Chapter 14 | Part 1

By the next afternoon, Xandor had spread twelve copies across the table at the Scholar’s Rest. Charcoal dust darkened his fingertips.

Forty years of collecting them, and most still disagreed.

Names changed between kingdoms. Symbols were copied badly. Scribes turned diagrams into decoration and decoration into doctrine.

But five marks did not change.

He moved one sheet beside another, checking each mark against the cube.

Dulint leaned over his shoulder. “You’ve been doing that for an hour.”

“Longer.”

“Useful hour?”

Xandor pushed three pages toward him. Each showed a different rendering of the same old device. Different hands. Different centuries.

The five marks around it appeared in the same order.

“These aren’t embellishments,” Xandor said.

Eldric stayed by the door. “What are they?”

“I thought they named five versions of the object.” Xandor set a finger beside the diagram. “But here they all belong to the same drawing.”

The cube pulsed.

The first mark brightened on its surface.

The other four remained dark.

Balin stopped pretending not to listen.

Xandor brought another fragment beside it. A damaged line ran beneath the five symbols.

“Read it,” Eldric said.

“I can read three words with confidence.”

“Those, then.”

“First. Before. Whole.”

Balin frowned. “That’s not much.”

“No. But I have been looking for a whole object.”

Dulint folded his arms. “It looks whole to me.”

“So did it to me. Look at the spaces beside those marks.”

Maris shifted in the corner, both hands wrapped around a cup she had not drunk from.

“The screaming doesn’t feel incomplete.”

“No,” Xandor said. “I imagine a severed hand would still hurt.”

She looked at him.

“Poor choice of metaphor.”

“Very.”

Xandor touched the cube.

The first symbol grew hot enough to sting his fingertip. He pulled his hand back.

“The text calls the complete arrangement the Nexus. I took that to mean the cube alone.” He pushed the nearest drawing toward Dulint. “Now I think we have only part of what it describes.”

“Sense,” Dulint said.

“The name attached to the first mark, yes.”

The light on the first mark reached across the paper. Xandor moved the sheet aside; there was no concealing the cube even in this room.

On each drawing, that mark came before the others.

Balin looked at the four dark marks. “So those are missing.”

“Perhaps.”

Eldric watched him rub his finger. “Or they are here and not working?”

“That too,” Xandor said. “The drawings put five marks together. Only the first answers on ours. I need more than these scraps to tell you why.”

“Then leave the other marks alone.”

Xandor kept his hands on the paper.

The cube pulsed again.

Four marks stayed dark.

For the first time since Dulint had put the thing on his table, Xandor was grateful for what it did not do.

End of Chapter 14.1 —> 14.2: Naming Without Explaining: The Warning