“Or maybe they didn’t have anOor aUin their version of the name,” Gidon said.
“Maybe they dropped theRthousands of years ago,” Stefan said. “Tzoybia. Some languages don’t haveR’s.”
Despite my exuberance, a wave of apprehension hovered at the edges of my mind, a wave that could pull me under into a state of helplessness. There were so many possibilities, and we had no idea which path to try first.
“Don’t panic,” Yael said, catching my expression. “We know what we’re doing, remember? We’ve trained for this. We makemethodical attempts, and we keep going. We’re so much further ahead than we were a day ago.” She gestured at the trunk Daziel had brought. “This is a gold mine.”
“You’re right.” I took a steadying breath. We could now potentially match Language X characters to our alphabet. We were far closer than an hour ago.
We needed more ancient nouns containing the four unknown characters from our potential “Tzorybium” to test them, so we ran the highlighting spell on the manuscripts.
This resulted in so, so many words.
For a minute, the five of us stared. A gold mine, Yael had said, and she was right. Surely some of these would be proper nouns we could guess. We would have answers soon if we could stay steady and figure it out.
“We write them all down,” Yael said, somehow managing not to float off in a stunned reverie like the rest of us. “Then we’ll go through our ancient proper noun list and see if we can find matches.”
That was the right way to do it, the academic, precise method. But I couldn’t help glancing at our original scroll with the word for “Ziz,” to see if anything jumped out. It did not. I glanced at the manuscript Daziel had brought in with the word “Ziz” too. Just in case.
I caught my breath.
“Look,” I said, my voice a scant whisper. My heart started to pound, and a shiver danced across my neck and shoulders. One line below the word “Ziz,” almost an entire word glowed—which meant we could potentially sound it out. I scribbled it down, adding our theorized characters:B?/(M/A/U?)/T?
The two unknown characters were the same.
“Fuck,” Stefan said. “If that’s anM—if this language doesn’t use vowels and that letter’s anH—”
BHMTH.
BEHEMOTH.
“But they use vowels. There’s anIin ‘Ziz’!” Gidon howled. “And twoI’s in the second word!”
Stefan wrote down the word that could be “Tzorybium” again:TZRIBIM.“Maybe theyonlyuseI.”
Energy rushed through me, the kind that meant that we were on the brink of a great discovery, not unlike standing on the cliff at the edge of the plains and the wilderness and worrying about falling, or like boarding a ship to take you to a city you’d only ever fantasized about. We were nearing a vast precipice, and as long as we could keep running, build up enough speed, we could leap to a new world on the other side.
“I hate that,” Gidon said. “They’re going to have some crazy grammar rule, and we’re never going to find it out.”
“We are,” Yael whispered. She was clutching her knees to her chest, unblinking as she stared at the text. “We’re going to figure it out. We’re going to crack this.”
The sheer belief in her voice sent a shiver down my spine. We could do this.
The others set themselves to making the list, the way Yael had suggested. But I stayed still, staring at the manuscript.
There was something niggling in the back of my mind. As if something I half remembered was trying to break free.
Something that mentioned the Great Beasts. Something I knew. Not a spell but something like a spell. Like a song, from my childhood? A poem or recitation?
I went cold, then hot.
Daziel said these manuscripts came from a ship excavated from a silted-up harbor. I was a sailor’s daughter. I knew all about sailors—how they stowed belongings, what they ate, the prayers they said for safe passage. I also knew something that all ships kept on board. A rutter, a handbook used by navigators to steer the ship and provide specific directions—directions that probably hadn’t changed in thousands of years because the coastlines and maelstroms hadn’t changed in millennia.
I felt like I was floating. “What if it’s a rutter?”
If it was a rutter, we would not only have characters we could match from one language to another—we would have words. Words we could translate from Language X to our language if the same directions were given in both.
And Gilli was a navigator’s daughter. She might be able to read them.
