Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-two
A few days later, two dozen people gathered in the common room of Testylier House.
There were the residents: Leah and Jelan and Gilli, even élodie and Birra, and the other half dozen girls, all of whom had gotten to know Daziel in the last five months.
Ezra and Hiram had come with half the knockball team.
Yael and Gidon and Stefan with a few friends each, most of whom I hadn’t met.
“Hey, everyone.” It was nerve-racking to have so many eyes upon me.
I’d never done public speaking, never been interested in it.
“Thanks for coming. I know I was vague about what’s going on.
Everyone here knows how the winds are worsening, and people are worried the Maestril won’t come in two or three weeks like it should? ”
Everyone nodded.
“Daziel has a theory about why.” I explained about the Ziz, the magic, the scrolls.
“Yes, the Ziz is corporeal, not spiritual or metaphorical,” I said, to ward off this shock in advance.
“Shedim are more entwined with the natural world and magic than humans; they have knowledge we don’t, including this.
We need to find the Ziz so we can cure it. ”
Everyone blinked, then started talking at once. Just like the Sanhedrin, really. Ezra’s voice rose above the rest, cutting through the confusion and wonder and getting straight to the point. “How?”
I spread out my hands helplessly. “No idea. So we’re turning to you for help. If the Sanhedrin isn’t going to take this seriously, we’re going to put together our own council.”
There were a few nervous laughs. “The Ziz is one of the Great Beasts,” Birra said, like we were idiots. “If the rabbis and the sages can’t find it, I don’t think a handful of students will be able to, even with a shayd helping us.”
“Doesn’t mean we can’t try,” I said firmly.
“How? What do we even know about the Ziz?” one of the fourth-floor girls said.
“Maybe more than we think,” Yael said, and I smiled at her. “We start with what we do know, no matter how big or small, and move forward from there.”
Another fourth-floor girl, who studied art, fetched an easel, and another a few mythology books. We slowly crafted a list of what we knew.
~ King of the Birds
~ Controls the wind
~ Real big?
~ Giant eggs squash cities
~ One of the three Great Beasts (along with Leviathan and Behemoth)
~ Very old??
~ Stands in ocean?
“Let’s go through each one by one,” Jelan said from where she sat next to Gilli, her steady manner providing some much-needed calm. “See if that jogs anything in our minds. What does King of the Birds mean?”
“All the birds listen to it?” Ezra offered.
“The birds left,” Yael said. “What if they knew the Ziz was hurt and went to it? They went northwest.”
“Maybe we could track them,” someone else said.
“Maybe someone already did,” Gilli said, gnawing at the end of her pencil. “Someone must have, right? Must have charted the path they took when they left? Maybe people across islands and other countries also took note.”
“Definitely.” I wrote down Find out the path the birds took. “Anything else about the birds?”
“Birds roost,” one of the knockball boys said. “High up. So maybe we want to look in the mountains?”
We worked through each bucket, teasing apart what little meaning we could.
“Legend says the Ziz blocks the most violent winds,” one of Gidon’s friends said.
“Could we learn something about its location from where winds come from? The Ver and Den winds came more frequently this year—maybe they usually get blocked at some place, and that could inform us—well, of where the Ziz usually is?”
Find out how winds work, I wrote.
“It’s supposed to be in the ocean, right?” Gilli said. “The lore says sailors came across it once, and it was so giant that even though they were in the deepest part of the sea, the water only came up to the Ziz’s ankles, and its head was in the clouds.”
“That’s very big,” Ezra said skeptically. “Surely someone would have noticed.”
“Maybe it just means it’s in the most remote part of the ocean, which is where we should look.”
By the end, we had a list of things to follow up on.
~ Find out the path the birds took/last place birds were seen in Ena-Cinnai and direction they were flying
~ Find out how winds work/where winds come from
~ Talk to sailors about remote mountains and ocean
~ Pinpoint remote/high-up places
~ Talk to rabbis about Great Beasts
~ ~ ~
Over the next week and a half, my friends and classmates set to work. It shocked me how much weight lifted off my shoulders with others helping. I breathed easier realizing I wasn’t going to have to do everything myself. I could tell Daziel felt the same.
With others concentrating on finding the Ziz, I put my energy into the scrolls.
The Sanhedrin approved funding, and the Keep became chaotic.
Professor Altschuler and the rest of the linguistics department stopped by the scroll room daily, as did history professors and spellwriters and other academics, not to mention their support staffs and students.
No hints of the Maestril appeared, but the Corisoc did; the rare southern wind carried red dust that got into every nook and crevice in Talum. It clung to my skin and hair and made the whole city look like it had been dipped in clay.
“I hate this,” Stefan said one evening. It was late enough no one besides our cohort remained in the scroll room, so he lay on the rug, stretching his spine after hours bending over the scrolls. When it was just us, we’d given up any pretense of propriety. “I feel like a hamster on a wheel.”
I felt like I was slowly going mad. We were giving everything we had and getting nowhere.
With so many more people involved, we’d made quick progress analyzing word frequency in healing spells across a dozen languages, but it led nowhere.
Our hypotheses on articles and verbs were patchy.
We’d looked over the words containing Z and I and theorized what they might be and what letters their other characters might match, but everything resulted in dead ends.
It would have been different if it’d been slow progress but progress nonetheless; instead, we felt incompetent and stupid, like children turning metal puzzle pieces, unable to twist them apart.
“I feel like a blindfolded goat.” Gidon picked at the red dust from the Corisoc caked under his nails.
I blinked. “A goat?”
He flicked the dirt onto the floor. “They’re always bouncing around all over the place. That’s how I feel. And chewing cud.”
“Do goats chew cud?” Yael asked. “I thought that was cows.”
“Cows, goats, sheep,” I said absentmindedly. “They’re all ruminants. They have four-chambered stomachs, and the cud is regurgitated from one and chewed again.”
The three city kids stared at me.
“That’s disgusting,” Stefan said. He stretched, his shoulder bones popping. “I wish we had more Language X. It’d be way more likely we’d find other proper nouns if we had thousands more pages to pore through.”
We needed proper nouns to decipher character phonetics. If we didn’t have any in the scrolls, perhaps we should look elsewhere. “What if…we could find more examples of Language X?”
“We’ve already tried,” Gidon said gently. “Didn’t Professor Altschuler cover this in your initial reading? He toured the northern lands two years ago, talking to international scholars, and found nothing.”
“Right,” I said. “But…what about faraway places? Places we don’t share scholarship with yet?”
“How would that help?” Stefan asked. He threw one of his juggling balls in the air and failed to catch it; it rolled out of his arm’s length, and he half-heartedly reached for it. “We’re not going to be able to see them. I even wrote to my family in Aolong to see if they had contacts, but nothing.”
A smile stretched my cheeks. “We have someone who can travel twice as far as Aolong, very quickly.”
Three faces whipped up to mine. “Oh shit.” Stefan sounded impressed. “You think he could?”
“Sorae.” Yael immediately named an empire three thousand miles away, past even Stefan’s home.
I could hear the quiver of suppressed hope in her voice.
“He should go to their courts. Their scholarship is impeccable. Two thousand years ago they traded all over the world. I can’t believe we didn’t ask him earlier. I forgot demons—shedim—can path-jump.”
“Daziel,” I said, not lifting my head from where I’d let it slump against the wall. “Daziel, Daziel.”
He appeared. No one even flinched anymore. The red dust of the Corisoc had afflicted even him, giving his black curls a garnet gleam.
“Can you path-jump to Sorae?” I explained the situation. “If you take me with you, I’ll be able to recognize the characters of Language X—”
“You can take us with you?” Yael interrupted. I didn’t think she’d cut anyone off the whole time I’d known her. “I want to go.”
Daziel shook his head. “I’m not taking either of you. The mirrorways are too dangerous for humans. It might not leave your mind the same.”
“Would the betrothal protect me?” I asked. It’d messed with my physiology already; maybe it would help us here. “I might be fine.”
He looked at me almost angrily. “I’m not risking your safety. Show me what I’m looking for and where.”
It shouldn’t have made me happy that he cared so much about my safety, but it did.
“Start at the universities and museums,” Yael said.
We made a list of everything we knew in Sorae, despite it being very little.
We made him a card with the characters of Language X so he could recognize them, then a letter with an official seal we stole from Professor Altschuler’s office requesting to borrow materials.
Apparently we all had very flexible morals by this point.
Besides, we all agreed the professor would have let us had he been here.