A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [3]
“Oh, there you are, Jill! I’ve been looking for that reference you wanted.”
“The history scroll? You’ve found it?”
“I have indeed, and just now, so it’s a good thing you wandered in like this. Must be an omen.”
Although he was joking, Jill felt a line of cold run down her back.
“In fact, I’ve found both of the sources you were talking about.” He tapped the papyrus in front of him with a bone stylus. “Here’s the scroll, and it does indeed have a reference to elves living in the islands. Well, maybe they’re elves, anyway. Take a look at it, and I’ll just fetch the codex.”
The scroll was an ancient chronicle of the city-state of Arbarat, lying far south in the Bardekian islands. Since Jill had learned to read Bardekian only recently, it took her some minutes to puzzle out the brief entry.
“A shipwrecked man was washed up on shore near the harbor. His name was Terrso, a merchant of Man-gorat….” There was a long bit here about the archon’s attempt to repatriate the man, which Jill skipped through. “Before he left us, Terrso told of his adventures. He claimed to have traveled far, far south, beyond even An-murdio, and to have discovered a strange people who dwelt in the jungles. These people, he claimed, were more akin to animals than men, because they lived in trees and had long pointed ears. Because he was so ravaged by fever, none took his words seriously.”
“Curse them all!” Jill snapped.
“They don’t truly go into detail, do they?” Suryn came up at her elbow. “Here’s the Lughcarn codex. Do be careful with it, won’t you? It’s very old.”
“Of course I will, Your Holiness. Don’t trouble your heart about that. May I take it back to the guest house to read? I need to rest from my journey.”
Suryn blinked at her for a moment.
“Oh, you’ve been gone. Of course—silly of me. By all means, keep it with you if you’d like. There’s a lectern in the hut?”
“A good one, and a candle-spike, too.”
Jill bathed and ate a sparse dinner before she got around to looking at the codex. By then, early in the evening, the fog was coming in thick, darkening the hut and turning it chilly, too. She laid a fire in the hearth, lit it by the simple means of invoking the Wildfolk of Fire with a snap of her lingers, then stuck a reading candle, as long and thick as a child’s arm, onto the cast-iron spike built into the lectern. Before she lit the candle, though, she sat down on the floor by the fire to watch the salamanders playing in the flames and to think for a while about the work she had in hand, gathering every scrap of available information about the mysterious inscription. Although it was a pretty thing, made of dwarven silver and graved with roses, the ring itself carried no particular magic. It might, however, be important as a clue.
She already knew much of its history. Once it had belonged to a human bard named Maddyn, who had traveled to the western lands and given it to an elven dweomermaster as a gift. That master had in turn given it to a mysterious race of not-truly-corpsed beings called the Guardians. She was assuming that the Guardians had added the unintelligible inscription for the simple reason that the ring hadn’t been inscribed before they’d got hold of it, but when one of their kind returned it to the physical world by giving it to another bard, elven this time and named Devaberiel, it carried its little riddle. As far as dweomermasters could tell, the Guardians perceived important omens about future possibilities as easily as most men see the sun. Since they