Questioner had already adjusted her senses to pick up the talk of the Timmys, which she was stowing away while her internal translator worked at it. Give her a few days, and she’d know their tongue as well as the fifty or so others she’d come equipped with.
Ornery leaned to whisper into Mouche’s ear. “What do you think of her, the Questioner?”
Mouche considered it. He had spent hours every day for some years considering what this or that individual woman was like, for if one could not know that, one could hardly be a Consort.
“I think she’s sad,” he whispered back. “Not showing it, of course. Very soldierly about everything and taking a proper pride in her duty, but underneath, she could use a bit of happiness.”
Ornery, surprised, sat back in her own place, thinking of what Mouche had said. All in all, she thought, Mouche was probably right. Questioner, who had heard every syllable, was slightly surprised.
The tube in which they were floating began to narrow slightly. From ahead came louder water sounds. Without interference from those aboard, the two little boats lined up end to end, their speed increased to a dizzying rush that carried them through the last narrow bit of small tunnel into another with a diameter several times as large. Beside the boats, a huge eye, like a pale balloon, emerged from the dark water and stared at them. Great dripping, weed-hung swags of line or cable pulled themselves above the water, dark against the background glow, heaving the boats into the slower current. Not cable. Too thick for cable. Tentacles. Far above, the higher, broader ceiling shone softly with fractal patterns of amber and emerald.
The two canoes stayed in line, as though they were linked, and the moon-eye ahead of them swiveled from left to right before turning in the direction of their movement, the joined boats holding steady in the slow current.
A voice drifted back to them, “Drink this water now. To make you visible.”
Ornery began to laugh. “So now we’re invisible.”
“It isn’t funny,” complained Mouche.
“You are only darkness, Mouche,” said Questioner. “You’re a black hole in the middle of light. I’ve been analyzing the water. I detect no impurities that would endanger your health, but it does have luminescent bacteria in it. Presumably, if you drink the water, soon you will glow, and we can see you. I must admit, I’m curious to see a glowing Mouche, a shimmering Ornery!”
“The bacteria? They won’t make you glow?” asked Ornery.
“Probably not. But I can make myself glow, so you know where I am and what I’m about. I’d like to know what that thing was that came up just beside us?”
“Joggiwagga,” whispered the darkness.
“Joggiwagga,” murmured Questioner. “I’ve heard that before.”
“It is Joggiwagga who raises the pillars,” said Ornery. “It is Joggiwagga who keeps track of time, by the moonshadows. I saw one once, by the side of the sea, setting up the stones!”
“Dangerous,” whispered the voice. “To be seen by Joggiwagga on the land.”
“I moved very fast,” Ornery confessed.
“Wise,” murmured the darkness. “Wise. It would not hurt us for we are part of it, but you are not.”
“What do you mean, you are part of it?” asked the Questioner. “You are part of Joggiwagga?”
A verdant glow ahead of them billowed, then shrank once more, as hair was tossed wide and then fell into place. “Joggiwagga is part, we are part, all everything is Dosha, all is made in Fauxi-dizalonz, except you people and jongau people and Her and Niasa.”
“What are jongau?” the Questioner asked.
“Bent people. People not put together right. That Ashes one is jongau. That Bane, that Dyre, they are jongau. All their kinfolk and like, many, many more! They are not finished. They are only half done, and they smell bad. They should have the courtesy to die, but they do not.”
“And who are the Corojumi?” the Questioner pursued.
Out of darkness: “Once were many Corojumi to open spaces, make the dances, fix what is broken … “
“And Bofusdiaga?”
“Bofusdiaga mixes things together. Bofusdiaga stops pains and breaks chains and burrows walls and sings to the sun. That is Bofusdiaga.”