Chapter 6 #2
“Did you really think you could come to the territory of the fortunate and not find yourself confronted with the children of fortune?” he asked, words accented but understandable.
He kept smiling as he shifted his position slightly, swinging the bident from Thomas to me.
“This is our place, and we brook no intrusions.”
“I’m sorry,” said Thomas. “These were the coordinates I had. We intended no trespass or disrespect against your people.”
“Intent isn’t the same as action,” said the man. “You intended no trespass, but you have trespassed all the same. We have little enough territory remaining to us. Why should we tolerate your coming here and treading upon what is ours?”
“I’m a distant relative, if that helps,” I said.
My great-grandmother, Frances Brown, was half-Kairos.
It’s where my side of the family gets our natural resistance to cuckoo mind tricks, and why we so often find ourselves dealing with ludicrous coincidences.
Sam liked to say that my family’s only plan was “Just wing it,” and he wasn’t far wrong, because being part-Kairos meant “just winging it” worked more often than not.
The man looked at me, eyes narrowing. “It doesn’t help,” he said. “What dreadful bower must have borne you, to stand so before us?”
“Uh, excuse me?” I scowled at him. “Don’t talk about my mother like that.”
To my surprise, he laughed. The other five Kairos began moving forward, their bidents held at menacing angles, clearly keeping an eye on us.
“This will be a delightful conversation,” he said. “The three of you will come with us now.”
“My wife—” began Thomas.
“Is already lost if she’s gone into the green,” said the man. “You will come.”
Jabbing their bidents at us to illustrate their point, the Kairos surrounding us urged us to start moving. I looked to Thomas, waiting to see how he would react.
To my surprise, he sighed and began to go in the direction they were urging us.
“Alice will be fine,” he said, in a low voice.
“Much of our time together since we were reunited has been focused on her learning that she’s not alone any longer, and me learning that she spent fifty years relying on luck and skill and didn’t die.
So I trust her to come and find us, and I’d really rather not start our time in this dimension by getting into a throw-down with a bunch of the locals. ”
“I don’t like this,” I grumbled.
“Neither do I,” he said. “But this is so far from the worst thing I’ve had to deal with that it barely rates a complaint. All right?”
“All right,” I agreed, and we kept walking, into the flowers, into the trees, away from the flat silver waters of the distant lake.
The Kairos led us through the brush for what felt like hours, finally emerging at the edge of a small village that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the American Southwest. The houses, which stood independently, ranged in height from one to three stories tall, and looked like they’d been built entirely from adobe bricks and fistfuls of some sort of thick, rubbery mud.
There was no glass in the windows, which had been set to line up with one another, allowing any breezes that blew by to penetrate all the homes at the same time. The rooftops were flat.
“Verity would love it here,” I murmured, soft enough that only Sam could hear me. He snorted, mildly amused but still wary.
Ladders made of what looked like thick bamboo lashed together with ropes made from braided leaves leaned against the front of the houses, allowing people to access the higher floors without going through the interior, and many of the windows had braided baskets hanging from them, some heavy with unidentified objects, others clearly empty.
And there were people. Maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise, this being their village and all, but it looked enough like a sound stage from some low-budget science fiction show that I almost expected the place to be deserted, or occupied by a few extras from central casting.
Instead, hunters with more of those strange bidents carried the carcasses of what looked like massive isopods and centipedes to hang them from hooks; groups of children sat cross-legged on the ground with adults leading them in counting games or story circles; unarmed adults hung laundry on lines or cracked the exoskeletons on the slaughtered insects, extracting the meat within.
All told, I counted more than eighty individuals, and I wasn’t taking care to count every single one of them.
Like the six who’d come to intercept us, they all looked human: drop any of these people on the street in Portland, give them a knit beanie and a paper coffee cup, and they’d fit right in.
Their range of skin tones included a few more extremes than I was used to: people so pale I could see their veins, or so dark that their skins seemed to swallow the light as it touched them, and a pair of women with gorgeous dark brown hair and skin yellow enough to verge on gold, but they were all within the spectrum possible for people on Earth.
They wore loose, layered clothing in greens and browns, clearly designed to make it easier for them to vanish into the foliage: some, like the initial six, had pieces of exoskeleton stitched or strapped to their attire, providing bright splashes of color that would, paradoxically, also make blending in easier.
Hard to hide among the flowers when you were the only thing in sight without petals.
Red seemed to be the dominant color—almost everyone I saw had at least one piece of shockingly red cloth integrated into their outfits, worn proudly as their primary adornment.
This wasn’t any community or culture I’d ever seen before, but they still looked so mundane that it was almost shocking when I heard a few of them speaking in low voices and realized they weren’t speaking English.
Weren’t … Wait. I looked back to our original six, who had ranged out to surround us in a loose circle. I frowned, then turned to Thomas. “Why do these ones speak English and those ones don’t?”
“An excellent question, Antimony. Why do you think that is?”
I scowled. He did that a lot—set little tests for me rather than answering my questions.
He said it was part of his duty if he was going to be teaching me sorcery.
“Kairos aren’t telepathic,” I said. “If anything, they’re the opposite, since they’re resistant to most forms of telepathy.
But this isn’t magical. I’d be able to feel it if this were magical. ”
“Are you so sure?”
“Yeah, and I’m pretty sure that ‘being held hostage by strange aliens’ is not the best moment for a pop quiz, okay?”
Thomas almost looked amused as he nodded. “Fair enough. Kairos are resistant to telepathy, yes, but not immune, and Johrlar is a telepathic world. Focus on what you hear.”
I blinked then, frowning, and tried to pay attention to the ongoing drone around us.
It hadn’t gotten any quieter as we moved, although it was steady enough that I’d started to almost tune it out, letting it fall into the background.
As before, it was divided into three registers, deep, deeper, and high and shrill.
But as I focused on them, I realized there was a fourth register, almost inaudible against the greater wall of sound.
I held up three fingers, making solid eye contact with my grandfather, and then, deliberately, raised a fourth.
His smile was the smile of every teacher I’d ever had, in school settings and otherwise, when I finally got the answer to some tricky problem or landed some complicated trick.
It was approval and satisfaction and a certain amount of smugness, like my cleverness was somehow down to him. In this context, I didn’t mind.
He nodded. “Johrlar is a telepathic world,” he repeated.
“That means most of the species that have managed to thrive here are sensitive, on some level or other. They hunt, evade, mate, and protect their young without visual or verbal signals. It’s only natural that some of the vegetation would pick up the same abilities. ”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Sam. “Plants don’t have brains. They can’t be telepathic.”
“Don’t they?” asked Thomas. “Even on Earth, we have clonal colonies, large groups of genetically identical plants that communicate within themselves, passing information as well as nutrients through their roots. Their brains aren’t like ours, being more decentralized and deconstructed, but I’d argue that they’re thinking all the same. Now, Annie. What do you see?”
I looked around the village, noting the presence of a flowering vine that had seemed almost inconsequential before, the local equivalent of morning glories.
The flowers themselves looked more like some sort of weird rainbow orchid, presumably optimized to attract bees and beetles I had never even dreamt of.
“I saw those vines where we landed, too,” I said. “Are they one of those clonal colonies?”
“I can’t be sure, but I’d wager yes,” said Thomas.
One of the original six nudged me to walk a little faster, and said, “The mind-mind flowers grow in discrete groves, and we build our settlements near their roots. They translate for us, and on the occasions when we find travelers like yourselves, they smooth the edges between our tongues. It isn’t without its drawbacks—none of us have actually learned to speak our mother tongue in generations, and I have little doubt that without the presence of the flowers, we’ll find that it’s been lost. But we understand each other, no matter where we wander, and we understand those who come from worlds beyond the sky, and we understand the heartless ones. ”
I blinked. Sam spoke first.
“You call them mind-mind flowers?” he asked, incredulously. “Isn’t that a little, well, ridiculous?”
“No, we call them mind-mind flowers,” said the man. He paused, frowning. “Or, I suppose, we call them whatever it is you’re hearing in translation. We call them what they are, and that word translates itself for others.”
“Does it apply to names as well, I wonder?” asked Thomas. “If I say my name is Thomas Price, will they hear those words, or ‘twin cost’?”
“Both,” said the man. “Delightful, isn’t it? You can communicate with any of us, down to the littlest babe.”
The idea of babies being able to make their wishes known in words was at once positive and unsettling. It would definitely lead to some social changes, and explained why the various groups of children seemed to be entirely mixed, containing everything from toddlers to tweens.
“Wait,” I said. “If you haven’t learned to talk, does that mean you used to live someplace that didn’t have these mind-mind flowers?”
“Of course,” said the man. “We are Kairos. This is not our world.”
“Meaning what…?”
“Meaning you are strangers here, and while you seem to intend but little harm, appearances can deceive. Still your tongues and stay your questions. We’re going to the Eldest Living.”
He waved the group onward, and we walked deeper into the village, Thomas looking unnervingly serene for a man who’d been held captive in another dimension for decades and had now been effectively taken prisoner again, Sam mostly just looking annoyed.
He kept his tail looped around me, limiting how far we could be separated, and I kept a hand on it, making it clear that right now, the anchor was more than appreciated.
I didn’t know this place or these people, even if they were distant relatives of mine.
I definitely didn’t want to deal with them alone.
Thomas’s serenity was odd, considering that we still hadn’t seen a sign of Alice. He kept walking, looking around himself with interest, and didn’t seem like he was getting ready to bolt into the brush. That probably meant he had a plan. I just wished he had a way of sharing it with me.
He glanced over at me and winked, broadly. Oh, he definitely had a plan. I’d just need to wait to find out what it was.
Holding to hope with one hand and Sam’s tail with the other, I took a deep breath and followed my grandfather into the unknown.