Let me know if you can’t read this. My handwriting isn’t what it used to be.
First of all:
The Crocus’ Stem Rm 314 – 1783 Dzoya, West Cinnamon Hill – Thul Ka
The end of Bethas has me in Serkaih, in a little town called Dkanat. I don't know about post, there.
What you’ve got in the package is Tsadi pezre Awameh in three volumes, and the old one where the title chipped off is Iwayi by Adopu. Of ada’na Tsadi’s I suspect you’d like “Dzih’axew” or “Silent Flight” in Estuan. It’s in the second volume. What do I know? My favorite is (has always been) the first one I clapped eyes on: “Liminal.” Iwayi is trickier because of what Mugrobi call “the back side of the tongue”. Nothing he writes is technically true, except it might be true in some way or another.
Enough of that. I’m sending them because of what you said about Mircalla. They didn’t make her what she is and nobody made imbali lie. I don’t know what I believe, but I don’t believe any man is more likely to lie than any other by his born nature. Adopu did not write the truth because nobody expected him to. Tsadi writes what is in her heart and not everybody thanks her for it. Some of it is kind of scandalous.
I said I was done rambling about my poetry and I am. I would like them back but - Hulali floats, and he drowns. (I would like Adopu back, sometime.)
I went to a few bookshops in Deventry and Bodecca and Two Falls too. I didn’t have much luck in Bodecca, being honest. Mostly plant books.
Deventry found me the old water-stained thing I stuck in the package with the rest. The name of it (as you can see from that hell of a cover) is When the Wicked Lay Still in Vita.
I can’t find a single copy of Mircalla though. Do you know of any places around here a man can empty his pockets for the unrestful dead?
Let me know how tryouts go,
Your father
That was how it had started, anyway.
He’d thought to send her the address, and the address alone; that was when his hand had started cramping, anyway. But somehow the sight of her name and a jumble of numbers and words, and the stretch of the blank page, had seemed worse than no note at all.
He should’ve at least, he thought, explained the books. It was his only copy of Adopu, after all, even if he had Tsadi to spare, though he found, the more he wrote, the less he expected it back.
And then, somehow –
He had to explain the book he’d got in Two Falls, so she didn’t think he was some kind of mung. She probably already thought he was some kind of mung, but that was nothing new; his lass had, too, for all she had teased him about how he didn’t read. He supposed Cerise knew her father read, but –
When he looked down at the page, it’d unfurled into a small monstrosity. He’d dictated letters this long to Rosmilda, for some official or other, who’d dutifully rearranged his words and taken out this or that flustered obscenity on the fly. To Ezre and Drezda, he’d written only sparingly, and to Aremu – he hadn’t wanted Aremu to see his hand, though the imbala was half of the reason he had tried so hard with his grammar to begin with.
Now, as he sat with the thick, rich watermarked paper, thinking of this mockery all trussed up in Anatole’s finest, he asked himself what the hell he was doing. He’d wasted at least three sheets with spelling errors – there was a dictionary at his elbow – and there was more than enough ink staining his fingertips.
And somehow, he was tucking it into the envelope and sealing it; somehow, he was stamping it.