Glisselda had to be told Jannoula was working for the Old Ard, maybe even acting under orders in Samsam. She would be traveling to Goredd to join the other ityasaari soon, if she hadn’t already. The Queen needed to capture her and lock her up before she could do any more damage.
I pulled out the thnik I’d acquired in Porphyry and would have used it at once, but Mitha cried, “They’ll hear you!” He snatched the device from my hand and tossed it down his gullet, chain and all.
I stared at him, appalled.
Mitha made an inscrutable clicking sound in his throat; I couldn’t tell whether he was scolding or apologizing. “The Censors will detect unauthorithed transmissionth. Come. We will talk when you have thlept.”
I swayed on my feet, exhaustion finally catching me up, and didn’t have the wherewithal to protest. He led me back to the warren by a different route—no operating theaters—but when we reached his nest, it was full. About twenty quigutl lay in a heap together. “There’th room,” Mitha insisted. “Pile in.”
I eyed the sleeping quigs. “They won’t be alarmed to see me when they wake?”
“Perhapth,” was all he said before scurrying off again.
I found some edge space where I didn’t touch anyone, but this part of the floor was covered in bark shavings, which poked my skin. Exhausted though I was, my nerves vibrated alertly. I thought about entering my neglected garden and sending a message through Lars again, but the last time had ended with Viridius hurt. Whom else could I contact? Who wasn’t compromised by now? I lay a long time, despairing.
Sleep crept up on me like a glacier.
Sticky finger pads prodded my cheek. I sat bolt upright when I realized what they must be; half a dozen quigs scattered away from me, some up the walls and across the ceiling. I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. The only light shone through the hole from the corridor. I could not tell what time it was.
“Mitha said to wake you,” called one from the ceiling above me, defensively.
“We’re collecting thnikth,” said another. “You’re to help uth.”
“How long did I sleep?” I asked, flopping back down.
“A very long time! It’s not today anymore. It’s tomorrow. That Porphyrian dragon ith already up, being helpful.” They all did that peculiar mouth clap Mitha had done, and I wondered if that was quigutl laughter.
They gave me a meal of tough mountain greens and undercooked yak; it was dreadful, but at least nothing was rotten. I followed a gang of youngsters through service tunnels so low I couldn’t stand. The quigs sneaked into the personal lairs of the Censors and doctors, located thniks and thnimis (devices that also transmitted images), and squirreled them away in their mouths. Then they came back to the tunnel and regurgitated everything into a little wagon, which I wheeled past the warren into an area so tight and remote I could barely squeeze into it. A quig at that end unloaded all the devices into a storage room.
Of course, some of the devices were around the necks and wrists of Censors and doctors. Once we’d cleared out the lairs, Mitha used the interlab thnimi to broadcast his knobby face and crackling lisp to every corner of Lab Four: “Attention, Censorth! All transmitting devices must be submitted for upgrade. Compliance is mandatory, as per Censorial Order five-nine-five-oh-six dash nine.”
The dragons cooperated, lining up in the oversized corridors and dropping their thniks into a mechanical wheelbarrow Mitha had set up near the chemical labs. From an air vent near the ceiling, I watched and listened to draconic small talk—who had bitten whom, how come Inna went on leave, the molecular composition of that new neurotoxin, why yaks don’t get as fat as they used to. Their thniks were larger than the ones saarantrai carried, dragon bracelets that would be a heavy neck chain to a human, rings that would be bracelets. Some had thniks fastened to their heads with cobwebby filaments so that they might talk with their talons unencumbered.
I lay on my stomach in a duct. The quigutls that had jammed in on either side of me kept rubbing themselves against me like cats. After a while it was too much for me, and I hissed, “Stop that!”
“Can’t,” said the one nearest my face. “If they thmell you, you’re dead and all Eskar’s hard work is thpoiled.”
It was hard to imagine that anyone capable of such tedious small talk would kill me, but four quigutl engineers had been mercilessly torched that day, one for getting too close to a Censor’s person uninvited, the others for seeking out thniks hidden in the dragons’ lairs. I went with Mitha’s nestlings to visit them in the quigutl infirmary when our work was done. It was a brightly lit space, with several small egg-shaped pools in the floor. The injured engineers each lay in one, soaking in some viscous liquid. Brisi was helping alongside the nursing quigs, scooping up the ooze with a ladle and pouring it over tender, charred heads. The hurt quigutl seemed cheerful enough, considering that burned, blackened skin was peeling off their bodies.
“Don’t worry, they’re on destultia,” a quig whispered in my ear. “They feel the pain, but they don’t mind it anymore.”
I was pondering this statement when Mitha arrived. He greeted each of his engineers in turn and then scampered up to me. He’d brought my flute from the warren; he presented it to me with a flourish of dorsal hands. “I hoped you might play a song for uth,” said Mitha. He ran a hand over his eye cone. “I wrote it. I will sing, and you harmonithe.”
“I like fifths!” someone piped up. “The wavelengths are integer multipleth!”
“I like tritones!” cried someone else.
Mitha coughed up an ember, spat it on the floor, and began to intone:
O saar, beware!
Beware the horde,
The ones you never see.
We build your lairth,
Repair, invent,
We do all this for free.
You torch our hideth,
You crunch our boneth,
Kill with impunity.
But we are not Tho helpless now.
Our day cometh. We are free.
I stared dumbfounded, not merely because he’d come up with a poem that scanned and rhymed, but because the tune was so perfectly tuneless that I had no idea how to begin to play along. I couldn’t just play fifths because I couldn’t figure out what note he was singing. It wasn’t so much a particular note as a low, throaty rumble, but then there were shrill, whistling harmonics coming through his nose. It reminded me of Brasidas’s sinus-singing at the harbor market.
I worried whether the sound would carry through the tunnels, but the quigs weren’t worried, and they surely knew their mountain better than I did. I decided to shrill along with him. I sent up some experimental whistles. Around me the quigs murmured; it sounded approving, but I couldn’t tell for certain until they started keening along with us.
We produced the most unholy cacophony, like fighting tomcats or the blast furnaces of the Infernum. The music brought tears to my eyes, not because it was teeth-grindingly dissonant but because they were all so swept up by it. They reached for each other as they sang, with hands and tails—one wrapped around my ankle—and with their crooning notes. If I closed my eyes, I could hear what they were doing, tendrils of sound curling and responding to each other, like pea shoots spiraling around a stake. The stake was Mitha’s lyrics, the one steady point of reference. This was art, quigutl art, and in some oblique fashion it was what I’d been looking for, what Dame Okra had once mocked.
I’d found my people and they weren’t even mine.