He didn’t, Vivian noticed, say that he was happy about it. It was a small distinction, but the knights, barred from lying, could be very exact in their phrasing.
“I’d be glad to hear what you don’t mind telling,” she said to Ulamir.
Even if there were words for most of it, you would find no sense in them.As usual, unless he was teasing her, there was no feeling that he was boasting, only acknowledging the difference—whether between humans and stonekin or the living and the dead.I can speak of three things I found. One is a story, which may interest you. One is a spell for gathering food in the outside world, which is unlikely to be useful unless you develop the ability to eat stone.
“And the third?” she asked, after relaying the information.
Vivian felt Ulamir’s satisfaction before he responded.The third,he said,is a passage from here to the bottom of the mountain.
Chapter 28
Behind the dais in the music room, a wall opened at Vivian’s command.
More or less.
It was really at Ulamir’s command, but he gave Vivian the word for it, which took her three attempts to say correctly. Stonekin syllables could be as slippery as cut gems or as rough as shattered rock. Magic, like this command, was often both.
She did get her tongue around it eventually, though. The wall in front of her folded back, and Vivian walked through the narrow archway it formed. Olvir followed her into a narrow passage constructed of glowing jet, where shallow stairs led steadily down. Rock brushed against his shoulders with every step, but he remembered the storm and had no complaints.
“I wouldn’t mind hearing the story, if you’re in the mood to tell it,” Vivian told Ulamir after they’d been descending for half an hour or so. “It’d pass the time.”
Ulamir replied, which Olvir sensed as a steady stream of information that paused only briefly.
“Once—” Vivian herself stopped and glanced over her shoulder, eyes shining gold in the darkness. “Let me know if you’d rather I shut up, hmm?”
“No. Or I will if that ever happens, but I’d like to hear the story.”
“This is a tale of Kanrath,” said Vivian, her voice becoming slower, echoing the rhythm that Olvir perceived from Ulamir, “who led the circle that lived here when the gods walked the world. He traveled over the land many times but always came back to his people, bringing word and goods from the lands beyond.”
Olvir tried to imagine being one of the people who’d talked to Ulamir—not Kanrath himself but one of the stonekin who’d spent all their life within the mountain, knowing nothing of the outside but what a few adventurous souls brought back.
Was it so different from the thousands of people who lived and died without going farther than a day’s journey from the villages where they were born? Olvir had known plenty of those, in his childhood and his duties both. Never seeing the outdoors sounded more restrictive, granted, but perhaps the stonekin viewed other mortals as deprived, spending their lives so far from the heart of the earth.
Vivian continued.
“Once, when Kanrath was young and hadn’t gone very far from the tunnels of his birth,” she said, “he met an old man planting trees. They were all kinds of trees…” Vivian fell silent, and for a while, the only sounds were their footsteps on the rock. The passageway spiraled down, dark and close. “Pine, apple, plum, oak. As soon as the old man put a seed in the ground and stepped back, the tree would grow right up. The ones that were supposed to have fruit bore that fruit immediately. All of them became very large all at once. Kanrath had only a passing familiarity with plants, but he knew that wasn’t precisely usual. He was extremely courteous when he wished the old man a good day.”
“Wise.”
“Very. When the old man greeted him in return, he used Kanrath’s name, although they’d never met. Kanrath saw that the man’s eyes were bright green, with gold centers that danced, so he knew he was talking to Poram.”
Olvir walked on, listening, picturing the world as it had been in the days when a traveler could come upon a god unaware.
“Kanrath, being stonekin, had no food fit to offer the god in the form he’d taken, but he volunteered to help dig holes for the seeds. Poram thanked him.
“Now, there was a custom in those days that a mortal who encountered a god could get a favor and true answers to two questions if they were willing to answer the god’s questions honestly in return.” Vivian paused, then laughed. “Kanrath, like most of us would, found his mind blank when faced with just that situation, however he might have thought about it beforehand. He asked Poram what he was planting. The god told him about the trees, their names and natures, and he asked Kanrath where he’d been going.
“‘I’m not sure,’ Kanrath said. ‘Wide is the world, with many places to see, and I don’t know where to start. Why, lord, do you create these? They don’t last nearly so long as stones.’
“‘But they’ll spread far in their seeds and farther in the lives of those they feed or shelter,’ said Poram. “‘All things end, and all go on. What wisdom can you give me that I don’t know already, child of the mountains?’”
If they hadn’t been under miles of rock, Olvir would’ve whistled. The Lord of the Wild, like his daughter, Letar, was one of the dark gods, the ones hardest for mortals to understand or meet on their own terms. Tinival was demanding—few knew that better than Olvir—and Sitha’s priests bore their own burdens, particularly when fate began to get involved, but both of those two had a gentleness about them, a forgiving nature that Poram and Letar didn’t share.
He would’ve panicked in Kanrath’s place.
“A reasonably intimidating question,” Vivian said, sounding as though she’d been thinking along similar lines. “Kanrath froze for a moment, the story says, then took a bit of rock from nearby. It was just granite, but it sparkled in the sunlight. He worked it the way the stonekin can do barehanded. In a few minutes, he’d formed the shape of a star. ‘I never saw these in the sky until recently,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you never saw them on the earth until now.’
“The god beamed at him. ‘The seed I plant bears fruit I hadn’t expected,’ he said. ‘You will understand such things in the years to come.’
