He stepped into a smaller side street overlooked on one side by three-storey facades marked out with small doors and smaller windows, and on the other by a looming blank wall whose expanse was pierced only by an arch. Ethmet stepped through this entrance, and Che and her company could only follow.
She bent to whisper to Trallo, 'Do you know what's going on now? Is this their usual welcome?'
The Fly's lips were pressed together and he shook his head.
They stepped out again into a world of sunlight and wonder and the sound of running water. Che's breath caught in her throat at the sight of it.
The Place of Honoured Foreigners was a broad open square, lined on three sides by great buildings, veritable palaces. There was a continuous band of rushes fringing the open space, interrupted only where little bridges crossed them to reach the steps of each palace, and where two archways gave access to the wider city beyond. In the centre was a pool, a marble-floored rectangle floored with an intricate mosaic that promised meaning and delivered nothing, just like the ubiquitous pictograms. Che could not stop herself from running over to stare into it. The water was clear as glass, no more than twelve inches deep. Tiny fish and water insects sculled across it, wholly oblivious to their audience. Benches of carved stone lined the pool's two long sides, and the quarters of the square around it were set with four crescents of green, tall grass and ferns.
Che shook her head. 'It's beautiful,' she said, forgetting diplomacy and just divulging what was in her mind.
'We are pleased that you find it so,' Ethmet said mildly. The academics were meanwhile staring about themselves like people in a dream. Only the two Vekken remained aloof, doubtless waiting for some trap to be sprung. Even the removal of the guards had not improved their mood.
'The larger arch, in the far wall, leads into the Place of Government and the Scriptora, where I and my fellow servants of our Masters dwell. Once you have had a chance to acclimatize yourselves, perhaps you would consent to visit us there. We would hold a banquet in your honour, if you would agree. For now, we have set aside this house to be your residence, while you are among us.' One of Ethmet's hands indicated a column-fronted building adjacent to the arch through which they had entered.
Che turned to look at it and she could not help giving a cry of dismay. As she recoiled back, only Berjek's quick grab for her arm stopped her toppling into the pool.
Each of the palaces – the embassies she supposed – had statues standing before it, flanking the door, but she had not registered that they were not statues of locals. They were not even like the cold, beautiful watchers flanking the Estuarine Gate. These were faces she recognized, or some of them.
The stone visages that met her gaze were those of cowled Moth-kinden. In that first glance, the male of the pair had seemed close enough to Achaeos to nearly stop her heart.
A lot of people were talking to her, but she could not focus on what they were saying. For a moment the air about the statue blurred, and she feared that his ghost would emerge from it to chastise her. The impression was soon gone, though, the blur due only to the heat. She felt stifled by the sheer number of people trying to find out what was wrong with her, and she virtually elbowed her way past Berjek and Manny and Trallo, until faced by the old man Ethmet.
She had finally elicited a genuine expression out of him, and it was surprised concern. Nobody had laid this trap deliberately, it had all been mere chance. Predictably, the Vekken had drawn their swords, but she did not feel she had the strength to reason with them again.
'It was… it was nothing,' she got out.
'We have displeased you,' Ethmet said mournfully. 'You must forgive us our ignorance of your ways.'
'No, no, please,' she said, and she looked the statue directly in its cold face.
Can I live with this, even for a tenday? What should I say, if I cannot? How could I explain?
I must live with it. The alternatives are too humiliating.
'Please…' she said. 'Please, it is just… the journey was long and I am tired, very tired.' The Vekken resheathed their blades sullenly, obviously resenting their inability to use them.
'Of course,' said Ethmet. He made a quick signal and the porters began moving the expedition's baggage inside. Che heard a startled cry from within, but she was already gazing around at the other embassies, the other statues that adorned them. She saw Spider-kinden, clearly recognizable by their features, although the garments were strange. She saw long-faced, hunchbacked people she could not name, and beside them were lanky Grasshoppers. There were even two that might have been Dragonflies.
'How long… how old…?' she murmured to herself. The carvings that circled the pillars and scaled the walls writhed under her gaze, and now seemed on the threshold of forming actual words, to reveal terrible secrets of time and antiquity.
She heard the sound of running feet behind her, and the all-too-familiar leather whisper of the Vekken drawing their swords again. A Beetle-woman burst out of the Moth-flanked embassy, knocking over a porter in her urgency. Che stared at her, wondering What is wrong with her? and seeing a moment later that it was the hair, of course. She had hair, which meant she was no native. When the woman cried out, 'Please, wait. Listen to me!' she had a Collegium accent.
Everyone had gone quiet, waiting for what she would say but, after a sidelong look at old Ethmet, she said nothing. The pause grew awkward.
'I'm sorry,' Che addressed her, 'who are you?'
'I'm… Petri Coggen. I'm Kadro's assistant,' the woman got out. She looked as though she had not changed her clothes or combed her hair for a tenday. Her eyes were wide and flinching. Che shared a frown with Berjek, then knelt beside her.
'What is it?' she asked. 'What's the matter?'
Petri's eyes kept being drawn to Ethmet, despite all her efforts to stop them. Che recognized a physical struggle within her, to control some outburst.
'I have to tell you things. Please-'
'Where's Master Kadro?'
'Ssh!' Petri's eyes went wider still. 'Not that – never that!'
Trallo had said as much when he briefed Che in Solarno. 'Where is… Sieur Kadro, then?' It seemed disrespectful to give a Master of the College nothing more than his name, and so Che compromised on the Solarnese title.
'Disappeared. Gone.' The words were barely a murmur on Petri's lips. 'This place…' Again her eyes were dragged over Che's shoulder towards Ethmet, whose expression suggested polite puzzlement at the ways of foreigners.
'Perhaps we had all better go inside,' said Che loudly, part worried about this woman's state of mind, part embarrassed at making a spectacle in front of their hosts. The porters had completed their job and Che saw a row of Khanaphir men and women lined up in the entrance hall, obviously the staff waiting to greet them. Glancing back she saw that the two Vekken still had their swords drawn, standing shoulder to shoulder, tilted away from each other.
'Please forgive us… First Minister.' In between turning to him and remembering his proper title she had caught, for a brief instant, a strange expression on Ethmet's face. It was the look of a man listening to a voice only he could hear. Are these people mindlinked too, like Ants? But this was something else, and she realized what it reminded her of. As she stepped over the little bridge, she put a hand on the Moth statue's shoulder, remembering how the magicians of the old races could speak to one another, distance no object. Achaeos had told her so many times.
The races who had graced this square in times past were all Inapt. The lords of the Days of Lore would have sent their emissaries here, before the revolution had put paid to their world. Those days, those far-off days, were engraved here in the very stone, enshrined in the reeds and the water, in the very faces of the locals. She felt her own loss, her deficiency, very keenly, but it was different here. Here, amongst the Khanaphir, it was surely no deficiency. Instead, it put her closer to them. Have I found a home here? Will they have words for what I have become? Fourteen 'They're setting up right opposite from us,' Vollen observed. 'That's convenient.'