The Various Vermin of a Veduka City - The Journal of Anther Strein

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The Journal of Anther Strein

Observations from a Travelling Naturalist in a Fantasy World

Written by Lachlan Marnoch
with Illustrations by Nayoung Lee

 
 

The Various Vermin of a Veduka City

14th of Rewis, 787 AoC
Navel of the Forest, Clearleaf Plateau

I confess to having given little previous thought to the topic of how we were to cross the dry1 land intervening the Navel of the Forest and the Veduka River. This may seem like an obvious omittance to some – Prentis included – but I assure you that it completely slipped my mind until the Navel waterfall swung into view yesterday. Fortunate for us, a well-worn portage road straddles the forest between. Instead of making directly for the Veduka River as the wyvern flies, which would take us north-west, we are now proceeding by foot and belly along the Navel Road, which tends north. This will deliver us to Kaagmester, the capital of Clearleaf Kingdom. Unfortunately, our return to a terrestrial route meant that we had to leave our little riverboat behind – a shame, for I had grown quite fond of it.

However, its loss is not a complete waste. A merchant and his hired guards had also been camping at the sinkhole, on the opposite side – they arrived at the riverside this morning as we were packing our tent. Although they dragged boats with them on wheeled trailers, they seemed quite happy to obtain a spare. We were very fortunate to recoup this loss, however partially - the relative inaccessibility of the Sunken River makes it something of a backwater. The merchant, a canny operator who recognised our weak bargaining position, paid us less than half of the boat’s original value. No matter, we should still have enough to reach Forum. I am more concerned with the extra weight we now must carry – with the luxury of a vehicle in which to store it, we may have let ourselves become over-provisioned. A hard day's walk has made this issue quite apparent in our sore muscles, and I think before setting off tomorrow we will probably jettison some of our luggage.

This is the first true road we have encountered in our journey, and it does wonders to our rate of travel over land. We have made camp by it tonight, a little way off into the jungle. I don’t know how often the King’s soldiers patrol here, if at all, so best to be cautious – bandits and pirates are not uncommon in the less-travelled regions of Veduka Rainforest.

Moonsday 16th of Rewis, 787 AoC
Kaagmester City

We arrived this morning at the first city of our journey. Kaagmester lies at the confluence of a large tributary, bearing the city’s name, with the Veduka River. These are the two most important trade routes to which Clearleaf can lay claim. The Sunken River, which emerges from its subterranean passage into the Veduka further south-west, is a backwater by comparison to either.

The city straddles the edge of Clearleaf Plateau, spilling down the slope in a series of terraces and coming to a halt at the Veduka’s southern bank. At the city’s crest, visible from any position below, stand the King’s palace and the houses of government. The crest of the royal family2, a crimson rowax beating its chest with fangs bared, flutters from the walls. In a less-than-subtle act of symbolism, the Kaagmester River itself pours directly through the palace grounds, roaring as a waterfall from an opening in the outer wall. The river is then guided steeply through the city’s heart by canal, to spill, after a long journey from the southeast, into the Veduka River. Two adjoining sequences of pound locks, beginning on the Kaagmester somewhere behind the palace, descend in zigzag all the way to the wharfs on the Veduka. These locks, repeatedly drained and refilled to convey water traffic across the steep face of the plateau, are the most impressive aspect of the city, which otherwise has little to recommend it. One exception is the view from the promenades at the city’s crest, from which the Veduka River (our first glimpse of it, no less!) and the rainforest beyond 3are laid out in verdant splendour. From the wharfs at the city’s foot, one has to squint to see the other side of the River at all.

To the southwest, the jagged snow-capped peaks of the Crown Mountains are faintly visible, looming over the jungle as behind a haze of pale blue. There, the Kingdoms of Clearleaf and Torvus have their mineral interests – the range is laced with mines of iron, tin, copper and gold (from which it has been said the Crowns take their name); the products of these mines are sold downstream to the other Kingdoms. Most of the coins in the subcontinent are minted from metals mined among the Crown Mountains.


Although the Rainforest is the heartland of my species, tribes of our kind can be found far and wide. The Crown Mountains are no exception. The Paluchard native there consist mainly of herders and hunter-gatherers, and are considered strange and dangerous by those of Veduka. Having little to offer the feudal lords of the forest, and being notoriously difficult to curtail into obedience, they are usually left to their own devices - with some exception, as I will explain.

Among them are tribes that consider Torvus Grove, a landmark within the kingdom across the river, a sacred site; these tribes practice a spirituality based on the dualism of light and dark, and perform pilgrimages to the grove by mandate. It was in one of these groups that I undertook my first mission for the Order. Their way of life is stark, to be sure, and their customs are very different to those of the rainforest, but I found them to be quite a welcoming people. Utterly resistant to conversion, of course - but that was the priest’s problem, not mine.


There are also Ridorun, a rarity in the Rainforest, among the Mountains. Ridoru settlements amidst the peaks have often threatened the mineral operations of the Kingdoms; the frequent and daring raids of the airborne clans have entailed a platoon of armed guards in every mining town. Alliances between the Paluchard mountain people and the Crown Ridoru clans have been oft alleged but never conclusively proven; the tribesmen are accused of watching or even infiltrating the mines, providing intelligence to the Ridoru marauders.

Lack of evidence has not prevented many mountain settlements from being put to the torch – or the end of a rifle - in retaliation for Ridoru raids. The village in which I was completing my first mission was almost among them, in the aftermath of a particularly brutal series of pillagings Ridoru from the north-east of Torvus Kingdom. Had we of the Order not been present to stay the king’s soldiers, I feel sure that the entire settlement would have been butchered. Our priest at that time – a moral giant compared to the esteemed Taragos – met the Kingdom’s party in a narrow pass on the way to the village, placing himself between the soldiers and the villagers4 in an act of outstanding courage. Murdering in the presence of a Priest of Febregon was perhaps one step further than the raiding captain was willing to tread. This stance was not ubiquitous among his troops – I recall a distinct impression that several of them, from the murderous glares on their faces, would not have minded adding the slit throats of the mission to the bargain. Even so, they retreated. I suspect the motive of such raids, as little-justified as they are, is frustration. Stamping out the Ridorun of the Mountains has long been the dearest wish of the Kingdoms at the western fringe of the forest, but this has never been possible. Unable to reach the distant peaks which host the Ridoru settlements - most of which are accessible only by wing, and have responded to attempts at uprooting them only with retreats to ever-more remote locales - the mining lords lash out at any foreign scapegoat. The Crown Paluchard tribes present an easier target. That is not to say that there has never been cooperation between the Mountain tribes and the Ridoru raiders; to be quite frank, after hearing the mountain-dwellers retell previous incidents at the hands of the Rainforest Paluchard, I would not especially blame them if there had been.


Any hypothetical reader (what are you doing in my journal, anyway?) will have to forgive me for writing little on Kaagmester itself; no city has ever held my interest long. Hot, crowded things in general, with little opportunity for quiet reflection or observation. Of those I have visited, this is not among the more interesting. All I can think of, when looking about at the ramshackle sprawl of walls and buildings, is the ghosts of the thousands of trees that once stood here instead, and the animals that relied on them.

As little as I care for them, it must be admitted that it is far from fair to think of cities as sterile things – although they invariably displace a good deal of native wildlife, in its stead they play host to a curious range of urban creatures. The teri, the dulgi and the gwaemul are but a few of the animals ubiquitous to cities across Proesus, apparently thriving in the presence of sapients. It would be remiss of me not to make some account of them, as mundane a description as it may seem to any city-dwellers - for whom the animals are a daily fact.

I love birds of all kinds, and parrots especially – but in the city I am alone in this sentiment. The dulgi (Dulgius dosi), a parrot utterly at home in an urban environment, is treated by most as a pest. No other animal is so synonymous with city life. Flocks of these birds gather in any public space, squawking and skirmishing for every available crumb, and they make their nests in every available crevice. This includes churches and temples, the dulgi apparently lacking any religious sentiment. This irreverence extends to the mortal plane - no new statue, in any city, is long-raised before it receives a decorative coating of dulgi-droppings. Although the bird’s most common morph is a dull muddy brown, some of the birds diverge from this phenotype in quite a dazzling fashion, in a variety of colourations and patterns. This development is one that I find most curious - most mutations of this kind vanish swiftly in the wild. I think, having watched flocks of scallop birds in the Central Desert, that any divergence from the appearance of the flock marks the offending bird as a target for airborne predators - making the individual easier to follow and isolate and harder to lose in the convalescent chaos of the escaping flock. Thus, in wild places, a mutation in appearance is deleterious, unlikely to be transmitted to offspring in the fact of the bearer’s likely demise. In an urban environment, where such camouflage is less of a concern, animals with these outstanding features can flourish - and the traits are more easily passed to the bird's offspring. What a fascinating observation. This shall require further reflection.

The gwaemul (Gwoemul ahsung), another mainstay of the city, is a most bizarre predatory amphibian, seeming to dwell exclusively in city waterways (sewers included). I cannot say from where it first sprang - although certain signs point to Shull or the Fork – for it is a common sight now in every city across Proesus. I name it amphibian, for it shares that class’s ease of transition between water and land, but I suspect it might be more accurately placed among the bony fishes, despite its enjoyment of dry land – along with a host of anatomical features that connect it to this group, it has no larval stage, simply growing larger and fiercer with each meal. Its ambulatory, bipedal, almost clumsy gait is like that of no other tetrapod. The gwaemul feeds chiefly on small animals found in the city, teri and dulgi included, hunting them by ambush and hoarding their bones to build macabre little lairs.

Teri are animals with the appearance5 of moderately-scaled lizards. Strong generalists, they can eat almost anything, and are adept at living in tight quarters – such as the walls or floorboards of houses (and inns). Their hard, regenerating teeth can be used to chew through an alarming diversity of materials, which lends itself to their superb skills at entering spaces in which they are not wanted. They are thoroughly adaptable and very survivable, with excellent senses attuned to the location of new food sources. There are several species known, but the most widespread is the common teri (Terius heunhan), which has made a regular pest of itself. Associated widely with filth, this creature has been implicated in the spread of several diseases, and itself spreads like one – teri can breed at an astonishing rate, making them impossible to be rid of entirely. Where sapients live, so too do teri. I have found no exceptions to this rule; even remote farms are likely to have a teri or two scuttling about the ovix-pen. The best that can be done is to control the animal's numbers. There are certain breeds of grubdog specialised for hunting teri, and the staconid may have been initially domesticated for this express purpose; the vermin spider is widely kept in Essiloreth6 for the same.

The staconid and the grubdog are two other animals often encountered in cities, although more by invitation than the other species listed here. Both thoroughly domesticated, they appear either as pets or as street animals. In some cities, measures are taken against the feral descendants of former pets – Manifold and Baaikhan have dedicated animal control services for this purpose – but not so here. Nobody pays much mind to the occasional staconid swooping silently from above to take a dulgi by the neck, or a grubdog begging for food in a park. They do little harm, so far as I can see, and help to keep vermin at bay. A hostile grubdog is cause for concern, to be sure, and attacks do happen on occasion, but in Veduka cities at least the street animals seem of quite placid temperament – certainly compared to the feral packs that can be found roaming parts of the wild. Germinating in my mind is an explanation for this divergence – much as the strangely-coloured bird is the first eaten, the street grubdog with a tendency to bite sapient hands is the first eliminated by the authorities. Thus, those with a sweeter disposition survive longer, are more likely to reproduce, and – presuming behaviour can be inherited, an idea I take for granted but have yet to explore fully – more likely to impress this behaviour on the next generation of street animals.

Of great interest is how thoroughly well-suited to an urban environment are all of these animals. They seem to rely utterly on a sapient presence for providing food and shelter. The behaviour of those animals that have made the urban setting their own would not, and does not, fare them well outside of it. The teri and the dulgi are seen apart from sapient quarters only rarely, and the gwaemul never. Cities have not existed forever – even the oldest ruins in Proesus have a finite age. So unless it is that city animals were created to experience lives leashed to us, it stands to reason that the behaviour of these animals was not always so fine-tuned for living in cities – that it must have, in some way, changed in response to the rise of the artificial environment.


I have not been marking the days of the week on my entries – merely the date with respect to the month – for a simple reason: since arriving at Leafshrine I, along with the rest of the mission, completely lost track of which day it was. The Leafshriners keep time by a different cycle, one which did not appear to correspond well to our week. This was not helped by Priest Taragos’ habit of calling mass on whichever random day of the week suited him. I have forgotten to ask at every stop since! Today, as I learned from a passer-by (whose answer to my question came along with a look that assumed of me the utmost stupidity), is Moonsday. We hence had the luxury, this evening, of visiting a chapel administered by the Order so that we could pray on the customary day. Although both of us have kept up a version of the weekly worship required by the Book of Dreams, we had not done so in a proper setting ever since leaving Leafshrine, and with only a guess at the proper day (we were, in fact, performing our rituals on Opalday). Febregon will forgive us, I am sure, but it is pleasant to be back on schedule.

Although overwhelmingly Paluchard, there are Austia here in the city, and Essilor too – relegated to a set of ghettoes lining the wharf districts. We encountered several at the service, although overseen by a Paluchard minister. More of these species are present than I expected, given Prentis’ reception along the Sunken. But I suppose if foreigners are to be found anywhere in the Kingdoms, it is along the Veduka River.

Although I had originally planned to purchase another rowboat here, I think we will instead book passage on one of the river ships making their way downstream. This course of action may prove more economical, and more prudent – the safety of a large watercraft will serve well on the river. There are plenty of lakes, lagoons and harbours adjoining the river, unpatrolled by the Kings’ navies, for pirate bands to set up base - a lone rowboat crewed by two would be a surpassingly easy target. I will miss the instructiveness of our close encounters with the wildlife, but not the danger. For tonight we take rooms in one of the inns set a little back from the wharf district. The inns further up are more liveable, but proportionately more expensive, and we may yet have to stretch our coin to reach Forum. Still, any bed7 is a relief after our almost month-long journey8. Has it really been so long already?

 
 

1 A relative term in the ever-moist rainforest.

2 Their name has slipped my mind for now. Oh well.

3 Lying in Torvus Kingdom, the Veduka forming the border between it and Clearleaf.

4 I was tempted here to describe them as ‘helpless’, but many of their warriors had taken up strategic positions in the pass, hidden from view. If our priest’s negotiations had failed, they were prepared to defend themselves - but I am certain that they would not have lasted long against the steel armour and weapons of the soldiers.

5 I say ‘appearance’ merely because they may not be true lizards – this is currently a matter of some debate. They seem more quick-witted than the reptilian lizards, and might be warm-blooded. The lack of relatives on Proesus has always suggested to me an origin in the Old World, perhaps in Toradus, but this is mere conjecture.

6 I found this somewhat alarming at first – such a large arachnid to have scuttling around indoors – but Essilor are not easily startled by spiders. Living in Essiloreth, one becomes accustomed to the occasional encounter. Paluchard are generally frightened by spiders, although the presence of many large examples in the Rainforest dictates that we can become used to them quickly, with forest-dwellers learning from a young age which are safe and which must be avoided; Austia, on the other hand, are universally and incurably terrified of them.

7 Even one accompanied by the patter of scurrying teri in the walls. Still, it’s not all bad – the headboards of the beds, the first with this feature that I’ve seen since coming to Leafshrine, are equipped with hanging posts for our dreamcatchers! Previous, we’ve made do with stringing them from the inside of our tent or from nearby branches. It hasn’t bothered me much, but I think Prentis was much relieved to properly engage in this evening ritual once again.

8 And even before – as gracious as its inhabitants were, Leafshrine was hardly the epitome of comfort.