Black as diamond, p.28
Black as Diamond, page 28
With no braids left to hide behind, Palenisa covered her mouth at a sudden bubble of incredulous laughter. “Makes two of us—messes, that is.”
Wren ducked his head between his knees and laughed. It was not a particularly happy sound—then again, neither was hers. They had precious little to be happy about, other than their being alive. And there was a grim sort of humor to sharing one’s self-made mire with another.
As they giggled morbidly, she tried to remember if there had been any laughter within the coterie. Or was it just duty and the will of the kharess?
And why did she not feel hollow anymore?
Granted, her neck felt exposed without the emblem, and she yearned just as much for her title. Still, a hearth flared in her belly. Her face warmed, her ears twitched, her smile was no longer as sad, and—“Do you smell burning?”
Wren started, eyes constricting. “Shit!”
Laughter bent her in half as he scrambled to pull a large round loaf from the oven. She doubled over when he burned himself, dropped it, and had to use his shirt to pick it up again. Palenisa wiped the gloss of amusement from the corners of her eyes as Wren set the wooden board on the table. On it sat a . . . thing. It looked like a braided wreath decorated with small protrusions resembling what she thought to be a leaf—or maybe a flower, she wasn’t sure.
“What was it supposed to be?” She chuckled, rapping a knuckle atop the blackened mess. It sounded like heels on marrowstone.
Dragging a hand down his face, Wren groaned. “A Norvatti food, panmi.”
“You failed.” She pointed, wearing a most helpful shit-eating grin.
“Thank you so much.”
Silently, she rounded the table and casually knocked their shoulders together, glancing sidelong when he jerked in surprise. Skittish as a wolvencat, with his wide wet eyes and anxious hands. Palenisa grinned and poked at his failed efforts.
“So, how are we going to fix this?”
He stared at her in shock. Then at the burned rock of panmi.
“Wait, really?”
She sent him a flat look. “No.” She flicked his temple, ignoring his feline hiss as she rested her arms on the table and raised a brow. “You want to fix things? Start with this and tell me how I can help.”
Toying with his fingers, Wren shyly looked back at the burned rock of panmi. He paused, throat bobbing as if working through the words as they formed.
“Um, right, then. Shall we?”
Palenisa stretched her hands out before her, interlacing her fingers. “We shall.”
Braiding dough into a circle didn’t fill the ache in her chest. Nor did cutting petals from pastry absolve the dishonor that still stained her. But she hoped the Zodiac were pleased with her choice. That it had been a good one. They called to her—all the spirits—when she prayed these days. Yes, they said, a dozen imagined voices sounding a chorus in her ears, you are good, you are right, and once you see this to the end, your honor will be as whole as your faith again.
Rishé
The Great Memories felt like an endless gift to Rishé as she sauntered through the aisles, piling her arms high with bismuth slates. It was quite possibly the grandest library in the world. A chronicle of the past, the era before Unification—everything that had ever happened, a thousand thousand years ago. A record of the present, the era after Unification—everything that was still happening, expanding constantly as time dripped.
The archive in the belly of the Nest was filled with a million gray tablets covered top to bottom and back to front with tightly packed inscriptions. At first, the symbols had appeared as strange glyphs, but the longer she looked, angling them in the unnatural light, which seemed to have no source, the more they glimmered to intelligibility. Someone from Anticarta might see Vulgar Antic where someone from Fa Djain would see Pshan.
It was among the most wonderful things Rishé had seen in her life. Easily top three, if not the first.
At the bottom of a winding set of stairs, the Great Memories radiated outward like a wheel into thirteen aisles of shelves that shot to the high ceiling. Down one aisle, Rishé walked with awe-stricken eyes and arms laden with slates, her head tilted back to gaze at the glittering vaulted columns.
Half spheres scooped the aisles in place of traditional shelves. The rim of the basins glowed lightning blue with slates set into the circles like frames in a hive. They bubbled lengthwise along the span of a marbled wall. And everything was lit in white and silver and drenched in crystal-clear hues.
Rishé imagined it was easy to get lost wandering.
Pausing, she juggled the slates she carried into the crook of one arm to pull another from the shelf and skimmed it. On it was mention of a strange stone with unusual properties—perfect.
The number of bismuth tablets in Rishé’s arms grew as she wound through pale serpentiform halls, as if it had become second nature.
Then she took a step, and her foot found open air.
A scream caught in her throat as someone yanked her back by three of her belts. She fell into the arms of Sagan with a half-born cry on her tongue. More importantly, the slates had almost toppled out of her arms. What a horrible thought: bismuth cracking, shattering to pieces on the pristine floors.
“Watch your step,” Sagan said coyly, setting her back on her feet and tucking a braid behind her ear. He raised a thick, split brow when she squirmed from his grasp. “There’s a hole.”
“Bastard,” she grumbled, reshuffling the slates so she could press the side of a palm to her forehead.
Humming, Sagan swanned around her. He hadn’t put his mask back on, so she saw his cool scrutiny. Wisps of dyed hair flew free around his face. Brown had crept in at the roots, marking the time he hadn’t been back to the guild. She remembered once helping him paint it—that time they’d done him up in bright red. With the patches on his skin, it had made him look northern, Antorcan.
She rolled her eyes and moved carefully to the edge where she’d nearly fallen.
It was a massive borehole. More accurately, a chasm. Deeper than the ceiling above was high, and so dark that she couldn’t even see the bottom—if there was one. It was as if a giant fist had punched its way through the floor. And there was not even a barrier around the margin to denote the danger, just a sudden sharp drop into nothingness. Her inquisitive eyes roved over walls made of unblemished stone. Well, not entirely. Gouged deep into the circumference of the well were unfathomably long scratches, harsh and jagged. There was a desperate quality to them, several forming a lattice of black that wept into the unseen abyss.
She squinted, unsure, but it looked almost like the cursed bile that seeped from Asaru’s mouth during his worst spells.
The Chronicler was never here. She didn’t believe that for a second.
“What is this, Sagan?”
Freeing a hand from her burden, Rishé gestured to the bleeding lines and turned to meet the glowing sockets of an adderowl. The violet of Sagan’s eyes trailed in an afterimage of light as he moved, bobbing his head over the side of the chasm like a drinking bird.
“I don’t know.” Mask back on, his voice doubled, a high tone melding with his velvet timbre. Without looking into his eyes, she couldn’t tell if his words were genuine or more distortions of a somewhat truth. As Asaru had told them, he didn’t lie. But it felt like the last year had taught Sagan strange new ways of twisting speech into a net that concealed his intentions.
“Is it your mission in life to be infuriating? Is that what you learned while you were away?” she asked, taking a step from the chasm. Then another. Sagan followed. Until they were both in the arched mouth of an aisle, more secure in their footing.
“Perhaps.”
Yes, it is, she heard.
Sighing, Rishé readjusted her stack of tablets, feeling their words graze lightly over the skin of her arms. “You know Asaru and Palenisa are furious with you.”
Sagan smoothed a finger over the cracks in the skull and said, “I know perfectly well what your friends think of me. Can still feel it in my nose.”
“You used a psychometry spell on them,” she pressed, rising to her toes until their eyes were level. “Something tells me that isn’t exactly what the Chronicler asked you to do. You went too far.”
He swayed forward so suddenly that she stumbled, her back connecting with a shelf. The coolness of the stone bled through her tunic and raised the hair on her arms. Heat fanned out from the mask’s twin-fanged jaw, as the shadows that hid Sagan’s neck darkened. “But are you going far enough?” His gaze fell to her overfull hands, then rose to her necklace. “Those don’t look like they’ll help us find any diamondglass.”
Rishé’s lips twitched to a frown, and she lifted the slates, tucking them closer to her chest as she leaned aside.
“I wonder,” Sagan said as he spun on a slippery foot. His suman flared out around his baggy trouser legs. “Are you here to resolve the curse—or satisfy your own curiosity?”
He assessed her over his shoulder before he glided down the hall and disappeared around a corner. When he was gone, Rishé dropped her head onto the tablets. Not because he was right, but because he read her so easily. He had a particular talent that was even more lancing than hers: to see people and to know what made them tick almost instantly.
Warmth burned over her breast. The unnatural heat of the pendant reminded Rishé what was important. The curse, yes, but her aims too. She’d climbed through that window because she needed to find this place. For herself and, most importantly, for the memory of her mother.
This was how she kept some part of her mother alive, after her father had left her to bear the loss alone. She wondered, fleetingly, where the Trifan clan was—if he still traveled with them. From Isile Dandar, she had a bracelet as a scarce reminder of a living parent. From Jarha, she had a pendant. Rishé’s face was half a woman she yearned to remember, and half a man she didn’t care to. And her resolve renewed.
There were four—five—of them working together; she had time to be a little selfish in her research.
Straightening her spine, Rishé huffed and tracked back through the aisles to the others. As she walked, the white of the tile grayed like clouds shuttering a winter sky. Polished marble walls soon gave way to what looked to be dust. Ash. Thick ash that covered the floor in a generous layer lapping at her heels.
As she moved on, the basins began to flicker with dying breaths, and the bottoms of the shelves became singed, growing ever more ravaged until she came across the source of destruction. A scar of black spread before her. The shelves had melted, crumpled under their own weight before falling across the aisle like spent matchsticks. The span of the hall appeared coated in obsidian, dusted with fine gray-black ash and crumbling stone.
A crunch came from underfoot. Glancing down, Rishé found a charred scrap of paper, and her heart rose to her throat.
It can’t be.
But it seemed it was.
Unlike the rest of the Great Memories, the records in this aisle were paper. And as far as she could see, every single parchment had been scorched. Fragments littered the ruin, tinted the entire span of records black or smoky gray.
Rishé picked her way past a damaged plaque, half broken and melted. She knelt and cocked her head at it, only the words “d-rk” and “-ef-re” remaining visible. Staring at the cinders, she pondered the depth of what had been lost. Precious early memories of a time before anything she understood of the world—erased. The dark before.
It was eerily quiet, a nothing noise, like being submerged underwater. Her breath came out in puffs that stagnated, dissipated.
From the middle of the burnt remnants, a glint caught her eye. Rishé set her precious tablets aside and peeked down. In the seam between two half-incinerated shelves was a disruption in the ash. Digging her finger along the crack, she searched for purchase and pulled. As black stained her hand, a square panel came away easily to reveal a hidden cache. Inside was an untarnished crevice built to resemble an ornamented chest. At the center sat weathered scrolls waxed shut and a tome.
Surprise shot through her. An actual paper-and-ink book.
On the rugged cover was a series of concentric geometric patterns that bore a deliberate unfamiliarity to spellwork. The lines resembled larimac trees, thin limbs and thinner branches, dotted intermittently with dark jewel circles. When she turned it over, the tome felt heavy . . . and oddly waterlogged, as if it had just been rescued from the atrium’s pool.
Rishé wiped a wet hand on her thigh and peeled open the front cover, wincing when the pages stuck together. Ash footprints trailed her as she shifted into better light.
On the sepia-tinted endpaper, in distinctly different hands, were three—words? Names?
Iosanne . . . Anad . . . The last had been scratched out so thoroughly, it was nearly unreadable. She squinted and was finally able to make out the scar. A story from Fa Djain of an assassin—thief. She corrected herself. False at the end of the day, merely a myth.
As Rishé turned the pages with great care, her eyes widened in wonder.
Diagrams of gems, gray and red ink shading the sketches of stones that looked exactly like her pendant.
This is it. She blinked in disbelief. This is really it.
She didn’t have the words to convey the enormity of what this meant to her. It made her want to climb out of her skin and wave the loose flesh like a madwoman, run through the streets, and maybe even desecrate an aetherstone. She felt like flying. Like she was both living life to the fullest and dying.
Rishé snapped the tome shut and tipped back, searching the aisles for an adderowl. Let it be known: She was not a suspicious person. Usually. Sagan’s interesting new mannerisms had just put her on edge. That was all.
Leaving behind the tablets amid ash and burnt ruin, she paged through the tome as she walked through the archives. Before she knew it, she was back in the teardrop alcove where her companions were sprawled on cushions dragged from the castle above, towers of bismuth slates spilling around them. In the center of their lazy circle was a candle crying wax and a hunk of half-eaten panmi. Pastry petals and stars decorated the slightly burnt bread—a valiant attempt.
At least someone was enjoying the dessert. “Enjoying” wasn’t exactly the right word—“tolerating,” perhaps. Asaru and Palenisa pulled chunks from the panmi. Asaru chewed and swallowed with an expressionless focus on the tablet against his knees. Palenisa grimaced as she lazed on her back, blue eyes roving over hers.
“Is that . . . an actual tome?” Wren asked when Rishé sat in a cross-legged meditation. He rested against the back wall, hooded by the suman that he and Asaru seemed to share custody of. There were two tablets in his lap and faded rings beneath his incredulous eyes.
“What does it look like?” she signed, pointing to her face then his. She pressed her foot against the side of his thigh until he rolled it away from her with a huff.
“A tome.” His hint of a smile was sheepish.
“Good job.”
The tips of his ears flushed and flicked. Rishé snorted and returned to the tome.
Surrounding the sketches, the sodden pages were covered in a faded script that floated before her eyes. Tracing the elegant writing, she found herself mouthing the words in an orthography she at least knew. Something sparked in her brain, and she realized they were incantations. They didn’t morph into understanding; the language was too unfamiliar and, from appearances, much too ancient. Bewildered, she flipped to a drawing of a monolith done in a haphazard hand.
Pillar of the Gods, she thought in delirious delight, wondering just what in the world this meant. None of it made full sense, yet she read on, intent to find out.
Warmth radiated from the striated stone on her necklace. Grasping it, she felt the phantom of her mother’s hand in hers. Jarha was almost as present as the ground beneath her. Both alive and a shadow on the wall. An illusion.
A tap on her thigh snapped her head up, and Rishé locked gazes with Palenisa.
“What?” Rishé asked guardedly, eyeing the fingers on her knee and holding down the urge to shuffle away from their startling warmth. The tome burned in her lap as well, waiting. Waiting.
“I need your opinion. I think I found something.”
“Why?” Well, I’m eloquent today.
“It should be obvious.” Palenisa rolled onto her side, wearing a thin sheen of annoyance. “You’re good with navigation and shit.”
The wheel in her brain caught, reeled, and stuttered to a stop. For a moment, all Rishé could do was blink as the other woman stared at her, shockingly expectant. The bismuth slate hovered between them. In a rare flustered moment, Rishé’s cheeks warmed. She wasn’t a beacon of faith, but it felt like a sacred offering.
“Lost in my mind a second,” she signed, too embarrassed to speak Akiki as she scrambled to put her mind straight. Palenisa tilted her head, frowning at Rishé’s hands.
Rishé opened her mouth but thought better of it and shook her head instead.
Taking the tablet from Palenisa, she inhaled, exhaled, and forcefully reorganized her thoughts. Not an entirely unwelcome surprise, Rishé admitted to herself, watching the woman in her periphery. Ivory coils billowed around Palenisa’s head, softening her features. The canary yellow of her blouse brightened her countenance such that she actually looked like she matched the title of sunlight Aspect.
Rishé would have examined her further, but the content of the tablet drew her attention.
Oh, Palenisa had found something.
The tablet described a series of excursions to an island in the Broken Spine. It claimed, she read, intrigued, that according to the geographical features, the Spine had once been part of Anticarta, an apt name for the treacherous jag of rock. So the northern continent laid claim to the sole island in the Spine that was fit for mooring, as well as any deposits of diamondglass found there.
