Chapter 16
One fine day Truth met with Lies upon a mountainside with all of Hantalon spread beneath them: field, and town, and city stretching to the sparkle of the sea. With a disapproving frown, Truth asked of Lies how many she had slain. And true to her nature she answered with a lie. “More than you, brother.”
The Basics of Deductive Logic , by I. P. Franchise
CHAPTER 16
Arpix
Arpix coughed several times, rubbing at his throat where the red-maned canith had previously grabbed him. He wanted to spit but it was a nasty habit that he discouraged in others and he managed not to.
“You threatened torture,” Arpix growled—you had to growl to speak canith. “The irony...” Arpix had learned the language from a canith wanderer who had stayed at the camp for most of the second year. The canith’s vocabulary in human tongues wasn’t extensive and Arpix wasn’t convinced he was particularly articulate in his own language either, so working out less common and more abstract words like “ironic” had been a difficult task and even now Arpix wasn’t sure he had the right term. “The irony is that speaking your tongue is torture on my throat at the best of times, and after being half throttled...” He coughed again and this time couldn’t avoid spitting.
“I’m sorry,” Evar said from behind them. “My sister—”
“I can speak for myself,” Clovis snarled.
They were all walking towards the camp now, losing sight of the skeer runners behind the low stone wall and gentle undulation of the plateau. The camp sat at the centre of the invisible bubble that kept the insectoids from approaching. The protected area was a little over a quarter of a mile across, large enough for the crops that sustained them and to walk a dusty mile around their domain without coming too close to the edge for comfort.
“You’re bleeding!” Arpix said it in his birth tongue then gathered himself to growl it through an increasingly sore throat. “You’re bleeding.” A bright notch had been scored over one of the metal plates sewn onto the leathers across Clovis’s side and it continued past the edge, slicing into and through the tough hide. A couple of feet below the cut, blood was dripping slowly from the lower skirts of her armour.
“That’s my business,” Clovis snarled. “Where’s this device?”
Arpix led them through the bean fields where he had spent so many months pulling strands of questing livira from the ground. The weed was as irrepressible as its namesake. He took them past the well that had been ropeless when they found it and had taunted them with the scent of unobtainable water. He lifted a heavy bucket from beside the guard wall they’d built around the hole. It was more of a goatskin pouch than a bucket, and a third of the water had leaked out. Still, thirst doesn’t critique. Clovis had the skin out of his hands in a flash. She didn’t, however, thrust her face into it, instead taking it to her injured brother, Kerrol, who took a long slow drink.
As the canith passed the bucket around, Arpix took a moment to study them. Arpix had been tall from an early age and had continued to grow, upwards rather than outwards, after his classmates had stopped. He stood a good six feet five, like a weed hunting the light, Meelan said. Clovis, shorter than her brothers, overtopped him by more than a hand, and every inch of her lean, athletic form was packed with the kind of muscle that doesn’t show itself until its owner demonstrates some remarkable feat of strength. She had a fierce vitality about her, an energy that unnerved him but which at the same time he found himself unable to look away from.
“What?” Clovis caught him staring and snarled a challenge.
“My apologies, madam,” Arpix growled through his sore throat. “We get so few visitors.”
Clovis tossed aside the bucket and leaned over to stare down the well. She made a sharp yipping sound, trying to gauge the depth.
“It’s nearly two hundred yards to the water,” Arpix said. “Through the thickness of the plateau and into the aquifer below the plain.” “Aquifer” was another word he’d had to tease from their visitor at great length and, judging by the look Kerrol and Evar had just exchanged, he might have been taught something not only wrong but inappropriate. Flustered, he tried to rephrase. “The buried lake.”
Clovis snorted. “Ignore them. They’re idiots.” She wiped her mouth and looked around at the small group with him. “This is all of you?”
Arpix nodded. He led them on, over a low rise and down into the depression where they had made camp in the reconstructed shell of a building whose masonry had lain half-covered by the dust. The canith wouldn’t be looking at that, of course: they would be staring at the head, neck, and shoulder of the great queen, all slightly tilted such that it gave the impression the huge statue might be about to plunge back beneath the surface.
The stone head was a good ten feet tall when measured from the bottom of the slightly pointed chin to the top of the over-wide forehead.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,” Evar growled.
“What?” Arpix was often far from sure he wasn’t putting his own interpretation on random snarling.
“A poem from antiquity,” Evar said. “There was a city here once, I think.”
“Yes. There are old tunnels riddling the plateau. Most of them collapsed. If not for the things we found down there we would have died shortly after arriving.”
“Where’s the weapon?” Clovis proved herself to be single-minded.
“I don’t know.” Arpix raised a hand to forestall any more threats. “It’s somewhere below us, I assume. Buried with the city it protected. It might be as small as a pebble or larger than a city square. I have no idea. We discovered its existence in the same sort of way that you did—standing inside the zone, looking out at angry skeer, and thanking whatever gods were watching over us.” He turned away from Clovis to address Evar, who was larger yet somehow less intimidating than his sister. “How did you get here? Do you know what happened to Livira and the others?”
Arpix had no experience of reading emotion on the face of canith but he felt sure that Evar’s sudden stillness and the way he looked down at his hands, bringing them together to wrestle slowly with each other, was not a good sign. A coldness gripped him. “Evar?”
The others had caught Livira’s name. Meelan, who had been sitting on a nearby rock, stood up quickly and stared as if trying to squeeze the meaning out of their conversation. Salamonda’s hand found Jella’s and together they came to stand beside Arpix.
Evar met Arpix’s gaze reluctantly. “I met Livira in the Exchange. Her friend, Malar, was injured and we came through my portal, to my time... now... to heal him—”
“She’s here?” A flicker of hope. Arpix couldn’t help but look around, knowing himself to be a fool even as he did so.
“We went back to look for you. She insisted. We were all ghosts—you understand? We could see but not touch. She and Malar got bound up inside assistants.”
“Inside?” Arpix tried to imagine it.
“Inside.” A growl and a nod. “I understood then that they had been trapped in the assistants that raised all of us.” He waved an arm at his siblings, both of whom rumbled in their throats. A noise that sounded like mourning. “I came back to the now. But I was too slow. Both assistants had been destroyed.”
A short keening noise that was almost a howl escaped Clovis. “The Soldier died hard. Many fell before him.”
“Destroyed?” Arpix understood the word; he just hadn’t thought it was possible. “An assistant?”
“By skeer warriors. Lots of them.”
“So where are Livira and Malar?” Arpix needed Livira to be somewhere. She couldn’t have come to her end like that. Not broken by skeer. His voice had softened past the point at which he could get the raw edges of the canith words through his sore throat. But Evar seemed to understand anyway.
“I don’t know.”
Meelan grabbed Arpix’s arm. “What’s he saying? It’s bad, isn’t it? I don’t believe him.” Anger tried to hide another emotion and his voice shook with denial.
“How long ago?” Arpix asked Evar.
“Days. Days... I tried to save her. I ran... I was too slow.” And Evar, showing more and sharper teeth than Arpix had imagined he possessed, slowly tore his hand across his chest, leaving three deep, bleeding furrows.
Arpix turned away from the canith warrior, having no answer for Evar’s pain or his own. “Assistants,” he managed, reaching for Meelan’s shoulder. “Livira and the soldier, their spirits got trapped inside assistants...”
“No!” Meelan shook his head slowly, studying the ground. He looked up sharply, eyes bright. “That was her? The assistants that saved us from the fire? That was her and Malar?”
Salamonda and Jella, understanding the emotions but not both sides of the conversation, closed in without questions, and for a long moment they stood, bound in a circle of each other’s arms, voiceless in their grief.
—
For the next two days, Evar watched over Kerrol and treated his wounded shoulder with help from Salamonda. Clovis proved less nurturing than her brother and instead insisted that she be shown the abandoned workings cut into the plateau.
Arpix had explained that when they had first arrived they had survived only because of the limited equipment they were able to scavenge from the tunnels. Their first saviour had been rope. Not from some inhabitant of the buried city—rope would never survive that long, even in a desert—but from some more recent habitation, when perhaps some other travellers had discovered that skeer left the area alone and had stayed for a while. The rope enabled them to reach the well’s water. Lengths of timber and a rusting hoe head had been other important finds.
What had really kept them from death that first winter, though, had been what they’d come to call “Salamonda’s little helper.” Nobody ever saw their hidden benefactor but the carcasses of rats, rabbits, even wild boar, and once a deer started to be discovered around the dig site, and it seemed that almost always Salamonda was the one to find them. To deepen what was already a deep mystery, it was very hard to believe that any boar or—even less likely—any deer dwelt within several days’ march of their position. Yet the blood on the bodies was still fairly fresh, and some were even warm. The animals appeared to have met their death by way of a broken neck with some degree of laceration to the flesh around their throats or napes.
Arpix took advantage of his time alone with Clovis to practise his canith. The canith had many languages of course, but the one Clovis and her kin spoke was common on the western side of the continent.
Clovis proved taciturn to start with, offering a snarl or a snort by way of answer as often as a word or two. But her hostility did seem to mellow, a fact that Arpix attributed less to his charming personality and more to her discovery that the first human she’d seen, Livira—whom she had immediately tried to kill—had actually been present almost her whole life as part of the assistant who had raised her.
Clovis’s exploration was aimed at uncovering the source of the city’s protection, with the unspoken promise that she would steal it from them. In addition, the survey served to educate her regarding the terrain on which she might have to fight, a basic component on any military checklist. Unfortunately for her, because they had such limited reserves of fuel, all of it rather smoky, the survey had to be conducted mainly in the dark.
In the parts of the complex where some whisper of daylight reached in through fissures or reflection, it turned out that human night vision was better than that of the canith. Which left Clovis having to hold on to Arpix’s arm, her head bent to his shoulder since most of the tunnels required even him to bend double.
Out of the wind and in such close quarters, Arpix became familiar with the scent of unwashed canith. It was a strong smell close up, but not, Arpix decided, particularly unpleasant. A musty scent that made him tingle.
He was under no illusions that standing in the rain, on the handful of occasions each year that there was rain, had left him in any way close to sweet-smelling, and he found himself hoping that his unwashed stench wasn’t too foul in the famously sensitive nostrils of the canith. Clovis in particular, since she only had to dip her head a few inches more to bite him.
When Arpix and the others had first explored the passages, Meelan had joked that the digging seemed to have been done by dwarfs. Arpix found the place oppressive. The darkness always seemed to hide an enduring sadness, and despite the fact that he had never counted himself the sort to attribute emotions to places or things, Arpix was unable to shake the feeling.
“This is the end.” Arpix patted his hands across the rough wall in front of him. “I think there’s one more side tunnel back on the left. It leads to an intact chamber of the old city but anything it held was scavenged long ago, and the exits are blocked.”
“Take me there,” Clovis growled.
“Your mother never told you you get more flies with honey?”
“I don’t want flies,” Clovis said.
“Oh, it’s not about wanting—”
“And I don’t remember much about my mother except that humans slaughtered her.” Clovis’s growl grew softer but somehow more dangerous in the dark. The fine hairs covering her cheek tickled briefly against Arpix’s ear.
“My mother and father, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were almost certainly killed when the canith invaded and the library burned.” Arpix had never truly taken their deaths onboard. He had left his family home to come to the library, and although he could walk there from the library door in half an hour, he had felt as apart from them as if he inhabited some distant island, isolated by overwork and by experiences they couldn’t share. Even so, he had spent a slightly awkward evening with his parents once a month, all of them revisiting the same old topics for lack of overlap in their current lives. “I haven’t mourned them.” He admitted this for the first time to the darkness and a stranger who had nearly strangled him. “I don’t know how to.”
“You should cry their loss to the moons and vow revenge,” Clovis answered.
“Revenge on whom?”
Clovis made no answer.
“On the next canith I see?” Arpix asked. “On the ones I see running from the skeer? Should I have doused the light and left you to it?”
“You should still howl for them, loud enough for the moons to hear.”
Arpix felt that perhaps he should, but could only offer, “It’s not our way.” He meant it wasn’t his way. Salamonda had wailed for her lost ones, no room for shame in her grief. Arpix felt somehow lessened by the fact that his own mourning had been unable to step over such social constraints even in this forsaken wilderness. Instead, it ached inside him, along with the regret that he’d never been able to tell his quiet and reserved mother or his quiet and reserved father that their quiet and reserved son had loved them very much in his own strange way.
Clovis sniffed the air, or perhaps his neck, close enough to make Arpix shiver. “You should howl for them.” Some gentleness in her tone made him imagine she might have intuited the depth of his emotion by scent alone.
She moved away.
“You’re going?”
“I know the path back.”
“I’ll come with you,” Arpix said.
“You should stay.” Clovis’s growl became more distant. “To not speak to the moons is to poison yourself from within. You should stay.”
“I...”
Almost beyond hearing she spoke again. “Thank you for the light.”