But when he drew forth his superviolet spectacles, he found that one lens was broken.

“Oh, hells,” he said.

“Oh, Ben-hadad didn’t tell you about— Oops!” Quentin said.

“Tell me about what?”

“So! Nothing in any color?” Quentin asked.

“Tell me about what?”

“They all thought you were dead. He had some experiments he needed to do. Something happened. And then I think he’s been trying to find the right time to tell you. He, he feels terrible.”

“Then why are you telling me this?”

He looked nonplussed. “It slipped.”

“I didn’t mean why you, I meant why not him. Forget that. Show me this.”

“It’s all the same. I’ve copied them all out. In each book, in each translation, there are fragments only of Lightbringer prophecies. I thought at first they might have used bad ink. You can see that in some old manuscripts: ink that fades with age and gets illegible. But you wouldn’t have the translations with blanks in exactly the same places.”

“Why not? I mean, if the gap was already there when they wrote the translation, why wouldn’t they leave a gap, too?”

“Because I looked at the various times in which each of these translations were made, and there have been different copyists’ notations used to show that a text was illegible or absent. None wrote those notations in these gaps, and none of their methods involved leaving long blanks, it’s an inefficient use of the space on the pages, which are often expensive. So, so someone erased the relevant sections in the copies and the translations. We didn’t lose all of the Lightbringer prophecies in existence, of course. But in these books, we get only fragments. And not all the texts have translations, so some of these translations are my own.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Kip said. “How did they erase ink?”

“With hide you can scrape it off. Often followed by putting down another layer of whitewashing solution. With papyrus, you—”

“But I don’t see any change between the scrolls where there’s writing and where there isn’t. It doesn’t look like it’s been treated.”

“The treatment may be so old that it’s impossible to tell the difference.”

“Meaning that the erasures happened a long time ago?”

“Well, that makes sense with those with old translations, but that’s not applicable to all of them. If there was a single time period where someone erased lots of documents all at once—”

“Like the Office of Doctrine? When the Chromeria anointed luxors?”

Quentin bobbed his head, chagrined. “They must have figured out some mixtures of luxins that would bond with ink and lift it out. When combating heresy, it’s the kind of thing they would have loved to find. And use.”

“Those assholes,” Kip said. “Long dead and still causing problems.” If Teia had been alive during that time, the luxors would have burned her on Orholam’s Glare as a heretic.

“Anyway, here’s the prophecies I’ve got, and then I want to tell you one more thing.”

Kip read:

Death in hand, his card, his lot

He fights/struggles with/kills forethought

“He fights/struggles with/kills?” Kip asked.

“That was my translation. Sorry. It was a tough one. It could mean he’s impulsive? Maybe he kills without thinking ahead?”

“Are they all this bad?” Kip asked.

He could tell the words wounded Quentin. “Some of these languages are highly contextual, and the pertinent portions have been deliberately erased. Someone did this exactly so it would be impossible to reconstruct.”

In the dusk of times the jinn will rise

Rivers flow blood and moon shine blue

Of Two Hundred will come the Nine

To bring about the end of time.

Kip looked up at Quentin. “That doesn’t sound so good. Jinn?”

“Spirits? Powerful ones, though. Demigods?”

“And you’re sure it’s a Lightbringer prophecy?”

“Yes. It’s not choruses or lions frolicking with lambs kind of stuff.”

The rebels rise, the old ways lost,

Heresy, hypocrisy—

“That’s the whole fragment? Not helpful,” Kip said.

Back to the spinner’s wheel

Rejected in blood

Victim of the Promethean’s brood

“Promethean’s”? Kip asked. It sounded like Old Ruthgari.

“Usually it’s a personification of someone who takes violent action intended for some good. Kind of dark overtones to it? But you still haven’t seen the best one yet.”

Kip looked. The last one was only a title. On the Gift of Light. “Um, that’s great, Quentin. Where’s the poem?”

“No, that’s, that’s it. But look!” He pulled out the two books side by side. “The translation is wrong, so it wasn’t erased. They missed it. The ablative with this phrasing usually would mean ‘on the gift of light,’ but it could also mean ‘on the giver of light.’”

“You keep looking at me like I’m supposed to have a revelation,” Kip said.

“In the original, the common way to construct it would be ‘doniae luxi.’ But the word order doesn’t matter in an inflected language except for emphasis, but here it’s ‘luxi doniae.’”

“Still not—”

“Centuries ago the Parian accent gave way to the Ruthgari, and ‘luxi’ started to be transcribed as ‘luci’.”

“Still…”

“Luci doniae. Which in the nominative case is … C’mon. This is like having to explain the punch line of a dirty joke.”

“Oh! Lucidonius! So a poem ‘On Lucidonius’? But what does that mean?”

Quentin deflated. “Well, I don’t know. But it does mean the Lightbringer is tied to Lucidonius somehow. The Light Giver and the Light Bringer? What if they’re the same? What if the Lightbringer has already come?”

“And nobody noticed?”

“Everyone noticed Lucidonius. He changed—he changed the whole world.”

“But they didn’t notice that he was the same person they’d prophesied about?”

His hands are forged to take the blade,

His skin is dyed for war.

By father’s father is he unmade

He all will save through what all abhor.

Kip was almost done even trying. But Quentin said, “No, no, look, this is not even close to an exact translation—you think it rhymes in our language by coincidence? Even the meter is wrong. Iambs are natural for our tongue, but they wrote in dactylic hexameter.”

“Dact—what?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“How does this help us?”

“Well, well, well, it probably doesn’t. But I could spend years with this stuff! And this one, it makes reference to ‘he,’ which I assume is the Lightbringer, at least it’s been erased, too. This last one is a contested prophecy, but I don’t know whether it’s because they aren’t sure if it’s about the Lightbringer, or if it was contested later because it’s impossible.”