Chapter Text
After a while, the little house in Nardah began to feel too small for the three of them.
First it had been just Azzanadra. One night in the summer of 169 — after some nine thousand years of absence— the little twinkling signal of his presence had reappeared on the little green screen of Wahisietel’s racial radar. A few hours later, the cobweb-covered erstwhile Pontifex Maximus of the Zarosian Empire had barged in through his front door without knocking, and had proceeded to claim asylum in Wahisietel’s bedroom.
Then, after a few weeks of somewhat awkward rooming, two more signals had appeared on the display in his head. Akthanakos and Enakhra — both missing in action and presumed dead since before the war — had re-emerged in the desert. The following day the former had turned up in Nardah, and invited himself for an indefinite stay. As time went by and neither of them showed any indication of leaving, the last house to the north seemed to slowly but surely shrink in size.
Let it be said that Wahisietel was as fond of his guests as any Mahjarrat will be of another, but he was also a solitary and territorial creature by nature, not to mention much accustomed to the peace and quiet of his bachelor pad. It was all very well that his brothers were free — and that he was no longer the only Zarosian at large — but it would have been ever so much more pleasant for him had the others gone and enjoyed their newfound freedom somewhere else.
Firstly, there was the matter of space. He had put Azzanadra on the spare mattress. He had hung up the hammock for Akthanakos. But by then, it had become quite impossible to live comfortably, leave alone concentrate on his work. Furthermore, he thought to himself, if any more long-lost Brethren showed up on his door (here, for some reason, he always imagined uncharacteristic demands of seed-cake and declarations of "at your service"), he'd have to put them on the roof.
Apart from that there were the problems of culture shock. To be precise, his two guests had been trapped out of time in the era of the Zarosian Empire, and they had re-emerged into a world where even the name of their god wasn’t known. They had never lived in a world where the Mahjarrat were unknown, or where magic was uncommon. Neither of them knew how to lie low, how to live in human form, or how to live in human society; one of them thought he was a camel while the other thought he was next from a god —
At this point, Wahisietel usually forced his thought process to shut down. Then he refilled his pipe and went to smoke it alone a sand dune. But as days passed, he realized he either had to do something about the situation or decamp permanently to the trackless wastes.
There had been incidents, after all. For instance, there had been the time Akthanakos had held a long, hearty, and very public discussion on market fluctuations with the water trader’s camel. And the time Azzanadra had almost set fire to a man standing outside the bedroom window. And then the very peculiar occurrence involving all the goats facing northwards at noon, which Shiratti the Custodian had thankfully accredited to Scarabas the beetle-god.
Nonetheless, People Were Talking. And when talk got going in a one-ox, closed-for-the-weekend place like Nardah, it never died down until it had claimed a victim.
The sacred town of Elidinis was one of those quaint, ancient, and picturesque villages where anyone whose family has not lived there for fifty generations was considered a foreigner, and where deviation of any kind was looked upon with the kindness generally given to cockroach infestations. Wahisietel had arrived there almost four decades ago — a scholar; the son of a Kharidian mother and a Pollnivnean father, a stranger in a strange land — and had over the years managed to create himself quite a comfortable little life. He collected and studied religious texts. He interpreted hieroglyphs. He wrote and read letters for illiterate townsfolk at a very reasonable rate, and had occasionally taught some enterprising individuals to read the modern syllabic script.
He liked the climate. He liked the people. He very much wanted to continue it for a few more years. But it was becoming all too clear that if he did not get rid of his housemates, he’d face the prospect of being ridden out of town on a rail.
“Houseguests and fish,” he thought to himself. “You have to throw them out after three days, and for the same reasons.” And so he began to plot for a way to gently dispose of them.
***
The solution occurred to him sooner than he had hoped for, during a teatime conversation with Akthanakos that night. The two of them were sitting in silence at Wahisietel’s desk, sharing a plate of almond cakes. For a pair of men eating freshly-baked pastries, they looked surprisingly gloomy.
The last incident had been quite bad.
An hour earlier, Miss Meskhenet the herbalist — who for years had carried a small, damp, and rather hopeless torch for the enigmatic Mr Wise — had shown up. Ostensibly it was to bring a plate of cakes and a pouch of her special pipe blend. In reality, Wahisietel knew that she had wanted to show that at least she continued to approve of him (and by extension, of his eccentric friends), no matter what the local gossips said.
It had not gone well.
Azzanadra, who treated all offers of food as poisoning attempts, had taken one look at the poor woman and had stalked off muttering something about plebeian yokels. Miss Meskhenet had been quite offended, but at the end Wahisietel had managed to explain that his friend was merely unaccustomed to society, and had got her to sit down. They had been chatting entirely normally when without a warning, Akthanakos — who had been bathing in the bedroom — had suddenly barged in, wearing nothing but soapsuds and a dung-eating grin, and Miss Meskhenet had run out of the house screaming bloody murder.
“This is hardly going to work out, is it?” said Wahisietel gloomily, as he helped himself to another almond cake. He rarely ate, unless it was necessary to keep up appearances. However, some things were too good to pass by, even if he disliked the business of “letting food run through” as he called it. Besides, he somehow felt it a duty towards Miss Meskhenet, though he could not have explained the logic behind the sentiment if asked.
“What will not?” Akthanakos asked rather absent-mindedly. He was spreading honey on an almond cake, which took up most of his concentration.
“This,” Wahisietel said. “You two being here. Teleporting in and out at all hours, shapeshifting in plain sight, talking to goats like this was the Forum of Senntisten. People are onto you. First they’ll be onto you and then they’ll be on to me. And then it will be Musa Point all over again.” He shuddered.
“I do my best,” said Akthanakos, a touch defensively.
“You try,” Wahisietel replied through gritted teeth. “And a fat lot of good it will do me when the people come in with their pitchforks. Then look at Azzanadra,” he continued, now on a roll. “He’s not used to having to do a damn thing he doesn’t want to and has no idea how to start. I mean, he’s not going to get along with these Fifth-Age people. He’s accustomed to being addressed with fear and trembling, and now he has to go up to the dig site in Misthalin and negotiate with Saradominists about the right to break into the ruins of his own house. Can you imagine how that one’s going to go?”
“Like a wingless icyene,” said Akthanakos cheerfully, not paying him much heed.
“Him and his airs and graces,” Wahisietel went on. “I just know that he’s going to show up there demanding to be let in, and he’ll lose his temper and end up getting arrested. He’s not even trying to fit in. Because that would mean he’d have to admit that in this day and age, he’s the Pontifex Maximus of Sweet Fanny Adams and no-one owes him a damned thing.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Akthanakos replied. Having finished glazing a second cake, he pressed the two together to make sandwich, which resulted in Wahisietel’s cherrywood desk receiving a fresh varnish of honey.
“You know, you could use a few pointers yourself,” said his long-suffering host, getting up to fetch a rag.
“About what?”
“About behaving like a human. A Fifth-Age human. Perhaps even a Fifth-Age human who wasn’t brought up in a barrel.” (Akthanakos, unwilling to let a good thing go to waste, was now spooning up the spilled honey with his forefinger.)
Right at that moment there was a violent shriek outside, and two seconds later a fantastically sunburned Azzanadra entered, slamming the door shut behind him.
“Is the woman gone?” he barked, glancing about as if he was entering the scene of a crime.
“Quite gone,” replied Wahisietel. “What was the screaming about?”
“Good,” said Azzanadra. “Insolent peasant.”
“What was the screaming about,” Wahisietel repeated, a terrible suspicion rising in his mind.
“Pest control,” said Azzanadra. He glanced about as if he had lost something, and having located The Grammar of The Common Tongue, headed for the bedroom muttering something about heathens.
“AZZANADRA, WHAT WAS THE—”
“That neighbour of yours was lurking outside again,” said Azzanadra airily. “I made him think he was an ostrich.”
There was a brief, very pregnant pause. Then Wahisietel spoke.
“Before you go,” he said, his voice suddenly very low and soft, “I’d like a word with you both.”
Akthanakos looked up, having licked the desk throughout the previous exchange.
Azzanadra stopped at the doorway.
“Sit,” Wahisietel said. “We need to talk.”
After a few seconds’ delay — during which Azzanadra demonstrated that he was not obeying an order, but had merely reached the conclusion that he suddenly wished to sit — the third Mahjarrat claimed a chair by the table.
“About?” he said, his eyes drifting towards the plate of cakes as if it were a rabid chinchompa.
“About the two of you,” said Wahisietel. “About the two of you being here.”
“What about us?” asked Akthanakos the wholly innocuous.
Several ideas passed through Wahisietel’s mind in quick succession. These involved concepts and phrases such as “cleaning rota”, “sharing rent”, and “dig yourselves a pit and jump in it”, but at the end, what came out of his mouth was quite different. It was something practical and feasible. Something that would benefit them all as individuals, and the Zarosian faction as a whole. And like all his best plans, it was something he made up as he went along.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, when he knew he had the others’ attention. “I know the two of you both have things to do elsewhere. Azzanadra, you’re going to Senntisten. Akthanakos, you said you’re going to Ghorrock. You both have business to attend to, but I could say, you perhaps don’t know very well how to fit in with modern society.” Azzanadra bristled visibly. Akthanakos blinked like a small furry animal in headlights. But when neither interrupted him, Wahisietel continued.
”The fact of the matter is,” he lied, “that I have some business in Varrock. Something I’ll have to take care of fairly soon. What I was thinking about is that since we are all going the same way, we could travel there together. You two could see some Fifth Age sights, practice your Common, learn about the modern-day customs and manners...”
He looked at the two of them for a while. When neither said anything, he finished his spiel.
“Or alternatively, I can kick you both out of the house, go on my way alone, and you two can do what the hell ever you want.”
“Road trip,” said Akthanakos quickly. For all his faults, he knew the better offer out of two.
“Road trip,” Azzanadra conceded finally, with all the air of a general laying down his arms.
“Fantastic,” said Wahisietel cheerfully. “A road trip it is, then. A Zarosian road trip. A journey of discovery for the Zarosian Mahjarrat.”
“Does that mean,” blurted Akthanakos, “that we should invite your brother as well?”
They all considered this for a few seconds, letting various scenarios play out on the dirty grindhouse screens of their minds.
“No,” said Wahisietel bluntly.
“No,” echoed Azzanadra.
“No, said Akthanakos, casting the final vote.
Outside, there was strange noise, as if someone was running about flapping their arms fiercely. Wahisietel considered this, and began to mentally compose and explanation for the event. Yet, even if the incident was not connected to him, it was clear that the time for his exit was about right.
“We’ll leave at dawn."