No Quest For The Wicked

Page 3

“It actually sounds better in the original language. I’m no poet, so I’m going for accuracy instead of beauty in my translation.” He pulled the manuscript closer and pointed to the page. “See, here’s that part.”
The paper was yellowed with age, and the ink had faded to a dark reddish-brown color. The lettering was spiky, looking like something on a heavy-metal album cover, and I didn’t recognize so much as a single letter. Even though the magic in the document couldn’t affect me, I thought it looked evil. “I can’t believe you spend all day with this thing. It wouldn’t have to affect you magically to drive you nuts. What is it, written in blood on human skin?”
“It’s not human skin,” Owen said mildly, but I noticed he didn’t say anything about the blood. Ew. If I were him, I’d be wearing rubber gloves under the cotton ones. Then he leaned closer to the evil document. “Wait a second, this can’t be right.”
“Maybe the inkwell bled to death,” I said as a chill went down my spine.
“No, it’s not an error in the manuscript. It’s changed. This is the part I translated yesterday, the stuff about the clouds and the seat. It says something different now.”
“It’s rewriting itself?” I asked, leaning closer to look, even though I couldn’t tell what might be different about the manuscript. “That’s not entirely unheard of, though, is it?”
“No, and if any book could, it would be this one. But the events in this book happened so long ago that it shouldn’t be changing.”
“So if that part changed, that means this Eye of the Moon is in a different place now,” I concluded. “That first description sounds like it could have been on an airplane when you translated it.”
He looked up at me, and I could see from the pallor of his face how serious this was. “That would be bad,” he understated.
“Well, where is it now?”
He turned back to the document, frowning as he studied it. “Let’s see, there’s something about glittering stars, cubical robins’ eggs, a king’s ransom in gold, silver, and jewels, guarded like a fortress, a place to break one’s fast.”
“Sounds like Tiffany’s,” I quipped.
“What?”
“The jewelry store. They have gold, silver, and jewels, and their boxes are kind of a robin’s egg blue. I’m sure it’s guarded pretty heavily. And then there’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s—you know, Audrey Hepburn staring longingly into the jewelry store windows as she eats her Danish on her way home from a night out?” His blank look told me he was sadly culturally deprived. “But of course, that’s impossible, because how would some Dark Ages wizard know about Tiffany’s?”
“What the Dark Ages wizard did was embed a spell that relays the current location of the Eye using certain possible descriptors. The Eye’s been lost because the description of the original hiding place no longer matched what was there—the place had changed even though the Eye hadn’t moved, and since it hadn’t moved, the text remained the same. If it’s been moved, then the text might use more updated references.”
“So it really could have ended up at Tiffany’s?” I put my hand on his shoulder as an idea struck me. “We should go! We could find out.”
“I don’t think so … I mean, it’s been lost for centuries, and it shows up in Tiffany’s? That’s unlikely. It’s probably just a bad translation on my part. I was doing that off the top of my head.”
“Then translate!” I said, waving my hand at the table with a “get to work” gesture. “I can wait.”
“This could take awhile. You should go to your office. I’ll call you when I have something.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
“Okay, then.” I leaned over to give him a kiss. “I’ll leave the coffee and rolls outside in case you need another break.” I then reluctantly headed up to my office, where I could do something exciting like alphabetize my pencil cup. Again.
On my way into the sales department, I smiled and spoke to everyone as I passed their offices. They were willing to chat, but they didn’t need anything from me. In a way, that was good because it meant business was going well. Unfortunately, it also meant that I felt totally useless. I’m not sure that being busy would have helped much, though. While I’d hated my old marketing job before I learned about the magical world, I’d thought that was mostly because my boss was evil. It turned out that I just hated marketing.