Rokhaset moved forward. As we went to follow, he stopped and held out a hand. “Wait a moment, please. I wish to be able to examine this clearly, and your presence with all of your iron makes that impossible.”
We waited as he moved about thirty yards on, then stopped and examined the light again. There was a click and we were in darkness. “Hey!” I said.
“Just testing. So it is now no longer giving you illumination?”
“It’s off.”
He verified this by switching it on and off several times, then brought it back to us. “I believe I can arrange something, if I understand the operation correctly.” Rokhaset screeched some orders to his people, and then gestured for us to follow. “There are many things for us to discuss, I believe, but first it is time for us to speak together as friends. It has been a very, very long time indeed since my people and yours spoke as one people.”
“I wondered about that. There are legends among our people about spirits who live in the earth and who fear the sunlight or who are vulnerable to iron.”
“The ‘sunlight,’ as you call it, merely confuses some of us, and can damage our eyes over time by causing them to fog. There are some beings that avoid your sunlight for more pressing reasons.” Rokhaset spoke those words as we passed along a polished-looking corridor. “But I am surprised by your people even having legends, for the time when the Nowëthada and the Tennathada walked and spoke together is many generations past even for my people. Indeed, it was thought to be no more than legend by many of the Nowëthada, as none of them could even tell whether your people spoke at all.”
We emerged now into another large hall, but this one seemed oval and had what appeared to be a long table and chairs of odd designs in it, with many Nomes going back and forth. The others formed into an honor guard as we approached. The High Spirit seated himself in the center of one long side of the table, and indicated we were to sit directly opposite him on the other side. The table was about five feet wide, allowing for plenty of room. The chairs were a bit short for us—not unexpected—but after a few minutes of sitting in them seemed surprisingly comfortable, though my legs did feel that they had very little clearance below the top of the table.
“I’ve been thinking about what you just brought up, Rokhaset,” Jodi said finally. “The problem is that there’s no way you could have talked with us before. It wasn’t until the past, oh, fifty years or so that we could’ve built gadgets that would let us hear you, and you hear us.”
” ‘Gadgets’?” Rokhaset repeated, puzzled. “Gadgets . . . Do you mean these ‘machines’ like the ones you carry that make your voices sound like ours?”
“Yes.”
“Ah. Well, in those days, there was no need of such things. As our legends and histories relate it, we were a much closer people in the ancient time; that is, you and I would have seemed less alien to one another, and we would have had ways of speaking together that would be considerably more simple. But then came the Makurada Demagon . . . the, hmm, what would make sense in your language . . . the ‘Senseless Shattering’? Ah, no . . . Darkness? Hmmm . . . Perhaps the best expression would be something like ‘Plague of Blindness.’ But that implies a disease, which this was not; it was a disaster which struck the whole world and affected it in different ways for each of the peoples who then inhabited it. The Nowëthada lost contact with Nowë, who was sore injured by the Makurada, and with your people, and while apart, we changed.”
“Who is Nowë?”
“You would call Nowë our patron deity, god or goddess of the Earth. That is what Nowëthada means, the People of Nowë. It is at Nowë’s will that we exist. We are the servants of the Earth, made to oversee the interaction of the living rock with those other things that live upon it.” He sat up a bit straighter. “Ah, tell me how this seems to you.”