He told them about the Nonmen, the Cûnuroi, and the glory of their civilization in the First Age, when Men lived as savages and the Tusk had yet to be written. He told them about Cu’jara Cinmoi, the greatest of the Nonmen Kings, and the wars he fought against the Inchoroi, who had fallen in fire from the void, and how those wars left the survivors mateless and immortal, with no will to resist the Five Tribes of Men. And then he told them of the First Apocalypse.

“If you want to look at the true ruin,” he said, nodding to the barren knoll where the Captain sat alone with his inhuman lieutenant, “look no farther than your Cleric. Reduced. Dwindled. They were once to us as we are to Sranc. Indeed, for many among the Nonmen, we were little more.”

He described the Meori Empire, the great White Norsirai nation that once had ruled all the lands on the Long Side of the mountains, as the Scalpoi called it, the wilderness that was their hunting grounds. He described its destruction at the hands of the No-God, and how the great hero, Nostol, fled south with the remnants of his people, and found refuge in the lands of Gin’yursis, the Nonman King of Cil-Aujas. He described how the two of them, hero and king, defeated the No-God and his Consult at Kathol Pass, and so purchased a year’s respite for the entire world.

“But what does it mean,” he asked the faces about the fire, “when angels walk the very ground we trod? What does it mean to be mortally overshadowed, to toil in the dazzle of another race’s glory? Do you admire? Do you bend knee and acknowledge? Or do you envy and hate?

“Nostol and his Meöri kinsmen hated. Dispossessed, they coveted, and coveting, they maligned those they sought to rob. They did what all men do, you, me, throughout the entirety of our lives. They confounded need for justice, want for writ. They turned to the tangled strings of their scriptures and pulled out the threads that spoke to their fell ends.”

“Betrayal,” Mimara murmured from his side.

“Refuge,” Achamian said. He then narrated the three versions of the tale as he knew them. In the first, Nostol instructed his chieftains and thanes to woo the Emwama concubines, the slaves the Nonmen used as substitutes for their long-dead wives. Nostol, he explained, hoped to incite the Nonmen to some act of violence, something he could use as a pretext to rally his people behind his planned atrocities. Apparently the Meöri were zealous in the prosecution of his orders, impregnating no less than sixty-three different concubines.

“Talk about farting in the queen’s bedchamber!” Pokwas exclaimed.

“Indeed,” Achamian said, adding to the chorus of laughter with the mock gravity of his tone. “And there are no windows in the deeps of Cil-Aujas …”