Ink, Iron, and Glass (Ink, Iron, and Glass #1)(42)
Very delicately, Faraz set the book back on the table. “Um, maybe this isn’t such a brilliant idea.…”
Leo narrowed his eyes at Elsa. “Melting lungs, you say?”
“I really think it’s very unlikely,” she said, flipping open the book cover to look for the coordinates in the front. “Faraz, can you tell me which of these symbols are numbers?”
Faraz folded his arms. “I’m becoming increasingly certain this is one of those ideas normal people would know not to follow through on. You know, the kind that gets pazzerellones killed before their time.”
Elsa was beginning to regret she’d said anything; caution could only impede the search for her mother. “Well I’m going. We’ll never get through this stack of worldbooks if we stand around wringing our hands all day. So read off the coordinates for me, will you?”
With a sigh, Faraz reluctantly found the settings for the portal device and read them aloud. In the end, when the black oval irised open, they all decided to go through.
Elsa stepped through nothing and emerged into a world with light, air, time, and solid ground beneath her feet. So far so good. She took a deep breath, just to be sure, and looked around.
They were in a large square room with a domed ceiling. An arched doorway was set into the center of each wall, all of them leading to darkened alcoves. Everything was constructed of seamless stone, as if it had been hollowed out from a single piece of rock.
The place felt old. It wasn’t just the spare lines of the cut-stone architecture—such a contrast with the intricate, fine detail of classical Italian design—or the thick swirls of dust settled on the floor. No, Jabir had imbued his creation with that indefinable something else: essence, or atmosphere, Elsa didn’t know what to call it. Whatever the effect was, it took her breath away.
“The Lost Oracle,” Faraz said. “I can’t believe it’s real. I can’t believe we have it.”
Elsa gave Faraz a look, wondering if he was going to start jumping up and down with joy. What was it with Earth people and their history? The obsession with the past held no appeal for her—the present was all that mattered. She hardly needed historical context to appreciate the talent required to create such a fine world as this.
It was Porzia who asked, “Lost Oracle?”
“It’s said Jabir had a fascination with the oracles of ancient Greece, so he scribed a world with the property of divination,” Faraz explained. “In his treatises, he describes it as a temple with four alcoves representing the four directions, but the book itself has been missing for a couple centuries.”
Elsa tapped a finger against her lips thoughtfully. “Well, that explains why Montaigne would have acquired it. The Oracle isn’t a person, but if it’s intelligent and aware, it would be something of a precursor to scribed humans. He must have studied it when he was working on Veldana.”
“But is it?” mused Porzia. “Intelligent and aware, I mean. It seems a bit … like an empty room.”
Leo waved his arms in the air and shouted, “Hello?” The sound echoed. He turned to Faraz. “So how do we turn it on, or wake it up, or whatever you want to call it?”
“I can’t say for sure. I’d guess you have to step into one of the alcoves to receive a prophecy.”
“There’s one way to find out,” Elsa said with a shrug, then stepped toward one of the alcoves.
“Wait,” Faraz hissed, his hand darting out to grab her arm. “You shouldn’t. What if the Oracle’s functional?”
Elsa paused, taken aback. “You think it can actually tell the future?”
“It’s a Jabir ibn Hayyan—anything’s possible,” said Faraz. “What if the Oracle has the ability to dole out perfectly accurate self-fulfilling prophecies? What if accessing the Oracle changes the real world to fit its predictions?”
“That would be dangerous,” Elsa conceded as she gently pulled away from Faraz’s grasp.
“Sounds impossible to me,” said Porzia. “How could a scribed book affect the real world?”
Elsa said, “There is one obvious solution—I’ll simply avoid asking about the future. Facts about the present only, no predictions. Just in case.”
She walked toward one of the doorways, and as she moved closer, the dark alcove began to brighten. She stepped inside, expecting the light to have a source, but there were no sconces or lamps, only a directionless ambient glow. The effect was surreal, and she couldn’t help but wonder how Jabir had succeeded in so elegantly twisting the laws of physics. He’d been a master of his craft, no doubt about that.
On the wall there was a single raised carving of a stylized hand, fingers pointing down, with a large eye in the center of the palm. The hand seemed to be shaped from the same stone as the wall, though the eye looked like colored glass, with a black pupil and deep-blue iris surrounded by white.
Elsa leaned in to get a closer look. The eye moved, focusing on her as if it were alive, and she jerked away from it.
“You have questions, young mortal,” said a deep, resonant voice. The voice, like the light, seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Elsa hesitated and glanced back at everyone else behind her, several meters outside the alcove. They wouldn’t be able to hear. She cleared her throat. “Where is my mother?”