They looked like the symbols on Ankha’s kitchen clock.
They also looked like the symbols I’d seen on clothing here, and on the slip of paper the woman handed me earlier. Iremembered the research I’d done on Ankha’s clock, how some of those symbols were just like things I’d found in books, only inverted, or sometimes inverted and written backwards.
I now desperately wanted to know what they meant.
“See if you can read this,” the man said, that calm patience back in his voice.
I blinked.
I stared at the symbols. A mild panic set in. I had no idea what language I was even looking at. I’d never learned to read hieroglyphs of any kind, certainly not Ancient Egyptian written backwards and mirrored.
For a long-feeling few seconds, my throat constricted as I stared up, watching the symbols rotate three-dimensionally in the dark space. I remembered that everything up until now had meant doing thingsnotbecause I’d been taught, but because I’d felt my way through. Every test involved using that tension and heat in my chest.
I decided it couldn’t hurt to try the same thing again.
I focused that buzzy, intense spot inside me on the symbols.
My eyes fell out of focus. My breathing slowed.
Something deep inside me began to relax.
I felt the precise instant when it all clicked, when that heat and intensity connected to the foreign pictographs. I watched the gold, three-dimensional symbols turn liquid as they dispersed, changed shape, then changed number, all without seeming to use up any more material.
Again, I heard gasps.
I nearly lost focus. That time, I managed to pull it back, to keep most of my attention focused on what I was doing.
“Can you please read me the passage aloud, Miss Shadow?” the inspector asked, still polite, but with another hint of delight infusing his words.
I cleared my throat.
“It is, like most things, merely the conduit of magic,”I read carefully.“Like any conduit, neither more nor less… yet also both moreandless. Powerful in endless possibility. We, the erect ones, pride ourselves as the first, as its only masters. Yet even the smallest bird and the largest water animal shares its understandings. They use it to call and to find and to see and to laugh, while we use it to divide and deceive…”
The man nodded encouragingly, his smile sliding wider.
I frowned.
There was more. There had to be more. It definitely felt like I wasn’t finished, but that was the entire passage he’d given me. Had I botched the translation somehow?
The silence between us grew tense.
On either side of me, I felt people watching, waiting, their breaths held.
“Is it a riddle?” I asked the man finally.
He gave me a conspiratorial smile.
“Do you know the answer?” he asked back.
I hesitated, then blurted out the first thought that popped in my head.
“Is it language?” I asked.
He clapped his hands, and murmurs rose on either side. That time, I heard disbelief, even skepticism in those muttered words.
“Verywell done, Miss Shadow…verywell done!” The man with the oddly sharp beard beamed at me. “That was quite masterfully handled, I must say!”
I noticed movement in the corner of my eye, and glanced down at the papers on the table in front of him. Pictographs and hieroglyphs now covered two of the three sheets. I swore I saw English written there, too. More symbols appeared on the third sheet as I watched, mixed with English like the others. Unlike the woman with the scarlet quill, the man didn’t write with anything, or touch the paper himself. The symbols arrangedthemselves seemingly on their own, rapidly filling over half the empty space.
