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Answers mean nothing without the right questions.
—Kirythean proverb
The next week fell into an easy routine. Gabe and Lore would wake up, eat breakfast, and go to the Church library. Then they’d spend hours poring over old manuscripts and bound copies of notes from the years after the Godsfall, Compendiums translated from Eroccan and Kirythean and even old Myroshan, from before Myrosh was subsumed by the Kirythean Empire and the language was outlawed. The mentions of Spiritum, when they found them, were brief. Still, they came every day, looking at the books Malcolm had already procured for Anton, trying to find something to make everything—Bastian, the bodies from the villages, what August and Anton were planning—coalesce into sense.
Their studies included more obscure subjects, too. Namely, texts on the strange things accomplished by channeling elemental power leaked from the minor gods. Someone had made a ship sail faster by using the power of Caeliar; another had managed to make events from dreams mirror in the waking world with the power of Lereal. It made sense that Anton would’ve researched such things, if he suspected that the sudden deaths were due to leftover elemental magic. But nothing in the books resembled what had happened to the villages.
For six days, Malcolm let them work in relative silence, keeping his curious looks to a minimum. When the questions finally came, Lore was surprised it’d taken so long.
“You know,” Malcolm said slowly, “you could just ask Anton what he’s found out.”
Lore froze. Across the library, bent over a book, Gabe did, too.
They’d both known that at some point, they’d either have to come clean to Malcolm or come up with a plausible lie. On that first day, Gabe had conferred with his fellow Presque Mort while Lore looked at the books and told him that they’d rather the Priest Exalted not know of their current project. Lore had tensed, but after a brief moment of silence, Malcolm agreed. He and Gabe were old friends, and from what Lore understood, the librarian wasn’t quite as devoted to Anton as Gabe was. If Gabe was asking him to be discreet, Malcolm knew it was for good reason.
But now, Gabe didn’t move, so Lore made a quick decision. She stood from the bench and stretched out her back, feigning nonchalance. “What exactly is Anton researching, again?”
“He didn’t give me specifics,” Malcolm said, sliding another book from its shelf and giving it a cursory study. He’d given Lore and Gabe a pair of the gloves he always wore, but neither of them were allowed to touch the rarest books even with them on. “He wanted everything with a mention of Spiritum’s practical application brought to him. I assumed he had an idea for how it might be used to counteract the Mortem issue, but since it’s been a couple of months and he hasn’t broached the subject, helping doesn’t seem to be his objective.”
There was something brittle in Malcolm’s voice. Lore slid a look to Gabe; the Presque Mort was looking at his friend with his lips pressed together, a line drawn between his brows.
Malcolm didn’t notice, attention absorbed by his books. He carefully opened the one he’d just retrieved to a certain page and slid it beneath the glass in front of Gabe. Then, removing his gloves so as not to soil them, he retrieved a small watering can from the corner and began carefully tending to the incongruous plants growing along the shelves. “All the references to Apollius granting Spiritum-channeling abilities to the Arceneaux line seem to be metaphor for them being His chosen rulers of Auverraine. No Arceneaux has ever actually channeled Spiritum. It’s all around us, just like Mortem is, but it’s not something that can be grasped.”
“Neither was Mortem, until Nyxara died,” Lore said.
Malcolm pointed at her. “Precisely.” Clearly, he didn’t get many opportunities to debate theories of magic; he seemed nearly giddy at the prospect, his dour manner from earlier forgotten as he finished his plant tending and retrieved his gloves. “So if you subscribe to the idea that Apollius isn’t dead, just waiting in the Shining Realm, it makes sense why no one can use Spiritum. There isn’t a body for it to leak from.”
“If you subscribe to the idea?” Gabe looked up incredulously from the book he’d been reading through the glass.
“You did say your research would be heretical.” Malcolm shrugged, pulling his gloves back on. “I’m just living up to your example.” He gestured with one hand, then the other, indicating one thing following another. “Whoever has the power has to die—or, for the sake of pious sensibilities, we’ll just say experience a change of state—in order for someone else to use it.”
Even with the concession, Gabe didn’t seem terribly pleased by the direction the conversation had taken. With a furrow of his brow so deep it shifted his eye patch, he looked back at his book.
“Now,” Malcolm said, still addressing Lore, “theoretically, you could pull Spiritum from a living thing, much like taking Mortem from a rock or deadwood. But living things cling fiercely to life; they don’t give it up easily.”
Lore wandered over to one of the shelves of books Malcolm actually let her touch, bound copies of lecture notes from the university in Grantere, a smaller city farther north. “I would imagine taking Spiritum from a living thing would leave it dead.”
“That does logically follow, yes,” Gabe said drily.
She ignored him. “And you’d have to pull from something large, like a person or a big animal or a shit-ton of flowers to get enough Spiritum to do anything.” She hadn’t the foggiest what someone might attempt to do with Spiritum, but Mortem wasn’t exactly the most useful thing, either.
“If we follow the theory that it works similarly to Mortem, yes.” Malcolm leaned back against the table, crossed his arms. “But note: No human has ever actually channeled Spiritum, so we don’t really know if it works the same way. This is all conjecture.”
“Then why is it mentioned in the first place?” Lore moved on from the lecture notes and instead grabbed one of the non-rare copies of the Book of Holy Law. She flipped to the notation, memorized now. “The Book of Holy Law, Tract Two Hundred Fourteen. ‘To my chosen, I bequeath my power—Spiritum, the magic of life.’”
Malcolm grinned.
Lore eyed him over the edge of the book’s cover. “You have some fiddly little scholarly fact about this passage, don’t you?”
“Not fiddly, thank you very much, just a translation dispute.” His grin widened. “Tell me; is chosen singular or plural?”
Her mouth opened to answer, then shut with a click of teeth. Lore looked to Gabe; he looked just as confused by the seemingly simple question as she was.
“It can be either, depending on the context. And therein lies the problem.” Malcolm went to the bookshelf, pulling out another copy of the Book of Holy Law. This one was written in Rouskan; he flipped to the same page and pointed out Tract 214. “I don’t suppose you read Rouskan, but they have slightly different variations on the spelling for their equivalent of chosen, one singular and one plural. This copy was translated just after Apollius disappeared—the translator would’ve gotten the dictated passages from Gerard Arceneaux himself.” He tapped the word on the page. “And he used the singular spelling for chosen.”
Gabe got up from the bench, came around to look at the Rouskan translation. “Was the singular translation only in Rouskan?”
“All languages that have separate spellings of chosen to denote singular and plural went for the singular option until about 16 AGF—so fifteen years after Apollius disappeared, right in the middle of Gerard Arceneaux’s reign.” Malcolm was off and running, now, pulling other copies of the Book of Holy Law from the shelves and turning to Tract 214 in all of them, littering the table. “At that point, all translations swapped over to the plural spelling.”
