How? Dariel asked.
Because the same is true of me. I trail many strings. Thousands. Tens of thousands. And each of these touches a million souls. Sometimes I feel very heavy, pulling them behind me. Sometimes lifting my arm is like moving a mountain. As it should be for one like me. An accursed one like me.
The notion of weight was hard to equate with the tall, slight man who placed the words in Dariel’s head.
How do you know me? Dariel asked. The smell of my skin. My breath. How?
Because you are of Tinhadin’s line. I see him in you.
You knew Tinhadin? You are truly from my lands?
Na Gamen turned and set his green eyes on him. They were larger than normal, jewels in his gaunt face. His earlobes spread out in large curves shaped like butterfly wings. They moved when he did. When he stilled, they swayed as if rocked by a gentle tide. We are children of the same land, yes. And I did know Tinhadin. I know him still. One does not forget the man who tried to murder him. That man who helped, in his way, to make this accursed life.
You have said that before. How are you accursed?
You would know it all?
Yes.
It will come at a price, Dariel. A gift, but a dear one. One that will be hard to live with. Do you want it?
Whether I want it or not, I’m here, he thought. Sharing, he answered, Yes.
Na Gamen gestured that they should continue walking. Dariel fell in step beside him. Again, the sound of his feet stood out strangely compared to the silence with which the Watcher moved. If the man’s feet-hidden beneath long gray robes-touched the stone at all, they gave no indication of it. Not even the fabric of his robes swished audibly. Beside him, Dariel felt awkward and loud. Every motion he made was too large and cumbersome when compared to the silent grace with which Na Gamen floated beside him.
Listen. See. I will feed it to you.
Dariel did not get a chance to ask what that meant. Before the words had faded from his head, images began to scroll across his vision, scenes through which he could barely see the real world behind. Mixed with this, thoughts and emotions came to him, delivered not with words, not explained, just given to him. He felt them as if they were his emotions. His thoughts. And through that Na Gamen’s voice came and went, moving him forward, answering questions as he thought them.
The name Lothan Aklun, he claimed, was the Auldek translation of their name, given to them in this land. Before that they were called the Dwellers in Song. They were a religious sect in the Known World. It was they who had preserved the Giver’s tongue through the eons. They long lived in cloistered seclusion, respected by all the tribal powers. They kept The Song of Elenet safe, the actual book itself, written in that thief’s crimped hand.
Back then, they still believed the Giver would return. They believed they could make amends for Elenet’s arrogance, for his crime of stealing the language of a god and using it in folly. They did not use the god’s song for themselves-as Elenet had-but sang it for the pure beauty of it. They did not create things. Instead they formed the song into a hymn in praise of creation. They sang it so that the Giver, wherever he was, would hear it ring with purity and would know they were worthy of his attention. That was all they wished to do. Make amends for Elenet’s crime and bring the god back into the world.
Also, they worked to purify the song. There were, even in Elenet’s own hand, errors and impurities in the song, evil or hateful flourishes. The Dwellers worked to find them and remove them, so that the book would be pure. It was an ongoing task that gave their lives meaning.
When new devotees were ready, they journeyed across the land, in small groups or singly. Dariel saw all this as much as heard it through Na Gamen’s words. Cloaked figures greeted the dawn with their heads raised and voices flowing out over the hilly Talayan landscape. A single man walked a mountain pass, keeping time with the tapping of his walking stick on the stones. Women knee-deep in the tranquil waters of a blue ocean praised the sun as it burned its way into the rim of the world. A circle of singers around a campfire, wrapped in cloaks against the frigid wind, eyes gazing at the millions of stars as their lips moved, asking the Giver to come back and bring harmony to the world again.
As he listened, Dariel understood the word-notes that were that strange language, so filled with longing, so true and perfect. Somehow, they carried the solidity of the substance of the world rendered in living sound.
For hundreds of years we lived and died and worked at this mission , Na Gamen said. He held Dariel by the wrist now. They walked along a narrow shelf of rock that dropped off down a steep slope on one side. Before them, a stone staircase curved up toward the peak of the mountain. They carried on toward it. The world was in chaos through all that time. See it.
And Dariel did. Warring factions. Uprisings. Tribal betrayals. Atrocities. The Known World as it had once been flashed before Dariel’s eyes in a torrent of images. He saw things real and surreal, things that made sense and things that did not. An army of mail-clad warriors smashed against howling tribesmen in furs and leather. Creatures with the lower bodies of horses and with human torsos above pounded across dry plains. Black skinned as Balbarans, they screamed war. A queen bearing a narrow, simple crown spoke before a gathered host of snarling monsters, crammed together inside a huge chamber. She showed no fear of them. She just spoke on, her freckled face serene before the madness.
Na Gamen explained that Edifus left the Dwellers alone as his conquest took shape. He even visited them on occasion, learning the song himself and adding his voice to theirs. Perhaps he still respected the god. Perhaps he believed as they did. For a time it seemed so. He convinced them that the world they were building-once the warfare was over-would have a beauty in the god’s eyes. In that way, he would aid in luring the Giver back to the Known World.
We came to trust him. We freely gave him The Song of Elenet. Who better than a king to protect it? His sons, Thalaran, Tinhadin, and Praythos, wanted to become students of The Song, but we would not teach them. Even Edifus would not teach them. He did not trust them. He wanted them to wait, to grow older, to find wisdom through warfare first. He hid The Song in a place he thought nobody could find it. When Edifus died, one of the sons showed himself to be everything Edifus had feared. Tinhadin, the middle son, was a man apart from his siblings. He fell into warring with them. Even as their Wars of Distribution spread the empire farther than Edifus had ever dreamed, he found ways to kill both his brothers. Still he wanted more.
A man with Akaran eyes and a twice-crooked nose raged into a temple, pushing through chairs and desks, his sword slashing at any of the robed pupils near enough for him to cut down. Many fled from him, but one man did not. He stood, leaning against a lectern, his hands clasping it behind him, holding it, his face defiant. The warrior swung his sword, sloppy with rage. It sliced through one of the priest’s arms and most of his torso. He let loose the weapon and climbed over the gore slipping from the dying body to reach the text that the priest had been protecting. The look of rapture on his face was like nothing Dariel had ever witnessed.
We should have been prepared. We should have seen it coming. We did not. He stole a text that should never have been read and made himself a sorcerer. He used it to teach his chosen warriors. Together, no army could stand against them.
Warriors in orange cloaks waded into a great host, an army like the entire world. The sorcerer warriors hewed forward with great sweeps of their long swords. They whispered words that Dariel heard as if their lips were pressed against his ears. He knew the meaning of the words for the space of time it took to hear them. Horrible words. Sounds that were the unmaking of the world. Notes that tore and destroyed. Phrases that twisted in Dariel’s ears like living cancer. And then he saw the man with the twice-crooked nose on a field of carnage. The man ripped off his helmet and stood, the only upright figure in a graveyard that stretched to the horizon on all sides, bodies countless. The silence terrible.