4. N
Haldeen watched as Andaleisia waited for the guards to escort the sample—Triana—out of the tower, and far enough out of earshot.
The moment they were out of sight she rounded on him.
“You bastard,” she said, “You locked me in with her.”
He had never seen her this furious before, along with another element that he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Disbelief? Well, it didn’t matter. Her fortunes rose and fell with his, and as long as she held up her part of the bargain, he didn’t need anything else out of her.
But best to placate her somewhat, so that she could think clearly and reasonably again.
Haldeen shrugged. “I had the control rod, and had her collared. I could’ve put her to sleep the moment she raised her hand. You were in no danger.”
He shrugged, looking to change the subject.
“What was that accent … pure gutter … half the vowels dropped? This is what happens when you give a perfectly good world to the dregs. Dregs in. Dregs out.”
A series of loud booms from outside the tower interrupted the argument.
The Predator’s assault bought him the ideal situation to buy him time and to reset the board.
“Let’s do this somewhere else, shall we? The king had a word with me yesterday … several words with me, actually … about his Lord Gatekeeper being too near a battle. I’d rather not reprise that, if possible. There is a shelter close. Go there?”
Three points at once … his rank and proximity to the king that brought the soft living, his importance to the city, and a reasonable request she could hardly argue against.
“Fine,” she spat out, still fuming. “But this isn’t over.”
He made a gesture for her to precede him.
She couldn’t very well turn around to argue while navigating the narrow stairs.
The descent bought time, while he figured out how to disarm her.
Once down, then to his courtyard office, well away from the servants, and firmly his on turf.
He’d engage, but at an angle, where he had the advantage.
He needed to continue to shift the ground. She did well on linear paths. Best to knock her off her stride, and continue shifting topics, until she stood on ground of his choosing. Once he had her there, he could turn her arguments back onto her, make her feel foolish, and pull her fangs.
He talked to her back as she descended, gaining an edge.
She couldn’t very well stop and turn to engage, and she had to keep her eyes on the narrow stair.
“The word choices and vocabulary were … very difficult to understand … but she seemed to have less trouble understanding us, than we did her.”
He tossed out the lede, and smiled to himself.
Us. We. Remind her that no matter how angry she got, she needed him.
Give her something else to put her mind to as well.
“I can’t see how a few decades would have made that much difference to a language—”
She did stop then, and he nearly plowed into her.
She turned and opened her mouth, about to say one thing, then closed it again as he captured her attention.
“Two options,” she replied. He could see her irritation—she was starting to grasp his technique of handling her—but the problem he set her proved too juicy to pass.
“Linguistic drift … same thing that causes each city to have its own dialect, and each neighborhood to have its patois. Cut them off, Separate them, and in time local jargon becomes dialect, and eventually … distinct language. You need time for that. Lots of time. Generations.”
“You said, two possibilities,” he prompted, gesturing for her to continue her descent. The tower vibrated slightly, a thrum of some kind of heavy impact. “More quickly, please. I’d rather not die here.”
She continued downwards, hurrying a bit as he felt a second impact through the floor and his shoes.
Not an impact on the tower itself, but something large and heavy, with a blow that had translated from the city wall to the ground beneath, and so to the tower.
Definitely time to pick up the pace. The second hit spurred Andaleisia on as well, and they quickened their steps, hurrying to get out of the tower before something serious did happen to it.
They came out into the passage below, both flushed and breathing heavily from the quick descent. He quickly guided her to one of the estate bunkers, fortunately empty, except for them. He closed the heavy door.
He kept his face still, as she wiped the sweat from her face. “That can’t be right. Given elven lifespans, generations spanned centuries. For things to have changed that much you’d need … centuries? What’s your other thought?”
Her brow furrowed with thought. “Or, there is a native species that is intelligent enough to talk, and they mixed and blended languages. Syncretized language … a blend of ours and something else.” She shrugged. “Maybe both, maybe neither. I’m an enumerator, not a language expert.”
They felt the slight shifting of air, followed by a low whump that carried through the ground and into the bunker. Whatever was going outside was serious. He kept his voice calm, focusing on something that he could control.
“We’ll need extended speech samples,” he said, thinking out loud.
“Then, we can break it down … look for borrowed words, linguistic patterns that don’t fit the dominant word forms that we recognize. If we don’t see word borrowing, then, well, it’s just taking our beautiful language and butchering the hell out of it.”
He held his peace, relying on her to puzzle it out …
nice and linear … playing to her strengths, her fury cooling further.
“It was really hard to pick out much individually, with all the words mashed together, and that gutter-speak.”
She paused. “But the social cues remained the same …. Head nods and shakes for ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ and when you held your hand out, she took it without thinking. It shows common social traits.”
She paused, scowling. “The business with the iron bar was entirely unnecessary, by the way.”
He raised an eyebrow in a well-practiced look of superiority, and she flushed and turned away, silently rebuked.
She started to pace. “Social cues. We’ll need to figure out whether there is a second species. Something native and sentient. If there is a great deal of interaction there, for instance, if they overwhelmed the natives and put them to work. You said there is no magic there?”
“Some. Not much. Not enough to power a Machina. Maybe enough for light work. Illusions. Other children’s games. Perhaps some work with food to make it more palatable.”
He nodded. “Not enough for the kind of warfare we are waging against the Predators. Certainly not enough for the intercity wars we had before the Predators turned from a nuisance into a threat.”
She pressed on. “Sooo, without Machina to do most of the hard labor, and without the kind of magic we know … they would almost have to have either a subservient population or some kind of trading nation to exchange goods with. If that ‘something’ talks, well, the two languages will start blending.”
He took a deep breath, recognizing a touchy moment. But, this needed to be dealt with now. “It. Not her. It.”
“What?” she replied. “Clearly female. Well, the chest is nearly vestigial, and the hips are slim as a boy’s, but female.”
“It,” he insisted. “It is a sample. That’s it. It doesn’t exist as a person …. It. Start thinking of it as a ‘she,’ then it becomes a person, then you start treating it like a person. As long as it remains an ‘it,’ then you can do as you like.”
She blinked twice, and he actually saw the moment when something connected in her mind.
He leaned in, starting to ask what had just occurred to her, when she cut him off.
“In any event,” she said cooly, “the Council will hear about all this, and the king, and she … it … will need to know how to speak properly.”
Andaleisia paused, then looked at him. “How do you intend to explain that she—it—got here in the first place?”
Before he could answer, she continued. “There was a lot of disturbance in the ambient magic during that attack. We’ve had magic-empowered items spontaneously start up then drop again when that happens before. Usually in the domestic services—” she said,
holding up her hand to forestall the rebuke he was going to utter at not being told about this.
“There’s no reason to tell you just because the water heating turns off and on again, or a lift won’t operate for a moment. I can easily see where the small experimental Gate they allowed you to build would open for a split second and something would fall through,
especially if you were trying to collect a sample discreetly, without actually opening it for more than testing the air or tossing a pebble through, which is, as we both know, forbidden until the Council of Kings gives permission.”
He tilted his head, careful not to show his surprise. Meek, mild, dull little Andaleisia had just shown him a twist he hadn’t expected. He didn’t like surprises. Not from his staff, and certainly not from his wife.
“Anything else?” Haldeen asked, with just a touch of sarcasm.
“Yes,” she replied, neither folding nor rising to the bait.
“Get rid of that thing … that gray-scaled abomination … that … whatever it is. The moment someone finds out about that, then all the stories about how this all just ‘happened’ will just evaporate.”
She folded her arms across her chest and she hunched her shoulders in.
“That thing terrifies me. Just seeing it gives me the shivers, and I can’t really say why. But, it does. I want it gone.”
He nodded once, acknowledging her point without agreeing. She took his response for more than he meant, as he’d intended. No matter how clever she thought she was in these battles of wits, the power in this equation was always on his side, and always would be.
She didn’t smile, but he could see that she was still angry, working past it, but still angry.
Still, he had her back onside, and they both knew her life and privileges required her to help and support him.
If this partnership failed, she would go down with him; there would be no rescue from her family of too many females.