Yet there was nothing he could do. There had been no opportunity to attempt wooing the Lagon with words. He was stuck in a rocky prison, all the giants out of earshot. And even if his luck changed this instant and the Lagon set him free and agreed to march to war at his side, there must be preparations for battle, and then the long journey back over the Dog’s Head. Indeed, the likeliest outcome of this adventure, even should he manage to win over his captors, was that they would not arrive in time to save the Sem or the royal twins.
If only he had access to the secret of Parros that had enabled Rinda and Remus to escape the burning Crystal Palace and journey with lightning swiftness to the Roodwood, far, far away! If he knew the workings of that ancient mechanism then it would be a simple affair to bring the Lagon armies right before the Mongauli in an instant—but this was an empty dream. Ah, Rinda, Remus, if only you knew how valuable you are! Your worth is greater than a thousand times your weight in diamonds. So precious you are that an entire army has gone mad trying to claim you. If the Mongauli could capture the twins, and through them the secret of Parros, then they would conquer not only the Middle Country, but the entire world.
Enough.
Guin lifted his head, pushing these thoughts from his mind. Some things it was better not to waste time pondering. He might be surrounded by enemies, and plunged into what was, by any reckoning, an entirely hopeless situation, but he had no intention of giving up and leaving his fate in the hands of the gods, for that was the coward’s way. If there came a day when the twins of Parros breathed their last, all the tribes of the Sem slaughtered down to the last brave warrior and a sword thrust through his own neck, that—and not a moment sooner— would be the day Guin stopped fighting.
Drip…
How could a simple sound be more maddening even than his thirst, or the hopelessness of his predicament? Wrapped in shadow, Guin swallowed his exasperation at the cruel workings of fate, forced down the bitter unease, and sat still as the rock around him.
Exerting his iron will, Guin wrenched his thoughts away from the burning thirst in his throat and considered the barbarians who had chained him there. Little was known about these giants of legend. Guin was likely the first man to have stepped within the borders of their territory in centuries, even millennia. The Lagon, together with the even more primitive Sem, were the only two peoples to live in this accursed land of Nospherus. Yet though their home was the same, how different they were!
Compared to the simian Sem, who stood only one taal in height and weighed no more than a ten-year-old human child, the Lagon were truly giants. The tallest among them stood two-and-a-half taal high, and weighed as much as a foal of three years. Though similarly covered in thick hair, the Lagon lacked the tails sported by the lesser wildlings, while that hair, veritable manes, coiled from the napes of their necks to their thick waists.
And compared to the Sem, whose capability for thought had halted at a level that was decidedly pre-human, the Lagon appeared to possess something akin to intelligence. Though their faces were fearsome to behold, their eyes burned bright as lamps with the fires of a wild intelligence.
Guin had seen the giants’ purpose in coming to the white valley where they captured him: they were there to harvest the rock salt. Sem cuisine was simple at best; they boiled the occasional root that was too hard to gnaw, but in essence they were hunter-gatherers who lived on the raw spoils of the wild land around them. Yet the Lagon gathered the seasoning stone, salt, and very likely used it to preserve their food. They even appeared to use the salt as a means of commerce. Guin knew this because as they hauled him to their village, he had asked them what their business was in the valley, and they had laughed at his ignorance.
“The white sand is sacred to lagon. The blessing of the white sand keeps away the earth-rot.”
“The white sand can be traded for many things,” another had said. “The little lagon come often hoping for a handful.”
“Little lagon?” Guin had asked. “You mean the Sem?”
“Not sem. Your unknowledge is vast, lagon who wears the head of a beast. Sem are not lagon, they are sem. Beasts of the sands. The little lagon of which we speak call themselves kitai.”
Somehow when the Lagon spoke the word sem, Guin knew that, in their language, it meant “ape.” Yet he could not help but be astonished at his informant’s next revelation. “The Kitai?”
So men from the land of Kitai had traveled across the mountains from the far side of Nospherus, entering the desert land from its eastern border, to trade with the Lagon. While the men of the Middle Country wrote off the far desolate reaches of this desert waste as the edge of the world and busied themselves conquering their own neighbors, the Kitai, who were a familiar sight in any land with a trading port, had opened routes into these outer marches and conceivably might soon enter Nospherus, perhaps even crossing the Kes to arrive at the three archduchies of Gohra.
Guin had always suspected there was some reason that Mongaul had turned its eyes toward Nospherus. Perhaps it was, ultimately, to open trade routes—and perhaps the Mongauli were already too late. It would have been only one of their many miscalculations. A force of fifteen thousand men must have seemed a more than sufficient number to crush what little resistance the desert monkeys, barbarous giants, mindless yidoh, and vile sand leeches could offer. To an elite army, the wasteland no doubt had appeared to promise an easy conquest with scarcely the need to bloody a blade.
Obviously the Mongauli didn’t know Nospherus.
It occurred to Guin that, at some point in the not too distant future, all eyes in all lands would turn to this barren borderland. Something lay hidden in Nospherus, and when that something came to light, every country in the known world, from the three archduchies of Gohra to Kitai on Nospherus' eastern border, and the ancient kingdom of Hainam whose ruler claimed to be descended from the royal line of Kanan itself, all the way to the shadow-bound theocracy of Ferah-la, would rush to be first to claim the prize.
Of course, this was merely conjecture. For the time being, Nospherus was, to most of the inhabitants of these lands, nothing more than a featureless stretch on a map, a strip of unknown territory dividing the eastern reaches of the world from the west.
The Lagon village to which Guin had been taken was situated in the mountains, not far from the valley of salt. Legends told that the Lagon never lingered in one place, but traveled constantly in the nomadic fashion. Other legends claimed that the mysterious race dwelt in the ruins of the empire that once reigned from deep in the Kanan mountain range, as eternal wards of the ancient relics.
When at last Guin met the fabled giants, he had discovered that both these legends were true, and at the same time, both were wrong.
The village of the Lagon was indeed nestled deep in the Kanan Mountains, but when Guin was brought through its midst, feeling the curious stares of the giants upon him, he had come away with the impression that this was not the ancestral home of the Lagon but simply one of many temporary communities they had made over the centuries.
Nonetheless, the village was an impressive sight. The giants’ relatively advanced culture was clearly evident in the construction of their homes—not the simple pit dwellings of the Sem, but real houses built from blocks of rock hewn from the mountainsides. These stone houses were dark and cool within, and several of them seemed to serve the function of communal storehouses in which salted meat and rock amaranth could be stored. This alone proved that the Lagon possessed knowledge far exceeding that of the Sem.
It was only from subtle clues—an instinctual impression that Guin would have found hard to articulate—that the leopard-man guessed that the Lagon had come here relatively recently, and that they likely relocated at regular intervals, carving the mountain stone to build new villages like this one where they would live for years, or possibly decades, before packing up and moving on again.
Perhaps this strategy was designed to obscure the location of their homes from the great desert wolves and from the Sem, and was furthermore a convenient way to gain access to new pastures and hunting grounds. Though they knew methods for storing food, they did not yet seem to have discovered the art of cultivating the soil. Even had they been so inclined, there was little arable land in these rugged mountains or the surrounding desert on which to grow even the hardiest crop.
Apparently the Lagon represented a step in civilization between that of the Sem and that of the peoples of the Middle Country and the far east. Though they did not yet practice agriculture, they were beginning to wean themselves from the nomadic hunting life.
Yet the language they spoke was very similar to that of the Sem. Guin wondered just how the tiny Sem and the giant Lagon had diverged into what they were today. And what to make of the unbelievable claims that both Sem and Lagon were children of the ancient Kanan Empire—in other words, descended from humans? What demon’s hands had twisted them into their current form? Nospherus, Nospherus… Though his thoughts wandered they always came back to this harsh land. If only he could understand these peoples, if he could unravel their mysteries, he might uncover the deeper mystery that lay hidden in its sands.
Like the secret of the ancient machinery of Parros, this land, too, held a secret that could change the world.
How could men like myself become Lagon, or Sem, falling so far?
Guin stiffened, as though an icy hand had grasped his heart.
Men like myself? Am I a man? They called me the lagon who wears the head of a beast. Then what am I? Am I human? Am I—
A low growl, released at last after long hours of tortured self-control, escaped from between Guin’s huge fangs. Suddenly, he reached up to seize his leopard-masked head as forcefully as the chains would allow him, and shook it wildly as if he had gone mad.
Then, just as abruptly, he stopped.
Guin lowered his hands and glared out into the darkness.
Someone was watching him.