The Writing on the Wall CH16

"This doesn't make any sense!"

Noni's chair screeched loudly as she pushed it away from her desk.  A cluster of scientists consulting Asclepia of some matter or other looked up disapprovingly at her, but she paid them no mind as she stomped over to my work station.

She held out a little potted plant and handed it to me.  The leaves were brown and wilting, hopelessly close to death, or more likely a year or more beyond it.  It had possibly been a flower once, or meant to be one, but the brown and grey clump that hung down from the top of the dry brown stem might have easily been a deformed aboveground potato as a blossom.  I would have believed the potato hypothesis first.

"Does this make sense to you?" she asked me.

"That depends on what I'm looking at," I said.  "What is supposed to make sense?"

"It isn't.  It just defies logic."

"I doubt that.  You are not synonymous with logic," Chrysander said, not looking up from the papers I had given him.  He had been staring at me too much, and anything I could find in the old tongue had actually proven quite adept at swaying his attention.

Of course, he didn't need to divert any of his attention to be insulting.  Noni looked as though she were considering giving his chair a kick, but then she just shook her head and leaned on my desk, pointing to bits of the plant with a pencil.  "This poor thing is still alive."

My eyes widened, threatening to leave my skull.  "That's not possible, is it?"  I didn't pretend to know anything about plants, especially in front of Noni, but there was something safely basic about assuming a plant in this condition was quite dead.

"No, it isn't.  You don't need any kind of nature magic to see it, and if you do have some, even if it's just animal sense, you won't even look for signs of life deeper than the eye."

I waited for her to go on and reveal the point.  Flakes of dark, rich soil dribbled from the lip of the pot onto my hands.  They felt damp.

Noni's pencil jabbed at a withering leaf, then into the soil at the base of the plant.  "The roots are still seeking moisture.  They're frantic as a drowning man."

"That isn't normal?"  I cleared a spot on my desk with an elbow, then set the plant down.  More flakes of soil fell on the desk.  "It looks like it's in the same state as a drowning man."

The look Noni gave me was a mixture of gratitude and the kind of look that I had often seen on the faces of teachers who knew that they were covering dangerously complicated topics.  She pulled her pencil out of the flower pot and grasped it in her hand.  "It would be normal if this was a new state.  Very new.  It also wouldn't last for long.  Maybe half an hour, and that would be a record."

"Tell me when you realise that you're being tedious.  It should come right before you actually get to the point."

I went ahead and gave Chrysander's chair a kick.  Three days of being around him, and I still wasn't immune to anything that he did.  Though I had learned a way to pretend I was.  Inwardly feasting on satisfaction, I ignored him outwardly and turned back to Noni.  "That's what you're on about then.  It doesn't make sense because this poor thing has been hanging on longer than that."

She beamed at me, though there was an obvious strain to it.  She was worried.  "Exactly.  This was taken from the house where you hid from the Hollow Man.  It's been in this state for days."  The stress on this last statement, very like her to throw onto anything for the sake of sounding dramatic, had more impact on me than when she employed it elsewhere.

Looking at the plant with a new fascination, I suppressed a cooling of the blood in my veins.  This plant had just been in the same house as the Hollow Man, presumably the same room.  Even very old accounts told of his leaving behind burnt footprints in every surface from carpet to marble, but this was the first I had even heard of his affect on living things not strictly sentient.

"What does it mean?"

Dismay openly twisting her features, Noni shrugged.  Since we had come to the laboratory, none of us had really left.  Not even Demetrius had gone home through the tunnels, although Noni had told me that she and her father communicated through courier once or twice.  The cosmetic magic was fading.  Her added charm was already gone, and her hair had begun to change colour.

She shooed Chrysander out of his chair.  "Go and get us some lunch," she ordered, then pulled the chair closer to me.  "We need to discuss and you are in the way."

He scowled at her, looking bizarrely like Demetrius, and folded his arms over his chest, shoulders squared.  "It's the middle of the morning," he reminded her, pointing up at a clock that had escaped my notice for the first two days we had been working in this place.  "And you have a chair of your own."

Soterios, helpful as ever, jumped up from his new desk adjacent to Demetrius's work station, and brought over Noni's chair.  She crossed her ankles and ignored both young men.

I sighed and shook my head, then wiped the soil from my hand.  It left a black streak on my skin.  "Thank you, Soterios, but I don't think that this spat can be solved by anything so powerless as logic."

He laughed in his quiet way and sat in Noni's chair.  "What started it?  I wasn't paying attention."

"You didn't need to be," Chrysander assured him.  "Our Noni was just whining because her pet plant is ugly and dead.  Like her sense of fashion."

A gasp tore from Noni's throat, and she kicked him sharply in the shin.  While he hopped on one leg, hugging the injured limb to himself, she fixed him with a glare that I was certain could have killed a pigeon.  "Go away," she said, no thought to eloquence.  "Or I shall tell your elder sister how you behave in front of ladies."

To my surprise, Chrysander actually looked a little pale.  Although that might well have been due to the pain of the kick, more than anything else.  He put his foot back down just in time to avoid falling down.  "Which one?"

"Any of them!"  Noni crossed her arms and turned her back to him, fuming.

He did the same.  "Go ahead.  They all like you better than me anyway."

Whatever was going on, it clearly had to do with that same shared history that linked everyone but Soterios and me.  I was beginning to feel a twinge of jealousy whenever it cropped up.  I let them enjoy their row, or whatever any of it could be called, and focused on Soterios.

He looked bewildered, but also a little amused.  "They're all like that, aren't they?"

I nodded.  "It's worse when they're tired.  Hasn't Demetrius told you anything about it?"  I didn't suppose he really would have, but it didn't hurt anything to ask.

"Maybe I could ask.  I hadn't thought of it."  Soterios reached over to touch the ugly potato blossom with a tentative finger.  "When we aren't talking about this paladin business, he asks me about Zurhykeh and the monsters."

That, unlike Noni's plant, made perfect sense.  Demetrius and monsters.  It was like Noni and her plants, I thought, with a wry smile.  I wondered if he missed being a tooled up ranger out on the grounds of his weird family estate.  "That's what Zurhykeh is known for," I said, almost nostalgic.

Laughing ruefully, Soterios nodded.  "When I was small, I asked my father if we could convince them to go away.  He told me that they liked the beaches too much to leave, and I asked him if that was why we stayed."

"Let me guess: he told you that we stayed because without us, the monsters would get tired of the beaches and go into the city."

He nodded vigorously, eyes shining.  "He did.  City people couldn't handle it at all."

We shared a laugh then, though I caught myself looking over at Demetrius, his nose buried in a book about holy responsibility.  He had done all right against the sunakake hag.  Too dumb to run away, but willing to fight.  But was he city people or not?  "Maybe everyone in Zurhykeh should become paladins."

"All of the fathers would do it," Soterios said, touching the plant again.  Then he looked up at me.  "Do you think my grandmother will worry?"

The question didn't so much catch me off-guard as it did unsettle me.  Those sorts of questions had never plagued my life.  There had not been an opportunity.  "Grandmothers always worry," I said.

"That's not really an answer," he pointed out.

Noni saved me from having to respond by dragging her chair over and saying, "Finally got rid of him.  He shouldn't even be here."  She smiled at Soterios in wordless greeting, then went back to the subject of her plant.  "This could mean anything.  Hollow Man always shows up outside, and no one ever noticed plants reacting to him before this.  What does he do to his human victims?"

The question was not one I felt was remarkably tactful, but it was Noni speaking.  I attempted to cover my piqued anxiety by shuffling through papers, pretending that they had been thrown into hopeless disarray by her initial interruption.

Suddenly, the flower pot rose into the air as if being called to some kind of heaven, leaving little flakes of prepackaged earth to sprinkle down onto my desk like a mild spring rain.  I looked up and realised that it was just Demetrius.

He whisked the pot over to set it on Noni's desk, a grim expression on his face.  The sort that I had come to think of as belonging to or coming from his father, like the quick little heel turn and red hair.  "Don't be such a nuisance," he said, staring Noni down.  "Think before you go and ask questions like that."

"I do think," she said.  "It's an important question, and Athena is the one who has all of the Hollow Man research.  It's not my fault all I got were plants and samples of dirt."

"Not your fault, but it is your business.  Are you shocked that a plant mage would get plant mage work?"

Noni folded her arms again, her shoulders slumping.  She tucked her chin down and looked as if she were talking to Chrysander again.  "This is ridiculous.  You're always less fun when Chrysander is anywhere near you."

As if he had been struck, Demetrius's eyes widened and he almost looked hurt.  "I am not!"

"You're less mature, too."

"Please don't fight."  Soterios brushed the rest of the plant dirt from my desk, careful not to leave any streaks on the books or the desk itself.  He sent Noni an imploring look, then turned it on Demetrius.  To the latter, it seemed he was a bit sterner, which I couldn't help smiling at.  Just a couple of days working with our grim ranger and Soterios already had a backbone around him.  But it wasn't terribly unexpected, I had to admit.  To survive on the beaches, you had to be made of some tough stuff, healing house or no healing house.

Demetrius conceded to this request rather easily.  I suspected that might have been because of Noni, in a small way, but he didn't even look at her, so I couldn't be sure.  He leaned over my desk and reached into my space to pick up a book.  "This looks like something I have," he said.  "May I?"

With his hand all but grabbing it, of course I nodded.  At that point, he could have just taken it and then at least I wouldn't have had his elbow in my face.  But that was a man, wasn't it.

He lifted the book away, its spine creaking a little as it whooshed through the air, open and ready to be perused.  "I was right," he said, his voice rather soft.  Then, louder, he said, "This is a paladin's log.  Sometimes they kept these, detailing recovery missions for posterity and teaching tools.  We have a couple," he added, indicating the adjacent workstations, and then Soterios himself.  "Ours are mostly just dry stuff though."

"That's..."  I swallowed.  "I've been avoiding that one.  I was just going to start on it, so I tried opening it to a random page.  Feel free to keep it far away from me."

"Can't do that, you'll hear from Asclepia."

I didn't bother to correct Chrysander.  For one thing, it didn't really matter to me what he called anyone, and for another, Asclepia wasn't in the laboratory at that time.  At least, not the first tier.  She had been called up to the second tier for some reason nearly an hour before, and showed no sign of returning just yet.

However, Demetrius took immediate issue with the return of my monkey assistant and his attitude.  "Don't talk like that to your superiors," he said, clearly relishing the opportunity.

As usual, Chrysander was unruffled.  "You do love having the chance and right to say that, don't you?  A delicious sort of irony, I would guess."  He grinned at us all, then danced around Demetrius to snatch the paladin's log away.  "For your information, dear Dem, I've already read this, and wouldn't you like to know what's inside."

"Of course I would," Demetrius said, obviously pretending not to be curious.  Dutiful as anything, and a little bit pompous, he put his hands on his hips and tried to look as if he wasn't annoyed.  I could see his eye twitching though.  Nor did I blame him.  "Asclepia wouldn't give any of us extraneous information, and she's made it perfectly clear from the start that anything she gives Athena is of the utmost importance."

Making a face that implied he was trying to imitate a man with deep jowls, Chrysander intoned in a mockingly deep voice, "Oh yes, yes.  The utmost importance.  This more than anything she's let me sneak a look through."

I stood up and plucked the book from him.  It was disturbingly easy, as if he had known I would do it.  "You think so, do you?  What makes it so vitally interesting?"

"It belongs to Ser Zotico Naderry.  Or belonged, I suppose.  Death does have a way of dissipating ownership, or so a grave robber will tell you."

"Known a lot of grave robbers, have you, Chrys?"  Hands still on his hips, Demetrius was beginning to resemble a displeased statue.

Soterios sent Demetrius a pleading look, while Noni clicked her tongue at both her fiancée and my unpopular assistant.  "If anyone needs to stop being a nuisance, it's one or both of you.  I can't even tell which anymore."

Standing carefully at the centre of this, in case they came to blows, I turned my immediate attention to the book.  It was handwritten, like a few of the books I had been given copied passages of, and in a strange shorthand that took some time to decipher.  Ser Naderry had apparently not been a terribly tidy-minded man.

Although he had been an excitable one.  As soon as I got past the shorthand, I realised I was plunging into a detailed description of a battle that bordered on the prosaic.

More to stop the arguing than to better process what I was reading, I read it aloud.  "Tuesday, I think, he says.  It's so difficult to tell the days this deep into the pit.  This is nothing like my first assignment.  HM throws at us every tool at his vile disposal, even the--" I swallowed, then forced myself to go on.  "Even the bodies of my fallen men.  He works faster when he is enangered.  Or is it that he does not want them for the same dark purpose as that poor... that poor young girl?  I hope to my dearest god that we are not too late for this one.  We had to come so very far to find her."

I stopped reading, and the bickering did not resume.  I did not realise that I had been clutching the book in white-knuckled hands until Soterios reached up to take it from me.  His gentle hands, not as calloused as Demetrius's, nor as tanned as Chrysander's, were equally roughed and smoothed by life around a lot of sand.  I relinquished the book, and he ran a finger down the page, seeking the place where I had halted.

The first thing he said was, "They did find her."

"But in what state?"  My voice, already sliding into a higher register, was at least steady.

He looked down.  "It is like all the others, but not, thank the stars in the firmament, too late.  She is alive, and haunted, but unmarred.  I have the portrait which her mother gave us.  The girl does not differ from it.  She has not aged like the last one."

Aged.  I had spent too much time on the history and the research side, hiding from what I ought to have been focusing on that it hit harder than it otherwise might have.  I sat back in the chair, and did not object when Chrysander put a hand on my shoulder.

Noni appeared to notice this.  Though she did not refrain from making another face at him, she held my hand, exerting her place as the higher ranking friend.  I almost laughed, but held it in for fear of hysterics.

"I'm going to walk right into that."

"Not alone.  You'll be with two paladins," Demetrius told me.  He did not take my other hand, but there was something in his hooded blue eyes that made me wonder if he wanted to.  "We'll--"

"Three," Chrysander said, blunt as a rock.  "I'm not going to sit on my laurels while the rest of you go out and battle an ages old evil.  There'd be no point in that at all."  He took a breath and even though I could not see him, standing more or less behind me as he was, I knew that a speech was coming.

Noni cut it off.  "Don't be absurd.  You can't go along on whatever pseudo-recovery mission gets planned.  And you certainly can't be a paladin."

His fingers dug into my shoulder, very slightly.  The increase in pressure seemed somehow disconnected from me.  "Oh no?  I can be a bounty hunter."

"Hunting the bounties that your family approves isn't--"

He let go of me to step into Demetrius's immediate space, a jabbing finger nearly taking out the latter's eye.  "My family has nothing to do with my job.  I'm not like you, doing what my papa asks like a good dog.  I do what I like."

"Don't you just."  Demetrius's jaw was clenched, but he continued speaking clearly.  "Go on doing what you like.  There are limits.  Just because yours aren't like mine doesn't mean you haven't any."  He folded his arm, affecting total disinterest in the finger that practically rested on his freckled nose.  "Go on and feel superior, just because you get to have your danger where your parents wanted you to be a scholar, and oh, poor old Dem is out being a ranger on his papa's land, no chance at healing so much as a downed squirrel."

Soterios handed me the book and then stood up, coughing politely into his hand.  "I'm going back to work.  When you disentangle yourselves from this... whatever it is, I could use some help with the last four tenets."

With that, he bowed to me and Noni, then did exactly as he said he would, no bravado.

Still holding my hand, Noni looked down at it and tapped her fingers on the back of my thumb.  "You don't think that I..."  She shook her head.  "I'm afraid for you, Athena.  And for the boys.  Even though they can be dreadfully stupid.  But not so much that I don't want to go with you.  Do you think Asclepia will make me stay out of it?"

Chrysander backed away from Demetrius, one step, two.  Then he spun on his heel.  Just like a Trevino.  "If she keeps me out, then she had better keep you even farther away from any danger."

"But that isn't fair!"

"When is anything fair?"  He leaned on the desk, his hands too tense to lie flat.  His fingers curled as though his hands were a pair of bird spiders preparing to scuttle away.  "Is it fair that Athena has to do any of this?  Or that you can't go home and see your doting papa and his silly aviary?"

A giggle, out of place, but so very welcome, unwrinkled the air.  Noni held her free hand over her mouth and actually smiled at Chrysander.  "You're right.  I do miss those birds."

She was taking the focus away from me.  I squeezed her hand, then set the open log of Ser Zotico Naderry on the desk, open to the upsetting passages.  "What birds?" I asked, pushing the log to the back of my mind.  Only for the moment.

Chrysander's fingers relaxed, but still did not lie flat.  Demetrius's shoulders were still squared and tense, but his face had given up that stony look.  "Noni's father, Baron Laocoon.  He keeps an aviary the size of a village house, says that because Noni has gardens, he ought to have birds.  He wanted her to have lots of friends, but he also wanted to teach her that the only friends you can cage up and keep with you always are," he cleared his throat and made a bit of a face, imitating a larger, older man, "stupid things with brains that envy marbles their size."

Noni laughed, and I camouflaged my closed throat in the sound.  The log waited for me on the desk.