Darkdawn - Jay Kristoff Page 0,232
a name that even the most piss-addled, bowlegged, slack-jawed inebriate couldn’t forget.
When in doubt, keep it simple, stupid.
* An alehouse classic known as “The Hunter’s Horn,” in which a poacher named Ernio learns several lessons from various young ladies about the value of possessing of an enormous …
O, never mind.
* In which Ernio learns that blowing one’s own horn is almost entirely …
O, never mind.
* Guaranteed to make you smile from ear to ear, gentlefriends!
* Autoerotic asphyxiation, in case you were wondering.
* Blacksteel, also known as ironfoe, was a wondrous metal created by Ashkahi sorcerii before the fall of their empire. The metal was said to be forged from fragments of the stars themselves, which could sometimes be seen tumbling from the night skies above the empire. Wily sorcerii hunted down these star fragments and forged the metals they contained into peerless weapons.
Blacksteel never grew dull or rusted and could be sharpened to an impossible edge. Even a fragment of the material was worth a living fortune—pound for pound it was far more valuable even than gravebone.
How Mouser got hold of an entire sword made out of the stuff is anyone’s guess, but if I were the gambling sort, I’d wager he wouldn’t be able to produce a bill of sale.
* The final volume in the extraordinarily popular and fabulously licentious Six Roses series, which chronicles the life, times, and jaw-dropping bedroom antics of six courtesans in the court of Francisco X. The series was biographical and named many high-ranking members of court along with the king himself.
So explosively titillating were the contents (Cardinal Ludovico Albretti was said to have suffered heart failure reading the climactic bordello scene in volume three), publication of the fifth volume caused a major riot in the streets of Godsgrave. The series was declared illegal by Aa’s ministry and, under pressure from his queen, Ilse, the king agreed to ban it—though it should be noted Francisco X was actually something of a fan and only outlawed the books under marital duress.
The author, Laelia Arrius, was imprisoned for life in the Philosopher’s Stone and sadly never completed the series, hence the presence of the final volume in the library of the dead.
I’ve only skimmed them, myself. The politics are rather silly. The smut is top-shelf, though.
* The leviathan is a fearsome predator of the Itreyan oceans and natural foe to the drake. It is possessed of hooked tentacles, a razored beak, and four large, saucer-shaped eyes. The beasts can be found in deep or shallow water and are hunted for their ink, which is both an indelible pigment and a potent hallucinogenic. Dweymeri use the ink in their facial tattoos and rites of adulthood, while the rest of the Itreyan population use it to get utterly shit-faced.
Ink can be utilized as an intoxicant in three ways—drunk, inhaled, or injected. Its various effects are summarized by this lovely little poem, often sung by children around Godsgrave during games of jump rope or the like.
Quaff for the nodding,
Smoking for the high,
Needle for the bitter man,
Who’d really rather die.
Morbid little bastards, aye?
* The unholy nature of Niah’s … feminine accoutrements … is a matter of some debate amongst theologians. Amongst most normal folk, however, the wickedness of Niah’s immortal lady parts is indisputable, and cursing by them is tolerated, indeed, vigorously encouraged by ministers of Aa’s church.
* Never do this. No matter how impressive it might sound to your future colleagues. Not only is raw meat more difficult to digest and less nutrient-rich, it’s also rife with ill humors.
When feasting on the flesh of your enemies, gentlefriends, always take the time to cook it first.
* Perhaps the oldest drinking game in the history of the Itreyan Republic, Kingslayer was originally known as “Beggar.” The rules for the game are basic—a glass is placed in the center of the table, and each player takes a turn trying to bounce a copper beggar into it. If successful, the player gets to nominate another player to take a drink.
The nominated player is allowed one chance at “revenge,” by attempting to bounce the coin with their off-hand into the glass. If the revenge bounce is successful, the original nominating player must drink twice. However, the original player is also allowed a chance for revenge, and if successful, the drink tally doubles again.
As you can imagine, among ambidextrous players, these revenge matches can result in a rapidly escalating tally of drinks. The longest official revenge bout was recorded between Don Cisco Antolini and the newly crowned Francisco XI at a grand gala celebrating the king’s own coronation. The beggar was successfully bounced back and forth between the men twenty-seven times, with the king ultimately missing the twenty-eighth bounce.
Mathematicians among you will realize this meant the new king was now compelled to drink 67,108,864 shots of goldwine.
Francisco XI wasn’t the brightest king to sit on the Itreyan throne, but he was a man of his word. Not to see his honor besmirched in front of his entire court, and against the advice of his queen, the newly crowned monarch resolved to make an attempt. He made it to his fifty-seventh drink before he collapsed, and despite the best efforts of his apothecaries, he died the next turn.
Francisco XI’s reign is the shortest in the history of the Itreyan monarchy, but remarkably, most of the citizenry found the tale of his end rather touching, and the game of Beggar was renamed Kingslayer in his honor.
When given the choice to be ruled by an honest idiot or a competent liar, most people prefer the idiot.
* O, fuck me, you were thinking. It’s been a while, I wonder where all the footnotes went? Maybe the author got embarrassed by everyone in his own book taking a steaming shit on them and decided to refrain for the rest of the novel?
Well, fuck you, gentlefriends.
The gorewasp is a flying insect of the Ashkahi desert, banded in red and black and measuring around a thumb length. Though it can’t compare to true horrors of the Whisperwastes like retchwyrms or sand kraken, they’re still particularly nasty pricks. Their stings are incredibly painful, and, strangely, a pregnant female’s venom is also imbued with psychoactive properties. Creatures stung by the mother-to-be will be thrown into frenzy by the pain, driven to self-harm or lashing out at those around them in an attempt to end their toxin-induced agony. Herd animals will be abandoned or, more frequently, killed by their fellows, and even human victims have been known to top themselves to end their own suffering.
The lady gorewasp then goes to work, laying her eggs inside the freshly killed carrion. She’ll lay upward of a hundred younglings, who hatch in a burst of rancid blood and rotting meat around nine turns later. Hence their rather unimaginative name.
So there. Another footnote. And there’s plenty more where that came from, you ungrateful bastards.
If you’re such an expert on literature, maybe you can write your own book, neh?
* There are a total of twenty-eight Itreyan legions under Imperator Julius Scaeva, and aside from the Bloody Thirteenth—Itreya’s renowned slave legion—the soldiers of the Seventeenth are probably the most infamous.
Led by Caius “Decimus” Viridius (himself an alumnus of the Bloody Thirteenth), the Seventeenth are the legion that operate farthest from the civilization, and thus, from the jurisdiction of Godsgrave, expected to keep peace in a largely untamed land that belongs to the Republic mostly in name only. In a place so vast, the legion maintains order largely by reputation rather than physical presence. And it’s not a reputation for kissing babies and helping elderly women cross the street with their market baskets.
For example, after a rise in taxation in the city of Nuuvash, the civilian populace rose in rebellion and destroyed its small garrison of Itreyan troops. Well-schooled in the art of siege warfare, the Seventeenth quickly retook the city. But Nuuvash was an important trading hub, and, unable to simply put the entire population to the sword, Viridius introduced the punishment of “redding.”
The entire civilian population, men, women, and children, were divided into groups of one hundred and forced to draw stones in a lottery. Those who drew a red stone—a full tenth of the participants—were set aside. The remaining 90 percent were forced to stone the losing tenth to death, or be executed themselves.
The final death toll is unknown, but of this we can be certain—that until the Republic’s fall, the people of Nuuvash never rebelled against Itreya again.