She was deciding whether to get some rest when she spotted Lucia walking into the trees.
She blinked. Had she really seen what she thought she saw? She headed up the grassy slope towards the treeline. Her doubt evaporated as she went. Of course Lucia had slipped away on her own: it was just like her to disappear like that. Probably the people in the camp thought she had gone to sleep. Lucia needed solitude more than any of them, and she had the least to fear from the forest spirits.
The thought did not comfort Kaiku. She skirted the camp and reached the point where she had seen Lucia enter the trees. A pair of sentries were watching her from where the tents were clustered, evidently wondering what she was up to. She let them wonder. Better if she could get Lucia back without anyone noticing. On the heels of that thought came another: how had Lucia got away without being seen?
The forest seemed funereal in the moonlight. The silence and the still air gave it a tomblike feel, and the unfamiliar foliage put everything subtly off-kilter. Though Iridima's glow rendered everything in monochrome, these plants still reflected a kind of colour, some hue that she found hard to identify. She listened for a moment, and faintly she heard a tread heading away from her.
She was about to follow when something moved in the darkness, a shifting of some vast shadow. She paled. It was massive, as big as a feya-kori but wider, filling the space between the roots of the forest and its canopy. She could see it only as glimpses, obscured as it was by the boles of the trees in between; but glimpses were enough. Some colossal four-legged thing, there in the forest. Watching her.
She went cold as she found its eyes. Small and yellow, impossibly bright, and set far apart on a head that must have been bigger than she was.
It could not be there, her rational mind told her. It would knock over trees whenever it moved. It could not be there because it could not fit.
But yet she saw it, in defiance of sense, a hulking shape among the trees, wreathed in dark. If she set foot in the forest, it would come for her. And yet, if she did not, she left Lucia to its mercy.
The sentries were staring at her oddly now, as she stood transfixed on the edge of the clearing. She did not notice. She was caught by the gaze of that dreadful beast.
Lucia, she thought. She took a step forward, and the beast was on her. Mishani shivered suddenly at her writing desk. She frowned and looked over her shoulder. At the edges of the lanternlight the room was cool and empty. The unease persisted for a moment or two, but Mishani was too level-headed to give much credit to phantoms of the mind, and she was soon immersed in her task once more.
She was kneeling on a mat in the communal room of the house at Araka Jo which she shared with Kaiku. Before her, spread across the table, were rolls of paper, inkpots and quills and brushes, a glazed-clay mug of lathamri and a stack of books. She was dressed in a warm sleeping-robe and soft slippers, but she had no intention of sleeping just yet.
Her interest in her mother's books had become an obsession these past weeks. She was desperate to understand, dogged by the certainty that there was something she should know through these words, some message her mother was trying to communicate to her. It had been a growing suspicion for some time now, but with the publication of the last book she had realised that it was indisputably more than fancy on her part. The final lines that Nida-jan spoke were the first half of a lullaby that had been a private song between mother and daughter. Her mother had used it once before, with the merchant Chien, as a way to identify him as an ally to Mishani if all else should fail. Now she was using it again.
But to what end? That was the puzzle. And no matter how Mishani pored over the books, she could not see what it was she was supposed to work out.
She took a sip of lathamri and stared at the paper before her. After exploring several theories, she had returned to the area of the books that bothered her the most: the awful poems that Nida-jan had taken to reciting. Their appearance seemed to coincide with the point where her mother had begun producing smaller books at a faster rate, and her exquisite prose had become sloppy. Mishani had written out one of them with a brush on the paper before her, large calligraphic pictograms painted in black ink. As if by increasing their size they would give up their secrets. She had tried making anagrams for hours now, scratching the words she built from the symbols in tiny script at the bottom of the paper, but it all came out as nonsense.
She tutted to herself. She was getting frustrated, and it was late. She had drunk too much lathamri which was making her jittery, for she had a small frame and was not used to it. And she could not concentrate properly while she had the knowledge in the back of her mind that Kaiku and Lucia had most likely reached the Forest of Xu by now. Gods, she hoped their trust in Lucia was well founded. If she did not come out of there alive, all their hopes were gone. And if she did not come back, then Kaiku would not either…
Such thoughts bring you no profit, Mishani, she told herself. Make yourself useful.
Indeed, making herself useful was something she really should have been doing; but she did not want to leave Araka Jo until she had unlocked the mystery of Muraki's books. She had returned from the desert to lend her political skills to the Libera Dramach in the Southern Prefectures, but most of the nobles were in Saraku or Machita, and seldom visited here. She had heard about the assassination attempt upon Barak Zahn during the rout at Zila, and suspicion naturally fell upon Blood Erinima. She wondered what kind of retribution Zahn had in mind, and whether she should go to him and offer her help. Division was the worst thing at this time, and yet it did not surprise Mishani in the least that the nobles could not cooperate even in the face of such an overwhelming enemy. Blood Erinima sought advantage for themselves, just like every other high family. They were not thinking of the wider consequences, only the chance to win themselves the throne. Such was the way of politics.
She could sense the proximity of an answer in the pages before her. She knew she was close, but the solution still eluded her. Though she did not know what to focus on, where to look, she believed that if she persisted, the picture would gradually become clear. If only through sheer force of will.
An owl hooted outside. She stared at the paper. For a long time, she did not move; she was entirely consumed by the workings of her mind, turning possibilities over and over. Absently, she picked up her mug, took a sip, and put it back again.
The slight movement in her peripheral field of vision, the way the mug did not seem to sit quite right against her fingers as she replaced it: these were the tiny warnings that told her she had misjudged where to set it down, that the lathamri was tipping off the edge of the desk. She snatched at it, catching it before it could fall, and in doing so the trailing edge of her other sleeve caught the ink pot and tipped it over. She hurriedly set the drink down and righted the ink pot, but by that time a slick of black had spread in an ellipse over a section of her calligraphy.
She huffed out a breath, annoyed by the waste of ink. Her sleeping-robe was stained at the cuffs too. She reached to roll up the paper and discard it, but she was arrested halfway. Slowly, she drew her hand back and stared at the paper again.
The ink had spilled across several lines, but the one that caught her eye had escaped with only minor damage. Only two pictograms in the middle of a four-syllable word had been obscured. But what had caught Mishani's eye was that there was a new word made by taking out those two symbols. The first and the last, when contracted together, created a new meaning.