straight from sabbrok

Art By Moebius/Giraud

 

Straight from Sabbrok had they come, the city most scheming low on the horizon by the time they made camp. Wreathed in writhing wormsmoke from the ground where the sacred serpent turned and twisted (they had buried its tail in the earth, made fire made upon its head) they watched as it wrote the secret language of spirits into the dust of the ditch where they sat.

Their beasts still stood, shivered vast shoulders and steamed and stomped: Priest’s Horses, large and pale, legs double knuckled, necks low and long, no fur but downy feathers, no flat teeth for chewing grain but thick fangs full of venom nectar that the riders milked each morning and each night drank, as they were drinking now, from blue ogre head gourds twice or thrice the size of any squash or pumpkin plucked from the fields of wavering green that flanked the road.

Though each of the riders were priests, none of the five faces flushed in the last embers of the serpent’s slow burning had come to the faith in the same fashion, and though they had all received the same missive from their masters in the early hours of the twinned dawn, and all had obeyed the commands, had ridden from Sabbrok while the green sun of the city had yet to rise above the smokestacks of the factories, each carried hidden purpose in their heart which weighed heavy, and kept them from conversation with each other. 

Their eyes, however, were far more active than their stilled tongues suggested, and beneath the heavy-lidded paint that picked them out as priests, their vision flicked and whirled from face to silent face, counting each countenance as if conducting some ceremony, each visage a vital aspect of an arcane calculation.