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CHAPTER ELEVEN THE HARRIED SCRIBE
Denying. Every part of me was caught up, denying.
“This can’t…” My voice carried up, and the glass ceiling threw it back. This can’t, my echo mocked. This can’t…
The old man peered at me through stone eyes. His hands were thin, with bulbous joints, the undersides of his fingernails ink-stained. He had no hair upon his head or face. No color in his sunken cheeks.
He said nothing, slowly ru
“Don’t be an ass.” Maude elbowed the king. “Tell her who he is.”
King Castor gave a shaky laugh. “I should think it rather obvious.”
When I looked over my shoulder at Rory, none of my shock was painted upon his face. “What kind of cruel trick is this?”
“It’s not a trick, Diviner.”
The old man watched. “I see,” he rasped. “You mean to rip the veil from her eyes. So to speak.”
I had the brimming compulsion to scream. “Who are you?”
On and on, the man’s finger stirred clockwise circles in the black ink of his inkwell. “Traum’s historian. Its knowledge. Its greatest craftsman.”
He came toward me with pounding steps, as if he weighed a great deal, and the echoes traveled far and near. “For nothing but ink and the persuasive quill can devise what is true.”
A chill set its claws in me. I could see his pores—the lines of his face. Save his eerie stone eyes he looked so… mortal. “Those are the words of the Harried Scribe. An Omen. A god.” I stared at his inkwell. “But you—you’re just a man.”
He blinked once, twice, then, far quicker than a man his age had any right to be, he flung the ink from his inkwell.
And vanished.
The ink came at me in a black glob. I winced, waiting for it to splash upon my face. It didn’t. There was a ripple in the daylight, and then the ink was gone, replaced by the man who’d thrown it. He’d traveled nigh twenty paces on that tide of ink, invisible until he was but a whit from my face.
“Are these the eyes of a mortal—the inkwell of a mere man?” His breath smelled of limestone rubbed too hard or too long. Rotten. “I am Traum’s Scribe. I’ve walked the cobbled streets of the Seacht for over two centuries, bearing magic. My ink never dries, a tool—a weapon. I can travel without being seen, lay waste to ravenous sprites. My writings have inspired reason, invention. My inkwell is a portent of things good or bad, but I have ever been an idol of knowledge. A symbol of truth. What is a god, if not that?”
I was shaking.
Rory’s hand found my elbow, a warm stanchion to keep me sound—
“Don’t touch me.”
I jerked away, carrying myself away to the nearest tower of shelves, fighting the rabid urge to be sick.
“And you—” The man, the Harried Scribe, turned his stone gaze to the others. “It’s been a long while since someone has stumbled upon my dwelling.”
King Castor cleared his throat. “It was I who discovered you, Scribe. Last night, in the market square. I placed a rather potent gift upon your altar. When you came to retrieve it, my knight and I followed you hence.”
The Scribe’s nostrils flared. “And you are?”
“I—yes, I can see why you might not know, given that I am new and not wearing my armor—” King Castor labored to swallow. “I am the king.”
The Scribe barked out a laugh. “Truly? Your ilk gets younger with time.” He looked fondly upon his inkwell. “Which is why my ilk remain ever at the helm.”
King Castor turned as red as a pomegranate.
“There are benefits to youth,” Rory snapped. “The mettle to break from tradition, for one.”
That seemed to hearten the king. He drew in a wavering breath. “We have come to challenge you at your craft and claim your inkwell, Harried Scribe. I, Benedict Castor the Third, am taking up the mantle.”
My gasp was a ghost, floating through the room. Claim your inkwell.
I looked to the Harried Scribe, expecting wrath. But he was still, standing in the middle of his great room, fixed in the light of the dome, surrounded by his books. He looked so untouchable, so solemn and imperious that for a moment I wondered if I’d been wrong. Perhaps he was more than just a man with strange eyes and a magic inkwell. Perhaps he was divine, an Omen—a true god.
Which would make what Rory and Maude and King Castor were doing sacrilege. Cold. Hard. Blasphemy.
“Take up the mantle, you say.” Stone of eye, stiff and wan of face, the Harried Scribe exhibited no emotion. But there was an air of menace about him when his attention fixed upon the king. “And when you fail to defeat me at my craft?”
Maude moved to stand closer to King Castor. “Then we will be at your mercy.”
The Scribe bared his teeth. I wished he hadn’t. They were gray and cracking, like he’d pressed his jaw down with too brutal a strength. “Then I accept.”
He flung his ink. Disappeared. When he was corporeal again, he stood directly in front of me. Hard hands found my waist. More ink was flung, and a terrible weightlessness touched my body. I went invisible and was lifted off my feet—flung upward.
I landed in the Harried Scribe’s clutches upon one of his shelves, fifty feet above the floor.
Below, the others were shouting.
“Fear not, my dear.” The Scribe brushed my hair out of my face as I grasped for something besides him to cling to. “I shall protect you against these disbelievers.” He reached for a book—began to thrum through its pages. “This has happened before, of course. Heretics have found me. Tried to take what is mine, tried to steal my inkwell—my power. They never do, and it always ends the same way.” He gri
Oh gods. It was a mistake looking down. My stomach was in my throat. “What is taking up the mantle?”
“Thievery. Dissent.” He closed the book he was reading and flung it, its responding thud against the stone floor echoing through the room. “A king’s quest to claim all five stone objects and take the power of the Omens for himself. But to succeed—” He pulled another book, then flung it as well. “My craft is knowledge, and they must beat me by it. Which, of course, they will not.”
He leaned over. Called down to the others. “There will be three questions. You must answer at least one correctly, then you must ask me a question that I ca
Rory’s expert profanity drowned him out. “Bring her down, you fucking cur, or I will—”
Maude gripped him by the arm and said something I could not hear, silencing him.
The shelf creaked beneath my shifting weight. Sweat pooled in my palms. “I want to get down,” I told the Scribe.
“Shhh.” He sniffed the air, then drew closer. “I won’t let you fall.”
He put a cold finger under my chin and lifted it, baring my throat to him. He sniffed that, too. “Strange, that Aisling has sent you to me in this fashion. I’ve never felt a Diviner’s pulse before. Even stranger, that you come under the wing of a heretic.”
Once, back at the cathedral, a merchant had tried to pull One’s shroud off. He’d scratched her cheek. A moment later he was on his face, motionless, bleeding into the gravel. A gargoyle had hit him so hard in the head his skull had cracked. At the time I’d been reassured that such volatile, terrifying beasts were looking out for the Diviners. It was only after that I became unsettled. Volatile, terrifying beasts were, after all, difficult to read—impossible to predict.
I knew the machinations of the Harried Scribe’s inkwell, knew how to read his portents. And yet sitting on a shelf with him, so far above the ground… I was at the hands of something volatile, terrifying. Wholly unpredictable.
“I haven’t been sent,” I managed. “I’ve come because of my Diviners—”
“We await your questions, Scribe,” Maude called from below.
The Scribe forgot me, dropping my chin to look down upon the others. “Since you are a king, and these, I suspect, your appointed knights, I will transpose my questions into that which you can understand. Love, faith, and war—the virtues of knighthood.”
Rory rolled his eyes.
“Let us begin with a question of love.” The Omen flung his ink and vanished, reappearing on a shelf below me and pulling free a leather-bound book. “What, according to the Seacht’s poet laureate, Ingle Taliesin, does a king gift his bride upon their wedding night?”
I could tell by the tight lines of Maude’s, Rory’s, and the king’s mouths that none of them knew the answer. After a moment’s deliberation, King Castor said, “A dower share of his land and wealth.”
The Harried Scribe gri
How keen the young king to take up his bride, how noble and steadfast is he.
With wine, with brine, the vows are all said, his heart hence taken by she.
But, pray, what gift should he tend his new queen—what token could ever compare?
No silk is so soft as the touch of her skin, no portrait, no jewel, so fair.
Perhaps a song, composed in her name, or maybe an altar, a shrine.
Or even the moon, brought down from above—
Nay. His cock will do fine.
The Scribe let out a raucous laugh. I stared at him, dumbfounded. “That’s horrendous.”
Below, Maude was rubbing her brow. “Poet laureate my ass.”
“Never trust anything written in rhyme,” Rory muttered.
“Not well-read, I see.” The Harried Scribed composed himself. “I find courtly love rather banal. But a laugh from the belly is a welcome occasion.” He snapped the book shut, vanished, then reappeared on the shelf next to me, making it shake. “Onto faith, then.”
This question required no book. The Harried Scribe leaned forward, perched like a gargoyle upon his shelf. His rasp dripped with mirth. “What was the name of the first Diviner? The foundling child who came to the tor and named the Omens?”
The trio beneath me balked. “The abbess does not speak it in her Divination story,” Maude called. “It’s never been spoken.”
The Scribe toyed with the sleeve of my cloak. “Is that your answer? That the first Diviner was without a name?”
Another biting moment, then King Castor said, “It is.”
“Pity. Once more, you are incorrect.”
King Castor and Maude were unmoving and Rory the opposite, slouched, boot tapping, hand fidgeting incessantly in his pocket.
Only one question remained.
“What was it?” I whispered. “The child’s name?”