The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [54]
The assumption was that they had been enslaved so far back in the past that they had lost whatever language they might once have had, speaking instead the pidgin that the Skasloi had devised for their slaves. So hateful was that language that they had abandoned it as soon as the masters were all dead, adopting instead the tongues of their human companions.
It seemed entirely plausible. He’d read in several sources that the native language of the Skasloi could not be spoken by a human throat and tongue, so they had devised an idiom that could be used by both themselves and their slaves. Human slaves must have all spoken that language, but many had retained their own speech to use among themselves.
Yet almost no word of that slave tongue was retained in any modern dialect. Virginia Dare and her followers had put every Skasloi creation to the torch and forbade the speech of slavery. They never taught it to their children, and so it died.
“Skaslos” might be the only word of their language that remained, Stephen mused, and even that exhibited the singular form “-os” and the plural “-oi” inherent to elder Cavari, a human language.
Perhaps even the name of that demon race had been forgotten.
He paused, finding himself at a canal wider than those he had crossed before, and his skin prickled as he had an unholy thought.
What if the Skasloi hadn’t all died? What if they, like the greffyns, utins, and nicwers, had merely gone somewhere else for a very long nap? What if this illness, this enemy, was the most ancient enemy of all?
Hours later he took that unsettling thought to sleep with him, resting on a mattress spiced with the Sefry scent.
He awoke to a sharp poke in his ribs and found the girl staring down at him.
“What’s your name?” he murmured.
“Starqin,” she replied. “Starqin Walsdootr.”
“Starqin, do you understand that your parents are dying?”
“My parents are dead,” she said softly. “Killed in the east, fighting a greffyn.”
“Yet you feel no sorrow.”
Her lips pursed.
“You don’t understand,” she said at last. “They had no choice. I had no choice. Now, come along, please.”
He followed her back to the boat he’d arrived on. She motioned for him to get in.
“Just the two of us?” he asked. “Where’s Dreodh?”
“Preparing our people to fight,” she said.
“Fight what?”
She shrugged. “Something is coming,” she replied. “Something very bad.”
“Aren’t you afraid I might try to overpower you and escape?”
“Why would you do that?” Starqin asked. In the faint light her eyes seemed as black and liquid as tar. Her face and hair, in contrast, made her seem ghostlike.
“Maybe because I don’t like being held captive.”
Starqin settled next to the tiller. “Would you row?” she asked.
Stephen took his seat and placed his hands on the oars. They felt cool and light.
“You’ll want to talk to him, the one we’re going to see,” Starqin said.
“And I don’t think you’ll murder me.”
Stephen pulled on the oars, and the boat glided almost soundlessly away from the stone quay.
“It’s interesting to hear you talk about murder,” Stephen said. “The slinders don’t just attack greffyns, you know. They kill people, too.”
“Yah,” Starqin said, almost absently. “So have you.”
“Evil people.”
She laughed at that, and Stephen felt suddenly stupid, as if he had been lecturing a sacritor on holy writ. But after a moment she grew more serious.
“Don’t call them slinders,” she said. “It demeans their sacrifice.”
“What do you call them?” he asked.
“Wothen,” she said. “We call ourselves the wothen.”
“That just means ‘mad,’ doesn’t it?”
“Divinely mad, actually, or inspired. We are a storm blowing the forest clean.”
“Will you really help the Briar