Chapter 6
Edmund woke with his skull still throbbing, but the rest of his body feeling somewhat better. Granted, on the scale of misery, horribly sore wasn’t great but it was still a lot better than badly beaten.
The Dervish was sitting upright, back against the packs, his chin on his chest. Edmund thought the sword … man … being was probably asleep. Could he get to his feet and go take care of personal business without help?
Let’s find out. The Dervish hadn’t said anything about helping him earlier, but it was still embarrassing to have to be held upright while he took a piss.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if the man hadn’t been so pretty.
Really, it was almost ridiculous. That long, elegant jawline and those biting silver eyes …
Edmund shook his head. He had no idea why the Dervish was affecting him like that.
Normally he didn’t react all that strongly to a man’s looks.
He’d once traveled for weeks with an absurdly handsome paladin and hadn’t felt much beyond general aesthetic appreciation.
Fortunately, he seemed able to stagger to the edge of the woods and take care of himself without falling over halfway through. He washed his hands in snow as best he could and turned back, to find the silver eyes in question open and watching him.
“How do you feel?” the Dervish asked.
“My head still hurts,” Edmund admitted. “But if you’re eager to move on, I could probably—”
He went to the saddlebags and leaned down. His skull gave an enthusiastic throb, and added a dash of sparkles across his vision, just for variety.
“Or we could wait a day,” said the Dervish. “Or two.”
Edmund smiled weakly. “That might be best.” The sparkles faded, and he went back to his task, extracting the books from the bags.
The Dervish had wrapped them back up in oilcloth and put them back.
He fished his glasses out of the case he kept his writing utensils in and put them on, thanking the gods silently that he hadn’t been wearing them when he’d been attacked.
He did sometimes, if he was reading while walking, which was a trick he’d mastered long ago during slow parts of the journey.
The headache eased a bit once they were on. He could see perfectly fine at a distance, but without the glasses, reading became a painful exercise. Of course, now his swollen cheekbones hurt where the metal arms pressed against them, but life was full of trade-offs.
“Thank you for saving the books,” he said, opening the first and checking it for damage.
The Dervish shrugged. “Books are valuable,” he said. “At least, they were in my day. I assume things haven’t changed that much.”
Edmund looked up, suddenly curious. “Did they have printing presses in your day?”
“The what-whats?”
That dated the Dervish’s day to at least a hundred and fifty years ago, unless he came from somewhere extremely remote.
“Machines. You engrave a plate with a page from the book, coat the plate with ink, then, errr … stamp the plate onto a page? The ones they make now are a bit more complicated than that, and some even have automatic inkers, but that’s the gist. It’s much faster than hand copying, though they’re not nearly as beautiful as illuminated manuscripts. ”
“Huh.” The Dervish stared at nothing in particular. “How incredibly obvious. Why didn’t anyone think of that before?”
“Some people had been doing it with wood blocks for a while, mostly to make cheap pamphlets, because the quality wasn’t very good, you know?
The artificers in Anuket City got hold of the idea and improved it dramatically.
Using metal plates makes them last longer, and you can apply more pressure, which spreads the ink more evenly, whereas the wood blocks would crack sometimes and…
” He recognized the Dervish’s expression and cleared his throat.
“Anyway, books are much cheaper to produce now, but there’s so many old books that we haven’t reproduced …
the Forge God and the Many-Armed God both have people whose entire job is to make printed copies before the old ones deteriorate.
That’s why I was bringing these to the library in Archon’s Glory.
” He opened the next one and winced, seeing a bootprint across the cover.
“So what are these about?” asked the Dervish, sitting down next to him. “Something important?”
“Oh yes, very!” Edmund brushed the mud off as best he could, then carefully wrapped the book and opened the next one.
“This one is a translation of old poetry from the Hundred Houses, and this one is a book on cattle husbandry, and this one is a religious text from the Benandanti, and this one is actually from the cynocephalic lands, and I think it’s about perfume or possibly alchemy, but none of us can read it. ”
“Ah,” said the Dervish. “Very important. I see.”
Edmund flushed. People outside of the temple rarely understood. “Knowledge is important,” he said, mostly to the book in his hands. “We have to safeguard it, or what good is it to learn it in the first place?”
Most of the volumes had escaped with no worse than dirt. Only one had been badly damaged. Pages spilled from the binding and Edmund bit his lip as he surveyed the damage.
“It really matters to you, doesn’t it?” said the Dervish quietly. “What happens to these books?”
“It does.” There was no way to fix the damaged book right now.
He’d need glue and vellum and specialized tools.
Some of the pages had ripped and parts were probably still attached to the boots of his attackers.
Edmund sighed and tenderly replaced the book in its oilcloth sleeve.
“It’s not the book itself, you understand, it’s…
” He took his glasses off and exhaled, trying to find a way to phrase it that would make the Dervish understand. “Suppose you raised … oh…”
“Sheep,” offered the Dervish.
“Sheep, fine. And there are things that go wrong with sheep, right?”
“Ancestors, yes. I’ve often wondered how wild ones survive, when the tame ones are always falling over, dropping dead, or having their hooves fall off.”
“Exactly!” Edmund grinned at him. “And suppose you figured out, after twenty years of keeping sheep, that the sheep in this pasture were fine, and the ones over here weren’t, and the difference was a plant they were eating, so you realized that if you mixed a little bit of the plant into their feed, their hooves stop falling off. Or even just fall off less.”
The Dervish considered this. “I haven’t looked after sheep since I was a boy,” he said, “but I suspect that would be an extraordinary help.”
“Right. And you know this, and you mix the plant diligently, and your sheep are happy, and then you fall off a cliff and die.”
“Aaaaaa.…” The Dervish fell over backward with a trailing cry. “Splat. Poor me.”
“And poor sheep,” said Edmund. “Because you never told anybody and you were illiterate and didn’t write it down.
And for the next hundred years, sheep are limping everywhere, despite someone having already found a cure, until somebody re-finds it.
The world could have been better, in just this one small way, but the knowledge got lost.”
The Dervish, still lying on his back, studied Edmund thoughtfully. “So it’s not all just barnacle pigeons, then.”
Edmund shook his head. “It’s not all just barnacle pigeons.
It is so important that we keep the knowledge alive…
” He trailed off, suddenly glumly aware that he was no longer employed in such a field, and that if he wanted to keep knowledge alive, he would have to find a way to do it without the aid of the temple.
“I don’t know how I’ll keep doing it,” he said, mostly to himself.
“Did you make no plans beyond leaving?” asked the Dervish. His voice was soft, but his silver eyes were sharp as scalpels. Of course, Edmund thought, it’s his future too, if we don’t find a way to break the curse.
“I thought perhaps I could work as a scribe, or a librarian, if the library in Archon’s Glory had an opening. Or … I knew a woman in Anuket City. An old friend.”
He was only aware that warmth had crept into his voice when the Dervish said, “A woman, eh?” in a suggestive tone.
“Not like that! She—we weren’t—I was a great admirer of her, um, her—”
The Dervish didn’t say anything, but his eyebrows did not so much suggest as draw diagrams and point to them.
“—her indexes.”
“Is that what they call it these days?”
Edmund put his hands to his face. His cheeks felt hot.
On one level, he knew that the Dervish was only teasing him, but he wasn’t used to being teased by extremely pretty men who had saved his life.
“She wrote Notes on Advanced Gear Construction,” he said, to the backs of his eyelids.
“Volumes one through seven. The indexes were works of art, except for volume four, but she updated that one a few years later.”
“Oh,” said the Dervish, actually sounding slightly embarrassed, “indexes.”
“They were very thorough. Also Ashes Magnus is old enough to be my mother.” He lowered his hands.
“I get it. And I’ve embarrassed you,” said the Dervish. He sounded genuinely contrite. “Sorry.”
Edmund should have stopped there. He knew he should have stopped there. It was absolute madness that he opened his mouth and said, “Besides, err, my order is sworn to, um, celibacy.”
“Now that’s a shame,” the Dervish said.
Edmund was apparently no longer in control of his own voice. He could only sit there and watch as he said, “It’s … it’s not like that. It’s women.”
“Women?”
“The, err, celibacy.” Edmund hated how he stammered when he got flustered.
He thought that it had gotten better over the years, but apparently it hadn’t.
Maybe he had just been flustered less often.
The Dervish was currently making up for lost time.
“We … um. Women are forbidden. The … the … order teaches … the … the feminine exhalations…”
He darted a glance at the Dervish, to find that the man’s eyebrows were climbing toward his hairline. “Feminine … exhalations.”