The houses on either side were for sale, Tess noted with sorrow but little surprise.
The youngster ushered her inside, and Tess paused in the front hall, breathing rapidly through her nose to put her sense of smell to sleep. The ground floor was deserted, although the hatchling insisted on opening every door and showing Tess their collection of fine human furniture: exquisite hardwood chairs, claw-footed couches, painted screens, inlaid tables, fancy boot jacks and coat trees, credenzas the size of small islands, paintings of Samsamese earls, suits of antique dracomachia armor in lifelike poses…more furniture and objets d’art than Tess could take in at once, let alone identify, jumbled together in the most unusable fashion.
“Four parlors,” said the little one, cocking its spines. “Does anyone else have four?”
“Indeed not,” said Tess. Cragmarog and the Queen’s residences didn’t count. “You can’t sit in them, though. That’s the reason for parlors, as I understand it. To sit in.”
“We can’t sit on chairs like that,” scoffed the youngster. “It’s in case we have guests.”
They went upstairs, where there were workshops for making devices. The dormitory floors were farther up, the hatchling said, but Tess didn’t need to see those. The quigutl would have made themselves nests so they could sleep in heaps; the house would barely look like a house up there. Tess followed the youngster down a short hall into a sunny room filled with, intriguingly, quigutl-style furniture: couches or benches, allowing them to lie on their bellies with their hands free to work. Several of the lizard-like creatures were working here. Some had affixed magnifying lenses into the openings of their eye cones, to do delicate, close-up work on thniks. Some worked on larger objects—jennies, groglets, pilchards, woles—or welded joints with the jet of fire at the end of their hollow tongues. Hot metallic smoke curled toward the ceiling.
Across the room, a smallish quigutl swiveled one eye at Tess, then the other, then raised the front of its body upright and cried, “Tethie!”
Tess’s mouth fell open. This quigutl was a male, with ruddy streaks on his throat; he couldn’t be the same Pathka, who’d been laying eggs when Tess first met her. And yet he knew her name (the notorious quigutl lisp was only apparent to Tess when they tried to pronounce Goreddi words; her name was a challenge). She knew the voice, and even though it sounded like a heron choking on a frog—a double-strong croak, as it were—it brought a lump to her throat.
What other quigutl would know her name or be happy to see her? At least…maybe he was happy. He’d made no move to leave his couch.
“Pathka, is it really you?” Tess managed.
“I might ask the same thing. You’ve grown so tall,” said Pathka, head spines waggling playfully. “But come closer so I can sniff you. I can’t leave my bench.”
Tess picked her way among the working quigutl, who ignored her, and saw that Pathka wasn’t exaggerating: a manacle around one ankle bound him to the workbench with a chain. Tess knelt beside him, holding out her arm to be sniffed and studying his scaly face as he did so. This was Pathka, all right; there was the broken head spine, and the scar behind her ear where her mother had bitten her.
His mother. Its mother?
“Youuuu,” said Pathka in a long exhale, “have been having adventures without me.”
“None worth the name,” said Tess, smiling apologetically.
“Nonsense. You’re a mother, I whiff. Congratulations!”
Tess withdrew her arm, embarrassed. So much had happened since she last saw Pathka; there seemed suddenly a great chasm of time and experience between them. “What are you doing here?” she said, gracelessly changing direction. “How is it that you’re male now?”
Pathka clapped his mouth, quigutl laughter, and said, “I became male three years ago. It was overdue. The others teased me, ‘Do you want to lay another clutch of eggs, after it nearly killed you?’ But I worried thuthmeptha would hurt.”
Tess didn’t know the word thuthmeptha; few non-quigutl did. Even the greater dragons of the Tanamoot, who stayed one sex their whole lives, didn’t quite comprehend it. Quigutl couldn’t change into humans like the saar could, but the drive to change was still in them. They changed back and forth from female to male several times across their life spans, and evidently thuthmeptha was what they called that process. It was like the metamorphosis of a caterpillar in its chrysalis, though the caterpillar, that rank amateur, only manages it once.
Tess filed the word away for later. “But how did you come to Trowebridge? You left without saying goodbye, and no one knew where you’d gone.” Her words came out accusingly, as if Tess’s life might have turned out differently had Pathka not gone missing. Pathka would surely have kept her out of trouble.
Tess misremembered: Pathka was always more likely to get her into trouble than out of it.
“They knew,” said Pathka. “A whole nest of us came east together. We were tired of the city and heard life was simpler in Trowebridge.”
Around the room, the other quigutl, who’d been unsubtly listening in, slapped tails in agreement.
“Simpler how?” asked Tess, glancing uncertainly at the others. Pathka was the only one chained to a worktable; things surely hadn’t turned out the way he’d hoped.
“I can’t speak for others,” said Pathka, “but I wanted to escape the tyranny of money.”
The other quigutl shifted uncomfortably, now anxious to pretend they weren’t listening.
Pathka continued, too loudly to ignore: “There was a time when we used our hands, minds, and fiery tongues for the joy of it. When following our nature was its own reward. Now we ceaselessly quest after coin. I find this a hollow existence.”
Around the room, quigutl body language rose and swelled like a wave. Tess had been quite adept at interpreting it, but it was a long while since she’d been faced with so much of it at once. Here was a skeptical shoulder roll, there a spinal arch of irritation (or anxiety? She was out of practice). Nervous tails moved side to side in quick flicks, angry ones in a steady, deliberate wave.
Tess gleaned from this symphony of motion that the whole room was suddenly tense and defensive. Pathka had insulted everyone.
“You oversimplify our history and clog it with nostalgia,” croaked an old female across the room. “You omit the generations of quigutl who were compelled to their craft by dragons; the way humans and dragons would like to harvest our labor without compensation; the way they’ve scorned us for living like beasts, without the refinements of civilization.”
The gathered quigutl puffed their throat pouches and chattered agreement: “True. We have money now, a tangible good. They have to respect us and take us seriously.”
Pathka swiveled an eye cone at Tess and wobbled it sarcastically. “And so the quigutl of this age mistake bemusement for respect, resentment for tolerance, and money for joy.”
“Whereas you mistake dreams for reality,” countered the old female. “You’d take us back toward powerlessness and subservience, to lose ourselves in myth. What joy is there in that?”
“Brethren, it is time for dinner,” said a much younger female, appearing in the doorway.
“Yes, go,” Pathka called after the rest, who slithered off their benches and bolted for the door. “Eat on schedule. Sleep on schedule. Poop on schedule.”
“Stop harassing them, Mother,” said the young quigutl who’d called them to dinner.
“Teth,” said Pathka, gesturing at the youngster, “do you remember Kikiu?”
The juvenile reared up and folded her ventral arms across her chest, a very human pose. Tess didn’t recognize her or her name. Pathka said, “Ko is my offspring, the one who survived. The one you persuaded me to spare.”