I returned by way of the harbor market, where I bought some lighter clothes, some olive oil salve for my scales, and a large embroidered pillow as a gift for Naia.
Abdo’s auntie loved the pillow, but she still made good on her threat to take me to the baths. I survived it by observing everything with an academic, dragon-like detachment: the nautical mosaics across the domed ceiling; the greenish, mildly musty water; my old-fashioned Goreddi shame at being naked; the elderly watching me closely with amusement; and the fact that I was the palest, scaliest person there.
It was all very curious. I might write some sort of treatise.
I had been happy to give Abdo a day to himself while I visited the embassy and the baths, but when he didn’t get up the next day, I began to worry. I had two weeks to find the other ityasaari—and Orma—before Kiggs and Comonot arrived, and surely Abdo wanted Paulos Pende, the ityasaari priest, to free him from Jannoula as soon as possible?
Speaking in a low voice so Ingar wouldn’t hear, I asked Naia after breakfast, “May I wake Abdo? He had hoped to visit the temple of Chakhon soonest.”
Naia looked appalled. “I doubt that,” she said. “You must have misunderstood.”
I thought back to our last conversation on the subject, aboard the ship. In fact, he’d been unenthusiastic. “Why wouldn’t he want to go?”
She pursed her lips, her eyes darting toward Abdo’s curtain, as if she weren’t sure how much he would want her to tell me. “He quarreled with Paulos Pende and parted on bad terms. I doubt the priest would want to see Abdo, either.”
Ah. Abdo’s reticence on the subject began to make sense. But if the old priest wouldn’t see Abdo, surely he’d see me. Maybe I could broker enough of a peace that the old man would agree to unhook Jannoula. Besides, Paulos Pende was the logical place to start if I was to find the Porphyrian ityasaari. I’d glimpsed the temple of Chakhon yesterday as I’d passed through the Zokalaa.
Ingar had sidled up behind me while I talked to Aunt Naia. He was a problem. I didn’t want him spying on my progress and keeping Jannoula apprised, but he would surely follow me around like a dog.
I decided to take the bald bookworm to Porphyry’s renowned library, the Bibliagathon—where Orma had been researching half-dragons. I could lose Ingar there, and maybe take a quick look for my uncle. We set off before noon, toward the heights of the wealthy west side of town.
“I’ve heard … so much …,” puffed Ingar. I’d been climbing the hill too fast for him, but he wasn’t one to let a little thing like lack of breath stop him from talking. “My own library is … not inconsiderable.…”
I paused so he could rest. His hairless head sweated rivulets and was alarmingly red. I looked away, at the city spread below us like a colorful bowl, the harbor a splash of violet soup at the bottom. Ingar leaned against a shady garden wall; vines vomited gaudy pink flowers through a crack above his head.
“I’ve had it sent to Goredd,” he said when he could finally put together an entire sentence without panting.
“Had what sent?” I’d lost the thread of his thought.
“My library,” he said. “Jannoula wants to build Heaven on earth, and what else can a paltry fellow like myself contribute? It wouldn’t be much of a paradise without books, you must agree.”
“Heaven on earth?” I said. This was new. “What is that supposed to be?”
“You know,” he said, his bovine eyes wide. “When we’re all together. We will live together in Goredd, with you, and be safe and happy.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again. Was that what she was after, or was that what she told Ingar she was after, to manipulate him? For all I knew, it was what she’d told Ingar in an attempt to manipulate me, to show she shared my dream of recreating my garden in the world.
That dream tasted bitter to me now.
Besides, Heaven on earth didn’t explain her actions in Samsam. Josef’s regency surely portended the opposite of safety for half-dragons, no matter how smitten he might have been with Jannoula herself. She was up to more than Ingar knew.
“I have twenty-seven thousand books in my library, give or take,” said Ingar, spontaneously setting off again, as if he heard the Bibliagathon calling his name. I followed in silence. “My mother collected books,” he was saying. “That’s how she met my father, the saarantras. He acquired rare books for her, and there are indeed marvels in my collection. I have the original testaments of St. Vitt, St. Nola, and St. Eustace.”
“The original—meaning, written in the Saints’ own hands?” I asked.
He shrugged modestly. “A savvier theologian than I would have to inspect them, but I believe so, yes. They’re from the Age of Saints, certainly. The script of that era incorporates some idiosyncratic features—”
He broke off because just then the famed edifice came into view: the graceful columns and soaring dome, the porches and courtyards where philosophers had walked and argued. A repository of the knowledge of ages, the Bibliagathon occupied an entire city block, and more. Orma had told me half the books were divided among three additional outbuildings: one for the ancient and frangible, one for extremely obscure texts, and one for new acquisitions and the difficult to categorize.
Ingar hopped on his toes like a little boy; in that moment, I understood him. Here was his Heaven on earth, surely.
My plan to leave Ingar in the library had a significant flaw: I was not immune to the siren call of books myself. I wandered, transfixed by the endless shelves and scroll niches, the colonnaded courtyards and burbling fountains, the scholars passionately scribbling treatises at long wooden tables, the gentle slant of sunlight along the open corridors.
That Orma might be here was all the excuse I needed to stay. If he were seeking out historical references to half-dragons, where would he be? I could read the inscriptions above the doors only with difficulty; Porphyrian script differs from Southlander, so I had to think about each letter. Luckily, the inscriptions came with bas-relief carvings. Some were obscure—how does a bullfrog represent philosophy?—but the carving of musical instruments seemed unambiguous.
Orma was a musicologist by training. It was a place to start.
The musicology room was unoccupied except for a bust of the poet-philosopher Necans at the far end. His bronze nose shone, polished by generations of scholars unable to resist the temptation to tweak it. I perused the shelves, noting with a certain pride that we had more music books at St. Ida’s in Lavondaville. My uncle had had nearly as many texts in his office.
Some books were in Southlander script; some were even familiar from my student days. A fat volume of Thoric’s Polyphonic Transgressions, bound in white calf, reminded me so vividly of Orma’s old copy that I pulled the book down on a sentimental whim, looked at the cover, and nearly dropped it.
There was a gouge mark across the cover where I’d attacked it with my plectrum the day Jannoula had used my mouth to kiss Orma’s.
This was Orma’s copy, unquestionably. He’d left Goredd with as many books as he could carry—some of which, I’d learned from the librarian at St. Ida’s, weren’t even his. Had he gotten tired of carrying them? He was so possessive of his books that it was hard to imagine him willingly giving one up.
The book bulged strangely. There was a lectern—a reading desk—near the bust of Necans. I opened the volume of Thoric there and found a second book, a slender manuscript, tucked inside. Behind that was a sheaf of loose papers, which spilled across the desk, cascading over the edge and settling to the floor like falling leaves. I gathered them up, my excitement growing. I knew Orma’s angular writing; these were his notes. If he’d left them, he must be coming back.
I tried to reorder the jumbled pages, but they weren’t numbered. I began to read, and the first page, happily, soon became obvious. He’d written THESIS across the top in large letters. I read:
It is difficult to find confirmed historical cases of dragon-human interbreeding. Dragons barely acknowledge that such a thing is possible; if it has happened, they didn’t record it. Human sources occasionally allude to the possibility, without documenting any instances (exception: Porphyrian sources). What if historical half-dragons did exist but their origins were obscured? I propose to search for accounts of people with unusual abilities or characteristics, look for patterns, and surmise from there.
A large, well-documented collection of such individuals has been under our noses all along: the Saints of the Southlands.