Shoreseeker

by Brandon M. Lindsay

  Tharadis didn’t like the sound of that. Though it did help explain why a prophecy had been keyed to him.

  She studied him out of the corner of her eye as they walked. “You’re the Naruvian, aren’t you? The one who came to petition the Council.”

  He smiled at her. “Yes. My name’s Tharadis.”

  She nodded and looked ahead. Instead of giving her own name, she said, “I’ve heard of you. Everyone in the city has by now.” She gestured for them to turn at the next corner.

  Tharadis wondered how true that was. He hadn’t been trying to draw attention to himself. He had even left his headband in his room today, though he supposed Shoreseeker declared him Warden just as much, if not more so. Still, he had seen more than his fair share of strange looks. He wondered if it was simply him not fitting in rather than anything to do with Patterning. The possibility of having some latent ability, some “effect” as she called it, frightened him. It meant that he wasn’t in control of himself. He might even be a threat to those around him.

  He realized with a start that they had been winding through rows of shelves and had even gone down a flight of stairs while he’d been lost in thought. He stopped and rounded on the librarian, who had come to a halt a step behind him.

  “What is this?” he demanded. “Why haven’t you been leading me to the prophecy section?”

  She studied him through her spectacles with her head cocked, red hair draping over one shoulder, brow furrowed in a thoughtful frown. Her hand drifted to the large orb hanging from her neck, stroking its glassy surface in an unconscious motion. “You have no idea how we got here, do you?”

  “How could I? I’ve just been following …” He trailed off. “No,” he whispered. “I’m the one who was leading us here.” A chill ran through him. “But I don’t even know where here—”

  “The prophecy section.” The woman gestured to a door down the narrow corridor just in front of Tharadis. “We’ve arrived.”

  Tharadis stared at the door, unwilling to meet her eyes. Was she playing him for a fool? Or had he really led them here? He finally turned back to her. “How?” he asked, his voice quiet.

  She shrugged. “Consider it a test. If you hadn’t been keyed to a prophecy, you would have never found it on your own. The library has an interest in making sure only those who have business studying prophecy can access this section.”

  “And if I hadn’t found it? You would have just taken my book without honoring our agreement?”

  “I was fairly sure you would find it. That’s why I agreed in the first place.”

  Tharadis drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “So … what you’re telling me is that the library’s entire floor plan is a Pattern?”

  “Of course it is. That’s what we do here.” She gestured to the door again. “You going in or not?”

  He hesitated. His head was already beginning to ache, and he hadn’t even started learning about prophecy yet.

  But ignorance was precisely his problem. And he wouldn’t solve it by waiting any longer. “All right,” he said, striding for the door.

  “Alyssa,” she blurted.

  Tharadis stopped to look at her. “I’m sorry?”

  “Alyssa. It’s my name. I’m the Academy’s chief archivist. Sorry if I was rude to you earlier.” She looked away as if she regretted speaking. A wavy strand of red hair came loose. She stuffed it back behind her ear and gestured him forward. “This way, then.”

  He turned to hide a small smile as he walked to the door and opened it.

  Chapter 33: Books and Words

  Tucked away in the depths of Academy library, the prophecy section of the library was an oasis of stillness in an already silent sanctuary. The section was kept in its own compact room. The smell of the air here, filled with dust of history, was intoxicating. Alyssa loved the place; quiet though the library was, she often came here to escape even the sight of other people. Books and words, those were the things that made sense to her. People were an enigma.

  None more so than this man, this … Warden. Yet in spite of that, she found herself feeling at ease in his presence. Flustered and frustrated, which was to be expected, but still strangely at ease.

  To him, Alyssa imagined that many of the books collected here were hardly worthy to be called such: some of them were short stacks of coarse vellum, only a dozen pages or so, with two scraped hide covers bound together by a braid of aged leather. Others were scrolls, stacked in diamond-shaped cavities, and still others were merely loose papers, flattened and stacked in a haphazard manner in shelves of their own.

  Tharadis entered the room slowly, his eyes taking it all in. Then he circled around the single table in the center of the room to the shelves with the scrolls. He pulled one out, unrolled it, and scanned it quickly. He put that one back and looked at another. “These are just … random designs. They don’t look like prophecies at all.”

  “That’s how all prophecies look to the people they’re not meant for.” Alyssa shrugged. “To you and me, just a bunch of nonsense, scribbles. But prophecies are keyed to specific people. Only those people can read them.”

  Tharadis nodded. “That’s what Larril told me, too. I thought I was losing my mind when I read those words on the wall. There was a crowd of people there, but I was the only one who could read them.” He paused a moment with his fingers resting lightly on the scroll. “Prophecies are Patterns, aren’t they?”

  “Yes,” Alyssa said, “but I know what you’re going to say. Patterners have tried to crack prophecies in the past, and while they often think they get one right, their assumptions always turn out to be wrong.”

  Tharadis glanced up. “Why is that?”

  “Do you know much about cryptology?”

  “Codes, right?” He shook his head. “I haven’t studied it. I’ve only heard the term.” A smile spread across his face as he added, “I was pretty good at riddles when I was young, though.”

  “Codes can be quite a bit more complex than riddles, although some of the same principles apply. There’s one particular kind of code that is impossible to crack, even by Patterners.” Alyssa straightened her back as she adopted a lecturer’s tone. “It’s called a Vayan cipher. It’s made when the key used to encrypt the message is longer than even the message itself. What do you think happens when that is the case?”

  Tharadis lifted one hand while he pushed the scroll away with his other hand. Alyssa paused as he sat in thought, his eyes flickering across the wood grain of the table, as if he were counting in his head. Or studying the grain itself. “They would get a number of false solutions that were indistinguishable from the correct one.”

  “That’s … that’s entirely correct.” She had prepared to launch into a deep explanation of mathematical uncertainty and false positives, but found the wind stolen from her sails. It was supposed to have been a rhetorical question.

  Tharadis stood and began to pace. “So, each prophecy is keyed to its intended recipient.” He paused, then wheeled on her. “Couldn’t a Patterner reverse engineer the key? Study the person, figure out how the prophecy was keyed to them?”

  “If only it were that simple. You would have to completely understand the recipient’s Pattern, which is next to impossible. Most Patterning is done by understanding only part of an object’s Pattern. In principle, it’s actually rather crude, which is why it often seems more mystical than scientific to laypeople.”

  “But prophecies are unique in that they require total knowledge of a person’s Pattern.”

  Alyssa nodded. “That’s right.”

  He folded his arms and stopped pacing, one thumb stroking his chin. He was staring directly at Alyssa. His study of her was so sudden and intense that she had to turn glance away. With her fingers, she combed some of her hair over her ears so he wouldn’t see how red they doubtless were becoming.

  In truth, she didn’t mind the intense scrutiny. And she berated herself for it. This man was a foreigner, and an important one beside
s. And he was making her head all muddled with his questions. She wasn’t in any condition to be so drawn to him.

  And yet, she found she was no longer thinking about prophecy or Patterning. So she was utterly startled when his next words were, “How can I understand you?”

  She glanced up at him. “Excuse me?”

  “Perhaps I misspoke.” Then, suddenly, he smiled to himself as if to some private joke. The smile was gone as quickly as it had come, replaced by the same serious expression as before. “I mean, how is it that we’re speaking the same language?”

  She frowned. “What do you mean?” She knew exactly what he meant, but she couldn’t believe that he did.

  “Well …” He started pacing again. “Our lands have been separated for over six hundred years, with no contact at all. That’s a long time, long enough for the meaning of words to change. A few changes to start out with, to be sure, but these changes would compound over the years. Like,” he held out his hands in a helpless gesture as he struggled to find the words, “like a story, told over and over and over again, never once written down, never once checked against its source. After enough time, the story changes so drastically that it becomes unrecognizable. It becomes a different story entirely.” He pointed at Alyssa. “Our language should’ve behaved the same way. Since the appearance of the Rift, Naruvians haven’t been able to check the meanings of words with the people of the Accord. Yet I understand you as if we grew up in the same town. As if the language we speak hasn’t really changed in over six hundred years.”

  Alyssa groaned as she dropped into a chair across from Tharadis. “I can’t believe this!” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “Did you know that I studied at the Academy for over five years before they taught me that? And I really struggled with it. I nearly had to quit the Academy for something you figured out in,” she fluttered her hand, “a few idle moments.” Her eyes started to burn. Oh no. Don’t cry.

  Tharadis sat down across from her and took her hands in his. “Alyssa. I’m grasping at smoke here. I’m not here to make you feel foolish. I’m here because I need your help. So, please … I beg you.”

  Alyssa stared at her hands in his. Tharadis’s hands were calloused, the hands of a swordsman. Not the hands of a scholar. He was right, of course. Even if he did have some good guesses, she knew that relying on guesses was a dangerous way to live. She pulled back one of her hands and wiped at her eyes. “I … I will do my best to help you.” She met his eyes.

  He smiled.

  Quickly, she pulled her other hand away, stood, and rubbed her palms on her robes to rid them of the sweat that had mysteriously sprung into being. “Anyway,” she said, trying to distract herself from the memory of her hands in his, “yes. Language. You want to know why it hasn’t changed. Well, it has. But not as much as it could’ve.”

  She sat back down. “You see, language is a description of the world we live in. We create words to keep track of our ideas. They’re a little like signposts.”

  Tharadis nodded. “I’m following you.”

  “But the strength of our language is dependent on the precision of our definitions. If our definitions are sloppy, we could be using the same word, but talking about completely different things.”

  “That makes sense.” Tharadis nodded again, then stood. “So you’re saying that our language was specifically created from the bottom up, with more accurate definitions, to reduce miscommunication. Which had the added effect of making it more resilient to change over time.” Then, as if to himself, he muttered, “Very resilient, it seems. It must have been a Patterner, or group of Patterners, who created it.”

  Alyssa stared at him. How was he doing that?

  “How long ago did they create it?” he asked.

  Alyssa shrugged. “Over eleven hundred years ago. A number of wars had broken out over simple diplomatic misunderstandings, so a cabal of Patterners came up with it as a means to world peace.” She shook her head. “They failed in that regard, but they did a good job of coming up with a clear language. It was adopted almost everywhere.”

  “And when were the first prophecies?”

  “We don’t have any going back past the Sheggam Scourge, and few older than four hundred years here in the Accord. Everything older than that have been destroyed. But the first confirmed prophecy was …” She trailed off. Shores take me! Could it be true?

  “Alyssa. When?”

  Her words sounded strange, as if someone else were speaking them. “Just over a thousand years ago.”

  Tharadis nodded, as if he had expected her to say that. “They weren’t merely making a new language. They were creating a language based off the World Pattern.” He slapped his palm on the table in excitement. “That’s what prophecy really is. It’s the World Pattern speaking to us.”

  Chapter 34: Analysis

  Alyssa stared at Tharadis from across the table as he silently paced. She had studied at the Academy for years, ever since she was old enough to call herself a young woman. Even before then, her childhood had been directed towards one goal: entrance to the Academy. And though her own skills as a Patterner were quite limited—she could only do a few things well, though she was the very best at one of those things—she was still able to become an archivist at the library at a very young age. She had nearly unlimited access to everything the Academy published, and she was trusted with the highest-level secrets.

  Yet never once in all her years attached to the Academy had another spoken of a connection between the Patterned language everyone spoke and prophecy. Had they kept it from her? Her, the archivist, responsible for the preservation of the Academy’s knowledge?

  Or had they even known at all?

  She found it impossible that they hadn’t. After all, it seemed so obvious in retrospect. But Alyssa herself hadn’t made the connection and had never heard anyone else voice the suspicion.

  Except for Tharadis.

  “The question remains,” he continued, “what is the World Pattern trying to say?”

  Alyssa finally found her voice. “I suppose you can start by telling me the prophecy you received.”

  Tharadis paused, eyeing her. “All right,” he said, “but I have one more question. This Patterned language … it’s still capable of containing flaws, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Alyssa said, feeling like she was a lost ship that had found familiar waters, “it is. It has to allow for individual context. So it’s still subject to change, only less so.”

  Tharadis nodded and pointed at the table. “From where I’m standing, I see a table. From where you’re standing, you see the same table. But it looks different to you, because you’re on the other side and sitting down. I’m over here, standing up. We see the same object but are looking at different details because of our perspective.”

  “That’s right. That’s one of the strengths of our ability to form concepts. It’s flexible to a certain degree, to allow for changes in perspective. Otherwise I would see a table and you would see something that wasn’t a table, even though we were both looking at the same object.”

  “But,” Tharadis raised a finger, “that flexibility can also lead to other problems, such as vagueness and ambiguity. No matter how resilient our language is, we can’t get rid of those because we need the ability to account for context.”

  “That’s true.” Alyssa cocked her head to the side. “You don’t understand the prophecy, do you?”

  Tharadis smiled. “No. It’s ambiguous, and it’s vague.” He sat down. “All right, I’ll tell you.”

  He took a deep breath before letting it all out. Then he said:

  To the land of the dead, one must go

  To find what was lost

  Blue stands against Green

  The unyielding shatters

  Death heralds world’s end

  And you shall die

  Alyssa listened to the flow of his words, enraptured, carried along against her will with her eyes half-closed. The words were evocative,
beyond the mere meaning of the words themselves. They had no meter that she could identify, but still, it sounded like poetry. No, more powerful than that. She suspected that it was a quality of the prophecy itself, its inherent Pattern.

  Yet as she opened her eyes, the words began to haunt her with their meaning.

  Alyssa cleared her throat. “I can see why you were hesitant to tell me about it,” she said, “and why you are so desperate to learn about prophecy.”

  Tharadis nodded, his face grave.

  “Some parts were ambiguous,” she added hesitantly, “but others were … not so much.”

  “That last part worries me.”

  “Yes.” Alyssa rubbed her palms on the thighs of her robe again. She didn’t want to think about that. “But who is this ‘one’ it mentions?”

  “Well, if it’s not me, then it has to be someone I know. Or will know. Otherwise, why give the prophecy to me?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, “but we don’t know the purpose of the prophecy. It may be telling you something you need to know in order to change something. Or it could just be something to torment you for some purpose beyond your understanding and control. Or it could just be something that has nothing to do with you. Lots of true prophecies have been given to people for no apparent reason. It’s a mistake to think of the World Pattern as a person, with some sort of stake in the outcomes of what we humans do or don’t do.”

  “Normally, I’d agree with you.” Tharadis leaned forward with one hand on the table. He tapped the table with a finger on his other hand. “But, again, the ending. What if the World Pattern did have a stake in this one? If all is destroyed, then wouldn’t that mean the World Pattern, too?”

  “I suppose, but does a rock care if someone takes a hammer to it? Of course not. It just does what a rock does, and it doesn’t care or act to preserve itself.”