Mind of the Magic (Arhel Book 3) (17 page)

“We’re premier scholars—some of the finest in Bonton, which means the finest in the world.” Bytoris said that without even a hint of a smile.

“We were studying the First Folk tablets—” Geos added with a nod.

Bytoris interrupted him. “Made more discoveries in our brief stay than the Arissers did in their entire first year. I, for example, discovered the Caligro Tablets—a series of documents in one of the back sections of the library containing not only First Folk script, but the same text in Old Arhelan, and also in Ancient Gekkish, the precursor of the current Hoos dialects. If it had been left to the Arissods, Arhel would have been another hundred years before finding the linguistic key to the whole site. Pittering around, they were, no more clever than pigs spinning on a spit.”

Faia giggled. She could imagine what Kirgen would have had to say about that. The infamous feud between the natives of the city-state of Bonton and the grand old magical center, Ariss, was still definitely alive and well.

Edrouss Delmuirie sat up, though, interested by what the Bontonards had said. “The Caligro Tablets? And you found them in the library? I don’t remember documents by that name.”

“And why should you? I just discovered them—they’re named after me. They were filed in the back of the library, where the Arissludge hadn’t gotten yet.”

“I know the library fairly well,” Delmuirie said. “What were the file numbers?”

“File numbers?”

“Impressed into the stone on the side—Klog numbers.”

Bytoris frowned. “Klog—what are Klog numbers? I wrote down the location markings—but those are in First Folk codings.” He pulled a little tablet of drypress pages out of his pack and riffled through them. “Here. I found the tablets in double-three, three-two, four, one, double-two.”

Delmuirie closed his eyes and began ticking things off on his fingers. Faia watched his lips move, and felt the urge to say something terribly silly, but she restrained herself. “Oh,” he said at last “You would have found those in a section with blue-green stone shelves, about midway down the wall shelf.” He looked over at the Bontonards. “Yes?”

“Yes.” Bytoris frowned, puzzled. “That’s exactly where I found them. How did you know that… and who are you?”

Delmuirie smiled. “Let me introduce myself. My name is Edrouss Delmuirie. I used to work in that library.”

The looks on the Bontonards’ faces were so priceless, Faia pressed her face into her sleeve to hide her laughter and racked her feet up and down on her bedroll.

Bytoris got his voice first. “
Edrouss Delmuirie? The
Edrouss Delmuirie? The Delmuirie of the Barrier? But you can’t be. That Delmuirie lived two thousand three hundred eighty-seven years ago.”

Faia found that statement too funny for words. “How do you know it wasn’t two thousand three hundred eighty-six years ago? Or eighty-eight?” She rolled onto her stomach and chuckled. “Or
seventy
-eight?
Sev
enty-eight,
sev
enty-eight,
sev
enty-eight.” She loved the sound of those words—she thought she could say them all night.

All four men looked at her with enigmatic expressions on their faces.

At last Delmuirie said, “Well, it
is
a sensible question, if not sensibly put.”

Bytoris stared at Faia. She grinned back at him, then schooled her face to seriousness, trying to make her expression as mysterious and full of secret knowledge as would be any scholar’s were he in possession of a deep, important secret. Bytoris looked disconcerted—he kept his eyes on her while he answered Delmuirie. “Our calendar begins on the year of Edrouss Delmuirie’s death. He was a great Bontonard scholar and the author of many erudite works on magic and scholarship—”

“Though his style was terribly dry and formal,” Geos interrupted.

“Only in his later period. His earliest works are models of concision and wit.”

“Personally, I always thought he read like six different writers—I’ve suspected for years that every anonymous work in the scholarly canon was attributed to him sooner or later.”

“Nonsense.”

“I don’t think so,” Geos said “It doesn’t matter right now, anyway. The point is, Edrouss Delmuirie is dead. And has been for a fiendishly long time.”

“Well,
I
am not dead.” Delmuirie linked his fingers together and stretched, cracking his knuckles loudly. “And I resent being told that I am. And I
am
Edrouss Delmuirie, but I was never a Bontonard—Bonton was a cow pasture with a bunch of grubby cowherds living in the middle of it when I knew it.”

Bytoris’s face went dusky. “Spoken like an Arissod.”

Delmuirie snorted. “
Bog
-Arisser, you mean? That stinking swamp Ariss was home to stinking fish-eaters and the ugliest women in the world.”

“Well, we agree on that at least. Nothing good has ever come from Ariss.”

“I spent some time there,” Faia said. “I thought it was an interesting place.”

Bytoris, however, was not interested in her travels. He had returned to his previous subject. “The real Edrouss Delmuirie…” The expression on his face became unreadable. Faia thought Geos looked skeptical—but she couldn’t figure out what Bytoris Caligro was thinking at all. He sat straight up and hunched his shoulders forward leaning toward Delmuirie. A weird fanaticism burned in his eyes. “I don’t suppose you could read the script of the First Folk, could you? As proof that you are who you claim to be.”

“First Folk script—I did not know they had a
script
. Or do you mean Klog-press?”

“The impressions they left behind in tablets.”

“That’s Klog-press. Of course I can read it. And write it. I speak and read Air Tongue, Stone Tongue, Blood Tongue
and
Water Tongue—that is what I was
doing
in Skeeree.”

Bytoris’s eyes narrowed. “He speaks it. He reads it.” He stared down at his feet and rubbed the bridge of his nose with one long, graceful finger. When he looked up at Delmuirie again, his attitude was unmistakably condescending. “Would you at all mind giving me a demonstration?”

Delmuirie shrugged. “Does not matter to me. If there are no more Klogs, seems like a useless enough skill, but—”

Bytoris pressed his lips into a thin white line. “Useless. Of course. A moment, please.” He rummaged through his pack, and came out with a sheaf of drypress sheets. He held one up, and beckoned Delmuirie over. “These are rubbings I did of the tablets so I’d have copies for my own study.” He leafed through the sheaf and pulled out a single drypress sheet. He covered all but the top third with the other sheets, which he put facedown. “I know this part—I worked out the Gekkish. If you would start reading here.” He pointed to a line on the page.

Edrouss Delmuirie nodded, and studied the sheaf. “This is the Graggha-Sondmon Treaty—the one before the amendments, you know. There is a more recent one back about four shelves.” He glanced down, then back up again and opened his mouth. Instead of words, though, he began to cough and sputter and hiss and growl. Gyels lay back on his bedroll with his eyes closed, his expression one of boredom. Faia and the Bontonards looked at each other in disbelief, though.

Faia had thought Hoos sounded bad—but the sounds Delmuirie was making were like two mountain lions in a bag with their tails tied together. Two very
big
mountain lions.

“Stop!” Bytoris yelled after a brief demonstration. “What are you
doing?”

“I’m reading it.” Delmuirie shrugged. “In Klog.”

Bytoris’s face paled. “Translate,” he growled.

“You did not say you wished to have me translate it. You said you wanted me to read it.” Nevertheless, he ran his finger back to the top of the section Bytoris had marked off, and began again. “We agree,” Delmuirie read, “we peoples of Klaue and Annin tribes, to make no more war on each other, to cease in all times and places from hunting each other for our skins or teeth or bones, to cease in all times and all places the stealing and eating of the peoples of each other’s tribes. We, the Klaue, shall refrain from dropping stones on the heads and homes of our Annin neighbors. We, the Annin, shall refrain from coating landing towers with pitch and tar, or from lighting them on fire when they become covered with trapped Klaue. We shall not make war on each other for sport, nor shall we demand slaves or heavy tributes. We shall make our peoples to live together in peace, to our mutual benefit, sharing our skills and talents and ruling jointly in a Council composed of the best representatives of all our people.” Delmuirie sighed. “Then it goes into the actual articles of agreement. Do you wish me to read those as well—” He looked up and his speech faltered; he stared at Bytoris.

The Bontonard crouched on his blanket with his face pressed into his thighs and his arms wrapped over the back of his head.

“By all that is sacred,” Delmuirie murmured, “what is wrong with him?”

Geos glared at Delmuirie. “An entire realm of scholarship, through which many, many scholars could have gained great wealth and fame, has just fizzled into a minor study of a dead, but known, language.”

“How am I to repay my travel-study loan now, if not through my great discoveries?” Bytoris moaned. “I’ll be in debt so deep my children’s children will not be able to buy their way out of it. The assessor’s office will have my house and…” He kept talking, but his voice dropped so low Faia could not make out the words—only the tone of his unhappiness.

Nervously, Geos changed the subject. “You’ve not told us
your
name, girl.”

Faia quit staring at Bytoris and turned to the other Bontonard. “Faia,” she said. “Faia Rissedote.”

Bytoris stopped bemoaning his financial woes and raised his head to stare at her. Then both Bontonards glanced from Delmuirie to her, and Geos shook his head in slow disbelief.

“Then we are awash in celebrities. You
are
the girl who nearly destroyed Ariss?”

Faia winced and nodded.

Bytoris sat up straighter and gave her a half-smile. “Pity you didn’t get it all while you were at it.”

“I wasn’t trying to destroy any of it. I simply did what I had to do to stop the evil.”

Bytoris opened his eyes and studied her. “The Arissonese usually like their evil. I’m surprised you didn’t do things to encourage it, like the rest of your countrymen.”

“I’m not Arissonese,” Faia said dryly. “I’m Kareen—hill-folk.”

“Oh?” Bytoris smiled at her—the smile suddenly genuine. “I’m familiar with the Kareen—the hills above Bonton are full of them. Where are you from?” he asked her.

“North of Willowlake,” she said quietly. She didn’t feel like going into the details about the demise of her village, Bright.

“Why, I actually
knew
a man from up around Willowlake,” Geos said, startled. “An old wool merchant who came into Bonton and sold his wool in my neighborhood when I was a boy. He always brought milk-sweets and hard candy with him when he came to town.”

“My da told me all wool merchants carry candies in their pockets,” Faia said. “The children run to them, and their mothers follow. It’s easier to sell the wool that way.”

Geos watched the smoke curl out through the vent in the top of their makeshift tent and sighed. He seemed not to hear her. “What was the old man’s name? I knew it once.” He lay back, evidently deep in thought, then said, “Well. I can’t remember… but you probably knew him.”

“Probably not. I was from
near
Willowlake.”

“There isn’t much at all near Willowlake—and this was a memorable old fellow. You’re not so young that you wouldn’t have known him,” Geos insisted “Tall as a tree, and always knew a good joke. Rumor had it he’d fathered half the children in the Virlatch-Sodin district—my neighborhood.”

Bytoris said coldly, “Rumor-mongering is one of the Great Sins.”

Geos laughed and slapped his knee. “Bytoris is from my neighborhood, too—and come to think of it, I never met your father. Went off during the wars; that was the story. Maybe—” he began to sputter and cackle, “maybe your mother knew the old trader, eh?”

Delmuirie and Gyels laughed too. Bytoris, though, went pale. He turned his back on them, every stiff line of his body eloquent with wordless anger.

Geos stared after him, no longer even smiling. “I only jested, Bytoris. I meant no insult to your mother—she has ever been kind to me.”

Bytoris kept staring off into the distance.

Geos bit his lip. Faia could see the regret in his eyes and his posture. He took a deep breath, then in a soft voice recited.

“By Witte, your wit shall draw our doom.

For e’er the jester wears his jest

And mockery brings the Mocker nigh,

Whose truth none love.”

“That’s Terrfaire, the great Bontonard poet, from
Three Lies and The Maiden,”
he told Faia in a quiet aside. “Terrfaire also wrote, ‘Make thy peace or find thy grave with honor unsullied.’” He frowned and looked over at Bytoris’s back. “Dare I apologize?” Geos asked his fellow Bontonard.

Bytoris, though, didn’t answer. Instead, he lay on his bedroll and feigned sleep.

To Faia, who’d discovered the bonnechard did make her sleepy after all, sleep seemed suddenly a wonderful idea.

“I’LL never take another leaf of that stuff again,” Faia muttered under her breath. During her second day of trekking through the dark, she’d had plenty of opportunity to think about the giddy behavior she had exhibited while under the influence of the bonnechard—and she’d had plenty of time to regret that, as well as the pounding headache it had left her with.

She yearned for a cabin and a roaring fire and a soft bed. Her ribs throbbed but the bonnechard stayed in its pack, untouched, in spite of the fact that in this second camp, which seemed even colder and more exposed, the ground underneath her bedroll was rockier and more uncomfortable than it had been the night before.

The tiny fire in the center of their tarp-tent crackled merrily, though, and Gyels insisted they’d gotten closer to their quarry, so they were all in good moods.

The five of them ate, then drifted as they had the night before, into talking—but this night their stories were about other places they’d seen and other journeys they’d taken.