Shadow Scale: A Companion to Seraphina(72)

“You know,” he said, his bovine eyes wide. “When we’re all together. We will live together in Goredd, with you, and be safe and happy.”

I opened my mouth and closed it again. Was that what she was after, or was that what she told Ingar she was after, to manipulate him? For all I knew, it was what she’d told Ingar in an attempt to manipulate me, to show she shared my dream of recreating my garden in the world.

That dream tasted bitter to me now.

Besides, Heaven on earth didn’t explain her actions in Samsam. Josef’s regency surely portended the opposite of safety for half-dragons, no matter how smitten he might have been with Jannoula herself. She was up to more than Ingar knew.

“I have twenty-seven thousand books in my library, give or take,” said Ingar, spontaneously setting off again, as if he heard the Bibliagathon calling his name. I followed in silence. “My mother collected books,” he was saying. “That’s how she met my father, the saarantras. He acquired rare books for her, and there are indeed marvels in my collection. I have the original testaments of St. Vitt, St. Nola, and St. Eustace.”

“The original—meaning, written in the Saints’ own hands?” I asked.

He shrugged modestly. “A savvier theologian than I would have to inspect them, but I believe so, yes. They’re from the Age of Saints, certainly. The script of that era incorporates some idiosyncratic features—”

He broke off because just then the famed edifice came into view: the graceful columns and soaring dome, the porches and courtyards where philosophers had walked and argued. A repository of the knowledge of ages, the Bibliagathon occupied an entire city block, and more. Orma had told me half the books were divided among three additional outbuildings: one for the ancient and frangible, one for extremely obscure texts, and one for new acquisitions and the difficult to categorize.

Ingar hopped on his toes like a little boy; in that moment, I understood him. Here was his Heaven on earth, surely.

My plan to leave Ingar in the library had a significant flaw: I was not immune to the siren call of books myself. I wandered, transfixed by the endless shelves and scroll niches, the colonnaded courtyards and burbling fountains, the scholars passionately scribbling treatises at long wooden tables, the gentle slant of sunlight along the open corridors.

That Orma might be here was all the excuse I needed to stay. If he were seeking out historical references to half-dragons, where would he be? I could read the inscriptions above the doors only with difficulty; Porphyrian script differs from Southlander, so I had to think about each letter. Luckily, the inscriptions came with bas-relief carvings. Some were obscure—how does a bullfrog represent philosophy?—but the carving of musical instruments seemed unambiguous.

Orma was a musicologist by training. It was a place to start.

The musicology room was unoccupied except for a bust of the poet-philosopher Necans at the far end. His bronze nose shone, polished by generations of scholars unable to resist the temptation to tweak it. I perused the shelves, noting with a certain pride that we had more music books at St. Ida’s in Lavondaville. My uncle had had nearly as many texts in his office.

Some books were in Southlander script; some were even familiar from my student days. A fat volume of Thoric’s Polyphonic Transgressions, bound in white calf, reminded me so vividly of Orma’s old copy that I pulled the book down on a sentimental whim, looked at the cover, and nearly dropped it.

There was a gouge mark across the cover where I’d attacked it with my plectrum the day Jannoula had used my mouth to kiss Orma’s.

This was Orma’s copy, unquestionably. He’d left Goredd with as many books as he could carry—some of which, I’d learned from the librarian at St. Ida’s, weren’t even his. Had he gotten tired of carrying them? He was so possessive of his books that it was hard to imagine him willingly giving one up.

The book bulged strangely. There was a lectern—a reading desk—near the bust of Necans. I opened the volume of Thoric there and found a second book, a slender manuscript, tucked inside. Behind that was a sheaf of loose papers, which spilled across the desk, cascading over the edge and settling to the floor like falling leaves. I gathered them up, my excitement growing. I knew Orma’s angular writing; these were his notes. If he’d left them, he must be coming back.

I tried to reorder the jumbled pages, but they weren’t numbered. I began to read, and the first page, happily, soon became obvious. He’d written THESIS across the top in large letters. I read:

It is difficult to find confirmed historical cases of dragon-human interbreeding. Dragons barely acknowledge that such a thing is possible; if it has happened, they didn’t record it. Human sources occasionally allude to the possibility, without documenting any instances (exception: Porphyrian sources). What if historical half-dragons did exist but their origins were obscured? I propose to search for accounts of people with unusual abilities or characteristics, look for patterns, and surmise from there.

A large, well-documented collection of such individuals has been under our noses all along: the Saints of the Southlands.



The Saints? “That’s a crackpot theory, Uncle,” I murmured.

Crackpot or not, I read on. The library around me faded and the sun crossed the sky unnoted. Orma had systematically researched Southlander Saints—including Saints I’d never heard of—and listed every inhuman characteristic: St. Prue’s blue skin, St. Polypous’s extra legs, St. Clare’s visions. He’d drawn up a chart in which he rated their quirks as likely, plausible, metaphorical, or outright invention (he considered St. Capiti’s detachable head the latter; he had a point).