"Race you?"
"Like we used to do. Remember? I used to beat you all of the time."
"I remember letting you win so you wouldn't have a tantrum and order me beheaded," Tsem corrected.
Hezhi pretended to pout, then changed her expression to one of surprised discovery. She pointed up the corridor, where Tsem had been so nervously gazing. "Is that who you were looking for?" she asked.
Tsem turned to look, a flash of concern passing over his heavy features. When he turned back, puzzled—there was no one in the direction she pointed—it was just in time to see Hezhi's skirt vanishing around the corner. He rolled his eyes, bellowed, and gave pursuit.
Her servitude became joy after that. Each day her knowledge of the old script advanced, and, soon enough, Ghan began to teach her indexing. Indexing was actually simple enough; it involved reading—or at least skimming—a book and making a list of the subjects and important personages detailed or mentioned in it. There was a master index—a truly enormous book that Ghan kept hidden away—composed of entries under various subjects and persons. Under each heading could be found a list of the manuscripts that mentioned them and a set of numbers indicating where in the library the book was likely to be found. Hezhi was amazed—and a bit chagrined—to learn of this index. It would have made her earlier search much simpler. Books were shelved in the order that they were acquired, and as soon as they were placed on a shelf, that shelf was labeled with a number—the number following the one before it, naturally—and the same number was written on the inside cover or first page of the book, so that it could be reshelved. This meant there was no telling where a book on a particular subject was without the index.
Indexing was by turns boring and interesting, depending upon the book she was reading. Ghan seemed satisfied enough with her work, however, though he was gruff and even caustic when she made mistakes. As time went on, however, her mistakes became fewer and fewer; her eyes could dance through the glyphs, discerning their meanings, and, now that she could understand the complex play of metaphor and even outright punning that the script was based upon, she began to catch subtle shades of meaning she had never guessed at.
So absorbed was she in her work that she did not think much about the ghost that had attacked her in the hall or the strange forest she continued to dream of so often. Her mind had returned to the earlier question of D'en and her inescapable conclusion that she needed to better understand her own family if she was ever going to discover his fate—and her own possible fate, as well. So in the evenings, when she was done with whatever Ghan asked her to do, she would turn not to geographies of strange places or treatises on ghosts, but instead to Royal Chronicles. She did briefly glance at one rather recent geography that seemed to suggest that while there were no forests such as she dreamed of in the central part of the world, the distant reaches—north, west, east, south, and west of the sea—seemed to be all forest, occupied by monsters and subhuman creatures. Under such circumstances, locating her dream forest seemed unlikely at best.
She had almost as much trouble with her researches into the royal family.
"The index lists a number of books that are not on the shelves," she mentioned to Ghan one day.
"There are many books that need reshelving," Ghan observed. "You can do that this afternoon."
Hezhi did so, but the books she sought were not among them. She brought this to Ghan's attention.
"Tell me the titles," he said, and when she did, his eyes narrowed with anger.
"The priesthood took those," he practically snarled.
"Why?"
"Let me rather ask you why you want them."
"I am a princess, and I have an interest in the royal family."
Ghan shook his head. "Ah, no, Princess. You tell me the truth—so I will not punish you—but you omit much, as well. Your interest in the royal family seems very specific. The genealogies we have, and the Book of the Waterborn, which merely details the emperors and their deeds. But these—Manifestations of Godhead in the Waterborn, The Origin and Uses of Royal Power, The She'Deng—these are unusual books."
"Is that why the priesthood has them?"
"The priesthood has them for many reasons, not the least of which I think is the rare child like yourself." As he said this, he shuddered, and his eyes half closed.
"Well," he muttered, sitting down.
"They Forbid you?" Hezhi whispered.
"Hush," Ghan snapped. "Don't speak of it. And I advise you not to speak of those books anymore, either, to anyone."
"I… won't."
Ghan nodded. "The priesthood is singularly unimaginative," Ghan said, after he seemed recovered. "They take books from me in which puzzles are pieced together, but they leave the original pieces of the puzzle in the library."
"What do you mean?"
Ghan sighed. "The whole cloth is no longer here, but the warp, the weft, and the loom may lie around." Another tremor ran through him, and Hezhi raised her fingers to her mouth.
"I'm sorry, Ghan. We won't talk about this again."
"No, I don't think we will," Ghan agreed, breathing heavily.
In the next few days, Hezhi read some of the texts on the royal family very closely—especially the histories. She turned up a number of rather cryptic references. One manuscript referred to the "River-Blessed," and at first she was certain that this meant people like her father, to whom the River gave powerful sorcery. Another mentioned a time when no suitable heir could be found who had reached the "age of investment," so that a vizier had to be appointed to rule until such time as someone reached that age. She discovered that many emperors had been no older than she when they ascended the throne—but none were much younger. On her paper, she wrote these two things down side by side. She returned briefly to a book on the history of the city's architecture, now that she could really read it. In it she found an oblique reference to a large portion of the palace being destroyed, not by flood or fire, but by a "River-Blessed unleashed." This "River-Blessed" was named: Ta'nganata Yehd Zha'dune. She looked him up in one of the genealogies and discovered that he had been placed on the throne as Chakunge at the age of ten—the youngest emperor ever to rule. The chronicle recorded that he ruled for just over a year. This work did not mention any general destruction of the palace; it merely mentioned that the -nata ghost suffix was added to his name at that time. This particularly intrigued her because it occurred at the very beginning of her own dynasty; Zha'dune was the old pronunciation of (Zha'dune.
On her way home, rather than talking to Tsem—who seemed distracted anyway—she tried to piece together what she had learned. She could see clearly now what Ghan meant in his metaphor of the loom, warp, and weft. In no single book would she find all of the information about any person or event. The book on architecture had failed to note Ta'nganata's date of ascension and his untimely death, but the genealogy—which contained that fact—neglected the small detail that he had, in that year, de-stroyed much of the palace. These were threads she could weave together, threads that, she hoped, would form some tapestry with a picture she could comprehend. The loom, she guessed, was herself—no, that was wrong, she would be the weaver, wouldn't she? No matter. It was just an analogy.
Much of the evidence seemed to point to her own age—about twelve—as somehow critical in the royal family, at least for men who might be emperor. She suspected that it was somehow connected with her bleeding. If that technically made her a woman, there might be some similar change that made boys into men— though she knew for a fact that men did not bleed, had quite different organs than women. She decided that this would be the object of her research the next day. Whatever this change might be, it occurred at different times for different men, though within the same few years. This also fit with what she knew of women. The story she had reconstructed about Ta'nganata seemed especially important: a boy somehow raised to the role of emperor while still too young; at least that was her reading of it. Even in the genealogy there was a sense, though a very subtle one, that some mistake had been made in choosing him. She connected the fact that he had been the youngest emperor—she felt that this was emphasized in the text—revealed the nature of the mistake. And this boy—this eleven-year-old boy—had somehow destroyed a vast portion of the palace.