Chương 181: Chapter 176. What Are Friends For?

Adom turned another page in the Book of Primordial Runes, his finger tracing down the ancient symbols carved into the parchment. The candlelight flickered across the intricate drawings, casting shadows that made the runes seem to shift and writhe.

"Where is it," he muttered, flipping to the next section.

"Where is it." Across the table, Sam hadn't said anything in a while. He sat where Adom had put him an hour ago, a cup of tea gone cold at his elbow, watching the pages turn, his face carefully blank. Trying, very hard, not to hope. Somewhere on the walk back to the house he'd given up protesting — that it was useless, that Adom didn't have to do this. Now he just watched. Adom had been at it for over an hour.

Cross-referencing his notes, checking every healing-related entry he could find, and a fair few that weren't. The book was organized in the most inconvenient way imaginable: not by letter, or function, but according to some primordial logic that had surely made perfect sense to whoever compiled it a few thousand years ago, and made none whatsoever to him.

"Adom." Sam's voice was rough.

"The best healers in the city have looked at her. For years. If there were anything to find—""The best healers in the city don't have this." Adom didn't look up. Three more pages. Nothing. Two more pages. Still nothing. One more page, and—"Ah." There it was. A rune like a stylized heart, lines radiating outward from it like veins, ringed by smaller symbols that seemed to pulse even on the static page. He knew it was related to healing. The surrounding context made that much clear.

The exact mechanics, the specific applications, the precise way to wake it — all of that was still locked behind layers of meaning he hadn't been able to crack. Until now, maybe. Adom looked up for the first time in an hour. He turned the book around so it faced his friend, finger resting beside the rune.

"Sam." There was something in his voice that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"I think we might be able to do something with this." Sam leaned in. For a long moment he just studied it.

"... What is this?"

"A rune." Sam gave him a flat look.

"I know it's a rune. I mean I can't read a stroke of it. It's like nothing I've ever seen."

"That's because it's primordial." Adom tapped the edge of the page.

"It's not the magic we do now. It's the magic ours grew out of. Older and stranger. A whole different language." Sam went quiet. He visibly decided he wasn't even going to ask how Adom had got his hands on a book like this.

"... All right." And there it was, back in his voice despite everything. Hope.

"How does it help my mother?" Adom scratched the back of his head.

"Well." He drew the word out.

"I… don't actually know how it works. Or what it does, exactly. Not yet." Sam's face fell, just slightly, prompting Adom to add something quickly.

"B-but it's the only rune in the whole book that touches healing! The only one!" He found that was the most important fact.

"And nothing in here is small. If this is the primordial rune for heal, then it's strong. Stronger than anything a healer in this city could lay a hand on. We'd only have to work out how to understand it first." Sam took off his glasses, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and let out a long, slow breath.

"Ah, Adom." Adom just sat there for a moment and watched Sam coming apart on the inside, where none of it reached his face. He knew the look. Because he'd worn it himself more times than he could count. Less often these days, granted. But he knew exactly what it was. Perhaps…

"... No matter how long the night is, no matter how dark, if you keep walking through it without stopping, sooner or later you'll find yourself smiling at the sunrise." Sam looked up at him.

"Mr. Biggins told me that today. Not the exact words, but still. I found it comforting.

"Sam went still."... Mr. Biggins, the shopkeeper?" His brow creased as the thought caught up with him." That Mr. Biggins says things that make sense now?"

"It's a front." Adom heard the words leave him before he'd quite decided to let them go.

"He's a dragon. Older than ten thousand years. He set up a little shop full of weird stuff, and he's been sitting in it waiting for me since long before I was born." Sam stared at him.

"... Do I sound insane?"

"What do you think?" Adom huffed a laugh.

"Yeah. Figured." But looking back at his friend, he found he didn't want to stop there. It was Sam. Sam already knew the largest secret he carried: that he'd lived a whole life before this one and come back to do it again. The dragon, Adom had kept to himself all this while, and only because it had felt like Biggins's secret to give and not his. But that was a wall. And tonight, with this, he was done with walls. So he told him.

Everything, right there at the table, in one long rush: what the book truly was, where it had come from, what the primordial runes were and what they could do, how a regressor and a ten-thousand-year-old dragon had wound up on the same side of the same impossible war. Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. No more secrets. Only the truth, finally out in the open between them.

By the time Adom had finished laying it all out, Sam had come back to himself somewhere along the way. The slump had gone out of his shoulders and there was that familiar light in his eyes again, the one that turned up whenever a problem got interesting enough to forget being sad about.

"Okay. Okay, wait." He pulled his chair in.

"So, [Revealer's Eyes] shows you magical patterns that'd be invisible otherwise. And [Riddler's Bane] lets you understand a thing more deeply, once you've already got a decent grip on it. Right?"

"That's about the size of it, yeah."

"And neither of them gives you anything on this?" Sam tapped the edge of the page, beside the rune.

"That's the catch." Adom sat back.

"A rune doesn't work just because you can see it. Magic runs on intent, so before you can use one, you have to understand what it actually means. What it's for. Only then does it open up. Otherwise a child can draw it and it would have no effect whatsoever." He nodded at the book.

"And most of this thing is still a closed door to me. It's taken Kim and me years just to crack the runes we have. To read them, then drag them up to something a decent modern mage could understand." He watched Sam's face start to dip toward the floor again, and got there first." But!" Adom leaned forward.

"When I'm really, properly stuck, I go and see Old Mazor." Sam's head came up.

"... The leviathan?"

"The leviathan. He read that script when it was still wet ink and Law explained the basics of them to him, a long, long time ago." Adom tapped the page.

"He doesn't know it the way a runemaster would. But a leviathan's memory doesn't fade, so he remembers enough; what it was roughly meant for, the shape of the idea behind it. Enough to point me at the right direction and let me do the rest." He closed the book and stood.

"Which is exactly what we're going to go do. Right now." Adom had his coat half on when...

"Hey…" Sam called.

"Hm?"

"... Thank you. For all of this." Sam shook his head slowly.

"An hour ago it felt like the world was ending. And now it just feels like… a problem. A hard one. But a problem." He looked up.

"You did that."

"Hey." Adom pulled the coat the rest of the way on.

"What are friends for?" And there it was, Sam's first real smile of the night.

"Besides," Adom added, "I owe you. For a whole list of things, if we're keeping count. Oriscael being the latest." That killed the smile on the spot. Sam dropped his head straight into his hands.

"Do not bring up Oriscael."

"I'm only saying. I remember."

"Everyone else has had the decency to forget." Adom laughed and tucked the book under his arm.

"Come on, before my father gets back with Ada and Bennu. The second those two catch the scent of a secret, it's questions till dawn, and we've got a leviathan waiting." He nodded toward the door.

"Let's go see Old Mazor."

About twenty hours later, they were standing on the ocean's water itself. The flat black surface of it held their weight like cool glass, rising and falling in a slow swell beneath their boots. The little boat that had carried them out bobbed a few feet behind, empty, tugging gently at nothing. In every direction there was only water, darkness and the enormous silence of a sea with no land within reach of it.

"Dude." Sam turned a slow circle, taking in the whole vast nothing of it.

"Are you sure this is the place?"

"Coordinates are right. Hour's right too." Adom didn't bother looking around; he'd checked three times on the way.

"I've been here before, Sam. A few times. You don't trust me?"

"I trust you. I just..." Sam waved a hand at the endless dark, and the total absence of anything resembling a landmark.

"It's the middle of the ocean. At night. It all looks exactly the same." It did. It was well past midnight, and they were twenty hours away from Arkhos, after taking a boat to get out here, most of which Sam had slept clean through, curled up in the bottom of the boat. Adom drew a breath, faced the empty water ahead, and spoke the word: a single low sound, strange and shaped wrong for a human mouth. But nothing happened.

"... Y-you sure that's the right word?" Sam said.

"I think so." Adom frowned at the water.

"Pretty sure. Last time I was out here was… what, nine months ago? Worked fine then."

"Maybe he's asleep?" Adom looked at him.

"What?" Sam spread his hands.

"It's the middle of the night! You don't actually know he's not asleep. For all you know we just sailed twenty hours to go bang on a leviathan's door past his bedtime, which, frankly, is rude."

"He's a leviathan, Sam. I don't think he keeps a bedtime."

"You don't know that. Maybe he's very particular about his evenings."

"Maybe leviathans don't sleep at all. Besides, it's fiiine. We're friends."" You're friends. I met the guy once, when I was thirteen, and I thought you were just really good at the druid thing." Sam dragged a hand down his face.

"I don't know him, man. And I'd rather not have him remember me as the one who turned up at one in the morning, empty-handed, asking for favours." Just then, the water in front of them began to turn. Slowly, at first. A wide, lazy spiral opening in the black surface, the swell bending in on itself, drawing toward a single point a few yards off the bow.

"See?" Adom said.

"It's working." The spiral widened, then quickened. What had been a gentle eddy sank and deepened into a true pull, the water circling faster and faster, until it became a vast spinning funnel — a whirlpool the size of a town square, opening in the middle of the sea like a gate. Sam had stopped talking. They edged back a step as the whirlpool widened, neither of them keen to learn what it felt like to be pulled into it, while behind them, the boat strained against the swell. And then they waited.

The funnel spun, the water roared down into it, but still, nothing came up. A few seconds passed. Then a few more, the thing just churning away in front of them, vast, loud and entirely empty. Adom watched it, and a small, uncomfortable thought surfaced alongside the spray. Mazor was old. That wasn't even an insult — it was, fairly literally, his name. Old Mazor. And old things, in Adom's hand-on experience, did tend to keep early hours. …

Maybe — and he'd sooner have eaten the boat than say it aloud — maybe Sam had a point?

"Adom."

"Yeah, I know." He sighed.

"Look, maybe we give it a little longer, and if nothing comes—""No, Adom." Sam's voice had gone flat and strange.

"Quick question."

"... What?"

"Is a leviathan supposed to have tentacles?" Adom frowned.

"What? No. Why would a leviathan have—" Then he looked ahead. Something was rising out of the whirlpool. Not breaching gently, the way Mazor did, but climbing. Hauling itself up out of the black water on limbs that didn't belong to anything Adom had any wish to meet. Soon, more of it came out, allowing the boys to observe a bulk the size of a ship. One great pale eye, fixed and lidless.

And unfolding around it, arm after arm after arm, each thick as a temple column and lined beneath with rings of pale, grasping suckers. That was visibly not a leviathan. More like a kraken, a nd it saw them. Then it lunged.