by Holly Lisle
The audience laughed, and he gave them a tight smile and continued.
“I got this book from two First Folk children—”
The noise level rose again in the Basin—this time from gasps of astonishment, disbelief, a few catcalls and scattered shouts of derision.
Praniksonne waved down the shouts. “I confess this sounds unlikely—but I have proofs. I shall now present those proofs.”
He began to read from his paper. He described his discovery of three children in Omwimmee Trade who spoke an unknown language, who were all strangely deformed and in the garb of no known people—primitives, he called them. But each carried a tablet, and once he had made himself understood to them, they traded him one of their tablets for a few trinkets and baubles. He then described how, after he gained their trust, they led him into the jungle, and into their village—also primitive, he said, full of deformed lizard-worshipers who shrank back in fear at the sight of someone as tall and straight and healthy as he obviously was.
In the middle of this presentation, Kirgen leaned very close and whispered, “Look at Thirk.”
Roba spotted the saje down in front of the assembly. He was frantically scanning the audience—she realized he was looking for them. When his gaze moved in her direction, she began waving.
It took him a moment, but he finally saw her. He crept out of his seat and began climbing over and through the audiences.
Meanwhile, Praniksonne was telling about the lizard-headed monuments he’d found in the jungle—new, just made by the ugly, inbred descendants of the First Folk. He described their degenerated culture, that held only echoes and imitations of its former glory. He described the books—used as plates or building materials, many broken, none read—and he sadly hung his head. “They’ve lost any memory of the greatness they once had,” he said. “And they’re destroying the remnants of the ancient First Folk civilization.”
Someone asked him, “Saje Praniksonne, how did you survive in the Wen jungle? Is it not death for any not Wen to enter?”
“For any normal human who is not Wen—surely. Even my trip was fraught with perils. But for a saje of my power and skill, those perils can be overcome. You could not think mere primitives could stand against magical power like mine.”
Thirk made it to Roba’s side. He nodded to Kirgen, then pushed between them and sat down. He leaned close to Roba. “This is it. I can’t believe it but this is confirmation—if we can find that village, and the rest of those tablets, we might be able to find Delmuirie’s final resting place. We have to go now.”
Roba felt her hands clenching into fists, automatically, as if they weren’t a part of her body. “Now as in—when?”
“Right this minute. We have to get to Omwimmee Trade and find someone who knows how to find that village.”
Roba was getting a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. “What about presenting your paper, Thirk?”
Thirk gaped at her. “Are you insane?” he sputtered. “Then everyone will beat a path to the jungle—and I want to get there first.”
“No—” Roba said, shaking her head. “No—no, I don’t think so. You should go ahead and present—”
“No. We have to go.”
“But what about my students?” She heard her voice developing a whining edge that she didn’t like, but she seemed powerless to stop it. “What about my job?”
“I hired you—and they’ll find a sub for your students. When we get back—after we’ve found that village, and vindicated Delmuirie’s name, you’ll be able to have any job you want. This is the proof that your paper was right, Roba. Proof!”
“No. Oh, no,” Roba whispered.
Chapter 6
IT took a full day for Roba, Kirgen, and Thirk to gather supplies for an extended jungle expedition; Roba loathed shopping for rugged clothes, ugly snakeproof boots and light-but-tasteless no-spoil foods. She hated paying rent and apartment protection in advance. She despised leaving her classes. She abhorred the idea of abandoning a perfectly good civilized city for someplace that wouldn’t have hot and cold water or Ralledine restaurants.
That day was followed by another full day spent flying in an unscheduled airbox to get from Ariss to Omwimmee Trade. Roba spent most of the airbox trip looking out the glassed-in side at the changing cloud-terrain beneath, wishing she could have thought of some compelling reason for not going. Kirgen, in the seat facing hers, slept. Thirk, beside her, fidgeted and wrote notes to himself and referred incessantly to the paper she and Kirgen had concocted.
Thirk was excited, tense, and frequently chatty. “Praniksonne will be able to transport,” he fretted. “Even if his expedition left after us, they’ll still get there before us.”
“Those tablets have waited out the Purges, the wars and the gods only know what else.” Roba pulled her gaze away from the window. “They’ll wait for you. Besides, Praniksonne can’t possibly suspect another group will go after that First Folk site.” Why should he, she thought. He’s the first person in recorded history to cross into the Wen Territory and live to tell about it. She hoped to the gods he wouldn’t be the last.
“I don’t care about the tablets,” Thirk snapped. “I care about finding Delmuirie’s final resting place—and vindicating him and winning him the respect history owes him.”
Roba pressed her cheek against the cool, wavy glass and closed her eyes. I’d be happy to know we were going to survive.
“Praniksonne is going to subvert this whole thing to his own ends,” Thirk muttered.
Focusing an expedition on actual scholarship instead of your personal obsession—now that’s an interesting definition for subversion, Thirk. Roba sighed. With her eyes still closed, she said, “Well, at least the two of you aren’t fighting for the same discoveries.”
“No. But I want to be able to make mine first. I don’t want the important discovery buried under a mound of trivia.”
Trivia, he calls it. It galls him the way the scholars flocked around Praniksonne—the way they made much over him, and ooohed and ahhhed his discovery. It infuriates him that they begged and pleaded to accompany the great man into the jungle, to be present at his find—that they would not take “no” for an answer, even when he warned them again and again of the dangers. He knows the scholars would have made no such clamor over his paper—not even if he’d marched Delmuirie himself in front of them.
Roba forced herself to breathe deeply and regularly and pretended sleep. She knew there was no way she could actually sleep—her multitude of falsehoods, hanging over her head like storm-filled clouds, left her stomach churning. The pending Delmuirie fiasco was going to destroy her career. Thirk would come to his senses and realize the sources she and Kirgen had used to create their “Delmuirie Disappearance Hypothesis” were nothing but ludicrous old myths…
…She would be publicly discredited and removed from her position, Kirgen would be thrown from the University…
…And Kirgen… what about him? Thirk didn’t realize the two of them were living together. He wouldn’t approve—he had made his own interest in Roba clear from the time he hired her…
…Worrying about the theory or her future or Thirk’s reaction to Kirgen were all wastes of time. None of that would matter. She was going to die in the jungle, along with Kirgen and Thirk and all her hopes for the future. None of the three of them had any idea where the First Folk site was—and Praniksonne wasn’t going to tell…
…But if they did make it to the First Folk site, Thirk would kill her. He wasn’t going to find Delmuirie—what he was likely to find was Delmuirie had never been anywhere near the First Folk site.
Thirk, Kirgen, Delmuirie, the First Folk, the jungle, the University, humiliation, exposure, despair, death. With her mind looping endlessly around its multiple tracks of worry, Roba fell into exhausted, nightmare-ridden sleep.
* * *
The Keyu stirred and roused with sudden intensity —their thought-voices snapped Choufa out of deep slumber.
&
nbsp;
The thoughts slid greasily through her mind, not aimed at her—not, she suspected, intended for her. Perhaps the Keyu didn’t know she could hear them whenever they spoke. Would they hurt her—eat her —if they knew? What is out there? She wondered. What could they want so much? She shivered, feeling pity for whatever it was.
The Keyu clamored.
Choufa shuddered. She hated the Keyu and hated being privy to their hungry, hateful, nasty thoughts. Her gods were evil gods, who set their monsters to bring down people—who hungered for the death of people.
Not people—She corrected herself. The Keyu hunt peknu. Nothings. I should not worry about them.
And then the irony of that ingrained habit of thought struck her, and she bit her lip. She was a nothing. Sharsha were as low as peknu but trapped in tighter bonds.
And then the thought-voices of the Keyu clamored in excitement, overriding her own thoughts. Unable to fend the Keyu off, she became absorbed in the thrill of their hunt.
There were no pictures in Choufa’s mind—there were only the words, the slippery, whispery, everywhere voices of the Keyu and the sense of something being forced toward the hungry trees that squatted in their deadly circle. She could feel their guiding thoughts, that drove the beasts in the jungle to chase the peknu-who-were-food. She could almost understand—could almost feel through her fingers and toes (branches and leaves?)—the manner whereby she could drive the beasts herself. The sensation tingled through her body, and then the beasts gave the peknu into the hands of the Silk People, and the minds of the outlanders fell silent.
When, later, to the pounding thunder of the drums, the Silk People offered up the wakened captives to the Keyu, the anguish of their embrace—mind-screaming bone-shattering flesh-rending horror—ripped Choufa into and out of treemind trance and left her shivering and scared on the branchwoven floor of the sharsha tree.
* * *
Medwind, Nokar, and Seven-Fingered Fat Girl sat to dicker. They faced each other across the broad table in the public room—behind Fat Girl stood Dog Nose and Runs Slow. Behind Medwind, Faia and Kirtha waited.
Medwind was prepared for a big argument between Nokar and the kids—she knew they wanted a lot for their tablet, and after all they’d been through, she wanted them to get it. Nokar, however, was infamously tight with his trades. She would have preferred to handle the trading, but Nokar said he was the one they’d been looking for, he was the one who had spent years archiving the First Folk reference collection in Faulea’s library, and he was going to be the one to dicker.
Medwind didn’t trust him. He had about him the air of a man hiding something—and he wouldn’t even tell her what.
So they waited, with the tension at the table growing.
“We trade this book. What you trade?” Fat Girl opened in Hraddo.
“I have come ready to offer you wonderful things,” Nokar smiled and said in the girl’s language.
Medwind realized that by dickering in the girl’s own language, Nokar had won a tactical point—he could use a different tongue to discuss details of the deal with his colleagues, but Fat Girl had no fall-back language.
The old man continued. “I’ll give you two bags of grain, two bags of sweet-roots, and a bag of journeybread.”
“WHAT?!” the Wen kids yelled.
Medwind turned to him and, in Huong Hoos, a language that, of those present, only they spoke, muttered, “Are you crazy? That’s nothing, Nokar. That tablet is worth a hundred times that, and you know it. And they know it.”
“Yes, of course,” Nokar murmured, also in Hoos. “How thoughtless of me.”
Seven-Fingered Fat Girl stood. “You are trying to steal from us,” she said. “We will take our book to someone else.”
Nokar switched to the girl’s language. “Medwind tells me I have offered you not enough. So I will pay you two tens-of-tens bags of grain, two tens-of-tens bags of sweet-roots, and one ten-of-tens bags of journeybread.”
“Saje god and demons,” Medwind muttered in Hoos. “Now you’re going to break us.”
Fat Girl sat down and smiled. “That is better.” She looked to her colleagues, and they smiled, too. “We also want the secret of the dirt-trick, which you must show us, and some of the magic dirt that makes food grow.”
“Of course,” Nokar agreed. “How many bags of the magic dirt do you want?”
The three Wen kids huddled, and Fat Girl came back to the table a moment later. “We have to feed us for the cold season in the mountains. So you tell us how much food one bag of magic dirt makes.”
Medwind told them, “You could grow enough tare-grain from one bag to last you a season—and tare-grain stores well. That goes for beets and onions and calley, too.”
“Then we want ten bags of magic dirt,” Fat Girl said.
Nokar told them “fine” before Medwind could even begin to dicker. “So do we have a trade?”
The Wen kids looked at him warily. They conferred again. “Yes,” Fat Girl agreed when she returned to the table. “We will trade.”
“Good.” Nokar rose. “Then we trade you five tens-of-tens of food and ten bags of magic dirt here tomorrow. How you going to carry it all?”
The kids stared at each other, then at the old man. They wore horrified expressions.
Nokar crossed his arms over his chest and said, “I don’t think you and Dog Nose can carry more than two bags of food at one time. Little Runs Slow can maybe—maybe—carry one. Even then, you’ll not be able to run very fast.”
“But that is not enough for our book.” Fat Girl stood again. Her eyes shone with unshed tears. “We must have much food—we must so that we can go to our city—”
Her eyes widened as she realized she what she’d said.
Nokar didn’t let the comment pass. “City?” he asked. “You didn’t say anything about a city. You said the Silk People threw you out of their villages. You said you live on the paths between, and have no home. So what city?”
Fat Girl’s face went gray. “There is no city,” she said.
Medwind felt her heart beginning to race. Fat Girl was lying. “What city, Seven-Fingered Fat Girl?” she added in Sropt. “Did you find tablet in city?” Over the past month, the kids had neatly changed the subject anytime the question of the origin of the tablets came up. They wouldn’t say whether there were any more tablets, or how they found those. When questioned, they suddenly couldn’t understand a word anyone said to them, or they looked off into space, or remembered a word of drum speech they hadn’t taught yet, or noticed Kirtha or Runs Slow doing something they weren’t supposed to. They’d guarded their secret for all they were worth.
A city—Medwind thought. Her heart pounded wildly. That’s quite a secret to hang onto.
“Is it a city made of stone?” Nokar asked. “Does it have stone monsters in it? Some buildings shaped—like so?” He described a dome with his fingers—put into Sropt his descriptions of the only First Folk-artifacts anyone had ever found before.
The Wen kids stared at each other, then at the old man. They wore their shock on their faces.
That’s it! Medwind thought and clenched her hands together under the table.<
br />
“It is exactly as you say.” Seven-Fingered Fat Girl hung her head. “I didn’t know you knew the city. I thought only we knew it.”
Medwind Song and Nokar exchanged glances. In Hoos, he said, “They’ve found one, Med. They’ve found an actual First Folk city.” And to Fat Girl, he said, “Yes, we know this place. Tell me, how many other books you find there?”
Fat Girl looked at him and shrugged. “Tens of tens of tens. Too many to count. We were going to keep trading them. We would have been very rich.”
Medwind thought her heart was going to pound out of her chest. “A library, Nokar,” she whispered in Hoos. “They sound like they’ve found a library.”
Medwind saw Nokar’s fingers grip the table edge. His knuckles turned white, but his voice stayed calm. “I offer a different trade, then,” he said. His Sropt was slow and careful. “You take us to the city and show us the book place. In trade, we carry your trade goods to the city, and we teach you to work the dirt-trick to grow food. We stay in the city, and you stay in the city—there’s places enough for all of you and us. What do you say?”
For several moments, no one said anything. Fat Girl did not confer with the other Wen. She merely sat very still, staring at her hands. Then she took a deep breath, and looked up, and slowly nodded her agreement.
* * *
The airbox landed outside the massive log palisades of Omwimmee Trade. While Roba and Kirgen got out and stood ankle-deep in the mud and unloaded their supplies, Thirk started giving directions.
“We’re going to spread out and find out what we can about First Folk who’ve come in to trade. I’ll take the indoor market. Kirgen, you take the outdoor market. Roba, why don’t you come with me?” He gave her a broad, encouraging smile.
Roba noted the smile, and caught the deeper implications immediately. Thirk figured with Kirgen occupied elsewhere, he could cozy up to her. She shook her head. “I have a friend who lives here now—the Huong Hoos woman I told you about once. I’m going to stop in and visit her—”