“Yes. Gahn Thaleo’s uncle, Gahn Seerak, delivered the killing blow to the borog. But he died in the process. He named his nephew Gahn just before he died, with Warrek as a witness.”
“And that’s how Thaleo became the Gahn?” I asked. I recognized this phenomenon. It was how Gahn Taliok had earned his title, when Gahn Irokai lay dying on the battlefield. Oxriel had been the witness then.
“Sort of,” Zaria said. “Despite the legitimacy of his claim upon the title, Gahn Thaleo called for a baklok anyway.”
“A baklok?” Tilly interjected. “That sounds familiar.”
“A baklok is a competition to determine a new Gahn,” Zaria explained. “It is similar to the vaklok you witnessed yesterday, but much more harrowing and serious in nature. Men can die during bakloks.”
“Oh! I remember,” Tilly said. “That’s how Razek became Gahn of the Death Plains. He met Jocelyn when she stumbled upon him during his baklok.”
“But if it’s so serious, and people can get hurt,” I asked, “why would Gahn Thaleo call for a baklok? When he’d already been named Gahn? Did someone oppose him?”
“No, no. Nothing of that nature,” Zaria said quickly. “Of course, I was only a very small child then. But from what I have always heard, everyone respected Gahn Seerak’s choice for his successor.”
“So why the need for a baklok?” I asked, still wrestling with the question. It didn’t make any sense. If they’d just gone through this terrible ordeal with the borog creature, and people had died, why not just instantly step into the new role of Gahn and restore some peace and normalcy? Why throw things into further chaos by calling for some big competition among all the remaining men?
“I do not know for sure. I do not know that Gahn Thaleo has ever shared his reasons for doing so. I can only share my own theories,” she admitted. “But Gahn Thaleo…He has no ego. He is not brash. There is no pride in him that I can see. He has always put the needs of the many before anything else. I truly believethat he wanted to give all men a fair chance. To let the baklok decide who was truly worthy of the title of Gahn, rather than the word of one man, even if that man was the Gahn before him.”
I considered her words, turning them over in my mind. It seemed too virtuous a motivation for the secretive Gahn. But Zaria had certainly known him much longer than I had. So maybe, at least part of her explanation was right.
“If you were just a toddler at this time, how old was Gahn Thaleo?” Tilly asked.
“He had only just reached his age of manhood.”
“So, maybe, like, eighteen?” Tilly said to me. I shrugged, doing some quick mental math. If Zaria looked to me to be the equivalent of someone in her early or mid-twenties, and she was a toddler when this had all happened, then it probably happened the human equivalent of about twenty years ago. If I had to guess, I would put Gahn Thaleo on par with a mid-to-late thirties human man. So that seemed about right.
Only eighteen years old…
I could picture him as a young man more easily than I could picture him as a child, at least. When I tried to imagine him any younger than eighteen, I was still met with a frustrating blank. But I could certainly imagine him a little leaner, a little lankier, his face not quite so stony. Not quite so scarred.
“Is that when he got his scar? During the baklok? Or during the fight with the borog?” I blurted, the question burning right up and out of my lungs. I drew a line down my face with my forefinger.
“Oh, no,” Zaria said. “I believe he’s had that scar since childhood.”
Tilly and I exchanged shocked glances. It was an absolutely brutal scar, deep and jagged. It must have been a horrific wound for a child to have endured. Even now, the sight stars of his left eye were paler and a little slower to react than the sight starson the right. Why wouldn’t a child with a wound that bad have been immediately treated with Vrika’s blood? As far as I could tell, Vrika’s blood, like Lavrika’s blood in the Sea Sands, healed so swiftly that scarring was often non-existent. It was only when a wound was left to heal on its own that such scarring could develop.
What kind of healer would let a young child go through that sort of agony? And what about his uncle, this Gahn Seerak? Hadn’t he been there? What had he done to help?
Every time I learned something new about Gahn Thaleo, it simply created more questions. Questions about him.
And how I felt towards him.
Because even though I couldn’t visualize him as a child, I was still experiencing a sudden, unmistakeable stab of sympathy for that child. For the pain he’d so obviously gone through.
But I could separate the child from the man. I had to. The current, adult Gahn Thaleo didn’t require my sympathy. If anything, he required my suspicion. I didn’t trust him. Caring about what he’d gone through didn’t feel safe.
That child in pain was a world away. A different person entirely from the Gahn I knew now.
Even if they both shared the same scars.
8
NASRIN
After delivering some breakfast to our friend-lump and making sure she didn’t want to get up yet, we spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon in a bright, airy cave with Zaria, another woman named Salina, and her two daughters Wanda and Vanda, the little girls we’d met yesterday at the vaklok. Wanda and Vanda jumped up, their sight stars spinning excitedly when they first saw us, and then they spent the next few minutes telling us all about what they’d done with the paper and pens we’d shared with them yesterday. They talked about their experimental drawings with such earnest, youthful seriousness that they might as well have been talking about drafting some new law or government documentation.
“Where is Fiona?” asked Wanda, the younger of the two. She and Fiona had chatted a bit together yesterday, and I could tell that the little Deep Sky girl was disappointed not to see her new human friend.
