And silence. Awkward silence. I stand there, with those wide arms, and the two women stare at me. I am again reminded how different I look from their kind: I am a head taller than either of them. And there are the horns.
I have a lot of complex instrumentation in them. They are useful augmentations to the natural human state. But I am anthropologist enough to know that Earth Resurgent adopted the modifications primarily as a display affectation, one which has in the past caused some alarm amongst the locals here.
That is not the sole reason for their being taken aback, however.
“Astresse,” says Astresse slowly. “Astresse Once Regent was my great-grandmother, Nyrgoth Elder.”
I stare at them. All those happy memories have lost their colour, all at once. I clutch for them, but they are like sand, gritty and abrasive. Sand under the eyelids. Sand in the mind. And of course she is dead. The outpost reported dates and times faithfully. If I had been thinking properly, I’d have been fortified against the revelation, not even have made the mistake in the first place. It has been well over a century, at least twenty-five of the locals’ long years, their “Storm-seasons,” as they call the dual-lunar cycle of climatic chaos that sweeps this world. Astresse, at whose side I rode to war in the most absurd and glorious venture of all my long years, has been dust for generations.
I force myself to re-establish the DCS, distancing me from the fresh wave of despair about to crash down on me. It is almost more than I can manage. Part of me just wants to give up, at that point. But seeing this girl, this stranger, gave me such hopes.
And now I am rational again, and all that nonsense is locked away, and I compose my face and look sternly at the pair of them, constructing my sentences in the local dialect, whose roots to old Earth languages I painstakingly dissected centuries before.
“Why are you here?” I ask, or at least that’s the sense I’m aiming at. The locals’ speech is ornate and filled with qualifiers and conditionals, so perhaps it comes out a little fancier than I intend.
Lynesse
“FOR WHAT PURPOSE do you disturb the Elder?”
Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning. His hands were long-fingered, long-nailed; his face was long, too: high-cheekboned, narrow-eyed, the chin and cheeks rough with dark stubble. His skin was the sallow of old paper. He had horns. In the old pictures, she’d thought they were a crown he wore, but there they were, twin twisted spires that arched from his brows, curving backwards along his high forehead and into his long, swept-back hair. She would have said he was more than half monster if she hadn’t known he was something half god. He was the last scion of the ancient creators who had, the stories said, placed people on the world and taught them how to live.
And now she had been silent too long. Esha jogged her elbow and she burst out, “I call upon the ancient compact between the royal line of Lannesite and the Elder, where you bound yourself to aid the kingdom should foul magic rise against it. A new threat has arisen who wields terrible powers, as did Ulmoth in the time of Astresse Once Regent. Ulmoth whom you met sorcery with sorcery and cast down.”
The Elder’s look at her was haughty and dismissive. There had been a moment, when she told him of Astresse, that she had thought to read human responses in those arch features, but now she looked on him and could only see the distance between them.
“I am not troubled by such small matters,” he pronounced. “These disputes you must resolve yourself. It is not fit for me to intervene,” and he turned to go.
Lyn had a whole speech prepared—literally memorised by heart—in which she recited the Lineage of Queens, elucidated the deeds of her great-grandmother and the legends of Nyrgoth Elder and made a formal plea, diplomat to great power, for the honouring of bargains. There was an expected language to these things, just as though one were telling a tale, conventions to abide by. One did not just charge into the tower of a sorcerer and take liberties.
And yet he was already going away, without any of her elaborate charade enacted, and she just lunged forwards and tugged his sleeve, as though she were a peddler and he was departing without paying.
The robe punished her. There was a crackle and a feeling as though it had bitten her fingers. Then she was sitting on the floor, hand ringing with pain and tears in her eyes. Esha had grabbed her shoulders and was trying to haul her back, gabbling apologies to the Elder, begging him to forgive the princess’s temerity. Nyrgoth just stood there, looking down at her, seemingly as surprised as she was by the development.