Corinn knew these men were competitors, but she always suspected much of their repartee was a show for her benefit. They were both rich. They both had married among each other's families. They both had all the rewards of royalty with none of the responsibilities. She spoke crisply, as if the scene before her did not affect her at all. "The Giver abandoned us long ago. He neither rewards nor punishes. That's for me to do. Come. Lead me to the heart well you spoke of. I will speak with the prince as we ride."
With that, the merchants knew she wished them out of earshot. They started off-even Elder Anath deferring without a word-along the embankment, their assistants and advisers with them. The tall sandstone walls and towers of Bocoum dwarfed them to one side, stark contrast to the flat desolation on the other. Corinn let them ride well away before touching her mare on the neck and urging her forward.
A contingent of Numrek followed them, bare chested and proud, their swords in prominent sheaths, some with axes in hand. They did not ride, since horses were nervous around them and their rhinoceros mounts were suited only for warfare. Their long strides easily kept them in position, though. Corinn had grown as used to them as she was to any servants. They were simply a part of her life.
"What do you think of all this?" Corinn indicated the ruined fields with her chin.
Aaden wrinkled his lips. "It really wasn't like this before?"
"No, you heard how they described it at dinner last night. They exaggerate, but these farmlands are what made Bocoum the city it is. Their crops fed mouths all around the empire. There was a time you could have ridden south from the city for four days before leaving cultivated lands. Acacia's power came as much from Talay's crops as from anything else. An army can bring death, but a farmer can give life. Fortunately, people fear one more than they acknowledge the other."
"Why did it change?"
"I don't know," Corinn answered. "I don't know." She repeated the answer for no reason other than that it felt good to admit it. She could do so only with Aaden, for he had always asked her questions that she could not answer. Why are eggs egg shaped? Why are sand dunes like ocean waves? Where does wood go when it burns? How does the Giver's tongue work? Nobody else, of course, asked her questions like that, and she loved him for it.
Glancing at him, she said, "I'll have to fix it, though."
"How will you? Will you use-"
"Yes. It's time the world sees some of what I can do."
The boy considered this a moment, his lips pursed and his expression older than his eight years. He eventually answered with a curt nod, his gesture of approval.
The merchants turned off the main thoroughfare and descended a ramp to a south-running road, closer to ground level but still elevated enough to provide a vantage. They worked their way farther from the city, riding on roads and sometimes in the empty irrigation canals. The slow rain of falling ash gave the place a surreal, hellish aspect. It was a wonder that anything had ever grown here.
All of this because of the lack of something so simple: water. Corinn could still scarcely believe it. In Calfa Ven, where she spent as much time as she could, showers appeared out of cloudless skies. The rivers bubbled with water. Floods were the concern, not drought! And a good thing, too, for it was the bounty of that place that had sparked the idea that led her here this afternoon. That and Dariel's charitable work. And, of course, her study of the song. Nothing was more central to her life now than the study of the Giver's tongue.
From the first moment she held The Song of Elenet in her hands, on the day that Thaddeus Clegg had brought it to her as a blood gift, she had been changed. It had awakened strength within her, cunning that she had always had but had never used, determination that she knew lay within her but that she spent a lifetime shying away from. It was because of the book that she was able to ally with the league, the Numrek, Rialus Neptos-all of whom she had needed to destroy Hanish Mein. And the song had promised her that more, much more, was to come.
At night, with her servants dismissed and her doors barred, she had opened the book and fallen again and again into the moving, languid words that were not words. It was a wonder every time; and for the first few years it had been enough just to see the words come alive and to hear them inside her head. When they gave her permission to open her mouth and let them out, she had discovered new joy like nothing she had known before, joy as complete as the moment Aaden had slipped free of her and been laid on her chest.
Aaden was part of the song, in a way. Only he had ever witnessed her singing. She had called up small things for him: glass beads and smooth stones at first, gourds that made rattles, simple toys, and then insects, butterflies, red-breasted birds, and tiny ring-necked snakes. The things she had brought to life were but trinkets, she knew, but singing them into existence exhausted and sometimes frightened her. That last creation had been strangely, benignly terrifying.
When her voice faded that afternoon in her chambers on Acacia, the swirling of sound and shimmering light that had gathered around the object finally dissipated. And there it was, the thing she had spun out of words. A thing that "nobody had ever seen before," as Aaden had requested. The two of them had stared at it in silence. It was a furry creature the size of a six-month-old child, but it did not have legs or arms. It had a trunk but the bulk of it was a head of sorts, vaguely feline, with no sign of ears, no whiskers. Its fur was so fine it swayed in waves at even the slightest motion, changing color as it did so, as if each strand had within it yellows and reds and blues and every shade in between.
For all this, its eyes were its most distinct feature. They were completely round, and when it blinked, some sort of lid passed from one side of the eye to the other, and then back again a few moments later. With each blink, it seemed more and more sentient, as if it understood something new about them each time that membrane slid from one side to the other.
The mother and son stood watching the creature for just a few short moments. The entire time, it watched them as well, cocking its head and looking from one to the other, waiting. When Corinn began the song to unmake it, she was sure she saw something like disappointment in the creature's eyes. But that may have just been the spell, for within a few breaths the invisible ribbons of sound moved around it, slipping over and through its form and rubbing it from existence.
Aaden's voice had seemed inordinately loud when it broke the silence after the unmaking. "Why can we never show anyone?"
"Because such things are only for you and me to see. This is our great secret, remember? No one else knows; no one else can know. In the song is all the power we will ever need. The knowledge of creation and destruction. In the song is power that the world has not truly seen in uncorrupted glory in twenty-two generations. It's my power. Mine alone, but it will be yours in times to come."
They were far out into the fields when they again drew up to the contingent of Talayan merchants. The city was a prominent but distant barricade to the north. Heat shimmered around them, blurring objects even at middle distances. They had stopped at the edge of a massive square basin. It was elevated above the plains around it, hemmed in by thick earthen walls, and carved down into the earth. There were gates at each of the four sides, with plates that could be raised and lowered. Beyond the gates, irrigation channels stretched off in each direction. It was meant to hold a great body of water, but, like the landscape all around it, it was completely dry.
One of the engineers-several had met the group, along with a few laborers, even some children who stood at a slight distance, nearly naked and silent-explained that a deep spring had once fed the tank. She could see the hole in the center of the square. It had been a steady source of water for hundreds of years. There were a few others like it throughout the fields, but those had run dry much earlier.