Once, Bellis (with a horrible spasm of fear) thought she saw the drifting, meandering flight of a she-anophelius over some of the higher-up buildings. But the males nearby turned and began to throw stones at the figure, driving it away before it had spotted the Armadans or entered any of the houses.

They reached a kind of square, ringed by the same dirt-colored houses and the skeletal sun-engines, where the crevice widened and admitted light from the baked blue sky. At the far end, Bellis saw a split in the rocks and a jutting cliff, a precipitous path down to the sea. And here, finally, someone came to meet them: a little delegation of nervous anophelii males, bowing and ushering them forward, into a great hall in the stone of the hills.

In an inner room, lit by immensely long bored shafts full of light, by mirrors that refracted the day and recycled it in the mountain, two anophelii had come to stand before them, bowing politely, and Bellis (remembering that day in Salkrikaltor City, different language but the same job), had come forward and greeted them in her clearest High Kettai.

The anophelii had stood still, their expressions quizzical, not understanding a word.

Bellis tried again to make sense in the stilted eloquence of High Kettai. The anophelii looked at each other and emitted hissing noises like farts.

Seeing their mouth-sphincters twitch and dilate, Bellis real-ized the truth, and she wrote, rather than spoke, the High Kettai words.

I am named Bellis, she wrote. We have come very, very far to speak to your people. Do you understand me?

When she handed the paper to the anophelii, their eyes opened wide and they looked at each other and crooned enthusiastically. The older man took Bellis’ pen.

I am Mauril Crahn, he wrote. It is scores of years since we have had visitors such as you. He looked up at her, his eyes crinkling. Welcome to our home.

The anophelii hooting tongue had no written form. For them High Kettai was written language, but they had never heard it spoken. They could express themselves perfectly in elegant script, but they had no idea how it would sound. The very concept of High Kettai "sounding" was alien to them.

Over scores or hundreds of years, a symbiosis had built up between the Samheri sailors and the Gnurr Kett authorities in Kohnid. The Samheri cactacae came to the island with livestock and a few trade goods, and took their cut as middlemen. Kohnid bought from them whatever the anophelii gave.

Between them, they controlled the flow of information to the mosquito-people. They had carefully ensured that no language other than High Kettai reached the island’s shores, and that none of the anophelii ever left it.