“Now,” Malcolm said, still addressing Lore, “theoretically, you could pull Spiritum from a living thing, much like taking Mortem from a rock or deadwood. But living things cling fiercely to life; they don’t give it up easily.”
Lore wandered over to one of the shelves of books Malcolm actually let her touch, bound copies of lecture notes from the university in Grantere, a smaller city farther north. “I would imagine taking Spiritum from a living thing would leave it dead.”
“That does logically follow, yes,” Gabe said drily.
She ignored him. “And you’d have to pull from something large, like a person or a big animal or a shit-ton of flowers to get enough Spiritum to do anything.” She hadn’t the foggiest what someone might attempt to do with Spiritum, but Mortem wasn’t exactly the most useful thing, either.
“If we follow the theory that it works similarly to Mortem, yes.” Malcolm leaned back against the table, crossed his arms. “But note: No human has ever actually channeled Spiritum, so we don’t really know if it works the same way. This is all conjecture.”
“Then why is it mentioned in the first place?” Lore moved on from the lecture notes and instead grabbed one of the non-rare copies of the Book of Holy Law. She flipped to the notation, memorized now. “The Book of Holy Law, Tract Two Hundred Fourteen. ‘To my chosen, I bequeath my power—Spiritum, the magic of life.’”
Malcolm grinned.
Lore eyed him over the edge of the book’s cover. “You have some fiddly little scholarly fact about this passage, don’t you?”
“Not fiddly, thank you very much, just a translation dispute.” His grin widened. “Tell me; is chosen singular or plural?”
Her mouth opened to answer, then shut with a click of teeth. Lore looked to Gabe; he looked just as confused by the seemingly simple question as she was.
“It can be either, depending on the context. And therein lies the problem.” Malcolm went to the bookshelf, pulling out another copy of the Book of Holy Law. This one was written in Rouskan; he flipped to the same page and pointed out Tract 214. “I don’t suppose you read Rouskan, but they have slightly different variations on the spelling for their equivalent of chosen, one singular and one plural. This copy was translated just after Apollius disappeared—the translator would’ve gotten the dictated passages from Gerard Arceneaux himself.” He tapped the word on the page. “And he used the singular spelling for chosen.”
Gabe got up from the bench, came around to look at the Rouskan translation. “Was the singular translation only in Rouskan?”
“All languages that have separate spellings of chosen to denote singular and plural went for the singular option until about 16 AGF—so fifteen years after Apollius disappeared, right in the middle of Gerard Arceneaux’s reign.” Malcolm was off and running, now, pulling other copies of the Book of Holy Law from the shelves and turning to Tract 214 in all of them, littering the table. “At that point, all translations swapped over to the plural spelling.”
“It’s a sin to change the words of Apollius.” Gabe leaned over and braced his hands on the table, peering at the books like he could make them confess something.
“Sounds like Apollius should’ve chosen His words a bit more carefully, then,” Lore muttered.
Gabe straightened. “Hmm.”
“So if it was meant to be singular,” Lore said, “that would mean that instead of all the Arceneaux line having the ability to channel Spiritum, it’d be only one of them.”
Malcolm nodded. “That’s the same conclusion Anton came to.”
The mention of the Priest Exalted made the air heavier.
The librarian stared at them a moment, dark eyes glinting with curiosity. When he spoke, it was quiet, and with the air of something decided. “Do you want to see the most recent book we acquired? I had to send for it from Grantere, after August specifically requested that Anton find it.”
“Malcolm—” Gabe started, but the other man held up a gloved hand.
“Things have been rotten for a while, Gabe.” The teasing excitement he’d had while talking about translations was gone now; Malcolm sounded resigned. Sad, like someone coming to terms with a fact they’d long suspected but tried to ignore. “Anton and August are clearly keeping secrets, and Anton trapped you in the Citadel when he knew it was the last place you wanted to be. Between that and the research he’s doing—not just about Spiritum, but about Mortem and how it can be manipulated—I’m not convinced he’s who I want to be following.”
Gabe was stricken silent. They’d all skirted close to heresy in here, but Malcolm’s words came the closest of them all.
“Not that I necessarily want to be following you two on whatever harebrained quest you’re on, either,” Malcolm said wryly, “but I have a… a feeling, I guess. Something is changing, and I want to be part of changing it.”
Neither Lore nor Gabe knew what to say to that. But after a moment, Gabe reached out and clapped the other man on the shoulder. He kept silent, and looked troubled, almost afraid.
Malcolm returned the gesture, then turned to the cabinet where the rarest volumes were kept. “Let me find that book. It might shed some light.”
Next to Lore, Gabe crossed his arms, face drawn and pensive. Lore tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “You said Anton was looking into Mortem, too? What about it?”
“Awful stuff,” Malcolm said softly. “Reports on the necromancers, back in the first years after the Godsfall. Apparently, the ability to raise the dead wasn’t about how much Mortem they could channel, but how they manipulated the Mortem that they could. And others worked in pairs—one to raise the dead, the other to control them, through some complicated channeling ritual.”
Lore frowned and twisted at one of the ribbons on her sleeve. She’d worn a new gown today, a powder-blue number with short puffs of fabric covering her shoulders, the ribbons that gathered the sleeve trailing down the backs of her arms. They itched.
Malcolm frowned, opening and closing another drawer. “Dammit,” he muttered under his breath. “It’s on transubstantiation, so I would definitely have put it in this drawer, not the one up top…”
“Would you happen to be looking for Theories on the Physical Practice of Transubstantiation by Etienne D’Arcy?” Bastian asked. “Because I have it right here.”
Lore’s head whipped around so fast her neck creaked.
The Sun Prince of Auverraine stood just inside the door to the library, one shoulder leaning against the jamb. He held a large leather-bound book in his hands, absently riffling the pages back and forth, mindless of their age and value. A guileless half smile lit one corner of his mouth, but his eyes glittered darkly in the dim light.