Colors of Another Sky Ficbit – Rosetta… Plank

The girl stared back, tears tracking down through bits of mud on her face. She took a breath, nail moving back to scrape at wood with sheer determination, to poke and pry….

No, no, that board’s not big enough, you shouldn’t take it until you can get out!

She pulled anyway, opening a gap two thumbs wide in the deck. Not enough for even a kitten to squeeze out.

But just wide enough for a muffled clatter of wood, as she pushed another, far thinner plank through the hole, angling it so it lay face-up on sun-shrunk decking. Weathered gray wood, smeared with mud-

No. Not smeared.

Sparrow eyes didn’t focus like a human’s, but they worked enough for me to read the shapes – the hanja, and eonmun – traced in flaking clay.

Infection. Shark-men. Danger. Help.

…The eonmun for infection and shark were both misshapen. But they were close enough.

Squeezed into the flat of the wood, almost out of room, there was a third set of shapes I did not know. Based on the first two, perhaps it meant the same?

Much later I would find out they did mean the same. Roughly. Much more roughly than trying to translate the tongue of Ilbon to Hangugeo. Translation, I was told, was as much art as words, and trying to wrest meaning from concepts that did not quite match was like wringing blood from stone. Specifically, a three-language stone from the far-off land of Egypt seized by a short Corsican who’d tried to rule all of Europe. Never try to rule all of Europe being one of the lessons Jason thought crucial for vampires and cultivators alike.

But that would be later. For now – even through the sparrow’s senses, I felt darkness moving in the water.

I dropped the link, blood thundering in my ears as I focused on breathing. On not feeling as though I’d abandoned a child to die. The pirates’ curse was shark. They might sense magic tied to blood.

“Lee Cheong?” Chae, fox-sharp eyes piercing me as she stood nearest, one hand on the steel-ribbed fan at her waist. Not a threat, just a readiness to smack a dazed vampire between the eyes if the blood-link had drawn my spiritual cognition too thin for a moment.

Of course it could be a threat, that fan had more tricks than anyone at court had yet seen. I knew some of them; Commander Kim had known more. Some of them, I was sure, Chae withheld simply to keep me alive out of sheer annoyed curiosity.

One day I hope to convince her I did not end up in the river on purpose.

Advertisement