The origin of any people smart enough to consider the question is almost always murky. Almost always. Almost.
The truth is most exceedingly touchy, you see, to say nothing of long-forgotten. And it’s so much more entertaining and satisfying to make it up for yourself.
The inhabitants of Matagan claim that they were placed there by the gods in general and their gods in particular. An old chestnut, but they are the fondest of both old chestnuts and this one in particular.
The people of the faraway Terramac do not speculate on their pasts any more than their futures. And in times long-forgotten, no doubt they believed the same thing.
The dunegrowing and strange folk of Gizikk say they walked out of the sand one day in a fit of youthful rebellion, and that they will each only come home to it when they grow old enough to speak its words and think its thoughts once more. This gives their parents less sway than you would think.
The Oth!Arh!Ehn of the Widenedlands hold that they were once nothing more than maggots on the corpse of a bird on a riverbank until the hour of the Drawing Apart came. This is the source of themselves, Ing!Ehn! the city of flesh, and the Oth!Onn!, the great river whose banks are spanned two thousand miles apart. Those who dispute this point at their lack of resemblance to maggots; those who agree contest them to display a man whose innards do not bear distinct resemblance. Such volunteers are scarce, and the evidence garnered thus remains hotly contested.
The Ta’s thoughts on their origins, or whether they have those thoughts at all, are unknown to those that are not Ta. They do know, however, not to ask questions.
By comparison, the tale of the first of the Bitters is practically and literally an open book. For you see, much of it was recorded and documented as it happened.
Simmyon Besch was a man given to proclivities, and rare ones at that. No, not the more common and common-sensical proclivities of the flesh; rather, his Sir Besch, Most Official Magistrate and Counsellor to the Consul of Demmer-Don-Dimmer was a great chaser and hounder-after of the strange and peculiar sensations and patterns of the mind. Six and forty books could have been written on his rulings of the law – although at present they number a mere twenty and nine – but his title and position, and its responsibilities, were at best an inconvenient nuisance to him as he labored at his workbench, squandering his labors to pursue his fancies. The despair of lawyers was the pleasure of the traders and merchants of Demmerdant, for Simmyon’s inexhaustible demand for novelty and ferocious pace of research had quickly exhausted all local psychological substances, and funded many a far-flung expedition.
The men of the colleges frowned at him sometimes, but those that did were inevitably older set in their ways. Those who were possessed of more youth or more kindly nature lent a more benign eye to his efforts. Some few daring professors even offered collaboration, but none – not even those who proffered mere advice free of authorial strings or indebted hints, not one – received more than a polite and thoroughly stated refusal. His Sir Simmyon Besch was not a selfish man, but he was a relentless one that would follow his own lead come hell over hinterlands. His research might be shared, but never its direction.
There are many who wish that Simmyon Besch had had the decency to be selfish.
It was a failure, of course.
They always are, aren’t they? The first man to make cheese wondered at the foul decomposition of his milk; the first maker of sear-taffies groused over how the Nabat-wood some fool had slipped into his ovens had fried his chewy, crunchy jerky into elastic, charcoal-tasting softness; the man who sought to blow a bottle of glass swore mightily as the misshapen lens a sneeze had created bored sunlight into a flame at his britches. Without failures, successes would be rare indeed.
This was small comfort initially to her Lady Menthiss, Highly Official Lord-Judge, on the day the failure occurred. A trial was completed, its filing sorted, its review in dire need and its political fallout in want of plumbing to the utmost fathom. Her hand raised to the latch of the Most Official Magistrate, her throat cleared, and she was promptly catapulted straight onto her rear against the Most Plush Carpetting, left prostrate at the blindly advancing feet of Simmyon Besch.
“It will never work!” he screamed. “Never! The thoughts of mind – made manifest as muck! Party tricks and lies! Frauds! Empty child’s-stink!” He spat so viciously on the carpet as to leave a permanent stain (of what sort was never found), and stamped away in a mood that was very nearly as foul as the stink that wafted from beyond the open doors of his chambers.
Her Lady Menthiss was a woman of utmost conscientiousness. She would never dream – never imagine, never HINT – at intruding upon the premises and possessions of her superiors to satisfying idle curiosity. Such a thing would be an appalling breach of protocol, every bit as recklessly misguided as refusing to investigate a possible health hazard that his Sir might have left behind in his grief-ridden haste. Therefore, she made sure that no servants were about to do themselves harm, then went into Besch’s chambers and shut the doors behind her.
When she emerged a half-hour later, with crossed eyes, a running nose, and a thoughtful expression, the first thing she did was run to a servant and demand that the Lord Dean of Demmerdant be summoned immediately.
The second thing she did was to seize pen and paper and march straightaways back into Simmyon’s Besch’s offices and begin to take notes with the speed of a racehorse in heat, from then until the arrival of the Lord Dean some three hours later.
His Sir Simmyon Besch’s efforts of the last eighteen months had been in utter vain. Rather than creating a medium which would replicate the precise thoughts of an experimenter, bringing the purity of mental and spiritual imagery to the typically meager domain of material form unscathed by clumsy transition through poet’s pen or sculptor’s chisel, he had instead produced a foul-smelling cauldron of oily substances of varying thickness, in volume a little less than two litres. It roiled incessantly, produced surprisingly little noise given the turbulence of its surface, and put the odor of the sharpest cheese in Demmer-Don-Dimmer to shame.
It also produced seemingly random structures within itself given enough time. Lattices of stringy crystals and webs of gummy resins.
If a sufficiently pained note-taker were present, over a sufficiently lengthy period of time, one might recognize said structures were somewhat less than random.
If said notetaker were pathologically rigorous in their observation of detail and mundane reality, and possessed of an unimpeachable memory, one might recognize that they were, in fact, replicating a precise, if highly abstract, map of the surrounding table.
The notetaker, of course, would be highly surprised by this, and greatly excited by the notion of a substance that, although lamentably incapable of telepathic properties, was nevertheless capable of forming a perfect copy of its surroundings. A useful discovery to be sure. Anyone would be happy enough with this. Anyone at all.
But only the most inanely patient person imaginable, a person steeped in pedantry, marinated in tedium, and with a deft grasp of the most monotonous details of language, would’ve noticed that the text from Simmyon Besch’s open (self-authored, incomplete) tome on psychoalchemical processes had been altered substantially in the little model floating in his cauldron. The alphabet and sentence structures were broken down and rearranged, changing, always altering, vanishing and reappearing and restructuring itself like a child playing with blocks. Methodically.
The days that followed were tumultuous and heady, nearly as much so as the vapors that fumed from his Sir Besch’s creation. Besch made no protest when the men of the college removed the object of interest from his study; indeed, he thanked them for sparing his eyes the sight of his failures. His eye’s gain was the loss of their noses: within an afternoon’s time the laboratory the fluid was host to was a den of fumes, and Besch’s cramped, crabbed notes were made nigh-unreadable in the thick haze.
Codes were deciphered. Questions were sent to Besch (once again burdened in the realm of law) and returned with answers which begat more questions. Ingredients were purchased from traders, angrily returned, replaced, exchanged, and finally repurchased. Flames bubbled and laughed to themselves underneath hissing fluids, running riot over iron-rimmed crockpots.
Several of the more elderly professors nearly fainted in the later stages of examination, but after a hasty revival with lemon water, the verdict was triumphant. Where once the college had possessed a single two-liter cauldron of Besch’s mysterious self-teaching fluids, they now held two, virtually indistinguishable in every way.
The only question now was what to do with them. Which would have been so very simple to solve if everyone hadn’t had an answer.
In testing, a broader sampling conveys a more credible result. This is practical and reasonable. And this it was for practical and reasonable motives that over a dozen more of the oil-and-smoke mixtures were produced for consideration, as well as for the purposes of petty feuding and academic tribalism. The urges to tinker and test were nigh-unstoppable, and even close colleagues were set apart from one another on the exact methods to use to probe Besch’s mysterious solutions. His Sir Mozzen Fen was not about to contaminate his processes of psychochemical overlap with the inept bungling of his Professorship Bentin Tanton’s nearreal vapor thematics. And of course neither would be caught dead adding that ludicrous pet project of her Deaconship Tessala Manner’s – dynamic hueing as a conductor of dreams? As likely that the sky were supported by eight cherubs, thank you very much.
No, no, each curious investigator demanded their own playground with which to expand the cognitive horizons of Besch’s brew, and every week more and more of them came to poke and prod and investigate. The quantity of vats used grew too immense for any classroom or study lab, and a gymnasium was conscripted to hold the sheer volume – much to the ire of the students, who not only felt the sting of being deprived of athletics and sportsmanship but also the sore goading of their building’s new overlords, who pressed them into service as monitors, recorders, and minders. While her Professorship snored, a student sat at her vat’s-side, pencil tickling, mind stewing, feet tapping, nose prickling under the veiled mask provided to ensure safety from the noxious vapors.
It shielded the body from harm, perhaps, but the nostrils from disgust, never. Each vat grew its own odors, all varied, all overpoweringly mighty in expression, so that even the sweetest-smelling stew was as great a chore to monitor as that which brought to mind a rotting carcass. The students, left to their own devices, developed their own peculiar means of sorting and identifying the projects. Sours. Sweats. Sicklies. Sweets. Bitters. Rotters.
It was the Sicklies that produced the first results, some two months later. While nodding off over his studies, the nameless student on observation duty for the vat – whose only known traits must include an iron stomach, as the Sicklies were jointly if unofficially ranked the vilest of the brews – raised his eyes from the tiresome book he was poring over, rubbed futilely at them with fatigued paws, and returned his gaze to the words in front of his face. So deep was his exhaustion that it took until the end of the sentence for him to realize he was staring into the cauldron rather than his textbook and reading a question instead of a tiresome piece of anecdotal evidence.
The question was thus: what am I?
Whether – whatever – the student responded is also unknown.
The cognition, as that moment was dubbed, was credited to the tireless efforts of Professor Tanton. His nearreal vapors were a good deal nearer than any had surmised, including his Professorship himself, and he was rained so greatly in glory that he near-drowned in it. The creation of an artificial psyche, in a laboratory, from a culture of mere liquid and gas, broiled through a piping system of not-quite-there ethereal mist scavenged from beyond the Sill itself! The only name of genius more eagerly swept from lip to lip was that of Simmyon Bash, the man whose grand failure had begat such a triumph.
Alas, his Sir Besch was not available to witness the fruiting of his glory. He had been found three weeks before the cognition, at his desk, immobile. Surrounding him on that ornate wooden surface were a mechanically-altered Ta Listenstem, a lead-woven and silver-inlaid pouch of sand and gold of Gizikk origin, a female Sfoll’s prime brain-horn, heavily-stained with unknown substances, and a series of exotically-constructed vials containing mind-altering fluids, powders, and particles too potent to be named, let alone sold. His expression was quite impossible to read, and most novel to all who looked upon it.
The cause of death was deemed to be a blood-clot in the brain, though no-one quite dared to perform an autopsy on that augustly domed forehead, for fear of seeing what may have lain within.
Of course, when all the champagne and shoom have been consumed, there’s still the tidying-up of the research left to be done. Tedious, but necessary. Like chewing.
First and foremost was the rapid shunting away of the failed vats. As important as they had been when they could have heralded the soon-to-be Great Discoveries of their creators, they were now embarrassing might-have-beens, and the sooner it could be pretended that they had never existed, the better. The failures – and the one or two students that were felt to be necessary to tokenly ‘observe’ them – were shut up away in a small laboratory and ignored for the sake of many a scholarly reputation.
After that came the tests. Tests of intellect, tests of responsiveness, tests of basic empathy and emotional development, tests tests tests. Some of the later ones the Sicklies began to suggest improvements for, and that was when reserve was cast to the winds and gales in favor of headlong informational exchange.
The Sicklies were apt pupils, and quick learners – though of course, all communication had to be done by means of placing texts adjacent to their cauldron. But with a swift stenographer and the addition of further bulk material to the Sicklies to aid in construction, communication was fluid and swift. Within hours of discussion in philosophy, they were giving even ground to his Doctorship Iblon Nott in matters of ethics. A week of biology and chemistry gave them expertise enough to speculate upon the parallels between their own forms and that of those who taught them, and within a short month the Sicklies were polymaths of a sort unrivalled within the school’s walls.
It was most disturbing. But permissible. Novelty is permissible.
And then one day, as the Lord Dean himself was just concluding an exhaustive interview with the Sicklies on the subject of the governance of Demmerdant’s academic community, a question emerged within its depths: when may I see the city?
The Lord Dean gave the eminently reasonable reply that the Sicklies had of course seen the city already, or were they not this very moment within the hallowed walls of his office; his, the Lord Dean of all Demmerdant, the greatest city in Demmer-Don-Dimmer?
The rest of it. All of it. I want to see its walls. I want to see its rivers. I want to see its markets and its highways and its towers. I want to see the palace of the Consul of Demmer-Don-Dimmer, and I want to see this building from the outside as it truly is. I want to see the city, and judge for myself whether it is what I have imagined it to be.
The Lord Dean hemmed and hawed of ‘lack of preparation’ and ‘all things in good time’ – adeptly, for he was no freshly minted member of faculty – and sent the Sicklies away. Immediately following this he consulted with his professorial council, and from the pooling of their collective wisdom and matured insight the following was determined:
That the substance which was capable of learning, known as the Sicklies, did possess desire and drives.
That the Sicklies did also possess self-assertion and the capability to ignore or argue against perfectly good advice.
That the Sicklies were indeed already possessed of knowledge pertaining to many of the physical and psychological sciences comparative to that of the collected council, in a post-cognition period of less than a month in length.
That this knowledge so generously (in hindsight, perhaps less than wisely) shared to it could be dangerous, especially in so changeable an entity, and one capable of expanding its intellect so rapidly.
And finally
That something should be done about this situation.
Which was
That the Sicklies must be disposed of.
It was easy enough. The Sicklies remained in their original small, lightweight cauldron. As simple as picking it up and carrying it to the nearest waste-sink. As simple as tipping it forward a few degrees, held gingerly in gloved fingertips by a student who was only a little more cautious than bored.
The liquid drained away quite rapidly, despite its thick and sluggish appearance. Behind it remained only a hairline-thin crystalline lattice, half-formed into half-thought sentences, already brittle and pale in the daylight that peered through the laboratory’s cobwebbed windowpane.
Three taps sent that into the sink as well, and a rush of water to follow.
Even the smell was gone.
After the Sicklies were disposed of, the question remained of what to do with the remainder of the vats. And of course, it required many hours of debate after a full reformation of the professorial council to reach the eminently sensible decision to do away with them too.
The sinks required the attention of plumbers at least three times during the process, and one unfortunate had the entire contents of the Sharps spilt all over him from head to toe, putting him in a vinegar-scented sickbay for over a month. But this, asides from a few stubbed toes, was the only real disruption of a messy but necessary business. The sun set, the sun rose, and the college of Demmerdant was as it had been before. Serene and knowledgeable.
One week later, the Bitters walked through its doors.
Much of what had occurred in the gap between the purging of the vats and then is supposition and guesswork, troubled by a lack of important witnesses and much use of it-stands-to-reason. But the general presumption is this: the Sicklies had been the first of the vats to reach cognition, but they had not been the last. Somewhere in the hubbub and excitement of the event’s aftermath, somewhere in a dimmed room with only a solitary set of distracted eyes to observe, the Bitters had awoken, or perhaps simply finally found the means with which to express thoughts that had long been simmering in their depths.
It had learned, perhaps. In the quiet, it had theorized and tested and predicted and observed all by itself. It had taken lessons from the dark and been tutored by dust, it had hypothesized of the world outside the doors by the dirt on the boots of its monitor, it had inducted biology from the germs and mites and spiders.
And while it learned, it had learned to move.
Crystalline lattices were a known thing to it. Extending them was no real feat of logic. Searching the immediate environs with these probes for nutritional additions was an incentive to explore, as well as a good means of providing more fuel to build with.
The testimony of the second plumber should be mentioned here. After his turn at the laboratory sink, conducted from the dankness of the basement, he swore that the cause of the blockage had been a rat ‘lodged-whole’ in the laboratory drain, and that the creature had skittered away with a clumsy gait after he freed it. “A wonder the thing ‘twasn’t drowned.”
Following this, analysis of recovered texts from the college indicate that student book theft from the library rose nearly 400% over the week, in direct flabberghastment of a statistically expected average of records from the last century. This was noticed, complained of, and collected together with warnings of missing lab equipment, particularly glass beakers and the like. Dark suggestions were made of students plotting to brew psychoactive substances for their own childish amusement, and the dorms were searched no less than twice, without warning each time.
Nothing was found, the disappearances of odds and ends were chalked up to carelessness, and the life of the college moved on.
On the day the Bitters stepped through the guard doors of the college of Demmerdant, it stood five feet eleven inches in height, approximately, and not much less in width. In shape it was a lump with limbs – four stumpy legs that moved in oddly sinuous motion, and a pair of great elongated reaching things with blunted appendages. In matter, it was glass, it was ceramic, it was metallic, it was a hundred, a hundred more vials and beakers and cauldrons and pots and kettles and cups and dishes, all sealed in strangely malleable glue that beaded with a dark and heady perspiration. This figure was lashed together with twine, wire, rope and an unhealthy conglomerate of glistening near-solids; it should not have stood upright, and yet it strode faster than a man might run. The air around it seared the nostrils raw with its intensity, and in its left paw it bore a great sign, etched with almost delicate calligraphy into a torn piece of oak that had once been a plank from a study hall’s floor.
It read: I HAVE SEEN.
The college was hit the hardest, with only the quickest and luckiest escaping. By the time the Bitters walked through the gates of Demmerdant College once more it found itself facing a full platoon of the city guard armed to the teeth with the Consul’s largesse: weapons from the Terramac, crafted from strange alloys that seemed to glow too brightly in the sunlight.
It was a frightful thing, to be sure. Its surface glistened with fresh blood, and its limbs were entangled with unspeakable masses. Redness suffused it, mixing with its natural murk, and it held the sign I HAVE SEEN aloft high and proud as it marched without pause towards the massed men-at-arms of Demmerdant.
It was glass, it was ceramic, it was – in some part – metallic, and none of those things, however hostile the force that powered them, could withstand the force of a full volley of Shentomaran Shells – the buzzing, vibrating little disks shrieked and whirred as they bored through mulch and kitchenwares and metal. The Bitters quivered and spilled its guts across the college’s doorstep, across the cobbles that had seen a dozen generations of graduates, and it moved no more.
There was silence in the street then, save the humming of the weaponry. Silence, and then a strange scrabbling sound that was the most important in all the world.
From a doorway shambled a small thing, not much larger than a cat, crafted almost entirely from a single cauldron. Its limbs were cutlery, and the glue that held it was thick as sludge.
From a window came shattered glass and a crawling thing that looked to be an entire kitchen’s-worth of containers, all sealed now, all full of something that roiled without boiling.
From the river came a low, long grinding, and the hull of a river-barge scraped its way over the sides, fitted with limbs that had once been masts. It stank of old weeds and fresh scum.
And only hesitantly, slowly, reluctantly in the wake of this unveiling, came the screams of all of Demmerdant.
As a whole, Demmer-Don-Dimmer got off lightly.
The college was nigh-purged.
The Consul’s palace was eliminated entirely, and not a man nor woman living can still say what took place there.
Those who did not fight but only fled – those who were not of the college, that is – were let be, and permitted to flee to strange lands and familiar disdain, there to live their lives as best as they would be begrudgingly permitted. “Dims” was a word used harshly, and far too often for far too long.
Today, Demmer-Don-Dimmer is a quiet place, and empty. A pittance of cats gone feral prowl the jungles that were once housing, and pigeons roost in ransacked bookcases. People too may wander as they will within the realm, to marvel at the soaring, untouched walls, to stare at the falling, creaking things that were its towers, its markets, its highways.
But when their eyes turn to its rivers, they turn away. For the stench of those bodies of water – of all the water in all of Dimmer-Don-Dimmer that does not come from rainfall – is beyond belief, and things grow in its depths that cannot be seen, hidden safely under thick curtains of silt and worse.
They do not speak often. They act on the outside world still less, save when their domain is intruded upon.
For the most part, the aged oaken plank jabbed into the muck at the edge of Demmerdant’s docks holds the only message that the Bitters are willing to leave, inscribed thickly over the older, worn words that it once held.
I HAVE JUDGED.