can ask where is the toilet and comment on the weather, so long as it’s something you know the words for, like raining. Am I right?”
“I never had to speak anything other than Acacian. I did it because I… wanted to show that I cared.”
“Do you know what Mor would call that? Insulting.”
Dariel looked away. “I can’t be accountable for what someone finds insulting.”
“No, but you should try. Trying counts for a lot.”
“That’s what I just said!”
Anira laughed. “You want me to teach you Auldek? Real Auldek, not just polite phrases?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do. If it’s your language I’m learning-not the Auldek’s.”
“There are no Auldek here anymore. They are your people’s problem. I’ll teach you if you will try to learn.”
“I’ll try,” Dariel said.
B ack on the Sky Mount, Dariel and Na Gamen had stood atop a pinnacle of stone, a high protrusion at the very tip of the mountain. Clouds flew past them at incredible speed, wet against Dariel’s skin. It was terrifying each time they cleared and the entirety of the mountain heights fell away beneath them. A span of time had passed since last they spoke, he knew. He had reached this place by walking up the stone staircase. He knew that. But he had not walked up it in a continuous journey from when this conversation began. Time, or his awareness of it, did not progress with such reasoned steadiness.
What did you do? he asked. How did you respond to Tinhadin’s crimes?
Look there and see, Na Gamen answered.
Following the Watcher’s gaze, Dariel looked down and saw, overlaid on the mountains, a vast ocean. At the edge of it a tiny fleet hugged an arctic shoreline colder and more forlorn than any Dariel had seen. They were specks on an infinity of water and waves, stone and ice. He swept down closer. Figures huddled on the decks, wrapped in blankets. None of them worked the sails, and yet the ship moved forward. Among them, on the deck of the last vessel, a man stared directly at Dariel, his green eyes desolate, hopeless. He opened his mouth and spoke with the Watcher’s voice.
Cowards, we fled. We did not even manage to get The Song of Elenet back from Tinhadin. We tried, but he attacked us with a savagery that combined the true song with the evil texts. He threw a curse at our backs, one that forever banished us from the Known World. It burned, and we fled before it. We were not warriors, Dariel Akaran. We were the faithful, and our faith had been raped and violated. The Giver had truly forsaken us. He was gone and would never return. His abandonment of the world was complete. No prayers or devotion or singing his praises would ever bring him back. Instead, he gave the world to men like Tinhadin. We thought the world had ended.
They were years in the Far North, progressing slowly or not at all. At times they were stuck fast in the pack ice for months on end, often floating back toward the Known World. They survived by murmuring the words of The Song. They kept it going constantly, passing it from ship to ship like a lantern to warm and light them. They did not have the actual text of The Song of Elenet to guide them anymore, but they had studied it hard before fleeing. They knew enough, and they had seen that the Giver’s words could be twisted to serve man. So they sang. Not to call back the Giver, though. They sang to live. To stay alive. And as they did, floating in a lifeless land, they learned hatred.
When they finally sailed south along the new coastline that was Ushen Brae, they saw the possibility of life returning to them. A new nation, a new people.
I stood on the beach the first day we made contact with them. They bunched before us, all threat and armor and weapons. No language between us, but they made themselves clear. They would kill us, destroy us. Throw our corpses back into the sea if we offended them. That’s all they offered us, though we arrived with no heart for war. We looked past them, over them, to the land beyond. Ushen Brae was rich and fertile, bursting with plant and animal life. The Auldek were fools to have turned their back on it and to have spent themselves at war instead of peace. They were, we thought, no better than Acacians.
Dariel saw all this. He felt what they had felt. They could live on in the new land, but not among the Auldek. They would live separate from them. They would scrape by, living on the barrier isles, where the Auldek feared to go. So they did, building at first a crude settlement. It was not life as it had been. They could not rekindle the love of the world they had once felt, but they would survive in defiance of Tinhadin. They would spurn him. They would be revenged on him by that very act. Once awakened, revenge is a hunger as great any other.
There was a problem, Na Gamen said. Already our mastery of the song had begun to lose its purity. Our voices warped from true, like instruments losing their tuning. Soon, it seemed, we would have to abandon it entirely. That was too much to bear. So we learned to preserve some of the Giver’s tongue outside ourselves. Knowing it would decay in our minds until it was nothing but curses, we worked to put the song into things. We trapped our intent inside stone, wood, metal. We built with material and sorcery bound together. For, yes, the song was sorcery to us now. We became like Elenet, seeking to use it for our own means.
The soul vessels, Dariel said.
Na Gamen stared out toward the horizon. His large eyes open against the buffeting wind. And other devices, yes. These made our lives easier, gave us power, made it possible to trade with the Auldek. We thought for a time that would be all. We would trade with them what we could. We would survive. But then a ship reached us from the Known World.
Dariel saw it. A floating wreck. A ship with a shredded mainsail and the smaller ones in tatters. The men upon it skeletal. The dead and living mixed together, hard to tell apart. They had not sailed to Ushen Brae intentionally. They had floated with the currents after being battered by a savage storm and blown far from their normal waters. They were suffering from illness and delusion. Some spoke to the sorcerers they saw as if they believed them to be keepers of the afterdeath.
The sorcerers nursed the sailors back to life, a few of them, at least. It was not easy. They were far gone, insane from their ordeal. To save them Na Gamen and the others fed the sailors a diet of mist threads, keeping them in a chamber rank with the smoke of the stuff and using the threads to sew their festering wounds and made poultices of it to soothe their sores. They bound their heads and squeezed the madness out of them, bringing them back in a form that suited them.
Then the Dwellers in Song developed a scheme to use them. They would send them back to the Known World in a new, better ship, one that could sail directly across the Gray Slopes without fear of succumbing to sea beasts. They could not do this themselves, for Tinhadin’s curse would forever hold, but these sailors could. They would offer trade with a vast new nation.
We called ourselves what the Auldek called us: Lothan Aklun, the Dwellers in Song. We said nothing about our origins. Through these sailors, we offered a deal with Tinhadin, though he would never know with whom he partnered, or why we offered it. This, Dariel, was the birth of those you call the league.
Of course it was, Dariel thought.
We saved them, created them. They have thought themselves apart from other men ever since. And we made this trade into a punishment. Revenge on the Acacians. Punishment for the Auldek for being so like them in their love of war and destruction. The Auldek needed to repopulate their nation after years of war. We took that ability from them, made them barren with the song. Tinhadin, the sailors told us, was fighting with his own sorcerers. They had turned against him, or he against them. He was trying to hold together an empire that denied it even was an empire. He was at the verge of losing everything. We had only to find a thing that each side could provide the other. We did. Children for Auldek. Sedated peace for the Acacians. So it was arranged.
We did not understand at the beginning how long it could last, how we would prosper. We harvested souls from the quota children and kept them within our own bodies. We became immortal by sucking lives from Acacia. We gave them to the Auldek so that they would live and live and live, always needing more. We made the quota children infertile, so that the Auldek would always need more of them. So it has been ever since.
How was that a punishment? Dariel asked. You made us prosper. We ruled unbroken for twenty-two generations.
What greater punishment, Na Gamen asked, is there than sacrificing your morality for a delusion? What’s worse than living with lies woven into the fabric of your every interaction? We are nothing but the lives we lead, Dariel Akaran. Even poor children sold into slavery may live honest lives. No Akaran has done that since Tinhadin became the despot he was. Your people have escaped death these many generations, but they have lived failed
