Inlojem stopped pacing and moved close to Quantelenk, so that his words were muffled and barely passed through the air to reach Quantelenk’s ears.
“You are the Master, Quantelenk - the last great Vesh of Omzul and the last Oolyayn in Uiwyesh with an Ulgayir to his name. The rest who hold our holy temples are Hagayalicks. They welcome this terror to our world and wait to kill in the streets again. We are both needed…here, in our village to protect these people. Why do you send me away, to protect this…this false prophet?”
Quantelenk nodded with a sense of approval at Inlojem’s doubt. “I have not believed in a child prophet for many harvests, Inlojem. But The Prophet, Iogi is named such for a reason.”
“You are asking me to die, Quantelenk. For a child prophet,” Inlojem seethed.
“No, Inlojem. I am telling you to succeed. Do not die or fail. Bring the child North and make sure you have safe passage from this world.”
“This is the Vesh you have chosen over all others to leave our world and represent the Oolyay.”
“This child is not the one I have chosen to represent the Oolyay. You are,” Quantelenk clarified.
Inlojem glared at him, seemingly unconvinced. Quantelenk sighed and slapped his thighs.
“Very well,” Quantelenk conceded. “If you do this for me, I will wander out from The Ulgayir and go toward the ship, and there I, too, will die in The Nothingness- surrounded by its minions…whatever they may be.”
“Your child prophet will have its life,” Inlojem intoned. The old priest slit an old palm upon his sickle-blade and rubbed the lavender ooze along Quantelenk’s cheek, to confirm the oath.
II
His name was only Teftek. He'd always noted it in his mind as a telling observation of Gilojen culture. Captain Teftek chewed y’Yoz root while dusted off the projectile loader on his Uim-Vorstram Repeater. He thought it was a decent gun but not “fine-looking,” like his Uim-Palstagler. The UP was what he used to hunt wild Ijsquin, which was admittedly a bit mean because the gun itself could bore a five-knot-hole in anything. He sighed, remembering it as he picked a Kadul-hopper out of the case register. He dangled it in front of his face by one of its twenty legs and sneered at it. He flicked the hopper aside; there was no reason to kill it. He wasn’t a foul Vesh after all. About a hundred children milled about the transport truck against which he leaned, and he started wondering about where his platoon had wandered off to. It seemed likely that they were all drunk and he was stuck being sober. Today he would have to transport some decrepit old fool and the little blind child his religion had tortured.
“Come on, Captain- that’s good protein you’re throwing away- you still wanna grow, don’t you?” said Pojlim. Teftek made another mental note that the man's name was only Pojlim, another Gilojen. Although they often despised each other, Omzul Vesh were not much different from Gilojen Vesh, except for an irritating obsession with pinning titles to everyone’s name. Teftek speculated that if he were born this far North, his name would have been something like The Annoyance, Teftek. Pojlim was nonchalantly glancing at the Captain’s activities between wrench-twists, tightening up the bolts on the truck’s foot-step nearby.
“Shut up,” Teftek blurted out callously, wounded slightly by the stab at his height. Teftek was a notoriously small, nervous male, who was known to “think too much,” according to higher Uyor authorities. He was a ragged Vesh with a ferocious sense of grit emanating from his lava red eyes. He kept his face clean-shaven, and his curly red hair was closely cropped between the thick, vertical black stripes that divided a Vesh’s head into three parts. His strong young eyes could see the specs of dirt on the Kadul-hopper’s legs and his ears could parse the frantic conversations of the rushed town folk around him. All these Vesh around Teftek were tall and muscular; beefy soldiers with muscles that could break one’s neck if they looked for too long. “I’m a captain. You repair trucks. How many Oolies have you killed, huh?”
“You might not wanna say that too loudly,” Pojlim warned, mocking Teftek’s arrogance. “Most of these people are, or were, Oolies.
Teftek waved his arm, disregarding the sentiment. “Who cares?” he scoffed. “They should be happy that there’re people stopping their crazed priests from sacrificing them at every turn. Who sacrifices their friends and neighbors?”
“Well, my grandfather was an Oolie,” Pojlim replied. “Wasn’t really like that…I mean, he wanted a quick death at the end of his life…”
“Yeah, yeah yeah- justification of barbaric rituals in the face of an otherwise legitimate argument, I churn where you’re straying,” Teftek replied, throwing his hand up again and pointing his chin a little higher in the air. “But you’re also talking about a bunch of Vesh who think, even now, under the threat of alien invasion that this is some miraculous sign of the coming of The Oolyay.”
Ridiculous stuigen rituals thought Teftek as the keen red orbs in his face darted from Vesh to Vesh. They prayed on the ground before they were loaded into transport trucks, and the Hagayalick devotees eyed the soldiers with looks of contempt and suspicion, watching their spouses and children leave them. He knew that the Uyor Seviogn could no longer protect them, but the Uyor Sevoign had never really been able to protect them from the start. They didn’t want it. They resisted it like a child resists medicine…like those damned child prophets resisted medicine even as they suffered from a brutal plague.
Teftek had fought for this region, killed Oolyayns and Hagayalicks - most likely many of these Vesh’s friends and kin. None of them wanted to be here, in this frigid, dark land where the white sun was even bleaker than in the South and the winters poured down snow until whole villages went missing. They were forced here when the Hagayalicks would not give up the fight. They were forced to stand against both religions, entrenched in their absurd sacrificial rituals - who would have thought that recording and distributing vid-reels of beheadings was a practice that was filled with honor? Oolyayn, Hagayalick, they were just different words for the same barbaric terror. The Hagayalicks would stab you in the back, the Oolyayns would stab you in the front.
Teftek chewed his Y’yoz root for a while longer before spitting it out. The flavor had gone out of it and that tingly sensation between his lips had stopped so it was otherwise useless. Sometimes he thought about his gums, and how some of the older officers’ gums had turned brown and cracked from chewing the stuff, so he didn’t chew it every day. He had a pretty strict regiment, in fact; once every five days, around mid-day.
Pojlim wiped the sweat from his brow, sliding out from below the footstep on the truck as the pale noonday sun shimmered on his stark white forehead and his black glossy stripes. He spat out an old batch and greedily stuffed more Y’yoz root into his own mouth before wiping his hands off with a grease rag. “When they issued the orders, where were you?” Pojlim asked. It was a question that had been asked all day, by all sorts of Vesh- or at least questions like it. Teftek had heard it walking down the street, in a café in Qol before he left, even from his ex-companion. She had messaged Teftek to say that she was also sorry about her recent infidelity, but the world seemed to be ending. He couldn’t see how it was relevant where someone was when the aliens invaded, but he understood the reason that other Vesh were asking.
Everyone was afraid; from what they had seen, these aliens were nothing like them- not even bipedal. They were strange, tentacled masses that seemed to churn the energy around them in and out of existence. These things were truly and entirely alien- far more different than the depictions of bipedal aliens, closely resembling Vesh in the popular science fantasy vid-reels. The mass broadcast of what the Uyor Sevoign was calling an “ultimatum” was mainly just confusing. The alien seemed to speak in friendly tones but had no grasp of the Vesh language, just spouting out words or phrases at random. The only way that anyone could tell that they were even invaders was that the asteroid colony and extra-planetary sensor grids had been destroyed- most likely by their ships. This information had been cla
ssified by the Department of Global Security, but Teftek was pretty good with squeezing classified information out of ranking officers.
“I was at a bare-knuckle match in The Grain District,” said Teftek. “A resident named Ridgol was knocking the qulrota out of a Haygy named Jium. Then some alarms went off and all the soldiers got rounded up and dragged back to base- you know the rest.”
Pojlim nodded and sat for a moment, mushing the Y’yoz root around in his mouth contemplatively.
“I was having sex,” he said at last. The response was simple and honest- Teftek decided not to follow up on it and, after a moment, Pojlim’s head disappeared back under the truck.
Teftek checked his pocket-ticker: Base 15, Unit 42. Late, he thought. As he brought his ticker away from his eyes, a child that seemed bleaker than anything he had ever seen stood almost directly in front of him. The child's cheeks were recessed so deeply that they seemed like canvas stretched across bone. The child’s eyes were not a Vesh’s eyes. They were neither white, nor red, nor even (like those very blessed, gorgeous models from the inner-cities) a hue of purple or orange; they were black. Pitch black. Outstretched toward Teftek was the child’s tiny, malnourished arm; rubbery white skin hung from his birdlike bones, and scrawny fingers looked rheumatic with bulbous knobby joints. A single finger protruded off the hand that pointed away from all the others, directly at Teftek’s forehead, as if attempting to drill into his brain.
“You are the death-priest,” the child said, his eyes seeming to look through Teftek towards something far away.
“What?” Teftek asked, shifting nervously and feeling deeply uneasy in the child’s presence.
The tiny little boy dressed in black, thick wool kept his hand firmly pointed at Teftek’s head.
“You are the death-priest?” he asked. Teftek realized now that this was a question and he relaxed just a little. Then a very old, tottering Hagayalick Necrologist strode up behind the boy and lifted his tiny frame up. The boy looked at the Hagayalick and repeated, “You are the death-priest?” Teftek relaxed slightly, not noticing Pojlim, who was secretly observing Teftek’s fright with slight amusement.
“Forgive him,” the ancient Hagayalick Necrologist interjected. “He is waiting for The Seeker, Inlojem…but I told him to go to your transport truck. Are you…uhm…The Captain, Teftek?”
“Captain Teftek,” Teftek corrected. “Not, The Captain, just Captain.” Most older Vesh had titles which seemed almost regal in nature, but were considered part of their names. These roles were ascribed to them during their youth in religious societies, but in the Uyor Sevoign these titles were either discarded or never given in the first place. Teftek would never find out that Pojlim was actually named The Grafter, Pojlim, because he had sewn a finger back onto an elder of his village when he was a child.
“Of course, Captain Teftek,” the relic of a Vesh said, stressing Captain far too heavily to mean any sort of respect. “This is The Prophet, Iogi.” He took Iogi off the ground and handed him to Teftek, who stood awkwardly with the child facing him, the boy's armpits resting on Teftek’s hands.
“You are the death-priest.” The child repeated. Teftek wasn’t sure whether it was a statement or a question anymore. The child just said it. Teftek handed Iogi to Pojlim, who had crawled out from under the truck to observe the wonderful awkwardness.
“Right, we’ll get him to where he needs to be,” Teftek assured the old Necrologist.
“Oh? Well…that’s good,” The priest replied dismissively, He was already walking away as three other children crowded around him. These children were much better nourished than Iogi, and they immediately began complaining about trivial discomforts while yelling at the old Necrologist for the smallest of offenses and pulling on his robes.
“Where’s Inlojem,” Teftek barked, his voice carrying above the complaints of the other child prophets who swarmed the Necrologist like Snap-fish.
“What? Oh…” The Necrologist turned around, with three children hanging from his arms and back, his old frame seeming as if it would collapse right there. “He is…”
“I am here,” Inlojem stated, pushing past the other Necrologist and walking directly toward Teftek. A child prophet started whining and grabbing Inlojem’s arm, and Inlojem pushed the child away from him by the forehead. The child began to cry, and amidst the chaos the other children began to cry as well. The ancient Hagayalick caretaker looked severely dismayed. Inlojem turned around and stared at all three children like a Shade just before it cuts open its victims. Their cries ceased. Inlojem turned away with a grunt and continued his B-line toward Teftek.
Teftek instinctively gripped his repeater and mentally prepared himself to speak to the towering old Oolyayn Necrologist, who lumbered at him in a manner that was also strangely elegant. Teftek straightened up as Inlojem reached him, and Inlojem stared Teftek down. The old Vesh’s eyes seemed to hold the world in their grasp; a looming sense of hatred that could not be manufactured over time, but seemed to have been built into him from the start. There were a thousand wrinkles around them, each one telling Teftek a new story about the trauma that this Vesh had either witnessed or had imposed upon others.
But Teftek knew something about trauma. The weapon at his side had eliminated villages, and no matter how creepy or strange, no Necrologist with some half-cocked belief about an ironic death-deity could scare him. He swallowed hard and then creased his brow as Inlojem finally spoke.
“This is it? You’re a boy!” Inlojem barked.
“I am Captain Teftek,” Teftek protested, “and I’ll have you add-“
“A little boy! They expect me to bring a child-prophet to the edge of the world, and they give me a little boy with a dung-popper to lead the way,” chastised Inlojem. His words were directed both at Teftek and to someone else entirely, as if cataloging this perceived misfortune to his deity. “What nonsense.”
“You will address me as Captain Teftek!” He barked.
“Captain of what? Other boys? Do you know what’s out there? Have you ever been in the country of Shades? Do you know what the Oolyay brought us on these vessels? I have slit the throats of boys like you in their sleep and spread their blood all over the camps, so that-“
“Are you going to get in the truck or are you going to stay here?” Teftek asked, losing his patience as he felt his fingers wrap themselves around the trigger. Inlojem’s eyes burned holes in Teftek’s neck, his own hand gripping his sickle-blade readily. Slowly, Teftek heard Inlojem’s footsteps, as he moved around the Captain, so smoothly that the motion was invisible at first. Teftek’s eyes followed Inlojem until he met Pojlim at the back of the truck. Still glaring at Teftek, Inlojem jumped up into the back of the truck, ignoring Pojlim’s tilted, respectful head and his outstretched helping hand. Teftek holstered his gun and pulled his eyes away, finally releasing the breath he'd been holding.
* * *
Inlojem sat upright on one of the pakrim benches inside the transport truck as its three-wheeled structure bumped along over rough gravel. Surrounding him were other boys, he thought, whose only differentiation from their captain were their muscles. Many had thick red or orange beards that spread from their chins like explosions frozen in time, and some had tattoos of Fio Rij Hagayal, or of The Oolyay. They had given Inlojem and the child prophet some space, leaving them on a bench of their own, pressed up upon the front of the truck’s tent-like enclosure against the back of the cab.
They looked and acted like grown Vesh, a couple of them singing and going on about a fight that had occurred in the town’s tavern. Yet, their voices quivered like prepubescent adolescents when they mentioned the dreaded alien ships that crashed throughout the planet. A hint of doubt entered Inlojem’s mind as he heard one of them attempt to explain the situation calmly using words like “fission frags” and “nuclear fires”. Such things elicited a more intense level of fear within the eyes of the young boys who surrounded the Necrologist.
They seemed so troubled by these wor
ds, words for strange weapons that Inlojem didn't understand. They looked like old men, if only for a moment, in their ponderous, concerned gazes. It led the old Vesh to invite a moment of doubt into his own mind, as he looked back beyond the town towards the distant smoldering wasteland that had been created by the falling alien ship. Even though he had already known, for the first time he understood that this was happening throughout the world; alien ships were crashing and eviscerating villages, towns and whole cities.
Inlojem watched The Ulgayir fade into the horizon of smoky ash and disappear as the truck struggled up the mountain paths, almost throwing him from the bench at each bump in the road. Inlojem knew that next to him, The Prophet Iogi stared at him with what seemed to be longing, keeping the child within his peripheral vision.
“You are the death-priest?” Iogi asked.
“Yes,” Inlojem replied coldly, keeping his eyes squarely on The Ulgayir as its points vanished. Inlojem had learned to detest child prophets because they had been so deeply corrupted by the Hagayalicks, who spoiled them and pampered them for every muttering line of tripe that came into their vacant, materialistic minds. Those children were undisciplined, royal and vicious, lying about someone they hated so that person would be killed by the Hagayalicks. Other times they simply spun myths out of their own creativity, and established new rituals just because they could. Eventually they would turn into Necrologists who killed, raped and tortured anyone who they proclaimed an enemy.
They were nothing like the child-prophets of Oolyay, whose very existences were predicated around suffering. In the early days, in the days of The Shades, when Shades would prowl from town to town and spread their plague across the land, the children of the Oolyay were brought forward through mishap and terror. The joy of those who received them, to see children spared by the vicious Shades was intense, but the suffering of their bodies was equally miserable. Their flesh were blighted with an unquenchable hunger at first, which would have to be fed until the fever subsided. Afterwards there was always dementia; a bout of sheer insanity where the deepest, unknown secrets of the Oolyay spewed forth into the cold world of Veshmali through the child’s unfiltered lips and betrayed the cruel God.
The Reward of The Oolyay Page 2
