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.
The Santoth, Dariel said. You are like the Santoth. You use the same magic.
No, came the reply. No, we do not speak the same magic. No, we were not like them. No more so than a scholar of warfare is a warrior. We were scholars. We kept The Song. We preserved it. For centuries we stayed outside the world’s power struggles. We kept The Song alive and refined the Giver’s tongue for the good of all. You must understand that. We made it even purer, so that if ever the Giver returned we could speak with him and show him that we were not all like Elenet. That’s what we were.
The Santoth… What they stole was not The Song of Elenet. It was the texts we had removed from it, the parts of it that were most foul and twisted. If they had been true scholars, they would have known this, but they were warriors. They only ever wanted the things that warriors want. Conquest. Power. To be feared. These evil texts were aid enough. And Tinhadin only wanted their rage, so he inflicted them with pain to plague them all the moments of their lives that were not spent fighting for him. That was why they fought so mercilessly. By inflicting pain, they escaped it briefly themselves.
It was not until later that Tinhadin discovered where his father had hidden The Song of Elenet. He retrieved it, and once he had it, none could stand against him. Not the Dwellers, not his Santoth. He sent his own sorcerers into exile without sharing the true Song with them. They were raging evil, hateful, but they were powerless against him. He had only to speak to destroy them, so they accepted their exile.
Dariel shook his head. But I saw them on the Teh Plains. When they thought my brother dead, they marched north to search for him. Aliver had promised to release them once he found The Song of Elenet. He died before he could. When they confirmed that he was dead, they unleashed a nightmare on the Meins. It was a horror, but they did it for us. They did not seem vengeful. They won that war for us.
No, not for you, Na Gamen corrected. For themselves. If what you say is true, they fought and destroyed-as is dear to their hearts. Don’t believe they did it for you, though. If they destroyed your enemy, it was because that was the only place they could direct their anger and disappointment. Dariel, be thankful your brother died before he released the Santoth. Be thankful he never gave them The Song of Elenet. If he had, they would have destroyed him and taken the world as payment for their suffering. That’s what they want. Time does nothing to change men like them.
So that is the truth as I know it, the Watcher said. Tinhadin stole from us and created the Santoth. We should have fought him before that, but we had no gift for prophecy. We did not know what was coming. How could we? I ask you, how could we?
A week away from the question, out of Rath Batatt and back into Inafeld Forest, Dariel sat away from the others, on night watch. He pressed his back against the base of a large tree. The group slept-or lay quiet with their thoughts, like him-in the small clearing just below him. He still pondered Na Gamen’s question. He had not answered it when asked, but now he thought he knew. They could have known what was coming if they had paid attention to the world. If they had kept their eyes open to the struggles of nations and the ambitions and fears of man, instead of believing they could ignore such things for their higher calling. Of course a thing that could be made into a weapon would be a made into a weapon. It did not matter if it was a thing of beauty. It did not matter if their mission was holy and benevolent. It only mattered that The Song could be twisted to serve human greed. If that was so, it was only a measure of time until someone grasped for it.
A man like Tinhadin, whose blood-Na Gamen reminded him-flowed in his veins. He did not let himself think also of a woman like his sister. That thought lurked at the margins of his consciousness. He knew it was there and that it would not likely go away, but he could not face it yet. There was too much else to face, too many things more pressing on him. As he had thought before, he needed to solve the problems of this land. It was here in Ushen Brae that he found himself, and here that he had to carve a path forward. The fact that Na Gamen looped it all back to the Known World did not change that. It just made everything more urgent.
“Dariel?” Anira climbed the small rise up toward him. He had not seen her until she spoke. “May I sit with you?”
Dariel indicated the space beside him, with a crescent of root that would make a comfortable seat. “I’m no good as a watchman tonight.”
“When were you ever? Are you still thinking of him?”
“Of course. You?”
Anira sat back against the trunk, her arm pressed against his. “I never had trouble sleeping before. Now…”
“Was your time with him… bad? I mean…” He hesitated. “I don’t know what I mean. It’s still hard to talk about.”
“No, my time with him wasn’t bad. Was yours?”
“I don’t know how to answer that,” he said.
An eruption of monkey calls peppered the air just then. For a few moments, the creatures leaped and swung through the trees above them, passing like a great herd along a road of branches and limbs. When they were gone into the distance, both of them let the silence be. Anira did not seem to mind that he had not answered the question. Dariel was glad, as he was grateful for the press of her dark skin against his.
Anira said something in Auldek.
“Why do you all sometimes speak Auldek? I would think you would hate it.”
“The tongue of our enslavement?”
“Something like that.”
“All the tongues offered us were the tongues of our enslavement. Would you have us speak Acacian?”
“You do speak Acacian,” Dariel said.
“Out of necessity. It’s still the language that sold us to slavery. It’s the language of the league. We all came here with a first language, not always Acacian, but we also spoke some Acacian. We had to. It’s the language of your empire. If we could have sorted ourselves we might have kept Balbara alive in us or Candovian or Senivalian. But we were thrown into a world where two languages were the only true currency. Auldek among the Auldek, Acacian among ourselves. At least we speak two languages. What about you?”
“I speak a bit of lots of things.”
“A bit?”
“I had to. I traveled all over. I worked among the people in Aushenia. Right in with them, rebuilding after the war with Hanish Mein.”
“My noble prince,” Anira teased. She leaned her knees up over his and rested her head on his shoulder. “And how much of their talk can you speak? You can say, ‘Hello.’ You can say, ‘My name is Dariel. What is yours?’ You
