There was resistance. Arhu had stopped speaking out loud, now, and was using the Speech silently, impressing his desire on the tablet. It took more time than the general restoration had, but at last those final characters started filling themselves in. Arhu was breathing hard by the time the work was finished and the tablet sat whole and new-looking in the case.
As she and the others moved in for a closer look, though, Rhiow noticed that the reconstituted symbols seemed to be jittering a little in their places, as if they were having trouble staying restored.“Arhu,” she said —
“Yeah, I see it,” Arhu said, his voice sounding a little strained. “Whoever dug them out really wanted them gone. But I’ve copied this image to the paperwork in case the restitution gives way.”
“Nice technique there,” Hwaith said to Arhu. “Do you know which of these is next? I’ll get it ready for you.”
“Sure,” Arhu said. “It’s that one.” He indicated the first tablet, a round one, on a shelf in the next case. “And that one underneath it, next shelf down.”
“Right.”
Arhu looked back to the tablet he’d just restored. “Rhi, I really think this this is going to need a little of the Eye– “
“Do as much as you can without it,” Rhiow said.
He flicked an ear in agreement, and narrowed his eyes to see the tablet better. For some moments, though, he didn’t say anything, and Rhiow started to worry. “They’re not in some kind of code, are they?” she said, concerned. Normally for codes to be made intelligible to a wizard, at least the cultural context for them had to still be available in some living mind, or recorded in the general knowledge base of some living culture. But if it isn’t –
“No, nothing like that,” Arhu said after a moment. “It’s complicated. But the Whisperer’s helping me. These people’s calendars were really accurate, but so weird in terms of how they divided the months and stuff! They had everything from those thirteen-day cycles Helen mentioned to onesthat went on for two hundred sixty days… and then much longer ones based on Venus’s orbit and Iau knows what else.” His tail twitched idly as he worked out what he was looking at. “But there’s one really long sequence called the Long Count… and this stuff has to do with that. There wereshorter cycles buried in it: hundreds of years instead of hundreds of days or months. And the dates make sense now that the missing stuff’s in place.”
Arhu paused, studying the tablet.“So what we’ve got here are three sets of dates. There are these three long recurring cycles – one that’s three hundred ninety-four years, that’s a b’ak’tun, and one that’s fifty-four, and one that’s eleven. And there are three short cycles of days or months, and three that are very short, just hours or minutes. At very long intervals, all nine cycles coincide. Looks like someone way back when made a list of when the cycles were scheduled to intersect next…”
Urruah looked over at Rhiow.“The Lady in Black did mention ‘three times three times three’…”
She waved her tail at him in agreement. Arhu meanwhile sat there squinting at the characters for a few seconds more, while his off ear flicked again a couple of times as if someone was whispering in it.“Getting it now,” he said. “The years don’t just have numbers, but animal names. All of these are Years of the Black Jaguar.”
The fur stood up all over Rhiow.
“You don’t seem to get a whole lot of those,” Arhu said, laying a paw on one or another symbol to get a clearer reading. “But when you do get a Great Coincidence, it comes in a double pair with another one that’s fairly close: then they don’t repeat again for a good while. The places onthe tablet where somebody came in and chipped out the characters – that’s the last time the cycles coincided.” His far ear flickered again as the Whisperer said something in it. “The way ehhif reckon time, the first coincidence started on June twelfth, nine thirty-one A.D. and ran through till that June fourteenth. Then there was another one that ran from April fifth, nine ninety-four A.D. until April seventh–“
“And the time after that?” Urruah said, his voice completely steady and unconcerned.
Arhu peered at it.“From July twenty-first to July twenty-third, nineteen forty-six…”
Rhiow gulped. From last night until tomorrow night…
“And the rest of that pair is June seventh and June ninth – “
“Of this year,” Urruah said almost inaudibly. “Our this year, uptime.”
“Yeah,” Arhu said… and only then realized what he’d said, and licked his nose several times in rapid succession.
The terror took Rhiow by the throat and squeezed. We’re too late, she thought. Whatever’s going to happen has already started happening! Yet she forced herself to calm down, for there was no proof that they were too late. In fact, the Powers prefer to intervene at the last minute. It gives the Lone One less warning of what They’re about to do,and less chance to find a defense…
“All right,” Rhiow said, working to keep her voice under control. “The question now becomes one of what exactly is supposed to happen.”
“These are ready for you,” Hwaith said from inside the next case.
Arhu paced past the tablets in the case where he’d been working and jumped across into the next one as Hwaith stepped back to make room for him. “Thanks,” he said, looking at the next tablet, which though square had a circular design in the middle and various other pictographs and signs in the corners. “Yeah, this is about the Coincidence too. ‘In this time and only this time may the Dark One become the Shadow of the great and deadly Silence that comes from outside all that is, the Devourer of Worlds: and the greater makes the lesser Its own for that time.” Arhu turned his head to follow the symbols around the curve of the circle. “Yet only by beings within the world may this identity come to be so forged, when they shed blood in rivers, denying their kinship with their own kind, willingly driving out life for death’s and power’s sake.” Now he was standing with his head practically upside down. “Then at such a time if such beings so seek their freedom as to bring about the fulfillment of their desires at the utmost price, they shall have their will, and pay that price; for even the God of gods, in wisdom or folly, has not denied them this freedom, either to preserve their worlds or destroy them…”
Arhu straightened up, and spent a moment wiggling his head around to try to get a kink out of it.“Anything more on that one?” Urruah said.
“No,” Arhu said, jumping down to the second tablet that Hwaith had reconstructed. “Those are just decorations.”
“Good,” Urruah said. He sounded terribly calm, but Rhiow could feel him managing himself as rigorously as she was doing. The last thing either of them dared to do right now was upset Arhu and possibly interfere with his ability to read clearly what he was seeing. “Got that copied too?”
“Did that first thing,” Arhu said. He now sat down in front of the third tablet, which was densely packed with the squarish pictographs, written very small.
“Wow,” he said after a moment.
Hwaith gave him a look.“Wow?”
Arhu’s tail twitched back and forth as he tried to work out what he was looking at. “Whoever wrote this didn’t believe in putting things in order,” he said. And his face wrinkled a little in distaste, like that of a Person smelling something bad. “It’s all scrambled up. The first part is something about ‘The Dark Rift’. And something comes out of it, and it’s really angry. ‘For long has it been confined in the dark, and kept from its home.’And then there’s stuff about blood, too much blood being shed…”