I’d expected, exiting the domain of the Home Key back into the post-Sky Kingdom liminal space, to have to do another transportation or teleportation jaunt. Instead, the space has, while we were out, turned into a cavernous room leading into a tunnel of rough stone, worked in geometric tesselated patterns of vaguely regular polygons.
It’s imperfect, but still beautiful, and I gawk at it for a bit. It’s the first genuinely imperfectly executed art I’ve seen in the Temple; most of the areas were relatively spartan, cramped corridors and barely-surface-level rooms of dungeonstone, and even the ones that were more decorated were almost universally in the category of bad designs done to perfection.
This seems human, though I immediately append or Nayyosa, or orcish to that, and my brain momentarily goes into a spiral of curiosity.
“Are there … um.” I rack my brain for a moment, searching for the right words. The rest of my party halts at the entrance into the stone hallway, looking at me with variously quizzical expressions. “Are there more sophont ilks of folk than the three Nayyo, orcs, and humans?”
“You ask this now?”
“Zanya,” Amber says with a mildness that she probably thinks is hilarious, “this is Adam.”
“Of course.” She hums, maybe thoughtfully, maybe for emphasis. “Sed, though to hear of it, Arcadia is lost and all those that dwelt there with her. I’d not think to find any in Iavshet, but they may yet live across the Storm.”
I blink at her. “My number of questions is mounting.”
“There are also the Wind,” she says, ignoring me pointedly.
“The Wind aren’t an ilk of folk,” Amber retorts. “No moreso than the Gods are, or the rivers and hills of the world.”
“Wisdom from the mouth of a child; when last did you speak to one?”
“Two years ago; I served the Temple, which speaks often enough with Wind and Rue alike, as a hag should know.”
“Hey, hey. I don’t like it when my friends fight.” I let some concern leak into my voice, along with a bit of soothing placation. “Let’s not get insulting, please.”
There’s a pause, with Amber and Zidanya eyeing each other and then me. “I think I hear a familiar tone of voice,” Amber says consideringly.
“The Magelord chastises us, and not for the first time.” Zidanya locks gazes with Amber, and then for some reason she’s smirking.
Actually, they’re both smirking, which probably is either a great sign or a terrible sign. “Rue,” I say breezily. “Like, regret?” Omniglot is wonderful and very weird. “Are they named that way because they’re, like, regretful?”
“Hast reversed the relation; the word arises from the spirit.” The good humor in Zidanya’s face falls off like an air shutter slamming down. “Meddle not with them, Magelord. Should you run across their ilk, speak only truth, ask no questions, accept no gifts, and consider no offers.”
“Be polite, to the utmost, but never debase yourself,” Amber adds, mirroring Zidanya’s seriousness. “They will cleave to the spirit of an agreement, and are not unreasonable, but imply that they intend to cheat you and they will kill you.”
I raise an eyebrow at them. “That scary? And here I thought you two weren’t afraid of anything.”
“Rue are not like the Wind; they are not like any ilk of folk that walks Iavshet in this age.” Amber looks over at Zidanya, voice contemplative. “Do you know how old they are? I know only that they pre-date the Temple.”
“I’d not be inclined to speculate past the First War; but every Rue I knew of or read of, every Rue known to Arcadia’s annals and histories, is from before that tumult of a time.”
“Nigh six thousand years, then, at an absolute minimum.”
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We stand there, staring into the dimness of the stone hall, and I start chuckling. I get a couple of glances from my companions, but I just shrug. “Six thousand years is long enough that it’s past my ability to reason about or grasp. We - where I’m from, nobody has six thousand years of continuous historical record. Nobody.” I start walking forward, paying careful attention to the stone walls, making a deliberate effort to appreciate them. “And that leaves me where I was before.”
“Moving forward?” Amber’s ahead of me again, head swiveling side to side.
“Moving forward,” I agree genially.
We walk in silence. I won’t say that everyone is lost in their thoughts, or that everyone is being vigilant, because I’m pretty sure that Amber is as vigilant as I am absent-minded, but nobody’s saying anything, and it leaves me with nothing to do but think. Well, to think and to appreciate the art on the walls; prompted by the descriptions of the three Nayyosa ilks, I recognize the stout gamahad at their forges and in their plate armor, the gotz at their cauldrons or with chisels in their hands, and the vavoc in what look like fields, tending mushrooms. The artistry is impressive, but it lacks perspective, and it’s quaintly rough; it’s as though someone is trying to ape a style from long ago, while still being an amateur themself.
Not that I’d be able to replicate their feat. I’ve never had any luck with art, other than true-representational sketches and diagrams, preferably on grid paper, with the dimensions carefully estimated and then reproduced as best I could, as mechanically as I could. But being an educated consumer of creative works was about as fundamental to being a decent citizen as anything else in the Fleets, and I tried.
“Who are these?” I’m running my finger over a figure I haven’t seen before. It’s a depiction of a tall, thin figure, maybe two meters and a bit, judging by its relation to the gamahad next to it. Whoever it is has a bow, arrow nocked and drawn in almost mockery of a pair of incredibly thin arms, and a tail that wraps around the entire scene. “For some reason I want to say these are Sed, but I don’t know why.”
“The Sed were spirits, not of the land as are the Wind nor of the notional as the Rue; they are spirits of that which live, taken kindred form.”
“So, fox-people?” I glance up and down the wall to the friezes of other Sed. “And cat-people, and otter-people, and … this one I don’t know. But they all have such fluffy tails. You’re sure they’re not around anymore?”
There’s a moment of silence, followed by a round of almost-choking laughter. “My lord, may it never come to pass that you are tested on your self-control.” Amber can barely hold it together long enough to mock me before she dissolves into laughter anew.
“Touch not the fluffy tail, O Magelord, lest you be destroyed! Alas, alack, wellaway; I cannot resist touching the fluffy tail, even should it lead to my demise!”
“I am surrounded, I say, surrounded by no-goodniks undermining my authority and position.” I turn around to grin at the two of them, and to raise an eyebrow at Sara. “Well? Are you going to take a turn at the wheel of mockery?”
“Yes, sir.”
She doesn’t say anything else, and my eyes narrow. “But you’re going to make me wait for it, which will increase the anticipation and serve as an act in its own right.” I can see her smiling, and I shake my head in feigned exasperation. “Beset on all sides. Even the newcomer indulges in humor at my expense. I’d ask why I put up with all of this, but…”
That, along with an eyebrow waggle, is enough to get me a kiss from Amber that has me pushed up against the wall, and I’m flushed and grinning when she lets up. “We should perhaps leave the historical carvings to be looked at in fair measure later, my lord.” Her voice is fond but definite.
“Yeah, we’re on the clock, I know, I know.” I let my gaze slide over the carvings again before sighing and walking past them.
The one patch of carvings of the six different Sed, each in their different poses, isn’t the only break in the polygon tesselation of the walls. It’s not a very long walk, couldn’t have been more than a kilosecond, kilosecond and a half at most even as slow as we were going, but there’s four other sets of carvings. One of those is recognizably orcs, loping across what Amber says is a grassland; the other three I’m not familiar with. There’s some kind of horrifying underwater monstrosity full of tentacles and gaping maws with jagged teeth that Sara calls a Donun, which neither Zidanya nor Amber has any familiarity with, and an obelisk in a mountain range that Zidanya says represents the Nephil, some sort of titan or giant race; both of these are kith, which they explain means they’re … not necessarily species, some of the ilks of kith contain multiple species and some of them can interbreed, and all of the kindred can interbreed, but somewhere between being a species and being a sociocultural group.
The last mural is inscribed across a three-meter wide archway, where the stone corridor we’ve been walking through has smoothed and widened to become a formal entry. There’s wings everywhere; bat wings, insect wings, bird wings, all manners of wings, each having truly vast aspect ratios.
There’s no question about what kind of kindred the Tazi are, at least, and no question about who the carvings are about.
Amber’s in front, one step forward and three to the side. Zidanya’s behind me, two steps back and one to the left, and Sara mirroring her on my right; there’s some sort of meaning to the formation, but it eludes me and it’s not important. What’s important is the guards at the gate, and not staring or gawking so much that it becomes rude.
“Magelord Adam Levi James and party.” Amber’s voice is firm, carrying into the distance, as she speaks to the vast-winged pair. “We are expected.”