The terrible memories of the Malarial Queendom abided. Kohnid was playing a game, keeping the brilliant anophelii as pet thinkers; giving them nothing that might make them powerful, or let them escape-Kohnid would not risk unleashing the she-anophelii on the world again-but just enough to think with. The Kettai would not allow anophelii access to any information outside of its control: the centuries-long maintenance of High Kettai as the island’s written language ensured that. And that way, anophelii science and philosophy were in the hands of the Kohnid elite, who were almost alone in being able to read it.

The jigsaw pieces of ancient technology that the anophelii possessed, the works of their philosophers must be quite astonishing, thought Bellis, to allow this convoluted system to continue. Each Samheri journey from Kohnid to the island would bring with it a few carefully chosen books, and sometimes commissions. Given these conditions, some Kohnid theorist might demand, and remembering the paradox laid out in your previous essay, what is the answer to the following problem? And handwritten anophelii works, under chosen Kettai names, made the return journey, in response to such questions, or to problems posed by the anophelii themselves, to be printed by Kohnid publishers-without payment. Sometimes they were doubtless claimed by some Kettai scholar as his or her own work, all adding to the prestige of the High Kettai canon.

The mosquito-people had been reduced to captive scholars.

The island’s ruins housed old texts, in the High Kettai language the anophelii could read, or in long-dead codes they carefully broke. And with the slow accretion of the books from Kohnid, and the written records of their ancestors, the anophelii also pursued their own investigations. Sometimes such a resulting work was sent overseas to the island’s masters in Kohnid. It might even be published.

That was what had happened to Kruach Aum’s book.

Two thousand years ago, the mosquito-people had ruled the southern lands in a short-lived nightmare of blood and plague and monstrous thirst. Bellis did not know how much the anophelii men knew of their own history, but they had no illusions about the nature of their own womenfolk.

How many did you kill?wrote Crahn. How many of the women?

And when, after a hesitation, Bellis wrote One, he nodded and responded, That is not so many.

The township was without rank. Crahn was not a ruler. But he was eager to help, and to tell the guests everything they might want to know. The anophelii responded to the Armadans with a courteous, measured fascination, a contemplative, almost abstract reaction. In their phlegmatic response, Bellis detected an alien psychology.

Bellis wrote the Lover’s and Tintinnabulum’s questions as quickly as she could. They had not yet broached the most important subject, the very reason they were on this island, when they heard a ruckus from the other room where their companions waited. Loud voices in Sunglari, and responses in shouted Salt.