Chapter Twenty-Two #2
“Not likely you’ll run into anyone at this hour, is it?” Gidon said. It was nearing eleven bells; we had just put another pot of coffee on. None of us had any intention of sleeping soon.
“It’s morning in Sorae,” Daziel said absently. After tucking everything up his sleeves, he touched my cheek and was gone.
I pressed my hand to my cheek, the ghost of his touch lingering. Despite my anger, I worried about him gallivanting around a foreign land on his own. I wished I’d been able to go with him.
~ ~ ~
The next day, the four of us were so antsy Professor Altschuler sent us away, dryly promising he and his staff could handle the scrolls without us for a day. I couldn’t concentrate without knowing whether Daziel was safe. I should have insisted on at least attempting to go with him.
Between classes, I passed through the front courtyard, where the winter fair had been.
Now beetle corpses littered the grass matted by red dust. The school’s brass gates, with their book and tree emblem, no longer gleamed.
The Maestril should be arriving any day now, and everyone was wound tight with its absence.
If it came, it would wipe the city clean of red dust and insects.
If it didn’t come, the harvests would fail.
I returned to the Keep around the same time as the rest of my cohort, and we stayed past ten bells, when Professor Altschuler finally left, shaking his head. “Your minds won’t do any of us any good if you insist on exhausting yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” Yael said, but none of us went anywhere. Instead, we fiddled with more words, trying to guess Language X character phonetics and unsurprisingly making no breakthroughs.
Near midnight, Daziel returned. And he brought a trunk.
“What?” Yael said.
I jumped up, instinct telling me to fling my arms around Daziel, I was so happy he’d returned safe. But he wasn’t mine to hug. I clasped my hands together instead.
He met my gaze with his obsidian one, and there was a pained sorrow in his smile, as though he could tell I’d wanted to embrace him but held myself back.
Then he adjusted his expression with his inhuman quickness, turning to my friends with a showman’s panache and sweeping his arms at the trunk.
“They were very agreeable. Said these were found on an ancient Cinnaian ship excavated from a silted-up harbor some fifty years back.”
He lifted the lid. Inside, a dozen scrolls nestled against a purple velvet interior.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of people I talked to,” Daziel told our dropped jaws.
“I had tea with a professor at his daughter’s house, and he directed me to a very small university halfway across the country—anyway.
A preservation spell snapped over the ship’s library when water came onboard and saved the texts. ”
“We need the highlighting spell,” Gidon choked out. My own hope and excitement were reflected in him, in all of them. If this batch of Language X included proper nouns with Z and I, we could finally theorize more of the alphabet.
Before using the finding spell, we made copies of the new texts, so we could spread neshem on the copies instead of the originals.
We worked quickly, fumbling and laughing, all of us bundles of nerves barely held together.
When the copies were made, we cast the highlighting spells for words containing both and .
Two words glowed on the parchment.
Hope so fierce it almost hurt speared me.
Stefan jumped up in the air, whooping and squeezing a smiling Yael’s shoulders.
Gidon made a pleased noise. I stopped trying to control every movement and whirled around and hugged Daziel tightly.
I breathed him in, his familiar scent, his blazing and comforting heat.
I held him tightly, as though I could use this embrace to take a print of his body.
Then I let go, leaving him with wide eyes.
And then we all leaned forward.
The first of the two highlighted words glowed in the beginning of a ten-page manuscript.
I blinked because I recognized it. I recognized it because it was the two letters we knew arranged in a way we’d seen before.
My brain stuttered, confused and almost disbelieving of the word highlighted before us.
Ziz.
The five of us exchanged bewildered looks. “How likely is it we’ve found another spell for the Ziz?” Gidon said.
“Not likely,” Stefan said.
We turned to the second word. This one was much longer, with seven characters. Z and I made up three of them, scattered throughout the middle of the word: ?Z?I?I?
I wanted to vomit or cry. I felt like I was playing trivia at a pub. I knew this one, I knew it, and if it was right, we would have so many letters. “Tzorybium,” I choked out.
Yael grabbed a pen, scribbling letters into our blanks: TZ (O/R?) (I/Y?) BI (U/M?).
“It’s not perfect,” Yael said. “There’s only seven characters in the Language X word and nine in ours. They might use the same character for both Y and I, but it’s not a one-to-one match.”
But it was so close, I could feel it, how painfully close we were, how we were almost at the place where we could start matching our letters to Language X.
“Maybe it’s Tzorybia, the adjective and language, instead of the place name.
” Which added A as an option for the last character, as well as U and M.
“Or maybe they didn’t have an O or a U in their version of the name,” Gidon said.
“Maybe they dropped the R thousands of years ago,” Stefan said. “Tzoybia. Some languages don’t have R’s.”
Despite my exuberance, a wave of apprehension hovered at the edges of my mind, a wave that could pull me under into a state of helplessness. There were so many possibilities, and we had no idea which path to try first.
“Don’t panic,” Yael said, catching my expression. “We know what we’re doing, remember? We’ve trained for this. We make methodical attempts, and we keep going. We’re so much further ahead than we were a day ago.” She gestured at the trunk Daziel had brought. “This is a gold mine.”
“You’re right.” I took a steadying breath. We could now potentially match Language X characters to our alphabet. We were far closer than an hour ago.
We needed more ancient nouns containing the four unknown characters from our potential “Tzorybium” to test them, so we ran the highlighting spell on the manuscripts.
This resulted in so, so many words.
For a minute, the five of us stared. A gold mine, Yael had said, and she was right. Surely some of these would be proper nouns we could guess. We would have answers soon if we could stay steady and figure it out.
“We write them all down,” Yael said, somehow managing not to float off in a stunned reverie like the rest of us. “Then we’ll go through our ancient proper noun list and see if we can find matches.”
That was the right way to do it, the academic, precise method. But I couldn’t help glancing at our original scroll with the word for “Ziz,” to see if anything jumped out. It did not. I glanced at the manuscript Daziel had brought in with the word “Ziz” too. Just in case.
I caught my breath.
“Look,” I said, my voice a scant whisper. My heart started to pound, and a shiver danced across my neck and shoulders. One line below the word “Ziz,” almost an entire word glowed—which meant we could potentially sound it out. I scribbled it down, adding our theorized characters: B?/(M/A/U?)/T?
The two unknown characters were the same.
“Fuck,” Stefan said. “If that’s an M—if this language doesn’t use vowels and that letter’s an H—”
BHMTH.
BEHEMOTH.
“But they use vowels. There’s an I in ‘Ziz’!” Gidon howled. “And two I’s in the second word!”
Stefan wrote down the word that could be “Tzorybium” again: TZRIBIM. “Maybe they only use I.”
Energy rushed through me, the kind that meant that we were on the brink of a great discovery, not unlike standing on the cliff at the edge of the plains and the wilderness and worrying about falling, or like boarding a ship to take you to a city you’d only ever fantasized about.
We were nearing a vast precipice, and as long as we could keep running, build up enough speed, we could leap to a new world on the other side.
“I hate that,” Gidon said. “They’re going to have some crazy grammar rule, and we’re never going to find it out.”
“We are,” Yael whispered. She was clutching her knees to her chest, unblinking as she stared at the text. “We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to crack this.”
The sheer belief in her voice sent a shiver down my spine. We could do this.
The others set themselves to making the list, the way Yael had suggested. But I stayed still, staring at the manuscript.
There was something niggling in the back of my mind. As if something I half remembered was trying to break free.
Something that mentioned the Great Beasts. Something I knew. Not a spell but something like a spell. Like a song, from my childhood? A poem or recitation?
I went cold, then hot.
Daziel said these manuscripts came from a ship excavated from a silted-up harbor.
I was a sailor’s daughter. I knew all about sailors—how they stowed belongings, what they ate, the prayers they said for safe passage.
I also knew something that all ships kept on board.
A rutter, a handbook used by navigators to steer the ship and provide specific directions—directions that probably hadn’t changed in thousands of years because the coastlines and maelstroms hadn’t changed in millennia.
I felt like I was floating. “What if it’s a rutter?”
If it was a rutter, we would not only have characters we could match from one language to another—we would have words. Words we could translate from Language X to our language if the same directions were given in both.
And Gilli was a navigator’s daughter. She might be able to read them.