“Thank you, Lady Serafina,” Halcot said. His face was lined and drawn as he turned to Tildi. “The pain was terrible! How did you do that, young lady? You must be made of tough fiber.”
“I … we didn’t think much of it at the time,” she admitted, with retrospective horror at what could have befallen her family. “It didn’t do that to any of us. Not even once. My mother would have thrown it away if it had.”
“Intelligent design,” Olen said. “I told you, smallfolk were made to be tougher than they look. I must state, however, that the Great Book is many times more powerful than this.”
The scholar clicked his tongue over the leaf. Tildi noticed
he
didn’t try to touch it, either. “Where did the peddler get this?”
Tildi shrugged. “I didn’t know. We don’t see him anymore. We used to see him around planting, and again at harvest. It’s been,” she reckoned backwards, “about two and a half years since the last time he came. A nice man. Pretty close to our size, with big ears and a thick, blond beard and crinkly eyes.”
“This comes long before the theft of the book, Olen,” Balindor said. “Two and a half years!”
“There have been rumors that Knemet has been trying to find indications of the book’s whereabouts for centuries, my lord prince,” Edynn said. “It took him ten thousand years, but he seems to have found it.”
“Now, Edynn,” another wizard said, clad in red livery. “We do not know that it is Knemet who has stolen it.”
“I cannot hold out hopes like you, Crispian,” the white-haired wizardess said. Beside her, Serafina sniffed disdainfully. “It would take very powerful magic to have stolen it, not to mention an utter disregard for life to have harmed those poor cows. Do not forget them!”
Cadwallan shook his head. “I cannot pretend to understand the magical arts. Why would proximity matter?”
“Well, your majesty, lords and ladies,” Olen said, “allow me to demonstrate. I can tell by my art that this is a true copy, made directly from the book itself. Even though it is not the Great Book, it has power because it was in contact with it at one time.” He waved a hand, and sent the
fragment to hover beside an unoccupied chair. “And when I put it near an object, you see how the rune appears.”
To Tildi the chair’s faint rune began to glow brighter.
“I don’t see anything,” complained Balindor, squinting.
“The rest of us can,” Edynn assured him.
“I can, too,” Tildi said. “I’ve been seeing runes like that on my travels, ever since I left the Quarters. In trees. Even in the sun. Do you mean it is my leaf that is making it do that?”
Olen’s shaggy eyebrows went up. “This is very important. Very. It would mean that where the book passed, the runes are most likely rendered visible. We must discuss this later. No, highness, I did not expect that most of you could see them unaided. Here, my lord.” He took the scrying glass off the table and set it on the floor. He held out both hands and began to mutter to himself. The glass grew until it was taller than Tildi. The image of the chair was inside the globe, the rune in it aflame.
“Ah, there it is!” Balindor exclaimed, as the symbol became golden to Tildi’s unaided eyes. “And you say that every living thing has a rune within it somewhere?”
“Not just living things. Everything,” Olen said.
“How is this pretty page dangerous?” asked a well-dressed merchant with a shiny, red face. “My scribes could turn out something just like this in a day.”
“Your scribes could labor until the end of time, but without the talent to see and draw true runes they could not come close to evoking even a thousandth of the power that this book commands. Even this small leaf of a single copy is dangerous.”
“Bah! Illusions!”
“Would you like to touch it?” Halcot challenged the red-faced man. “I assure you, the burns on my hands were no illusion. They still ache.”
“Yes, but handling it is one thing. How could it
affect
something that it does not even touch?”
“The connection between the written word and the thing is made strong by proximity.” Olen brought the leaf to hover beside a foot-thick candle in a huge bronze stand. “Watch. Do you see the rune within it?”
Tildi could. A simple glyph, gleaming coldly in the wax, broke through into ordinary sight. She had studied
candle
. There was little difference between the general symbol and this one.
Lindora beamed. “Ah! How interesting. It is not at all the same as the chair. Are the runes in all things so different?”
“Oh, yes,” Olen said. “Just like the runes you use to read and write today, but flexible and self-altering. Each to its own design and good time, as well. All things change. People grow, age, die. Plants bloom and wither. Stone crumbles, metal is mined, worked, rusts away. The runes show the alterations as they occur. Behold. I will make it larger so that you can easily see the changes I will make in it now. Tildi, fire.”
Tildi was startled out of her reverie. Fire? When she had been doing it incorrectly all this time? She looked at him with dismay. He gave her an encouraging gesture. Straightening her tunic unnecessarily, she stood up. It was a simple spell. She had done it dozens of times on the way to Overhill, and a thousand times since.
Don’t make a fool of yourself in front of company,
she told herself severely.
Ano chnetegh tal!
All her practice proved worthwhile. The spell didn’t fail her. She managed to cast a light between the tip of forefinger and thumb. The green flame flickered into life as if she had been all alone. She was so amazed that it worked that well she nearly let it burn her before transferring it to the wick. The wizards in the audience nodded their approval, and the nonmagical visitors seemed impressed.
“Do you see the change in the rune?” Olen asked.
They all leaned forward to study it.
“It has a little finger in the center of it now,” Magpie observed.
“Yes. It’s red and yellow,” Merricot, son of Halcot, said with disdain.
“A candle with a flame. We learned things like that in our reading lessons as children. This rune is fancier than most of the ones we use for every day.”
“Now, see what happens when I change it.”
Olen reached into the gigantic image of the rune. With a bold stroke, he enlarged the thin red stroke to a bold one. The flame at the top of the candle flared up into huge flame. The top half of the candle blew outward in gobbets of molten wax as if an invisible hand had smashed down on it.
“Now, my lords, imagine if that had been a human being or a centaur.” The room fell silent.
“One could kill, if you knew the glyph for a certain person,” Balindor said.
“One could kill
millions,
without knowing who was whom,” Olen pointed out.
“So, are we waiting for the end of the world?” Magpie asked.
“It’s possible.” Olen looked grave. “We must consider that such an outcome is possible.”
Instead of being concerned, the young man grinned. “That’s what you wizards always say. Doom and gloom and destruction.”
Halcot turned a florid face to the minstrel. “You are irreverent, boy. Save your mountebank antics for an audience chamber or a music hall. If you were my son, I’d thrash you.”
“Probably,” the lad agreed, crossing his boots insouciantly. Tildi kept her face from changing, but she expected that the bard knew what was in her mind. If she lifted her eyes he grinned directly at her.
“Oh, stop, highness, he’s winding you up like a clock,” Edynn said, tossing her handsome waves of silver hair. “Impudent boy. If I were a hundred years younger …”
“If you were,” Magpie said, with interest growing in his yellow-green eyes, “we could save the world together without all of these old men.”
Her daughter looked from one to the other and made a horrified noise.
Edynn gave him an indulgent glance, and turned back to the matter at hand. “Olen, you must have a plan of action, or you would not have called us here.”
“I have. I suggest a many-pronged attack. Most of you”—Olen gestured at the visitors—“will go home and mount a lookout for the thief. Be vigilant for reports of any unusual occurrences. Your wizards will be able to tell the difference between an ordinary magical outbreak and the passage of the book. Others, like myself, will continue our vision searches, through crystals, mirrors, and other philosophical devices. Yet, we must have some who will set out and look for signs of the book’s whereabouts and pursue the thief to his lair. As you have seen, it cannot pass invisibly. Ideally, then, the book will be wrested away from that person, whomsoever it may be, and I am making it sound vastly easier than it will be, and placed back in a hiding place, with the best protection that we in these later days can muster, which yet a further group must prepare. Some of you in this room have been enemies in the past. I tell you that it is
imperative
that you should put aside old disagreements, in the name of our world’s very survival. I can put it no stronger than that.”
A few of the people glanced at one another, and exchanged curt nods.
Tildi, who was no student of history outside of the Quarters, wondered what Olen meant. Perhaps one day she would have time to learn more about it.
Masawa cleared his throat. “I notice, my old friend, that there are no representatives here from the Scholardom.”
“Who?” Tildi couldn’t help herself. Everyone looked at her. She blushed. She was forgetting herself. She would never have made such an outburst at a meeting. The scholar smiled at her. He did not seem to mind.
“It is an order of knights who have sworn themselves to the protection of the Great Book. They are very learned, and train themselves to the very peak of physical perfection so that they can serve it if it should come to them. I would have thought that you would have enlisted their help immediately when you learned of this theft, Olen.”
“I am afraid,” Olen said, “that we and the Scholardom would work at cross-purposes. I do not speak against them or their philosophy, though I do not agree with it. They would not see the urgency, as we do, of putting it immediately out of reach of the curious. I have broached the matter, in a subtle way, with an abbot of the order. In a hypothetical manner, of course. He became very enthusiastic on the subject, putting forth all manner of schemes to use it to correct ‘aberrations of nature,’ as their doctrine states it.”
This phrase provoked an outburst from the centaurs and werewolf contingent.
Olen held up his hands for silence. “In other words, to let it fall into their hands would be to compound the problem. At present we believe that there is only one thief. We do not know who he or she is.” He held up a hand to forestall another outburst from Edynn. “The fact that this thief has not immediately begun to use the book suggests that he or she has a purpose in taking it. Therefore we are under two constraints instead of one. We must find the thief before his or her purpose is set into motion, and we must keep this knowledge, and the book itself, from falling into the possession of the Scholardom. The second is by far the easier of the two, since all it requires is keeping our own counsel regarding what it is we seek. Alas, it is inevitable that the Scholardom will learn of our search, but I hope that by then we will have already accomplished our goal.”
“Very well,” Edynn said, standing up. “You need a party to seek out the thief. I will lead it. Who will go with me?”
Hands went up all over the room. Olen looked pleased. “I am gratified at your offer of service. Edynn, I believe you have your pick.”
Tildi had been thinking hard since Olen had shocked her with the
truth of her people’s history. Like the werewolves, she did not want to believe it. How awful it was even to think that their ancestors were not truly smallfolk. She did not
want
to be the product of a curious wizard’s experiment. She wanted things to be the way she had always believed, that smallfolk had been brought into existence at the beginning of all things by Mother Nature and Father Time. How horrified the elders would be to discover that their family tree might in truth
be
a tree. Only the ridiculousness of the notion allowed her to consider it without going mad. She hoped that the thief would indeed prove to be one of the immortal Shining Ones. She wanted to ask him very seriously what on earth he could have been thinking!
She had more to consider following the demonstration of the candle, and King Halcot’s injury touching the page that her family had cherished for years. What harm the original, whole book could cause! It had killed so many beings, directly or indirectly. The cattle were only the latest victims. Still, she had a feeling that the chances were good that if she could handle the one, she could also manage the other, and spare injury to the very brave people who were putting themselves at risk, for the world’s sake. She also felt that she owed something to the memory of her brothers, who had sacrificed themselves to save the other villagers that bleak day. It was in her nature to be useful. Here was a job that possibly only she was capable of. To offer her services was the least that she could do.