by Jean Johnson
“It is why we get along so well,” Jintaya agreed. “I think it is time for us to retire for the night. We Fae will keep an eye on this Anzak while he is here, day and night, but until the negotiators arrive, we will simply be courteous and polite toward him. Once they have assessed the situation, then we will know better how to proceed, and when. Please spread the word not to make any promises to him or his kind.”
“We’ll remember,” Tulan promised her, one taje to another. “I’m glad you’re willing to deal with him and his kind, Djin-taje.”
“I could have gone my whole long life without meeting any Efrijt, so I won’t say it’s a pleasure,” Jintaya admitted dryly. “But I will do what I can. You are all under my protection . . . and by extension even those who live beyond the inner desert’s sands. Goodnight, everyone. May you all sleep well.”
The others murmured goodnight in return. Turning, Jintaya glanced at Ban. Nodding, he joined her in heading back into the hidden pantean stronghold. Rua stayed behind, wandering over to talk with Lutun and his granddaughter Anuda.
That reminded Ban of something, though he refrained from speaking until they were firmly within the hidden, sculpted halls of the Fae’s underground home. Pacing alongside her through pools of light shining from crystals embedded in the ceiling, he tucked his hands behind his back. “Siffu will never stop thinking of you and the others as beings of anima, rather than beings of flesh and blood.”
“Ugh,” Jintaya muttered, raising her first two fingers to her brow again with a wince. She didn’t need to see where they were going; both of them could walk these corridors blindfolded after so many years. “I don’t think she has many believers following her. I hope she doesn’t have many believers. I’d like to think it’s just a tiny few, and mostly just her spewing nonsense at her descendants. Certainly, Anuda doesn’t act very often like we’re proto-gods or anima-beings, and she’s friends with Seda, who did, and is the one descended of ‘Grandmother’ Siffu.”
“She was remarkably prolific for never having shared sex with a Fae,” Ban pointed out. “That makes for a lot of descendants. Twelve of her own, counting both sets of twins, all of them fully human.”
“And each has since gone on to have at least two more, and the most fecund of them each had eight. Most of them haven’t hesitated to share sex with a Fae,” Jintaya stated. “Bringing in new Fae, who are not accustomed to how the pheromones of this world’s humans will affect them . . .”
Ban stated the obvious. “We’ll have a lot more half-blood children in the near future, and three-quarter blood, too.”
“They don’t smell quite as alluring, thank the stars that brought us here,” she muttered. “Inbreeding is always dangerous. I need to remind Zitta and Zuki to update the family trees in the animadjet halls. To make room for yet more half-breeds.”
“There is that herb I found,” Ban reminded her. At her raised brows, he prompted her memory. “Year thirty-seven, I had gone far to the east, across the eastern sea, to the land where the people are very short and dwell in caves because their land is all hills and mountains, with steep valleys and ravines. There was that plant with the sap that was supposed to repel disease-bearing mosquitoes and ticks, that made the local humans smell awful. The jar of insect repellent I brought back repelled you.”
“Oh, yes, the burnt rubber sap smell,” Jintaya recalled. “A pity you couldn’t get the bush to survive the trip, and the seeds would not propagate. Rua was a bit annoyed by that.”
“I took too long in coming back,” he pointed out. “If I traveled at high speed, that could help keep a transplanted bush alive.”
She considered it a moment, but only a moment. Shaking her head, the leader of the pantean dismissed the idea. “I would rather have you here, or headed northwest to the Efrijt lands. I was going to send you back there, but if the Fae Gh’vin can send us those negotiators within just a few days, I would rather you stayed and awaited their questions and assessment of what to do, based on what you and this Anzak fellow can tell them.”
“Can, in my case. Will, in his,” Ban stated dryly. “If I were him, I would have brought some means of communicating long-distance, and as soon as I found myself alone, I’d be talking with their leader.”
“That would be the sejo,” she agreed, giving the word the local pronunciation, seh-yoh. “That’s the member of the triumvirate that usually makes all final decisions for the medjant. But if I could, I would spy on their sefo. That’s the one who balances the books, checks the contracts, and knows all the laws and rules, both how to follow them, and how to break them. The seso, who is in charge of operating the daily work of the medjant’s business, would be the next one to interrogate, since it’s the seso who enforces how the local workers are treated, whether they’re treated harshly with exploitation, violence, and threats, or very rarely with reasonable fairness.”
He snorted at the very idea of an Efrijt being fair. That earned him a brief questioning look, and a sigh.
“Not all Efrijt are as cruel as the one who abandoned you, Ban. There are those who profit from the artistry of workers on a particular world. They treat those artisans well, because they know you cannot beat or starve or even just trick beautiful art out of someone. Certainly not for very long, and definitely not consistently.”
“Do the humans of this world have any art the Efrijt would be interested in?” he asked her, arching a brow in skepticism.
“Highly unlikely,” she said, gesturing to open the door to her personal quarters. It melted to either side under a touch of her magic, turning from smooth and solid wall to delicate filigree stonework, to an opening that revealed walls that had been carved with an astonishing level of detail over the decades. Kaife might be their best at sculpting earthen elements, but Jintaya had several more centuries’ worth of practice than he did. Her designs caught Ban’s eye, distracting him a little.
“You have a delicate, intricate touch,” he murmured, focused more on the walls than on the furniture of her sitting room. “Is that . . . ? That’s a record of all the activities of each year, laid out in pictorial relief, scene by scene.”
“That is correct.When you get to be my age . . . aheh . . . Sorry. My apologies,” she offered, smiling wryly.
Instead of being hurt by the reminder that he had and would outlive her, Ban found her forgetfulness amusing, and smiled softly. “I am glad I can make you forget our age differences. You were saying?”
“When you get to be my age, it helps to record everything, so that one year does not end up blending into the next. But you know that, my Ban.”
“Yes.” He didn’t have to elaborate. He didn’t have to, but he did. “I prefer the way these years blend into each other, endurably pleasant.”
“It may get unpleasant, if the Efrijt will not accept our claim to govern this world under Fae rules for outworlder visits,” she warned him. “I really do wish I could spy on their leadership.”
Following her through the sitting room into a hall that wound deeper into the crystal-laced granite surrounding them, Ban asked, “Why can’t you? Between your Fae artifacts, and the way your magic meshes so perfectly with the local energies . . .”
She shook her head. “I could see superficial things from here, but the Efrijt will have warding spells raised against scrying, particularly now that they know the Fae are here. I would need a special type of crystal to form a sort of magnifying lens in order to penetrate their shields.”
“So have Kaife make it,” Ban said.
Again, a shake of her head, rippling her long, sungold hair. “He hasn’t made anything like it before, and I don’t have the time to wait for him to learn how. It has to be made from uncut tourmaline crystals, tiny ones that have to be devoid of magic in their making. They have to be selected in shades of red, green, and blue, and set into a mesh screen as tightly and evenly as possible in little triads. And if too much magic is use
d in their making . . . it will not be able to penetrate spells designed to thwart magical scrying attempts.
“So everything should be done by hand. Unfortunately,” she pointed out, “in the amount of time it takes to do things by hand, we could visit them in person back and forth three or four times. With the slip-discs, but still . . . Yes, it would be nice to have such a thing, but it just would take too long to build. Everyone has a job to fulfill over the next few weeks.”
“I don’t have a job,” Ban pointed out. “Until I am sent back to the Red Rocks area by you or the negotiators, I have nothing to do. Nothing, save stand around and look appealing to you.”
Torn between gaping and laughing, she stared at him, jaw sagging, then gave in with a huff of amused air. “Oh, now you develop a sense of humor . . . ! Very well, Ban. I will get you the book on how to construct the lens. It requires a pair of hexagonal frames,” she added, gesturing for him to follow her as she detoured from the entrance to her bedroom to a set of stairs that meandered downward. “Ones made from wood that is bent by steam, not by spell . . .
“When they are both made, one is flown near the location in question by attaching a sailing platform to the outside of the frame and using magic only on the platform itself; the other frame is linked to it by the only other bit of magic allowed. Let me find the tome in my library, as it has explanations for each and every step needed . . .”
***
Just as Anzak had both feared and hoped, the transceiver box only worked up on the clifftops, where the mass of stone lining the ravines of this place could no longer block the mechanical signal. The reason why his bag was so small that it vanished behind the roll of his anashak when slung on his back was that he had extracted and dropped signal boosters every so often in his long flight southeast. With their inability to fully access and utilize the magical energies of this world, his people had fallen back on purely mechanical means of doing things wherever possible. It was a bit primitive compared to the elegance of magic, but it worked.
Sitting on his unrolled anashak under the chilly night sky, tens of thousands of stars gleaming in faint pinpricks down upon him, Anzak waited for someone to notice the beeping of an incoming signal from the transceiver back at the medjant. It took a while. Long enough for a stinging bug of some sort . . . the kind the humans back at the valley called a skorpeeyon, he thought . . . to crawl onto the rug in search of new terrain. Anzak flicked it away with the blade of his knife, sending the thumb-length beast flying.
It tumbled among the rocks several yards away just as the transceiver screen came awake, glowing up at him with the face of Sejo Zakal. Reporting directly to the sejo upset his nerves, since by rights he should have reported to a daro or even a kuro, but Anzak kept his expression calm. They were a small medjant, with only four levels of rank between the lowest and the highest. Having the eyes of the House Leader upon him was inevitable.
“I was about to retire,” the sejo stated flatly in their native tongue. “You had better have good news to report, Taro.”
Diplomacy made him adjust what he had been about to say. “I shall leave the judgment of my news up to my sejo’s wisdom,” Anzak informed her, holding the transceiver close enough so that its screen lit up his face. “I have reached this Flame Sea place. They call the region and the tribe that, but the main settlement is called Ijesh.”
“Beautiful,”Zakal translated. “What have you observed so far?”
“Not as much as I would like, as I arrived at dusk,” he cautioned her. “Their leader, they call her Taje Djin-taje-ul, or Djin-taje. She has long hair, almost to the ground. I’d say at least three, four centuries old, from what I know of their kind. There was a second one, Rua-taje—the locals have switched the titles around for these Fae, instead of putting the taje part first. It is very strange. But the leader, Taje Djin, she knew exactly what a taro was, and refused to do business with anyone less than a kuro in rank,” Anzak added. “The other one seemed to know a bit, too. I do not know how many more there are, just yet.”
“So she has some knowledge of our ways,” Zakalmuttered, mouth flattening in disgruntlement. Her lips twitched, baring her tusk-tips for a moment, then she sighed. “What of the size of their settlement? How large is it?”
“It is difficult to gauge the size, as most of the buildings are carved into the cliffs and hillsides of all the valleys of this area, the wadijt, as the locals call them. All of the slopes I have seen so far have irrigation channels and other ways of shunting water to catch-basins and settling ponds,” Anzak added, thinking through what he had observed. “They irrigate their grazing fields as they irrigate their crop fields, with low aqueducts and covered ditches fed by artesian springs.
“The little I was able to learn about those springs, the ditches, the buildings . . . the Fae have created all of it. I was told by a . . . child,” he admitted reluctantly, “that the original valley walls had been sandstone, but when the human tribe arrived, the Fae replaced the sandstone with granite in all areas that they wanted to put buildings. I had the chance to examine one of the boundaries between granite and sandstone. It looks as though they drained the sandstone, letting the granite flow up into its place.”
“Drained?” Zakal asked, narrowing her burgundy eyes. Her lips pulled back a little, baring her tusk-tips. “As if it were a liquid?”
“Like sand in an hourglass, Sejo,” he told her. “The sandstones have mostly level, horizontal striations, until they get within a finger’s width of the granite, then the layers turn abruptly vertical. It is very subtle from a distance, yet clearly unnatural when viewed up close. The granite is a bit less obvious in its patterning, but I believe it, too, flowed into place from somewhere deep in the earth.
“The sheer scale of how much they have accomplished, even accounting for an occupation of forty-plus years, is awe-striking,” he continued. “The guest lodgings I was given show no signs of mechanical tool marks, and all the hallmarks of having been magically shaped. When I questioned the youth guiding me, he said these Fae can shape a residence of four chambers in just a few hours, complete with running water and sewer waste tunnels. He said they do so as easily as just sitting there, breathing. But that is not the most disturbing thing, Sejo.”
The medjant leader narrowed her eyes in annoyance. “You should tell the most important things up front, Taro.”
“I apologize, but the importance would be lost without a proper context, Sejo,” he reminded her. “The youth said the Fae only work their greater magics in the evenings, so that they don’t steal the anima from the local mage users. I did not understand what he meant until I tried drawing magic up out of the oil lamp in my quarters, earlier this evening. Fire is the only source I can pull an anima-spark out of, on this world. But instead of being drawn toward me like it should, it resisted and tried to angle away.”
“Angle away?” she repeated, dubious.
Anzak nodded. “It was pulled back toward the area where I first met with the Fae. I managed to capture it, but it was not easy. The youth said that it’s just the way the anima works in this area. It is like water, he said, and the Fae become the bottom of the wadij; all the water, the magic, flows toward wherever they are. He then boasted that no one has been able to use the local magic against the Fae, because they absorb it like sand absorbs raindrops.”
The sejo bared her tusks in a grimace. “If the local magics automatically head toward them whenever they use their own—which the restriction on when they use their energies implies—combined with the stoneworking they’ve done . . . that suggests they find magic very easy to use in this realm. It will be very difficult to gain legal rights to any of it, when we are nearly the opposite, that we have to fight and struggle for any scrap of the local energies, and can only rely upon our own inner reserves.”
“Struggling to capture the local anima depleted mine, Sejo,” Anzak forced himself to admit. “I lost more energy th
an expected, at least as much as I would have gained back among the Red Rocks valleys. I suspect to use the local magic near the Fae on this world would be a negative sum in energies, not a positive one.”
Again, she bared her teeth in a grimace. “We will have to study them further. What else can you tell me about the Fae presence on this world?”
“I think they have bred with the locals,” Anzak confessed. “Many of the children and some of the adults have blond hair and Fae eyes, but brown skin. Their ears are rounded like a human’s.”
“Can they use the local magic like a Fae?” she asked.
“I do not know. As I said, I arrived near twilight, and have not had a chance to explore far,” he told her. “I must lay my anashak out flat tomorrow to absorb sunlight and convert it into magical power before I can fly back, and do so for at least a full day, possibly two.”
“Stay several days,” his sejo ordered him. “Talk with the locals. Ask questions about their history. Find out about their . . . animadjet. And the half-breeds. The damnable el-fae perverts will breed with anything that catches their licentious eye. But . . . find out if breeding with the local humans makes it easier for the offspring to control the magic. If it works for them, it might work for us.”
Anzak wrinkled his own nose in disgust, baring his tusks. “You would expect us to . . . ? With humans?”
“I meant with the Fae. There is precedence for it, from other worlds where we have crossed paths with them,” Zakal stated bluntly. “I will consult with Sefo Harkut about the exact precedents of using half-breed inheritors to determine control of a region. Children can be influenced to follow a parent’s orders and wishes. It is not our only option, of course, but it is a possibility. Plus it would guarantee us at least two decades of occupancy, allowing us time to increase production.”
Considering Anzak was in this medjant specifically because his uncle wished him to assist the man’s daughter, Kuro Nazik Urudo, in overseeing the traders and artisans, Anzak knew quite well that younger family members could be influenced by older ones. The Urudo family had its kin tucked into several different medjants, on the theory that diversity ensured prosperity, since even if one particular medjant failed, the successes of others could balance out the losses. Ironically, it was his male cousin, Daro Dakin Urudo, Nazik’s young brother,who had expected to be the taro of Medjant Kumon.