“Please excuse the demands we make on your privacy,” Dirant said after advancing as a result of a hurried colloquy with his companion on the subject of which of them was likelier to make a favorable impression on an artsy type. “Our meeting is a blessing for us. We are unwilling travelers brought here by unnatural occurrences difficult to describe and harder than that to believe. Our best evidence they are genuine is our complete sincerity in saying that do not know where we are and would be grateful for information on the point.”
If the fairy noticed his flagrant violation of etiquette in neglecting to state their names on account of the warnings several stories gave concerning even that simple pleasantry, she ignored it in favor of a topic which required immediate attention. “I'm not sure what song to perform next. A request?”
Unfamiliar with the musical scene, Taomenk offered a general suggestion. “Something about the history of this place, perhaps.”
“What a wonderful request! Here's a song about rabbits.”
Despite learning nothing about their predicament from the song, candor compelled Dirant and Taomenk to admit after ten verses that not only did her performance entertain, they now considered themselves qualified to raise and breed rabbits as a side business.
The fairy songstress finished with a powerful chord, her arm remaining outstretched for a time afterward as she spoke. “Wiuyo the bard has completed another song! I hope you liked it. What is music? What is this thing we call 'audience?' I've spent a long time looking, and so far this is my answer. Another request?”
Dirant tried again. “You must have traveled widely to attain such sophistication as is evident in your graceful playing and experienced voice. Is there a place you know where people sent magically to this area might be deposited, or?”
“Hm?” Wiuyo hopped off the stone bowl. “You want to go on a quest to reunite with your dearest friends and have the whole adventure memorialized in song? Let's go!”
She dashed off, whereupon the Adabans followed even though they suspected her course to be based on enthusiasm rather than deliberation. If she was running toward no particular place, her destination was no worse than theirs, and if she was instead leading them into a cunning trap, Mr. Aptezor had likely been caught in it already. That would be one companion recovered. On the subject of camaraderie, questions less urgent than the ones he had before occurred to Dirant.
“Is there any evidence which contradicts the idea the Ertithans were in fact fairies?” he asked Taomenk en route.
“What a question that is, and we should have all thought of it earlier. Offhand, no, I don't think there is. You're implying of course the Ertithans escaped the ancient cataclysm by manufacturing their own reality into which they escaped. The reason fairies stopped appearing was that they finally perfected their new world and shut it off entirely from ours. You might be right.”
“My notions are not nearly so developed as that, Mr. Taomenk. Are we in a fairy realm, or did we by coincidence meet a lone fairy, the last of her ilk? That is the limit of my present reflections.”
That question neither could answer until they saw atop a hill to their right a single horse, black and unimaginatively saddled with an ebony-dark seat. Every child, Dirant included, at one time or another wished to come across a Hill Rider and be carried away from his stupid family toward a thrilling adventure. Whether as a result of maturity or simply altered circumstances, Dirant was glad to leave the supernatural horse behind on its hill.
With that doubt settled, the Adabans discussed the intricacies of fairy realms which the brief visits of earlier times, reported incompletely and embellished further as each storyteller added and edited as he liked, naturally failed to reveal. Was the Hill Rider a unique being or part of a breed of horses inclined toward abduction? What should they do if someone insisted on hearing their names? Was Wiuyo ever going to speak to them again? What about the fairy gold?
They were preparing pseudonyms for themselves, a precaution wise in their present circumstances but helpful also if they wished to write trashy novels as a secondary venture (or primary depending on their success), when their guide pulled up short. Not far short though, since the unsightly clay before her gave way presently to an imperious range of jagged rocks doubtless caused by volcanic activity, though the volcano was in hiding at the time.
“Go around or go straight? Going straight is more heroic, but I'm a bard.” Wiuyo leaned back to consider the proper solution. The matter troubled her to such an extent that she squeezed her palms against her eyes to enhance her concentration or else as theatrical flair. Musical theater employed the modern descendants of her claimed profession, after all; few today claimed “bard” as their job unless encouraged to do so by a complex tax code.
The exercise helped her reach a decision. “Does anyone have a coin?” she asked, in response to which Taomenk held out an ezola. “Thanks.” She dropped it in a purse hung on her tunic belt, brandished her guitar, and strummed.
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For the first time that day, provided it was the same day still, Dirant and Taomenk stayed conscious while they were transported elsewhere by means far less prosaic than a vehicle, their feet, or the feet of their kidnappers. Their new location possessed an atmosphere similar to that of their starting point, also known as the real world. The air, not merely present, hung so thick that Dirant wanted to open a window; what stopped him was not seeing any.
“The darkness is excessive,” he said.
Wiuyo evidently concurred, for she directly provided a solution. Fairy lights spun around her and illuminated in yellows and purples an underground cavity closed off entirely from the surface as if the earth wanted for certain of its treasures a vault secure from both intruders and the corroding light of the sun. There was a palace in the Ertithan style not far away, nearly intact, and there another no less preserved, and another, seven or so altogether. Other buildings may have been temples or granaries, the default guesses for the archaeologist who lacked confidence, and all of them in reasonable repair. Half of the street retained its antique appearance provided Ertith's road technology did indeed extend no further than dirt and gravel.
“Ah!” Dirant and Taomenk's exclamations, though identical when written, were trivial to distinguish for any listener. While Dirant's expressed surprise, Taomenk was undergoing religious ecstasy.
He sniffled as he spoke. “This is how theories are disproved. It's almost enough to get me into a temple.”
“Or to design a temple on behalf of a client?”
“Ha, maybe so, Mr. Dirant.”
The surroundings impressed their bard not at all. “Come on, come on. You have to find your friends. This way, here, gather around. I won't put how much help I gave you in the song, and you can trust a promise I make about music. There!”
They returned to the domain of fairies with no more fuss than that. A quick examination indicated they were on the opposite side of of the volcanic rocks which had threatened vainly to arrest their progress. No account of fairies familiar to Dirant mentioned what Wiuyo had just done, but he supposed it could have been extrapolated. Those fairy halls had to be somewhere, and another reality reachable through the guest world was as good a place to store them as any. Perhaps people throughout history trespassed against the guests frequently without realizing it on their way to marvelous halls of glamour. The possibility heartened him.
“Persuading Miss Wiuyo or another fairy to take us back there cannot be impossible, Mr. Taomenk,” he suggested.
The engineer responded with raised hands, a thoughtful expression, and no willingness to speak for a time until he said, “I had to estimate. The distances are different.” He nodded in response to his own deliberations. “Without question. We traversed a greater distance in the cavern than was reflected here. Eh.” He resumed the journey in higher spirits than ever, far more intent on the implications of the discrepancy than in his missing associates, whom he knew only on the level of exchanging cordial greetings. After some musings on the topic, ostensibly directed at Dirant who suspected any audience or none at all would have filled the role just as well, Taomenk attempted to elicit more information from Wiuyo. Not only did his excitement quell his reservations about talking to a fairy, but also some rougher ground in that area reduced her speed and thereby facilitated conversation.
“Do you know where we were just then, Miss Wiuyo?”
“We'll go to the border. Meetings there are the most poetic.”
“How did you judge where it was safe to switch between worlds?”
“Meetings, partings, changes in situation. Borders represent all that and more. Sometimes I think they represent too much and they're just an easy tool for lazy lyricists.” That was valuable, if not what either Taomenk or Dirant wanted to hear. “A lazy little verse is a good thing sometimes.” That too.
After a few rounds of that sort, Wiuyo halted. “I'm sorry for ignoring you, friends. What tribes are you from? Would you describe yourselves more as animated by mighty passion or sensitive to the melancholy of death and life?” Since she resumed her trip toward the border with the question mark still in the air, her zeal to hear their responses might be doubted, the more so when she started testing out verses based on answers she invented herself. The exhibition, combining supreme skill and consummate carelessness as it did, amazed Dirant. After thinking it over, it amazed him again for another reason.
“Mr. Taomenk, it is a historical fact that language is somehow no barrier to understanding fairies or being understood, and yet it cannot be true that the meter and wordplay of Miss Wiuyo's compositions function the same in every language at once.”
“Ah, I haven't given much consideration to poetry, but you're right. What a shame that foreigners won't be able to enjoy this except in translation. I'll allow I don't think much of the brotherhood of man, but I'm not spiteful either.”
“No, it works just fine no matter what,” Wiuyo turned back to explain. “You're willing to listen or you aren't, and that's the whole of it.”
Judging it unwise to dispute with their one guide and a fairy on top of that, the Adabans merely shook their heads at each other and redirected the conversation toward the dissimilarity between the dazzling courts of fairy kings depicted in the typical story and the country through which they were passing, a place prone to dragging itself home just after curfew, unpunished because the bailiffs empathize with its circumstances.
“Low fairy density is responsible,” Taomenk opined on the basis that he had not yet seen a single fairy or any variety of person aside from Wiuyo, excepting Dirant of course.
“It may be that everything of relevance transpires within, for example, a stately ziggurat, and if the witnesses we read troubled themselves to tour the countryside, perhaps their accounts would have been closer to the scene about us now.”
The exchange, later admitted to be a mistake, focused the two men on that ugly, tedious scenery. Consequently their journey took on the aspect of a multi-year odyssey for all that they had thus far expended less than an hour on it. Still, Wiuyo remained steadfast in her confidence, and the man unable to trust a fairy, well, regardless.