April 24, 2018

PodCastle 519: Burning Season

48 minutes

* Author : C. L. Clark

* Narrator : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Host : Setsu Uzume

* Audio Producer : Peter Behravesh

PodCastle 519: Burning Season is a PodCastle original.

Rating: PG-13, for things unspeakable.

It was burning season in Rashid. Again.

Even in the shop, I could smell the smoke. Can you believe I used to like the smell of burning paper? With my eyes closed, I can still see pages glow red before they burst into flame and curl into ash until they crumble.

I clerked at a small sundries shop in Commercial. The owner was a Duchies woman, one hand peach-pale, the other brown as her shop counter. She had no love for the All-King, who had toppled her Grand Duchess, but you don’t need love to run a business, just enough money to buy mercy. After that expenditure, though, she couldn’t afford to hire a licensed Translator. Coincidentally, I couldn’t afford a license, so she paid me a little extra to quietly broker transactions from the non-Duchies customers and shippers she couldn’t understand.

I am an Omniloquist. Some say we’re a curse the last true Rashidan king put on his enemies before he died, so that we’ll never flounder helpless under a conqueror. More say we have no true power, just an uncanny ability to pick up foreign sounds quickly. Until the All-King came, I was inclined to think the latter. We were a skill with a guild, like any other. And then he came, with his Collectors. There’s nothing natural about them. Maybe there’s nothing natural about us.

I slouched on my stool, drawing shapes with my finger in the whorls of the counter’s grain when the shop bell clanked and an old man shuffled in. He stumbled on a catch in the wooden floor. Loose trousers showed his bony ankles and a dirty rag around his chin protected against the soot. His dark skin hung loose on thin limbs and gray dreadlocks hung down to his waist. My hand strayed self-consciously to my own head, covered in short, springy curls. I’d cut my dreadlocks to fit in with the new king’s aesthetic.

“Can I help you, sir?” I asked in the All-King’s tongue. He didn’t look like a thief, but he didn’t look like he had coin to spare.

He squinted and shook his head. “I can’t understand,” he said in Rashidan. “I can’t understand anything but this.”

There was no one else in the shop and my employer was counting money or signing for a shipment in the back. The setting sun ignited the copper and glass and polished wood of half the room, while dousing the other half in shadow.

He could have been a spy, hunting Omniloquists working off-market. Yet I trusted him. I think it was pity.

“What do you need?” I asked in Rashidan.

His eyes brightened. “You are an Omni, yes, miss? Do you know my granddaughter?” Everything about him seemed uncertain. The inflection of his voice, the delicate wringing of his fingers. He’d barely looked at the goods since he started talking to me.

“Sorry, sir. I — I’m not an Omni, I just know some Rashidan.” I started to back away and called over my shoulder. “Madam — ”

“My granddaughter isn’t an Omni, either; she’s a student. Kiroga is her name.”

Spoken aloud, the name was a slip-dagger reopening a wound I’d cauterized with fear. Even when the door opened again, bell jangling, I struggled for my voice.

“She said to look for you if I couldn’t find her.”

Another frisson of fear, another step back. This was her vengeance.

He was no relation to Kiroga. She was the daughter of a Grand Duchies duke. With her swagger and dueling blades and her penchant for the finer things,

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