“The rest of his friends are alive.” Tears welled in her eyes when she remembered the whip cracking against Niko’s back. “I have to find that book. I just have to!”
“Fine. What’s the title?”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know! He just said it was old with a red cover.”
Gem froze when a light bulb went off.Could it be?She remembered the old book in her secret study that she’d never been able to decipher. Occasionally she would pull it out to compare the archaic language to the new books she purchased. Lately she’d been too busy with work to fool with it. When Viktor had given her that room, it already had a few books in there, but that wasn’t one of them. It turned up later, but she couldn’t place the exact time. Could Niko have found her secret room and put it in there? But why?
Because he knew she’d keep it safe. He knew she’d never dispose of a book, especially one she hadn’t translated. Everyone knew how much Gem loved a challenge, and Niko was probably confident that she would never decipher the symbols in that book. She thought back to the day she first found it on the bottom shelf, intentionally out of view.
Gem sprang to her feet, knocking Wyatt onto his butt. “By George, I think I’ve got it!”
With lightning speed, she flashed out the door just as nimble as a fairy. When she reached the first floor, she sped toward the hall on the east side. Gem finally stopped at the recessed alcove where the secret door was located. She lifted the lantern off the wall and went inside the room.
Her latest discoveries littered the large work table. She placed the lantern on a hook near her reading chair before locating the large red book and placing it on the table. The spine crackled as she opened it up and turned to the first page. Right there in front of her this whole time was a symbol of a snake eating its tail.
“Eureka!”
She hadn’t made the connection when Cyrus mentioned an ouroboros. Gem had opened this book dozens of times but always skipped to different sections. Just like a cream-filled chocolate, it was the middle that mattered. Gem scooped the book in her arms and sat down in the leather chair in the corner. Cyrus wouldn’t expect her to find it this quickly, so maybe she had time to figure out what she was dealing with.
Gem sat there for a long while, flipping the pages and analyzing the symbols. Just when she was about to close the book and call Cyrus, she came across a glyph that looked familiar.
“I’ve seen this before,” she whispered, the Relic knowledge in her mind flipping like the pages in a book.
Not everything a Relic read was put to memory. They had selective memory, and any new material they wanted to string to their DNA, they memorized at will. So whatever that symbol represented wasn’t something in her Relic knowledge, but she’d seen it. And recently.
Recently.
Gem stood up and set the book on the table. The only books that she’d been looking at lately were the ones acquired at Pawn of the Dead. She grabbed a shawl from the back of her chair and draped it over her shoulders before searching her shelves.
Gem found the fragile book and gingerly opened it. It was handwritten in an extinct Semitic language of ancient Mesopotamia. On some of the pages, above the passages, were symbols written with a different ink—a more modern one, because it was blue. Gem held her breath when a symbol caught her eye. She looked back at the red book and saw that they were an identical match.
Identical!
“Behold, I have found the key!” she sang. Gem jumped up and retrieved her pen and paper. This was when the magic happened.
The newer writing must have been direct translations of select passages. It could have been notes, but she decided to go through and analyze each one. Some languages using symbols weren’t structured the same. The shapes might represent a phrase or have separate scripts, or it could be a combination of sounds to form words. Gem could easily translate the original language in the small book, and once she connected the patterns between those words to the symbols written above some of the passages, she could tackle Niko’s book.
Gem didn’t want to touch the pages of the red book more than she had to. The paper looked so old, and yet as she ran her finger along the edge, something felt different about it. As if the harder she scraped her nail against it, the stronger it felt to the touch.
Gem spent the next two hours jotting down possible translations. She compared every single symbol to search for repeats but had difficulty finding any. Translating a completely new language was a daunting task that took time, but it was exciting. If she managed to crack the code, she could store that knowledge in her DNA. It almost made her regretful she wouldn’t have any offspring to pass it on to, but at least her own knowledge base would increase.
After it grew too dim to read, she replaced the candle in the lantern. Her feet were ice-cold even though she’d kept them on the footrest of the desk chair. She yawned loudly and stared at several sheets of paper she’d compiled in search of a pattern—anything that might connect to a word or idea. One symbol appeared in both books, and Gem double-checked in her dictionary to see if there were other definitions for that word. Then she pored over each line using that symbol to consider the context of its use in the sentence.
Her gaze drifted over to the open pages of the red book, and she pulled it to her. She pondered over the word, wondering if it was the correct translation. All signs pointed to yes, but she needed to translate a passage of complete sentences to know for sure.
She traced her finger over the symbol. “Sun.”
Her fingers warmed, and she turned around when the flame in the lantern grew brighter. Had it? There was no sudden burst of oxygen in the room.
“I must be sleep-deprived.”
As she stood up to leave, something compelled her to stay.
Maybe she wouldn’t be able to decipher this language in one night, and maybe it didn’t even matter. But if she could learn just enough of it, she might understand its value. Perhaps that alone would give her an advantage. Had she not found this latest book at the pawnshop, she would have never made any progress. What were the odds that something like that would have landed in her hands at this very time when she needed it most?
The fates must have been looking out for her.
Chapter 23
