A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,126

zealotry may make him reveal quite a bit, and he may be less likely to lie about it. And of course we would all like to know more about the Sixth and Seventh Kennings.”

Those were my orders, but Teela reassured me that they weren’t going to rely on me alone thanks to the mistral’s military adviser, Zephyr Bernaud Goss. “The zephyr believes—and the mistral concurs—that Saviič is part of an overall strategy to find a path over the ocean that is not plagued by krakens. He feels that dozens of small craft, perhaps a hundred or more, were sent out in hopes that a few would make it across to somewhere. It’s an old idea, but no one has ever done it because if you are seeking a quick death, you might as well seek a kenning, and few people wish to volunteer to be kraken chow. So we’ll be making queries up the coast, asking if anyone else has seen someone like Saviič. We might have some answers in a few weeks.”

And so, fortified with tea and cake, I descended into the dungeon to resume my language lessons. Saviič’s sunburned skin was peeling and blistering in places. A healer had paid him a visit and given him some ointments or creams or whatever: greasy smelly unguents that might provide him some relief. He preferred one over the others and had been given more, but that dead skin had to flake off at some point and dry, papery ridges of it crested all over him. I asked him how his skin was feeling, and after inspecting his arms, he grunted.

“Hot. Burns,” he said, then pushed down the air with the flat of his hands. “Lower. Better.” He pointed at me. “You burn sometimes?”

“No,” and then I broke eye contact to compose my sentence for him. He was used to such pauses by now. I had to not only come up with the proper words but order them in Eculan syntax so that a simple sentence such as “I stay inside” was phrased as “I inside stay.”

His next question surprised me. The words were, “Skin you black why?” and it took me a moment to realize he was asking why my skin was dark. It was a telling query; it indicated that not only had he never seen people with darker skin, he had never even heard of them before. His entire experience of the world was pale—or pink, I supposed, if they burned so easily.

But that made me wonder how he could have a religious text purporting to know about seven kennings and somehow not know that the majority of people blessed with them had dark skin of one shade or another.

I frowned at him and said, “Most people have dark skin.”

He scrunched up his face. “Here only, most?”

“Not here only. In world.”

He shook his head vigorously. “No. Most skin like mine.”

That made no sense unless he knew much more of the world than we did. “Ecula only?” I asked.

“No. World.”

That conflicted so badly with facts that I wondered if we had different conceptions of what “the world” meant.

“World is Teldwen, yes?” He nodded, so I continued. “Places in world are Ecula and—” I stopped myself and held up a hand, opening my ink pot and scrawling out a rough map of the world I knew, an inferior copy of the professional map we’d used to establish the location of Ecula earlier. I sketched our explored lands to the left and a series of five small blobs for Ecula, leaving room on the right side of the paper in case. I’d been so focused on finding out where his country was that I never asked about other countries he might know—lands beyond his own.

“This is world,” I asserted, thinking he would either accept it or correct me, and he corrected me, shaking his head.

“I do not know this part,” he said, pointing to the west. “But world is more.”

I handed him the paper through the bars in a wordless command to demonstrate what he meant. He still had his own ink and quill from our earlier language lessons.

His attempts at cartography were even worse than mine. He merely drew three circles on the right side, each bigger than Ecula but nothing like the size of our main landmass, and assigned names to them: Joabei to the north, Omesh near the middle, and Bačiiš to the south. The last one drew my attention for its linguistic relation to the old language,