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“It’s our one advantage,” said Olivenko. “We can break their little skulls under our feet.”
“Or between our fingers,” said Umbo. “Much less elaborate than sliding a slab of metal into Param’s throat while she’s time-slicing.”
“I don’t think we need to declare war quite yet,” said Rigg. “Besides, from the paths I’m seeing, there are several dozen who are not out in the open here. They’re all deep inside the machinery of the flyer. I think that regardless of who actually commands the flyer, this vehicle will crash if the mice feel threatened.”
“Good guess, they say,” said Loaf.
“And we can’t jump back in time,” pointed out Umbo, “since we’d materialize in midair before the flyer got here, and plummet to the ground.”
“Thanks for pointing out our powerlessness,” said Param.
“They call it a stalemate,” said Loaf.
“Not really,” said Rigg. “Not while we might save the world, and they might not. We need each other. But let’s say that I’m open to discussion when we reach the Wall.”
“I’m not,” said Umbo. Rigg saw that Umbo immediately regretted his defiant tone. He held up his hands as if to erase what he had just said.
“Then it’s a good thing I’m going to do all the talking,” said Rigg with a grin.
“What are you going to say?” asked Param.
“Anything I say to you,” said Rigg, “they can hear.”
“I can hear whatever they say to each other,” said Loaf.
“Everything? Their click-and-tap-and-sigh language, too?”
“Now that I know it’s a language,” said Loaf.
“They have no level of communication too soft for you to hear, even with the facemask?” asked Rigg.
Loaf nodded at the question. “I have no way of knowing,” he admitted. “That may be what they wish me to believe.”
“Such a quandary,” said Rigg. “How to establish trust with a nation that has already attacked us and murdered some of us.”
“We’ve killed a few of them, too,” said Param.
“Only when they put themselves underfoot,” said Umbo.
“You call them a nation?” said Olivenko.
“That’s what they are, don’t you think?” asked Rigg. “A foreign country. An inscrutable culture. They regard us with such contempt that they don’t think they have any obligation to tell us the truth or keep their word to us.”
“They’re assuring me that they’ll keep their word, they don’t break promises,” said Loaf.
“How odd,” said Rigg. “And here I thought they were supposed to be human.”
“All right,” said Loaf, “now they’re saying that they can’t trust us, either.”
“Because we’ve killed so many of them, and broken our word to them, and lied to them constantly,” said Rigg.
“They say that the only reason you didn’t lie is that you didn’t take them seriously enough to think that they were worth deceiving.”
“A fair assessment,” said Rigg. “Also, they could overhear everything we said to each other, which makes lying harder for us than it is for them.” Then Rigg broke into the ancient language of the Stashik River plain, the one that had been spoken by the Empire of O, while the Sessamids were still dung-burning tent-dwellers.
Until this moment, Rigg had never known why Father thought it was so important for him to become fluent in a dead language. But now, having been through the Wall, the others understood him very quickly. But these mice, having never been through the Wall, and having never studied a dead language spoken only in another wallfold, understood not a word.
Father—no, Ramex—had known about the language enhancement that anyone who passed through the Wall with Rigg would receive. He gave me this language so I could use it under exactly these circumstances—needing to talk with those who had passed through the Wall, without being understood by those who hadn’t.
