No Cure For Curiosity [Finished]

[Bee]

A shiver rattled through her as she touched the tome. It was real. She knew it. It was skin. It was dried and a little flaky; there were faint swirls, darker, with a little color left in them. Purple and green. A Lowlander. She knew these sorts of things happened, of course, and had happened and happened and happened over the ages. It was barbaric. Her stomach turned.

Nevertheless.

It was interesting. It was fascinating, she couldn’t keep away from it, no matter how off-putting it felt; no matter how paranoid she became that someone was in the room with her, waiting for her to make a move; no matter how much her common sense told her to bury the thing deep in the ground and forget about it. It was clearly old, and Phaedra could no more bury an old book than she could set herself on fire. Every bone in her academic body screamed against it.

And so it rested on her inn table in Esterberry; unopened, for the moment. She knew, at some point, that her curiosity would overwhelm her, and she would read it. Phaedra spoke many languages. If she didn’t know what it said off-hand, she could likely deduce it by relating it to something she did know. There were only so many languages; there were only so many dialects.

The man who had desperately shoved it at her said it was cursed. Phaedra knew things could be cursed.

Nevertheless.

She was going to open it.

[Bee]

Ezra needed money, as he often did. His stomach ached. It was not so bad now that Senka was out of the house and living with her boyfriend, but that mostly just gave him a different kind of ache. She wasn’t biologically related to him at all, and he called her his niece, but she had always felt like a daughter, and her absence was as powerful a force as her presence.

He needed something to pass the hours. Writing wasn’t working. That well had long run dry. For the second time in his life, he felt the compulsion to get out, to do something, if only to distract himself from the quiet little void he suspected was at the center of his life.

He told Senka he would be gone for a while. He wasn’t sure where he was going. The realms could be such odd places. He wasn’t going back to Torquehelm, certainly. He had a feeling, strong and irrational, that he was going to return there to die, and he wanted to avoid it until he was ready to go.

So he packed, and he wandered.

[Bee]

She had to open it soon, or she was going to go mad. Just having it sit there was giving her all sorts of nutty ideas. The person she imagined, the one waiting for her to act, it was everywhere now, hiding just beyond the scope of her vision, always in whatever room she moved the book. She turned and turned and never saw it.

For a short time she thought it was some kind of genuine spectral essence. In her temporarily loss of wits, she tried talking to it, convinced it was the ghost of the Lowlander bound around the book.

“You can communicate with me,” she said, because if she could sense the damn thing she might be able to talk to it somehow. What she knew about ghosts could fill a thimble, but she knew the common lore. “I want to help.”

But there was nothing. Whatever it was—if indeed there was a something—it was not interested in communicating.

It’s not as though I can’t open it, she thought. After all, no harm ever came from reading a book. Who had said that? Someone important.

[Bee]

He was rather dismayed by how little the world moved him. The rolling hills of the Highlands, the almost artful disrepair of Corvistowne, the ships lulling on the Selkie Lakes—nothing spoke to him. Nothing leapt out and told him to make a home there, to do something, to be someone. They were just places; the people were just people; life was just dull, maddening life.

Esterberry he went to on a lark. A small band of smartly-dressed scholars were making their way back from Corvistowne, and Ezra had thought they looked interesting, and tagged along. He tended to regard academia as a strange, almost mythical realm populated by bizarre creatures, and this group did little to prove him wrong. Their conversation seemed to consist entirely of out-doing each other at pretentiousness by lobbing increasingly obscure literary quotations at one another.

He was, curiously, welcomed as a connoisseur of music. They respected his knowledge of the classics.

“You could almost,” they told him, “hold your own in a conversation with Professor Fanshaw.” This Fanshaw person was, he gathered, the chief authority in Esterberry on the performing arts. He accepted the compliment. It was the only one he received.

[Bee]

It didn’t take her very long to realize that no harm ever came from reading a book was an extremely problematic statement, if in fact not outright false. It was like those bloody hippies wandering around with their daisy-chain crowns, all an it harm none. What was harm, eh? And to whom? On the grand scale of repercussions, everything one did eventually hurt someone, directly or indirectly. There was no isolated action.

Plenty of harm came from reading books. Despots got funny ideas about slavery and domination. Psychopaths learned to make weapons and kill more efficiently. Children read terrible paranormal romances and thought it fine literature, leading to another generation of intellectual decay.

Phaedra took the book to her study. It was dry in her hands. She opened it.

The pages were utterly blank. She frowned. All this worrying, all this paranoia, and the damn thing was empty. She twitched her glasses up her nose, hmphed in indignant frustration, and shut the tome.

There were invisible inks. Maybe she just had to go out and get the wash to reveal it. Yes, that was good step.

[Bee]

Esterberry was really quite grand. It was certainly the most developed place he had ever been to. Beautiful, in a very self-conscious, show-off kind of way.

His party swiftly abandoned him.

“Nice to’ve met you, old friend, but we’ve work to do,” said the head of the group. Ezra’s brief run as group entertainment was at an end. He didn’t mind. There was plenty to look at, and he did exactly that. Everything was so pristine and bright. He entertained vague notions about staying, about landing himself some kind of job as an archivist for music, perhaps an assistant. The Esterberry population was, as he understood, at least mildly xenophobic and preferred to hire their own, but he had an expansive musical background. He could do something.

Maybe then he could afford good food. Proper nutrition. Hmm. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

He went into one of the libraries.

[Bee]

The ink wash was a bust. The page she carefully tested was as infuriatingly blank as it was when she first opened it. Maybe it was some kind of journal, fashioned but never written in. That was a tragedy. Such a tome was meant to contain something. Why else would it be bound in such a skin, and feel so vile? She wasn’t going to give up on it.

But now it was very, very late, and she needed sleep. She eyed the book balefully.

“You’ll tell me your secrets eventually,” she told it. “I’m an Esterberry. You won’t outsmart me for long.”

She flipped it open again, one last time, and there, sprawled across the pages, was a jumble of faded brown ink. It was Lowlander tongue—a very old dialect, she guessed, because it was vaguely readable in the way that a toddler’s scrawl could be translated roughly into the standard vernacular by a familiar adult.

It was Lowlander tongue, and it was horrible. She felt cheated and betrayed. There were no ancient secrets here. There were brutal fairytales, stories of rape and murder and torture and worse. Her stomach turned. She was accustomed to twisted tales—appreciated them, academically—but there was a difference between a morbid cautionary tale and the overly-detailed, enthusiastic descriptions of gore and violence here.

Nothing short of morbid curiosity propelled her to read on.

[Bee]

By some magnificent stroke of luck, Ezra found himself with a job. He was the Third Assistant to the Deputy of Modern Music Studies, which he was informed—very often and very empathetically—was a prestigious position for an outsider to find himself with. They did, however, press him to take classes.

“I know my stuff,” he said, bemused. The Second Assistant to the Deputy of Modern Music Studies had no patience for this protest. He huffed.

“That is entirely not the point,” he said. “The point is that you aren’t certified. There is no official difference between you and the madwoman three blocks over who yells ‘The Mariner’s Revenge’ to her cats at three in the morning.”

“I don’t have cats,” Ezra pointed out.

The Second Assistant looked at him like he was mentally retarded. “You need a degree. Take the classes if you ever want to move up in the world.”

“You’re only a Second Assistant,” Ezra said, perplexed once more. He had, to Ezra’s knowledge, been stuck in the position for the last four years.

The Second Assistant went deeply red. “I’ll be First Assistant soon enough,” he hissed. “It’s a slow process. Take the classes. In four years, you’ll have a degree, and then you’ll have respect. Or don’t.” The bipedal cat drew himself up to his full height, which was impressive. “I don’t care either way, weasel.”

Ezra sighed. Why was he so terrible at making friends?

[Bee]

Phaedra had spent an hour reading the stories before the ink, faint to begin with, faded away entirely. So, it was magical! A magical Lowlander book of grotesque fairytales. Well, at least the damn thing was unique, if not overly useful yet. She decided she liked it, no matter how much it creeped her out. She had something. And when she figured out whatever it was the book was hiding—she was still certain it was hiding something—she was going to reveal it and stun the Esterberry community with her find.

It was as she was flipping absently through the blank pages that one bit of ink caught her eye. She was certain it hadn’t remained before. It was at the very front of the book, like a preface, but it was only a small poem.

The voice lends fire to flames gone out:
Another time, another route.
Wary should the walker wander—
Safe harbor here but danger yonder.
For those who walk the star-bright path
The wealth of kings is won.
For a daywalker’s footsteps naught but wrath:
The kindest hands won’t coax the damage undone.

Cheerful. And tricky. There was some kind of trap here. Why would that appear only after the rest of the text had disappeared? She felt a little thrill of horror and elation. The words held magic! She looked over the verse again. The voice lends fire. Perhaps it had to be read aloud to work?

She stepped back from the book warily. The wealth of kings was dandy. Damage undone was most certainly not.

It was time to get Corvie. She needed a guinea pig.

[Bee]

Ezra had not been working in the archives a very long time when a very strange young woman approached him. She looked like any other Esterberry, with neatly-kept curls and glasses, but there was something manic-crazy in her eyes. He saw that in Senka’s eyes every once in a while. It was not any kind of crazy. It was Corvie-crazy.

“How do you do?” said the rodent, politely. It was a…sugar-glider? He had never seen one of those before.

“I’m pretty good, I guess,” said Ezra, unwilling to commit to a conversation. Corvie-crazy typically led to bad, bad things. He just wanted some peace and quiet out of life.

“My name is Phaedra,” she said, as though that should mean something to him. “I hear you’re new in town.”

“Just a few weeks,” he confirmed.

“How do you like Esterberry? Make any friends?”

“Not really,” he replied, not sure why she was so curious. “I think the Second Assistant wants me gone.”

“That’s a tragedy,” she said, sympathetically. “Yes, we’re not terribly welcoming to outsiders, I’m afraid.”