Dance of the Kalkorae

Vlad: We didn't know they were Kalkorean medes when we first saw them. They were something out of nightmares, really.

The Seru and its neighboring tribes are wints: tall, pale-skinned, fair-haired strong people, sometimes darker for their time in the sun.

The only Seru who are short and dark-skinned like the Kalkorae are children who have been playing in the mud. This is not encouraged.

They carried no weapons, just sticks attached by a cord to thick leather belts. The sticks might have been metal. Their teeth gleamed ferociously against their skin. They wore something over their eyes that made them look like bugs. They were all many years older than us. They made no threatening moves toward us.

We learned a lot, later. We learned that they feared us as much as we feared them, like any two intelligent species would. We learned that they would have let us arrive peacefully, except they thought we were responsible for destroying their tower.

Vic: A bunch of them already swarmed the soaked and burned mass of the wind fan, waving their wands about and dancing strange jigs.

"They turned off the shield," Lenar said. He was still watching the myst, something we should have been doing.

They spoke rapidly in a language we didn't understand. A few climbed the ladder.

"There was no one in the hut," I said. "How did they maintain a shield if there was no one in the hut?"

One of the four near us said something to his companions, and the rest laughed. Vlad wheeled on them, arms raised.

"What do you want with us? Why are you here? What does that tower do?" His voice got louder with each question, until the two closest to him waved their wands in agitation and the ones in the tower looked out from the hut.

"Wind fan hurt," said one of them, in our language.

"Pardon me?" I said, while the boys gaped.

He gestured to the broken tower and pointed his wand at a tree. Lightning shot from it, which startled all of us.

"Ka pow!" he said, and did an agitated dance. Then he calmed down. "Wind fan hurt," he repeated.

"How did you learn our language?" Lenar asked.

The man smiled, his teeth almost glowing. "Hear Lenar, Vic, Vlad speak." He gestured to the tower. "Hear Lenar, Vic, Vlad walk.

"It's a sentry tower," Lenar said, in awe. "A self-sustaining one."

"These guys are smart," I said. "They learned enough of our language in a day to communicate with us now."

Lenar was shaking his head though. "They've been watching the Seru for a while," he said with certainty. "Keeping us out with the idea of a haunted region. They understand far more than they're saying."

All this time, he watched the speaker's face, and then I saw it too. He couldn't hide the twitching of his lips.

"We knew you were smart," the man said, nodding to Lenar. "It is a shame we will have to kill you now."

Vlad: She's worked all day on that one. Likes to drop people in suckmud with barely a thread to hold them, that one does. Well, she's right though.

The man's name was Perui. He was kind of a chief warrior/engineer for the Kalkorae. His main job was to oversee the defenses - the towers - that protected the fledgling community.

After his vague - and untrue - statement about his having to kill us, which did, at the time, put the fear of Seruvus in us, Perui introduced himself and graciously tied us up and told us to wait. Lenar went quietly, passively. My sister followed suit, though with a bit more backbone. I was outraged.

"I will not be tied up!" I shouted at Perui's retreating back. "I will wait quietly, nicely here, and not do anything but watch. By Seruvus the Oathbinder, I promise."

Then the pain began.

Lenar told me later that one of them had aimed his wand at me while jumping up and down in the water. Neither he nor Vic could identify exactly what happened, but I know what it felt like. It felt like every last hair on my body was repeatedly being pulled out, sharply. I mean, to the last hair on my toe, the last eyelash, the ultimate arm hair. And I had copious hair.

None of it actually was pulled out, because if it had been pulled out, it couldn't be pulled out again. But it felt like it was pulled out, four, five times.

So I passed out, and woke, bound and gagged next to my sister and Lenar, who were bound but not gagged.

"You should've gone quietly," Vic hissed at me. I gnawed at my gag.

Vic: The Kalkorae are harmless unless provoked, you see. Lenar and I saw that right away. So long as we never bothered them, they would never bother us. I had faith that Lenar would be able to talk us out of Perui's ultimatum. Maybe it was misplaced, but we all survived in the end.

The repairs to the wind fan and the sentry tower did not take too long, but they involved quite a bit of jumping around and dancing. We eventually got Vlad's gag removed, and he sulked next to us.

"Energetic bunch," I said.

"Too energetic," he huffed.

"They seem to be very proud of their tower and the wind fan," Lenar said. "Very protective. Do you notice how each time they use a magical application, they do something physical?"

"Too physical," Vlad scowled.

"All their magic comes from those wands, too. It's not free, like ours. I wonder if they've studied our magic as they've studied our language."

"Yes," Perui said, appearing next to them. Vlad tried to climb up me, which is hard to do with hands and legs bound. "Your magic we know. There was the Battle of Strand, you see." He crouched down for a minute, his goggles pointed at us. "You will hear all, we will tell all. It is time. Our gods have shown it."

"Our gods have shown it, too," Lenar said. Vlad and I met each other's eyes, then turned to look at the turtle in the bucket.

"Yes, yes," Perui said, smiling happily. "The turtle. The bucket. The boy with the mouth. The twin girl. The smart one." He frowned. "Not the scorched but soaked wind fan. For that, you will die. But first, we must tell you all."

"Tell us, then kill us?" Lenar asked.

His swiping motion dismissed the question. "The gods said, turtle in bucket, boy with mouth, twin girl, smart one. They said, we will tell all, you will hear all. They did not say, you will live when you have heard." He grinned again. "Come, we must go to Domus Palus now."

Lenar: Maybe this is the final time I am interrupted. I am nearly finished. I have not slept in several days. The Kalkorae in general are bright, inquisitive people. They do not have leaders who are not engineers. They do not have wives who are not inventors. Everyone seems to have two specialties. As Vic has said, they are an energetic bunch, probably because it takes them almost two steps to go as far as Seru do in one. They think in terms of permanence. The Seru have a town, but it can be and often has been moved. There are many tribes that don't even have towns. The Kalkorae, though, partially because of their magic, build permanent structure after permanent structure. A Seru would never think of a sentry tower, but the Kalkorae built them before they built their homes. The first thing they put up, and the most well-protected building in Domus Palus, was a water wheel. It is their primary source of magic. The "giant lizard intestines" that Vlad and Vic so colorfully name are conduits for the energy created. The belts are private magic-generating devices, and the jigs and jumps and dances our captors at the time did were to keep the belts charged. Magic was directed through the wand - which is a Kalkorean word. The Seru sided with the Kalkorae in the war, when the Totanbeni came south in force to drive out the Kalkorae, because we knew fully what the Totanbeni knew only in part: the only way to defeat them would be to defeat a building. This is a next to impossible concept to grasp for a wint.

Vlad: You could defeat the Kalkorae by slaughtering everyone, Lenar, which is how the Totanbeni nearly won. But we're not that far yet. Vic is giving me dirty looks simply for writing that.

The growing city was two days away. We zig-zagged past three more towers, just so Perui could check to make sure all was well. Along the way, they forced us to learn their language.

"If we must tell all," Mreru, a mechanic/historian, informed us, "then you must be able to understand all."

The land grew more cultivated. More than a mile past the inner row of sentry towers, the water fell back. In here were the glowing things people had described. How they had missed the towers was beyond us. These buildings redirected water throughout the land. It was very complicated.

Lenar asked, haltingly, in their tongue, how many natives - that's what they referred to us as - had come inside their walls.

"There was an entire tribe," Mreru answered. "We found them worshipping one of the cannon towers, far toward the ocean. Eventually, we flushed them out with few casualties." Casualties was a mede word that meant incapacitated people. This could be a broken arm or a cease of life. "From your Seru, of which there are many who share our border, perhaps a handful. We saw one when we laid the conduit around the outer towers. We watched several get almost within eye-sight of the towers before they ran. We are interested in why they ran?"

"The wind fans sound like ghosts," Lenar said. He had to use the Seru word for ghost. There was quite a bit of discussion, as their always was, when some new word came up. Finally, a consensus was reached.

"Spirits," Lenar corrected himself.

They laughed, then. "Spirits sound very different than that," Mreru said. He went on, "One man plugged his ears with something and blindfolded himself and stumbled through the water, past the towers, and came close to the water buildings. We are interested as to why he blinded and deafed himself?"

Lenar could only speculate. Vic shrugged. I said nothing. The turtle did as turtles do.

Vic: We were neither bound nor gagged when Perui stopped our group early on the third day.

"Domus Palus," he said broadly, teeth shining, arm waving, wand causing all three of us to flinch. Even the turtle seemed to flinch.

At the time, the first thing you saw when Domus Palus appeared was the water mill. The giant building had two water wheels and more than a dozen wind fans on it, all of it spinning madly. Thick conduits stretched from it into the town proper, dozens of finished wood and stone buildings and hundreds of unfinished ones.

"Where do you get all the stone from?" Lenar asked.

"From the ocean floor," Mreru answered. "And there are cliffs many leagues north of here."

"Don't the Totenbeni shadelshifs bother you?"

Perui grinned, removing his goggles. They rested against his forehead like an ill-formed pair of horns. "We have defeated their bone ships before. We can and will again."

In the harbor, a dozen gigantic ships wallowed.

Mreru said to Perui, "I see the final group has arrived."

Perui nodded.

"Final group?" Lenar asked.

"Yes, there were three groups to the Kalkorae. The first group, ours, was small. Three ships, to find a good harbor and test the natives. This group defeated the bone ships. They also built the water mill. The second group held most of the settlers, and was six ships. The smaller, final group, brings more settlers, but mostly it brings essentials that cannot be built here yet."

"What essentials?"

"Things of magical nature," Mreru said mysteriously. "You cannot use them, so there is no need for you to know what they are."

Lenar's forehead creased in thought. "If we cannot use them, then there is no reason for you not to tell us."

Perui laughed and clapped Lenar on the back. "I told you, Mreru! This one is very bright! His logic grows with the language."

"How soon until he argues for his freedom?" Mreru shot back.

"Oh, not much longer, I think," Perui said, waggling the wand at Vlad just for the joy of watching him jump. "He may argue all he wants, but he knows what will happen."

"Point that thing someplace else," Vlad growled from behind Lenar.

Vlad: This is quite comical, Vic, the way you write it. At 15, I was bigger than Lenar. At 18, Lenar was head and shoulders taller than Mreru, who was fingers taller than Perui. How on Diah could I hide behind someone smaller than me, in fear of someone who barely came up to my chest? This entire situation makes no sense.

Vic: Yet it is true, and age seems not to have brought you wisdom, dear brother. First, Perui held every wild rice. He could put you in unending misery with a dance. Second, he was much older than us. Third, he had the easy authority of someone to whom command was second nature. I am not surprised you jerked away from him as often as you did. The wand was quite a deterrent.

Perui gave us the short tour of the town.

"The roads are not paved yet," he said, and Vlad interrupted.

"What are roads? What is paved?" Of course this led to quite a discussion, which lasted until we were ushered into a large, mostly stone structure.

It was surprisingly cool inside.

"As guests of the Kalkorae, you would be offered baths - if the bathhouse was finished, that is - clean clothes and rooms, a banquet and logical conversation with members of my household and my friends," Perui said, leading us down a dark hallway. "As prisoners, however, you are welcome only to clean rooms and the food of the soldier/mechanics."

He opened a door, and we were led into a dim suite with four closet-sized cells surrounding a sizeable common area devoid of furniture. He sighed.

"I apologize that there is nothing to sit on. It takes time to manufacture things for our own people, you see, without having to do so for prisoners." He brightened a bit. "I have a spare room now that my son has married. I will have my servants bring that furniture down directly. I am certain Perua will understand."

"Who is Perua?"

"My wife!" he exclaimed in joy. "She is a most hospitable woman."

"How long will we be in here?" I asked as the door closed behind us.

"Oh, not long." His dark face and brilliant teeth shone in the little grill in the door. "For you must be told all, and you must hear all, and then, we get to kill you.

Copyright 2005-2007 Eric Zawadzki and Matthew Schick. All Rights Reserved.
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