Unwritten, page 9
Beatrix lifted her eyes from Tome III on the Essential Knowledge & History of the Zweeshen, which someone had left behind in her turret room. A spiraled candle had burnt by the window when she’d returned to the guesthouse. After reading the book, she now knew it for what it was: a Fogges candle. Who had lit it for her? Not anyone with connections to the Bounding Bureau, that was for certain. Beatrix winced at the memories from earlier that afternoon.
When she touched the bandage around her head, her initial wince turned into a frown. More proof about the disappointing nature of this place. She didn’t doubt its reality anymore. But whatever she would have imagined if she’d known the world of stories existed, it wouldn’t have been this. To her, books were at times comforting, often exciting, always full of wonder. Filled with people one wished to meet. With adventures to partake in. But unlike the books she loved, the Zweeshen felt familiar in an all-too-human way. Flawed like the real world. With a lack of altruism or heroics, and little magic to make up for it.
As if to belie her thoughts, one of the pesky vines overhanging the window frame moved. Perhaps a trick of the light. This vine was thorny and thin, shining blue-black. And when Beatrix touched it, it shied away like an anemone. Its contact filled her with a longing so intense she swayed from vertigo. The need for more, where the more was indefinable, grabbed her. Familiar magic swirled, mixing with something else, deep and unfathomable, older than anything she knew, but that her soul recognized all the same. Her body attuned itself to a heavy power that smelled of moss and ink, rather than her Furie’s rust. Without thinking, she reached out again. This time the vines wrapped around her wrist with the strength of an Amazonian liana and held on. They grew and looped around her fingers, pushing them into her fist. A sound, more song than words, reached her mind.
“Unwritten,” it murmured, “may the words keep you safe.” As soon as it came the singing went away; the vines fell off and slunk out the window. Her blood hummed with the same earthy power as the inkthreads and spooked Beatrix with the yearning it lodged inside her heart.
May the words… The phrase in the letter. Was that the rest of the sentence Mom had left unfinished? May the words keep you safe. It seemed an innocuous well-wishing, and yet… The buzz of danger in the cold room challenged that conclusion.
Her head throbbed, and she shivered despite her long-sleeved shirt.
“Are you feeling better?” Emma’s voice came from the door. The girl pushed it to slip in. She went to check the hourglass on the mantel, which Beatrix had inspected earlier. It had four labyrinthine chambers through which emerald sands looped back and forth. “The time’s up. You should be like new.”
“I feel perfect,” Beatrix said, undoing the bandage and dropping it on her desk. She watched herself in the age-spotted mirror by the wardrobe. There was no sign of the gash in her temple or the marks on her arms, and after turning left and right without pain, she assumed her broken rib had mended too. “I don’t have a single bruise. That healing cream of Neradola’s did wonders. Amazing magic.”
As soon as they’d arrived at the guesthouse after the episode at the Bureau, William and Jane had called the ghost. Neradola had shown up with Trelius in tow and quickly gotten to work. While William scowled in the corner by the fireplace, mumbling about the excesses of the council and the guilds, the gladiator tried to distract Beatrix. She appreciated the effort but would prefer to keep quiet. Her bedroom felt too crowded, and the shock from the altercation had left her off-balance.
The second Neradola completed her exam, William had walked over to Beatrix. His frown was deeper than ever. “What were you thinking?”
Beatrix’s hackles rose at the question. “I don’t know what you mean. They tried to arrest me.”
His voice rolled out like the growl of a beast. “The officers are allowed to kill. You don’t fight them. You stay away from them. It’s not as if you had Inaechar to spare that you can afford to waste magic.”
“Nobody asked you. I didn’t need your help. I did fine.” The Furie, exhausted as it was, nevertheless made an effort to jump up. “I thought you were going to avoid me.”
“I would if you stopped getting in trouble.”
“What I do is my problem.”
“William, Trelius,” Neradola had called then. “If you would leave now. I will wrap Beatrix’s cracked rib.”
Now Beatrix touched the side of her forehead in amazement. Neradola’s ointment had fixed all her injuries, so there remained no evidence of the confrontation with the Bureau’s officers.
Her memories were a different matter. The pain when her head had hit the column. The snap of the baton against her chest. The fear while she gasped, thinking she might not breathe again. She’d never experienced anything like that. Even Julie and her friends contented themselves with cutting her things, once or twice keying her Jeep. But a bad shove was as far as they came in terms of true violence. This had been different. She wondered if she’d ever look at a uniform the same way, without seeing it come for her.
“Neradola’s salve wasn’t magic,” Emma said. “Tissue regeneration science. I heard William got you the latest bio-tech stuff from the sci-fi labs. Who knows how, since it’s close to impossible to find. Don’t frown. You need all the help you can get regardless of the origin. Nera shared she and William met during their Introduction to the Zweeshen. That’s the one mandatory class taelimns attend at their guild after Bounding. And Jane has known him forever. If they both like him so much, he can’t be all bad.”
“Maybe he’s not a jerk to them. I don’t get why he’s even around. You heard him tell me he would keep his distance.”
“Not what he said.” Emma hooked a purple strand behind her ear. “He explained he had to keep away. It isn’t the same.”
Beatrix didn’t see a difference. She wanted neither his assistance nor his meddling—but she struggled to explain why he bothered her so much. A skin thing, probably. Whenever she interacted with him, it took all of two minutes for her to become violently annoyed. Maybe because he seemed both absent and in the middle of everything, often aware of what was going on in advance while she still struggled to catch up. Case in point: this salve business.
Emma scanned the room and wrinkled her nose. “Smells like a grave in here. And your Fogges candle’s out.” She retrieved a waxed lighting stick from a dish and bent to borrow fire from the salamander that made its nest in the fireplace. The creature stretched into a joyful flame, pouring out violet and green plumes that twisted in pirouettes and shaped mythical animals before exploding into fireworks.
From across the room, Beatrix had to concede there might be an upside to the Zweeshen’s overabundance of fireplaces.
“Well,” Emma said after she’d lit the candle on the windowsill, “what have you been up to?” She looked in the direction of the letter that lay on the desk with unfettered interest.
Beatrix had spent hours studying it while waiting for her healing to take effect. Then she’d picked up the history tome. Gathering information about the Zweeshen seemed critical if she was to formulate a plan. Riddles didn’t get solved by touring the city, getting new clothes, or shopping for “essential” artifacts—even if Emma had been delighted to go procure all those things while Beatrix recovered. Beatrix needed a systematic approach. And fast. Now that the Bounding had failed, her time in the Zweeshen might be limited—at least according to Jane—and Beatrix was determined to squeeze every moment she had here.
“My mother left a letter for me,” she told Emma now. It would be good to have the opinion of someone versed in the Zweeshen. And Emma was…endearing. “There’s a riddle in it, and I’m working to decipher it.”
“A riddle!” Emma beamed. “How exciting. Can I be part of your quest? I didn’t get one of my own, being a Draft and all, so I would love to help you.”
Whatever last bits of reserve Beatrix had, melted at the eager look in Emma’s eyes. Had she been like that at her age? That free to be excited? She didn’t think so. “Sure.”
“Excellent. Where do we start? What is your plan?”
Beatrix hated to recognize she had only the beginnings of one. Ever since she’d arrived in the Zweeshen, she’d been swept in a wave of situations not of her choosing. Distractions, all of them. It was time to focus.
“I believe there are several paths to investigate. Take a look,” she said, and Emma approached, her ever-present satchel bouncing on her hip. In her journal, Beatrix had numbered the main options: Mary Brandt, the riddle and the symbols, the map, and the Eisid Naraid.
The young girl bent over the paper to read. “So exciting! To be part of a real-life mystery.” She tapped her finger on her cheek. “The riddle’s a bit odd. I’m not quite sure what to make of it.”
“Neither am I. I couldn’t match the symbols to any writing system, and the text I’ve revealed doesn’t tell me much. But I believe I should find Mary Brandt first. That way she could assist with the rest.”
“Mary should be the priority then.” Emma’s hair twisted, rearranging itself into a bronze braided crown. “But how to locate her?”
“I had an idea at the Bounding office,” Beatrix said. “People keep obsessing that all taelimns must be bound. That everyone needs to be accounted for. If that’s true, wouldn’t Mary show up in the Bureau’s lists?”
“Of course!” Emma’s face brightened. “In the Grand Codex. That’s where all Boundings are recorded. She should be there along with her biblioworld of origin.”
Beatrix’s insides warmed with a stirring of hope. “How do I get access to the Codex?”
“I’ve never heard of anyone reading it. I guess you’ll have to ask the Librarian.” Emma’s grimace was that of someone who’d eaten a lemon. “He did agree to facilitate your search. What other leads could we chase? Oh, I sound all Mystery and Adventure, don’t I?”
“Another path is the map.” Beatrix eyed the drawing at the bottom of the letter. “The lack of labels doesn’t help there.”
“It could be anywhere.” Emma squinted a bit while looking at it. “But I recognize the rune. I’ve seen a similar version in my story. It stands for the never-ending cycle.” She looked up, pride glinting in her voice. “My book deals with a bit of alchemy, you see. The snake eating its tail is an ancient symbol.”
Beatrix studied the drawing, a twisting ring made up by a serpent biting its tail, half white, half black. She, too, had seen it before. Grandfather had drawn it on a parchment. She massaged her temples, willing the memories back, so she could recall how he had used it. Maybe that would give them a hint about the nature of the spell in the letter.
Emma plucked the thought from Beatrix’s mind. “Alchemists marked objects with it. They traced the symbols on their tools. Sometimes on the bits of skin they used for their incantations. It’s often an empowerment rune.”
“Tracing.” The image of Grandfather’s hand took over Beatrix’s mind, as he dipped into an inkwell and followed the rune she’d seen repeated on the puma’s flank. Once. Twice. Three times.
Grabbing a pen, she was about to try the same when Emma stopped her. “Use your finger. You have your own ink.”
As Beatrix’s index finger settled on the rune, her fingertip throbbed, and a thin thread of black floated out. She drew a smoky trail over the symbol to shape the head of the snake, then its spiraled body, creating a full circle where mouth met tail.
A first pass caused the lines in the map to darken. With the second, colors bloomed throughout, and by the third, the map’s surface stretched and grew upward, the landscape lifting and dropping to shape valleys and hills. Trees and lakes. The edges of a rocky cliff. All in perfect detail, a most accurate three-dimensional model. A banner flew over it, like a standard ribbon, curling at the ends.
Beatrix almost exploded with satisfaction. Her success felt like a warmth that reached everywhere.
Emma read the title on the pennant. “The Sacred Valley of the Eisid Naraid.” The girl wrinkled her nose. “As reveals go, that’s kind of disappointing.”
True. Beatrix laughed. But promising.
A couple of minutes later, the map receded into the rough, hand-drawn lines from before. Flat and colorless.
“Predictable but helpful regardless,” Beatrix said. “Now we know where I’m supposed to go. Instead of anywhere in the Eisid Naraid, Mom is guiding me to a particular spot in her world.”
Beatrix shook her head at her own words. Her pleasure at their progress mixed with wonder. It still seemed unbelievable that her mother was a taelimn. Beatrix had nine years’ worth of questions for her. Not just the obvious, like where she had been and why she’d left. But others, conversations like moms had with their daughters all the time. At a coffee shop or the salon. She wanted to talk about nothing and everything. Maybe ask how her parents had met.
Beatrix had often wondered, especially after a despicable comment, how the sweet mother of her memories could have chosen Martin. Had she loved him? Was there a different side to him that Beatrix didn’t know? In most ways, he was a stranger. She’d thought Mom dead for close to a decade, and Beatrix knew her better than she knew Martin. Now the desire to spend time with her mother was a knot of want. And the unveiling of the map took Beatrix a step closer. “We need a full map of the world to match this region. Do you know where I could find one?”
Emma bit her lip. “The cartographers should help. We can try tomorrow since no one’s left at the faculty now.”
Beatrix made a note in her journal. “I wonder if there’s a map at the beginning of my book.”
“Evenzaar said your book is Fantasy, so I’d think there’s a good chance of that.”
My book. Beatrix smiled with disbelief at this conversation. She still struggled with the concept. “I can’t wait to live through the story and learn everything about my world. I know nothing about it.”
“Oh, Beatrix,” Emma said with such sadness the room seemed to slump with her. “You can’t live through your mother’s tale. It’s impossible to enter a biblioworld while a tale is in progress.”
“But the Librarian said I could travel.”
Emma nodded with emphasis. “You can. But the bridges open only after The End. Taelimns become free from their artisans—their writers—at that point and live forever as they wish. Whoever is still alive, that is. So you cannot live your mom’s story. You can, of course, read it if you wanted.”
Read it. Somehow, as obvious as it should have been, Beatrix hadn’t even considered that. “I have to get that book now.”
Emma grinned. “We can search the Main Library. There’s time before dinner.”
10
SPHINX
This, Beatrix thought as they entered the Main Library, this was more like it. The paneled walls, the shelves full of books stretching into the distance. The study tables with their green lights, the stained glass, and the beautifully carved lecterns upon which the most treasured manuscripts rested, enclosed in glass. And the smell. That precise mixture of wood and wax and leather with a touch of aged paper. The sounds of pages as they turned. The motes of dust dancing in a shaft of colored light. Now, this was what one would expect of the world of stories. A library to please the most exacting of readers. To delight the most romantic of book lovers.
“Destination?” asked a short man, probably no more than three feet tall, and Beatrix realized Emma had navigated them both to the Library help desk. There was something familiar about him, with his folded ears and playful eyes, but Beatrix couldn’t place him. Which book?
Instead of the whispers, Emma answered in her mind. A pub patron from that story with the ring.
Beatrix smiled. That made total sense. She surreptitiously looked down, in search of bear feet.
“Research, borrowing, or guild-exclusive sections?” the man asked.
“Excuse me?” Beatrix said.
“First-timer, eh?” He climbed on a stepstool to talk eye to eye. “If you tell me what you’re after, I can have it pulled. The Library has eight floors, three sub-levels, and countless private storage rooms. Wandering is not advisable.”
“I’d like to read a copy of my biblioworld’s book,” Beatrix said. It was still unbelievable to be asking for that. To think her book was here. Impossible.
The man nodded, his pudgy hands waving back and forth over a piece of slate. “The borrowing library is on the third floor, West Wing. If you’d lift your band, I’ll forward the directions.”
Beatrix frowned, confused.
“Band, please,” he insisted.
“Here.” Emma extended her arm to have her wristband scanned.
“You can’t borrow with that one,” he said. “You may read it here. Title?”
That took Beatrix aback. “I’ve no clue. Can you find it with the name of the world?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t do searches. That’s the Sphinx’s purview. If she accepts your query and lets you through to the search rolls. Anything else?”
“Is there no other way to locate the book?” Beatrix asked. “A database of some kind? A search engine?” How could this be? She felt cheated.
“Try the Sphinx,” the library employee said. “Any other requests?”
“How about maps? Are there any books that contain maps of Fantasy worlds?” Maybe she could check the index for the Eisid Naraid. Not efficient, but it might work.
The short man turned thoughtful.
Beatrix’s patience frayed. “Do I have to ask the Sphinx for that too?”
“No, I can recommend several. The Ultimate Guide to Fantasy Cartography by Erasmus would be a good start.” He tapped a few times on his stone tablet and then made a notch with his stylus. When he looked up, Beatrix read pity on his face. “Sorry. You can’t get access with that band.” He pointed to Emma. “Only full guild members.”
“Use mine.”
Beatrix turned to find William and groaned inside. Seriously? “Are you stalking me?”
