to lie better. He works on his stammer and tries again to figure out his body language (with a much less scary source of advice than before) and plans out stories in advance since he can't make them up on the spot and lies, casually, pointlessly, almost habitually at some point, at the library and in stores and to people on the street, just to see how often he can pull it off. It's exhausting. He's getting better at it.
Magnificence spends more time working with his camera. He still wants to be good at it, because it was the last thing Anemone got for him, and he could tell that it was very important. This time, he thinks he's gotten a little bit better at it since he started, and he feels really good about that. He's going to be a little more prepared for things in the future.
Once Araari adjusts, New York is--nice. It's cold, too cold, and she spends a lot of her time inside and still shivering from it, but it's--free of memories.
She has her good memories: her netela, her mother's spindle, her crucifix necklace. They don't help like she's used to them helping, but they're--better than anything else would be. The rest of her memories are left in Ethiopia with everything else. She hides the first aid kid where she cannot see it and is grateful for once that she owns very little.
She finds an Ethiopian Orthodox church. It's less fancy than what she's used to, which is a surprise, because it seems as though everything else is much fancier in New York than it was back home, but it's--nice. People speak Amharic and Ge'ez. She takes communion. It feels almost normal. She had missed this, more than she realized.
She's not--happy, exactly, but she's not jumping at shadows anymore, and she can talk about what happened without going into a panic.
Agravaine is still having nightmares; Mordred doesn't get a lot of sleep. They're neither of them at their best and that -- makes sense, right, it's not like anyone would be at their best right now. Mordred wants desperately to be able to say I'm sorry I'm doing this to you and I'm sorry I'm putting you in danger and I'm sorry I'm worrying you but he's not, he has already decided this was worth it, it would be empty words and they would both know it and it wouldn't help.
He tries to not think about it, to work on invented grammar and vocabulary for a world that never was or is, and instead it just reminds him of that conversation with Louise Fauche and all he can think about is what's going to happen when they're in Malta and how on Earth he's going to keep everyone alive.
So instead - he reads. Not books stolen from the cult but Sinclair Lewis and Bertrand Russel and the books that he read over and over again as a teenager, the books that made him someone who will fight the whole world because it needs fighting.
It's still not perfect. But it helps a lot more than pretending nothing was happening helped.
Zoe spends a lot of time in New York at the shooting range, and makes trips out of the city to unpeopled areas to practice things they won't let you practice at a range. She's not going to be the one to put the clues together, but she can be the person who keeps those people alive. She practices shooting moving targets, shooting while running, shooting from moving vehicles. She envisions herself in different scenarios, rushing in to fend off whatever is threatening the others, saving the day. She tries not to think about how malaria is not the sort of thing you can shoot.
Mordred is probably going to wind up seeing the new movie twice and that's if Lev doesn't want to see it too. Ice skating sounds fun, it'll be a welcome change from the heat. He makes such a face at the idea of the girl across the hall having a crush on him, and then sees Agravaine trying not to laugh at the face he's making, and then smacks Agravaine in the arm and tells him to stop teasing but he's laughing when he says it.
Henslowe talks for a few minutes about developments in painting while he was gone, and other changes. There are apple sellers on the streets of New York now. The breadlines are striking to him. And it is remarkable to see the bars open for business. And talkies! Henslowe marvels at the talkies.
"Yes. Still, we can acquit ourselves well or badly in what Providence has put in front of us. And... it is a cold comfort to have acquitted oneself well-- especially if your friends are eaten, literally or metaphorically. But I find that my honor is one thing they can never take from me."
"We can acquit ourselves well or badly, but --" and here he struggles for words for a moment. "My friend holds the philosophy that people would be basically good, if they had the chance and the space to be. That being good is hard, because the world is broken, and not everyone can do it, but if they could they would be. I don't know if I agree. But I do think he's a better person than I am."
"From Captain Walker," says the first man. "He says you and all your friends should go back where they came from. Stop poking your nose in places it don't belong."
"Yeah," says the second man. "Be a shame if something happened to you while you were in New York looking into issues that don't concern you."
"Look at you, you fucking nun," says the first man. "You’re out of your depth. Why don’t you go home and pray a rosary, huh?”
"--Wait, she's a nun?"
"Of course she's a nun, didn't you read the briefing?"
"I am not sure how I feel about threatening a nun. I'm a good Catholic, you know."
"Nun or not, she's going against Captain Walker's business interests, and that is not good for your life expectancy. --If anything, we're helping you," the man says to Araari.
The first man is going to move this interaction back onto the intended territory. "What the hell are you doing in New York? Why the hell do you care what drugs Captain Walker might or might not be selling?
"You can't swear in front of a nun," the second man objects.
"Fine. What the gosh darn heck are you doing in New York, and why the golly gee whillickers do you care what drugs Captain Walker might or might not be selling? --Is that better."
"Yes."
"You should get back to Ethiopia, and we'll give you a little hint to help your memory," the first man says.
"You go to Hell if you assault a nun, I'm pretty sure."
"Fiiiiiiine." First man sighs. "Due to my companion's-- scruples-- you will not be given a hint to help your memory."