Chapter Six

The Plan

It should be known that orruks are not a sentimental people. They have wants, and they have loves—more of both than anyone who has only fought them would credit—but grief, to an orruk, is a kind of weather-damage: a thing that happened to the roof, to be patched around and got on with, not lived inside of. A human klan that had lost what the Gutscrape lost would have spent a season on its knees. The Gutscrape spent about nine days—which was, as it happened, exactly as long as Vragg could go without walking the racks himself and counting what nine days had already cost them—and then it got up, because the dead do not check the traps, and the traps do not check themselves.

So the hall filled back up with the sounds of a klan working—lines going out at dawn, gear passing through Gobber's piles and coming back mended, Gnik's whetstone keeping its dry time under everything—and if a stranger had looked in on it he would have seen a band twice the size of the one that had first walked out of the bog, ordered, working, alive, and he would have been right about all of it and wrong about the one thing that mattered. Fifty was less than a hundred, and a hundred had been thin on this ground. But fifty was still more mouths than the winter's stripped-out lines had fed comfortably even before there had ever been a hundred, because the ground itself had spent the whole of that same winter being eaten, and nine days of half the eating did not undo a season of the full amount. The lines came back a little lighter than they had nine days ago. The rack showed its poles sooner than it should have. Vragg portioned what there was with a flat, even hand, and nobody starved, not yet, and every few nights the portions went round a little smaller in a way that only three creatures in the hall had troubled themselves to measure.

Two of them measured it together, at the wall, in stones. The third measured it from the cold end of the hall, arms folded, jaw set, and Moggruk watched her do it and felt the old file open on its own.

Mudda Ironchin had come out of the wide road alive, which surprised nobody who had ever dealt with her, and had brought out maybe half the Reekfen with her, which she did not regard as luck. She had bent her iron knee to Wutzgut for a price, and the price had been that her boyz ate—that was the whole of the contract, the entire text of it—and Wutzgut was gone, and the boyz ate thinner every week, and the knee, as far as Mudda was concerned, was owed to nobody now walking. She did not say this. She said it the way she said everything now, with her eyes: counting the racks when the racks came in, counting the portions when the portions went round, standing at Vragg's shoulder when the watches were set with the patient, upwind look of a creature auditing work it hadn't yet decided to keep paying for. Vragg felt it. The whole hall felt it. He answered it the only way his new flat self knew, which was by being fair at her, relentlessly—portioning her boyz to the strip and the knuckle exactly even with his own—and fairness, Moggruk noted from the edge of things, was precisely the wrong coin, because Mudda had never once asked to be treated evenly. She had asked to be fed, and evenly was becoming a smaller number every week, and you cannot pay a hungry klan in arithmetic. He filed her where he had always filed her, under later, and noted that later had begun, very quietly, to move up the queue.

The mouths, then. That was the count on the near side of his ledger, and it only ever came out one way. But it was the far side that Moggruk kept returning to, on the long watches, and it had a thing on it that would not lie flat, and the thing was the eels.

He had watched a country throw food away. That was what it came down to, every time he walked it through. A full day's catch of eel, priced by reflex the very first night—a good stretch of eating for the whole of the Gutscrape as it now stood—swung about over black water by creatures being other creatures, dropped, retrieved, dropped again, spent. And the crabs with it. Nobody in that roaring bowl of thousands had so much as blinked, because the spending was the point, because whatever the crowd was buying with all that meat was worth more to them than the meat, and a country that could pay that price for fun, several nights a week, was a country sitting on more food than it knew what to do with. That was not a guess. That was the one kind of fact he trusted, the kind you could price. Hungry countries do not play with their food. He had grown up in a hungry country; he knew, to the finger's width, exactly how far a hungry country will walk to retrieve one dropped eel. The pale folk let theirs sink.

Dey got so much, he thought, slow, turning it. Dey pay it out fer noise.

It wanted a second half, and for a while he didn't have one. Then he looked up, the way he did most nights when his own count ran dry, and found where it always took him: Nibz, a little apart against the wall, squaring a finished stack of ten stones before starting the next, unhurried, her eyes not even on her own hands anymore. He had watched her do that a hundred nights running and it had never once given him anything but comfort. Tonight it gave him more—because he knew the trick from somewhere older than comfort. It was the same one she'd had from the first night he'd known her, telling him how she'd crossed the grey country alone: counting the scary things so as not to have to feel them, forty of them, then sixty, running the numbers out ahead of her like a rope into the dark. She still did it. It had just stopped being about fear. And walking back along that same first telling to find where the trick had started, he arrived, the way you arrive at a room you'd forgotten was down that hall, at the thing she'd told him before any of the bad part—a bowl. The great cut bowl in the canyon wall, tier on tier, built by long-gone somebodies for a crowd longer gone still—held now by a mean lot of orruks who had worked out half the trick and stopped there, taxing the one narrow throat of river a boat at a time, eating what the toll bought, thinking themselves clever. Half the trick. He had filed it that same night, whole, under later, and not known what he meant by it.

He knew now. An' I know a place wot makes da noise, an' nobody's payin' fer it—yet.

He lay with it the rest of that night, testing it the way he tested new ground, one weight at a time. The bowl was held, and held by orruks, and orruks did not hand over made places for asking—that was a problem, and he set it down on one side. He could not build a spectacle himself, had no forty swimmers, no tall one with open arms, no small boats with torches—that was a problem, and he set it down too. But the pale folk could. They had all of it, had it to spare, ran it several nights a week in a bowl already full—what they didn't have was the other bowl, the far one, the empty one, and no reason yet to want it. Right there was the joint the whole plan would turn on, the place where it would either hold or spring wrong, and he lay staring at it a long while.

Because there was one more fact in the file, and it was the strangest one he owned, and everything depended on it. He had walked among them. Before the wide road, in the weeks of the going-toward, he had lain against their walls while they climbed over him, swum their flooded squares while they poled past close enough to touch, and not one of them had raised a hand or so much as a cry against him. And then he had watched five of their giants thresh a hundred orruks into the water without hurrying, over one of their own hauled up a pole. He had spent nine days failing to make those two facts sit in the same box, and it was only now, holding the plan against them, that they clicked and lay flat: the pale folk had not come to the wide road because orruks were there. Orruks had been on that ground a year, trapping the margins, eating the eels, and the country had sent nothing and noticed nothing. They had come because something of theirs was taken. That was the shape of it. A country too fat to grudge the margins, and too strong to lose one thread of its own—you could stand beside it your whole life, so long as you never once put your hand on what it owned. It was a rule read off one night's terrible evidence, and he knew better than to trust a rule that cheap, and he trusted it anyway, provisionally, the way you trust first ice: because the whole of the crossing depends on it, and there is no other bridge, and you go light, and you listen.

What he needed now was not courage. Courage was the cheap part. What he needed was words—enough of the tumbling gabble to put a want in front of a pale thing and have it land as a want, and not as a hand on something owned.

Right, den, he thought. Time I learned to talk.

He went at the words the way he went at everything, which was the way of a trapper on unfamiliar ground: from cover first, then by small sets, then by checking what each one caught.

The place he chose for it was deep in—a great stone thing in the western quarter of the city, three floors of arched galleries stacked around an open square, with the whole ground floor drowned a tall man's height and the upper two alive with pale folk at their trading. He had marked it on the far edge of his old routes and never gone close; now he went close, because it was the wordiest place he had ever found. The pale folk poled in under its arches and climbed the corner stairs and packed the upper galleries from morning to dark, and every one of them was talking—haggling, calling, laughing across the square from one gallery to another—and below all of it, under the boats, the drowned floor lay still: statues standing to their waists in brown water, weeds lifting slow from their shoulders, old pictures made of little stones going down the walls into the murk. The pale folk poled straight over the statues' heads without one glance down. Moggruk, flat in the shadow of a broken stair on his first morning, looked down through the water at a stone face looking back up, calm as its cousins on the drowned street east, and understood that he had found the place where the pale country kept its talk the way the klan's hall kept its meat: heaped, handled, traded all day long.

He spent the first days only listening. That was the ground-reading, and he was better at it than any creature alive: not learning words yet, learning where the words lived—which sounds came out at the start of a trade and which at the end of one, which sound made a pale thing hold up a thing and which made it wrap the thing in a leaf and hand it over, which sounds were greetings (short, tossed, answered in kind) and which were prices (chanted, sing-song, met with wailing that meant, as far as he could tell, nothing at all, since the wailing pale thing always paid). He built the map of it the way he'd built the map of the drowned streets, behind his teeth, sound by sound: this one opens. This one closes. This one, said with the hands up, undoes—he watched a pale thing say it and back out of a trade, and the other one gabble cheerfully and let it go, and he filed the undoing-sound deepest of all, because a trapper's first question about any new ground is not how do I go in. It is how do I come back out.

Then he began to test, one word at a time, the way you set one snare on a new line and sit back to see what walks in.

He had trade-goods for it. Eels—his own portion of his own catch, carried in a wet sack across half a dead city, which was a spending he did not tell anyone about and did not let himself price too closely, because the hall's arithmetic was thin enough without a runt subtracting from it for words. And here his first true finding, made on his first attempt, in the corner of the lowest dry gallery, from a pale merchant with a stall of small shining things: the pale folk would trade with him. He had crouched at the stall's end, put the eel down between them, pointed at nothing in particular, and made the opening-sound as near as his mouth would let him—and the merchant had looked at him, one long look, the grey-green of him, the wet sack, the whole wrong shape of the customer—and then something in its pale face had simply settled, the way water settles, and it answered the greeting, and traded. Fair, even: it took the one eel, weighed it in its hand like a thing of known worth, and gave back a little folded leaf, ceremonially, with both hands, gabbling a stream of what was unmistakably praise for the goods it was handing over.

In the leaf was mud.

He examined it for a long time that night, back east, by ember-light. Good mud. Bog-standard mud, in the most exact sense available. He had watched the trade with his own eyes: the merchant had wrapped it the way you wrap a treasure, handed it over the way you hand over a treasure, and—this was the part that would not file—its face had held nothing anywhere in it of a cheat. He knew cheating; the klan cheated constantly, at everything, and the whole art of it was in the face. The merchant's face had been the face of a creature concluding an honest bargain, well pleased on both sides. Which meant the pale thing had either given mud for eel knowing it, and worn the wrong face perfectly—or it had not known it. It had handed over mud and seen itself handing over something else. He set that thought down very carefully, some way off from the rest of the file, the way you set down a trap you suspect is still armed, and did not go near it again for days. But he kept the leaf.

The words came in fast after that, once the trading opened. He worked the galleries in short careful visits, never twice the same stall in a week, never more than one new sound a day, and every sound tested the same way: said, and then watched, to see what it produced. Some produced goods. Some produced directions—a long arm and a stream of gabble and a helpful pointing that he learned to follow with his eyes and file. One produced laughter, every time, from every pale thing he tried it on, whole stalls of them doubling over, and he retired it unsolved and faintly resentful, a snare that caught only mockery. And the numbers he got for nothing, or nearly—for the price of standing at the end of a fish-stall through one long morning while the seller chanted the same rising sing-song over every basket, one to some number past his own stacked tens, the whole count of the pale country laid out in order like stones going down in rows. He brought the number-sounds home to Nibz that night, all of them, in order, and said them at her quietly by the wall, and watched the accountant of the Gutscrape sit up half the night matching pale sounds to her own stacked stones with her ears absolutely rigid with joy. It was the first wealth he had ever brought anyone.

The mistake, when it came, came the way his mistakes always came: not from ignorance, but from watching too well.

There was a balcony on the third floor, over the square's north side, where the trading noise thinned and a different kind of talk happened—pale folk in heavier cloth, fewer of them, taking turns to stand at the rail and say measured things to the galleries below. He had marked it early as the place where the fancy-adjacent talk lived: slower sounds, carved at the edges the way the hanged lord's talk had been carved, and delivered always with the same shape—a raised hand, a phrase, a pause into which the galleries below made a low agreeable sound. He had watched it for days, the way he'd once watched the hat's arm-signals, hunting the working parts. And one grey afternoon, at a stall on the second gallery, trading for a hand of dried whiskerfish, wanting to move the trade along, and here his hand found a phrase he had reason to trust more than the rest of his hoard, because he owned one whole piece of it already: three carved beats with a sound folded into the middle of them that he knew, that he'd known since a black lake and a name struck against a chest—Balfus. He had heard this exact shape off the balcony a dozen times, always first, always answered the same agreeable way, and he had reasoned, the way a trapper reasons from a partial track, that a phrase carrying that particular name could only be good weight to put behind a trade. He said it.

"Per Herre Balthus — auðite."

The merchant stopped moving.

Not the settling-stop of the first day, when the strangeness of him had washed through and passed. A full stop, hands flat on the stall, eyes coming up to him—and then the pale thing straightened off its habitual hunch, the first time Moggruk had ever seen one of them do it unbidden, and made the low agreeable sound, alone, and began—quickly, almost fumbling—to wrap not the whiskerfish but everything: the fish, a jar, a folded cloth, its long hands flying, gabbling something rapid and deferent in which Moggruk caught, twice, the sound-shape he knew meant the tall one who ran the stone cup. And down the gallery, one stall and then another, heads were turning—not at the strange grey-green customer, they had stopped seeing him days ago—turning at the phrase, at where the phrase had come from, and a pale thing in heavier cloth at the gallery's far end put down what it was holding and started, unhurried but very definitely, to walk toward him.

He understood his snare in the time it took the first parcel to hit the stall-top. The balcony phrase was not an opening-sound. It was a claiming-sound—a sound that said, before anything else got said, on behalf of. He had picked up a word that did not describe the world; it appointed the speaker a place in it, a place with cloth he was not wearing and questions arriving on legs, and there was no undoing-sound in his whole hoard big enough to take it back—hands up would unmake a trade, not a rank. So he spent the only coin that had never once failed him. He went still—not fleeing-still, which draws the eye of everything that hunts, but the other stillness, his life's whole work, the stillness that argues there was never anything here—and then he was off the gallery and down the drowned stair and gone along a route he had walked twice in each direction before ever trading a word in that place, because a trapper's first question about any new ground had been answered days ago, and the answer held.

He lay up that night in a dry vault two streets east with his heart going long after his breath had settled, and made himself take the lesson whole, both halves of it, the fright and the finding, because they had arrived together and only a fool keeps one twin.

The fright was plain: words were not snares after all, or not only. A snare catches what walks into it and holds no opinion of the setter. A word caught both ends. Say the wrong one and it was the speaker hanging upside down, spinning slow, waiting to see what came up the road.

But the finding—the finding he turned over until the sky went purple, and it was this: one phrase. One phrase, in his wrong mouth, with his wrong face, out of a wet sack of eels—and a country that had priced him at nothing for a week had straightened its back and started wrapping parcels. They had not checked him. There had been nothing to check—no cloth, no chair, no horn on a silver chain—and the merchant had not looked for any of it. It had heard the shape of a claim and filled the rest of the claimant in itself, the way—he went very still on the vault floor, arriving at it—the way the first merchant had looked at plain mud and filled in a treasure.

Dey don't see wot's dere, he thought, slow, cold, wide awake. Dey see wot da shape says ought to be dere.

He did not sleep after that. He lay in the dark pricing it, this one fact worth more than every word in his hoard together—because a trap, in the end, is only ever a shape that says food where the truth says otherwise, and he had just watched an entire country walk toward the shape.

The question was no longer whether the pale folk could be trapped.

The question was how a runt got the fancy to build the shape with.

The weeks taught him the city the way the bog had taught him water—a place at a time, a habit at a time, until his feet held more of it than his head did. He worked outward from the trading-place by his own old law of never twice the same ground in a week: the drowned squares where the boat-traffic thinned, the long walkways above the wet streets, and at last, south past the great stone cup itself, a quarter he had been leaving alone because it felt kept even by the standards of a country where everything was kept—two great halls of stone facing each other across a plaza, one dark, one pale, both streaked with the centuries of rain, and behind them, against the tall arched thing that walked on stone legs out of the southern hills and poured cold water into a basin all day and all night, a low sprawling building full of pools.

He found it at dusk, following the water-sound, and lay a long while on a wall watching before he understood what he was looking at, because it matched nothing in either of his countries. Pale folk floating. Not swimming anywhere, not fishing, not crossing—floating, at their ease, in still warm-smelling water, drifting from one dim chamber to the next through doorways sunk to the lintel, and around the whole slow scene, low over the pools, small quick shapes cutting the dusk air, snatching at the midge-clouds off the surface. Bats. He knew bats the way he knew rain. They worked the water in long stitching passes, between the columns and out again, and the floating pale folk watched them go with a fondness he could see from the wall, and nobody hunted anybody, and the whole place breathed a peace so total that Moggruk's first professional judgment of it was deep suspicion, followed slowly, over an hour of nothing happening, by the strangest thought he had ever had about the pale country: dis is wot dey do instead of bein' afraid.

He came back four dusks running before he tried it. It was the right ground for trying—one creature at a time, off its guard, half-asleep in warm water, far from any crowd—and on the fourth dusk the water held exactly one: an old one, floating alone on its back in the biggest pool with its long hands folded on its chest, wisps of white hair spread out around its skull, gazing up into the wheeling bats with an expression of perfect contentment. Moggruk slid into the far end the quiet way—which he had privately thought his own craft until forty pale swimmers had shown him what quiet water really was—and stood chest-deep a polite distance off, and made the opening-sound.

The old one startled pleasantly—a small splash, a bobbing recovery—and peered at him through the dusk. Moggruk held still and let himself be priced. He had learned, by now, roughly how the pricing went: the eyes traveled over him, the grey-green, the wet, the general shape of a creature standing in water like it belonged there, and then—he could all but watch it happen—settled on some answer that contented them.

the old one said, warmly, and then a stream of it, fast and pleased, out of which Moggruk caught perhaps one sound in six.

He caught the warm-word, and the middle-word, and the beckon that went with them, and the rest washed over him and away. What he kept was not the words. What he kept was the shape of what had just happened, because it was the mud-leaf again, seen now from the inside: the old thing had looked at an orruk in its bath and needed him to be something, and had reached out and made him something, all by itself, unasked, in the time it took to blink the water out of its eyes—and whatever the something was, it came with a welcome and a place in the warm middle, and Moggruk never did learn what he had been made that evening, and did not need to. I didn't even do nuffin, he thought, wading obligingly toward the middle. I just stood 'ere, an' 'e filled me in.

What followed was the most instructive hour of his life, and he spent most of it saying almost nothing, which was, it turned out, all the conversation required of him.

He had come with tests prepared—small fumbled phrases, half-sentences, words in wrong orders—meaning to find how much wrongness a pale thing would tolerate before the welcome curdled. He never found the bottom, because there was no bottom. Every gap he left, the old one filled. Every word he mangled came back to him mended—he could hear that much, his own crooked sound returned straightened, with a fond little nod attached, the way you'd steady a tired workman's elbow—and each time, the talk that followed was three times the size of anything he had asked for. He got out three sounds about the bats—the animal-word, the water-word, and a grunt where the grammar should have been—and the old one lit up like a torch-line, and rolled in the water, and flung one long dripping arm up at the wheeling shapes, and talked.

Moggruk understood none of it. He floated beside the old one and did what a watcher does instead of understanding: he followed the finger, and read the face. The finger pointed at bats—brown, quick, jag-winged, hoovering midges off water the colour of steeped bark—and the face, upturned beside his in the dusk, was doing the thing he had heard ten thousand do at once on the night of the lanterns: the long soft falling fondness, the sound of tools being set down. At one point the old one lifted a palmful of the pool and let it run glittering off its fingers and said something short and reverent over it—"Klar som glas. Se det. Beint frá bergarne, denne."—and Moggruk looked at the brown water running off the pale hand, and then at the face above it, and the face was full of plain honest love for what it was seeing.

And there, chest-deep in the warm dark, the trap he had set aside a month ago—the one marked still armed—finally sprang, harmlessly, in his hands, and gave up its answer whole.

The merchant had not cheated him. That was the whole terrible size of it. He had been carrying the mud-leaf all this time as a puzzle about one pale thing's face, and it was not about one face, because here was another face, old and kind and half-asleep, wearing the exact same honesty at a palmful of brown water—and no creature alive wears a cheat's face by accident, but a whole country cannot wear one on purpose. The wrongness was not in the faces. It was upstream of the faces. Something stood between the pale folks' eyes and the world—something patient, and enormous, and always on—and whatever the world handed them, it handed them back better: mud made treasure, brown made clear, a wet runt made welcome. They were not a country of liars. They were a country being lied to, all of them, all the time, every waking hour, and not one of them knew, and Moggruk lay very still in the warm water beside the happiest creature he had ever met, and felt the plan behind his teeth shift and settle and grow a size larger—because a country that finished your sentences for you was a country that would finish your lie for you, and do it better than you ever could, and thank you after.

He tried one more test before he went, because a trapper proves a line before he trusts it. He assembled, with enormous care, his best sentence yet—the far-word, the bowl-word he'd traded for at the fish-stalls, and the Spektakl sound, which he had never yet said aloud to any pale thing—and laid it out crooked and half-built:

The old one turned in the water, and puzzled at him a moment, and then delight came up in the ruined moon of its face like light rising.

one long hand rose out of the water and pointed, north, unerringly, at the great dark tiered shape standing against the last of the light—

and on, and on, warm and helpful and entirely wrong, building out of Moggruk's three crooked words not the far bowl in the canyon but the near one, the known one, the only bowl the old thing's whole mortal life had ever held—and Moggruk caught the name-shape he knew and followed the pointing finger to the stone cup he had climbed twice in the dark, and filed the answer as the finishing working exactly as the finishing worked. It did not trouble him that the answer pointed at the wrong bowl. His words had been bad; the old one had built what it could from bad wood; a better sentence would build the better thing. That was how he priced it, floating there in the warm dark—and he was wrong, in a small quiet way that would take him some while yet to find, because the fault that evening had not been in his words at all. Some countries a sentence cannot reach because it is broken. Some it cannot reach because the creature hearing it has never in its life been told the world is larger than the water it bathes in. Moggruk did not yet know there was a difference. He would learn it standing in front of the one pale thing in the city who did.

The old one talked the moon up. Moggruk listened to every word he could not understand, and understood, and when it at last hauled itself dripping and content up the submerged steps, it paused, and looked back at the strange still shape in the dark water, and said something warm and final with the good-parting sound in it, and Moggruk returned the good-parting sound, correctly, and watched it go.

Then he lay back alone in the warm water of the pale country's gentlest place, under the stitching bats, floating the way he had floated in black bog-water a hundred nights before any of this, and assembled the whole of what the weeks had bought: the words, enough of them now; the rule of the margins, still holding; the pricing, and the mending, and the finishing—a country that would greet its own robbery at the door and carry it inside and set a place for it at the table.

What he did not have was the fancy. Words started the shape, but the fancy was what the shape got built on—the cloth, the carved talk, the reason a country straightens its back—and a runt in a wet sack of eel-water could no more counterfeit fancy than he could counterfeit being tall.

One fing at a time, he thought, and slid out of the pool the quiet way, and went east in the dark, toward home, to spend his second telling at a fire that had laughed at his first.

Mudda Ironchin unbent her knee on a grey noon with the whole hall watching, because that was the only way Mudda did anything.

There was no challenge in it, which was the part Moggruk filed hardest. She did not come at Vragg; she came to him, stood square in front of the pillar that was not a boss-seat, and said her piece in the flat carrying voice of a creature reading out a tally: the knee had been bent to Wutzgut, for meat; the meat was thin and Wutzgut was thinner; the debt had died with the creditor, and the Reekfen were going back east, to the bogs, where the country was poor but the country was theirs, and any orruk who liked the sound of that could walk with them and welcome. Then she waited, arms folded, iron to the last, to see if the new almost-boss meant to make it a fight.

And Vragg—Moggruk watched him do it, watched the old Vragg and the new one change grips on the moment like two hands on one haft—did not make it a fight. He looked at her a long, level while, and then he said, "Da door's dere," and turned back to the watch-list, and that was the whole of it. No roar. No wager of teeth. It cost him more than a fight would have—anyone could see that; a fight was a thing Vragg knew how to win—and it was also, by every count Moggruk could run, correct: you do not bleed for mouths you cannot fill, and every mouth that walked out was a mouth the thin lines no longer had to feed. Right ain't da fing wot won, Moggruk thought, watching him not-fight, an' 'e's learned it. Dat's da new floor goin' in. He was not sure Vragg had noticed himself standing on it.

They went the next morning, Mudda and her Reekfen and more besides—hungry ones, young ones, a brace of Splitlips who had folded in once already and saw no shame in folding again—and when the gate had scraped shut behind the last of them, the count in Nibz's stones that evening came to twenty and six, and the hall, which had been too big for fifty, sat around its one fire in a quiet that had a new taste to it. Not grief. Arithmetic. Half a klan does not mourn the half that walked; it recounts the racks, and shortens the watch-list, and hears, under everything, the one question nobody asks aloud: an' 'ow long till da next lot goes?

Moggruk gave it two nights. Then, when the fire was low and the hall was sleeping, he crossed to the pillar, and spent his second telling.

He had built this one the way he now built everything—prepared ground, tested weight, an order to the laying-out. He did not start with the plan. He started with the eels, and the pricing of them, a country so fat it paid food out for noise; and then the bowl, Nibz's bowl, downriver, cut for crowds and squatted by a tick; and then, the load-bearing course, the thing he had spent a month of dusks proving: that he could walk among the pale folk, and trade among them, and talk among them, because their eyes did not work like eyes—because they looked at wot woz dere an' saw wot ought to be—and he laid it all out slow, one stone on another, and watched it land on Vragg the way it had never once landed on the old one in the warm pool, which is to say: it just lay there. No finishing. No filling-in. Vragg took each piece exactly as said, no larger, and stacked them in a silence that grew heavier as the stack grew taller—and Moggruk, somewhere in the middle of it, understood with a small distant jolt that the trick did not work here. Orruks under-read. Orruks made you carry the whole weight of a thing to their feet and drop it, and even then they walked around it twice before they'd touch it. He filed that, even then, mid-telling: da pale country builds yer lie for ya. Yer own folk make ya say it plain.

So he said it plain. "Dey got everyfing, boss. Food to frow away. An' dere's a bowl on dat river wot's sittin' dark, an' a city wot 'ud pay anyfing to see it lit. Somebody's gonna stand in da middle of dat sum an' get fat off da addin'. I mean it to be us."

The fire ticked. Vragg sat with his forearms on his knees, looking not at Moggruk but at the middle distance where he kept his counts, and when he finally spoke he did not say any of the things the old Vragg would have said. He said:

"S'pose it's all true." The words came slow, tested, like ground. "S'pose dey really is mad as birds, da lot of 'em. S'pose dey look at mud an' see treasure, look at you an' see—wotever dey like." His eyes came up, and there was no mockery in them anywhere, which was worse. "Runt. We seen wot mad does. A monf back. Mad come up dat road wiv shields, in step, quiet as fog, an' mad took da best klan wot ever woz apart in one night an' walked 'ome before breakfast." He shook his head, once, the slow way. "You wanna go stand in da middle of dat, an' talk at it, on da bet dat it finks yer somefink nice. One wrong word—one—an' dere ain't gonna be a wall for you to watch da rest of us die from dis time. Dere ain't gonna be a rest of us. Dere's twenty-six." He let that number sit where he'd put it. "Da answer's no."

And Moggruk, who had walked in carrying a month of proof, found he had nothing to put against it—because it was not stupid, and it was not scared, and it was not Wutzgut's blindness wearing a new face. It was the exact same count Moggruk himself ran every day of his life, run honestly, by a creature whose whole charge was twenty-six mouths and a fire, and it came out no, and the terrible thing about it was that Moggruk could find the flaw in it nowhere except in the one place Vragg could not follow him: in the file, behind his teeth, where a country of finished sentences lived that Vragg had never walked.

Vragg watched him not-answer, and something in the big shoulders eased a fraction—not triumph; relief, maybe, that the runt had no rope to pull him out onto that water with. Then he did the boss-thing, the good one, the one Wutzgut had never learned: he gave the beaten argument somewhere to go.

"Lines is thin," he said, gruff, turning back to the fire. "You're da best ground-reader we got, an' yer already wanderin'—don't fink I don't count ya out an' back. So wander useful. Go west if ya like, go wherever ya go—an' find us food, runt. New water, new runs, somefin' da twenty-six can eat." A pause, and then, flat, final, not unkind: "Dat's da job. Not bowls. Not fancies. Food."

Moggruk stood a moment in the fire's last light, holding both halves of what he had just been handed—the no, entire and honestly won; and underneath it, unnoticed by the creature who had given it, a door standing wide open. Go west. Wander useful. Find us somefin' to eat.

He had told Vragg the truth, and the truth had lost. He filed that. And he went back to his wall, and lay down next to the small stacked stones of everything that was left, and stared into the dark with his heart going strange and slow, because west was where the food was, that part was no lie at all—and the finding of it, the true finding, the kind that would feed twenty-six forever, was going to look, for a long time before it looked like anything else, exactly like a runt talking to the maddest things in the world.

Right, den, he thought. Food it is.