Free Bastion by Mercedes Lackey Page A

notes.
    “Don’t have one in their own tongue,” Mags replied. “They don’t do games.” They didn’t, of course. Everything was serious with those people, and as far as he could tell, nothing was ever done for sheer pleasure.
    “Tell me the word they use, then,” the priest replied, and noted down what Mags said, asking him to pronounce it carefully several times to make sure he got it right.
    And that was when things got . . . interesting. Mags had thought that these people had an entire language, and for some things they actually did. But there were entire concepts missing, mostly having to do with, well, living. They didn’t have words for too many kinds of food, for instance. Or anything that someone might do in his leisure time. They had to borrow words for these things from some other language, and it didn’t take long before Sorensen put down his pen with an expression of satisfaction.
    “I’m done with you, Mags, at least for now, although if you ever want to help me compile a full dictionary I would be very pleased to monopolize your time for as long as Herald’s Collegium will let me,” he said, and turned to the others. “Heralds, I have your answer. As I suspected, when you described this culture to me, they are not nearly so far away from us as we had thought. And rather than being a culture, they are more of a—sect, of sorts. A very secretive clanlike group that lives almost unknown within a greater Kingdom. And that Kingdom is Thurbrigard. I suspect they are hidden in the mountains, and not one person in five hundred thousand knows they exist.”
    “Well, that explains why Karse got involved,” Nikolas said thoughtfully. “And why they had some tokens from the Shin’a’in with them, if they went straight west at first, looking for the boy, then doubled back and went north.”
    “Even so,” the priest agreed. “And being in the midst of Thurbrigard, they have their own language only for those things that are important to them. For anything that is foreign to the clan culture, they must use the words of the people around them.”
    “Having their own language would allow them to speak in front of others without giving themselves away,” Nikolas observed. “Well! Now we are much farther ahead than we had been. Possibly there are some in Menmellith or Rethwellan who have diplomatic or trade ties there—”
    Mags had no idea what on earth good that would do him, but at least now he had a location for “his” people.
    “All right, Mags, consider yourself released,” said Herald Nikolas, with that look in his eyes that told Mags that he really wanted the Trainee to be elsewhere so he could discuss things with the others. Mags was adept at taking Nikolas’s hints, and made himself scarce.
    Besides, he wanted to go to the library, the Heraldic Archives, and the Guard Archives. Whatever there was to learn about Thurbrigard—he was going to find it.

4
    M ags leaned up against the fence and watched the Reds and the Greens skirmishing against each other in Kirball practice. He’d had to get outside for a while; the dust in the Archives was beginning to make him sneeze, and his eyes were getting tired from perusing all the closely written pages of ancient reports. The sun was warm on his back and the air so clean out here that it made him wonder why he was bothering to spend so much time inside when this weather was so fleeting.
    Well, he knew why. The Archivists wouldn’t let him take the boxes of reports outside to read.
    So far he hadn’t found terribly much. Mostly, anything useful had been buried in the interviews that the Guard did with traders and entertainers before they were allowed to pass the Border. Thurbrigard was so very far away that no one had taken much thought to gathering intelligence on it. There were a very few mentions of it, and only then as places that traders said they carried goods from. Carved semiprecious gems for the most part: high value, small size.