Oh.
“How long have I been here?” I asked.
Jelem’s smile deepened at my tone. “A night, a day, and nearly another full night. It’s almost Owl’s day, and a new week, by your reckoning.”
“Owl?” I echoed. Damn. Maybe he had gotten through enough of the book to find something after all. But what was he doing with it in the first place?
“Where’s Degan?” I asked.
“He’s been in and out-more like a worried hen than an Arm.” Jelem took another sip of wine and looked at me. “You can ask me directly, you know. It’s not as if I haven’t already been insulted.”
“Fine,” I said. “What are you doing with the book?”
Jelem nodded. “Better. Simply put, you wouldn’t let it out of your sight. You made Degan promise to leave it with you. He did.”
“And you just decided to help yourself to it?”
“No one made me promise not to.”
“I take it,” I said, “that you found something interesting in there.”
Jelem tipped his glass toward me in salute.
“And that it’s going to cost me,” I said.
Jelem set the glass on the table. “That,” he said, “is entirely up to you.” He picked up the book again. “I’m sure you’d be able to puzzle a fair amount of this out on your own, or pay someone else to do so, but that would take both time and trust. I doubt you have much of either to spare at this point.”
I didn’t bother denying it. He had me in a corner, and we both knew it.
“How much?” I said, steeling myself for what I knew was going to be a very large number.
Jelem surprised me by waving the idea away with a sweep of his hand. “Money? For this? Perish the thought. You already owe me, and besides, who am I to be greedy?” I was good; I didn’t laugh in his face at that. “No,” continued Jelem, “I was thinking of something of more immediate use.”
“Such as?”
Jelem tapped his finger on the book meaningfully.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. The book stays with me.”
“You misunderstand,” said Jelem. “I don’t want the book-I’m not stupid, nor do I have a death wish-but I do want to know why you’re so interested in it. You and glimmer don’t usually mix, Drothe, especially when the glimmer’s imperial, so I-”
“What?!” I said, throwing the sheets aside and swinging my feet to the floor. I stood, or at least tried to. My legs refused to bear my weight, and I only stayed upright by catching myself on the bed’s footboard.
“Oh, be careful,” said Jelem absently. “Your legs won’t be able to hold you for a while yet. The healing glimmer used up most of the strength in the surrounding muscles to speed up your recovery. It should finish replenishing itself in a day or so.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I growled, clawing my way back to my perch on the bed. I took a deep, shaking breath and let it out about as smoothly as it had come in. “Are you telling me,” I said, “that book is about Imperial magic?”
Jelem smiled lazily. “As far as I can tell, yes. And no. It-”
“What do you mean, as far as you can tell?” I said. “Either we can be executed for having that book, or we can’t. You’re the Mouth, damn it-is the stuff in there forbidden or not?”
Jelem sat up straighter in his chair and fixed me with a hard look. “I can tell you,” he said evenly, “that this book was put down in that ridiculous mixture of termite tracks and rodent droppings you Imperials call writing; I can tell you that it’s in a different dialect than you use today; and I can tell you that an imperial Paragon named Ioclaudia Neph wrote the book, mainly because she was kind enough to sign it. What I cannot tell you is what exactly Ioclaudia wrote about, because someone woke up in a foul mood and told me to put the book aside before I could finish.”
“But if an imperial Paragon wrote it, what else would it be about?” I said. Paragons were a select cadre of imperial magicians. By decree, they were the only ones allowed to work with Imperial magic.
“Not having finished it, I’d rather not hazard a guess.”
I stared at Jelem and his smug smile for a long moment. The bastard knew more than he was letting on, and he wanted me to know it.
“All right,” I said. “So if you don’t want a book that may or may not be about Imperial magic, what do you want?”
“I already told you.”
“Yes, but how does knowing why I want the book help you?” I said.
“Simple,” said Jelem. “If I know why you’re interested in it, I will know why others are after it. Kin and Imperial magic don’t often cross paths-having that happen, and being involved in it, puts me in a rare position.”
“You mean it’ll give you leverage with whoever has the book in the end, be they criminal or imperial.”
Jelem shrugged. “Something like that, yes. I’ve found that leverage is never a bad thing to have.”
“That could be a hell of a dangerous lever,” I said.
“A tool is only as dangerous as the man who uses it.”
I leaned back into my pillow and considered. The offer made sense from Jelem’s point of view; the more he knew, the more he could parlay it into an advantage. And, given the hints he’d just dropped, he had a fair start on the book’s contents already. But that didn’t help him unless he knew whom to play-or avoid-down the line.
As for my end-well, there was a hell of a lot to tell. What had started separately as a cleanup job and a hunt for a missing relic had become a twisted mass involving my sister, assassins, Gray Princes, a Kin war, White Sashes, and now, apparently, a long-dead Paragon and her notes on Imperial magic. I knew I could run most of it by Jelem without betraying either Kells or Degan, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
As a Nose, my instinct was to keep things close until I had them figured out. Except, in this case, I wouldn’t live long enough to do that unless I found out what I had.
Besides, I wanted to know exactly what all the fuss was about.
“Got any seed?” I asked.
Jelem reached into one of his sleeves and tossed me a pouch. I emptied two of the dark orbs into my palm, rolled them there briefly with my fingertips, and then took them into my mouth. They were superb.
“You have to keep this tight,” I said. “I know I can’t expect you not to use it, but it can’t make the rounds. Understood?”
“Completely.”
“All right,” I said. And I told him. I talked about being sent to dust Fedim, the conversation above the sewer grate, the attempts on my life. I talked about the missing relic, the scraps of paper, Iron Degan and the Gray Prince and Ten Ways. I went over everything that impacted either Ioclaudia’s book, Ten Ways, the fighting between Nicco and Kells-even my dream encounter with the Gray Prince. The only things I left out were my Long Nosing, my Oath to Degan, and my relationship to Christiana.
When I was done, Jelem remained silent for a long time, slowly swirling the last of the wine in his glass and staring at the light that gilded its rim. When he did speak, his voice was soft, as if coming from a great distance.
“The dream,” he said. “The dream… disturbs me.”
“You and me both,” I said.
Jelem shook his head. “I’m not talking about the woman’s warning, although I think you should heed her to be safe.”
“Then what?”
Jelem looked up from his wine. “Dream manipulation is… Well, it’s not done. At least, not that I’ve ever heard of. Not in the empire.”
“But they do it somewhere else?”
“There are stories, told in the oldest wajiq tals in Djan-what you might call magicians’ academies, though you have nothing to equal them here-of ancient masters who could step from one reality to another like we pass from room to room in a house. These studies were banned ages ago. The despots felt this power too closely mimicked the traveling of our gods, that it was a kind of blasphemy. It’s said the first step to such travels was to be able to enter the land of another’s dreams.”
“Are you saying there’s a Djanese yazani after this book, too?”
“No,” said Jelem. “I’m saying that, if your dream was manipulated as you say, the person responsible has access to a form of magic banned in my homeland for generations. Whether your imperial glimmer can do such things, I don’t know.”