“Could these be God Talkers?” he asked Mena, once she had emerged to answer his gruff command. “When Tinhadin exiled them, did they not rampage down toward the south like enraged giants? That’s what I recall from my childhood studies.” From his childhood studies? The very idea sounded absurd enough that Leeka doubted his own sanity. He might be dreaming or hallucinating. Mena might look at him and name him a madman. He asked, without his usual command of voice, “You see them, too, I hope?”
Mena did not respond, but she stared in a way that was answer enough.
Dariel joined them a moment later, just as speechless. Within a few minutes what remained of the entire army stood gazing to the south at the scene playing out across the heavens. It was hard to gauge how far away the figures were. Each of their strides appeared massive. Their legs seemed to stretch out as if the foot would plant itself beyond the onlookers. But the next step after that was just the same, and again after that. For all the strangeness of this Leeka knew they were, in fact, getting closer. But the territory they traversed was beyond his ken.
Leeka sensed alarm building around him. Personally, it had not occurred to him to be fearful. Something was happening here, yes. Something unexpected. Even without knowing what it was, he welcomed it. But considering the things they had witnessed recently, it made sense that others would be afraid. They were not all old men, like him. They were not all resolved to die as he was. Of course, they would conclude that whatever was coming came against them.
Somebody began mumbling a prayer in Bethuni. Another uttered the word that named Meinish ancestors, saying that they were coming to avenge Maeander. Still another yelled that it was Maeander himself returning. He had been killed in contradiction to honor, and they were all to be punished for it.
“Calm! Let us be calm,” Leeka said.
Nobody seemed to hear him. People began to back away, tripping over things, their eyes dilated with growing fright.
“All of you stand!” Leeka bellowed. “Hear me! Whatever comes, be brave with us and welcome it. We still fight for Princess Mena and Prince Dariel. Our cause is just-”
Mena grabbed the general’s arm. “I know what they are,” she said. “You’re right. They’re God Talkers. I called them back.” She piped up, her voice sharper than Leeka’s, higher pitched. It got attention. They had nothing to fear, she yelled. The giants coming were Santoth sorcerers. She had called them. They came to answer her, and they were friends of her brother’s, friends to them all. “There is nothing to fear.”
The tone with which she pronounced this last statement did not really contain enough certainty to match her words, but just hearing her speak had a calming effect on the soldiers. Instead of fleeing, the troops drew closer together. They tightened up, flanking the royals and the general. Even those who had not been near them and who probably had not heard Mena’s words gravitated toward her, perhaps remembering her feats from the previous days and taking some comfort from them. Together in one mass, they waited.
Leeka, standing just behind the Akarans, saw Dariel turn his head and heard him whisper in his sister’s ear, “I hope you’re right about this, Mena.”
“Me, too,” she said, once more staring at the sky. “Me, too.”
When the shapes changed, they did so quickly, all of them going through it in the space of a few compressed seconds. One moment they were the towering figures they had been since Leeka first laid eyes on them. The next they were smaller. And then smaller again. Then smaller. It was so fast that Leeka’s eyes were still in the sky when there was no longer anything to see up there. The billowing clouds consumed themselves in a silent implosion. Behind it the morning sky emerged, its normal pale shade of Talayan blue.
Leeka wondered if that was the end of it. A light show in the heavens, without substance, hard to read or understand, finally disappointing. But that was not all of it. He heard inhaled breaths all around him, felt Mena’s arm brush his unintentionally. He lowered his gaze.
There on the earth, just yards away, walked a group of men. They were of normal stature, of flesh and blood, moving at an easy pace, about a hundred of them. They swayed slightly, as the giants had, but in most ways they were everything those shapes had not been: small, corporeal, tangible. They had the stooped postures and the thin limbs of old men, with gaunt, hungry faces. They should not have been frightening. Yet Leeka could not help but step back, pressing against the barricade of bodies just behind him.
The first of the men stopped just a few strides away. The others bunched up behind them. Leeka stared at their faces. They were not right. They were not normal. He saw them in concrete detaiclass="underline" the individual shapes of their noses, the jagged ridges of their hairlines, the shape of their eyes, and their slow manner of blinking. But he could sense stitches at the edges of their foreheads, or just under the chin, as if they had taken on the skins of others and wore them sewn onto their own skins. At times tremors rippled across their flesh, leaving them different from before. The longer he looked, the more he thought he saw bits and pieces of familiar persons in their features. He even saw himself in the scowl on one, in the eyebrows of another, the jawline of that one…
Who called us?
The question appeared in his mind. He heard it, even though it had not been spoken. The figures had not moved their mouths, but the words sounded within him with a choric timbre of blended voices. Glancing around, he knew he was not alone in having received the question.
Who called us?
“I did,” Mena said. Her voice sounded as brittle as a twig. She seemed to think so herself. She tried again. Without opening her mouth, she spoke, I did. Are you Santoth? Nualo? Is one of you Nualo?
The figures drew in. They seemed to slide toward Mena on rollers. One of them stepped forward. He managed to convey that he was Nualo, without overtly affirming it. Leeka just knew, and he knew that everyone nearby knew also. They were all part of this.
Why was it not the firstborn? Nualo asked.
Mena glanced at her brother, at Leeka. She swallowed. Aliver-the firstborn of us-has died…
Flushed, her lips trembling, Mena carried on. He was killed by our enemy. That’s why I called you. Before he died, he told me only you could-
The Santoth did not let her finish. They asked for proof of the firstborn’s death. Mena told them that his body was nearby. Instantly, the sorcerers drifted toward it. They knew how to find Aliver’s corpse without needing to be directed.
Unable to speak, not knowing how to begin, Leeka did not move. Nobody else did either, except to look into one another’s faces. Dariel eventually broke the silence, saying, with a strained hint of his usual humor, “I’ve asked this before, and I’ll try it again in this situation…Do we have a plan?”
Mena did not have time to answer. The Santoth were already returning, sliding into the same positions they had been in previously. Leeka barely managed to follow the exchange Mena fell into with them. So much passed between them, not just words but other thoughts that did not take verbal form. While Leeka got tangled in it, Mena managed to sort through the weight of information floating between them. The Santoth admitted that they had felt Aliver’s death when it happened. They had known the moment the connection between them was cut, but they had hoped it was not so. They had believed him when he promised to free them. Only he could do so because he was the first of his generation and a direct descendant from Tinhadin. They wanted to know how he could have allowed himself to die with his promise to them unfulfilled.