The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [92]
“But what am I to do, exactly?”
“Gather the books and scrolls you know you will need, though no more than can be packed on one mule and one horse. Be prepared to leave by morning.”
“Tomorrow? But that’s not enough time. I have to think! Don’t you understand? If this is an epistle, it’s likely the only one that has survived.”
Ehan coughed. “Begging both of your pardons, but that’s not right. My studies weren’t thorough, I know—the virtues of minerals has always been my subject—but in the ahvashez in Skefhavnz, I studied John Wotten’s letter to Sigthors. I didn’t know the word ‘epistle,’ but that’s what it would be, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Stephen said, “if what you studied was really a letter from Wotten to Sigthors—but it wasn’t. What you learned was a reconstruction of that text by Wislan Fethmann four centuries ago. He based it on a short summary of its content written by one of Sigthor’s grandnephews sixty years after the victory over the Skasloi.
“Sigthors was killed in the battle. The grandnephew got his information interviewing the surviving son, Wigngaft, who was seven when his father read the letter aloud to his followers and sixty-seven when asked to recall what it said. There was also a single line recorded supposedly by Thaniel Farre, the courier who delivered the letter. But we don’t have the original by Farre, only a thirdhand copy of a quotation of Farre in the Tafles Vincum Maimum, written a full thousand years after his death. ‘Come what may, no grandchild of mine shall see a single sunrise under slavery. If we do not succeed, with my own hands I will end my line.’”
Ehan blinked. “So that’s not really what was written?”
“In truth, we have no way of knowing,” Stephen said.
“But surely Fethmann must have been inspired by the saints to create an accurate reconstruction.”
“Well, that’s one school of thought,” Stephen said drily. “In any event, he wrote in Middle Hanzish, not in the original encrypted form, so whether it was divinely inspired or not, that ‘epistle’ is of no help in translating this one. There are, by the by, a few other epistles with the same dubious provenance as the one you bring up. In fact, it’s not uncommon to find them for sale in Sefry caravans, both as ‘originals,’ written in gibberish, and as translations.”
“Fine, then,” Ehan said brusquely. “So our epistle was a fraud, a local tradition not approved by the Church. So what? Are there no authenticated epistles?”
“There are two fragments, neither with more than three complete lines. Those seem to be originals, though neither is here. But they are supposedly faithfully reproduced in the Casti Noibhi.”
“We have the Dhuvien copy of that volume,” Pell said.
“I could hope for a better edition,” Stephen said. “But if it’s the best you’ve got, it will have to do.”
A thought occurred, and he met the gaze of the fratrex.
“Wait a moment,” he said. “You said this epistle—if that is what it is—is a clue to the location of Virgenya Dare’s journal. How can that be, when her journal was hidden centuries after the revolt was over?”
“Ah,” the fratrex said. “Yes, that.” He signed to Ehan, who lifted a leather-bound tome from behind his bench.
“This is the life of Saint Anemlen,” the fratrex said. “While at the court of the Black Jester, Anemlen heard a rumor of Brother Choron, in whose hands the journal had been entrusted. Choron was supposed to have stopped in the kingdom ten years before the Jester won his bloody throne, serving as an adviser to the monarch who was reigning at the time.
“The book rested there for a while. In one passage, Anemlen records that Choron discovered—in a reliquary—the scroll you now hold. Without saying what it was, he stated that it spoke of a ‘fastness’ in a mountain some eighteen days’ ride to the north