Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-three
Gilli could read them.
Daziel fetched her to the Keep. She arrived in pink pajamas and her yellow School of Science blazer and a smile like a spring breeze, even as she warned us that this wasn’t her forte.
“I haven’t looked at a rutter since I was thirteen.
We should try to get one—tricky, they’re not in libraries, but I can write to my mom. ”
Then she proceeded to identify dozens of words.
She pointed at the first paragraph. “This is probably the traditional prayer to protect the ship. The prayer could have changed,” she said doubtfully, “but I expect it says ‘Leviathan, Lady of the Sea, Ruler of the Oceans, grant us safe passage through your deep waters. Ziz, Master of the Sky, Master of the Birds and the Air, lend us swift winds and see us safe through your storms. Behemoth, Great Beast of the Land, bring us safely from shore to shore.’ ”
I started breathing in short little gasps; Yael closed her eyes and opened her mouth. Gidon collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his knees. Stefan punched Daziel in the arm.
“What?” Gilli looked alarmed. “Did I say something wrong?”
“You said something so right.” I threw my arms around her.
“You said so many words. If—if it’s right—Gilli, it’s a translation.
Enough to get us started, to give us conjunctions and definite articles and start us really, really translating.
Otherwise—even if we could figure out how Language X sounded, even if we could have matched our letters to theirs, we wouldn’t have known the meaning. ”
“Oh,” she said, looking pleased. “Good.”
Gilli started us rolling down a cliff until we gathered speed on our own and could make educated guesses. At some point Daziel handed over a rutter in our tongue, which no one asked too many questions about.
We spent all night working. In the morning, we’d have to tell Professor Altschuler, and we wanted to be as far along as possible before it was taken away from us.
This kept us from being thorough, from doing the slow, proper analyses we’d been trained to do.
Instead, we focused almost exclusively on the scroll for healing the Ziz and the rutter.
We barely managed to force ourselves to pause and map out all the letters.
When we did, we theorized Language X didn’t use vowels the same way we did, but our consonants matched closely.
We’d be able to read the language aloud, speak it to life after thousands of years of silence.
Then we dove into words. In the morning, we’d be set to detail categorizations ordered by the professor, but not tonight.
We drank coffee by the jugful, until we were so jittery I thought my heart might explode.
No one wanted to stop for food, so we ate whatever Gilli and Daziel brought, our eyes trained on the text.
By morning, we looked chaotic—hair everywhere, faces oily, eyes twitching.
But we didn’t care because the words were coming together.
“Oh my god,” Gidon kept saying. The syntax was similar to ancient Ille, one of Stefan’s languages, so we could theorize how nouns and verbs worked.
We could guess cardinal directions and movements and numbers.
It was trial and error—we’d plug in “strong” before “wind” and then see if it held up.
If it didn’t, we’d try again with another word—“cold,” perhaps, or “weak” or “unexpected.”
By dawn, we had this:
For Returning the Ziz to Its (Original /Enduring?) (Form/State?)
To perform the spell, the (name/description?) of the Ziz (must/should?) be (carved?) into the bone of the Ziz.
It is best to do so once a (millennium).
Four casters (must/should?) (stand?) at the four points of the compass around the Ziz and read its (name/description?).
They (must/should?) (funnel/use?) fourteen (unknown) into the spell:
You are the Ziz, Master of the Sky, Master of the Birds and the Air, beast of legend. You (stand?) with your (ankles?) in the sea and your (head?) in the heavens, with wings to (block out/inhibit?) the sun.
From there our guesses became more muddled—we suspected it was an anatomical description, which no words appeared for in the rutter.
“We’re so close,” Stefan groaned. “But how are we going to figure out the rest? It’s impossible. We’ll be able to phonetically read the characters, but we’re not going to be able to understand more unless we find an ancient anatomy textbook.”
It did feel impossible. There was no way for us to know, and while we could guess, our guesses were likely to be wrong. There’d be no way to read the correct spell to save the Ziz.
Unless…
It hit me, and I started laughing.
Only Daziel and Gilli looked concerned. The other three had suffered their own hysterical fits over the past twenty-four hours and were unconcerned with mine. “We don’t need to,” I said. “We don’t need to decipher it.”
“What are you talking about?” Stefan picked up an almond from the floor and ate it. I couldn’t even judge him at this hour.
“We figured out enough. We figured out how to pronounce Language X. We don’t need to say the spell in our tongue. We can do it in Language X.”
Everyone stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. Which, perhaps, I had.
“That’s madness,” Yael said. “You can’t perform a spell you don’t understand.”
“Why not? We understand what the spell is doing. It’s strengthening the Ziz. We just wouldn’t know what words we were saying.”
“We don’t know for sure about the pronunciation,” Stefan said. “It might not work.”
“It’d work better than totally wrong words.”
“I didn’t mean you technically can’t,” Yael said impatiently, ruffling her fine hair in a clear sign of stress. “I meant it’s unsafe to work magic you don’t understand.”
“It’s not safe to wait, either,” Daziel said. Unlike my cohort, he’d lit up at my suggestion. Energy coiled in his body like he might spring forward any moment. “It might work.”
“No,” Yael said. “There’s no reason to go racing off. We can wait a week, a month.”
“Can we?” Support came unexpectedly from Gidon—but then, he was from a farming family. “We need the Maestril now. If we wait another month, the growing season will be ruined.”
“So everyone suffers another year—that’s better than an unknown spell. We don’t even know where the Ziz is or what measurement the fourteen means.”
“True,” I said. “But maybe we can present it to the Council and pressure them to look at our possible locations for the Ziz and work on the translation in the meantime.”
“We do know the measurement,” Stefan said. “Language X phonetically spells out ‘troyil’—I bet that’s ‘troyelle,’ an ancient term from the Maudeli. It translates to roughly ‘five swimming pools’ worth of neshem.’ ”
We all stared at him.
“Five swimming pools?” I finally said.
“Yup.”
Gidon looked like he might faint. “That’s a lot of power.”
“The kind used to level cities,” I agreed.
“Where are we supposed to get so much power?” Gilli asked nervously, gnawing at the end of a braid.
“We’re not,” Yael said. “The Sanhedrin is. They have reserves they can use.”
“I dunno if the Sanhedrin is going to be willing to use so much,” Stefan said doubtfully. “Especially if we don’t know the spell will work. I mean, that’s a fuckton.” He turned to Daziel. “Can you give us power to use, like you did for putting the scrolls together in the first place?”
“Not that much,” Daziel said.
“Can you cast the spell yourself, then? You guys have more power than us, right?”
“We can’t direct it the way you do.” Daziel looked at me. “The only way…”
A horrible, tingling sensation skittered across my shoulders and down my spine. I knew what he was saying, could feel the realization inside me, sick and poisonous.
If you bound a demon—or a demon bound you—you could have the kind of power that raised temples and leveled cities.
“I need food,” I said abruptly. “Hot food. Daziel, come with me.”
The others looked startled. “Right this moment?” Gidon said doubtfully.
Yael, on the other hand, narrowed her eyes. She, at least, guessed what Daziel had meant.
“Yes.” I grabbed Daziel’s hand. Never mind I’d barely touched him for the last couple of weeks; this was urgent, and everything else fled my mind.
We didn’t speak until we’d left the Keep. The Corisoc had coated the campus with its red dust, and in the dawn light, the marble buildings looked like dull embers.
I led us to the river, where rushing water frothed white around the craggy rocks jutting above the surface.
I stepped across them, and Daziel followed, until we were isolated.
Wind whipped around us, sprays of water spattering against our calves and arms. Storm clouds gathered on the horizon, turned orange gold by the Corisoc.
“You think we could cast the spell if one of us bound the other,” I said flatly.
Daziel nodded. “We’re greater as a whole than as two separate parts.”
“I’m not binding you. Nor am I a huge fan of being bound again.” I had no desire to relive the experience at the Rocks, with overwhelming magic rushing through me, making me dizzy and sick and unable to breathe. “Neither of us should be able to control the other.”
He squinted toward the rising sun. “What if we couldn’t? What if we could maintain our independence?”
I narrowed my eyes. He’d had that answer easily; he had a plan, or at least an idea. “What do you mean?”
“I think our betrothal lessens the aggressiveness of the binding. At the Rocks, the binding didn’t feel as harsh as I expected.
I suspect that in the same way natural magic recognizes us as bonded to share magic and location, it recognizes us as a unit here too.
If we complete our betrothal—if you take my signet ring—I think you’ll be able to draw on my magic, but neither of us will be able to control the other. ”