He held out his hand, and after a moment of confusion, Si'Wren placed
the ivory writing sticks into his upturned palm.
Then, Borla insolently took her clay tablet, wrote mockingly upon it,
and handed it back with a contemptuous flourish.
'It is finished,' read Borla's new line.
Si'Wren looked down at the tablet, eyes full of anguish, and reached to
snatch one stick back from Borla to write quickly and far less
perfectly, 'Where have they laid the body?'
Borla looked into her eyes with a serpent's wisdom as he nodded at this
remark, and letting her hang onto the tablet, he merely inscribed the
even more carelessly written reply, 'In yonder field.'
Then he waited with his arm half-raised, until she had finished reading
this and looked up at him to see whence he pointed.
He raised his arm a little further and aimed a bony finger across the
camp beyond it's far southern boundary, past which could be glimpsed a
vast, sloping stretch of outlying fields, with the higher foothills to
the right, and the far lowlands whence they had all come, somewhere
beyond and to the left.
These were no level, cultivated fields, but were totally in the wilds,
as was most of the world. They were riddled by a network of deep,
almost impassable erosion gullies that were choked through their
centers by dense clusters of bamboo and great interwoven hoops of
enormously spiked, thorny vines, and bordered by dense copses of green
trees interspersed by tall grass.
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