by Carol A Park
Rubbing his chin, Vaughn stared after her until she disappeared into the back and then shook his head. When he turned to Ivana, the frustration on his face was gone. “I told you so. I told you!” He rubbed his hands together.
“All right,” Ivana said. “There’s still no guarantee that what you want is in there.”
“Even so.” He started pacing.
Ivana left him to his own thoughts. She drifted around the shop, letting her hand trail along some of the display cases as she went. In a few minutes, she’d have her father’s chest back. Only fifteen years late.
Trepidation warred with curiosity. What was in it? Did she want to know?
Would it answer any of the lingering questions she had about her parents?
What would it be like to read his old study notes again?
Perhaps a quarter of an hour passed before the woman returned. She set the chest on the counter. “Here you go. I’m glad to be able to give it back to its owner.”
“Thank you,” Ivana said. “If you ever have the chance to pass on the message, thank your mother for me, too.”
“I will. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“No. Have a good day.”
It seemed such little fanfare under which to accept an anchor to her past.
She touched her sister’s necklace, snugged the chest under her arm, and jerked her head at Vaughn. “Let’s go.”
Vaughn insisted that they rent the nicest room in the nicest inn. He assumed they would be staying in the town for at least a couple of days, and after the rather rough week they had had, he wanted comfort.
Ivana seemed too distracted to argue with him.
The inn was hardly a high-class establishment, but it was clean and the rooms well-furnished. It reminded him of Ivana’s old inn, in fact.
“Did you copy this place when you set up your inn?” he asked once the door to the room had been shut.
“I’ve never been in this inn,” she said, setting the chest down on a small desk.
“Oh. I thought this was where you lived.”
“No. I lived in Tian, about eight miles from here.”
He waited for more—why an apothecary from Eleuria had the chest, for instance—but she didn’t offer it. She had laid her hands on the top of the chest, and she was staring at it. He joined her. “Well? Are you going to open it?”
She stirred. “I have to pick the lock.” She rummaged around in her bag, produced a lockpick, bent over, and set to work.
After a minute or two, there was the faintest hint of a snick.
She set the lockpick aside, took a deep breath, and opened the chest.
Ivana stared down at a pile of papers. The chest was crammed full to overflowing; her father had obviously run out of room at some point and just kept trying to shove more into it rather than buying a larger chest or organizing what was in it better.
She shook her head, smiling faintly. Typical.
Was that a fond memory? Was she smiling?
Perhaps… Perhaps there would be something good to come out of this. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps all she needed was some closure.
“So,” Vaughn said. “I feel odd about rummaging through your father’s things…”
She grabbed a large stack of papers and handed them to him. “Have at it. If you find any of that writing, any translations, anything about a dig…let me know.”
He nodded.
She picked up the chest, set it on the floor, and settled herself down next to it.
He sat down at the desk with his papers.
And so it went, for hours.
Ivana read everything. There were a few receipts for major purchases and a haphazardly filled-out accounting ledger. But most of it was his old research notes, pages and pages of them. The more she read, the more her chest ached. She couldn’t help but wonder what life would have been like if none of it had ever happened. Where she might be right now.
Who she might be.
She flipped over a sheet of paper into a “discard” pile—at least as far as what they were looking for was concerned—and lifted another few out of the chest to reveal a bundle of folded sheets of paper, similar in size. Bits of broken wax clung to the top sheet, remnants of an old seal.
She frowned. Correspondence? She untied the string holding the pack together and laid each folded piece of paper out in a line across the floor. There were six of them. She unfolded the first.
The first line was the date of the letter, and her heart jumped into her throat. It was dated about a year after the last date in her mother’s journal.
Galvyn,
I hope this letter finds you well. I hear congratulations are in order in regards to your recent marriage to Avira. I take no offense at not being invited to a wedding that didn’t happen; I understand the marriage had to be quick.
You’ll be sorely missed at the university. I’m still bitter at how things turned out, but I suppose it’s better than hanging from a noose, yes?
I’m enclosing the first payment from our mutual associates. I hope it helps to defray some of the costs of the move and your burgeoning family—or perhaps it’s Avira who is burgeoning at this point!
Forgive my levity if it’s misplaced. If you have the chance, write back. I’d be interested to hear how your new posting with Lord Kadmon is going. I hear he’s a mostly decent fellow—for a noble, at least.
Best regards,
V. I.
Ivana laid the letter on the floor in front of her and stared at it. Payment? Payment for what?
It sounded suspiciously shifty; she ought to know.
She shook her head, as if to fling off some sort of strange dream. The thought that her father could have been involved in something less than honorable was, well, unthinkable.
Then again, this was also the man who had been on an illegal dig with her mother, so perhaps she shouldn’t make such hasty conclusions.
And about the timing of that dig…
Ivana did some mental calculations and wondered what “recent” meant. She had been born four months after the date of this letter. How recent could the marriage have been? Especially if her mother was already “burgeoning”?
Ivana reread the letter, taking special note of the comment about the lack of a wedding, and then sat back. Burning skies. They weren’t married when I was conceived.
Why did that surprise her so much? Perhaps because it seemed so unlike her parents.
At least her father hadn’t been the type to leave her mother penniless on the streets. A good man who had died for nothing, while the contemptable men who had ensured his death and the destruction of his family lived.
She gritted her teeth, and any sense that she might have found some closure by coming here was erased in a wave of bitterness.
Vaughn happened to glance her way, possibly because he hadn’t heard the shifting of papers for a while.
She glanced up at him, and he raised an eyebrow at her. “Find something?”
She handed the letter up to him mutely.
He stared at the letter long enough that he must have read it more than once. “Huh,” he said, handing it back to her. “That sounds promising.”
“It sounds like my father was involved in something illegal.”
“Er…well…technically, he was…”
She glared at him.
“At any rate, are there more of these? Perhaps this is related to the dig.”
She blinked. Of course. Of course it was related to the dig. At least, the money might have been. Had they found something worth paying them off for? It sounded as though some sort of bargain had been struck.
“Who’s ‘V.I.’?”
She shrugged. “No idea.” The letter was casual in form, so a friend, or perhaps someone else on the dig.
She turned back to the other five letters, and Vaughn turned back to his papers.
Now that she knew they were letters, she opened each of them and arranged them in chronological o
rder. The one she had read had been the second in the set; the first was neatly written onto the letterhead of a solicitor and was dated two months before the second.
I am pleased to report that your appeal has been considered and accepted. All interested parties have come to an agreement I believe you will find suitable.
Given the state of your wife-to-be, an execution order has been generously stayed. In addition, in exchange for your discretion in regards to the matter uncovered at the expedition, you will receive a total sum of 50,000 setans disbursed evenly over the course of the next five years.
In return, you will agree to confinement in your home region of Ferehar for the duration of your life. You will have no contact with any parties involved in the expedition or at your former place of employment, save our mutual contact, nor with any family. Should any evidence to the contrary be discovered, the forbearance on execution will be reevaluated.
Ivana almost choked, and her head was spinning with ten thousand thoughts. The foremost of which was: 50,000 setans? 50,000 setans? What in the abyss had he done with all that money?
That aside, this was strong evidence that the dig had been discovered, shut down, and her father had been paid off to remain quiet about their discoveries.
She wondered now if her mother’s pregnancy was an accident. Had they deliberately tried to get her with child to make their case more appealing? Would the Conclave really execute a pregnant woman?
Ivana would have said yes, but perhaps not all arms of the Conclave were equally depraved.
The final blow to what she thought she’d known was the move to Ferehar.
It hadn’t been her father’s attempt to support a growing family at all.
They had been forced into exile as punishment.
It was a rather strange and tenuous arrangement, like two parties pulling on a rope or balancing on a lever; if either side gave an inch, the whole thing would collapse.
The Conclave hadn’t wanted what her parents had known to get out, but her mother had been pregnant, so they couldn’t just execute her—perhaps the story had become public knowledge. Even the Conclave, at one point in their existence, would bow to poor public perception.
She took a deep breath and read the rest of the letters.
They were more from “V.I.,” always one side of a conversation and reported enclosures of payments. The last letter also professed to enclose the final payment; there were no more letters after that.
“Well,” she said. “My mother knew something, but it doesn’t help with your mystery language.” Once again, she handed the stack to Vaughn for his perusal.
While he read over them, she dug farther into the chest. There wasn’t much left, and she presumed Vaughn had had no luck with his stacks or he would have said something.
She thumbed through the remainder, finding more of the same—old research notes and accounts, and then just to be sure, she tipped the entire chest upside down and shook it.
Something rattled.
She frowned and set it back upright. The chest was empty, but when she shook it again from side to side, the bottom slid back and forth as well.
A poorly designed false bottom. It wouldn’t stop someone determined to find something, but the casual searcher might miss it.
She pried it open and set it aside. Underneath were two sheets of paper, one folded in half and the other a half-sheet upside down. She opened the one folded in half first.
She almost dropped it. It looked like a page that had been ripped out of that same journal. In a bold hand across the top, as if the person were angry or determined, was written:
SO I NEVER FORGET
Sketched beneath was her mother’s promised reproduction of the tablet they had found—a text written in the mystery language, with a text of similar length in Xambrian underneath it.
She couldn’t believe it. It was here. “Vaughn,” she said quietly.
He turned. She held up the paper in the air facing him. “It’s the next page from the journal.”
His eyes widened.
He took it gingerly from her, as though it might fray into a thousand pieces if he handled it too rough.
And then he set it down on the desk, clapped his hands to his face, and laughed. “I can’t believe it. I simply cannot believe it!
“We found it. It’s actually here.” He put a hand to his forehead. “This wasn’t a colossal waste of time.”
“You thought it was?”
“Of course I thought it was! This slim chance? I took what I could get, but I never expected to find anything!”
She sighed, but even she had a hard time suppressing a smile at his excitement.
“You can translate it now, right? Right?” he asked.
“It isn’t a lexicon,” she said. “But there’s a good bit of text here. I can probably translate most of the Xambrian, and assuming the Xambrian is a translation of the mystery language on the tablet, I can then compare this text with the writing on the serpent, and hopefully there will be enough similarities that we can figure some of it out.” Exactly what her mother would have done, in fact. The knowledge that thirty-three years ago, her mother had sat looking at this very paper, almost certainly trying to do the very same thing was…
Her throat tightened, and she cleared her throat. “Of course, it would be more helpful if we had more of this language, and more translations. It’s always possible there is little-to-no overlap, in which case this will be essentially useless.” If still fascinating. What language was it, anyway? Something ancient and long forgotten, if even the people who had originally used the shrine had felt the need to translate it into Xambrian for clarification.
A shiver went down her spine. All implications for trying to use the supposed serpent-door aside—this was a monumental discovery. Was this language the language of the people who had built the shrines to the heretic gods? Official Setanan history didn’t stretch back that far. If ever it even had, the Conclave had made sure to erase anything beyond the founding of the Empire itself.
It was no wonder the Conclave had shut down the dig and destroyed what evidence they could.
She couldn’t imagine keeping something like this a secret all these years. How it must have eaten away at her mother, knowing she could never speak of it.
Once again, a pang went through her—this time, the ache of loss. That she would never come to know that woman—the adventuresome woman who had risked everything to go on this expedition and summarily given up everything to keep it a secret.
The obstinate woman who had no doubt made her father squirrel away a bit of evidence—out of hope, perhaps? Hope that one day, things would change?
But it hadn’t. At least not for her mother. She gritted her teeth, pushed away all thoughts of something she could never have, and focused once again on Vaughn, who had been pacing silently while she was lost in thought.
“And how long will it take you?” he asked. “We’re running short on time.” Naturally, Vaughn didn’t seem at all uneasy by her caution that it might still all come to naught.
She shrugged. “To translate the Xambrian? A solid day of work should do it. The rest? Hard to say.”
He started pacing again. “We have about six weeks until the sky-fire, and it’s a two-and a-half-week trip to Marakyn, if we push hard. If you think it’ll take you longer than a couple of days, we might be better off pushing on. We have time, but I’d feel more comfortable finishing up in Marakyn since it’s closer to the dig site.”
“I said I’d go with you to Ferehar. I didn’t say I’d go with you any farther.” She had no problem going on to Marakyn. Indeed, it was a perfect place to settle down for a bit while she figured out what to do next. But he was so earnest, she couldn’t help it.
He froze and whirled to face her. “What? But you have to! We’re so close. You can’t just—” He broke off and studied her face.
She put on her best innocent maiden face and blinked at him.
“You’re tea
sing me,” he said.
“Teasing? Me? I said nothing that was untrue. I made no promises to go beyond Ferehar.”
“But you will. I can tell. You look too innocent. You never put that façade on when you’re around me.”
It was discomfiting that he knew her well enough to recognize that. She allowed the tiniest of smiles to break through.
He pointed at her and grinned. “See, I knew it! You don’t fool me.”
She flicked her fingers at him and sighed. “Yes, fine. Whatever. We can keep going and then stop for a more prolonged stay in Marakyn.”
He rubbed his hands together and continued his pacing. “Excellent.”
While he continued to exalt in their victory, she looked down at the final half-sheet of paper. She flipped it over idly, wondering what else her father had hidden beneath the false bottom that was so important.
Her heart stopped.
Vaughn was still in denial. He had hardly dared hope, and as each slip of paper had held nothing pertinent, his hopes had died a little. Even the letters Ivana had uncovered, while evidence that the expedition had existed and that it had been covered up by the Conclave, had given no progress toward translating that writing.
And then there it was. The gods bless Ivana’s mother, that stubborn, wonderful woman who couldn’t let it go.
He turned once again to grin at Ivana and suggest a celebratory dinner and drinks, but the expression on her face was unlike anything he had ever seen there before.
