The scouts who found us on the Lightning Plains made no attempts at conversation, seeming to sense our party’s mood despite the language barrier. Elana’s grief was palpable. So was Khanaarre’s terror. I wish I knew how to reassure them, but I didn’t even know where to begin. And though I was not magically bound, as the traders of old had been, I was still sworn to secrecy.
I was as surprised as my companions when we came to the next city and found it guarded and occupied, not the ruin we had expected from Dano`ar’s travelogue. I was grateful, though, and somewhat darkly amused: the bard’s secrets had led us directly where Khanaarre and I had both wanted to avoid.
I felt no sense of homecoming. The rigid and irregular cyclopean geometry of this city, and the ruins we had camped in two days ago, resembled the temple-city I had grown up in only in scale. I was a stranger, here, every bit as much as my companions.
I treated the guards at the gate the same as I had treated the scouts: I showed them the sign of passage that had spent the last two decades disguised as my hair pin. I told them that I was under the protection of the Temple of the Stars. I begged for the hospitality of their archons. And, somewhat to my surprise, it was granted without question or hesitation.
We were admitted within the walls and the gates were closed behind us. The interior was no more familiar to me than the walls: square-faced buildings with truncated porches, looming high enough that the wide streets looked cramped and narrow by comparison. We were led to a building that had no equivalent in the temple where I had been raised, or in Vencar or Georg, but when we were led inside, I quickly gathered its purpose. Khanaarre and Elana were given a suite. I was led to another room, where I was told to wait.
The room was small, just big enough for a handful of people to meet or to dine. Each of the walls, except the one with the door, was graced with an elegant backless chair and an enormous cushion. I pulled one of the chairs a little away from the wall and sat, watching the door, and waited.
I was not left to wait for long. It was no more than an hour when a new triad of giants appeared: a dark pair of liveried Jor and a pale cyclops woman in lurid red and gold robes. The cyclops’ head was shaved and on her forehead, above her massive blue eye, was a tattooed symbol that told me that she was xian g`ul, bound body and soul to a powerful rhu xian priestess. One of the Jor was carrying an octagonal table whose legs he unfolded as he set it in the middle of the room. When he was done, he pulled a cushion from the wall and set it across the table from me while the other Jor, his sister, laid out a small feast of rice and curried vegetables and flat naan bread. She poured two cups of masala chai, thick with milk and spices, then left with her brother, leaving me alone with the xian g`ul.
“Good evening,” she said. “You may call me Thieria.”
“Good evening,” I said. “You may call me Derrek Rowan.”
We drank our tea slowly, to prove that we were civilized. I was grateful for the time to gather my thoughts. It was not that I had had no time to think, but that I had used my time very poorly. And, in my defense, it was only in the last hours that I had had any clear idea of the shape of events that I would have to work within.
She was a good-looking woman. Tall, even for a giant, with shapely arms and a long neck. The vivid crimson of her sash and tunic made her pale skin look almost blue by contrast. Her nails were filed to long points and lacquered the same red as her silks. Her eye was the color of glacial ice by moonlight. She had a wide, impish smile that she used on me when she began to speak.
“So,” she said, setting down her teacup and serving each of us a generous dollop of rice and curry. Was she a particularly generous and egalitarian soul, or did she have some guess as to my true standing? “How does a djuunan come to carry a passage marker of the Western Reaches into the easternmost fortress of the Lightning Plains?”
I spent one last moment weighing my options. Then I told her. Not everything. Not the details of my life in Vencar, or the true scope of my power, or the current conflicts in my loyalties. But enough.
We ate as I talked. She listened without interrupting, not even to clarify. I had no doubt that her rhu xian master was watching and listening through her, but she gave none of the usual tells, which spoke both to her power and to theirs.
“That is quite a tale,” she said at last.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Understatement had always been my favorite form of humor, and I was far too tired to restrain myself.
“If it is true,” she went on, “you will want to be going to the Observatory?”
“There are any number of reasons that might not follow,” I said, in case it was a test. “But… dear gods, yes. If you have an Observatory here, yes, please, see me to the priestesses of the Stars. I would be most grateful.”
She nodded, and now her eye flickered in the telltale manner of one communing telepathically.
“Arrangements are being made,” she said. “A pair of Jor will come for you when it is time. And the archons will see you and your friends in the morning.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I am in your debt.”
She shrugged.
“Perhaps,” she said. “It has been a pleasure to meet you, Derrek Rowan.”
She rose, then, and left me. I took a few more bites of curry, rice, and naan, just for the pleasure of it. Then I relegated myself to tea, knowing that I had already eaten more than was ideal for the purifications I would almost certainly be about to undergo.
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