Chapter 57
“I’ve figured out something really exciting,” Quentin said. He was standing on the table in the restricted library. His hair was askew, and he had a few days’ growth of scrubby uneven beard. “Unfortunately, it’s trivial and not at all helpful!” He laughed, and it was the ragged sound of someone right on the edge.
Kip said, “Quentin, why are your teeth red? Tell me that isn’t blood.”
“Heh-heh-heh.” His voice pitched up crazily. “Nah, it’s not blood. Khat. You know khat? It’s a stimulant. Never used it until today—uh, three days ago. With kopi and khat and…” He looked down at several bowls below the table.
“Please tell me you haven’t been using the High Luxiats’ flower jars as chamber pots,” Kip said.
“Kip, under a thin veneer of excitement, I think I might be about to collapse.”
“That seems likely,” Kip said. “What did—did you drink the flowers’ water first?”
“I couldn’t drink it second. That would be gross. Plus, there wouldn’t be any room.”
Kip shook his head. He reached up and grabbed Quentin and put the young man down on the floor. He didn’t trust Quentin to jump down without hurting himself. The reedy scholar barely weighed more than Teia.
“Um, thanks?” Quentin said. “And please don’t touch me again. I don’t … I just don’t like being touched. Thanks.”
Kip shrugged. So Quentin was weird. Not any weirder than the rest of them. “So…?”
“The Black Cards and the Lightbringer are connected!”
“That is … exciting. I guess. How?”
“That we don’t know anything about either of them! Ha!”
Kip said, “Not so exciting.”
“I, I, I told you that I figured out the organization scheme, right?”
“That was like three weeks ago.”
“Right, right. I, I found all the references to the Lightbringer—I’ll show you those in, in, presently—and there was a problem with all of them—”
“Problem?” Kip interrupted. “What kind of problem?”
“One moment, one moment! So I had this thought and I went and I found all the books on the Black Cards. I couldn’t find them at first, but then I didn’t look for books on Black Cards—those have all been burned or stolen or what, what have you—so instead I looked for books about all the cards, but written before the Black Cards were declared black, that is, heretical, see?”
“Smart.” Kip wasn’t following, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“And I found the very same thing!”
“Same as what?” Kip asked.
“Same as the Lightbringer mentions!”
“But you didn’t tell—”
“Oh, right, right. Look.” Quentin pointed to a tiny book on the table.
The leaves were so old they were fragile and stained. “What is this?” Kip asked.
“It’s a luxiat’s prayer book. It was stitched into book form rather than a scroll so it could be thumbed through more easily, and fit in a pocket. They made them durable, and with plenty of empty pages at the back for the luxiat to record notes or prayers or dreams from Orholam or prophecies. This one belonged to Darjan himself.”
“The warrior-priest?”
“A leader of the a?dar qassis gwardjan. A green guardian priest.”
“The writing looks funny,” Kip said.
“The text? It looks funny to me, too. I don’t speak all these languages. I paired all the oldest books not in Parian or Old Parian with their translations. Sort of handy that the translations have been moved to this library, too.”
Kip hadn’t meant the text per se, though of course he couldn’t read it. He meant that there were blanks in the text. Spaces floated as if someone had written in invisible ink in them, but there were no words there. “What’s with the gaps?”
“Look at the translation book, right, right below it.”
The book of translation had gaps, too. They weren’t precisely aligned with gaps in the original, at least not by spacing. But Kip could guess that they must be aligned by meaning.
“It’s, it’s the same in all of these,” Quentin said. “Someone’s erased a lot.”
“Erased ink?”
“Or, or, or … or they wrote in some invisible ink. You’re the polychrome. You tell me.”
Kip shielded his eyes from the lantern and widened his pupils out to look in sub-red. Nothing. He soaked up some sub-red luxin from the lantern and brought it to his fingers—
“Kip, you’re forbidden to draft sub-red in a library!” Quentin said. “You can get expelled!” He obviously meant to whisper the last word, but he did it so loudly he might as well have been shouting.
But Kip was already done. There were no heat-reactive inks. He narrowed his gaze to superviolet—so often used for secret writing. Nothing there. He gently streamed superviolet luxin over the page, but nothing fluoresced. Then he donned each pair of colored spectacles in turn and gazed at the page. Nothing, nothing in any color.
But when he drew forth his superviolet spectacles, he found that one lens was broken.
“Oh, hells,” he said.
“Oh, Ben-hadad didn’t tell you about— Oops!” Quentin said.
“Tell me about what?”
“So! Nothing in any color?” Quentin asked.
“Tell me about what?”
“They all thought you were dead. He had some experiments he needed to do. Something happened. And then I think he’s been trying to find the right time to tell you. He, he feels terrible.”
“Then why are you telling me this?”
He looked nonplussed. “It slipped.”
“I didn’t mean why you, I meant why not him. Forget that. Show me this.”
“It’s all the same. I’ve copied them all out. In each book, in each translation, there are fragments only of Lightbringer prophecies. I thought at first they might have used bad ink. You can see that in some old manuscripts: ink that fades with age and gets illegible. But you wouldn’t have the translations with blanks in exactly the same places.”
“Why not? I mean, if the gap was already there when they wrote the translation, why wouldn’t they leave a gap, too?”
“Because I looked at the various times in which each of these translations were made, and there have been different copyists’ notations used to show that a text was illegible or absent. None wrote those notations in these gaps, and none of their methods involved leaving long blanks, it’s an inefficient use of the space on the pages, which are often expensive. So, so someone erased the relevant sections in the copies and the translations. We didn’t lose all of the Lightbringer prophecies in existence, of course. But in these books, we get only fragments. And not all the texts have translations, so some of these translations are my own.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Kip said. “How did they erase ink?”
“With hide you can scrape it off. Often followed by putting down another layer of whitewashing solution. With papyrus, you—”
“But I don’t see any change between the scrolls where there’s writing and where there isn’t. It doesn’t look like it’s been treated.”
“The treatment may be so old that it’s impossible to tell the difference.”
“Meaning that the erasures happened a long time ago?”
“Well, that makes sense with those with old translations, but that’s not applicable to all of them. If there was a single time period where someone erased lots of documents all at once—”
“Like the Office of Doctrine? When the Chromeria anointed luxors?”
Quentin bobbed his head, chagrined. “They must have figured out some mixtures of luxins that would bond with ink and lift it out. When combating heresy, it’s the kind of thing they would have loved to find. And use.”
“Those assholes,” Kip said. “Long dead and still causing problems.” If Teia had been alive during that time, the luxors would have burned her on Orholam’s Glare as a heretic.
“Anyway, here’s the prophecies I’ve got, and then I want to tell you one more thing.”
Kip read:
Death in hand, his card, his lot
He fights/struggles with/kills forethought
“He fights/struggles with/kills?” Kip asked.
“That was my translation. Sorry. It was a tough one. It could mean he’s impulsive? Maybe he kills without thinking ahead?”
“Are they all this bad?” Kip asked.
He could tell the words wounded Quentin. “Some of these languages are highly contextual, and the pertinent portions have been deliberately erased. Someone did this exactly so it would be impossible to reconstruct.”
In the dusk of times the jinn will rise
Rivers flow blood and moon shine blue
Of Two Hundred will come the Nine
To bring about the end of time.
Kip looked up at Quentin. “That doesn’t sound so good. Jinn?”
“Spirits? Powerful ones, though. Demigods?”
“And you’re sure it’s a Lightbringer prophecy?”
“Yes. It’s not choruses or lions frolicking with lambs kind of stuff.”
The rebels rise, the old ways lost,
Heresy, hypocrisy—
“That’s the whole fragment? Not helpful,” Kip said.
Back to the spinner’s wheel
Rejected in blood
Victim of the Promethean’s brood
“Promethean’s”? Kip asked. It sounded like Old Ruthgari.
“Usually it’s a personification of someone who takes violent action intended for some good. Kind of dark overtones to it? But you still haven’t seen the best one yet.”
Kip looked. The last one was only a title. On the Gift of Light. “Um, that’s great, Quentin. Where’s the poem?”
“No, that’s, that’s it. But look!” He pulled out the two books side by side. “The translation is wrong, so it wasn’t erased. They missed it. The ablative with this phrasing usually would mean ‘on the gift of light,’ but it could also mean ‘on the giver of light.’”
“You keep looking at me like I’m supposed to have a revelation,” Kip said.
“In the original, the common way to construct it would be ‘doniae luxi.’ But the word order doesn’t matter in an inflected language except for emphasis, but here it’s ‘luxi doniae.’”
“Still not—”
“Centuries ago the Parian accent gave way to the Ruthgari, and ‘luxi’ started to be transcribed as ‘luci’.”
“Still…”
“Luci doniae. Which in the nominative case is … C’mon. This is like having to explain the punch line of a dirty joke.”
“Oh! Lucidonius! So a poem ‘On Lucidonius’? But what does that mean?”
Quentin deflated. “Well, I don’t know. But it does mean the Lightbringer is tied to Lucidonius somehow. The Light Giver and the Light Bringer? What if they’re the same? What if the Lightbringer has already come?”
“And nobody noticed?”
“Everyone noticed Lucidonius. He changed—he changed the whole world.”
“But they didn’t notice that he was the same person they’d prophesied about?”
His hands are forged to take the blade,
His skin is dyed for war.
By father’s father is he unmade
He all will save through what all abhor.
Kip was almost done even trying. But Quentin said, “No, no, look, this is not even close to an exact translation—you think it rhymes in our language by coincidence? Even the meter is wrong. Iambs are natural for our tongue, but they wrote in dactylic hexameter.”
“Dact—what?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“How does this help us?”
“Well, well, well, it probably doesn’t. But I could spend years with this stuff! And this one, it makes reference to ‘he,’ which I assume is the Lightbringer, at least it’s been erased, too. This last one is a contested prophecy, but I don’t know whether it’s because they aren’t sure if it’s about the Lightbringer, or if it was contested later because it’s impossible.”
… he’ll pluck the immortal’s own beard and steal the shade from his head in the Great Library.
Quentin shrugged. “The plucking of beard hair is an idiom for vexing him, and to steal the shade from a man’s head—to a desert people? Not appreciated. So irritate and infuriate? Why the repetition? I don’t know. Checking the dates on both of those idioms to see when they were in use in the pertinent cultures might shed some light, but it’s a rejected prophecy anyway, so that’ll be low on my list.”
Kip said, “But why contest that one? It seems specific and clear.”
“It is. Unfortunately, we know that Lucidonius never went near the Great Library, and it’s been ash for nigh unto three hundred years now. Tellari separatists burned it down. Gave their lives, merely to take away something we loved and that made us better. May Orholam curse them.”
“That’s all very interesting, and not very helpful.”
“I know, and I haven’t told you the other thing, which is more of both.” Quentin looked suddenly so drained with his excitement past that Kip put a hand on his arm to steady him. Then he took his hand away at Quentin’s frown.
“And what’s that?” Kip asked.
“There’s some great stuff in these libraries. I mean I found out why the Feast of Light and Darkness can be a month off the actual date of the autumnal equinox, like it was this past year. It’s—never mind. Doesn’t matter. There’s also some really terrible stuff in these libraries. More terrible than good, I think. Even focusing narrowly, I’ve come across … Doesn’t matter. None of that other horrible stuff has been erased. So far as I can tell none of the other stuff that I would have expected the luxors to object to has been erased—except everything about the Black Cards. Even their names. They’re just gone, Kip. Nothing else has been erased: just some parts of the Lightbringer prophecies and everything about the black cards. There’s some connection. Some force that doesn’t want us to see the truth here. But it’s all gone. Down to even the impressions a pen would have pressed into parchment. They wanted to keep a secret, and they have. They’ve already won.”