Karsis stirred, saying thoughtfully, “Maybe if Ardan knows where to find more of the things, he’ll send us after them.”
Moon looked down, scuffed at the gray tile with his worn fish-skin boot. So close. It wouldn’t be in these rooms, where Ardan kept his guests/prisoners. He could ask where it was, but that would just make him look like exactly what he was, a thief who had tricked his way in here to steal from Ardan’s collection. He thought he had already shown too much interest in it. He didn’t want these people trading him to Ardan for their freedom. Better to keep them talking about themselves. “Why is he holding you prisoner? What did you do to him?”
Orlis started. Karsis stared at Moon, lips thin with annoyance. Esom took a breath for an angry answer, but Negal stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. Negal said wearily, “We did nothing to him. Apparently he finds us… interesting company.”
So Ardan had collected them, as well. Moon didn’t feel terribly sympathetic. They weren’t dead and stuffed, and if not for them he would be back at Indigo Cloud Court in a bower with Jade, making clutches. Trying to keep the irony out of his voice, he said, “What makes you so interesting?”
Negal watched him for a moment, as if trying to decide if Moon wanted a serious answer or not. Finally he said, “We come from a land far to the west. It lies atop a tall plateau, isolated by boiling seas, impassable cliffs, rocky expanses with steam vents and chasms. We had legends of other lands, other peoples, but they were only legends. No one believed it was possible to leave our plateau. Or that if we did leave, we would find nothing but an endless lifeless sea.” He smiled ruefully. “We thought the boundaries of our little existence formed the entire world.”
Esom slumped, anger giving way to resignation. He muttered, “The plateau is not that small. It’s four thousand pathres across, easily.”
Negal continued, “Our Philosophical Society had long been exploring different methods of leaving the plateau as an intellectual exercise. Until we discovered one that actually seemed to have a chance of success. We built prototypes, experimented, and finally developed the Klodifore, the metal ship you saw in the harbor. Our crew of volunteers sailed away on what we thought would be a voyage of great discovery.”
Karsis touched his hand. “It has been that.” Defensively, she added to Moon, “We traveled for six months with no real trouble, visiting the different civilizations along the coast, learning this language so we could communicate. Then we ran into this island.”
Esom said, “Literally. We were plotting a course back across the sea toward home, and the leviathan swam into sight. So we decided to stop and see what kind of people lived on it.” He sounded so bitterly ashamed of the decision, it was likely he was the one who had pressed for it.
All right, so their story was more interesting than Moon had thought. “Then why did you go to the Reaches with Ardan?”
Orlis said bleakly, “He tricked us. He courted us, showed us things in his collections, talked about the trip he was planning to study the strange creatures who lived in the forest Reaches.” He shrugged. “He said it was a long way, and that as a magister he could only spend so much time away from the leviathan or the city would be in danger. Our ship was the only one that could make the journey in a short time.”
“It’s not that far to the forest coast,” Moon said, and then remembered that the leviathan might have been much further out to sea. And that maybe he shouldn’t seem to know exactly how far it was to the forest coast.
But Orlis said, “Not the journey to the coast, the journey inland.”
Esom said, with a faint sneer, “You probably won’t understand this, but our ship is capable of flight.”
“It’s a flying boat, a wind-ship?” Moon said, startled. “It has a sustainer?” That… explained a lot. Why Ardan had needed these people, why he couldn’t simply have gone with his own men. How they made it over the forest floor without being killed, how they had gotten up to the knothole entrance. The Kek hadn’t seen the ship, but then most of them had been on the other side of the tree in hiding. They didn’t see our flying boats either. It didn’t