A Promise of Iron by Brandon McCoy (the reading list .txt) 📕

of difference. She ran every test she could think of; the pages were still blank—as blank they were the day the book was first discovered.

She looked at the stack of letters in front of her.

She knew her father well. But his suggestions, well-intentioned or not, had brought her no closer to discovering the book’s secrets. What would be different this time? Months spent, and she was no closer to the truth. She had to consider the possibility that the book held no secrets. It was blank—a practical joke with a payoff several millennia in the making.

She lifted the stack of letters from her desk. Few wrote by hand anymore. Fewer still would waste actual paper to do it; then again, her father was always prone to excess.

She unwound the cord that secured the bundle of letters in place and stacked them out in front of the book. She laid them out side by side, organized by the date scrawled in the upper corner. There were six envelopes in all, and each envelope was thick with folded pages.

She crumpled the plastic bag then felt something at the bottom. Reaching in, she pulled out a small wooden box that had stowed away among the letters. She ran her hand over it, admiring her father’s craftsmanship and opened the lid to reveal a thin silver knife on a bed of purple velvet. The inscription on the blade read:

To my brilliant daughter

“Only you would think to send a letter opener,” she said.

She lifted the first letter and edged the knife to the crease in the corner. She slashed. Pages covered corner to corner in varying shades of ink tumbled out, pages that showed all the worrying signs of a brilliant mind. She unfolded them and began to read. At times she turned to her notepad, scrawling symbols with an identically inscribed pen. She pored through the pages, separating the flashes of insight from the ramblings of madness. Once finished, she folded the pages up and placed them back into the envelope. She lifted the second letter and slashed.

“Ouch!” she shouted as pain erupted from her hand. On reflex, she pulled the guilty knife away from her finger. She froze as a single drop of blood fell from her finger, staining the opened page of the book underneath. She jerked her hand away, but not fast enough to prevent two more drops from falling.

“Shit!” she shouted. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”

She looked over her desk in a panic. Finding no solution, she grabbed the opened letter and threw her father’s pages over the book, hoping to absorb the blood. She blotted feverishly and prayed.

Several breathless moments passed. Ignoring the fear that lodged inside her throat, she lifted the letter and assessed the damage. Pale pink streaked across the page like a poorly cleaned crime scene. Her blood, staining the pages of a book thousands of years older than written history. Her blood, destroying the archaeological find of a lifetime.

She wrapped one of her father’s pages around her finger and slumped back into her chair. She felt the urge to run, to hide, to shut out the lights and crawl into her bed forever, but she was no longer a child.

“Not like this,” she groaned, flipping through the pages. Those few drops of blood had marred the top page and soaked through enough to be visible on the second and third. She turned to the fourth and found it to be unblemished.

“Leeland will know what to do,” she said, grabbing the translucent device to her right. “Isaac, call…”

She stopped abruptly.

“I would never live it down,” she said. “Just another fuck up from a family of fuck ups.”

“I am sorry, madam, to whom would you like me to place a call?” the accented voice from the device replied.

She paused as she looked to the knife she still held in her hand. “No one, Isaac. Never mind. You can rest, thanks!”

The device replied, “Very good, madam.”

No expression marked her face as she looked at the book. There was no sign of the dark intent she considered as she brought the knifepoint to its spine.

“No one would notice a couple of missing pages,” she reasoned, “I’ve bound books before, Father could help with the…”

Movement caught her eye—she stilled. The blood that had smeared the page was fading. The knife dropped from her hand and clattered on the desk before falling to the floor. The blood continued to dissipate like a wave pulling back from the shore. When all was done, the page was clean and clear. It was as if nothing had ever happened.

She rubbed a hand over her tired eyes and looked again at the page.

“What in the…”

Red flashed. Symbols and designs appeared on the page as if struck by an antique typewriter. She stared intently. Some characters lingered while others recycled back into the blankness of the page. Some she recognized, languages she half-knew or had seen before, but they were jumbled into an incomprehensible series of vertical lines. If there was a hand, some unseen intelligence behind the display, it was an illiterate one.

She peered closer and placed her hands on either side of the book. The symbols seemed to respond to her touch as they twisted and assembled with new determination. Slowly, they became clear as a blood-red pattern took shape. Several words flashed in and out of existence, their life a brief candle. Then all fell away from the page as it had before. A single crimson word remained.

Hello.

She stepped away from the desk and rubbed at her eyes again. She looked with suspicion to the empty bottles of wine that littered her cabin. Her gaze shifted to the bed along the wall. It was piled with clothes that had sat undisturbed for days.

“How long has it been?” she asked. “A day? It couldn’t have been more than two, no, I rested a few hours last…”

She trailed off. The word was gone and the page as blank as before. She stared at it, daring it to