Of Truth and Beasts

Chane studied the narrow face of Premin Hawes. With her cowl down, cropped, ash gray hair bristled across her head, though any lines of age were faint in her even, small features. Severe-looking, she was not unattractive.

“My apologies,” he began. “I was ... only ...”

Chane glanced down the short passage to the chamber door.

Hawes could not have passed by without bumping into him, so how had she entered unnoticed? He flashed back to their first meeting.

When Wynn had been called before the Premin Council and he had been ejected, Hawes had stood inside the chamber doors. As the doors shut tight, the seam between them began to vanish. In a mere instant, the doors became one solid barrier. The image of Hawes with one hand raised, as she glared at him through the closing doors, had remained fixed in his mind. Her revealed abilities that evening were why he had ultimately sought her out in private.

“Well?” she said.

Chane remained calm, facing this deceptively academic-looking woman.

“Is it finished?” he asked.

She scrutinized him a moment longer and then turned toward her desk. Opening its top left drawer, she lifted out a narrow pouch of brown felt stacked atop two torn half sheets of paper and one of Chane’s own books. Much as he hungered to know what she made of the latter three items he had shown her, the first was the most important.

Premin Hawes loosened the pouch’s drawstring and slid its contents into her hand.

“This pair is smaller,” she said, “as you requested.”

She held out a pair of glasses much like those Wynn wore when igniting the sun crystal.

“They are the same?” he asked.

“Yes, simple enough to duplicate ... though these have structural improvements.”

Smaller compared to Wynn’s, their round, smooth lenses were framed in pewter. Unlike the straighter, thick arms of the original pair, these had tin wire arms with curved ends to better hook around a person’s ears.

Hawes had likely engaged her apprentices to make them—considering what little Chane discerned of her. Wynn had mentioned that Domin il’Sänke had scant respect for this branch’s metaologers compared to his own. Ghassan il’Sänke had not known with whom he was dealing.

The premin, like a mage of worth, did not put her skills on display unless necessary. Only petty dabblers made a show. From what Chane had seen at the council chamber, she was far beyond some academic practitioner.

“They were created from your specifications,” Hawes continued, “though they will not fit you.”

Chane said nothing. These glasses were meant for Wynn, to replace the ones she had. As to the first pair ...

He stepped around Hawes to her desk. Fingering aside the two half sheets of paper, he picked up the book he had left with her.

Chane had scavenged and saved as many books, journals, and sheaves as he could from a remote keep of Stravinan healer monks, ones that Welstiel had turned into feral vampires. This text, thinnest among them all, had held Chane’s attention from the start, though he could not truly say why. An accordion-style volume of grayed leather cover plates, it had one thick parchment folded back and forth four times between the plates. Its title read The Seven Leaves of ...

That final word in old Stravinan was too obscured by age and wear.

“Did you make anything of this, based on my attempted translation into Numanese?” he asked.

Hawes barely glanced at the book. She slowly pivoted the other way and retrieved the first half sheet of his notes—his translation. There were now more notes written in her own hand.

“Of ingredients mentioned, some are rare. They are mostly herbs and substances considered beneficial to healing ... but not all.”

Her explanation made sense, considering where he had acquired this text. To some relief, he realized what the last word of the book’s title must be.

The Seven Leaves of... Life.

But not all seven substances in the translated list implied leaves. Two he could not make out at all, proving difficult to copy them rote into Belaskian letters of similar sound. He glanced at Hawes’s notes, looking for those two.

“What is ... a muhkgean branch?” he asked.

“A mushroom grown by the dwarves,” she answered. “Its cap spreads in branched protrusions that splay and flatten at the ends.”

“Like leaves?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Yes, that might come to mind in looking at one. But I know of no medicinal purpose for them.”

This left another puzzle for Chane. To his knowledge, there were no dwarves in his part of the world. So how would those healer monks have known of this mushroom, let alone what it was called by dwarves?

“What of this ... an-os ... a-nas-ji ...”

Chane still struggled with the last of the seven terms. It was not Belaskian, old or contemporary Stravinan, or any language he knew. When Hawes said nothing, he looked up.

She was scrutinizing him again, as if deciphering him like some ancient tome.

“What is this text to you?” she demanded.