‘I wonder if he anticipated this complication?’ Trull meant Cotillion when saying he.
‘Unknown,’ Onrack replied, understanding well enough. ‘The task awaiting us grows ever less certain.
Friend Trull, I fear for these Imass. For this entire realm.’
‘Leave the wizard and his sapper to address our benefactor’s needs, then, and we will concern ourselves with protecting this place, and your kin who call it home.’
The Imass glanced across with narrowed eyes. ‘You say this, with such ease?’
‘The wizard, Onrack, is the one who needs to be here. His power-he will be our benefactor’s hand in what is to come. You and me, we were but his escort, his bodyguards, if you will.’
‘You misunderstand me, Trull Sengar. My wonder is in your willingness to risk your life, again. This time for a people who are nothing to you. For a realm not your own.’
‘They are your kin, Onrack.’
‘Distant. Bentract.’
‘If it had been, say, the Den-Ratha tribe of the Edur to gain supremacy among our tribes, Onrack, instead of my own Hiroth, would I not give my life to defend them? They are still my people. For you it is the same, yes? Logros, Bentract-just tribes-but the same people.’
‘There is too much within you, Trull Sengar. You humble me.’
‘Perhaps there lies your own misunderstanding, friend. Perhaps all you see here is my search for a cause, for something to fight for, to die for.’
‘You will not die here.’
‘Oh, Onrack-’
‘I may well fight to protect the Bentract and this realm, hut they are not why I am here. You are.’
Trull could not meet his friend’s eyes, and in his heart there was pain. Deep, old, awakened.
The son,’ Onrack said after a moment, ‘seems… very young.’
‘Well, so am I.’
‘Not when I look into your eyes. It is not the same with this Soletaken,’ he continued, seemingly unmindful of the wound he had just delivered. ‘No, those yellow eyes are young.’
‘Innocent?’
A nod. ‘Trusting, as a child is trusting.’
‘A gentle mother, then.’
‘She did not raise him,’ Onrack said.
Ah, the Imass, then. And now I begin to see, to understand. ‘We will be vigilant, Onrack.’
‘Yes.’
Rud Elalle led them into a split between two upthrust knobs of layered rock, a trail that then wound between huge boulders before opening out into the Imass village.
Rock shelters along a cliff. Tusk-framed huts, the spindly frames of drying racks on which were stretched hides. Children running like squat imps in the midst of a gathering of perhaps thirty Imass. Men, women, elders. One warrior stood before all the others, while off to one side stood three more Imass, their garb rotted and subtly different in cut and style from that of the Bentract-the strangers, Trull realized-guests yet remaining apart.
Upon seeing them, Onrack’s benign expression hardened. ‘Friend,’ he murmured to Trull, “ware those three.’
‘I decided the same myself,’ Trull replied under his breath.
Rud Elalle moved to stand at the Bentract leader’s side. ‘This is Ulshun Pral,’ he said, setting a hand on the man’s thick shoulder-a gesture of open affection that seemed blissfully unmindful of the growing tension at the edge of this village.
Onrack moved forward. ‘I am Onrack the Broken, once of the Logros T’lan Imass, child of the Ritual. I ask that we be made guests among your tribe, Ulshun Pral.’
The honey-skinned warrior frowned over at Rud Elalle, then said something in his own language.
Rud nodded and faced Onrack. ‘Ulshun Pral asks that you speak in the First Language.’
‘He asked,’ Onrack said, ‘why 1 chose not to.’
‘Yes.’
‘My friends do not share the knowing of that language. I cannot ask for guesting on their behalf without their understanding, for to be guest is to be bound to the rules of the tribe, and this they must know, before I would venture a promise of peace on their behalf
‘Can you not simply translate?’ Rud Elalle asked.
‘Of course, yet I choose to leave that to you, Rud Elalle, for Ulshun Pral knows and trusts you, while he does not know me.’
‘Very well, I shall do so.’
‘Enough with all this,’ Hedge called out, gingerly setting down his pack. ‘We’ll all be good boys, so long as no-one tries to kill us or worse, like making us eat some horrible vegetable rightly extinct on every other realm in the universe.’
Rud Elalle was displaying impressive skill and translating Hedge’s words almost as fast as the sapper spoke them.
Ulshun Pral’s brows lifted in seeming astonishment, then he turned and with a savage gesture yelled at a small crowd of elderly women at one side of the crowd.
Hedge scowled at Onrack, ‘Now what did I say?’ he demanded.
But Trull saw his friend smiling. Ulshun Pral has just directed the cooks to fish the baektar from the stew they have prepared for us.’
‘The baek-what?’
‘A vegetable, Hedge, that will be found nowhere but here.’
