“What has he already
“Like a phoenix?”
“No. No, nothing like that. Come Soul Night, you won’t care about phoenixes. No one will. Birth is so painful.”
Okay. Something terrible would happen. We’d gone over that. Maybe he didn’t know exactly what would happen. Or maybe he was too crazy to express how awful it would be.
I forced myself to meet his good eye, though he seemed to have trouble focusing. “When I came here before, I found books. But I don’t know who wrote them, and I can’t read the symbols.”
“No one wrote them. They were simply written.” He groaned and dropped his hand. “Give me water.
You promised.”
“Tell me how to read the books.”
“Same way you’d read anything. Learn the language.” Oil-dark fluid seeped from his ruined eye, down the crevices of his face, and into cracked lips. He swallowed it.
“What’s the connection between sylph and Janan?”
“Janan is nothing like sylph!”
“Don’t lie to me. I know there’s a connection.” The poison wouldn’t have worked on both of them otherwise.
“He is greater than them. He has always been greater, and they deserve to be cursed.”
Cursed? “What are sylph?”
“They are betrayers!”
“Did they betray Janan? Did he curse them?” Maybe all their attacks on Heart were about revenge.
But why did they seem to like me?
“Oh, they betrayed Janan,” Meuric said. “But he didn’t have to curse them. I don’t know who did, but if I had to guess, I’d guess a phoenix did it.”
A phoenix. No, that seemed too incredible.
“Give me water!” Meuric’s body tipped toward me.
I stood and stepped backward in one motion. “You’re not getting anything until you give me answers.
Real answers.”
“There are no real answers.”
“Look, Meuric.” Ugh, wrong thing to say, because he grinned widely.
I fought hard not to gag. Meuric’s odor of ammonia and bile made my headache increase. Soon my body would stop breathing out of self-defense.
I tried again. “Here.” I pulled the bottle of water from my coat. “Half-full.” I sloshed it. “I’ll give you this water, but you have to answer questions for me.”
“What questions?”
I put the water away and found my notebook, wishing I had the list I’d given to Cris. Still, I remembered lots of the symbols, and I flipped to a blank page and began drawing. “See this mark? What does it mean?” I showed him the symbol that looked like a crescendo.
“Less.”
“What?”
“It means less than. Math. Or it could mean ‘speak louder.’ I don’t know. Context. You must tell me more for me to tell you anything. Honestly, I can’t believe how stupid you are. Do you think I’m a data console, able to call up information when you press the correct buttons? Or a vision pool? Oh, I remember those. We used to think the hot springs would give us visions if we stood there and inhaled the fumes long enough. And they did give us visions! But not of the future or past or anything useful.
Headaches. Like you’re giving me now.”
I blinked and glanced at the page, desperately hoping it wasn’t a math symbol and that all the books weren’t written entirely in mathematical equations.
“Okay, let’s try another. Maybe it will be less ambiguous.” I offered a symbol that looked like an up arrow, but with four points along the shaft rather than one at the top.
“Hmm. Another.”
The next was a circle with a dot in its center.
“Still wanting answers from those books.” Meuric shook his head, as though disappointed but not surprised.
“Do you know what these mean?”
“Of course.”
“You must tell me everything. No leaving out details. If I think you’re lying, I won’t give you this water.”
“Very well.” Meuric coughed, flecks of blood and mucus spattering across the floor. “The second symbol means rising or higher. Ascending. You may sometimes read it as Janan, though it isn’t his name, simply a reference to him. The third symbol means city, or Heart—but only Heart in the way the other means Janan.”
“How do you tell which it means?”
For someone in his condition, he did an admirable job of looking at me like I was an idiot. “Context.
Of course.”
“Oh, of course,” I muttered, scribbling notes to myself. “What about the first symbol? The ‘less than’ mark.”
“It is but a modifier, changing the meanings of the words around it.” He gave examples of how the symbol might affect others.
I showed him several more symbols and he answered readily, the whole time grinning as if he believed I would regret all this questioning. But I continued on, and he told me how and why different meanings might be assigned to different marks. Then, too soon, I couldn’t remember any others well enough to ask about them. If only I’d found the stack of books again when I came in.
“Okay, you can have the water now.” I put my notebook away and retrieved the bottle.
“Yes! Give it.” Meuric lifted his arm, which drooped in unnatural places. When I handed him the bottle, it fell from his grasp and rolled across the floor. As it bounced against the far wall and settled, he just stared, desolate and unable to go after it.
Pity gnawed at me, and I fetched it for him. “Do anything I even
Meuric nodded, as I removed the top and held the bottle in front of him. All he had to do was lean forward, but I didn’t think he could. He should have been dead. Bone shards should have pierced all his organs and he shouldn’t be breathing, let alone talking.
Whatever Janan had done to Meuric, it wasn’t a favor.
I tilted the bottle over him until water trickled into his mouth. He drank, sputtered, coughed, and I backed far away. I didn’t trust all those sudden movements.
“Answer a few more questions and I’ll give you the rest.” Unless he started coughing on me again.
Maybe I could leave the bottle next to him and call it the end of our agreement. But he couldn’t drink it on his own. I hated that I felt obligated to make sure he got what he’d bargained for.
“You want to know how to stop Janan. There is no way to stop him, least of all for you. You are nothing to Janan. Insignificant.” He kept staring at the bottle, even as water dribbled down his chin.
“I’m not insignificant to you. I have the water.” I shook the bottle again. All this protest. All this insistence on my insignificance. Meuric was afraid of me, of what I might do, because I was the only one against Janan who could remember everything others were supposed to forget. Because I was new.
Different. Asunder.
Maybe special.
I steeled my voice. “Now tell me how to stop him.”
“Nothing can stop him. Already the world quivers with anticipation.” He glared up with his good eye, and the bad one gaped wider. “Why are you even here? You should have been like these screams, these crying souls never born.”
Terror flurried inside of me, and I whispered, “What do you mean?”
