A Plague of Giants (Seven Kennings #1) - Kevin Hearne Page 0,38

resist change because of their frequency of use, like numbers and everyday nouns. If they shift at all, they shift in pronunciation or at least share the same roots as older versions of a language, but it’s rare to develop completely different morphology—”

Teela held up a hand to stop me. I guess I had been babbling a bit. “Just tell me if you can read it now or later,” she said.

“Later. Once I talk with him, I will have a better idea of how long it will take.”

“Thank you. I will let you begin. But be careful. Do not let him get his hands on that book.”

“Why not?”

“Because the cyclones were at great pains to take it from him. He wants it very badly. So we want to know why. Is it a diary or what?”

“There’s no way it’s a diary.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s a completed work. Same script throughout. The handwriting is consistent with someone copying a text. Which means this probably has religious significance to him.”

“Holy writ? Like Reinei’s Wind?”

“Kaurian sailors never leave port without it, right? It’s not so difficult to imagine that this sailor would also bring with him a volume of comforting thoughts.”

Teela Parr nodded. “All right. I’ll come back to check on you soon. Good luck.”

I tucked the book underneath my new mustard-free tunic and followed the guards down into the damp and dark. The stranger waited in a single large cell. It was one of the nicer ones, with decent lighting and fresh matting for his sleeping tick. He had eaten his fill three times, I was told, so much that his stomach visibly bulged. A table and a chair already waited in front of the cell with a stack of paper on it, along with a fresh quill and ink pot.

Seeing the foreigner reminded me of my childhood, when I laid eyes on a teabush serpent for the first time: a sense of childish wonder coupled with a twinge of fear that this new thing in the world might be dangerous. He was too tall to be Fornish but a bit short to be one of the Hathrim. His skin looked pale and sickly to me, but I suppose sickly always goes together with pale in my mind anyway, and I am certainly no healer to judge these things properly. Apart from the slight bulge to his abdomen, he had a skeletal appearance, sharp-bladed cheekbones scraped clean and hollows under his dark brows, ribs starkly outlined on his torso. He definitely couldn’t be a stunted Hathrim; they had stocky builds and were fond of their beards and leather. His only clothing was a broad strip of cloth like a bandage wrapped around his hips, fastened with a length of coarse rope. And it was his choice to remain immodest, for I saw a folded set of fresh clothes resting in his cell.

Extraordinary. A new race of people from somewhere across the ocean. How had he ever managed to cross it?

He eyed me with suspicion at first, leaning against the wall to my left with his arms crossed in front of his chest and his right leg crossed in front of his left.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Gondel.” I tapped my chest. “Gondel.”

I got a glare for my trouble at first, but my expectant expression must have persuaded him to respond in kind. He tapped his chest once and said, “Saviič.” The ch sound at the end of his name told me that they were hewing to the old alphabet.

“Hello, Saviič.” I held up my right index finger. “Jedan,” I said. Then I lifted fingers in succession and continued to count to ten in Uzstašanas. “Dva, trik, četiri, pet, šest, sedim, osim, devet, deset.”

Saviič uncrossed his arms and took a couple of steps forward as I spoke, then shook his head when I finished. He began counting as well, correcting my poor pronunciation, or rather correcting the ancient words into his modern equivalent. The first four numbers had changed to jed, duv, tri, and čet, and sedim had changed to sedam. Interesting and encouraging. But what he said next was unintelligible babble to me. I think my lack of comprehension showed on my face, because he sighed in frustration. Remembering that the title of his book contained the word sedam, or seven, I withdrew it to begin discussing it with him.

Upon seeing it, he cried out and rushed the bars, startling me and causing me to stagger backward until I ran into