Mullah Shaj And The Blue-Tooth'd Wyzard Of Klem

7 Raby` al-awal 1328 A.H.

When we arrived in Klem, at sun-up, we heard the local Zu-priests invoking the poisonous song of the Gyrosphyrinx; the local fish-sellers baking their day's catches of lung-fish and brown-tongues from the River Of Mud into fresh clay; the women of the city moving towards the Hall Of Nomination, to decide the day's Tyrant (which word, "b'kyari," here, means "Righteous Walking Stick Of Civilization" according to Obul); the one-eyed beggars turning, rustling to their beds in the wall-coves of the Lame Quarter, having just sold their catches of rats, rat-fish, and fishing-rats (brain-mouse) to the local fish-sellers, who re-sell the rats as "lung-fish," or even a nonsense fish called Fear Chode (always capitalised); &c. We arrived and heard these things--all people following one another, mouths following stomachs--all ignoring us, our tight metal-clanking machine of Death, come to steal their fish, if not their law, peace, and girl-children. [I myself, I should note--unlike most of the men, esp. the Captain--am celibate.]

That idiot Captain Tariq, or "Shah Tariq al-Tariq," as he now calls himself, honestly believes we are getting closer to the monstre. The rest of us know the truth. We are not only lost, but running out of supplies. We keep... fighting for some reason. We run into a new village, pillage it, or else debate with its famous & infamous Debators, then pillage it. Or we don't. But still we eat. The Bridge Of Anger--for example--when we passed it, the crumbling, wending, black-stoned way up the heath-mountains: We were made to strip to our waists, to let the "vapours" of the mountain cleanse us of hunger. The men ate rocks, and some of them became very sick. I spoke with my friend Mullah Shaj, who is too pious for comfortable talk, but a very smart man, and a friend of mine in Science, and said, "Mullah Shaj, don't let the men eat rocks!" We were silent for a long time. Then he said, quietly, "Viz Sabbatai, ours is a party of goats. They have to eat something!" We did not laugh as he gestured to the sickly, hungry men, who do not care of monstres or songs or new realms and new gilt.

Our strange leader's latest strange decision (our life, all our lives, a string of decisions, ill or no) is this: That when we finally do meet with the day's Tyrant of this huge, red city of Klem, we will not beseech her to turn over her maps, treasures, magicks, unseen beasts, beauteous courtesans, or hidden religio-philosophical (or, more likely, sophistrical) texts, but that we will only beseech her to reveal the identity of the city's Blue-Tooth'd Wyzard, a woman who has lived a thousand years in twelve thousand bodies, trapped every few eclipses (an eclipse is coming now, says both the Mullah and the astrologer, F. bin-Hussein the Younger, who wears brilliant hats) by some weird psycho-magnetic power that I've yet to study. Though I am interested in this power, I am not interested in witch-hunting. And why does she have blue teeth?

A few theories: 1 - She is made of blue chalcedon, or green-blue quartz-crystal, such as the famous Mostly Crystalline Cat and the very famous Great Crystal Duck of the Sultan were constructed from. 2 - She is a whale (this is Obul's theory--I include it to be complete with all suggested theories, drunken, unlikely, or otherwise). 3 - She is a blue-tooth'd djinn (can speak from its ears, and hear with its mouth), such as is mentioned in the lost book of The Story-Sea of Raqiq F.'z. This is only likely in the Captain's fantasy-world of monstres and treasures. Mostly, the people of the white-apple-bearing-tree-forested lands have been industrious barbarians, false witches, or true but earnestly republican seers, with no interest in the occult.

There is one other theory, Mullah Shaj's: 4 - The Blue-Tooth'd Wyzard (why does the Captain insist we spell her name that way? abominable antiquarian...) is really a Figment, a Fantasm, a sign-post (he loves the word "sign-post") meant to hurdle us closer to the Gyrosphyrinx, a thing that may or may not exist, and may or may not be capture-able, and may or may not have a killing-song that I can somehow ingeniously trap for the Captain to take back to Istanbul. Why would Shaj believe such a thing? He strokes his still-black beard (though he is very old--he should not stroke his beard, or he will have a bald chin, I have read) and says that he has heard the song of the evil 'Sphyrinx, as has, or so claims he has, our Captain. He says this with a straight face (crooked beard), and I am inclined to believe he thinks he has, whatever that means...

Between the tall, perhaps purposeless buildings that form the jagged skyline of red Klem, a sun purses its lips over us, and suddenly there is no traffick. The streets are clean of dust and swine-smell (common in the other cities of these lands). The men are hard at work, or so we've been told by the Amazonian-looking guardlady, cloaked toe to crown in little beads and shells, as armour or as decoration or both. She walks slowly, and so do we--the Captain, the Mullah, the crazed Scot, and myself. Where is the astrologer? The cosmologer died a few weeks back, and no one has taken his post. Was it hunger, or dysentery, or both? No one now remembers. He has no headstone. Or else I wrote it, and now forget. A rat wearing a green helmet shuffles forth to train his black eye (one huge one) on my two brown eyes, which train themselves back at him. Strangely, for whatever reason, I feel the universe looking at us in this same manner...