“The literary code of the Western Empire, which dates from Received Laws of the Second Oligarchy, specifies a number of crimes. Besides simple blasphemy, sedition, lèse majesté, defamation, and incitement, the law stipulated any who fashioned an antihero into their stories in a flattering light was a felon; in addition, plagiarism was harshly punished.
“One curious addition during the reign of the Falling Leaf Emperor was a law promulgated against the writing of unrealistic literature. The Emperor deigned himself to write, in an adjunct to the decree, a statement saying, ‘We find the constant stream of fanciful stories and romantic novels to be a great detriment to the Eight Lands’ productivity and mental sanity. Therefore we condescend to tolerate henceforth only such works in letters as deal with everyday situations in a realistic manner.’ Which was wielded as a clumsy hammer against thousands of scriveners and eventually, by the law of Confraternity of Lawbreakers, broke apart the three hundred year-old Collegium of Writers.
“The law was rescinded by the Afternoon Nap Emperor almost immediately upon ascension; persecuted writers who remained alive and with their wits—a good deal lost all connection with the world, fictional or real, through the application of the Falling Leaf Emperor’s frightfully talented torture squads—were rehabilitated, and the Collegium not only reinvested with its former powers but confirmed in letters patent to be the only lawful membership for writers, which was later used to the effect of much sorrow and hypocrisy.”
Here Sluigy, having doffed his deerstalker and jammed his one-hitter’s bowl with a sweet and greenish-smelling ganja, sat back and played with his lighter, which in the quiet of his sudden silence emitted a monitory hiss.
Darby hung on the arm of the chaliced Will de Mere. She was thinking at the time, what was the significance of this short man with dark skin, why did all hearken unto him. His talk was interesting in a Sunday afternoon sort of way but the style was not all that impressive, the force of the words carried no one, she was unmoved from the nobleman’s arm except by her own initiative, which catapulted her from the count’s to a marquis’s, on which her bosom half-rested in warm indignity.
Later, having taken out Sluigy’s Counter and Bracket from the library and read it slowly over a week and half a case of sparkling wine, she was more understanding. Two weeks later, having dolored through Sluigy’s Crown Tier, she understood yet more deeply—Sluigy was a wildly inconsistent author. His performance before them was calculated and erroneous, as falsely premised as the aforementioned latter novel. If they had had the privilege of some other visit, they might have found the sublime holding–forth of the Sluigy of Scarful Reveries, which read as if it had been dictated by a dazzlingly bright divus straight onto the page in the austere typeface of late Western Empire graphic design.
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