Demons of the Flame Sea Read online

  “We would not object to their presence, save that they don’t want to do the work of mining the special rock themselves,” Jintaya told the others. “So they pay the locals to do the work, even though dealing with the special rock makes humans sick. But they do not pay the locals a lot. Certainly not what the rock is worth to their own kind. They do this in a lot of places they visit.”

  “They have rules they follow,” Ban added, “but only what is exactly promised, no less and no more. And if they have not promised it, they do not provide it.”

  “What does that mean?” Anuda asked, eyeing him in confusion.

  Her grandfather, Lutun, spoke up from the bench he was sitting on, using an iron knife to whittle a cup out of a chunk of burlwood. “It means that when you were arguing with your mother about a promise to fetch water from the cistern a few years ago, you fetched only one bucket’s worth when you knew she needed five. You said you promised to fetch water, but never said how much water.”

  His grandchild rolled her taupe eyes. “Grandfather! I was twelve. Of course I did not want to work hard. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”

  “You knew you didn’t want to spend all your life hauling water,” he pointed out dryly. “But water still needs to be hauled.”

  “Not if you build a channel and let gravity do all the work,” Anuda retorted.

  “We are getting away from the discussion,” Tulan reminded the pair. She turned back to Jintaya. “This Efrijt way of thinking sounds very different from how the Fae work. He seemed proud enough to think his people are a match for yours. Are these Efrijt a danger to us?”

  “We have Ban,” Lutun pointed out. “We should not be afraid.”

  “We do not always need to fight,” Toruk countered. The Dai-Fae served as the tribe’s chief warrior, but it was no contradiction for him to say such a thing. His human father might have been more inclined to fight, but Toruk had grown up a bit more cautious about starting fights, even if he was rather good at finishing them. “We also should not wield Ban as if he has no more choice than the spear in a hunter’s hand has a choice. He is a man, not a spear.”

  “Thank you,” Ban murmured.

  “You are a warrior without equal,” Toruk said, dipping his head so that his sandy curls brushed his brown cheek. “But you are also a man, and you deserve the same respect I would give myself.”

  “A warrior who is a man who is a god,” someone else muttered.

  Chapter Five

  Ban wasn’t the only one to frown. Jintaya narrowed her eyes, searched the crowd, and demanded, “Who said that? . . . Seda? Did you say that?”

  The teenaged girl widened her eyes, her suntanned cheeks flushing. Unlike most of the Flame Sea Tribe, she was a natural blond, like her paternal grandmother, Siffu, though her hair was more ash blond in hue than sun-bleached wheat, her skin the palest of the non-Fae gathered at the grand fountain. Her maternal grandfather was Éfan, however, and it showed in her hazel eyes, a blend of southlander human blue and Fae beige.

  Seda, seeing the eyes of everyone else focusing upon her, cleared her throat, looking a bit trapped. “I . . . I spoke out of turn, Taje. I was speaking nonsense. Please, ignore me.”

  Rua, head cocked slightly in speculation, switched to Faelon to hide her suspicions. “. . . Do you think Grandmother Siffu is back to worshipping us again?”

  Jintaya sighed heavily and briefly lifted two fingers to the middle of her brow, something she did when stressed. “I would not be surprised,” she muttered back in their native tongue. “I will try to find a moment in time to deal with it. It is annoying how, every time I think I have her convinced we are not gods, a year later, she’s back to spreading tales about us being anima-beings yet again . . .” Switching back to Adanjé-lon, flame-tongue, she said, “Yes, it is nonsense, and we will ignore it, though we will not ignore you. That would be rude, and you do have a right to be here for this conversation. However, it is often better to listen and learn, than make remarks on the side that do not follow the topic at hand.

  “Toruk,” she continued, returning to the original subject, the foreigner in their midst. “The Efrijt usually try to make a deal, rather than fight. They sometimes choose to fight right away, but it is rare. Still, it is a possibility. How prepared is the Flame Sea to be cautious and protective, if they turn into our enemy?”

  He mulled over her question. “Fighting before checking to see if a discussion can solve a problem is like hunting game before checking to see if there are leftovers from the last meal. It is wasteful, and dangerous . . . but hunting is still necessary from time to time, and so a good hunter practices every day. We have kept up our skills with spear and bow, sling and knife. Of the four hundred thirty-one members of the tribe . . . one hundred eighty-seven are children too young and elders too old to fight.

  “Not counting the Fae, and leaving out the women great with child or nursing their young, we have one hundred seventy-two who can fight. But if these Efrijt fight like the Fae, we will be little more than stalks of ripened wheat when they wield their scythes,” Toruk finished, shrugging expressively. “Useless in a fight.”

  “I’m not concerned about actually fighting them,” Jintaya reassured him. “You have our protection against the Efrijt. We are few, but formidable. I am more interested to know if the tribe has the will to be watchful. They will try to wave one of their hands off to the side to catch our gaze, while using the other to steal berry pies from our basket while we are distracted. We would rather conserve our strength as animadjet for actual fighting, instead of have to scry their actions all day and all night.”

  “That, we can do easily,” Toruk reassured her. “We are all used to watching for signs of deceit among visitors seeking to steal our carefully built wealth.”

  “For that, we could use most of the tribe. All you need is a strong mind and a good pair of eyes,” Taje Tulan added. “I’d say well over three hundred of us at any given time are mature enough to spy.”

  “These Efrijt live somewhere else,” Lutun stated, still carefully working on the half-formed cup in his hands. “Should we go spy on them, visit their tribal lands, see what things they have? Not to invade, but to understand?”

  “I was thinking that,” Jintaya said, “but it is a very long journey, and I am not certain yet who should go. I do want to let the tribe know something, however.”

  “What would that be?” Taje Tulan asked, raising a brow.

  “We are bringing more Fae here. A few to start, then many more,” Jintaya explained. “The first few will be here mostly to help try to talk with the Efrijt, negotiate with them. The rest would come to add strength to our position here.”

  She did not, Ban noted, ask permission for those Fae to come to Ijesh. There were a few humans who had asked permission to move into the area and become members of the Flame Sea Tribe, but they asked permission of Taje Tulan, a fellow human. The Efrijt were not a human matter, but an outworlder matter.

  Only once had Jintaya gotten involved in human matters without consulting Taje Tulan, when it had proved one of the new members was actually there to steal and remove wealth from the area, passing it along to her relatives in a nearby oasis. Jintaya had declared the woman outcast, and directed Éfan to weave a geas around the thief, a type of spell that would provoke pain if the thief ever came back this way again. Ban had returned from one of his many exploration trips in time to witness the last few days of that particular mess.

  Frowning in thought, Tulan absorbed that for a moment, then asked, “Are these new Fae strangers to you, or do you know them?”

  “Some of them are related to me,” Jintaya admitted. “Some will be coming here for reasons other than the Efrijt, for crafting things, for teaching . . . It is simply time to expand the pantean. Just a little for now.”

  “I’ve been waiting more than forty years for more of you to show up,” Lutun muttered, turning
the wood in his hands over to work on the bottom curve of the cup. “About time.”

  “Grandfather,” Anuda muttered, rolling her eyes.

  Jintaya smiled. “We Fae may move slowly in many things, but we can be quite swift in other ways. The new members will be here within a few days.”

  Tulan tipped her head. “Should we have a celebration to welcome them?”

  “Oh, I’d like that,” Rua agreed, looking to her leader. “We haven’t had a celebration in a good three months.” Considering it with a tip of her head, Jintaya nodded. “We could do that . . . but it will be a daytime celebration, not an evening one. There will be no tucking the children away for the night, and no palraca, or any of the things that usually follow when drinking it. The new Fae will be here to work, not to indulge in pleasure.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much of a welcome,” Toruk pointed out, folding his arms across his bare chest. “I like all of your golden men, but there are only three of them, and I would like to meet more.”

  “There will be time for such things later,” Jintaya asserted, holding up a hand. “Right now, we need to deal with the Efrijt, and not be distracted by attraction to one another.”

  “It is a weakness the Efrijt would exploit,” Ban added, noting the disappointed looks in the group. “They are not like us. They do not think of the needs of others as easily as you do.”

  “Particularly when they consider everyone else less important than their own kind,” Rua added wryly. “If you are not an Efrijt, you are not worthy of the way an Efrijt should be treated. It’s very . . . not like how we think.”

  Most of the others frowned in distaste; the Fae had always treated them with respect for both their differences and their similarities. Toruk’s frown looked more thoughtful. The chief warrior finally shrugged and said, “They must have had some terrible enemies in their past, to have had to band so fiercely together. Enemies who were determined to crush them, humiliate them . . . It made them cling to one another, lift one another out of the mud where they were being shoved by all others.”

  “That is very perceptive of you, Toruk,” Jintaya told him. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but yes, that could be why. At least, in the distant past. I’m afraid it is now firmly a part of their culture, simply the way they do things, and not from any external reason or pressure that I have noticed. We have to deal with how they act right now, not how they used to act, or should.”

  “What do you want us to do with this Efrijt, Taro Anzak?” Tulan asked her. “How should we treat him?”

  “Be friendly, but make no promises, no vows, and no contracts, spoken or written,” Jintaya directed her. She looked at the others. “That goes for everyone, Fae included. If you have any doubts, or if he seems oddly satisfied in a conversation, remind him that I, Taje Jintaya-ul, am the only one who can make binding contracts for the tribe and pantean of the Flame Sea with the Efrijt. No one else can make and confirm a contract.”

  “You want all of us to keep that in mind, Taje?” Anuda asked her.

  Jintaya nodded. “Yes. Spread the word that nobody can make any contracts or promises with an Efrijt, other than me. The negotiators who are coming will arrange the terms, and do so very carefully, but I am the only one who can make it official and thus enforceable. Do not say ‘I promise,’ or ‘I vow,’ or ‘I assure you,’ or anything of that sort.”

  “That makes them sound like they’re full of trickery,” Lutun said, looking up from his cup. “How dangerous are they?”

  Rua answered his question. “Remember that joke I told you, about the student who asks the teacher if a particular snake is poisonous? And the teacher says,’No, it is not poisonous,’ so the student goes to pick up the snake, the snake bites him, and just as he dies, the teacher says, ‘Snakes are venomous, not poisonous’ . . . ?”

  More than just Lutun nodded warily.

  “Now imagine that the teacher thinks he is far superior to his students, and does not care about their well-being.That is how they think,” Rua told the humans. “If you ask an Efrijt to tell you what creatures are poisonous, they will tell you only those that will kill you if you bite them, if you try to eat them, like the yellow-belly frog that dwells in the wadijt to the northeast. They will not tell you which creatures are venomous, the ones like rattlesnakes and adders that will kill you if they bite you, because that is not what you asked them to tell you. It is not what you bargained with them to tell you.”

  Lutun wrinkled his nose in distaste. He wasn’t the only one. Taje Tulan sighed heavily. “I will spread the word—all of us will spread the word—that we are to be very careful around this fellow. What about his paying for the cost of food and lodging?”

  “I have told him what he needs to do to pay for those things. He will pay me in information. Those who provide him with food will come to me to be compensated,” Jintaya reassured her. “He did not argue the matter, because he knows that I will ask him certain questions either way. He knows that I know that he will only know some of the answers I seek.

  “He also knows that I realize he will not tell me what I really want to know of his medjant’s innermost secrets,” she added.Jintaya shrugged eloquently, silently summing up the situation as one that just had no real leverage. “That, and food and lodging are not the sort of things an Efrijt considers worthy of a binding contract. They’re just not important enough to trade for secrets that would give us an advantage in negotiations.”

  “So we just . . . let him wander around, and look at everything?” Anuda asked, frowning in puzzlement. “How our wadijt are laid out, how many people live here, how our settlement is defended? Isn’t he like a sort of would-be raider? Isn’t that what would-be raiders try to do?”

  “He is allowed to go into any public area, the same as any other visitor,” Jintaya told the teenager. “I doubt he will try to get inside someone’s home without an invitation.”

  “We have never hidden our strengths from outsiders,” Toruk added in agreement. “Or our weaknesses. The one time we were attacked in recent years when Ban-taje was gone, the other Fae were still more than a match for the warriors and animadjet of our enemies. But those cases are rare. Most who come here want to see the wonders of Ijesh, our beautiful home. He will want to see them as well.”

  One of the younger children, a brown-haired boy with taupe eyes of about twelve or so, finally spoke up. “Why is everyone worried about the man with the orange eyes?”

  Toruk opened his mouth to reply, then paused, frowned, and looked to the Fae. “. . . Kadu is right. Why are we worried about the Efrijt, Taje Djin-taje? If the rest of us are not to make any contracts, why should we be worried?”

  Jintaya sighed and touched two fingers to her forehead, her golden eyes closing for a moment. Ban could guess why his question pained her. For all they had learned, living alongside the Fae, the local humans were still rather unsophisticated in many ways. Personally, he thought that was good, to an extent. Unsophisticated people tended to be kinder, overall. The problem came when one mixed the unsophisticated with the highly sophisticated, so he answered for her.

  “We have taught you about rules and laws,” he told the other humans. “And Rua-taje has explained how these things can be used to harm others indirectly, by a cruel teacher not warning his student that the snake is venomous when the student mistakenly calls it poisonous. These indirect harms can be very subtle, yet very dangerous over time. We are protecting you from the venom of a snake you cannot yet see.”

  “The Efrijt want to claim the right to trade freely throughout this region by their rules,” Jintaya explained, giving Ban a brief, subtly grateful look for putting the danger into context. “They usually do not attack directly, and so the injuries they do to those they interact with are subtle and small. But those injuries build up over time. The Fae wish to have everyone trade by our rules, which forbid casual or subtle harm of that sort, as well
as the more direct sorts of harm.”

  “We were here first,” Rua added. “We were here longer, and so our rules should be used, not theirs. These things will have weight in our arguments with them. But the Efrijt want something that exists in the region they have claimed. They will fight with words and rules and subtle interpretations to gain the most they can, and to only give the least they can in exchange.”

  “A subtle series of harms, indeed,” Toruk agreed, frowning in thought. “Is it because you Fae live so long, that you have seen how much damage can build up over time from such things?”

  Both females nodded. Ban did as well, but then he had outlived both Fae by many times over, and had seen many different versions of civilization. The Efrijt weren’t the only ones who could pile up damages over time, based on the things they were allowed to get away with. He addressed that fact now. “I have traveled through many lands. Most of the tribes I have seen are generous to strangers who visit. They are generous when they travel. The Efrijt are not generous.”

  “Can they be taught generosity?” Lutun asked, working now on the handle of his wooden cup.

  “I don’t know,” Jintaya replied. “But I would like to find out. I would like to keep him here for the next several days if possible. I want the incoming negotiators to meet with him, question him . . . so give him politeness and kindness.”

  “But don’t be too generous,” Taje Tulan summed. “Because his kind would see that as a weakness to exploit when dealing with us, is that right?”

  Again, all three of them nodded, Jintaya, Ban, and Rua.

  “. . . I think I dislike these Efrijt people,” the human chief muttered, wrinkling her nose. “People should be kind and generous.”