Lawrence Schoen - Barsk - The Elephants' Graveyard

Jorl rose from the floor, finding his feet and moving about the room. It felt good to be warm again. The Matriarch remained in her hammock, sitting, regarding him.

“Delusion? Child, you disappoint me. I had hoped for more insight from you, depended on it in fact. Did your time away from this world fail to open your eyes? Fine. So be it. The traditional methods are tradition because they work. In this instance, they require only minor alteration. Attend!”

She released a deep sigh, closing her eyes for a moment as if remembering or composing what she wanted to say. She began speaking again before opening them. “You are Jorl ben Tral, historian, Speaker, and most recently, captive. Your time in life has not yet ended; you are now as you are in life, in this, a world of my own making. I bid you welcome. Understand?”

He froze. The words differed in some particulars, but he knew the rest well enough. He knew their cadence and he knew their context, and the impossibility of them filled him with confusion. Margda had used the ritual of establishing; he’d done it himself often enough, grounding a newly summoned conversant. Was she implying that she had summoned him ? But only the dead could be summoned, and only those who were not Speakers could be summoned. And in any case, certainly not by a Speaker who herself had died centuries ago.

“I can see you have questions, but I don’t have the luxury of time to answer them for you. Accept what you see as true. I am Margda, you know me. And yes, I am Speaking to you, despite my being dead, despite you being alive, and despite your own status as a Speaker. I made the rules of the Speaker’s Edict specifically so I could come back and break them. I saw it in a vision, without the rules the future I sought wasn’t possible. I made them only to ensure that I could do what I saw needed to be done. I’m sneaky that way.”

Jorl walked back to her, unsure how to respond. He stopped in front of the hammock that raised her to standing height. He met her gaze and the words came.

“How can you break any rules? You’re dead!”

She glared back at him, her ears rippling with the Eleph idiom of irritation that spoke more eloquently than speech. Her eyes narrowed with obvious disgust.

“Don’t be an imbecile. You and I both know that death is hardly an impediment. I was summoned myself, days ago, by a young Speaker who also possessed a telepathic talent. A nefshon construct has the knowledge and experience its source possessed in life, and mine includes Speaking. That’s the danger in summoning any of our kind; such a conversant can still Speak.”

Jorl nodded, following the logic and obviousness of it. No Speaker had ever realized it because even considering the idea had been forbidden. By Margda.

“But … the nefshons of the living can’t be summoned—”

“Of course they can. You see the bundle of your own nefshons every time the koph takes hold. Summoning the living just takes more effort, wrenching the particles from the nefshon fabric of the conversant’s life.”

He gestured around him, “And the rest of this?”

“You’re the historian. This was my home, gone now but vivid to me as I saw it only days ago.”

“What happened days ago?”

“In my timeline? That’s when I sailed away.”

“So … other than the fact you’ve broken the first two rules of the Edict in Speaking to me, everything else about this summoning works like any other? And from your point of view, you’re at the far end of your life, but still alive.”

Margda’s eyes remained locked on his, and Jorl couldn’t look away.

“Good. You’re working it out. That should save us some time. Yes, I was summoned by another Speaker, one who tossed aside the first rule of my Edict. And, as a result, I in turn summoned you. Long ago, shortly after I stumbled upon the ability to manipulate nefshons, I had a vision of a young pharmer discovering a new drug, one with the potential to keep Barsk safe for centuries, or to completely overturn the balance the Compact had achieved with the Alliance. In my vision, the pharmer had a similar intuition and chose to end his own life rather than risk anyone else gaining knowledge of his creation.”

“How could one drug be responsible for so much?”

“Since my time, koph has allowed some sapients to Speak. Because the drug is plentiful at home, a diluted portion is part of annual celebrations that even children partake in. An immunity to the toxic effects builds up, and as a consequence Fant are orders of magnitude more likely to be discovered to be Speakers than all the other races combined. At the time of the Compact, this made the Alliance uncomfortable, and their attitude has only worsened since.”

“And the new drug? How does that change anything?”

“It changes everything! I believe he uncovered a koph agonist. Imagine a Speaker’s power to reveal information that vanished with the death of its keeper, expanding more than a thousandfold for the duration of a summoning. Every important person’s private indiscretion could be dug out from whatever pit it had been buried in. Industrial secrets would be discovered and stolen. Familial offenses that died with their principles would endure for endless generations. The potential blackmail and extortion would lead to draconian measures that would rewrite society at every level.”

Jorl gasped, the pieces falling into place. Margda continued to talk.

“The Bear major and the people he works for are desperate to learn how to refine koph for themselves, presumably to establish some parity by increasing the population of their own Speakers. They’re bumbling fools, the lot of them, and they’ll fail at their task. The methodology and their strategy make no sense. They haven’t yet even deduced that it’s derived from taww sap. Somehow they’ve gone off on a misperception that it’s distillation from a type of leaf though they’ve no clue which one in the entire forest it might be.”

“That’s why they’ve abducted the Dying?”

“Perhaps. Not everything is clear to me. I foresaw the new drug, but not its discoverer. Instead, I glimpsed the Lox who eulogized him, his Second who would be a Speaker. That was you, Jorl, eight hundred years in your past I saw you . I knew I would return, and I needed you to be at hand when I did. I arranged for you to have the aleph because our people need the secret your friend died to protect.”

Jorl’s face fell into his upraised hands. Tears streamed from eyes he hadn’t known were crying. “That’s why Arlo died. To protect us all.”

“Arlo?”

Sniffling, Jorl nodded. “My best friend. The pharmer you foresaw. He killed himself but would never tell me why.”

* * *

TOher surprise, Jorl’s simple remark was like turning her face up to fresh rain. She’d been lightly probing him all through their conversation, turning over this memory and that. The organization of his past surged in a myriad ways as she wandered through it, uncountable nodes of ideas and concepts, each connecting hundreds of thousands of others with bridges of different weights and saliencies, organized by sound and color and meaning and experience. Most of them looped back upon themselves over and over, each time subtly different than its previous incarnation. Untold individuals existed in Jorl’s mind and memory, some still living, others now dead, whom he had known in life, as well as people he had met only after their own deaths. He held too many for her to ever find by happenstance the one she sought.

Until he’d spoken a name and given her the key. Arlo. She pushed deeper into his mind, finding the node that defined all things bearing that name. A lifetime of detail so rich that even the weakest and stupidest of Speakers could have summoned him. But it meant nothing if she couldn’t hold on to it. In the midst of her probe, Margda felt her overtaxed telepathy fade away, taking the full sense of who and what Arlo was with it. Mere drabs remained, and even those threatened to slip away.