The Third Word

The God-Era characters are surfacing one after another. The first word is 空, which appeared on the surface of the old king's tongue. After that, another character began to recur — for the time being people call it the third word, because it always stands third in a certain group of characters.

It turns up in far too many places that ought to have nothing to do with one another. It is on the surface of that black shard from the old king's bones, cut so shallow that the light has to fall across it at an angle before it can be seen. It is on the back of an old bronze clasp that lay under dust for years, and although the face of the clasp has been rubbed to a shine, the character has not worn at all. It is in the middle of the stone plinth of the third house's empty place in the Tomb Gallery, pressed under a statue's base for several hundred years and uncovered only when the base was taken away. It is on the underside of a silver seal kept in a niche in a stone wall, and the seal itself carries no name.

These things stand decades and hundreds of li apart from one another, and come from different craftsmen, different materials, different uses. The same character is cut into all of them, and the run of the strokes, the angle at which each begins and ends, the proportion of deep to shallow, are identical throughout.

Those who have seen it say: this character is like something heard somewhere, and yet there is no recognising it. It is not read as any sound in any living language. House Greypen tried collating it against the copies of the rites text, worked at it for three days, and found no match.

The method of collation is House Greypen's old one: break the character into its strokes, and match them one stroke at a time against the elements that appear in the rites text. This character stopped at the fourth stroke — the angle at which the fourth stroke begins has no second instance anywhere in the surviving copies of the rites text. The man responsible for the collation wrote the two words Not found in the register, and left the date blank.

It simply appears again and again, as though something were using one and the same mark to mark one thing that has not yet been said out loud.