Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

Chane stood in the private study of Frideswida Hawes, premin of the Order of Metaology. And he was tempted to dig through everything in sight.

He understood a little of thaumaturgy, the physical ideology of magic, as opposed to the spiritual perspective of his own conjury. Still, something here might shed a spark of light on his own research. He leaned over the desk, touching nothing as he examined the stacks of parchment and paper. Most appeared mundane, concerning daily guild operations and Hawes’s own order. Considering the top one’s immature topic, one stack seemed to be papers written by initiates.

Chane returned to the left wall’s pegged shelves.

Spines and labels on texts and containers were all marked in the Begaine syllabary. Even after nights of stumbling through Wynn’s journals, he still struggled to understand the sages’ mutable writing system. He reached for a ceramic cylinder with a wooden cap to verify that it was a scroll case.

“So ... disrespect is not your only flaw.”

Chane spun at the voice behind him and came face-to-face with a mature, slight woman in a midnight blue robe.

“Do we now add thievery to the list?” she asked.

Chane studied the narrow face of Premin Hawes. With her cowl down, cropped, ash gray hair bristled across her head, though any lines of age were faint in her even, small features. Severe-looking, she was not unattractive.

“My apologies,” he began. “I was ... only ...”

Chane glanced down the short passage to the chamber door.

Hawes could not have passed by without bumping into him, so how had she entered unnoticed? He flashed back to their first meeting.

When Wynn had been called before the Premin Council and he had been ejected, Hawes had stood inside the chamber doors. As the doors shut tight, the seam between them began to vanish. In a mere instant, the doors became one solid barrier. The image of Hawes with one hand raised, as she glared at him through the closing doors, had remained fixed in his mind. Her revealed abilities that evening were why he had ultimately sought her out in private.

“Well?” she said.

Chane remained calm, facing this deceptively academic-looking woman.

“Is it finished?” he asked.

She scrutinized him a moment longer and then turned toward her desk. Opening its top left drawer, she lifted out a narrow pouch of brown felt stacked atop two torn half sheets of paper and one of Chane’s own books. Much as he hungered to know what she made of the latter three items he had shown her, the first was the most important.

Premin Hawes loosened the pouch’s drawstring and slid its contents into her hand.

“This pair is smaller,” she said, “as you requested.”

She held out a pair of glasses much like those Wynn wore when igniting the sun crystal.

“They are the same?” he asked.

“Yes, simple enough to duplicate ... though these have structural improvements.”

Smaller compared to Wynn’s, their round, smooth lenses were framed in pewter. Unlike the straighter, thick arms of the original pair, these had tin wire arms with curved ends to better hook around a person’s ears.

Hawes had likely engaged her apprentices to make them—considering what little Chane discerned of her. Wynn had mentioned that Domin il’Sänke had scant respect for this branch’s metaologers compared to his own. Ghassan il’Sänke had not known with whom he was dealing.

The premin, like a mage of worth, did not put her skills on display unless necessary. Only petty dabblers made a show. From what Chane had seen at the council chamber, she was far beyond some academic practitioner.

“They were created from your specifications,” Hawes continued, “though they will not fit you.”

Chane said nothing. These glasses were meant for Wynn, to replace the ones she had. As to the first pair ...

He stepped around Hawes to her desk. Fingering aside the two half sheets of paper, he picked up the book he had left with her.

Chane had scavenged and saved as many books, journals, and sheaves as he could from a remote keep of Stravinan healer monks, ones that Welstiel had turned into feral vampires. This text, thinnest among them all, had held Chane’s attention from the start, though he could not truly say why. An accordion-style volume of grayed leather cover plates, it had one thick parchment folded back and forth four times between the plates. Its title read The Seven Leaves of ...

That final word in old Stravinan was too obscured by age and wear.

“Did you make anything of this, based on my attempted translation into Numanese?” he asked.

Hawes barely glanced at the book. She slowly pivoted the other way and retrieved the first half sheet of his notes—his translation. There were now more notes written in her own hand.

“Of ingredients mentioned, some are rare. They are mostly herbs and substances considered beneficial to healing ... but not all.”

Her explanation made sense, considering where he had acquired this text. To some relief, he realized what the last word of the book’s title must be.

The Seven Leaves of... Life .

But not all seven substances in the translated list implied leaves. Two he could not make out at all, proving difficult to copy them rote into Belaskian letters of similar sound. He glanced at Hawes’s notes, looking for those two.

“What is ... a muhkgean branch?” he asked.

“A mushroom grown by the dwarves,” she answered. “Its cap spreads in branched protrusions that splay and flatten at the ends.”

“Like leaves?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Yes, that might come to mind in looking at one. But I know of no medicinal purpose for them.”

This left another puzzle for Chane. To his knowledge, there were no dwarves in his part of the world. So how would those healer monks have known of this mushroom, let alone what it was called by dwarves?

“What of this ... an-os ... a-nas-ji ...”

Chane still struggled with the last of the seven terms. It was not Belaskian, old or contemporary Stravinan, or any language he knew. When Hawes said nothing, he looked up.

She was scrutinizing him again, as if deciphering him like some ancient tome.

“What is this text to you?” she demanded.

“A curiosity. I would think any bit of recovered knowledge would interest a sage as much, if not more. Are these ingredients for something? Is it a type of healing salve, like I have seen Wynn sometimes carry?”

“Not a salve ... a draught, a liquid concoction, at a guess.”

She paused long, never even blinking, and Chane grew unnerved. Before he spoke, she cut him off.

“I’m uncertain of the full process, since it isn’t described in detail. By your translations, the text contains only cryptic references, perhaps key points or reminders of some more explicit procedure. It does not appear to be thaumaturgical—or, rather, alchemical—in nature, so perhaps a mundane process.”

Chane sagged a bit. Even for these grains of knowledge gained, he had hoped for something more conclusive. His own body was almost indestructible, but Wynn’s was not. He would use anything that might keep her whole and sound. Yet if Hawes could not decipher the process hinted at, what chance would he have to do so? He was no thaumaturge, let alone highly skilled as a conjurer. He worked mostly by ritual, sometimes spell, and rarely ever artificing, even in its most common subpractice of alchemy.

“What is this seventh item?” he asked again.

Open suspicion surfaced in Hawes’s expression.

“ Anasgiah ... is perhaps Old or even Ancient Elvish,” she said, correcting his failed pronunciation. “I found no translation for it, though I’ve heard something similar. Anamgiah, the ‘life shield,’ is a wildflower in the lands of the Lhoin’na.”