The Boon of Alon

CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

The next day is a rest day. Rev joins us for breakfast, full of tips and complaints about flying, but we have to part ways again on the way down to the lake. And she's leaving soon, to do gods-know-what—I hope she won't have to go to Pangessa, but I know Molla is one of the few Chama trusts on that matter, and wherever Molla goes next, Rev is going to follow.

On the brighter side, apparently Suthi satisfied herself yesterday that I'm not going to freak out because of her tragic backstory, because I barely even see her until late in the morning. She finds me in the archive, sitting on a chair in the middle of a row—I pulled it over to reach a record off the top shelf—and she has to pick her way to me through the scattered tomes I've collected and set aside.

"I thought we found what you were looking for yesterday," she says.

"Different prophecy. This one's more involved." I flip through the record until I find the right date. The prophecy I'm checking now said that a man named Rundar would leave his home town of Lanan in the Kingdom of Shalangath as a boy and return later as a man—Iamon admitted that what qualified him as a man, besides his age, was open to interpretation, but both his actions and the promise of his return set a number of other events in motion. I'm going to look those up later, but for now I'm hunting down any mention of him I can find so I can figure out when he went back, if he even did.

Suthi steps closer to try to read over my shoulder. "It's a list of names? Another town register?"

"Casualty records," I tell her. Rundar was supposed to have fought in several notable battles, and in my lap now I have the death and injury lists from that particular conflict. Finding him on a death list would prove he never returned to Lanan. Not finding him won't prove much of anything.

"This looks..." Suthi looks around at the mess I've made. "Complicated."

"It's not that bad." I point to each item I've kept out. "Map of Shalangath. That's a guild log, and that stack is logbooks from checkpoints and a few city gates. I'm tracking this guy Rundar, and those things tell me where he was going. That stack is journals and other personal records from people he probably encountered, to see if they mentioned him. That's a military register, and I'm looking in here to see if he died or was injured badly enough that he couldn't keep fighting."

"Gods," she says. "The other books don't tell you that?"

"He left the guild when he enlisted, and I need something to narrow down where to look in the other records." I've been at it all morning. It's probably getting close to lunch now.

Suthi leans closer over my shoulder, bending to see the volume in my lap, so that our heads are more or less level. "You said his name was Rundar? Of where?"

"Lanan, Shalangath."

We read the names silently for a little while. I turn the page a couple of times. Then she says, "Is that him?"

She points. It does look like it says "Rundar of Lanan" and he's on an injury list, which means what Iamon told me is, so far, still accurate.

"Looks like it." I lean over to look at the map. "They were fighting over on the west edge of the country, so if he was injured, he probably went back to Alvann City to recover. And that means I've got a couple days to look through in the Alvann gate log." I make a note of the date of injury and shut the casualty record.

Suthi shakes her head slowly. "I think this is all beyond me."

"This is a lot even for me," I point out. "We never do this much in archive sessions. But I dunno. It's like a puzzle. Anything you want to know, you just have to figure out who might've written it down."