When I lifted my head, I realized why the blaze had spread so quickly. I love you dearly, Grandmama, but it is your fault: the grenade went through the window right next to the specimens you so kindly donated to the exhibit and shattered all those glass jars, spilling formaldehyde everywhere. I have not forgotten the warning you delivered when I was seven and tried to hold a bit of embalmed flesh up to a gas light to see it better—it is very nearly tattooed on my brain—and so I understood immediately why that entire end of the room was in flames. There was nothing anyone could have done to stop it, short of the fire brigade itself.
I forced myself into the room. The heat was like a living thing, a monster beating at me and snarling that I should flee while I still could. The very air seemed to eat at my eyes and my lungs. The grenade had made a ruin of the entire place, splintering nearby shelves and knocking more distant ones over; I could barely work out where the tablets ought to be, and stumbled over things in my path. The only mercy was that with all the windows shattered, most of the smoke was going outside, rather than staying to blind me.
And I saw the tablets.
The grenade had blown them clear off their shelf and into the aisle, where they lay in a heap of fragmented clay. I wept with fury at the sight, but the tears evaporated before they could fall. And how was I going to get them out of there?
A surge of heat made me flinch, turning so Mornett’s rapidly drying jacket was between me and the worst of it. I saw he’d followed a few steps into the room, no farther.
I suppose most people would say a gentleman ought to have hurled himself forward, rather than letting me lead the way. But honestly, I think better of him for not trying to play the hero for my sake.
“Audrey!” he shouted, one arm up as if that would protect him from anything. “It’s no good! We have to get out of here!”
My answer to that was to lunge deeper into the room, toward the tablets. One of them had skidded mostly intact across the floor; I managed to grab it, hissing at the touch of hot clay, before sheer animal instinct dragged me back toward relative safety. I shoved the tablet into his hands and said, “Make yourself useful.”
He tried to protest even as he took it, but I wasn’t listening. I told myself that the fire was all the way at the other end of the room, that I just had to stiffen my spine a bit and I’d be able to rescue all the pieces before they could be damaged any worse—
But that was a lie. When I tried to drive myself back toward them, I felt like I was crisping alive. I might rescue another piece or two, but not all of them. And maybe not even that much.
My foot hit something on the floor. It was one of Arnoldson’s Nichaean pieces, a large bronze offering dish thrown facedown by the blast. I pulled Mornett’s jacket from my head, draping it over my hands to protect them, and heaved the dish up—I never could have done it without desperation giving me strength. My thought was to drop it over the pile of broken tablets to protect them, but howling fear meant I wound up hurling it like a massive discus, a clumsy throw that for all I know did more damage than it prevented.
An instant later, the fire brigade started pumping water through one of the windows.
A wall of boiling steam hit me like a fist. The next thing I knew I was out in the hallway, and I couldn’t fight anymore as Aaron dragged me toward the stairs, down, out into air that seemed like a shock of ice after where I’d been.
So for all my efforts, this is what I have to show for it: a single tablet. My face is scalded, my hands are burned, and as I write this I keep coughing, because in addition to the smoke there were fumes coming off the burning formaldehyde; one of the men from the fire brigade spent a good ten minutes upbraiding me for my foolishness. And yet, even though I only saved one—even though, now that the moment has faded, I’m all too aware that I could have died—even though this is easily the stupidest and most reckless thing I’ve done in my life—I don’t regret it.
Because they were prepared to destroy history, Grandmama. They mostly succeeded, too, and that makes me utterly sick. I don’t know if Gleinleigh was in on it; he seemed genuinely horrified about the risk to Cora, and Aaron said he didn’t know she was going to do this. Maybe it was all Mrs. Kefford’s idea. As for Aaron himself . . .
Whatever accusations one might fling at him, I don’t see him agreeing to blow up the epic and everything else in that room. He values the past too much.
You may think I’m being partial to him, that despite everything I still harbour some kind of warm feelings for him. Honestly . . . at this point, I hardly even know what to think. It is hard to hate a man who followed you into a burning building. But whatever you may think of Aaron Mornett, know this:
He left the tablet for me.
The men from the fire brigade examined us both, and by the time they let me go, Aaron had vanished. But the tablet I shoved into his hands? That was still there.
He could have taken it with him. I bet you anything Gleinleigh and Mrs. Kefford would have wanted him to, so they could finish what the grenade started. But he left it with me.
I think, having written this letter, I can finally sleep. I feel like someone has burned out the inside of me, leaving only a charred shell. Tomorrow I imagine the truth will set in: that we have lost the epic, that no one will care about smuggling when the artifacts themselves are gone, and this priceless text, horrifying ending and all, lives on only in our copies. Tonight, I just feel empty.
But I think that, for the first time, I may have done what Grandmama would do.
Your loving granddaughter,
Audrey
FOR THE ARCHIVES OF THE SANCTUARY OF WINGS
written by Kudshayn, son of Ahheke, daughter of Iztam
Endless Maw, accept this sacrifice and be sated. Let your hunger destroy no more.
Foundation of All, take Audrey into your sheltering embrace. She is my sister of no shell, as dear to me as Teslit; keep her safe from further harm.
Source of Wind, stay your hand. I cannot endure more change.
Light of the World, eternal sun, guide me through this darkest night.
FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF CORA FITZARTHUR
Mr. Alan Preston delivered some boxes to Clarton Square today, containing the fragments of the tablets. Dr. Cowell wouldn’t let the fire department clear away things in what’s left of the annex; he sent Mr. Preston, who is an archaeologist, to retrieve everything in a very systematic way. He says they would have been much more badly broken if a bronze offering dish hadn’t landed upside down over them, which helped protect them from falling debris and the firemen’s hoses.
Thanks to his careful work, and because Audrey made copies of all the copies (I mean extra versions of the drawings that show what the tablets looked like), I can identify this much so far:
Tablet I, the Creation Tablet: four pieces
Tablet II, the Genealogy Tablet: nine pieces
Tablet III, the Dream Tablet: three pieces
Tablet IV, the Hatching Tablet: four pieces
Tablet V, the Fledging Tablet: two pieces
Tablet VI, the Darkness Tablet: four pieces
Tablet VII, the Samšin Tablet: five pieces
Tablet VIII, the Nahri Tablet: four pieces
Tablet IX, the Imalkit Tablet: two pieces
Tablet X, the Ektabr Tablet: three pieces
Tablet XI, the Return Tablet: two pieces
Tablet XII, the Worms Tablet: four pieces
Tablet XIII, the War Tablet: three pieces
Tablet XIV, the Sacrifice Tablet: one corner knocked off,
but otherwise intact, because Audrey and Aaron Mornett
got it out.
Plus a box full of smaller fragments that will take a lot longer to identify. Mr. Preston told me anything can be put back together again, given enough time and patience, but he was trying to be reassuring, and he’s wrong. Not everything can be put back together.
I could have di
Uncle said he didn’t kn
I have
done many jigsaw puzzles, but never one in three dimensions. I can only think it will take an incredibly long time to assemble these again—and I don’t know what we’re going to do about the gold.
FROM THE DIARY OF AUDREY CAMHERST
2 Acinis
I just keep thinking . . . if they hadn’t tried to cover their tracks, we never would have realized the truth.
It should make me laugh. Maybe someday it will. But not right now, because everything they’ve done has already caused so much damage, and if we can’t put a stop to it somehow, they’ll do even more.
The odds of us managing that are a lot better now, though.
We’re all at Clarton Square. I didn’t even know Cora was here at first; Simeon brought me home after the fire, and I barely stayed awake long enough to write a letter to Grandmama. I slept until almost noon—though not well, thanks to inhaling formaldehyde fumes and smoke—and by the time I got up, Cora was hard at work. It turns out Alan delivered the fragments he’d retrieved from the rubble, and Cora sat down straightaway to organize them. On our dining room table, no less—but at least she put down a sheet first, unlike that time Papa left an enormous squid there.
I didn’t want to look. I am incredibly grateful to her for doing that work, because someone has to and she is as familiar with these tablets as anyone . . . but I knew it would just make my heart bleed, looking at the destruction those bastards have wrought.
At the same time, I couldn’t not look.
When Kudshayn came to my bedroom (shock! scandal! a male creature in my boudoir!) and told me what had happened while I slept, I said dully, “It hardly matters now—if it ever did. The Tomphries won’t put the tablets on display, not in this state, which means Pinfell won’t care whether they were smuggled or not, which means . . .”
I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence. But Kudshayn said, “We must see them sooner or later. And I . . . would prefer you to be with me.”
He wasn’t just saying that as a sop to my feelings, the way an adult will profess to be frightened of the dark and ask a small child to help them be brave. This hurts Kudshayn far worse than me; I could hardly refuse him comfort. I got up and hugged him (still in my nightdress; it is a good thing our household is used to outrageous behaviour), put on a dressing gown, and went with him down to the dining room.
It was like a morgue, with all the murder victims in a row. Kudshayn bowed his head and murmured a prayer over the fragments, which made them feel even more like the bodies of the dead. Cora watched that with fascination, but waited until he was done before she spoke.
What she said about the fragments will be important in time, but I hardly listened to her, because I was too much in shock, drifting closer to the table and staring like—well, like I was looking at corpses, except that I am not a priest and could not think of a single prayer, even though I have translated plenty.
Then I noticed something odd.
Cora cut off mid-recitation as I picked up one of the pieces of the Return Tablet. “Yes,” she said. “I was getting to that. Mr. Preston said he didn’t know what to make of the gold, but he picked up all the lumps of it he could find; those are in another box.”
Traces of it remained along the broken edge of the piece. Bright gold, standing out like the sun from all the soot and filth of the fire.
Kudshayn joined me and loomed over my shoulder. “It was . . . inside?” One claw-tip came around my arm to trace the narrow void in the center of the clay—a long gap just big enough to have held a thin sheet of hammered gold.
“It looks like it,” Cora said. “But the fire was so hot that it melted and all ran out.”
I truly am a Camherst, because life stirred in me once more at this sight of this oddity. I’d never heard of gold being inside tablets—though of course we wouldn’t know if it was there, would we, unless the tablets got broken. Which many of them have been, and none of those had gold that I know of, or a central void where gold or anything else might have lain concealed.
Kudshayn said, “‘Hearts of gold.’ Was that not inscribed on the sun disc Lady Plimmer bought? The one Simeon wrote to you concerning?”
“Yes,” I murmured, drifting down the table. “This might be proof that the tablets were stolen from that temple in Seghaye.” My gaze skittered across the broken pieces. The tablets were well made in the usual Draconean style, a core of rough clay covered with a layer of finer material suitable for writing, but the gold had formed a second, innermost core. On tablet after tablet—
Until I got to the one we’ve been calling the Worms Tablet. That one was solid clay. Two layers, just like a normal tablet . . . but not like the ones that came before it. And the War Tablet was the same.
That’s when I knew.
It wasn’t a guess. It wasn’t a theory. If I hadn’t been certain, I never could have done what I did then:
I picked up the Sacrifice Tablet and slammed it down on the edge of the table, breaking it in half.
Cora shrieked in protest and Kudshayn lunged, too late to stop me. “Audrey, what are you doing?”
I held out the broken pieces to him. Two layers of clay: just like the War Tablet, and just like the Worms Tablet. My hands were shaking, but my voice, when I spoke, was as steady as the Foundation of All. “It’s a fake.”
His wings fluttered, almost extending as if for balance, though wings can’t do anything to steady a Draconean against an earthquake of the mind. Cora said, “What do you mean, fake?” but I didn’t answer her. All my attention was on Kudshayn.
He thought it through. In the aftermath of so many horrifying things, with me holding the pieces of an artifact I’d just broken on purpose right in front of him, he still thought it through, because he is Kudshayn and that is how he works.
Restraint and rational focus notwithstanding, his wings trembled when he said, “There could be another reason. The style of the story shifts; we both know that. The last three tablets are more like history than myth. Perhaps that is why they lack the golden core: because they are not sacred.”
“If it were just the text,” I said, “I might agree with you. But consider the—the provenance.” My breath huffed out in disbelieving laughter. “Was it a mere stroke of luck that Mrs. Kefford and Gleinleigh got their hands on a text that confirms humanity’s worst suspicions about your people? Or did they get their hands on a text that was sure to attract a great deal of attention . . . and then arrange for it to be as damaging as possible?”
“But nobody could fake something like this,” Cora objected. “It’s far too difficult.”
Kudshayn said, “Audrey could—but wouldn’t. Aaron Mornett could, and would.”
I laid the pieces of the Sacrifice Tablet back down on the sheet, because the alternative was to drop them. Aaron Mornett. He isn’t the only one capable of such detailed, convincing work; I could think of a handful of people skilled and clever enough to carry it off. But Grandpapa would die before he falsified even a tiny piece of history, let alone something like this. So would the others. Only Aaron Mornett is unscrupulous enough.
In a way, I think that realization shattered me even more than discovering the forgery.
Because the forgery isn’t devastating; it is liberating. The nasty turn the story takes after the Light of the World is returned to the sky—all of that is a lie! Samšin doesn’t become a tyrant, they don’t blame human beings for the loss of the sun, nobody gets burned in sacrifice!
My thoughts might as well have been printed in capital letters across my forehead, because Kudshayn held up a cautioning hand when I whirled to face him. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” he said. “This does not prove the innocence of the Anevrai.”
“Who cares?” I said, laughing (and then setting off a coughing fit—this discovery has not liberated me from the after effects of smoke and formaldehyde inhalation). “I mean, of course you care; it still matters to you whether your foremothers burned people alive or not. But the proof of their guilt i
s gone!”
Cora said, in her most practical voice, “How are you going to prove that?”
It brought me down to earth with a thump. All well and good for us to point at the lack of gold inside the last three tablets, but that will hardly convince Pinfell—not when we’re accusing an earl and the wife of the Synedrion’s Dissenting Speaker. “I’ll shake a confession out of Mornett,” I said, halfway between grim and gleeful.
“Will his words be heard?” Kudshayn asked. “Your people put great stock in rank and wealth. Mornett has neither.”
The whole shape of it began to flower in my mind. “But this is so much more than forgery,” I said, the words drifting out of me, almost like I was a charlatan channeling some outside spirit. “I’ll bet you anything Hallman was behind the bombing last night—but he didn’t do that off his own bat. Somebody hired him. Gleinleigh or Mrs. Kefford.” Not Mornett.
And not Gleinleigh either, it seems. Cora hunched in on herself and said, “He swore it wasn’t him. He was angry that I got hurt, and when I said it was his fault, he told me it wasn’t. I—I believe him. But it doesn’t matter,” she added, suddenly furious. “He’s still working with the people who are at fault. Just because he didn’t give the order himself doesn’t make him innocent.”
That fits with what I know of Gleinleigh. There wasn’t supposed to be a riot at the airfield; there wasn’t supposed to be a bombing at the annex. He’s the type of idiot who thinks he can lie down with dragons jackals and not get blood on him.
“So it was most likely Mrs. Kefford,” I said. “She’s ruthless enough. But . . . that means the wife of the Dissenting Speaker hired a known terrorist to bomb a major public institution.”
“If we can prove it,” Kudshayn said.
Then his wings flicked in alarm. “The translation,” he said. “It has already been sent to the printer. We have to stop it.”
You would think that should seem small compared to the bombing. But after all, isn’t the epic the reason they’ve gone to all this trouble? Forge an ending, hire us to translate it—keep it under strict secrecy to minimize the risk that anyone will notice an error; I’m sure now that was Gleinleigh’s real reason for requiring our silence—then destroy the original so that, again, people will have a harder time spotting any mistakes. But the epic isn’t wholly destroyed (Cora says Alan said the offering dish helped protect the tablets!), and the attempt wound up showing us exactly what they were trying to hide. If they’d left well enough alone, we might never have discovered the truth.
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