The Guild of Xenolinguists by Sheila Finch

Author:Sheila Finch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2019-09-11T22:00:00+00:00

Six hours later, he’d found the keys. Denori was a relatively trouble-free language, its underlying world view not too far off others he’d encountered elsewhere in the galaxy. And a stroke of luck — the troupe had traveled widely and had dealt with lingsters in other languages, so they knew how to cooperate. He was feeling the exhilaration of interface now, the obliteration of self, the sense of union with other beings. He would get the job done easily in the time he had left.

He was suddenly aware that the female Mareb had pointed out was staring at him.

“Honored she-being,” he addressed her, using Denorian courtesy as he now understood it. “I am honored by the light you share with me.”

She seemed somehow less unjointed than her companions, less ethereal. She gazed at him, a long look from under thick, grey lashes, drawing her brows together.

“I would dance the light with you,” he said.

Her frown deepened as if she concentrated on the task of deciphering his meaning from the words still clumsily chosen to express it.

Tomas found himself suddenly shivering. One side effect of the drugs was that they lowered the barriers a lingster may have raised against remembering the darker experiences of his own life. Despite his training, an image now stirred in his memory. It had been one of the brief days of Gai‘ckian spring — mild, bright air, ice melting on a lake. Mitsuko had come to stand beside him, her black hair and red tunic making her a tiny flash of color like the birds Tomas fed in the snow. She’d been weeping — it was his special agony that he could no longer remember her not weeping. He tried to console her. Mitsuko was too sensitive for the job Mareb required her to do, and her guilt was driving her crazy. Hours later, she took her own life.

Someday, Tomas had sworn in his anguish, those responsible — inside the Guild or out — would pay. That had been three years ago; the opportunity hadn’t come, and his thirst for it had gradually dwindled. He was a realist, was that so surprising? The Guild suppressed romantic notions like love and revenge. Now all that was important to him was getting out. The endless weight of the work he was called to do had dulled his sense of vengeance. But the pain of his loss hadn’t gone away.

The Denorian dancer lowered her gaze, and the shining hair moved forward like rain across her face. She lifted her hands in a flash of viridian and whirled away from him.

“Light comes unchorded there.” The speaker was an old male, his copper-green face wrinkled and solemn.

Five of the troupe paused from their rehearsal and began stroking Tomas’s brow with long fingers, their bodies curving close to his. His nerves jumped at the touch, his skin flamed.

“Honored He-being,” the old man said. “There is no harmony in that one. That is why we will sell her.”

Tomas perceived the world as the Denorians saw it: a construct of lights harmonizing in an endless dance.

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