The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [29]
“Reading books,” Fend said. “Reading books when you’re right here in the mountain.”
“It’s a big mountain…” Stephen started, then waved it away. “From now on, don’t take for granted that I know anything, please.”
“Then you’ll walk the faneway?”
Stephen sighed. “Fine,” he said. “Have someone show me the route.”
Fend blinked. His mouth opened, and his eyes darted past Stephen to Adhrekh.
“What?” Stephen asked.
“Pathikh,” the Aitivar said, “we don’t know where the faneway is. Only Kauron’s heir knows that.”
Stephen turned and stared at the man for a moment and saw he was serious. He looked back at Fend, and then the absurdity was suddenly too much to contain, and he started to laugh. Fend and Adhrekh didn’t seem to think it was funny, which made the whole thing even funnier, and soon he had tears in his eyes and the back of his head had begun to ache.
“Well,” he said when he could finally speak again, “there we go. Quite a situation. So my answer to you, Fend, is that I will walk the faneway when I find it. Do you have any further dismissive comments regarding the need to do research in the library?”
Fend glowered for a moment, then shook his head.
“No, pathikh.”
“Wonderful. Now leave me, please, unless you’ve got another bit of absolutely crucial information you’ve failed to mention to me.”
“Nothing I can think of,” Fend replied. He knelt, stood, saluted, and returned his weapon to its sheath. Then he held up a finger. “Except this. I’ve word of where Praefec Hespero is hiding,” he said. “I’d like to personally take charge of his capture.”
“Favor for an old friend?”
Fend stiffened. “Hespero was never my friend. Only a necessary ally for a time.”
“Find him, then,” Stephen said. “Bring him here.”
He watched the Sefry leave. Was he really going after Hespero?
It didn’t matter. Fend was leaving, and that was good.
He retired to the library, where he felt safest. His guard of four followed quietly behind him.
They made him almost as nervous as Fend did. Sefry were nothing new to Stephen. When he was growing up in Virgenya, they had been a fact of life.
But at a distance. The Sefry of his experience traveled in caravans. They danced, sang, told fortunes. They sold things from far away and counterfeit relics. He’d rarely seen one with a sword.
They did not come calling, they did not go to school, they did not pray in chapels or visit fanes. They moved in the world of men and women, but rarely did they socialize with them. Of all the former slaves of the Skasloi, they were the most apart.
The Aitivar did not sing or dance, so far as he knew, but they could fight like monsters. Twelve of them had routed three times their number in the battle below the mountain. They were decidedly unlike any of their race he had ever known, but then, he never had really known a Sefry, had he? Aspar had. He’d been raised by one, and he held that they were all liars, absolutely not to be trusted. Fend certainly bore out that assertion. But the Aitivar—he still didn’t know what motivated them. They claimed to have been waiting for him, Kauron’s heir, but they were a bit gray as to why.
He noticed they were still bunched around him.
“I’m going to do a bit of research,” Stephen said. “I don’t need you right at my elbow.”
“You heard him,” Adhrekh said. “Take posts.”
Stephen turned to the vast collection of scrifti. A better collection he had never seen, not in any monastery or scriftorium. At this point, he had only the faintest idea of what was here or how it was organized. He’d found a very interesting section in an early form of Vadhiian he had never encountered before, and there were at least fifty scrifti in the section. Most seemed to be accounting records of some sort, and as much as he wanted to translate them, it seemed more pressing to divine the secrets of the mountain.
Still, daunting as the scriftorium was, the instincts and intuition of his training and saint-given gifts seemed to lead him roughly toward what he wanted. When he thought of a subject, there seemed a certain obvious logic that took