~Pinpoint remote/high-up places
~Talk to rabbis about Great Beasts
~~~
Over the next weekand a half, my friends and classmates set to work. It shocked me how much weight lifted off my shoulders with others helping. I breathed easier realizing I wasn’t going to have to do everything myself. I could tell Daziel felt the same.
With others concentrating on finding the Ziz, I put my energy into the scrolls. The Sanhedrin approved funding, and the Keep became chaotic. Professor Altschuler and the rest of the linguistics department stopped by the scroll room daily, as did history professors and spellwriters and other academics, not to mention their support staffs and students.
No hints of the Maestril appeared, but the Corisoc did; the rare southern wind carried red dust that got into every nook and crevice in Talum. It clung to my skin and hair and made the whole city look like it had been dipped in clay.
“I hate this,” Stefan said one evening. It was late enough no one besides our cohort remained in the scroll room, so he lay on the rug, stretching his spine after hours bending over the scrolls.When it was just us, we’d given up any pretense of propriety. “I feel like a hamster on a wheel.”
I felt like I was slowly going mad. We were giving everything we had and getting nowhere. With so many more people involved, we’d made quick progress analyzing word frequency in healing spells across a dozen languages, but it led nowhere. Our hypotheses on articles and verbs were patchy. We’d looked over the words containingZandIand theorized what they might be and what letters their other characters might match, but everything resulted in dead ends.
It would have been different if it’d been slow progress but progress nonetheless; instead, we felt incompetent and stupid, like children turning metal puzzle pieces, unable to twist them apart.
“I feel like a blindfolded goat.” Gidon picked at the red dust from the Corisoc caked under his nails.
I blinked. “A goat?”
He flicked the dirt onto the floor. “They’re always bouncing around all over the place. That’s how I feel. And chewing cud.”
“Do goats chew cud?” Yael asked. “I thought that was cows.”
“Cows, goats, sheep,” I said absentmindedly. “They’re all ruminants. They have four-chambered stomachs, and the cud is regurgitated from one and chewed again.”
The three city kids stared at me.
“That’s disgusting,” Stefan said. He stretched, his shoulder bones popping. “I wish we had more Language X. It’d be way more likely we’d find other proper nouns if we had thousands more pages to pore through.”
We needed proper nouns to decipher character phonetics. If we didn’t have any in the scrolls, perhaps we should look elsewhere. “What if…we could find more examples of Language X?”
“We’ve already tried,” Gidon said gently. “Didn’t ProfessorAltschuler cover this in your initial reading? He toured the northern lands two years ago, talking to international scholars, and found nothing.”
“Right,” I said. “But…what about faraway places? Places we don’t share scholarship with yet?”
“How would that help?” Stefan asked. He threw one of his juggling balls in the air and failed to catch it; it rolled out of his arm’s length, and he half-heartedly reached for it. “We’re not going to be able to see them. I even wrote to my family in Aolong to see if they had contacts, but nothing.”
A smile stretched my cheeks. “We have someone who can travel twice as far as Aolong, very quickly.”
Three faces whipped up to mine. “Oh shit.” Stefan sounded impressed. “You think he could?”
“Sorae.” Yael immediately named an empire three thousand miles away, past even Stefan’s home. I could hear the quiver of suppressed hope in her voice. “He should go to their courts. Their scholarship is impeccable. Two thousand years ago they traded all over the world. I can’t believe we didn’t ask him earlier. I forgot demons—shedim—can path-jump.”
“Daziel,” I said, not lifting my head from where I’d let it slump against the wall. “Daziel, Daziel.”
He appeared. No one even flinched anymore. The red dust of the Corisoc had afflicted even him, giving his black curls a garnet gleam.
“Can you path-jump to Sorae?” I explained the situation. “If you take me with you, I’ll be able to recognize the characters of Language X—”
“You can take us with you?” Yael interrupted. I didn’t think she’d cut anyone off the whole time I’d known her. “I want to go.”
Daziel shook his head. “I’m not taking either of you. The mirrorways are too dangerous for humans. It might not leave your mind the same.”
“Would the betrothal protect me?” I asked. It’d messed with my physiology already; maybe it would help us here. “I might be fine.”
He looked at me almost angrily. “I’m not risking your safety. Show me what I’m looking for and where.”
