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"Whoa! Whoa! Singe! I'm sorry! I apologize! That isn't what I meant at all." I felt a variant of Winger's question kicking in. If the woman who heard it wasn't human was the man still wrong? Apparently so. I'd tripped a triggerwire and I wasn't going to talk my way out of this one.
Good to see that you are not going to deny that she is involved with you, even if you do not feel that you are involved with her.
The Dead Man rescued me. This once. Because this wasn't a hole I'd dug for myself without help and because Singe was creeping up on the edge of true hysteria. And if there's anything the Dead Man dislikes more than females in general, or as a class, it's hysterical females.
There was one plus side to the whole emotional circus. Although ratgirls do get upset, they don't shed tears.
The silver elf woman just kept standing there, gaunt as Famine Himself in that old shirt, taking the scene in with those huge, strange eyes. She didn't seem frightened anymore. I wondered how much she was picking up from the Dead Man.
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Dean brought food and drink to the Dead Man's room. He seemed to have adjusted to the extended presence of guests. He and Singe, in particular, seemed to have achieved a sound accommodation.
After relating my extensive adventures I asked the Dead Man, "Have you been able to learn anything from our elven guests?"
A great deal. Begi
"All right. Your talents are mighty and your cleverness surpasses anything the world has ever seen. What do we know now that we didn't know yesterday?"
We now know that Casey is what he claims to be, an officer of their law sent here a year ago to arrest Lastyr and Noodiss. Insofar as I can decipher the images in Evas' mind, which is much easier to penetrate than is Fasfir's, those two are religious missionaries originally sent out by an outlaw cult known as the Brotherhood of Light. Proselytization is a major crime under the laws of these people. Casey is supposed to arrest them, simply for their intent to proselytize.
They stole the skyship they used to come here. They were not skilled in its operation. They crashed it into the river. Their motives for teaching Kip to invent things have to do with wanting him to create things that have to exist before they can begin to make the tools that they will need to fix their ship.
Which takes them into another entire realm of crime entirely, apparently. That of revealing the secrets of state sorcery. Another department sent out Evas and her companions to seize Lastyr and Noodiss for betraying sorcerous secrets, the fact of those crimes having been included in Casey's reports, which somehow leaked over to the competing bureau.
"If they needed a ship why didn't they just go down to the waterfront and hire one?"
Evidently the journey is too long to make in a normal sailing ship, which supposedly ca
"Wow." What else could I say? I've always known that the world is bigger than what I've experienced in my thirty years, but distances on that scale are beyond my comprehension. "And what about the elves from the flying disk? Who are they? Still more cops?"
They appear to be something resembling a sorcerer who, though he spends his whole lifetime studying magic and discovering new things about it, never does anything more practical with his discoveries than just write the information down. They are members of a fraternity where the search for knowledge is an end in itself. The excitement about Lastyr and Noodiss alerted them to the existence of Karenta and TunFaire, so they assembled an expedition to come study us. Apparently they wanted to grab Kip Prose because their ship is suffering its own problems and they thought that if they could open communications with Lastyr and Noodiss, working together they could produce one working vessel from the two cripples.
I do stumble into the weird stuff. And you can't get much weirder than this.
These last four may also have been doing commercial surveys of some sort, as a condition of gaining financial support for their research. At least one of them may be a ringer who really works for a law enforcement bureau that somehow oversees commerce. Fasfir holds all four in complete contempt. At the same time she is convinced that they are her crew's only chance of ever getting home. If their aerial ship can be made capable of completing one more long voyage, Fasfir sees two ways of accomplishing that. One calls for an improbable amount of good luck making repairs to the one aerial ship you saw up close in the wine country. The other requires that she and her friends find Lastyr and Noodiss so that their wrecked flying ship can be ca
The creature Casey will have a ship of his own hidden somewhere, of course. There is a general consensus that he will rescue no one but himself. He feels no responsibility for the others. But he will take Lastyr and Noodiss back as prisoners. And Fasfir is afraid that those two might be ready to surrender. They came here to save Karentine souls and teach Karentines forbidden magics that would make their lives easier but after a year of exposure to our savage ways, she fears, even those two have to have become convinced that we deserve our damnation.
"Not exactly original thinking there." A quick visit to the Chancery steps will expose you to all the outrage against the moral destitution of our times that you can possibly stand. Most of us are so poverty-stricken morally that we don't realize that we're missing something. According to the rant-and-ravers.
It was unoriginal when I was a stripling. It is a long slide indeed that never reaches bottom.
"You ever find any way to communicate with them directly?"
I have not yet given the matter much consideration. However, and despite any pretense to the contrary, this one understands spoken Karentine perfectly. They have a sorcery which allows them to learn very quickly.
Meaning she was tracking my part of the conversation.
Exactly.
"Ouch. But is there any solid reason for us to hide?"
Evas stood motionless, regarding me with those huge, unblinking eyes, possibly trying to see inside me, to the place where I was listening to the Dead Man. I wondered if she was having any success. I conjured a vivid erotic vision of the two of us rather energetically being boys and girls together. The Dead Man made his disgust known immediately. The silver elf did not, though by happenstance there was a huge crash in the kitchen.
I did get a somewhat puzzled look from Singe, which confirmed my suspicion that she might be slightly sensitive herself.
Very slightly. For which be grateful. Had she viewed that image we might be dealing with hysteria all over again.