The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,142

deceptive. You understand. You’ve seen the others: even the ones we know are from true prophets brim with phrases like ‘when brother turns against brother, and men put power over religion’ that obviously apply to every era. True, but useless. This . . . this is so different, it doesn’t surprise me that other scholars have questioned its veracity, its provenance, even the prophet’s sanity.”

She’s translated the scrolls for us. Felia has a knack for all learning, and with her charm and familial connections, she’s had the opportunity to study every discipline that has captured her interest with its foremost scholars. She is like unto a desert, leaving men once fat with knowledge desiccated. She is a hooded lamp, never bragging of her brightness, but taking for fuel everything that comes to the hungry wick of her intellect. She is now doubtless one of the great linguists of our age, and few of the others even suspect it.

Holding the ancient scroll in my hand, I ask, “Is any other translation possible?”

She chews on a finger. We both wonder if she’s missed something, so she goes through it phrase by phrase to see if I have any questions that might shine light on something she missed.

She says, “ ‘If upon that day,’ or ‘at the time,’ a constrained time, but usually it means ‘on the same day’ ‘when the Everdark Gates open full.’ That’s pretty clear: the Gates will have been open to some degree before then—and I do know that the translation of ‘Everdark Gates’ is certain; I’ve seen it elsewhere in even older scrolls. Unless you want to go really recursive, and say that ‘the Everdark Gates’ means ‘the gates of hell,’ since we know that’s how they got their name in the first place.”

“Let’s not get too deep here,” I say. “The whole premise was that this prophecy is remarkably unambiguous.”

“For a prophecy, yes,” she said. “But you’re right. Here we go: ‘and the bane touch the Jaspers’ is when the bane—plural, no note of how many—literally touch the Jaspers. If on that day, ‘there stands no Lightbringer’—again, ‘Lightbringer’ is used elsewhere, no ambiguity—‘on the Jaspers’ shore’—not necessarily literally standing, it’s often used colloquially the way we do: the Lightbringer is there, on the Jaspers, possibly literally on the shore of one island or the other. They didn’t call them the Jaspers then, but they referred to the islands in a manner that was consistent. They thought of them as four islands, including Cannon Island and another low island that is believed to have been sunk when the Everdark Gates closed and the sea rose. I have translated that bit as ‘the Jaspers’ for simplicity. ‘Then shall the Chromeria fall.’ In this context, ‘fall’ seems to mean both figuratively and literally. ‘As a river of blood pours from the Prism’s Tower’ is simply, ‘As a river of blood pours from or around a tower the Prism in some special sense climbs’—thus, ownership: ‘His or her tower.’ The same word for tower is used again in the next sentence.”

“Is ‘a river of blood’ sacrifices, or a massacre?” I ask.

“The Freeings have been going on a long time without causing a fall of the satrapies, so I’m guessing that the fall of the satrapies begins with this massacre around the Prism or his seat of power.”

“So maybe everyone on the Jaspers will be killed first,” I say.

“And there’s no clue who does it. Maybe the Angari who come in through the Everdark Gates? But I’m getting ahead of myself. ‘Then will seven towers collapse, and with them, seven satrapies.’ Obviously the falls of the seven towers and satrapies are figurative—collapse, political dissolution. Sorry, I’m overexplaining, of course you know that.”

“We’re grasping at straws. Too much explanation might actually be the perfect amount to trigger some new understanding. Please go on.”

She does: “ ‘Ye shall know the time is short when bane rise from the seas.’ I preserved the ‘ye’ instead of ‘you’ because he adopts a high tone here, an almost heraldic alarum. And apparently, this prophet believes the bane to be literal, physical things. He believes the loci damnata are real places, real temples of the false gods, the damned. ‘Atirat will rise off Ruic Head.’ ‘Off Ruic Head’ is a little tricky. Ruic Head wasn’t called Ruic Head at the time. It was the ‘fist sinister of the Iron Mountains.’ So the left hand of the Red Cliffs. Most agree that means Ruic Head, but it is a