Basrahip turned, his dark eyes meeting Geder’s, and the gentle smile on his lips expressed everything he needed to say. He had heard Geder’s voice, and he knew that what he’d said was true. Geder felt a rush of pride, maybe even of love, for the big man. Besides Jorey and Aster, Basrahip had been the best friend Geder had ever had. He clapped the massive shoulder. It was like hitting a stone.
“We haven’t lost yet,” Geder said. “We won’t stop until the world’s been made pure. The peace we make will last forever.”
“It will,” Basrahip said.
A thought stirred in his mind, something like hope surprised him. “Basrahip. Do you think… If Dawson Kalliam was tricked by the Timzinae? By the dragons? Couldn’t Cithrin have been as well?”
“The tricks of the dark ones are well crafted,” Basrahip said. “Without the voice of the goddess as guide, anyone might go astray.”
“So maybe… maybe it really isn’t her fault?”
“We cannot know until she stands before us and speaks with her living voice,” Basrahip said. “Do that, and all will be made clear.”
“No, I understand now,” Geder said. “I see what this is. We’ll save her. And I know how to start.”
If he’d allowed it, servants would have cleaned his library every day, whether he had found a few moments to visit it or not. He didn’t like having people in his things, though. Not even people whose lives he could control at a whim. Dust had gathered on his books and scrolls. The codices of old philosophical sketches he’d been paging through the last time he’d been there still spilled across the table. He didn’t know how long they’d been there.
Bright afternoon light spilled in through the windows as Geder pulled book after book from the shelves, searching for something he only half recalled. It had been part, he thought, of a longer essay. One that touched on half a dozen subjects ranging from antiquity to the nature of time to techniques of agriculture. He had the sense that it was one of Saraio Mittian’s translations of Bastian Preach, but he went through all eighteen of them, and none were the right one. Perhaps one of the Orrian histories.
His hands were grey with dust and so dry he was afraid his fingertips would crack when he found it. The pages were oversized vellum, thicker than paper and soft as skin. It had been a Saraio Mittian translation, but not of Preach. It was an extended third-age copy of Chariun’s Considerations. Likely, he hadn’t opened the book since he’d been in his father’s house in Rivenhalm. He turned the pages now, admiring the handwork, the details in the dropped capitals and the comic marginalia. The Considerations had been one of his father’s favorite books, he remembered, and Geder still felt a little intimidated opening its pages. And yet if he were to trace his love of speculative essay back to its roots, they were here.
He paused over the opening pages of the second section, following the lines of script with his thumb.
Speculation is the art of thinking where no evidence is available. To say that all birds are fish is not speculation but falsehood. To say that some birds swim for a time beneath the water is not speculation, but fact, as evidenced by the northern lake hen and salt heron. It is when we step outside these places of certainty that speculation opens its gossamer wings and breathes the free air. To say that some birds may nest beneath the waves and rise to the air only to hunt is speculation for we know of no such animal, and neither can we say for certain that none such exists. It is for this reason that speculation is also the natural realm of tolerance, for judgment demands evidence, and it follows that the absence of evidence which forms the core of speculation requires the absence of judgment.
Geder sighed. He didn’t remember reading those words precisely, but he could still conjure up the awe he’d felt at this book once. The reverence he’d had for it. Reading it now, it seemed painfully naïve. Puerile. It was embarrassing to think that he had once come here expecting wisdom. He turned to the back, to the additional sections that Mittian had included.
The drawings were not quite as he recalled them, but the sense of them was the same. The ruins of Aastapal and the fields where ancient battles had been fought had been a fashion in the third age, and Chariun had not only cataloged the shards and remnants that humanity had pried from the ground, but designed the mechanisms that might plausibly have employed them. The same hand that had sketched the beautiful little comic images in the margins here laid out the pieces of vast winged harpoons designed to loop through the air. Half a dozen designs of vicious hooked spears with holes at the end that would carry loops of thread no heavier than a human hair until the hooks bit dragon flesh. Then the thread was drawn, hauling stout rope through it. One whole page was dedicated wholly to the image of a dragon the size of a mansion being dragged down to its death by humans of half a dozen races. Including, to Geder’s confusion, a Timzinae. Well, it was speculation after all. Likely Chariun hadn’t known the Timzinae for what they were.
For hours he paged through the designs. Some were clearly fanciful. The sections on the vast, bladderlike airships fitted with prows of viciously curved metal that could tear and rend a dragon’s delicate wings were beautiful, but unconvincing. The bogs of adhesive tar that were meant to foul the dragon’s perch and slow or stop it taking to air were an interesting thought, but there was no guidance on how to concoct them. The ballistas modified with toothed gears that would spin bladed disks into the sky, on the other hand, seemed at least worth the effort of experiment…
He placed bits of thin cloth on each of the pages that seemed most promising to him. He didn’t feel as though he had been at his study long before the book looked as if it had sprouted a dozen tongues. When he reached the end, he felt the almost forgotten tug of pleasure, the temptation to stay and page through the library for a while. Not for anything specific, though if there were other volumes that touched on the weapons that the ancient dragons used in their wars, he would be interested. Maybe not even to read them, but to find the images and sketches put there by hands a thousand years dead. To find again some small thought that had never occurred to him before and let his mind take fire with it for a time. Basrahip might deride the words as being dead things, but not the pictures, certainly? A picture wasn’t true or false, it just was. And the things the drawings showed could be resurrected. Remade in a new time, and by the skilled hands of smiths who had never heard the old designers speak a word. There was a book about the making of maps, for instance, that he’d gotten years ago in Vanai, and never had the opportunity to more than skip through. In his memory, it had had pages demonstrating the different cartographic styles in half a dozen different hands. He wondered where exactly it had gotten to…
But no. Or, not no, but another time. He was Lord Regent of Antea, and the Lord Regent could spend a day looking over old books whenever he wanted. Unless the business of court intruded. And the war. And Cithrin. And the players. And, God, had they really had a dragon?
He hefted the book up under his arm and made his way down the stairs. Servants and courtiers scattered and bowed before him, but he ignored them. He called for his litter, and within moments half a dozen servants and twice the number of guards were carrying him out into the streets of Camnipol. Him and his book besides.
The smiths and armorers kept a district in the southeast of the city, tucked almost against the city wall. The smoke of the forges thickened the air. When he looked out through the windows, the men and women all along the street were bent double or even kneeling in honor of his passage. Near his destination, a particularly fat old man was being helped to his knees by two younger men.
The greatest smithy in Camnipol belonged to a massive Jasuru named Honnen Pyre. He and his apprentices rushed out to the street when Geder’s litter stopped there, and they were kneeling, heads bowed, by the time he stepped down. Geder walked over to the Jasuru. He was wider across the shoulders than Basrahip, his skin so stretched by the underlying muscle that his bronze scales didn’t overlap anymore, but showed a lacework of pale skin between them.