Page 25 of City of Stone and Silence

“Veldi?” I ask her, turning away from the looming, silent ship.

“No, sir,” she says. Her manner makes me wonder if she was a soldier before getting tossed onto Soliton. “It’s a Jyashtani. Says his name is Harak. He’s waiting just inside the south entrance.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I say. “Find Zarun and tell him to meet me there. Meroe, too, if she’s not busy.”

“Yes, sir!” She salutes again, and takes off at a jog.

I thread my way through the ziggurat, passing through the big chamber most of the crew occupy. Now that it’s clear the building is empty, a few have pitched their meager blankets in some of the other rooms in search of a little privacy. Back on Soliton, practically everything that hadn’t been scavenged from tribute had come from the bodies of dead crabs—meat for food, shells for armor and construction, sinew for fiber. What hadn’t come from crabs had been made from mushrooms. Learning to survive here in the jungle would be starting from scratch for the crew, unless the trees happened to hide enormous shelled monsters.

The ziggurat helped, sturdy and defensible in spite of its enormous age. And Veldi’s people clearly manage, so if we have to stay here—

But I can’t stay here. My hands tighten into fists. It’s easy for the immediate problems to get in the way—back on Soliton, I’d let that happen, and my only excuse was that I’d had the better part of a year still to go. Now I have less time, probably much less, and I can’t let myself get distracted again.

On the heels of these thoughts, I stride into the chamber just inside the southern doorway, where five crew with spears are waiting. “Well?” I bark, probably too loud, as they snap to attention. “Where is he?”

“Here I am,” a deep voice says, and I turn.

The man—and it is emphatically a man—is a tall one, topping me by a head and a half, and broad to match. He wears the full, flowing trousers I associate with Jyashtani, gathered at the ankles with dark ribbons, plus leather sandals and little else. His torso looks like a doctor’s anatomical diagram, with each muscle painstakingly picked out under dark, coppery skin. His hands are long-fingered and surprisingly delicate, but his arms are thick and fringed with short black hair. His head is shaved bald, gleaming like it’s been oiled, but he’s kept a thick black mustache, which droops down past the corners of his mouth.

I stop short, looking him over, and he clasps his hands Jyashtani-style and gives me a bow. It makes the muscles in his core shift in interesting ways, and I have an urge to feel them tighten under my fingers. Historically my preference in men has been lithe instead of bulky—like Zarun, for example—but I can’t deny my eyes linger. The scale of him—

Focus, Isoka.

“Deepwalker,” one of the guards says, sounding relieved.

“You said your name is Harak?” I ask the stranger, and he nods.

“I am. And you are Isoka Deepwalker.” I’m able to follow his speech only with difficulty. In addition to a thick accent, he’s speaking pure Jyashtani, and my knowledge of that language is limited. “I am here to welcome you to the place of the Divine Being.”

“Okay,” I tell him, mustering all the Jyashtani I can manage. “So who are you?”

“I am Harak,” he repeats patiently. “Of the gara-tseni.”

I grit my teeth. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“My order,” he says. “Your people call us ‘Minders.’” He mangles the Imperial word, but I recall Veldi saying something about “Minder fanatics.” “Our garash, my vettatol, has sent me to bid you welcome, and to offer friendship to all those who would gara tsen volta—”

At that point I lose the thread entirely. Fortunately, there’s a clatter of footsteps, and I look over my shoulder with a sigh of relief as Zarun arrives. Harak perks up as well, bowing deeper, and Zarun, looking surprised, matches his formal style. Harak rattles off a string of Jyashtani too fast for me to understand, and Zarun blinks.

“Can you understand him?” I ask.

“I think so. He sounds a little…” He cocks his head. “Pretentious?”

“Ask him what he wants.”

Zarun nods and answers. After a short dialogue, he turns to me again.

“He says he’s here to welcome us to the Harbor, the holy place of the Divine Being.”

“I got that much. Something about ‘garash’ and an order?”

Zarun frowns. “You have monks in the Empire, yes? People who retreat from the world and devote themselves to religion?”

“We do. Less than we used to, I think.” I remember something about a war between the monks and the Emperor, but I’m not sure if that’s history or just a story. “Is that what he is?”

“More or less.”

“My image of a monk is an old man with limbs like sticks and a long white beard.” I nod at the avatar of masculine perfection in front of us. “Not that.”