A Plague of Giants Read online

  “Forgive me for asking,” he said, “but—”

  “Yes, Tammel Vedd is my brother,” I interrupted, “and no, we are not very much alike.”

  “Oh. Well. Um. Great man, your brother,” and then he added, “Sorry,” perhaps realizing he’d implied I wasn’t a great man or as if he thought I might not agree.

  “No need to apologize. It’s true that my brother is a great man. But for all that, we do not speak very much.”

  It was a bald statement of fact that didn’t assign any fault, but I knew the cyclone would assign the blame for our chilly relationship to me. The wind of conversations about my brother always blew in the same direction, but I was always grateful when they got to this point, because the awkward silence that followed for whoever was with me was a blessed silence in my mind. I am as proud of him as I should be, but I do not enjoy constant reminders that I am the lesser son.

  There were only occasional Hathrim firelamps in the streets, and so we traveled in near darkness, much of Linlauen’s beauty shrouded in black, thin clouds obscuring the stars. But the gentle and omnipresent wind from the ocean kissed our faces, freshness with an aftertaste of salt, and the distant crash of waves on the base of the cliffs was a soothing counterpoint to the clack and rattle of the chariot on the cobbled street.

  Descending from the summit of the university grounds, we followed the winding trail of the coastal road through an expensive merchants’ district and then past the soaring spires of noble houses before ascending again to Windsong, Kauria’s seat of power and monument to the glory of Reinei.

  Once we arrived and the cyclone transferred care of the chariot to the palace hostler, I thanked him for his escort. The young man examined my face for signs of sarcasm but found none. “It’s only my duty,” he mumbled. Then, remembering his mission, he spoke briskly. “Come. The mistral bade me hurry.” He led me through a labyrinth of passages and narrow guarded doors until we entered the Calm from a small niche to the west of the mistral’s dais, which stood in the center of the circular room. The legendary tones and chimes of the wind hummed and tinkled as currents of air were circulated through the traps and tunnels of Windsong, but at present the Calm did not live up to its name. There were at least a score of people in the room, all bunched to the north of the dais, most of them talking over one another, but all conversation ceased when the mistral’s attention slid to our entrance. And with her attention came everyone else’s.

  I recognized the mistral’s chamberlain, Teela Parr, and a Priest of the Gale named Borden Clagg, but the others were strangers. Nobles and merchants speak the languages of money, fashion, and power, and those are the only three languages with which I have little acquaintance.

  The cyclone bowed before her, and I looked down until she deigned to recognize me.

  “Mistral Kira,” the cyclone said in a rich, full tone he’d never used with me, “Scholar Gondel Vedd, as you requested.”

  “Thank you, Carlen,” she said as I was wishing I’d taken more care in dressing. Unlike my poor cell at the university, the Calm was very brightly lit, and it cast into sharp relief the many wrinkles in my tunic and highlighted the spectacular mustard stain on my right breast. “It seems we caught you at a bad time, Scholar. We would not have disturbed your rest had there not been great need.”

  “Please excuse my disheveled clothes. I was given to understand that haste was at a premium. How may I serve the mistral?”

  I’d only ever seen portraits of her before, hanging in the university library; in person she was stunning. Tall and slim, Mistral Kira wore the traditional sky blue color of Kaurian leaders, a length of light cotton fabric wrapped cleverly about her body and chased about the edges with strips of soft yellow and sharp orange. It was fastened with silver brooches at her right shoulder and left hip. The silver sapphire crown shone at the top of her forehead; from this towered a magnificent headdress in blue, yellow, and orange, adding another half meter to her height. Eight thin silver torcs circled her neck, but she wore no other jewelry, not even rings. Her skin was as dark as mine but unblemished as yet by time.

  “Begin by speaking plainly,” she said. “I need not be reminded constantly of my title. I am told you are a linguist.”

  “Yes, Mis—ahem. I am. Fluent in all six modern languages.”

  “That is all? I was told you know the ancient tongue as well.”

  “I do, yes. Uzstašanas is a mother tongue to the modern languages spoken today.”

  “Excellent. I’m glad to be so well informed. Nobody told me of your fondness for mustard, though.” She arched an eyebrow at my tunic, and the assembled courtiers laughed on cue. That was okay, I thought. I still had no idea what I was doing there, but I was willing to suffer some official ridicule and the laughter of fools if it meant I could avoid the dungeons.

  “Scholar, I’m afraid I must send you to the dungeons,” the mistral said.

  My face fell, and I think I aged past my life expectancy in the second before she continued.

  “But not as a prisoner, you’ll be glad to hear.” Yes, if she could have mentioned that part before my bowels liquefied, I would have been glad indeed.

  “Oh,” I managed to reply.

  “An interesting situation has arisen, and we require your skills. My chamberlain will fill you in on the details, but I wished to meet you and make clear that I am very interested in what you may discover down there. I am sure you will do your best work, and I thank you in advance for enduring the coming hardship.”

  “Hardship?” I repeated.

  “Farewell, Scholar. I look forward to your report. Do be quick, for there may be something we need to act on immediately, but do not be so quick that you ignore details. Teela? If you please.”

  The chamberlain stepped forward and took my arm, guiding me to another door behind the throne. There were a bewildering number of them back there, each with its own guard. It occurred to me as we were about to walk through it that I hadn’t said farewell to the mistral. I swiveled my head around in an attempt to give my audience a sense of closure, but I saw that the mistral was talking already to someone who was dressed in an absurdly aggressive shade of purple.

  “Don’t bother,” Teela Parr said, recognizing the thought behind my glance. “And don’t worry; you did well. Most people babble or weep or even swoon the first time they meet her. She has that effect on people.”

  We entered the famous Silverbark Room, named for the four pieces of furniture made from the prized Fornish silverbark tree. Tales of its splendor do not do it justice. On a Nentian rug that rested on a floor of Raelech marble, two chairs faced a small sofa with an exquisite tea table between them. The legs of the chairs, sofa, and table were carved with the leaf silhouettes of different rare plant specimens never seen alive by anyone who wasn’t Fornish. The pieces represented a nearly priceless gift from the Black Jaguar Clan, the current rulers of Forn. These rested in the center of the room, which had vaulted ceilings and a series of stained glass windows high up opposite the door. Two windows were left clear and open to allow for a pleasant draught of ocean air through the room.

  There was a silver tea service set upon the table with sachets of loose-leaf black tea from Perkau, and the chamberlain asked me how I took mine.

  “Milk and honey,” I said.

  “Please, sit,” she said, gesturing to one of the silverbark chairs. I felt it would almost be criminal to sit on such a work of art, but apparently I was headed to the dungeons whether I sat or not. I sank into it, and the upholstered cushions cradled my bones with almost sinful luxury. A soft sigh of pleasure escaped my lips, and the chamberlain looked up from pouring tea and smiled.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” She looked to be slightly older than the mistral, perhaps in her early thirties, but she was not quite as tall. She had large eyes and a narrow nose, and her hair was curled tightly in rows and gathered in one long braid held by three silver rings, which fell all the way to her waist. If I remembered correctly, she was from on
e of the Finch houses, but she wore the mistral’s osprey on the left shoulder of her tunic.

  “Very nice,” I agreed, and thanked her for the tea.

  “I’m afraid the mistral might have scared you a little bit back there,” she said, leaning back into her seat with her lips curving in faint amusement over the rim of her teacup. “The hardship will be the time you must spend in the dungeon itself, with no breath of Reinei’s peace to sustain you. We will do what we can for your comfort, but there is only so much one can do with a dungeon.”

  I nodded sagely as if I knew all about the challenges of creating comfortable dungeons.

  “We have a special project for you, Scholar. A very odd person washed up on one of the islands in the archipelago on the ocean side.”

  That last part hardly needed to be said. People never washed up on the Rift side. The longarms or the bladefins always got them.

  “Washed up as in dead?”

  “Nearly so. More like a shipwreck. Except it’s better described as a glorified rowboat. And the strange man we found in it doesn’t speak a word of Kaurian.”

  “I begin to see why you might need me, then. But surely you have translators available, diplomats who usually handle this sort of thing.”

  “Usually we do. But he isn’t speaking any language they know. One of them theorized he might be speaking the ancient tongue, so we had to go digging for civilian linguists, and you were at the top of the list.”

  A knock sounded at the door, and a young page came in with folded garments across his arms. “The mistral sent me with a change of clothes for the scholar. She thought you might wish to change before you go downstairs.” The clothes were neatly pressed and of much finer quality fabric than I was used to. The tunic was a copy of the chamberlain’s—a sort of palace livery, really, for the page was wearing the same thing—a light desert tan with a sky blue sash running diagonally across the chest and an osprey clutching a fish embroidered at the top of the left breast. Resting on the tunic was a small unopened jar of imported Fornish mustard.

  I smiled. “Please tell the mistral I appreciate both her courtesy and her wit.”

  My parents used to tell me, in concert, that I was far too smart for my own good. They tried to discourage my love for language early on, and I was forced to sneak away to the university library at night to explore nautical records in the language of the Brynts, learn the few plant songs available in the percussive syllables of Fornish, and exult in the musical, rolling rhythms of the Nentian plains on the rare occasions when they put into port. At the time, in my youth, I naturally thought my parents’ brains were contaminated with dung. How could intelligence, a natural advantage, ever prove to be a disadvantage?

  Only as we descended into the dungeons did I concede that they might have had a valid point. It was dank, the air mildewed and moist, heavy with the reek of chamber pots.

  Had I listened to my parents, I would not be here. I would have traveled down to the Tempest of Reinei in my sixteenth summer, said the words to the Priests of the Gale and had the words said to me in kind, and then I would have walked to the edge of the cliff and thrown myself into the howling swirl, a literal leap of faith that Reinei would bless me with the kenning of the wind. A short while later, I would have emerged under my own power and joined a profession commensurate with my Windclass, or I never would have emerged at all, dashed against the rocks or dumped into the sea like so many others. Either way, I wouldn’t be in a still dungeon, charged with speaking to a foreign stranger.

  But I consciously chose this Windless life. It was the only way to guarantee I’d have a life, after all, since the Tempest takes as many as it blesses. It blessed my younger brother and took the older one. But neither of them ever visited a dungeon out of the comfort of the wind. And Teela Parr clearly did not want to add a visit to her duties. “I have to get back to court,” she said, stopping outside the door, “but let me give you a conversation piece to get you started.”

  The chamberlain produced a book bound in matted reeds, the paper inside of a strange texture to my fingers. The cover had a circle of leather glued in the center, hand-tooled to read ZANATA SEDAM in embossed letters. I read them aloud, and Teela asked me if I knew what it meant.

  Frowning, I said, “The second word looks like it’s close to two different numbers in the ancient language, but I don’t know what the first word is at all.” I flipped open the book and found a tight, flowing script using the ancient alphabet; a few words looked familiar, but none of them were immediately recognizable except— “Fire!” I said.

  “What? Where?”

  “This word here. Vatra. That’s ‘fire’ in the ancient tongue.”

  “So you can read it?”

  “I can read that word. Let’s see if there are any others … yes. Here is voda. That’s ‘water.’ ”

  “Very good, Scholar. But what about the rest of it?”

  I tore my eyes away. “You gave it to me less than a minute ago.”

  “What I mean is, do you recognize the language?”

  “It’s drifted away from the ancient tongue like all the languages have over the centuries, but perhaps not as far as ours has. Certain words resist change because of their frequency of use, like numbers and everyday nouns. If they shift at all, they shift in pronunciation or at least share the same roots as older versions of a language, but it’s rare to develop completely different morphology—”

  Teela held up a hand to stop me. I guess I had been babbling a bit. “Just tell me if you can read it now or later,” she said.

  “Later. Once I talk with him, I will have a better idea of how long it will take.”

  “Thank you. I will let you begin. But be careful. Do not let him get his hands on that book.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the cyclones were at great pains to take it from him. He wants it very badly. So we want to know why. Is it a diary or what?”

  “There’s no way it’s a diary.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s a completed work. Same script throughout. The handwriting is consistent with someone copying a text. Which means this probably has religious significance to him.”

  “Holy writ? Like Reinei’s Wind?”

  “Kaurian sailors never leave port without it, right? It’s not so difficult to imagine that this sailor would also bring with him a volume of comforting thoughts.”

  Teela Parr nodded. “All right. I’ll come back to check on you soon. Good luck.”

  I tucked the book underneath my new mustard-free tunic and followed the guards down into the damp and dark. The stranger waited in a single large cell. It was one of the nicer ones, with decent lighting and fresh matting for his sleeping tick. He had eaten his fill three times, I was told, so much that his stomach visibly bulged. A table and a chair already waited in front of the cell with a stack of paper on it, along with a fresh quill and ink pot.

  Seeing the foreigner reminded me of my childhood, when I laid eyes on a teabush serpent for the first time: a sense of childish wonder coupled with a twinge of fear that this new thing in the world might be dangerous. He was too tall to be Fornish but a bit short to be one of the Hathrim. His skin looked pale and sickly to me, but I suppose sickly always goes together with pale in my mind anyway, and I am certainly no healer to judge these things properly. Apart from the slight bulge to his abdomen, he had a skeletal appearance, sharp-bladed cheekbones scraped clean and hollows under his dark brows, ribs starkly outlined on his torso. He definitely couldn’t be a stunted Hathrim; they had stocky builds and were fond of their beards and leather. His only clothing was a broad strip of cloth like a bandage wrapped around his hips, fastened with a length of coarse rope. And it was his choice to remain immodest, for I saw a folded set of fresh clothes resting in his cell.

  Extraordinary. A new race of people from somewhere across the ocean. How had he ever managed to cross it?

  He eyed me with suspicion at first, leaning against the wall to
my left with his arms crossed in front of his chest and his right leg crossed in front of his left.

  “Hello,” I said. “My name is Gondel.” I tapped my chest. “Gondel.”

  I got a glare for my trouble at first, but my expectant expression must have persuaded him to respond in kind. He tapped his chest once and said, “Saviič.” The ch sound at the end of his name told me that they were hewing to the old alphabet.

  “Hello, Saviič.” I held up my right index finger. “Jedan,” I said. Then I lifted fingers in succession and continued to count to ten in Uzstašanas. “Dva, trik, četiri, pet, šest, sedim, osim, devet, deset.”

  Saviič uncrossed his arms and took a couple of steps forward as I spoke, then shook his head when I finished. He began counting as well, correcting my poor pronunciation, or rather correcting the ancient words into his modern equivalent. The first four numbers had changed to jed, duv, tri, and čet, and sedim had changed to sedam. Interesting and encouraging. But what he said next was unintelligible babble to me. I think my lack of comprehension showed on my face, because he sighed in frustration. Remembering that the title of his book contained the word sedam, or seven, I withdrew it to begin discussing it with him.

  Upon seeing it, he cried out and rushed the bars, startling me and causing me to stagger backward until I ran into the table and toppled onto it, beyond the reach of his long arms. I made an undignified noise and eventually landed on the floor, where additional noises and my continued flirtation with a broken hip brought the guards to the cell with spears pointed toward the prisoner. “It’s all right, I’m fine, just help me up,” I said. “The chamberlain wasn’t kidding. He really wants that book back.”

  One of the guards hooked a hand under my arm and hoisted me to my feet. I thanked him and seated myself at the table a safe distance from the bars. I straightened the paper and righted the ink pot that had tumbled on its side during my fall—luckily the cork had been in place. Placing the book in plain view on the table but well out of his reach, I smiled at Saviič to reassure him that I was not annoyed and pointed at the title. “Zanata Sedam. What is zanata?” I circled the word with my finger and then pointed at it, repeating my question so that Saviič would know I wanted to know that word. I saw that he was paying more attention to the guards than to me, so I asked them to retreat while I spoke with him.