Guin found the inside of the simple house to be stark and gloomy, with a heavy chill in the air of the kind peculiar to stone buildings. In its construction, the building was hardly more advanced than the pit-dwellings of the Sem. There was only one room; the morning light spilled in through three windows cut into the walls, splashing across an earthen floor that was bare save for a scattering of wolf skins laid around the central fire pit.
The elder had been placed upon one of the skins by the pit, and his keen piercing eyes now greeted the leopard-headed warrior. Kah motioned for Guin to join him, waved off the two guards, and began to speak before they had left the room.
“Brave Guin, as you have commanded, lagon now rise together. We leave our village, and head towards the land to which you lead us. There we will destroy your enemies. Whether it is victory or defeat that awaits us, this is the last morning we shall ever see this valley.”
“I do not—” Guin began, but Kah lifted a six-fingered hand for silence.
“This is not unusual for lagon, Lagon are not bound to one place. Until we find the promised land, any place we live, we live only for the now, not for the ever. Aqrra sends us messengers, once every two or three generations. The last came when I was but a child. One of our people went out into the desert, and returned bearing the sign. Then a great journey began, and in the end we arrived here, in this place between the mountains, where we built this village of stone. Lagon do this. We will leave this village after this morning, and travel far to the place where the bearer of the sign leads, and there we will begin a new home. Should it be a desert, we will live in the desert. Should it be rock, we will live in the rock. Should it be a mountain, we will live on the mountain.”
“I see,” Guin said, nodding. “This must be why no one knows where the Lagon live—like running water, and as the legends say, you’re never long in one place.”
“It is so. Aqrra has shown us many lands, but none yet has been the promised land. Though we may think so at first, in time something comes to tell us of our error, and only then do we know that the latest sign from Aqrra was merely another portion of our journey, and that though we have not reached the promised land, we have taken a step closer to it. And so we live in our new home until the next sign comes.”
Guin sat in silence, watching the old Lagon’s eyes turn expressive beneath his bushy white brows. Something about the lives of these strange beings, following signs from their god, knowing that each might not be the true sign, again and again abandoning the homes where they had lived for some generations, touched him deeply.
“We are the ones who wait,” Kah went on quietly. “This is what lagon means. Since time immemorial we have believed it is our destiny to wait, our destiny to follow. Yet, if that destiny is at its end with this new sign… How long we have waited! How often fought amongst ourselves, torn between those who would follow the sign, and those unwilling to abandon the land they had worked for since they were born… If—if you are indeed the last, the one who will lead lagon to the promised land…”
Kah’s voice trailed off into overwhelmed silence. He lowered his head, intertwining his twelve fingers, at a loss for words to describe what it would mean for his people if Guin were the final messenger.
A thought twisted suddenly in Guin’s mind, and he trembled. What if he was wrong? What if he was persuading the Lagon to abandon their village and travel far across the desert for nothing—to go to their own deaths as likely as not, in a battle that was not their own? For a moment, he doubted his right to move an entire people like this. The Lagon believed he was the long-awaited messenger chosen by Aqrra. But Guin had no idea whether he had indeed been so chosen.
The “sign of Aqrra” that he bore was little more than a strange object he had stumbled across in the valley of salt. True, he might have found it because some divine force intended that he should. Or he might be nothing more than a giant fraud. If it came to pass that both the Sem and the Lagon were defeated in this struggle with the Mongauli army, and their people slaughtered, he would be no god leading them to a promised land, but indeed a demon, a minion of Doal leading them to death, and despair, and destruction.
“How can you know the messenger of Aqrra, wise Kah?” Guin asked, doubts racing through his mind.
Kah’s answer came simply and without hesitation. “He carries the sign of Aqrra.”
“Like this thing I have?”
“Yes. Sometimes its appearance is slightly different, yet all resemble the one you bear.”
“And how do the messengers come by their signs? Is it by some revelation from Aqrra?” Guin found himself asking the sage. Though he half-feared revealing too much of his ignorance about Aqrra and dashing the trust he had only so recently gained, he was unable to contain his curiosity.
He could not have been more surprised by the elder’s answer.
“They obtain it as you did. A glimmer catches their eyes as they walk through the desert; they fall, they reach, and when they rise it is in their hands.”
“What?” Guin exclaimed. “You mean they just pick it up?”
“Indeed. The finding of Aqrra’s sign is a revelation nonetheless. Was this not the way you came upon the sign you bear?”
“That’s just how it happened,” Guin dropped his pretense. “To be honest, I know nothing of Aqrra—had not even heard of Aqrra before coming here. For such a person as I to have a revelation from Aqrra, to become a messenger… Can one be such a thing without knowing it?”
“Of course,” Kah answered. “Yet what has made me think that you may be the true messenger, the last to lead the lagon, is that of the many times those claiming to be messengers of Aqrra have appeared before us—many of whom were little more than pretenders and would-be kings—in all the long years of the lagon, this is the first time that the one who has come is not one of us. Not only are you not lagon, but your leopard head marks you as one not of this world. It is the first I have ever heard of such a thing.”
Guin made no reply, instead sinking deep into thought.
The familiar questions resurfaced in his mind: Who am I? Whence did I come, and why? For what purpose was I given life?
The questions hit him with such force that he forgot even the urgency that gnawed within him over the need to expedite the Lagon’s march. So many questions… Even if he were to disregard his unknown origins, the leopard-man found himself surrounded by far too much mystery to be easily explained. What was the source of the bizarre knowledge that came to him in shreds, like scraps doled out to a dog by a master’s hand— whose hand? He spoke the tongue of the Lagon, the tongue of the Sem, even the language of the Middle Country, yet he could not for his life tell which was his mother tongue. And the things he knew about the Middle Country—sometimes his memory seemed so clear, even though, to the best of his knowledge, he had never even been there.
The mystery did not end with what he carried inside him. He seemed to be involved in more inexplicable events than he cared to remember. How to explain the cyclone that carried him all the way to the Dog’s Head, or his encounter with the ancient king of the wolves there—not to mention his finding and picking up the sign of Aqrra, placing it in his belt without a second thought, and drawing it out at just the moment that could save him? It was all too much coincidence for him to accept—indeed, no erudite man would be likely to believe it had happened at all. Yet it had.
And though his form, his great leopard head, made him an object of fear and mistrust among those he met, who frequently regarded him as a monstrosity, it seemed to him somehow right that he should wear it—as though he were merely following the orders of some greater power, moving according to the will of something so vast that no man could truly know it. Contemplating this possibility, Guin trembled.
If his speculations were correct, then he was no man possessed of a free will and moving according to his own wishes. Though he might feel that he was free, he was in fact little more than an oversized puppet, manipulated from the sky, or perhaps from below the earth—a marionette chosen to complete his stated task and no more.