The Door into Sunset by Diane Duane Page B

Cillmod seems to have been talking to them. And when is the last time we did any such thing?”
    Lorn shook his head. Historically, there had never been much use in talking to Reavers: the few who had tried had died without finding anything out. The Reavers came from over the southern mountains, in the summertime, through the passes, they tried to take people’s land, they were driven out, always with terrible losses, and after a respite, they always came back. Not every summer, by any means. But most years you would hear of burnt crops somewhere, of land overrun and won back with too much blood. It was rare to know anyone from the south who had not lost friends or family to the Reavers, or who did not hate them with the same resigned and impersonal hatred one usually reserved for plague or root-wilt. People tended not to think of them as really human, and this was easy, for their languages were as strange as their ways, and they died rather than remain captive. There was some discussion as to whether they even knew the Goddess. Just now they had invaded in greater numbers than ever before, and been driven back again more conclusively than when the first alliance of Arlen and Darthen had done it. Yet here they were again....
    Lorn looked down the hillside. This party didn’t look particularly threatening... but where there was one Reaver, there were a thousand more, sooner or later. “How long have they been here?” “No more than a day or so. The circuit Rodmistress for these parts sent me word. They’ve done nothing, threatened no one. They’ve just waited here.”
    “Waited,” Lorn said.
    “Yes.”
    “Do we have an interpreter with us?”
    “I can manage that,” Eftgan said. “‘Samespeech’ is one of the first things they teach you when you master your Fire. How our guests will find it—” She shrugged. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Meanwhile, you have your own face back until we part. I think you may need it.”
    They rode on down the hill without further words exchanged: but Eftgan slipped Sarsweng from its carry-sheath and laid it across her saddlebow. Lorn looked more closely at the group of Reavers awaiting them, as they drew closer. They were much of a size, but there was one man among them who both was smaller than the rest, sharp-faced, with fair hair tied up in a tight knot behind and seemingly held in place with some kind of thick dyed grease. Under the strange hair, and the odd clothes, this man looked faintly worried.
    Lorn stopped his horse close enough to be polite and not to need shouting, but fairly well out of spear- or sword-reach. Beside him, Eftgan pulled up and nodded politely at the strangers, all of whom shifted uneasily at the movement, as if expecting it to be some kind of signal for attack.
    It took a moment for the rustling to die away. When it did, Eftgan said, “The Goddess’s greeting to you, strangers, and my own with it. What brings you into my country?”
    This time the start that ran through them was much more pronounced, and Lorn found this understandable. He clearly heard Eftgan’s voice asking the question in her drawly north-country Darthene. But at the same time he heard it inside him, underheard it, in Arlene of a perfect Prydon-city accent—his own, in fact. Yet it was still her voice. All the Reavers flinched and stared at one another like scared children, except the small man at their head. The set, wary look on his face apparently needed more than this surprise to unsettle it.
    “What do you mean by ‘your country?’“ the man said. The words of the strange language, as they came out, sounded surprisingly light and lyrical—but then Lorn had never heard Reavers do anything but scream unintelligible battlecries before.
    If the response surprised Eftgan, she showed no sign of it. “All this land is in my care,” she said, “from these mountains to the Sea far to the north, and from the great river to the next great river eastward. I