In the mountain hamlet of Thin High Totter, the brothers Ramthan and Sethlan Semelon were called the “talking twins,” though not to their faces. Glances and whispers followed them where they went. They were aberrations because, while the other six-year-old boys of Thin High Totter were still blurting single words, Ramthan and Sethlan chattered back and forth like old ladies. Even Sethlan’s words flowed like clear water and he was the blood-fed brother, usually the idiot twin.
As they grew older, their cleverness didn’t end with speech. At Ramthan’s instigation they diversified into trickery and theft. As young Tachba coming of age on Grigory IV, they would normally in due course have antagonized the wrong denizen of Thin High Totter and then been killed and soon forgotten. However, their precociousness caught the attention of the local pharmacienne, Mag.
Not having girls to teach at the moment, Mag corralled the talking twins during their worst hours, daylight. She taught them writing with ease, then flew through numbers and basic mathematics. Before long, she found herself dragged into the obscure topics that only the most promising young women normally attempted. Alchemy, scrying, calculus. The talking twins were deep into herbal embrocations when Ramthan derailed their education by dosing Mag’s baxxaxx with a trotter’s potion.
It was an accident! Nothing but an impulsive experiment with no malice intended, but try telling that to an old lady who had named her baxxaxx ‘Chomps’ and encouraged its bulbous head through her kitchen window so she could feed it treats. The creature would wait for hours like unsettling wall art while Mag gossiped at it and brewed potions. On the fateful day, Mag was away midwifing a young first-time factory mother and Ramthan discovered the potion warming in the sunlight beside the window—and there was the credulous animal’s gaping mouth.
It was a potion that softened a person’s stool so that stoppered bowels could release. To Ramthan’s delight it worked the same on the baxxaxx, immediately and vividly. The vast creature’s stomach groaned like an overheating liquor still, and then it terrified itself with an explosive brown plume from its ass. The brown plume turned out to be inexhaustible and the creature’s delicate mind broke. It careened around the yard, forced the gate, and then undulated into the hamlet of Thin High Totter where it visited every doorway with its gifts.
Days later, Chomps still hadn’t recovered and the hamlet was still livid, so Mag sought revenge. She ordered the town’s unemployable veteran, Gaffa, to give Ramthan a beating. The mood in the mountain hamlet turned buoyant. The talking twins were told about their looming punishment early, frequently, and at length, and they had time to prepare.
Though it was Ramthan who had potioned Chomps, the fallout landed on Sethlan, as it always did. Among Tachba boys the milk-fed twin was always the instigator, while the blood-fed twin was the one who settled the results. Ramthan’s ability to irritate others had grown through the years into something substantial, and this had forced young Sethlan to fight his way up an ever-escalating curve of risk. Now that they were near the end of childhood and preparing for their Shaping Trip, Mag’s retaliation in the form of an actual soldier who had fought on the eternal front seemed like a proper final challenge.
Sethlan intercepted Gaffa on the tree-lined path leading to the Semelon multi-family compound just outside of town. He brought his nine-foot sticker, the blood-fed’s traditional spear, which he had been hardening, balancing, and sharpening against just such a day as this. He saw that Gaffa had come armed as well, with a big oily Southerner blunderbuss brought back from the front, and he felt better about the whole thing.
“Gaffa, I know why you’re here.” Sethlan braced the spear in the dirt.
“La, boy!” Gaffa paused to catch his breath. “I’ll never get used to a blood-fed speaking like that.”
Sethlan had heard this all his life and ignored it. “Turn around and go back to town. They’re tapping a new keg at the Tree Squid. You don’t have to die today.”
“Go back and face Mag? While her baxxaxx is spurting all over the Totter? I seen him open his ass-plates and knock a child down with precision shitting. Send him to the eternal front, I told her! Put him in the artillery! But no, I’m supposed to give your beastly brother a hiding, and so I shall.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Sethlan raised his weapon and charged.
Gaffa stared, perplexed, until just before Sethlan threw the sticker. Annoyance and regret flickered on the man’s face, and he dropped to a crouch with his pistol in his hand. It went off with a heart-stopping explosion that echoed against the cliffs for a full minute. The bullet went wide, raking Sethlan’s scalp as it passed through his hair and spinning him off his feet.
The spear, however, didn’t miss: Sethlan threw low. Every boy in Thin High Totter had studied the daily brawls at the Tree Squid, and Gaffa’s first move was always to duck. The spear entered Gaffa’s neck, exited through his buttocks. On its path into the dirt, where it firmly embedded and kept Gaffa upright, it also speared his arm and calf. The man couldn’t stand again. After a while he stopped trying.
“Killed and gathered,” Sethlan murmured, staring. He was fascinated by Gaffa’s struggle, and feeling guilty about the fascination—and self-conscious of the guilt. He was sorry for the waste of this man when any other Tachba boy would have been indifferent. Their friends would have wavered only a moment before the Pollution wiped their minds clean of concern. Sethlan climbed to his feet, head throbbing, despising himself.
“Poor old idiot.” Ramthan emerged from the path and kicked Gaffa’s thigh, eliciting no response. “You killed him, but no matter. This codger can still be useful to me. He can fix our Mag problem.”
Sethlan had been thinking the same thing, but the milk-fed was supposed to have all the ideas.
Each boy shouldered one end of the spear and carried Gaffa like a hunting prize between them. They tottered down the path, gaining speed, and drew a crowd as they bustled through the hamlet to Mag’s house. Gaffa was beyond help but it only mattered that they were seen asking: Mag couldn’t let word spread that she had refused aid. She was childless and her skills were the only reason the hamlet tolerated a pharmacienne witch.
Gaffa’s corpse gave them access to Mag’s house. If she regretted the death, it still didn’t soften her heart toward the boys. Nor did she let them keep the Southie blunderbuss.
Which was fine, their plan was more subtle than that. While Ramthan faded into the background, Sethlan begged Mag to cut his sticker out of Gaffa. This became an involved project because the wounds closed and stuck whenever they shifted his body. With his sticker back in his hands, Sethlan led Mag into explaining the man’s collection of internal organs, which was diverse. He taxed her powers of invention with difficult questions as Ramthan quietly mixed what they both hoped would be an antidote for the baxxaxx. Chomps perceived the activity in the kitchen and hurried over with a concerto of flatulence. It shoved its head through the window and whether or not the creature regretted Ramthan’s previous potion, it opened its face plates, extended its three-pronged tongue, and licked the bowl clean.
The baxxaxx improved immediately. By the time Mag noticed Ramthan in her kitchen, Chomps had stopped venting its bowels and was peaceably licking condensation off the kitchen wall. Irritation warred with gratitude on Mag’s face, none of it helped by Ramthan’s smirk.
“It all comes down to cheese,” Ramthan explained. Since baxxaxx bile was separated and used to make hard cheese, and since the original trotter’s potion was a derivative admixture for soft cheese, all he needed to restore the animal’s gut was raw, unseparated bile from Mag’s cooking shelf.
“I can’t fathom why it worked,” Ramthan said airily, “but it stands to reason, doesn’t it? Are we forgiven, Mag, you gorgeous creature?”
“You’re forgiven,” she said. “Your blood-fed didn’t do anything wrong in the first place.” She fixed Sethlan with a glare, the first he’d ever earned from her. “Boy, your milk-fed brother will lead you into danger and despair. He will cause your death.”
Sethlan already knew this. It was the usual outcome for blood-feds, so Mag was not being especially prescient. Sethlan’s life course was clearly charted, launched as a squalling infant by that first click in his throat that turned him blood-fed, and then reinforced by a lifetime of expectations and social convention. Though he was nothing like other blood-feds the identity was fairly coded into him. He would be polite, shy, and slow in every direction. Ramthan was the one with ambition, hopes for the future, and the utter disregard for the fragile equilibriums along which Tachba society functioned.
Ramthan grinned as Mag turned away to feed Chomps a piece of Gaffa’s fatty liver.
“They can’t hold human flesh down,” she explained, “but la! they love the taste.”