by Jean Johnson
The Efrijt turned to face him, his tusks bared briefly in distaste. “Medjant Kumon. Give it the respect of using Frijsh when you speak of my House, and not whatever this human-tongue is.”
“Adanjé-lon,” the animadj he had been talking to corrected. Zuki folded her hands primly on her leather-skirted lap. “We call our language Flame Tongue.”
“Flame! Formed of fire and spark,” a female voice asserted, startling Anzak. He spun around, and found himself looking down at a short Fae, her golden curls dancing around her shoulders, those honey-hued eyes dancing all over his face, his shoulders, his hair. The twist of mirth to her lips made Anzak wary of her motives. In contrast to the fussy, flowing cream robes of the male, she wore a fitted shirt and pants in shades of fiery gold and orange, with a matching leather vest and knee-high boots in a brick dust red.
“The Efrijt were said to be masters of fire, even beings of fire, on some worlds,” the male drawled, recapturing Anzak’s attention. His smirk and his supercilious air were the epitome of Fae arrogance. He continued to pace around Anzak, viewing him from every angle. “No doubt the result of showing a few cheap fire-starting methods to impress the primitive natives.”
“Fire, flame, smoke, the broiling heat of a desert,” the female recited, sounding a bit gleeful about those words as she circled him, staying on the opposite side from the elegantly clad male. “Cheap beads for mineral rights, cheap healing spells for hard and long labor . . .”
Young, he realized. She looked rather young for a Fae. “Who or what are you?” Anzak demanded. “Are you the taro of this Fae medjant? Am I to only ever meet and speak with the lowest of you, the humans and the children? Where is your negotiator?”
She straightened from her slight crouch, hands going to her hips, her lips pursing. “Ooh! An insult. Not a good way to begin. He is the law-sayer,” the girl informed him. “Kefer, keeper of laws and rules. You might want to refer to him as Sefo Kefer, if you insist on using Frijsh titles for everything.”
“So, he is the negotiator,” Anzak decided, turning to face the male. Only to be laughed at by the female. He glanced back, and the male spoke.
“I am the law-sayer, the keeper and arbiter of the rules,” the Fae named Kefer stated smugly. “She is Jinji, the negotiator for this pantean.”
“A child?” Anzak scorned, glancing back at her.
“Another insult? I do wish you luck in dealing with me,” the youth stated, smirking. She stood there in her clothes that looked half Fae and half Efrijt, too young to hold such a great deal of responsibility, speaking in riddles as though she were mad. Anzak did not know what to make of any of that. The female folded her arms across her chest and strolled around him. “Of course, what kind of luck is the question. Will your people have good luck in dealing with me, and receive generosity? Or will you have bad luck with me, and receive a thrashing?”
One of the nearby humans, one with dark blond locks, lifted her head with a soft gasp, her eyes wide with what looked like sudden comprehension. Unsure what was happening, Anzak scowled. “Do not speak in riddles to me!”
“Then I will ask you a direct question,” the female, Jinji, stated. Her tone had turned calm, borderline serious. “What task were you assigned to handle before coming to this land four years ago?”
“I do not have to answer your questions,” Anzak retorted, annoyed by the pair, this weird young girl and this conceited older male.
“Yes, you do. You are to pay for food and lodging with information,” the male, Kefer, reminded him. “You have been here four days and three nights, eating our food and using our quarters. You have even been asking questions of us. It is time for you to answer ours, both the ones asked now and the ones asked later. You have several days’ worth of information to pay.”
“What task were you assigned to handle before coming to this land four years ago?” Jinji repeated.
The Efrijt frowned again. He considered the question carefully from different angles in his mind, before deciding it would be acceptable to answer. “I was assigned to work with the sefo, to interact directly with the natives in matters of commerce and accounting.”
He had to use the Frijsh words, since the human tongue, this Flame Sea tongue, had nothing similar in its vocabulary. Her response was a sympathetic wince, brow furrowing and her lips pursing once more. The youthful Fae was a lot more animated than the other Fae, who did everything languidly, smoothly; by contrast, the girl was a bundle of energy.
“Ooh, yes, that would end up being near-useless here,” Jinji told him, moving around so that he could see both her and the male at the same time. “It must have stung your pride considerably, finding out all your highly trained skills are virtually useless. At least, for now,” she added. “Have you begun introducing the concept of currency yet?”
That was a question the sefo had warned him about. Not because anyone had feared a Fae interrogation—they had not believed anyone had discovered this world, yet—but because there were Efrijt rules about that sort of thing. “We have introduced a tally system for future trading and bartering value. That is considered acceptable by most civilized beings when dealing with primitives.”
“I dislike being called primitive, young man,” the human elder, Zuki, chided him from her seat off to the side.
Anzak slanted her a look. Because she, an elder of her people, had treated him as an equal, had answered his questions without fuss, he gave her a polite reply. “It is true that an ember is hot, compared to the coldness of a stone. But that ember is cold when you compare it to the heat of a smelting kiln. Your people here are advanced compared to others of your kind, but you are still primitive compared to my own.”
“How do you physically keep your tallies?” Jinji asked him next. “Physical objects, marks on a wall . . . ?”
“Physical objects,” he replied warily. This was another situation where answering too much was borderline dangerous. Uplifting a truly primitive society was frowned upon even by the Efrijt, though mainly because the more sophisticated a culture grew, the more cautious they were in how they managed their contracts and agreements.
“They use coins,” a new voice stated, using the Frijsh word for the discs in question, since there was no equivalent in Adanjé-lon. A familiar voice, the tall man with the tattooed skin. “Silver and copper, from what I saw. The Red Rocks already had a basic understanding of math, but they did not have money thirty years ago.”
Anzak bared the tips of his tusks, annoyed by the painted man’s revelation.
“So long as the Efrijt do not teach them about money, they are free to use coins as tally markers,” Kefer stated. “It skirts the law very carefully.”
“Tell me, Taro Anzak,” Jinji said next. “Did you ever take care of a pet animal, either as an adult or a child?”
“What?” Anzak asked, thrown by the off-topic question.
“Did you,” she repeated patiently, “ever take care of a pet animal, and if so, was it as an adult, or a child?”
“All Efrijt children are taught to care for an animal, as part of our aptitude training,” he told her, annoyed by the query. It wasn’t common knowledge, but it wasn’t forbidden, either. “We are taught how to be competent in many different ways.”
“Describe the animal you cared for, how long you cared for it, and what happened to it,” Jinji directed.
“I do not see how that is relevant,” he muttered.
“The information I seek is not yours to dictate. You have not yet paid for more than a quarter of your first meal in this place,” she added, chiding him with the tone of someone who would have looked twice her age, had she been Efrijt. “Describe the animal you cared for, how long you cared for it, and what happened to it.”
Certainly it was not a tone normally used by anyone too young to benefit from the age-retarding effects of mercury, which only began when their body finished maturing in
their twenties. Anzak frowned at her. Even if he was the taro of Medjant Kumon, he was an Efrijt, and no Fae was his equal.
“You might want to answer her question,” the male, Kefer, directed him. “Every question you refuse to answer is a debt your superiors will have to pay—there is precedence for that, Pantean Shatrou versus Medjant Bankor, among the peoples of the Etti Sinquat of the planet Ta Shoudak.”
Annoyed, he sighed heavily, and spoke of the rabbit-like creature he had been given to tend. It had eventually died of old age, and the body had been donated to his anatomy class. The next two questions concerned the creature, then she leaped to a question about his quarters among the Red Rocks Tribe. Again, nothing particularly sensitive was asked, but it led without reason to a set of questions asking him how rare or cooked he preferred his meat, and from there, questions of how many of his kin also served Medjant Kumon and what tasks they had been assigned.
The more questions he answered, the more promptly he answered, the faster her questions came. Their speed ramped up slowly, almost imperceptibly, until it was only when Anzak stumbled, trying to answer as fast as she asked, that he realized he was answering so rapidly. Fast enough to have worked up a sweat despite the shaded coolness of the stone chasm’s garden. Fast enough, he only now realized he had answered a few things he should not have answered. Nothing too deeply secretive, but things that gave away some of the medjant’s business practices. Things that the Fae could leverage against his people.
“Enough!” he snapped when she drew in a breath to ask yet another question. “I have answered enough of your questions!”
The male responded to that. “You have paid for your first two nights, and half of your second full day. You still have several questions to go. But you will be allowed to take a break for a few hours. Animadj Zuki, we thank you for your indulgence in allowing us to take up some of your time with this man,” Kefer added, bowing to the aging human. “We will leave him alone for now.”
Shaken by the intense interrogation, bemused by it ending so abruptly, Anzak watched him turn to leave, then glanced around for the other Fae. Who had vanished while he was distracted. Only the half dozen human students and the animadj remained. Baring his tusks in a grimace, he looked around for a place to retreat to, not liking the wide-eyed stares of the pupils.
“Sit. Please,” the graying magic-wielder ordered politely. “I can tell you are disoriented, young man. Anyone would be unsettled by what you have endured just now. So, sit. Seda, pour him some water, please. He needs to drink liquids and rest for a while . . . and while he rests, we will have another lesson in summoning and controlling the anima from within ourselves. Remember, if you purpose the energies into a spell as you draw it up from within yourself, the Fae will not draw it out of you simply by breathing. So long as you do not cast your spell in their direction, of course . . .”
I must remember that, Anzak thought, returning to the stone bench that seemed sturdy enough to support his muscled mass. That’s important . . . Sejo Zakal will want to know that we cannot rely upon human magics against them . . .
How did that little girl leave me so shaken? he wondered in the next unsteady breath. Accepting the stone-shaped mug the teenaged girl handed to him, he drank deeply, letting the liquid quench his thirst and revive some of his unsettled nerves. From the moment of her appearance, she had nudged him off balance. And . . . kept him off-center, he realized, blinking at his thoughts. That was the key. She had nudged him more and more out of alignment, until his mental and emotional poise were no longer a foundation upon which to be calm and self-controlled.
He needed to remember to report this realization when he next contacted the head of the medjant. Forewarned was forearmed, and that female was formidable. Sitting there, drinking his water, he held out the emptied mug for another round. Lost in his thoughts as he was, he did not see the human girl’s speculative stare.
Chapter Seven
“He seemed shaken at the very end, Grandmother Siffae,” Seda reported to her matriarch that night. “Like a man whose confidence has been rattled. I do not think he understood what she did to him, until that moment. It was . . . clever. Very clever. I had to think about it myself all afternoon afterward, to figure out why he reacted as he did. But she made his thoughts off balance by spinning which way they moved, changing questions this way and that . . . and when she and the God of Laws learned something particularly important to them, he did not realize it, for they never showed their triumph when he was looking their way.”
“It is good to think about what you have seen,” Siffu praised her. “The gods do wish us to think for ourselves wherever possible. But are you sure she is the God of Luck? She sounds more like a God of Questioning.”
“Not completely, Grandmother,” Seda admitted slowly. “But she did say he would suffer if she decided he deserved bad luck, and that he would be rewarded if she decided he deserved good luck.”
“I think, if she is a God-Being of Luck,” Tuki stated slowly, arms wrapped around his knees where he sat off to one side, “then she takes her time in delivering rewards and punishments. Good luck and bad luck do not come when we want them to come, after all.”
Siffu nodded. The youth was not a member of her bloodline, but he did view the Fae as living anima-beings. And for all he was renowned for making mischief, playing pranks, and getting into mostly harmless trouble, he rarely spilled secrets. A youth who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut. “What else do you think, Tuki?”
“I think she fills her time in between discerning what he deserves and delivering it . . . with mischief.” He flashed a grin that matched his last word. Talgan, seated near him, reached over and ruffled the youth’s sandy blond curls. Tuki laughed even as he wobbled over, and righted himself. “Yes, yes, I know, that is the night-shadow calling the charred stick black! But I should know, yes?”
“That, you should,” Talgan agreed, ruffling his hair again.
“Behave,” one of Talgan’s older sisters admonished. Like her brother, she, too, addressed their mother by her nickname title. “Grandmother, what do you think of this Efrijt, now that you have watched him for yourself? Is he an anima-being? Evil or otherwise?”
Seda shook her head, answering for the matriarch. “From all the questions he asked Animadj Zuki, he does not draw the anima to himself. He cannot even wield it as effectively as we can. If he cannot do what the Fae do, then he is not an anima-being . . . right, Grandmother?”
“That is right, Seda,” Siffu agreed. “The anima-beings of the Southlands could absorb anima-sparks to make themselves stronger, though they did not draw those sparks to themselves as strongly as any Fae. The animadjet of the southern tribes had to capture the energies and direct it to their gods—it would swerve to be absorbed into them when it was within a body-length or so. We have all seen how the Fae can pull in anima-sparks from up to a selijm away, a full hour’s walk, if not two.”
“So then what is he, Grandmother Siffae?” another of the men asked, one of the younger ones, a second-generation double Dai-Fae whose mother had been Rua-taje and whose grandmother had been Fali-taje. “He speaks as though he believes himself the equal of a Fae, and the Fae give him the respect of someone who is their equal . . . but not in the way they give respect to us.”
“I think he means the Efrijt-man spoke of being more civilized than we are,” Seda clarified. “Of being more advanced and sophisticated, like the Fae are. If he is not an anima-being, but the Fae are . . . what is he?”
“Yes, what is he?”
“What are his people?”
Siffu, seeing the curiosity and confusion in the twenty or so humans gathered around her, breathed deep and sighed. “There is a word the Fae use. They try not to speak of such things around us . . . but we have overheard it, and gradually learned what it means. When they speak of Ban-taje being Shae, they mean he is a human, not a Fae, but not a human like we are human
s. They use the term ‘outworlder’ to describe him.
“It is clear that the Death God is not from the world we know, for no man we know of can survive death by so many ways,” she continued, explaining her thoughts on the matter. “He is from outside the world we know . . . and yet it is equally clear he comes from a sophisticated background, that the Fae can accept him as easily as they accept one another, yet they do not accept us with the same level of comfort and ease. They accept us, but it is more like a parent accepting a child, with love and respect, even with some equality . . . but not as a peer. I believe this Efrijt is an ‘outworlder’ as well, someone who comes from outside this world. One of their peers, but not one of ours.”
Before she could say more, Seda gasped. Siffu lifted her chin and tilted her head, silently encouraging the girl to speak her mind. Seda might one day make a good matriarch herself, since Siffu would not live forever, unlike an anima-being.
“I . . . I think this makes the most sense, Grandmother,” the girl confessed. “It just occurred to me that the Fae have always been careful about saying where they come from. They have never given a direction for where their home lies, whether that was north, south, northeast, or west by southwest. So, if they did not come from a clear direction, then . . . they came from in the world, as anima-beings . . . and because Ban-taje and this Efrijt, Anzak, are not Fae, they came from out the world.”
“Before he died, Pulek confessed to me that he saw the Fae stepping through a shining doorway,” Siffu reminded them. “He did not see where Ban-taje came from, but he saw Kaife-taje and Rua-taje, and half the others step through a door leading through the depths of the rock itself, so the Fae, at least, came from somewhere shining and forested. Perhaps this place lies at the heart of the world, though the deeper one goes into a cave, the darker it gets, so perhaps that is not quite right, either . . .
