Gilli and Jelan arrived before Leah could press further, Jelan focusing on Daziel as she sat. She wore her customary black beneath her red School of Engineering blazer. “He’s still here.”
“I am,” Daziel agreed. “Hello again, Naomi’s friends.”
“We should maybe tell a professor?” Gilli said nervously. As always, I was impressed by Gilli’s delicate outfit, this time a lacy pink dress and matching headband. Gilli was one of the few girls I knew who bothered to sew weights into dress hems instead of wearing pants. Her ensemble, paired with her yellow School of Science blazer—Gilli was training to be a healer—was springlike.
I shook my head. “I’d rather not make a fuss. I’ll try again tonight, after classes. It might be silly,” I added, flushing, “but I don’t want Ephraim and the others to figure out I was lying.”
“We can come over around eight and help,” Jelan said in her low, steady voice as she brushed neshem oil over her clay pot containing veggie chili, which would heat the bowl and thus her lunch. She activated the spell in the same calm tones.
I felt bad about taking up their time. “You don’t have to—”
“Of course we do,” Leah said. “That’s what friends are for.”
~~~
After lunch—through which Dazielmoped performatively as the rest of us discussed potential banishment strategies—Daziel followed me across campus. Much of the Lyceum had been built in the last three hundred years, but not all. A thousand years ago, Talumizans constructed the Keep as a defensive outlook along the peninsula’s west coast. The walls were thick, the interior cool, and the views insurmountable. It had six floors, each a single room, and belonged to the linguistics department in the School of Humanities.
My thighs burned as I spiraled up. No one had told me moving to Talum would mean quite so many hills and stairs. Stepping off on the fifth floor, we entered a room where narrow, tall windows let in light. Books packed the shelves between them. Tables filled the center of the room, and a few chairs lined the edges. It was cozy but not cramped; the high ceiling made it feel larger than the square footage. From one window, you could see the hills of the city rising to the east, while the other three windows looked out on the river. This was my favorite place in the entireLyceum—and the materials within were the reason I’d applied here in the first place.
“No distractions,” I warned Daziel. “I have to concentrate.”
He flashed a sharp smile. “Am I distracting? I’m flattered.”
“You weren’t supposed to be.” I looked away, flushed. Was he flirting? I didn’t know how to flirt with humans, let alone demons. Everyone back home felt like siblings, and if any local boys had been attracted to anyone, it was always my sister Adina. The people who’d shown interest in Talum only wanted my aunt’s attention.
Not that I was developing a complex or anything.
“What are you working on?” Daziel looked at the scroll fragments covering the tables. Paz emerged and hopped from Daziel’s shoulder to one of the bookcases and began scampering about, chirping excitedly.
It made me smile. “We’re trying to reconstruct old scrolls.”
“Hm?”
I pulled out a drawer below the closest table, showing him fragments of parchment held between glass plates. “These were found in spelled urns in the genizah at Zerach. Professor Altschuler went on an expedition there three years ago. He and a few colleagues have been trying to put the scrolls together ever since.” I’d read about the expedition in the news and had followed the story ever since. When I realized that the lead scholar worked here, at the Lyceum, I’d applied immediately and won a scholarship to assist with the translation.
Daziel bent to study the fragments. “What’s the language—Old Cinnaian?”
“Nope. We call it Language X, and we think it was the languagespoken here before Old Cinnaian—maybe two, three thousand years ago. None of the characters are familiar, and until we can piece the fragments together, it’s tricky to make calls about grammar and syntax. It could be encoded, or spelled so we can’t read it. And it’s possible not all the fragments are here—some might have decayed or been buried elsewhere—so even if we can decipher the language, we might not be able to read the text. But we’re going to try.”
Daziel trailed a finger over the glass, one black talon coming to a stop under a fragment with a spiral character. “You’re doing it all yourself?”
“Professor Altschuler has four students and some staff. I work on this three days a week, and there’s a weekly seminar. He’s given me a reading course to get up to snuff on different cryptography methods. I don’t suppose you recognize the characters?”
He bent over, looking closely at the whirls and dots. Regret colored his voice when he answered. “No. I’m sorry. I can understand living languages, but this one is well and truly dead.”
I waved it off, trying to swallow my disappointment. “It’d be too much of a break if you knew them.”
“How are you trying to put it together?”
I touched one of the fragments on the tabletop. “See these? They aren’t the actual fragments—those are in the glass plates. We created replicas. This way, we can rearrange them without touching the fragile originals. We try spells, of course, but it’s just as likely we’ll put the pieces together through manual labor.”
“I’m exhausted just listening to you.”
I laughed. “It’s fun. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle.”
I’d always loved puzzles, like I’d always loved languages—the satisfaction of putting pieces together intoxicated me.Deciphering an unknown language would be the grandest puzzle of all. But it would also be the hardest, like doing a jigsaw puzzle without an image to guide you.
The art of deciphering an unknown language is not an easy one, Professor Altschuler had said when I’d first arrived in his office. He was so tall and so thin, it stretched one’s belief, with thick hair and salt-and-pepper scruff.We know nothing about the characters, not whether they’re ideograms or have phonetic values or a third option we’ve not yet dreamed of.
