Raven's Strike (Raven #2)(37)

"It could be a copy." Lehr's voice was subdued, hushed.

"Maybe." Hennea's hand brushed it again. "Or it could be a fake - there's no way to tell."

"I might be able to tell," said Seraph slowly.

"How?" asked Hennea.

"I'm going to read its past." She reached out to touch it, but Hennea jerked it away.

"If it is that old, it is too dangerous."

"Dangerous how?" asked Lehr.

Seraph gave an exasperated huff. "It's a map, Hennea. I'll be lucky if anyone has held it long enough to leave any kind of impression at all. Can you read objects?"

"No."

"Well then." Seraph pulled the map out of the other Raven's hands and set it on the ground in front of her. "Now if I fall to the ground shrieking, feel free to take it away again."

"Mother? Are you sure you should do this?"

She slanted a look at Lehr. "Allow me the courtesy of knowing my limits. Unless it was an object of worship, or someone used it to kill someone else, it will be fine."

Before someone else could object, Seraph sent tendrils of magic into the parchment.

"It's all right," she told them when the map's past came to her in whispered bits and pieces rather than an overwhelming wave.

Aside from a few barely formed images, the newest history came to her first, though that was not always the case. She felt Hennea's hands and the intense quiet that would have told her a Raven had held the map, even if she hadn't known Hennea.

"Volis had this." She could feel the cold sweat on his palms and the fear someone might see him. "He stole it." A new image, closer to her than the theft had been, and she knew that he hadn't been able to read any of the maps. "He had thought something so carefully hidden away would have been important, but he could see nothing useful in a pile of old maps."

The map had been undisturbed for a long time. "It was hidden away, for safekeeping. For secret. A wizard holds it, a solsenti wizard - but he understands what he has because language is one of his gifts. A gift that has served him very well in his search for power, for..." She quit talking because she didn't want to confuse her audience as her reading slipped from nearer past to older and back again. The years were so pale, sometimes it was hard to hold them.

"Mother?"

Seraph blinked up at Lehr's familiar face.

"Are you all right?"

She nodded. "This is a map made by an apprentice?" The word didn't fit quite, but it was close. "A student, perhaps. He was disappointed because his teacher judged it harshly and made him redo part of it." She touched a section in the upper right where he'd had to scrape the parchment and redraw.

"How old is it, Mother?" breathed Rinnie. "Is it really from Colossae?"

"It's that old." Seraph's hands felt cold and heavy from the deep reading. "Once it passed out of the hands of the young man who made it, there was a succession of owners. They held it for such a short time, so long ago, and with such little passion that I could get no more than an impression of a lot of people."

She looked up to meet Hennea's gaze and give her a small smile. "It's emotion that leaves traces behind on things, and a map hardly inspires great passions of any kind. I can tell the age, but not much more for a long time. It was hidden or lost."

Seraph reached out and touched the satchel that had held the map very lightly with her fingertips and a thread of magic. "It was in this satchel, which is nearly as old."

Rinnie gave her prize a look of respect. "It doesn't look old."

"The preservation spell," murmured Hennea. "Things can last a long time with a good preservation spell, and the Colossae wizards' magic was very good."

"They lay together in secret, the maps and the satchel, for hundreds of years. Then a woman, a solsenti wizard, held it and puzzled over it - she was hoping for treasure, I think. When she first held it as a young woman, but her last touch is dry and aged. She kept them in a secret place, and it lay there for a time, never managing to decipher what it was she held though she knew it was old. About two centuries ago it came into the hands of another wizard."

She swallowed and looked at the rest of the map scrolls lying about on the floor and touched them, looking for more answers. When she had read them all, she said, "He had a gift for languages. I saw the gates of Colossae, where he was searching for something he desired very badly - power? Not quite, but it was close enough." She returned her fingers to the first map, the city map. "The next time he touched this he was held by the Stalker's power; he was the Shadowed. He hid the maps somewhere secret, he didn't need them anymore. Volis found them and took them - but he couldn't read them."

"Can you see him?" whispered Hennea urgently. "Lark tell me you can see who it is."

Seraph shook her head in frustration. "No. I get scattered impressions and a glimpse of a young man's face, but not enough to identify him. He just didn't leave enough of himself behind. I can tell you he became the Stalker's child almost two centuries ago."

Hennea swallowed her urgency behind her usual cool facade, though she was paler than normal. "We've not had one get so old since the Unnamed King."