“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
She smiled sadly, looked down at the map, then to Hiui’s horror began to tear it apart. The shreds fluttered down upon the leaves, sharp blue amidst crisp brown and still supple green.
“Why do that?” he asked when she was finished.
“Because I am loyal.” Dyffar dragged a foot across the leaves, scattering and mixing the scraps of parchment amongst them. “Come, we go home.”
Hiui shook his head. “I am not returning. Not yet.”
Waeo darted forward, fur spiking, all his colours on show, and Hiui reflexively flashed his own. “You have been ordered! Obey! We are too deep in the Others’ territory, alone. Against great odds, even one such as Dyffar’Kaoi risks discovery and death. Capture, even.” Waeo’s hands remained at his sides but the fingers stiffened, their wicked nails exposed.
“Do as I tell you to, Hiui,” Dyffar said.
“I did not seek for you to follow me here.” Hiui looked away from the remains of the map and met her gaze. “I’m sorry that your wisdom has been ignored, but I will not do the same. I will return when I have your proof for you, not before.”
“We should leave him to this craziness,” Waeo spat. “Little loss.”
Dyffar flinched minutely at his words, but both males saw it. Waeo’s face flushed as he caught the implication of what he had said, that his superior was deceiving herself.
“Do you not believe her?” Hiui asked.
The older male shifted evasively. “We should leave,” he muttered.
Dyffar sighed. “Return,” she told Waeo. “I will stay.”
Her carrier grew wide-eyed. “What?”
“Hiui is capable of carrying me also,” she said. “And I think he is not so petty as to abandon me here when his desires are contradicted. He will not leave me in danger frivolously. Return.”
Surprise turned to outrage on Waeo’s face—no wonder. His primary duty was being given to one not of his order, but he was subservient to her command. And was there a reprimand in it as well? Waeo had proposed abandoning Hiui only moments before, and though she must have confided her revelation in Waeo as well, he clearly had doubts.
“Yes, Dyffar’Kaoi,” Waeo said, pelt pressing flat—but his eyes burned furiously as he glanced Hiui’s way. Hiui startled. It was jealousy Waeo had sought to mask when they had arrived!
The carrier bowed to Dyffar, then leapt upwards, his form dwindling as though racing into a false distance. In seconds, Waeo had again become much like some small night-flying creature. He fell free, gaining momentum before his palm-wings caught the air. He arrowed into the forest and was lost beneath the canopy’s gloom.
“Hiui…” Dyffar closed her eyes, angled her face against the sunset. The light added vivid tints to her dun pelt, shone in her eyes when they opened. “I am grateful for the belief you put in my words. But the Messireen have made their decision. Neither you nor I may act against it.”
Hiui set his jaw. “I did not hear their ruling, and you are yet to speak it. I cannot be bound by orders unheard, that is law.”
“You heard enough before you absconded, I think, to know what was to be said.”
“I did not hear it.”
She sighed. “Messiree Xinnoh ordered the blue map destroyed, and bid me to pursue my unthinkable theory no further. So now you have heard it, and are bound.”
“Fine, and the map is destroyed. But she bid you seek no further, not me.”
“Sophist,” she said, but without rancour. It seemed Dyffar looked at him differently now they were alone. He wondered if she saw something new in his face as well. “Carry me back, Hiui. The warring will wait. I would rather talk with you more.”
“I would like that too,” he said, “but the war is being lost as we speak. We both know it, and we know why and how, even if the Messireen refuse to accept it. They may think the concept obscene, but truth is truth no matter how staining. If their injunction threatens the survival of the People, it is my duty to defy. The loss of the map will not stop me.”
“Will you really leave me here? I said you would not, you make a liar of me.”
“For frivolous reasons, no, I would not—but what could be less frivolous than this? I will find your proof and bring it to you.”
“I could merely take your hand to stop you.”
“Yet you have not.” He grinned and bobbed his head, barely enough to even constitute a mockery of manners, then sprang back before her hand lashed out for his—let them have their size and strength, females were slow!
Inner space pulled at his shape, melted away his mass until he was lighter than the breeze. The world drifted beneath him, Dyffar’Kaoi with it.
“Do not go there,” she called as he rose. “I will not follow, even if I somehow sense you are in need. Waeo’Jannin is correct, one warrior against a whole city will fall.”
“But one spy can bring down a whole city from within,” Hiui said, his voice thinning.
“Do not go, Hiui.” She sounded plaintive despite her strength, almost as though grieving.
“It is too late for you to stop me,” he said as the wind caught him fully, and in moments he was lost to sight against the darkening sky.
*
So the map was destroyed… but its lines remained in Hiui’s mind. Memory would suffice.
Walking the narrowness of the corridors was distracting and unpleasant. He had never entered a cave, the very idea made his skin clammy, but everything about the Others made him nauseous to his core: split from nature, denying their bodies the touch of the wind, hiding from sun and stars in these caverns in the air. And they destroyed the People’s gentle shelters to build them, cutting trees down to stumps until the forests shied away and refused to return.
He paused where two passages joined. All so they could lurk in tunnels such as these.
In the night hours the Others were less active, and Hiui was happy to take advantage. To attempt to fly here would be strenuous and best avoided. The tight immobility of the air was like wading through water, and every breath made strange pressures come and go in his ears. When he did encounter patrolling guards, he simply made himself small and hid in some shadowed nook, but in their absence it was much easier to navigate fully sized, even though—if he were seen—there would be little chance of an Other failing to recognise him for what he was.
He pressed on to where his memory of the map and his sense of the building’s orientation suggested he might find a connection between floors—a staircase. Dyffar had identified where several had been marked. He avoided the largest, a sweeping shape in the centre, and aimed for a corner of the structure, where more were represented by the placement of tightly-patterned circular motifs.
He found one, like a hollowed tree trunk through which a thousand small stone platforms spiralled. No sound echoed from above or below so he climbed it, up two floors, and emerged into a new room which—a flash of delight—he knew from the map.
At last, a frame of reference for the line which Dyffar had traced.
Behind closed eyes, he visualised the complex arrangement of rooms and passages. His experience of the lower floor filled in gaps of comprehension such that he was able to predict the separate sensations each room promised with accuracy. He set off, heading towards the centre of the palace, ever closer to the point at which—Dyffar believed, and he hoped—the Others’ great prize lay.
Before he reached that place, he heard not footsteps in his path, but voices.
He drew closer, the murmur of alien words growing more distinct, until he sensed two Others beyond a corner where one corridor bisected the next. He dared not move closer for fear of alerting them to his presence. Instead he shrank into inner space and crawled up the wall with the vestigial nails of his wings until he clung by the ceiling.
He peered around the corner’s hard edge, a tiny shadow face with glinting black eyes, and looked down upon two Others, both male, their bald bodies covered near completely in the Other fashi
on, leaving only furred heads and naked hands unmasked. The first was a soldier, wearing the familiar military style. The second was draped in stranger materials, their shape organised in ways Hiui had not seen before.
He listened to their words closely, and was pleased to find the soldier spoke at a steady, patient rate which made him all the easier to understand. He discussed some unnamed matter clearly known to both, but when the strangely dressed male replied he proved stranger still. His words were comprehensible but they tumbled clumsily from his lips, the sounds and intonation wrong, their starts and ends lost within each other.
He speaks the Others' tongue as I would, Hiui thought, with growing excitement. As though it were not his own!
Then, in a moment of hesitation, the stranger spoke clearly a word Hiui had never heard aloud, but which he knew—because Dyffar had written it upon the map, beside the Other word “palace”. Then it had been a jumble of meaningless symbols. Now it was a word.
The Bilingual existed!
Hiui gripped the wall feverishly, needle nails sinking deep into the dead wood as his heart soared. The salvation of the People was at hand.
Dyffar’Kaoi had been correct.
*
“Messireen, I beg permission to speak.”
Dyffar’Kaoi had bowed low, one knee to her chest, right leg extended long behind her, arms stretched to each side with the palms raised. An uncomfortable posture for a female, it was one Hiui (or any of his friends and lovers) could easily have maintained for hours, had they the patience or reason for doing so.
In making this most traditional sign of deference towards the People’s wisest, Dyffar sought to demonstrate extreme gratitude for the audience she had been granted. On any other occasion, it would be considered appropriately flattering by all of them, but Hiui feared it would prove to be of no benefit once she had her say.
This clearing at the heart of the forest had been preserved so for generations. The boles of the most ancient trees, so long fallen that they had become stone, lay in a ring of fourteen sides, barriers to the forest beyond, and deep layers of sand beneath mosaic shards of slate and shale meant no new growth would ever take hold where the eldest of the People gave their council.
To walk there was the strangest sensation—the living forest on all sides, but no life underfoot. Yet it was the only place in which all the Messireen congregated at one time, and enduring it was a trial any who sought to petition them must accept, as Dyffar did this night.
“Dyffar’Kaoi, we are pleased to hear your voice,” said Messiree Xinnoh at last. Leader of the council, the strength of her prime had faded into the brittle grace of a frosted cobweb, her fur wispy and fine, set in motion by the faintest breeze. “Rise and speak, good sister.”
Dyffar gave no sign of trepidation, yet Hiui knew she was disguising turmoil. “I bring news of a discovery, Messireen, with significance for the conflict.”
“We have faced painful defeats in recent times.” Xinnoh turned a palm forwards. “The Others have grown dangerous.”
“In battle beside my sisters, I slew an Other who bore a strange document. Through it, I have discovered the means by which their new successes are achieved.”
The Messireen stirred… with one exception. Hiui was watching for it and saw, but Dyffar seemed unaware. “Long have we spied upon communications between the Other’s leaders and their soldiery,” she continued. “In time they began to camouflage the meaning of their language, as fish at the bottom of a pool stir the silt and cloud the water to hide themselves from predators, or from prey. Each time they did so, we learned to see through these deceits—to use the tongue of the Others, we deciphered their codes. Each clarification led to numerous victories.”
Xinnoh inclined her head. “But their newest disguise has persisted. More lives have been lost to us in the turn of two suns than in the two hundred before. Brothers and sisters choose to fall in battle, but beneath the last moon many mothers were surprised during ritual and slain. Young offspring have been denied their greatest choice.
“Unless we unveil their words again, any security we feel is only illusion.”
Dyffar presented both palms to them. “This is my discovery.”
“You have dispelled their code?” asked another voice.
Hiui had crept to the edge of the nearest stone bole as Dyffar spoke, watching over its edge. Now he shrank behind it. A century and a half after his birth, his mother’s voice was still powerful and intimidating to him. She had not addressed him directly since she gave him his name, pulled him from her breast and thrust him upon Eiffon, master of the crèche, but when Sedduq’Hiui spoke, Hiui’Lleyen felt it, deep inside. He suspected he always would.
“No, Messiree.” Dyffar looked between the faces of the Messireen. “The code is not a code. It is another language.”
For a moment none of the elders responded, only looked at each other in mild confusion. “Of course,” Xinnoh said, “the language of the Others.”
“More than that, Messiree. This is no disguise as before, but a second language of the Others. A way of speech as different from their own tongue as ours is from theirs.”
Hiui watched the Messireen closely, his mother in particular. Sedduq maintained a neutral expression, unlike her barely suppressed outrage when Dyffar had approached her with this same news privately, both unaware that Hiui bore witness from the leaves above—little spy that he was. After she had been brusquely dismissed, Hiui halted Dyffar’s disconsolate departure to admit his eavesdropping, and confess belief in what she claimed. And after that…
He forced his thoughts back to the present. The surprise on the faces of the other Messireen seemed genuine, apparently Sedduq had not spread the word of Dyffar’s claims in advance, nor poisoned them against her. But their distaste at the revelation was clear. Perhaps she considered doing so unnecessary.
“They are of a single race but lack… unity of voice?” Xinnoh seemed at a loss. “What would be the purpose of such a thing?”
Dyffar could sense the hostility building before her words, desperation planting seeds in her voice. “Messireen, I believe I can provide proof.”
Sedduq turned her face to profile. “Proof of the impossible,” she murmured, and the Messireen murmured in agreement.
“The Others protect an artefact, brought from across the ocean.” The Messireen grew still more tense, but Dyffar pressed on. “We have suspected for lifetimes that the Others persist in lands long lost to us, that the coming and going of their vessels upon the water connects them to unknown places. Three turns ago, a vessel bore a tablet to our land—and we have suffered since! It carries the words of both languages upon it, a meaning shared, yet by systems so distinct as to be unrecognisable to the unlearned eye or ear.
“This tablet is the key that will allow us to comprehend the Others’ communications once more. Until we have it, I fear that they possess an insurmountable advantage over us.”
“And where is this tablet, that you are so certain even exists?” asked Sedduq—though she knew the answer already. Hiui’s heart fell, and Dyffar’s broad shoulders dipped. His mother’s disbelief in this bizarre concept would sway the other Messireen, reinforce whatever reluctance to accept it each one had quickly formed for themselves.
There was no chance for Dyffar, the decision would be against her. Nevertheless, she gave her answer, as much because it had been asked of her by the Messireen as because she believed in its truth. “It is kept under close guard, secretly, within the city on the cliffs.”
The elders swayed with a blend of incredulity, contempt, amusement, fatalism. “Their capital?” said Xinnoh. “And how would you claim it from such a place?”
“I have secured information—” Dyffar began, but held her tongue as those Messireen yet to speak began to mutter and hiss amongst themselves, Xinnoh turning the better to hear, Sedduq observing with satisfaction.
Hiui’s gaze lingered on Dyffar’s despondent back, but then he slunk away from his pla
ce at the bole and into the forest beyond. They may not believe her, but he did, and he had the means that all of them lacked—Dyffar, the Messireen and his mother, all of them.
He had the map.
He leapt, shrinking, into the air and flew.
In the circle of the clearing, while judgement on Dyffar was hotly discussed, Sedduq’Hiui felt her son’s departure. She touched one hand to her belly, eyes narrowing.
Dyffar saw her do so, and she wondered as well.
*
Hiui slipped by the stranger and the soldier, crawling slowly through the shadows at the ceiling for fear that a laboured flight through the motionless air would draw their attention.
When they continued on their way, taking the main corridor from which Hiui had come, he remained clinging to the ceiling as he made his way down a corridor far narrower than any other he had passed so far, and much more poorly lit, its far end all but a void of darkness.
The map had shown this corridor pressed between larger rooms onto which it did not join, as though it was meant to go unknown or ignored by those who used them. At its end lay a single room—a guardroom, Dyffar had speculated—but from it she had traced a line through the very walls of the building, highlighting a connecting sequence in which each wall’s width was just detectably wider than the norm. A passage truly unseen by all.
At the end of that line lay a room unlike any other on the map. Nestled within a cluster of small chambers near the heart of the fifth floor, it had neither doors nor windows, and touched no passage. Its existence hidden by careful intent.
According to what Dyffar believed, what he believed, there he would find the Bilingual.
As he crept closer to the corridor’s end, his sharp eyes caught the hint of movement. Two Others stood before a single door, facing up the corridor. If he had resumed his full size and approached on foot he would have had the only strong light at his back. A walking target, impossible to overlook, and he no match for two soldiers prepared.
As it was, he was lost in the deepening shadows, certain—right until the moment he chose to strike, dropping from the high ceiling directly over their heads—that neither guard had any inkling of his presence.
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