Elenet fled from this chaos, though nobody knows to where. In his absence the lions announced that they were supreme of the creatures of the land. The laryx, hearing this, cackled with laughter, for they disdained the lions and thought themselves supreme. That is why lions and laryx still shout at one another today. The lions roar their supremacy; the laryx shout back in hysterics at the lions' foolishness.
"Their blood feud goes on," Naamen said, "and perhaps always will. At least until the Giver returns and sets the world right again."
The storyteller bowed his head, indicating that his tale was concluded. Shen had lain with her head in the crook of her arm. For a moment Kelis suspected she had fallen asleep, but then she said, "I thought the Santoth made the laryx with the touch of their eyes-when they were angry, I mean, because of being banished."
"That is sometimes said," Kelis admitted.
"But Naamen said laryx were there in the first days."
Naamen said, "Sometimes two things are said that don't agree. Which is true? Or are both true? I cannot say. I just speak what was spoken to me."
The girl yawned. "I will have to ask the stones. They will tell me the truth."
Shen said this with childish matter-of-factness, with no hint that any might find the notion fantastic or unlikely or frightening. It returned Kelis to the whirl of his worried thoughts. This was no normal hunting trip or ramble or night camped under the stars to tell old tales. For the second time in his life he was going in search of the banished sorcerers, the God Talkers, the Santoth-the ones Shen referred to as the stones. They were beings he had seen only once, on one furious, horrible afternoon. It was a glorious event in that it marked Hanish Mein's military defeat, but it was wrapped in the emotion of Aliver's death and remembered in scenes so terrible he prayed he would never see their like again.
Even so, he was trying now to find these same sorcerers. Nobody could say why, save that a girl swore it had to be done. He was taking that child, a woman, and a youth with him; and he was doing so covertly, so that the queen he was sworn to serve would not know of the existence of a niece, one who might challenge her own child for the throne.
Benabe's voice interrupted his thoughts. "What do they want with my girl? Can you tell me?" She lay alongside her now-sleeping daughter, propped on an elbow and gazing at Kelis. Her face was lit more by the stars than by the weak glow of the dying fire. Seen thus, in highlight and shadow, she could have been either very old or very young. Either way, she had a beauty that artists would want to capture in stone.
"Me? Cousin, I don't have that wisdom."
Benabe exhaled and looked out at the dark expanse of the plains around them. The lion had stopped its roaring, but in its place a thousand tiny creatures chirped and whirred and rustled and yapped.
"Shen hasn't trembled since we left Bocoum," Benabe said. "Usually, she falls every couple of weeks. I have always hated those moments. It can strike her anywhere, anytime. One moment she is walking; the next she is flailing on the ground, eyes back in her head and mouth sucking, sucking the air. It happens more when she is agitated."
"She doesn't seem agitated," Naamen said.
"No, she doesn't," Benabe said, sounding almost bitter, almost resigned. "We're walking across a continent into a desert to meet sorcerers who should have died two hundred years ago and she's never seemed happier, never healthier. It's like when she wakes up from trembling. Her face goes so calm, peaceful. She smiles and is… happy. Me, each time my heart is pounding. Each time I think the fit has destroyed her, but each time it fills her with more joy than I ever have. I should love them for that, but sometimes I hate them instead." She brought her gaze to study Kelis, then Naamen, and then Kelis again. "I don't know if I am doing right to let her go. Kelis, you've seen them. Tell me that they are good."
In answer, he adjusted his cloak, snugging it tighter around his torso. He forced a yawn and held it long, and then adjusted his position as if on the verge of sleeping. "There is nothing to fear," he said, hoping the lie would be enough to end the conversation.
The next afternoon Kelis noticed something strange on the southern horizon. He said nothing about it, not that day or the next. But on the third day Naamen tried to make eye contact with him as they walked. He shot concerned glances that Kelis did not return. Kelis was glad that his companion did not voice his thoughts, for he still hoped he might awake the next morning and find the shapes had been but clouds, mirages, tricks the heated vapors played.
But in the clear air of the fourth morning he could no longer avoid the truth. Near, now, so suddenly near-as if they had crept on their toes forward during the night-stood a horizon-wide wall of mountain peaks. Foothills fronted slanting slabs of granite, behind which dark slopes ramped toward the sky, fading into the haze so that one could only guess their true heights. Rank upon rank of them, shouldering their way around the curve of the world. They were a range like nothing he had seen in the Known World, and they most certainly had not been here the last time he ventured into the far south.
Benabe asked, "I see those, and you see those. We each see those, right? So I ask, why are there mountains before us? Nobody said anything about climbing mountains."
"I do not know these mountains," was all Kelis could say in answer.
"What do you mean?" Benabe asked. "You have been this way before-"
"I have, but the mountains were not there before."
He stared a long time as the others shot questions at him. What did it mean? Were they so lost as that? How can there be mountains so large that they had never heard of them? How could he not have seen them if he had really come this way before? Must they cross them, or go around them, or-
To each he shook his head and repeated, "I do not know these mountains." He glanced at Shen, who was watching him. She was the only one who was unconcerned by the massive barrier facing them. She just cocked her head and smiled, as if untroubled and seemingly ready to carry on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He had said her name. Mor. It rolled off his tongue like he knew her, like they were old friends or comrades, like he was a master about to chastise her for slack work, as if he had the right to know her name and to shape it in his mouth. She was not sure which of these she most heard when he spoke, but it included all of them. It was a simple thing, but so unexpected that it ignited more anger in her than she had anticipated. The moment she had waited a lifetime for… the moment when she would spit in the face of an Akaran prince. A vile, contemptible Akaran! A despot. A criminal. An abomination that deserved to live only until it understood the full extent of the crimes done in its name. She had gone to that chamber ready to revel in finally seeing one of these Akarans, one hated more even than the Auldek or the Lothan Aklun or the league.
Instead, she lost control of herself. And why? Maybe, she thought, as she sat in a windowless room in the maze of tunnels below the capital city, it was his accent. His damned Acacian accent! He spoke as they had all once spoken-all of them in some variation or another-before years in Ushen Brae, speaking Acacian secretly while the official language of the Auldek bent and twisted their pronunciation so that they did not recall how they were supposed to sound anymore. The language of defiance that the People spoke to one another was a sad imitation of the language of the ones who had sold them as slaves. It all held a terrible irony. It was that, now that she thought about it, that had driven her to slash him so forcefully.