Sanctuary

Favaronas hurled himself back down the slope, his need to find Glanthon forgotten. Muted sunlight dappled the book. He touched the page. It was cold, stiffer than natural parchment, but no longer stone. It felt like heavy vellum, the sort usually reserved for covers, not text pages. With great care, he unrolled the curled page. It was covered in writing, a neat scribal hand, the ink copper-brown against the yellow vellum. The words were the same abbreviated Elvish as the labels on each cylinder. He couldn’t simply read off the contents but would have to decode the abbreviations.

He ransacked his meager supplies for ink, pen, and paper. He must transcribe the writing, get it all down, and worry about deciphering it later.

While he was engrossed, the sun continued its slow rise, the filtered orange light traveling across his bedroll. When the light fell upon the second and third cylinders, they also softened into readable scrolls, the tightly furled pages loosening with a soft whish. Favaronas’s heart thudded in his chest. What was happening here? The cylinders had been exposed to sunlight before and had not opened. Was it because the clouds were screening the normally harsh sunlight? Was it the first light of dawn? Could it have something to do with his dream that was not a dream?

Just now it did not matter. The mysterious books were open!

Around him, the warriors stirred. A sparse meal was prepared and eaten. Horses were watered and fed. Whenever a warrior passed by, the archivist found himself shielding the open scrolls from view. Without knowing why, he felt a need to keep this development to himself.

When the sun was more fully up, beams of stronger light reached out through gaps in the clouds and fell upon the scrolls. One by one, they curled up again, turning white and hard, becoming stone once more. Favaronas tried to stop the process by shading the books, but the transformation was inexorable. Barely an hour after he noticed the first book opening, all were stone again. He’d managed to copy out only a third of the first tome.

“Good morning!”

The archivist convulsed like a guilty lover. Glanthon had arrived, bearing his gear on one shoulder. “What?” Favaronas said, looking up. “Oh, yes. Good morning.”

Glanthon squinted at him. “Are you hurt? What are those marks on your neck?”

Favaronas’s hand went to his throat. “This? Nothing. I rolled over on a stone while sleeping and scratched myself.”

Glanthon could see no such stones in the immediate area of Favaronas’s bedroll, but if the Speaker’s archivist didn’t want to parade his problems Glanthon would not press the matter.

“We’ll be moving out soon. It’s two days to the caravan I road. I want to keep clear of Kortal itself. Too many Nerakan spies.”

Favaronas nodded. What he wanted most right now was for Glanthon to go about his business, so he could begin translating the writing he’d taken down from the first open scroll. He feigned a headache and asked to be left alone until the company actually departed. Unsuspecting, Glanthon wished him better health and left.

The camp grew noisier as the warriors curried their horses, saddled them, and stowed their gear. Favaronas broke his fast with a bag of dried vegetable chips and a cup of water, and tried to make sense of what he’d written.

The writing was like the labels, line after line of abbreviations, without break, punctuation, or capitalization, and only a small tic of the scribe’s pen separating each syllable.

Who would record valuable records in such a difficult fashion? Still, if each syllable represented a word in Old Elvish, he should be able to read the entire document. But it would take time. The first line was nat.hat.om.bar.sem.hoc.ved. Nat could stand for many things, from the word for rooster (nathi) to the verb meaning “to behead” (natcar).

By the time the company was ready to depart Favaronas had translated four lines, and those only roughly. The book on which he was working was apparently volume three of a longer work. It began in mid-sentence, not unusual in documents from ancient times: “—he commanded [us?] to raise the stones as part of the sacred star [or pattern?] that the powers of heaven had buried. [?] might be enhanced in this place.—” There followed several words he could not puzzle out, then: “Many were weak and reverted [or changed] by this time. The work went slowly. Many died, and their spirits walked by night, confined by the power [or place?] they sought to control.”

Now Favaronas really did feel a headache coming on. The thicket of ambiguous syllables yielded their secrets so slowly he knew translating the cylinders would require weeks of continuous labor. He would never be able to keep their secrets for that long in the confines of Khurinost.