Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) (30 page)

“The other side of town has better water and better soil. This side goes to woods quickly. We’ll be past all this in another hour.”

Bytoris was right, too. An hour of steady travel eastward took them to the edge of thick forest.

Edrouss studied the terrain and frowned. “These are the hills you meant? I thought you meant meadow hills like the ones we crossed to get to Bonton.”

“People work on that ground. Here, we’ll be safe.”

“The Klogs hate trees. Their wings foul and tear in the branches. We’re going to have to clear a hilltop for them before we can even begin to call.”

Faia saw Bytoris’s brows draw together, and his shoulders set. “Then that’s what we’ll do. We can’t use the cleared land.”

They found a narrow animal path, and followed it into the woods as far as they could—when it ran out they tied the goat to a tree, lifted the pieces of the roarer out of the jars where they’d been hidden, and continued on foot. Faia carried what little food they’d brought, and Bytoris’s forged First Folk tablet.

They found a likely hilltop, and Bytoris and Edrouss began felling and dragging off trees. Faia helped as much as she could—the first day by carrying water from the stream at the foot of the hill, and the second, by foraging for food from the woods. She found some tubers, but not enough for a meal. So she fashioned a sling out of leather from the hems of her breeches and gathered rocks; she brought down enough hovies and chervies that by evening of the second day, all three of them rested with full stomachs.

She slept both nights curled against Edrouss, and both nights fell asleep happy.

The third day at about midday, Edrouss declared the hilltop clear enough to serve as a landing spot for the First Folk.

They set up the roarer at the edge of the clearing—it was a bizarre-looking device, with a giant funnel at one end and a crank at the other.

“Shall we call them now?—or would it be better to wait until dark?” Bytoris squinted into the sun—he’d spotted Klogs flying over the day before, heading for the city in a flock.

“They aren’t any more nocturnal than we are,” Edrouss said. “A few of them like the darkness, but not many care to fly in it. We’ll call them now.”

He turned the crank. It grumbled and muttered and moaned softly, but didn’t roar.

Faia held her breath, with her fingernails digging into the palms of her hands, and prayed to the Lady, and waited.

Bytoris paled. “Please don’t say it doesn’t work.”

Edrouss swore, stopped cranking, and pulled the funnel away from the body of the roarer. He began twisting pegs that Faia could see tightened a rawhide drumskin stretched over the narrow end of the funnel.

He shoved the pieces back together and cranked again. The noise it made was louder—but still no roar.

“Damnall,” he growled, and repeated the tightening process. He stopped at one peg, and ran his finger along the rawhide adjustment cords. “This one is fraying already. God send to perdition a world that doesn’t have decent mechanical equipment available!” He looked up from his roarer and gave Faia a slow, doubtful shake of the head. “We’ll be more than just lucky if this lasts long enough to draw Klogs here.”

“Maybe we should wait and see if they fly over,” Faia suggested.

Edrouss pursed his lips. “That might work—though you’re always better off to engage their curiosity beforehand, so they come looking for you. Surprising a flock of Klogs can be very, very dangerous.” He tightened the rest of the cords, and sighed “That’s the best we can do.” He gave his roarer a quarter crank—this time it roared with a sound like the earth splitting open.

“At least it works,” Faia said.

They waited, sitting in the shade of the trees at the edge of the clearing, watching the sky.

“I should have left a message for Renina to take the children and get out of the city while she could,” Bytoris muttered at one point.

Later, Edrouss said, “I wish I had an idea of what we could do if the Klogs won’t negotiate.” Then he laughed. I’ve been away from this for too long. I’ve forgotten—if they won’t negotiate with us,
we
won’t do anything else. They’ll rip us into little pieces and feed us to their young.”

And later than that, Faia pointed at the sky and said, “There.” Nine winged shapes soared overhead in arrow formation, heading toward Bonton.

“Right,” Edrouss said, and ran for the crank.

The roarer bellowed. Edrouss turned the crank in a pattern of long and short roars—Faia watched the specks high overhead that had been soaring toward the city suddenly loop and circle back.

“Yes!” Faia shouted “They heard!”

Then, in midroar, one of the cords snapped, and Edrouss’s machine fell silent.

“No!” he shouted. “Not yet’” He yelled at Faia and Bytoris, “Quick, into the clearing and wave your arms. Yell. Jump up and down. Maybe they’ll see you.”

He was pulling the funnel away from the main body of the roarer when Faia and Bytoris ran out to try to catch the attention of the Klaue.

Faia pulled her overtunic off and waved it in the air; Bytoris followed her lead with his shirt. The Klaue were circling, but not coming closer—they seemed to be trying to find the source of the noise, but they weren’t having any success.

“Don’t quit,” Edrouss shouted “I think I’ve almost got this—”

Faia and Bytoris kept swinging their clothing and jumping and shouting. Then their shouts were drowned out by the bellow of the roarer—and the Klaue homed in on them with swift, terrifying precision.

“Get back into the trees,” Edrouss yelled.

They ran for cover, and succeeded in ducking behind two sturdy banims just as the ground shook with the impact of the first Klaue’s arrival.

Faia looked around her tree at that first nightmare creature, and found to her horror that it was studying her with a steady, curious gaze—its bright black eyes gleamed exactly as the stone eyes inset into the whitestone First Folk statues in the ruins had. These eyes, though, blinked occasionally. And this face, rich coppery gold with dun stripes, grinned at her with a mouthful of teeth like daggers. Then the creature made a chuckling, gargling sound and looked back over its shoulder as its fellows landed.

They thudded to the ground one after the other, each moving out of the cleared center with neat efficiency so the next could follow. When all of them had landed the coppery-brown one settled onto its haunches much as a cat would, and shook its wings, pulling them in with a finicky-looking movement and curled its tail around its legs. Paws? Feet? Faia thought its forelimbs looked very much like hands, except for the long, sharp, flat black claws. The rest of the Klaue—red and black, rich iridescent blue-green, grey, solid black, brilliant yellow, gauded out in hovie patterns and hovie colors but only as much like hovies as a hawk would be like a hummingbird—found various positions of repose. Then they sat and watched.

Edrouss stepped out of the woods and faced the Klaue leader.

He squatted and rested his arms straight to the ground; frank imitation of the Klaue leader’s position. Then he growled and hissed and whistled. All of the Klaue had been watching him calmly, but as Edrouss talked, a transformation overcame them. The long-spined rifles that draped like curtains to either side of their faces began to stand out. Their colors grew darker and richer, their muscles tensed; then one by one they leaned forward, stretching their long necks toward Edrouss, and one by one they bared their teeth.

Faia watched the transformation with increasing unease. “Bytoris, do you suppose that’s the way he wants them to act?” Faia asked.

Bytoris said, “I don’t think so.”

“Can we help him?”

Bytoris stared at her and his eyebrows slid up his forehead. “You jest. Unless you speak whatever… language… they speak, I don’t see any way we can help.”

“I don’t either,” Faia agreed.

Edrouss Delmuirie’s speech had faltered, and he stood staring at the monsters before him, silent.

One of them answered, a soft trill, two short whistles—first a rising tone, then a falling tone—another trill, a hiss, a cough.

Edrouss seemed to freeze. He hissed and whistled again, but the sounds were slower, and less sure.

The coppery-gold Klaue trilled and chirped and whistled.

Faia could see the tension across Edrouss’s shoulders, and the way they sagged and his head dropped forward after a moment—in despair, or defeat. She could not be sure.

The Klaue growled, a deep falling tone that grew louder and rougher—and that didn’t sound to Faia like any possible part of speech. It was a threat—no doubt about it. The Klaue bared its teeth and lowered its muzzle until it was face-to-face with Edrouss.

Do
something
, Faia thought.

She ran to the tablet they had left leaning against a tree, snatched it up, and raced out to face the Klaue.

“Faia! Get back! Stay in the trees!” Edrouss shouted.

“Don’t growl at him,” she shouted at the giant Klog, and threw the tablet at it.

The Klaue caught the tablet with one hand, its reflexes predator-quick, predator-sure. It hissed at her, and whipped around to face her. Then, almost as an afterthought it looked at what she’d thrown.

It gasped—the same quick intake of air a human would make—and turned and shouted to its companions. The shout was loud enough Faia felt it shake the ground beneath her feet. One of the Klogs stood and trotted over—it was a gorgeous scarlet creature with legs and wings and rilles darkening to black at the tips. Both the gold-and-dun and the black-and-red studied the tablet and trilled and chirruped at each other.

Faia crouched next to Edrouss and whispered, “What happened? What are they saying now?”

“I don’t know. Either they’re from a branch of the Klaue that doesn’t use Air Tongue, or the language has completely changed since I last used it.” He frowned. “I caught one or two words, though, so I would assume the latter.”

“They seem to know what that is.”

“Well, yes. It’s Stone Tongue—which is probably unchanged.”

“You mean there’s another language you can use? One you know?”

Edrouss Delmuirie sighed, and stood, and stretched his legs. Then he dropped back into a crouch and looked over at Faia. “There are—or were—four languages—I know all of them. The problem is, the correct language to use for working out concepts and entering into nonbinding discussion is Air Tongue. The trouble I could get us and everyone in Arhel into by using Stone Tongue defies belief. Stone Tongue is the language of things that are decided, unchangeable, and nonnegotiable.”

Faia didn’t see the problem. “Then use one of the others.”

“I can’t. Water Tongue is the Klaue spiritual language. Words for negotiation and discussion that we would need do not even exist in Water Tongue. And as for the fourth… if I uttered a word in Blood Tongue, yon big fellow and his friends would eat me before you could blink.”

“A entire language for war?” Faia found the idea dreadful.

“War and sex.” Edrouss gave her a wry grin. “Apparently the Klogs see connections between the two activities that humans do not—or do not admit to.”

“You haven’t met the Hoos.”

Edrouss raised an eyebrow, but Faia didn’t elaborate.

Instead, she said, “You have to find some way to talk to them.”

Edrouss nodded. “I know.”

“Can you write?” Faia considered the fact that she had learned to read Old Arhelan, though she would have no idea how to speak it. She told Edrouss this, and suggested that perhaps Air Tongue would work the same way.

Edrouss grinned at her. “That might work, love of my life. You might save us yet. Find me a stick, would you? Since I called them here, I do not dare leave or make any sign that my attention is lapsing. It would be an unforgivable—and fatal—rudeness.”

Faia nodded, ran into the woods, and cut a long, thin branch from a sapling, then shaved the branchlets from it and took it back to Edrouss.

He smoothed a square of dirt to one side of himself, then made a rattling noise in the back of his throat. Faia didn’t think she could reproduce if she tried for the rest of her life. Nine Klaue heads snapped around and nine pairs of cold black Klaue eyes narrowed.

Edrouss turned to face his smoothed square, then held up one hand while he scratched marks in the dirt with the other. He spoke in the whistling, trilling Air Tongue again while he wrote. The leader’s rilles stood out, and after an instant’s hesitation, the gold-and-dun snaked his neck out, tucked his rilles back, and poked his massive head over Edrouss’s shoulder so he could see what the man was doing.

One of the other Klaue made a questioning sound, and the leader looked back and snapped a reply that sounded rude to Faia—and apparently to the Klaue thus spoken to, for the creature tucked its head under its wing and snorted. It sulked as obviously as Kirtha when Faia told her to behave. Faia felt a thin tendril of hope grow inside her. It might be possible to understand the monstrous First Folk after all, and negotiate a peace between them and Bonton.

It might be possible to win.

In front of her, the Klaue flicked its tail over the message Edrouss had written, obliterating it. It nibbled thoughtfully at one knuckle on its huge fist then began pressing shapes into the dirt with its claws. It spoke at the same time as it wrote, and Edrouss gasped.

“Faia,” he almost shouted, “this is going to work! The sounds have changed, but the written words are still almost the same.”

Faia was elated. “What is it saying?”

“He. This flirt is definitely male. The red hussy over there is his intended mate, too, I’d bet you.” He glanced up at her. “These are young Klaue, the whole bunch of them. They’re the Klog equivalent of human adolescents—too young to marry, but too old to stay home.”

“What is he saying, then?”

“He says they were out flying when a storm came up—it blew them off course, and they landed here.”

“The storm that blew up when the Barrier came down?”

“Probably.” Edrouss wiped the ground smooth with his stick, and wrote something else. Then he read the Klaue’s reply to Faia and Bytoris, who had walked over to join them. “He says, “We attack the city because there are no true-men there.’”