by
Hundreds of years ago, or perhaps thousands—no one really knew—it had been a land of Silk and Money, a place where mechanical horses with rubber legs carried people for miles without resting and glass birds carried them further still to lands beyond, and every house was lighted with a captured fragment of the sun, and there were erotic pictures that had been painted by the acolytes of the god Kodak on walls everywhere, and the markets were stocked with trance-inducing drugs and remedies that were sprayed from cans, and men in fur suits hawked contracts that could be exchanged for cash on the date of a stipulated loved one’s death.
So much the English Scrawls said. So much, it was assumed, was true. But few people knew where the truth could be found now. Few men could read or write. Th
