Twenty-three
Gilli could read them.
Daziel fetched her to the Keep. She arrived in pink pajamas and her yellow School of Science blazer and a smile like a spring breeze, even as she warned us that this wasn’t her forte. “I haven’t looked at a rutter since I was thirteen. We should try to get one—tricky, they’re not in libraries, but I can write to my mom.”
Then she proceeded to identify dozens of words.
She pointed at the first paragraph. “This is probably the traditional prayer to protect the ship. The prayercouldhave changed,” she said doubtfully, “but I expect it says ‘Leviathan, Lady of the Sea, Ruler of the Oceans, grant us safe passage through your deep waters. Ziz, Master of the Sky, Master of the Birds and the Air, lend us swift winds and see us safe through your storms. Behemoth, Great Beast of the Land, bring us safely from shore to shore.’ ”
I started breathing in short little gasps; Yael closed her eyes and opened her mouth. Gidon collapsed into a chair and buried his face in his knees. Stefan punched Daziel in the arm.
“What?” Gilli looked alarmed. “Did I say something wrong?”
“You said something so right.” I threw my arms around her. “You said so many words. If—if it’s right—Gilli, it’s atranslation.Enough to get us started, to give us conjunctions and definite articles and start us really, really translating. Otherwise—even if we could figure out how Language X sounded, even if we could have matched our letters to theirs, we wouldn’t have known the meaning.”
“Oh,” she said, looking pleased. “Good.”
Gilli started us rolling down a cliff until we gathered speed on our own and could make educated guesses. At some point Daziel handed over a rutter in our tongue, which no one asked too many questions about.
We spent all night working. In the morning, we’d have to tell Professor Altschuler, and we wanted to be as far along as possible before it was taken away from us. This kept us from being thorough, from doing the slow, proper analyses we’d been trained to do. Instead, we focused almost exclusively on the scroll for healing the Ziz and the rutter. We barely managed to force ourselves to pause and map out all the letters. When we did, we theorized Language X didn’t use vowels the same way we did, but our consonants matched closely. We’d be able to read the language aloud, speak it to life after thousands of years of silence.
Then we dove into words. In the morning, we’d be set to detail categorizations ordered by the professor, but not tonight. We drank coffee by the jugful, until we were so jittery I thought my heart might explode. No one wanted to stop for food, so we ate whatever Gilli and Daziel brought, our eyes trained on the text. By morning, we looked chaotic—hair everywhere, faces oily, eyes twitching.
But we didn’t care because the words were coming together. “Oh my god,” Gidon kept saying. The syntax was similar toancient Ille, one of Stefan’s languages, so we could theorize how nouns and verbs worked. We could guess cardinal directions and movements and numbers. It was trial and error—we’d plug in “strong” before “wind” and then see if it held up. If it didn’t, we’d try again with another word—“cold,” perhaps, or “weak” or “unexpected.”
By dawn, we had this:
For Returning the Ziz to Its (Original /Enduring?) (Form/State?)
To perform the spell, the (name/description?) of the Ziz (must/should?) be (carved?) into the bone of the Ziz. It is best to do so once a (millennium). Four casters (must/should?) (stand?) at the four points of the compass around the Ziz and read its (name/description?). They (must/should?) (funnel/use?) fourteen (unknown) into the spell:
You are the Ziz, Master of the Sky, Master of the Birds and the Air, beast of legend. You (stand?) with your (ankles?) in the sea and your (head?) in the heavens, with wings to (block out/inhibit?) the sun.
From there our guesses became more muddled—we suspected it was an anatomical description, which no words appeared for in the rutter.
“We’re so close,” Stefan groaned. “But how are we going to figure out the rest? It’s impossible. We’ll be able to phonetically read the characters, but we’re not going to be able to understand more unless we find an ancient anatomy textbook.”
It did feel impossible. There was no way for us to know, and while we could guess, our guesses were likely to be wrong. There’d be no way to read the correct spell to save the Ziz.
Unless…
It hit me, and I started laughing.
Only Daziel and Gilli looked concerned. The other three had suffered their own hysterical fits over the past twenty-four hours and were unconcerned with mine. “We don’t need to,” I said. “We don’t need to decipher it.”
“What are you talking about?” Stefan picked up an almond from the floor and ate it. I couldn’t even judge him at this hour.
“We figured out enough. We figured out how topronounceLanguage X. We don’t need to say the spell in our tongue. We can do it in Language X.”
Everyone stared at me as though I’d lost my mind. Which, perhaps, I had.
“That’s madness,” Yael said. “You can’t perform a spell you don’t understand.”
“Why not? We understand what the spell is doing. It’s strengthening the Ziz. We just wouldn’t know what words we were saying.”
“We don’t know for sure about the pronunciation,” Stefan said. “It might not work.”
“It’d work better than totally wrong words.”
