Elsa fished around in the pile. “Montaigne had an office scribed somewhere … that’s probably our best chance. Now which one was that?”
She picked up an older book to check it, but as soon as she cracked the cover open, she remembered it was the world scribed in an alphabet she didn’t recognize. This was the book she’d found lying on the floor beside Montaigne’s lifeless hand. Without the restoration machine, she never would have been able to repair this one, at least not until she’d mastered the language.
“Where did you get this?” Faraz suddenly exclaimed, grabbing the volume out of Elsa’s hands. “Montaigne had this in his library?”
Elsa blinked. “Yes. Actually, he was holding it when he died. What’s wrong?”
He opened the book, intent on examining it. “The cover’s newer—it’s been rebound—but look at this paper, this ink. Don’t you understand? This is an original Jabir ibn Hayyan scribed world!”
“Who?” said Elsa, baffled.
Faraz, at a loss for words, cast a disbelieving look at Leo.
“A famous eighth-century polymath from Persia,” Leo explained. “He revolutionized the science of alchemy. He also redesigned all the materials used in scriptology, which, I understand, provided the basis for modern scriptological technique.”
Porzia stepped closer to take a look. “If it was important to this Montaigne fellow, I’d say it’s worth taking a look inside.”
“We must be careful,” Faraz said. “Jabir was notorious for his use of steganography in all his treatises. There’s no telling what we might be walking into.” Somehow, though, the excitement in his tone failed to convey a sense of warning.
Elsa had heard of steganography, the practice of hiding coded messages in written works, but she had never seen it in a worldtext before.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to go in blind or not at all,” said Porzia. Then she raised her eyebrows at Elsa. “Unless you can read classical Arabic text?”
Elsa shook her head. “It would take me a while to learn, especially if the scriptologist was prone to using idiosyncratic syntax.”
“Blind it is, then!” Leo declared, grinning. He rubbed his palms together as if he were expecting to receive a treat.
Porzia rolled her eyes. “You could at least pretend to be concerned for our collective safety.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Anything really,” said Elsa. “The walls might eat us. Or perhaps the atmosphere’s pure sulfur tetrafluoride and the acid dissolves our lungs. Or it’s a world where fluids can’t exist, so our blood instantly freezes in our veins.”
Everyone stared at her. Leo’s mouth hung slightly open.
“What? I’m not saying we shouldn’t go. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to scribe a world like that—it’s just possible, is all.”
Very delicately, Faraz set the book back on the table. “Um, maybe this isn’t such a brilliant idea.…”
Leo narrowed his eyes at Elsa. “Melting lungs, you say?”
“I really think it’s very unlikely,” she said, flipping open the book cover to look for the coordinates in the front. “Faraz, can you tell me which of these symbols are numbers?”
Faraz folded his arms. “I’m becoming increasingly certain this is one of those ideas normal people would know not to follow through on. You know, the kind that gets pazzerellones killed before their time.”
Elsa was beginning to regret she’d said anything; caution could only impede the search for her mother. “Well I’m going. We’ll never get through this stack of worldbooks if we stand around wringing our hands all day. So read off the coordinates for me, will you?”
With a sigh, Faraz reluctantly found the settings for the portal device and read them aloud. In the end, when the black oval irised open, they all decided to go through.
Elsa stepped through nothing and emerged into a world with light, air, time, and solid ground beneath her feet. So far so good. She took a deep breath, just to be sure, and looked around.
They were in a large square room with a domed ceiling. An arched doorway was set into the center of each wall, all of them leading to darkened alcoves. Everything was constructed of seamless stone, as if it had been hollowed out from a single piece of rock.
The place felt old. It wasn’t just the spare lines of the cut-stone architecture—such a contrast with the intricate, fine detail of classical Italian design—or the thick swirls of dust settled on the floor. No, Jabir had imbued his creation with that indefinable something else: essence, or atmosphere, Elsa didn’t know what to call it. Whatever the effect was, it took her breath away.
“The Lost Oracle,” Faraz said. “I can’t believe it’s real. I can’t believe we have it.”
Elsa gave Faraz a look, wondering if he was going to start jumping up and down with joy. What was it with Earth people and their history? The obsession with the past held no appeal for her—the present was all that mattered. She hardly needed historical context to appreciate the talent required to create such a fine world as this.
It was Porzia who asked, “Lost Oracle?”
“It’s said Jabir had a fascination with the oracles of ancient Greece, so he scribed a world with the property of divination,” Faraz explained. “In his treatises, he describes it as a temple with four alcoves representing the four directions, but the book itself has been missing for a couple centuries.”
Elsa tapped a finger against her lips thoughtfully. “Well, that explains why Montaigne would have acquired it. The Oracle isn’t a person, but if it’s intelligent and aware, it would be something of a precursor to scribed humans. He must have studied it when he was working on Veldana.”
“But is it?” mused Porzia. “Intelligent and aware, I mean. It seems a bit … like an empty room.”
Leo waved his arms in the air and shouted, “Hello?” The sound echoed. He turned to Faraz. “So how do we turn it on, or wake it up, or whatever you want to call it?”
“I can’t say for sure. I’d guess you have to step into one of the alcoves to receive a prophecy.”
“There’s one way to find out,” Elsa said with a shrug, then stepped toward one of the alcoves.
“Wait,” Faraz hissed, his hand darting out to grab her arm. “You shouldn’t. What if the Oracle’s functional?”
Elsa paused, taken aback. “You think it can actually tell the future?”
“It’s a Jabir ibn Hayyan—anything’s possible,” said Faraz. “What if the Oracle has the ability to dole out perfectly accurate self-fulfilling prophecies? What if accessing the Oracle changes the real world to fit its predictions?”
“That would be dangerous,” Elsa conceded as she gently pulled away from Faraz’s grasp.
“Sounds impossible to me,” said Porzia. “How could a scribed book affect the real world?”