He wanted to ask his companion about that but hesitated. She was already too keenly aware of his ignorance. He wasn’t sure how she had figured it out in a span of hours, while Havec himself was only beginning to see, but she certainly seemed to know that everything he knew about the world, he had learned by the age of fifteen.

As a child, he had the finest tutors available in his homeland, but he had done nothing in the last six years but hone his new martial skills and hate the man who taught them to him. In all that time, he had looked upon his hatred for his master as a source of motivation; only now did he realize how totally it had distracted him. He thumbed through the few facts he knew while he walked, acutely aware of how unhelpful they were.

Tabbaqera’s government was a convoluted tangle, even if he couldn’t remember most of the details. There was the Scolate, the military, and it enforced the laws. The Illiumate decided what the laws were, and the Illiumate was a monster with a hundred heads, made up of multiple bodies of representatives. Then there was the Hakam, and the Hakam didn’t do anything in its own right; it got to decide what the Illiumate and Scolate were allowed to do.

In Moritia, in contrast, there was his father. His father had told him a wise ruler heeded the advice of his councilors and listened to the concerns of his people, but at the end of the day, the decisions were his. Although there had been a time when Havec believed the responsibility would one day fall to him, he couldn’t say he had an opinion on this. Maybe their way was more practical for tiny newborn countries without a lot of cash, and this mind-bending bureaucracy was a luxury suited to civilizations with an almost limitless supply of resources and manpower. Maybe it was the natural result of the Empire’s age, the way an old tree had a million rings.

Or maybe it just didn’t make sense to him because he had become very stupid in the last six years. He glanced at his companion, wishing again that he could ask her opinion. Her mother was one of their politicians, she wanted to join their ranks. She must have valuable insights into the system.

He couldn’t, though. Having told her to go away and been ignored, she was entirely responsible for the situation. He was just passively reaping the rewards. The moment he started asking her questions, he admitted that he needed help. It was a tacit acceptance of a bargain he wasn’t going to make. Having only just begun to grasp how completely he’d been tricked, he wasn’t about to sign up for the same racket again.

It was at this point that he took in what he had been seeing with his frequent sidelong looks. The girl was tight around the eyes, the muscles along her jaw flexed. Her narrow nostrils flared with every breath, sucking wind. Havec was in even more pain than he had been yesterday, and it looked as though the same was true of her.

Glancing at the sky, he said, “It’s probably time to stop for lunch, what do you say?”

She let out a gasp of relief, but said quite casually, “If you want.”

“I guess we should look for a spot,” he began, but he noticed his companion’s eyes were fixed behind him, expression greedy. When he followed her gaze, he saw the broken top of an ancient structure peeking out around a bend in the trail off to their right. They came around the turn a moment later and the building was revealed, a tumble-down old tower of pale stone standing halfway up a shallow rise. It would be nonsensical to get this close to something so interesting and not investigate.

They cut off the road into the grass and began to climb, both of them stifling groans. The closer they got to the tower, the more it shrank, until they found themselves standing at the foot of a two-story ruin without a door. The lower story was covered in a mat of clematis dense as a forester’s beard, heavy with dark purple flowers at this time of year. What could be seen of the structure was curious, a mixture of vertical metal ribs and thin, horizontal slabs of stone that made it resemble a basket. It wasn’t straight-sided, but round and slightly conical, broader at the bottom than the top. The door was triangular, and he frowned at it as he wondered what hallucinogen the architect had been on when they dreamed that up.

“Havec! You have to see this!”

The girl had wandered in through that impractical doorway, and he followed her inside. Within, he found the building lit by more than a thin beam of light peeping through the westward-facing door: the girl had conjured a light of her own with which to explore. He was terribly disappointed when he saw this. He wanted badly to watch her perform sorcery. It wasn’t something his people had figured out how to do and the few items Xar owned were simple household tools. The actual sorcery had been performed elsewhere at an earlier date and he could only look at the results.

“Look at this,” she continued, voice hushed. She grabbed his sleeve, pulling him closer. The light was in her other hand; it looked like a lump of crystal, and he couldn’t tell if she had found it lying on the floor or if it was some special accoutrement of the craft that she carried with her. She held it close to the wall, illuminating a relief of curved or straight-edged shadows. It was, he decided, writing, in an alphabet he’d never seen before.

“I think it’s Senotine,” she added softly, her voice carrying the intimation that this was meaningful.

Briefly, he contemplated bluffing, but he couldn’t think how. “Which is?”

“A language. Very old. The first tongue.” The moment she had said this, she backtracked, making a noise of doubt. “One of the first tongues. We’re so many people at this point, I think probably there are at least four languages that could make the claim.”

“Which is right?”

“Well that depends on where you are, doesn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

Together, they wandered back outside and settled in the dirt before their tower. While they dug through their bags in search of food, she told him, “A civilization is its past and its present, right? Not just where it is, but where it’s been.”

“I think that’s probably true of many things,” he murmured, not meaning to.

Tactfully, the girl chose to let that pass. “This is the old heartland--”

“This?” he interrupted, startled. “Here?”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s so empty.”

“I guess that’s kind of what I’m saying. This was the, the heart of the old kingdom of Tabbaqera, where the people who began the Empire came from.”

Around a piece of cheese, he said, “So their language is the first, end of story.”

She scrunched her face up, and he decided Xar had been wrong to call her a ferret. She had thin, delicate features, but given a less tragically unflattering haircut, she could be pretty. Of course, another pressing prerequisite was that she give a shit, and it didn’t appear that she did.

“It’s not that simple, is it?” she demanded, and a fire had kindled in her eyes. “What about Hawlia? Hawlia was the first place the old empire conquered, it’s been part of the country for like four thousand years.”

“Which is a long time, but it’s still in second place.”

She shook a cracker at him. “But Tabb wasn’t an empire at all until we conquered someone, were we?”

Arrested by the idea, he said, “Huh.”

Qanath had twisted about to peer back at the tower and didn’t seem to notice she had cracked open his brain. “Nizerh is Old Country too and there are still a few really old buildings left, mostly temples and shrines. Nothing like this, though. I wonder what it was?”

“It’s funny it’s not built with local materials.”

“You think?”

“All the bridges we’ve gone across were made of sandstone. This is marble.” He shrugged. “I guess probably even ultra-rich empires don’t use expensive stone to put a bridge across a tiny stream, maybe that tells us nothing.”

“It tells us this building was important enough to merit expensive stone.”

Havec nodded, agreeing with her logic. “You can’t read what it says?”

She scowled. “I could have studied languages, but I didn’t want to waste my tuition on anything that wasn’t practical.”

He contemplated asking after it before deciding he wasn’t ready to plunge his hand into the basket of eels that was her relationship with her mother. Stuffing his last bite of cracker in his mouth, he laid down on his back and slung an arm across his eyes. Behind him, he heard Qanath rise and move away, going to pee or poke about in their tower.

The next time his eyes opened, it was dusk. He groaned as he blinked at the purple sky, pricked here and there by early stars. He felt as if he were on fire, burning from the inside out, and although there was a Horrible Mystical Thing he didn’t understand riding inside him, he didn’t think it was Kebbal: he felt like he was falling ill.

He pushed himself into a sitting position, noting that accidentally sleeping the day away had had one positive result: his feet felt slightly less awful than they had six hours ago. It was while he was peering around in search of the girl that he saw movement on the road. The sight of riders sent a jolt of anxiety through him, and he was suddenly wide awake. Hunching his shoulders instinctively, he watched what appeared to be two men coming around that hook where the road edged around the hip of this hill from the south.

He almost exclaimed aloud: he could swear those were their friends from yesterday, Hair-On-End and Smooth Guy. Both of them had their eyes peeled as they rode, squinting intently into the grass alongside the narrow highway in search, Havec feared, of them. Dirty and humbly-dressed, they didn’t see him sitting in the dirt amongst yellow grasses, not in the uncertain light of dusk. He kept his eyes on them until they vanished into the distance to be sure.

Only when they were gone did he let out a deep, slow breath. He had been sure, when they met those guys the day before, that they weren’t a threat, not in any straightforward sense. It was true he hadn’t learned much in the way of conventional knowledge in the last six years, but that didn’t mean he’d learned nothing. While Qanath went off to university to study civilization, he retreated to the animal world. Reflex, instinct, the honing of the senses. He would stand by his assessment that those guys were mostly alright.

He scratched at his scalp as he wondered what that told him. There had been a few odd moments in the conversation, hiccups where normal things should have been said and weren’t, but it was the very lack of awkwardness that made it strange. If they had been unnerved by the holes in her story, it would have felt natural; if they had been nervous, he would have stood up and revealed his presence, come what may. Instead, they had been guarded and polite, as if being lied to by a chance-met stranger on the road were nothing worth mentioning. As if they, too, had secrets and judged it bad form to pry at others’ lies.

He couldn’t think what to make of finding the fellows following them. Perhaps it had nothing to do with them and he was just being paranoid; he’d wondered at the time what they were doing out here and never come up with an answer. As he rose and went to wake the girl and have some supper, he decided not to tell her. Not given how frightened she’d been of those guys back before they had any reason to be.

Creatures of Myth and Legend

They spent the whole of a second day at the marble tower, dozing in the shade. Havec had a horrible sunburn thanks to their accidental nap; Qanath had nodded off within the tower, but he’d slept sprawled outside in the full light of the afternoon. Suffice it to say, his pale skin hadn’t appreciated it. The sunburn-fever made him tetchy and even more churlish than usual, but he napped most of the day, so she wasn’t really bothered by it.

The only real contretemps they had was over water; both of them were thirsty and Havec in particular was dehydrated. Qanath proposed to backtrack a bit to the last stream they’d crossed and refill their one canteen. Havec had no problem with the idea but insisted on accompanying her. When she told him he should stay out of the sun, he hissed. Too weary and thirsty to attempt to follow his hopscotch thought process, she let him come along.