XXI. THE WORD OF GOND
Cuatala usually kept her distance from big folks. She felt rather than thought them to be oafish and silly. She liked her new companions, but they had not yet distinguished themselves from other big folks in her mind. Graddick was pure oaf, Vahaera pure silliness, and Ystrien a perfect mixture of the two. They were loud and made big gestures. She, meanwhile, came from a people who preferred whispers to shouts and telepathy to whispers. It was for animals and birds to scream in the steaming forest; the hin padded through ferns and cool dells disturbing nothing. And yet, that afternoon, she had chosen to slip away from the Breakwater and spend her spare hours with another big person.
The Purple Portals stood a block from the marketplace. Its name came from the purple banners outside each entrance. Because it was a temple to Gond, the god of invention and craft, the builders had seen fit to adopt the latest techniques and embellishments in its design. The result was impressively distinct from the squat, plain structures nearby: four floors of pointed arches boxed in eight towers around a central dome. But it was also graceless, a mishmash of styles crammed together like papers in an archive. Cautala thought it was monstrous and ugly, and it was, on the whole. But here and there a detail the eye fell on at random–the half-smile of a winged bull, subtle grooves meant to be harp strings, an assembly of gears rendered precisely in stone–captured the imagination. As she went in, Cuatala saw a child hiding among flowers in a frieze.
She passed through the Hall of Wonders and several doors, each to a different Chapel of Industry or Chapel of Craft, where the altars doubled as tables for study and experiment.
“May I help you?” asked a gnome in clerical robes.
“I’m looking for the High Artificer,” said Cuatala.
“Right this way–he’s in the library.”
The High Artificer’s face brightened when he saw Cuatala. He was a human in his mid-thirties, almost dashing except for the tiredness around his eyes–a tiredness that only lived there, because everything else about him seemed to carry an electric charge.
“Cuatala! Got away from running errands for Ulblyn, I see? Wonderful. How long has it been? Is that so? And how are you progressing? You can? Good! Let’s see–this is what I had you looking at, wasn’t it? The Tharran Chronicles?”
She took the book he offered her and opened it.
“Turn to page one hundred and one. Now, read the first full paragraph on that page.”
Cuatala began, stumbling only a little. “And so King…Vor…byx conq–conquered the valley of Uz and brog…”–“The g is silent”–“brought his hammer down on the tribe of…Gour-slaz?”–“Close enough, it’s an Orcish name”–“Gourslaz the Bloody-Minded, from plain to coast… That land was his.”
