by Holly Lisle
“No middle ground in there, is there? I am to be either hero or buffoon. And is there a theory that some other person was responsible for this Barrier?”
“Some blame it on natural causes, but most attribute the Barrier to you.”
Edrouss Delmuirie laughed. “No doubt because I could not make a case for my innocence.”
Faia grinned wickedly. “Men have been attributed with great things for lesser reasons.”
But Delmuirie had stopped laughing. “Wait,” he said. “Tell me again where the Barrier goes.”
“All around Arhel,” Faia told him.
“All around Arhel,” he repeated thoughtfully. “So then, Vit and Kaz—what of them?”
“What are Vit and Kaz?” Faia asked.
Delmuirie nodded, and sucked on his lower lip. “Indeed, that tells me what has happened to them… and you have no Klogs, and an impassable barrier.” He frowned. “Well.” He fell silent, and began to walk faster, head down and shoulders hunched.
Faia scrambled to catch back up with him. “So what were Vit and Kaz?” She had little patience for mysterious behavior.
“Ah.” Delmuirie sighed “Places. Huge, wondrous, lovely places—not that it matters if we cannot get there. They were continents across the sea—where the real civilization was. No one bothered much with this outpost.”
“Outpost?”
“Arhel. This was scrap land—marginal from everyone’s point of view. Nobody wanted it—story is, when the Klaue granted this land to the Annin, the Annin named it ‘Our Hell.’ Truth is, it was not ours free and clear even then; the Klogs had their overseers back in Skeeree and in High Bekkust to make sure we Annin did not try to get above ourselves.”
“You’ve mentioned Skeeree before.”
“That’s the Klog name for yon old city we just left. What you call the First Folk ruins.” He started to laugh. “Skeeree was a sort of punishment post for the Klogs—none of the comforts of home, or damned few.”
“Kaz and Vit.” Bytoris shook his head, bemused. “It’s hard to imagine a world bigger than just Arhel. And these places are out there? You’ve seen them?”
“I toured Vit once.” He smiled sadly. “It was… seemingly endless. Fascinating. Ancient, even in my time—full of Kloggish history and Kloggish art. Wide-streeted cities with metal-banded towers soaring like needles toward the sky, thoroughfares lined with statues of the Heroes, libraries that would swallow the tiny one at Skeeree and a hundred like it. The great Klaue debaters arguing philosophy in the streets, roaring at each other from their pillars and spreading their wings in threat-display, while their admirers flocked at the bases of their favorites’ pillars and cheered them on. Vast, stinking meat farms; tone-deaf Klog orchestras playing caterwauls and skirling pipes loud enough to wake the dead and kill the living; Klog pirates swaggering down the avenues with their rilles ringed in gold and their claws tipped in obsidian, shouting at the young flirts and hussies to come join their bands. The parts of Vit I saw were unforgettable.” He shook his head, and turned so that Faia could not see his face. “And everything I remember is gone. I thought I was going to take all of this fine,” he said. His voice was barely louder than a whisper, and Faia heard it crack. She could see his shoulders shake. “I thought that it would not matter that my world was gone, because there was another whole world here and now, and I would find a place in it for me.” He glanced back at her, and the look in his eyes could have broken harder hearts than hers. Faia knew what he was feeling. She’d felt that same awful emptiness when everyone she’d ever loved had died of the plague in Bright.
Delmuirie added, “It does matter, though. It matters more than I ever could have believed.”
He let his pace slack off, making it clear that he wanted to walk alone. As he dropped back, Gyels also slowed, until Faia was even with him.
“I was listening to the man,” the hunter said. His voice was flat, and edged with a burr of irritation. “He tells a sad tale, doesn’t he?”
Faia agreed, keeping her own tone neutral.
“His is the sort of woeful tale women love, isn’t it?” Gyels’s face hardened into a frown. “You pity him, and then you’ll want to make him feel better, and the next thing anyone knows, you will have fallen in love with him.” He growled, “I wish I knew such a tale to tell.”
He hurried ahead, his shoulders stiff and angry. Faia watched him, disconcerted. He wanted her not to like Edrouss, she realized. Gyels was jealous.
Chapter 16
AT last the travelers made camp. With no cycles of day and night to break their journey, they pushed themselves to the point of exhaustion—the Tide Mother with its brilliant corona had much earlier dropped behind the far forests and rolling hills. Faia had no idea how far they’d trekked along the High Road, but no matter how hard they pushed, they never caught sight of Thirk.
Perhaps he has found a way to use the magic of the chalice to fend off weariness, she thought. She would never have attempted such a thing with magic—the rebound was too horrible and too dangerous once the magic stopped. However, Thirk was obsessed; perhaps he didn’t care about the price he would have to pay when he reached his destination.
Faia hurt. She thought with longing of the bonnechard leaves at the top of her pack.
I’ll have some after we set up camp, she promised herself. When I am safely in my bedroll and have nothing to do but sleep.
All five travelers tied their tarps together, bound the struts to form two strong arches that crossed in the middle to hold them up, and left enough of a hole in the center for the smoke from their small campfire to escape. The bitter cold was going to make sharing heat essential until the sun finally came back out from behind the Tide Mother—Faia thought sharing sleeping space with four men would be easier than sharing with one. She was glad she’d pushed for the companionship of Delmuirie and the Bontonards.
As it was, Gyels tried to spread his blankets next to hers—and only with difficulty did she manage to reposition herself between one of the Bontonards and the fire without making her retreat obvious. Once she’d done it, she wondered why she had. Every time she looked at Gyels, her pulse raced erratically and she felt the unmistakable stirrings of lust deep in her belly. She wondered if her real fear was that, starved for attention for so long, she’d find herself ravishing the man in the night—only to be caught by her other tent mates. The more she considered the idea, the less she could discount it.
So I want him, she realized. I suppose my problem with him is that I still don’t quite trust him.
His jealousy bothered her, too. It seemed presumptuous of him to exhibit possessiveness toward her where other men were concerned when she had promised him nothing; when, in fact, he hardly knew her. It was probably a difference in culture, she reflected, but if it was, it wasn’t one she liked.
All five of them passed around food—hard cheeses, traveler’s bread, jerky, and honey-sweetened grain balls—and talked in a desultory fashion of their aches and their weary desire for sleep. Faia chewed her leaf, which tasted even worse than Medwind had promised. But the bonnechard worked quickly, and once the pain eased, Faia discovered she really didn’t care how it tasted or how sore she was. She also discovered that instead of making her sleepy, the drug in the leaf seemed to wake her up.
Feeling suddenly sociable, she decided she hadn’t properly met her Bontonard companions.
She lay back with her head nestled on her pack and grinned at Bytoris, the man sprawled beside her.
“Did you know I don’t know a thing about you?” she said.
Bytoris’s dark eyes were mysterious, and Faia liked the faint hint of dimples in his cheeks; he wasn’t smiling right then, but he looked like he did often. He was handsome—though not, she thought, as handsome as Gyels. He grinned, and sure enough, his dimples deepened. “That’s only fair. I don’t know anything about you, either.”
Faia laughed. The drug gave her the most wonderful floating feeling. “You first,” she insis
ted.
He nodded. “My name is Bytoris Caligro.”
“Well, I did know that,” Faia said. “But I’m honored.”
Bytoris Caligro inclined his head and said, “Of course you are.” He smiled when he said it, and she laughed again. His voice was deep, and he rolled the syllables to those few words until they sounded like music. Faia caught indications of an odd accent, but nothing that she could put her finger on.
“And you,” she said, pointing at the other Bontonard Geos Rull had been sprawled flat on his blanket, looking, Faia thought, either comatose or near death. But he lifted his head from the pillow he’d made of a spare shirt and said, “My full name is Geostravin Thermadichtus Rull.” Geos had light hair that curled wildly, sticking out in all directions, and as many freckles across his nose and cheeks as Faia had. “I prefer to be called Geos.”
“I can see why,” she told him, then realized what she’d said wasn’t very nice. She clapped her hand over her mouth and murmured, “Ooops!” She tried a solemn nod and told him, “My greetings,” but her solemnity dissolved into a sputtering little giggle. She flopped back onto her makeshift pillow and sighed. “Why in the Lady’s name were you tromping around in that stone wreck of a city?”
“We’re premier scholars—some of the finest in Bonton, which means the finest in the world.” Bytoris said that without even a hint of a smile.
“We were studying the First Folk tablets—” Geos added with a nod.
Bytoris interrupted him. “Made more discoveries in our brief stay than the Arissers did in their entire first year. I, for example, discovered the Caligro Tablets—a series of documents in one of the back sections of the library containing not only First Folk script, but the same text in Old Arhelan, and also in Ancient Gekkish, the precursor of the current Hoos dialects. If it had been left to the Arissods, Arhel would have been another hundred years before finding the linguistic key to the whole site. Pittering around, they were, no more clever than pigs spinning on a spit.”
Faia giggled. She could imagine what Kirgen would have had to say about that. The infamous feud between the natives of the city-state of Bonton and the grand old magical center, Ariss, was still definitely alive and well.
Edrouss Delmuirie sat up, though, interested by what the Bontonards had said. “The Caligro Tablets? And you found them in the library? I don’t remember documents by that name.”
“And why should you? I just discovered them—they’re named after me. They were filed in the back of the library, where the Arissludge hadn’t gotten yet.”
“I know the library fairly well,” Delmuirie said. “What were the file numbers?”
“File numbers?”
“Impressed into the stone on the side—Klog numbers.”
Bytoris frowned. “Klog—what are Klog numbers? I wrote down the location markings—but those are in First Folk codings.” He pulled a little tablet of drypress pages out of his pack and riffled through them. “Here. I found the tablets in double-three, three-two, four, one, double-two.”
Delmuirie closed his eyes and began ticking things off on his fingers. Faia watched his lips move, and felt the urge to say something terribly silly, but she restrained herself. “Oh,” he said at last “You would have found those in a section with blue-green stone shelves, about midway down the wall shelf.” He looked over at the Bontonards. “Yes?”
“Yes.” Bytoris frowned, puzzled. “That’s exactly where I found them. How did you know that… and who are you?”
Delmuirie smiled. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Edrouss Delmuirie. I used to work in that library.”
The looks on the Bontonards’ faces were so priceless, Faia pressed her face into her sleeve to hide her laughter and racked her feet up and down on her bedroll.
Bytoris got his voice first. “Edrouss Delmuirie? The Edrouss Delmuirie? The Delmuirie of the Barrier? But you can’t be. That Delmuirie lived two thousand three hundred eighty-seven years ago.”
Faia found that statement too funny for words. “How do you know it wasn’t two thousand three hundred eighty-six years ago? Or eighty-eight?” She rolled onto her stomach and chuckled. “Or seventy-eight? Seventy-eight, seventy-eight, seventy-eight.” She loved the sound of those words—she thought she could say them all night.
All four men looked at her with enigmatic expressions on their faces.
At last Delmuirie said, “Well, it is a sensible question, if not sensibly put.”
Bytoris stared at Faia. She grinned back at him, then schooled her face to seriousness, trying to make her expression as mysterious and full of secret knowledge as would be any scholar’s were he in possession of a deep, important secret. Bytoris looked disconcerted—he kept his eyes on her while he answered Delmuirie. “Our calendar begins on the year of Edrouss Delmuirie’s death. He was a great Bontonard scholar and the author of many erudite works on magic and scholarship—”
“Though his style was terribly dry and formal,” Geos interrupted.
“Only in his later period. His earliest works are models of concision and wit.”
“Personally, I always thought he read like six different writers—I’ve suspected for years that every anonymous work in the scholarly canon was attributed to him sooner or later.”
“Nonsense.”
“I don’t think so,” Geos said “It doesn’t matter right now, anyway. The point is, Edrouss Delmuirie is dead. And has been for a fiendishly long time.”
“Well, I am not dead.” Delmuirie linked his fingers together and stretched, cracking his knuckles loudly. “And I resent being told that I am. And I am Edrouss Delmuirie, but I was never a Bontonard—Bonton was a cow pasture with a bunch of grubby cowherds living in the middle of it when I knew it.”
Bytoris’s face went dusky. “Spoken like an Arissod.”
Delmuirie snorted. “Bog-Arisser, you mean? That stinking swamp Ariss was home to stinking fish-eaters and the ugliest women in the world.”
“Well, we agree on that at least. Nothing good has ever come from Ariss.”
“I spent some time there,” Faia said. “I thought it was an interesting place.”
Bytoris, however, was not interested in her travels. He had returned to his previous subject. “The real Edrouss Delmuirie…” The expression on his face became unreadable. Faia thought Geos looked skeptical—but she couldn’t figure out what Bytoris Caligro was thinking at all. He sat straight up and hunched his shoulders forward leaning toward Delmuirie. A weird fanaticism burned in his eyes. “I don’t suppose you could read the script of the First Folk, could you? As proof that you are who you claim to be.”
“First Folk script—I did not know they had a script. Or do you mean Klog-press?”
“The impressions they left behind in tablets.”
“That’s Klog-press. Of course I can read it. And write it. I speak and read Air Tongue, Stone Tongue, Blood Tongue and Water Tongue—that is what I was doing in Skeeree.”
Bytoris’s eyes narrowed. “He speaks it. He reads it.” He stared down at his feet and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one long, graceful finger. When he looked up at Delmuirie again, his attitude was unmistakably condescending. “Would you at all mind giving me a demonstration?”
Delmuirie shrugged. “Does not matter to me. If there are no more Klogs, seems like a useless enough skill, but—”
Bytoris pressed his lips into a thin white line. “Useless. Of course. A moment, please.” He rummaged through his pack, and came out with a sheaf of drypress sheets. He held one up, and beckoned Delmuirie over. “These are rubbings I did of the tablets so I’d have copies for my own study.” He leafed through the sheaf and pulled out a single drypress sheet. He covered all but the top third with the other sheets, which he put facedown. “I know this part—I worked out the Gekkish. If you would start reading here.” He pointed to a line on the page.
Edrouss Delmuirie nodded, and studied the sheaf. “This is the Graggha-Sondmon Treaty—the one before the amendments, you
know. There is a more recent one back about four shelves.” He glanced down, then back up again and opened his mouth. Instead of words, though, he began to cough and sputter and hiss and growl. Gyels lay back on his bedroll with his eyes closed, his expression one of boredom. Faia and the Bontonards looked at each other in disbelief, though.
Faia had thought Hoos sounded bad—but the sounds Delmuirie was making were like two mountain lions in a bag with their tails tied together. Two very big mountain lions.
“Stop!” Bytoris yelled after a brief demonstration. “What are you doing?”
“I’m reading it.” Delmuirie shrugged. “In Klog.”
Bytoris’s face paled. “Translate,” he growled.
“You did not say you wished to have me translate it. You said you wanted me to read it.” Nevertheless, he ran his finger back to the top of the section Bytoris had marked off, and began again. “We agree,” Delmuirie read, “we peoples of Klaue and Annin tribes, to make no more war on each other, to cease in all times and places from hunting each other for our skins or teeth or bones, to cease in all times and all places the stealing and eating of the peoples of each other’s tribes. We, the Klaue, shall refrain from dropping stones on the heads and homes of our Annin neighbors. We, the Annin, shall refrain from coating landing towers with pitch and tar, or from lighting them on fire when they become covered with trapped Klaue. We shall not make war on each other for sport, nor shall we demand slaves or heavy tributes. We shall make our peoples to live together in peace, to our mutual benefit, sharing our skills and talents and ruling jointly in a Council composed of the best representatives of all our people.” Delmuirie sighed. “Then it goes into the actual articles of agreement. Do you wish me to read those as well—” He looked up and his speech faltered; he stared at Bytoris.