Are you doing well? I haven’t heard from you since you went back to Stokesley. There were some concerns when you came to Falchester about the reliability of the post; I would be grateful for even a brief note letting me know everything there is all right.
Your friend,
Simeon
1 These are clearly the origins of the three military orders known from the Classic Period, the Takhaba, the P rz, and the Zayba. There is no reason to think the founders were real individuals, any more than the four from a single egg are likely to have been—especially not when their names translate to “gold,” “quicksilver,” and “iron”—but this nonetheless provides an origin for those orders, however mythical.—K
Mornett once speculated to me that the names of those orders derived from those words. He must have been so pleased when he found out he was right.—AC
2 This is not confirmation that Anevrai queens rode dragons into battle, any more than depictions of such on the walls of temples can be taken as confirmation. (Those same walls show queens towering four times the height of their vanquished foes.) But it demonstrates that such an action is certainly an ideal they held as more than a visual motif.—K
A motif of domination. Your people are able to train mews and, to a lesser extent, other dragons, but that is done through much more cooperative means. This is control by raw force.—AC
3 Definitely not an accurate count—not for the pre-founding period.—K
4 Why is sparing the leaders justice? It seems like it would be more fair to kill them, and leave everybody else alive.—CF
The answer to that no doubt lies in the final tablet.—K
And I suspect it’s the reason Gleinleigh has gone to all this trouble.—AC
FROM THE DIARY OF AUDREY CAMHERST
16 Caloris
One tablet left.
We’ve almost stopped talking to one another, Kudshayn, Cora, and I. Not because anyone is angry. We work every waking moment on the tablets, half afraid to find out where they are leading us, but unable to stop, and I think I dread the ending almost as much as Kudshayn does. It’s already unpleasant, seeing the shift from the Anevrai as ancient hunter-gatherers to the conquerors who built an empire, but that alone wouldn’t justify the effort Gleinleigh has gone to. There must be more to come.
He isn’t here, the coward. In fact, he hasn’t been back to Stokesley since that dinner at Lady Plimmer’s. I’m not surprised; between what I said to Mornett and what I said to Mrs. Kefford, it’s obvious I suspect them of something, though I doubt they know that we’ve figured out their secret. If I were Gleinleigh, I wouldn’t come back here, either. Better to leave us to work undisturbed.
I keep wondering what other spies he has set on us. Mrs. Hilleck, the housekeeper? The maids who dust the library? We’re endeavouring to keep to our usual habits (and hoping no one was listening at the keyhole when we figured out the truth about the cache), but we’ve been making duplicates of everything in secret—copies of the tablets, transliterations, and the translation itself—just in case Gleinleigh swoops in at the last minute to snatch everything away.
A few weeks at most. Probably not even that. Then we’ll be finished, and we’ll have to decide what to do with our translation.
It isn’t quite true that we’ve stopped talking to one another, because that makes it sound like it’s mutual, and it isn’t. I had to ask Cora to stop, because she keeps on trying to speculate about how her uncle intends to leverage the translation, and then attempting to defend against those speculative attacks with logic. She persists in thinking that if we can just muster some nice, reasonable facts, then all harm can be prevented. Unfortunately, people don’t really think that way.
I should have known she was up to something these last few days. There’s relatively little left for her to do; it’s just translation now, and she still isn’t much help with that. But she was scribbling away in the corner, even though she’s up to date on copying our notes, and then every so often she would get up to look at something elsewhere in the library. Today, while Kudshayn was resting in his refrigerated room, she came up and thrust a sheaf of papers at me.
At least I have learned my lesson about brushing off things she hands to me. “What is this?” I asked, taking it from her.
“It’s an article,” she said. “Well, it’s part of an article. A draft. I don’t know all the things to put in it, and I’ve never tried to write an article before, so I don’t know if it’s any good. But you can help me with that.”
A quick skim showed me lots of discussion of climate—and, oddly, of volcanoes. There was even a map of Anthiope, sketched in Cora’s very careful hand. “This is about the geography of the epic?”
“It doesn’t match up,” she said earnestly. “Or rather, parts of it do, but not all. And I know you said the geography is made up, but I don’t think all of it is.”
Kudshayn and I have speculated about that from time to time, but I didn’t realize Cora had been paying such close attention to what we said. Her argument—laid out with all the formidable logic of which she is capable—is that the evidence of plant and animal life mentioned in the earlier parts of the epic, the Genealogy Tablet in particular, suggests the ancient climate of central Anthiope more than southern.
That much is reasonable, and I’ve thought the same thing myself. But then her article goes on to say that the volcano most likely to be responsible for the “loss of the sun” in the Darkness Tablet is also in central Anthiope—Mt. Dezhnie in Vystrana—citing a Dr. Ralph Stanyard as her source for this declaration. Therefore (her argument goes), it makes no sense that the Worms Tablet places “the mountain that ate the sun” in the southern part of the continent, in the lands of the mu: it must have been in the homeland of the Anevrai themselves. Therefore, human beings cannot be held responsible for that event—always presuming that it were possible to cause a volcanic eruption, which to the best of the article’s author’s knowledge it is not.
She stood patiently while I read through it. When I was done, the first thing I could think to say was, “Who on earth is Dr. Stanyard?”
“The geologist you told me to write to,” she said. “I mean, you didn’t actually tell me, you just hinted very pointedly, and you didn’t specify him; I had to write some letters first to even find a suitable geologist. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes—but I had no idea you’d gotten anything back, much less an actual answer!”
Cora stood very still, thinking back. “Oh,” she said. “Of course. I heard back while you were in Falchester and not talking to me, so I didn’t say anything. And then you started talking to me again, but by then I’d forgotten that I hadn’t told you about his letter.”
I sighed and rubbed my face with my hands. “Thank you, Cora. When all of this is done, I’ll be happy to assist you with the article.” (There were places in her draft where she could not remember or look up the things Kudshayn and I had said about geographical clues in the epic; she had left notes to herself that she should consult with me.)
Honesty prompted me to add, “I don’t know if it will do any good for the Draconeans, though. Even if you’re correct—and I think you are—it just means the Anevrai scapegoated innocent people for the loss of the sun. Whether the war that resulted is an actual historical event or just a mythical tale, the fact remains that this is a story the Anevrai chose to tell. A story they took pride in.” We can’t know for sure how the epic fit into their society, especially when the tablets were torn out of their original archaeological context, but they’re much too finely made to be anything other than an honoured text.
Cora’s shoulders slumped, and I felt like a cad. “Oh, please don’t think—I’m grateful you did this, really I am. At least you’re trying to find a way to make things better, while I sit here doing something that will probably make them worse. And . . . I want you to know that whatever happens with the epic, I’m glad I had the chance to work with you.”
Her chin stayed down.
“Truly?”
“Yes, truly. And if you ever want—”
I stopped myself, but I should have known better. Cora is a bulldog when it comes to unfinished thoughts; she won’t rest until she knows what you were going to say. “If I ever want what?”
If I weren’t so tired these days, worn to a thread by worry and work, I might not have thrown tact to the wind quite so comprehensively. As it is . . . “If you ever want to get away from your uncle, let me know. You shouldn’t have to go on living with a liar and a bigot if you don’t want to.”
Her shoulders tightened. “I’m grateful to him. For taking me in after my parents died. It was a railway accident. When I was ten.”
My heart thumped hard. I haven’t asked about her private life since she made it clear she wasn’t interested in discussing it with me; I have the feeling that her sharing it is as significant as Kudshayn telling me I could share the story of his clutch with her.
But the part about Gleinleigh . . . it had the sound of rote recitation. “That was good of your uncle,” I said, choosing my words with more care this time. “But being grateful to him and spending the rest of your life under his thumb aren’t the same thing. You can do something else with yourself.”
Almost inaudibly, Cora said, “I’m not fit for anything. I’m too awkward and no one else would want me.”
That hit like a slap of icy water. I came within an ace of flinging my arms around her before I remembered she wouldn’t like it. “The hell you are,” I said violently. “I need to introduce you to Simeon Cavall at the Tomphries. If I tell him about the work you’ve done for us here, he’ll weep with joy and then stick you in a windowless room to catalogue artifacts for the rest of your life.”
Then I reviewed what I’d just said. “Oh, Lord—I made it sound awful. I mean, only if you want to catalogue artifacts for the rest of your life. Otherwise you can do something else. Something more enjoyable.”
Cora thought it over. Then she said, “I would insist on windows.”
The little smile playing at the corner of her mouth lifted my spirits like nothing else lately, because it meant I’d made her feel better. I haven’t fixed everything—there’s no way I could—but at least I helped a little.
Which is about the only good thing that happened today. The epic is headed in dreadful directions, and a letter came from Grandmama this afternoon that has me wanting to crawl out of my skin with shame, because she’s right on every count.
I don’t know what Grandmama would do in my situation. Except be clever enough not to have gotten herself into it to begin with, and it’s far too late for that.
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF CORA FITZARTHUR
Things I found in Uncle’s files that look relevant:
—a letter dated 18 Acinis, 5661, Mrs. Eveline Kefford to Marcus Fitzarthur, Lord Gleinleigh
Mrs. Kefford doesn’t mention tablets outright, but she says she’ll make arrangements for “the crate” to be loaded on board his ship next month (this was a few weeks before he left for Akhia), and cautions him to be careful, since “some of them” are already damaged, and “it won’t do us any good at all if they can’t be read.” That sounds like tablets to me.
She also reassures Uncle that “everything has been arranged with the permit office.” Unless that has something to do with boats, I think she means the Akhian office that issues permits for excavation, because I remember Uncle fretting about that before he left. I guess his fretting wasn’t necessary, since Mrs. Kefford says the man in charge of that is “one of ours.”
— a receipt dated 2 Nebulis, 5661, for 245 clay tablets purchased from Joseph Dorak for 3500 guineas
There were 271 tablets in the cache, including fragments. 245 plus 14 (for the epic) is 259; I’m not sure how many tablets I recognized as coming from Uncle’s collections when I packaged them up for the Carters. I should have made notes. There are seven in what they’ve catalogued so far, though. I bet there are twelve in total.
—handwritten receipt, dated 3 Nebulis, 5661, 500 guineas for shipping, destination unspecified
It would never cost that much to ship tablets from Falchester to anywhere in Scirland, and I know for a fact we didn’t receive anything here at Stokesley (apart from milk and flour and so forth, of course) until after Uncle came back from Akhia, when his cache arrived.
He should have just bought his extra tablets when he got to Akhia. It would have been much cheaper than shipping so many there.
I didn’t see anything else obviously incriminating, but I will steal Mrs. Hilleck’s keys again tomorrow night and search Uncle’s study some more.
Tablet XIV: “The Sacrifice Tablet”
translated by Audrey Camherst and Kudshayn
Now all the south was brought under the wings of Samšin and her sisters. The people dug the āmu out of their holes and brought them before Samšin, and those who resisted were sent to bow before the Crown of the Abyss. Those who bent their heads in submission were given life.
The leaders were trapped in the cave where Samšin and her three had found them, with the wings of the issur barring the way. They prayed to the Ever-Standing, Foundation of All, to deliver its children, but the earth answered them only with silence. When the subjugation of the south was complete, Samšin came to the leaders of the āmu with her sisters, with her three followers, with her heart full of fury, and spoke to them in judgment.
She said to them, “In your evil you sought to deprive us of the Maker of Above and Below. I am Samšin, sun-gold, hatched from a single shell, and I have brought justice into the world. Hear now the justice I give to you: because you sought to destroy light, you will see light no more.” Her three seized the leaders and put out their eyes.
Then she dragged them before the people, so everyone could see that they had been blinded. She said to them, “In your envy you sought to take away that which loves us best. Hear now the justice I give to you: because you thought yourselves our equals, you will crawl in the dirt where you belong.” Her three seized the leaders and broke their arms and their legs.
Then she dragged them before the āmu, on their knees in submission, so everyone could see them crawling like worms. She said to them, “In your pride you led your people into a confrontation they could not win. Hear now the justice I give to you: because you spoke words of evil, you will speak no more.” Her three seized the leaders and cut out their tongues. This was the justice of Samšin, sun-gold, hatched from a single shell.
But when justice had been done, the people still cried for more. They said, “How can we be certain the āmu will not strike at us again? How can we be certain they will not take away the Light of the World? We must protect the Maker of Above and Below against their malice, now and forever. We must not fall into darkness again.”
Samšin considered this. In the silence of her heart she prayed; in her dreams she sought ideas. She had a dream of her brother Ektabr, sitting at the right hand of the Crown of the Abyss. She dreamt of an answer, given to her by her brother, who had been the price of light.
She said to the people, “I will make the Light of the World strong against the malice of the āmu. I will give it an offering from its chosen people, a gift of fire, so that it will burn more strongly; its flames will burn the mouth of the Endless Maw, so that it cannot be consumed again. I will give the remnants of the fire to my issur, a gift of bone for our faithful servants. I will give the ghosts of this offering to the Crown of the Abyss, a gift of memory for its hospitality. I will give the leaders of the āmu āmu to the fire.”
She built a structure of wood. Samšin built up a pile of wood; Samšin created a mountain of wood, whose rivers were of oil. She placed a stone at the center of the wood, in mockery of their god, and bound the leaders of the āmu to it. Their eyes were blind, their legs did not move, they had no tongues with which to speak, but they wailed their fear to the sky. Samšin burned them, a gift of fire for the Maker of Above and Below. Their bones she threw to her issur; their ghosts went
down to the underworld, the fate they had tried to make for the Light of the World.
This was the beginning of civilization. Samšin established order for the people, so that each would know their role; they became farmers and scribes, craf ters and judges, and they prospered under her rule. Below them stood the āmu; below them stood the issur; below them stood all the creatures of the world, the faithful servants of those the sun loved best. Samšin’s wings and the wings of her daughters spread until they encompassed all the lands and seas. Under their rule the Light of the World grew strong, so that its journeys to the underworld were brief, and the star demons did not dare to strike. Each year they made offerings to the Maker of Above and Below, when its power grew weak; each year they gave a gift of fire, a gift of bone, a gift of memory, a gift from among the āmu, so that they might turn darkness into light.
FOR THE ARCHIVES OF THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS
written by Kudshayn, son of Ahheke, daughter of Iztam
Light of the World, Maker of Above and Below, bright mirror, wanderer of the world, forgive the sins of my foremothers, committed in your name.
Ever-Standing, Foundation of All, dark stillness, refuge of the people, forgive the cruelty of my foremothers, committed against your children.
Ever-Moving, Endless Maw, forgive us for having forgotten you. Forgive us if we forget you still, relics of a past in which I can take no pride. All the achievements of the four—the working of metal, the planting of the earth, the administration of justice, the writing of words in clay—are as the dust of bones in my eyes, laid against the errors to which their creators came.
Forgive me, O my people, for being the one who bridged this gap. Forgive me for being the instrument by which our enemies have brought this tale from the sheltering darkness of the earth into the light of day, all for the purpose of staining our hands with blood in the eyes of humankind.
Turning Darkness into Light Page 24