On that day there was no mercy for those who had struck against the Maker of Above and Below. The Foundation of All turned away from those it had created. The Source of Wind did not hear their pleas. The Crown of the Abyss received them in their thousands, the worms who had eaten the light, from the eldest to the youngest, but the leaders were spared, for Samšin had promised that she would bring justice to the world.4
From: The Office of the Curator of Draconean Antiquities
To: Audrey Camherst
14 Caloris
Tomphries Museum
#12 Chisholm Street, Falchester
Dear Audrey,
Your knowledge of the corpus of Draconean literature is much more extensive than mine. Have you ever come across the epithet “Foundation of All”?
I’m sure you’d rather not be reminded of the auction at Emmerson’s, but if you recall the items I marked in the catalogue, one of them—the clay sun disk—seems to have been not as aboveboard as I thought. (Lady Plimmer bought it. I’ve had five letters from her in the last week, each one more frantic than the last at the thought of being sent to prison forever for unwittingly purchasing an illegal antiquity.) Its provenance seems to have been falsified, and knowing that, I’m wondering if it came from that looted temple in Seghaye, the one near Djedad. They found broken pieces of a similar sun disc there, and it’s rare enough to find them in clay rather than gold or copper or bronze that I can’t help but think there might be a connection, especially as Rouhani’s report said there was some kind of inscription on the back of the shattered one.
This one says “Foundation of All, guard these precious hearts of gold,” which is why I ask about the epithet. If we can link that to its presumed original context (the discs were set into the sides of a tablet chest), we’ll have more evidence for proving this one is “hot,” as the police say—and since there seem to have been four originally, and one is broken, the other two surviving discs might be here in Scirland, too. If we can trace those back to their seller, we might be able to connect Dorak to the ransacking of that temple outside Djedad. I doubt he was directly involved, of course, but anything we can do to trace the networks that smuggle these things out of their home countries will help us stop them in the future.
I find myself wondering if there’s any chance “Foundation of All” is somehow related to what we call foundation-style chests. It would be quite a marvel if we unwittingly replicated the ancient word for those things, but it would help prove a connection. I’ve also written to Rouhani to see if he can make out any of the inscription on his broken disc, and see if it says the same thing.
Are you doing well? I haven’t heard from you since you went back to Stokesley. There were some concerns when you came to Falchester about the reliability of the post; I would be grateful for even a brief note letting me know everything there is all right.
Your friend,
Simeon
1 These are clearly the origins of the three military orders known from the Classic Period, the Takhaba, the P rz, and the Zayba. There is no reason to think the founders were real individuals, any more than the four from a single egg are likely to have been—especially not when their names translate to “gold,” “quicksilver,” and “iron”—but this nonetheless provides an origin for those orders, however mythical.—K
Mornett once speculated to me that the names of those orders derived from those words. He must have been so pleased when he found out he was right.—AC
2 This is not confirmation that Anevrai queens rode dragons into battle, any more than depictions of such on the walls of temples can be taken as confirmation. (Those same walls show queens towering four times the height of their vanquished foes.) But it demonstrates that such an action is certainly an ideal they held as more than a visual motif.—K
A motif of domination. Your people are able to train mews and, to a lesser extent, other dragons, but that is done through much more cooperative means. This is control by raw force.—AC
3 Definitely not an accurate count—not for the pre-founding period.—K
4 Why is sparing the leaders justice? It seems like it would be more fair to kill them, and leave everybody else alive.—CF
The answer to that no doubt lies in the final tablet.—K
And I suspect it’s the reason Gleinleigh has gone to all this trouble.—AC
FROM THE DIARY OF AUDREY CAMHERST
16 Caloris
One tablet left.
We’ve almost stopped talking to one another, Kudshayn, Cora, and I. Not because anyone is angry. We work every waking moment on the tablets, half afraid to find out where they are leading us, but unable to stop, and I think I dread the ending almost as much as Kudshayn does. It’s already unpleasant, seeing the shift from the Anevrai as ancient hunter-gatherers to the conquerors who built an empire, but that alone wouldn’t justify the effort Gleinleigh has gone to. There must be more to come.
He isn’t here, the coward. In fact, he hasn’t been back to Stokesley since that dinner at Lady Plimmer’s. I’m not surprised; between what I said to Mornett and what I said to Mrs. Kefford, it’s obvious I suspect them of something, though I doubt they know that we’ve figured out their secret. If I were Gleinleigh, I wouldn’t come back here, either. Better to leave us to work undisturbed.
I keep wondering what other spies he has set on us. Mrs. Hilleck, the housekeeper? The maids who dust the library? We’re endeavouring to keep to our usual habits (and hoping no one was listening at the keyhole when we figured out the truth about the cache), but we’ve been making duplicates of everything in secret—copies of the tablets, transliterations, and the translation itself—just in case Gleinleigh swoops in at the last minute to snatch everything away.
A few weeks at most. Probably not even that. Then we’ll be finished, and we’ll have to decide what to do with our translation.
It isn’t quite true that we’ve stopped talking to one another, because that makes it sound like it’s mutual, and it isn’t. I had to ask Cora to stop, because she keeps on trying to speculate about how her uncle intends to leverage the translation, and then attempting to defend against those speculative attacks with logic. She persists in thinking that if we can just muster some nice, reasonable facts, then all harm can be prevented. Unfortunately, people don’t really think that way.
I should have known she was up to something these last few days. There’s relatively little left for her to do; it’s just translation now, and she still isn’t much help with that. But she was scribbling away in the corner, even though she’s up to date on copying our notes, and then every so often she would get up to look at something elsewhere in the library. Today, while Kudshayn was resting in his refrigerated room, she came up and thrust a sheaf of papers at me.
At least I have learned my lesson about brushing off things she hands to me. “What is this?” I asked, taking it from her.
“It’s an article,” she said. “Well, it’s part of an article. A draft. I don’t know all the things to put in it, and I’ve never tried to write an article before, so I don’t know if it’s any good. But you can help me with that.”
A quick skim showed me lots of discussion of climate—and, oddly, of volcanoes. There was even a map of Anthiope, sketched in Cora’s very careful hand. “This is about the geography of the epic?”