The Mountains Rise (39 page)

Tyrion awoke the next morning fresh and newly energized. His mind felt clear
,
and he knew that whatever had passed during his dreams
,
it was ready to reapply itself to the problem of dealing with She’Har spellweaving.

Eating the last of his travel bread for breakfast
,
he examined the spellwoven canopy that sheltered his platform. It remained just
as it h
ad been the last time he looked;
fantastically intricate all the way down to the smallest level he could perceive,
where it became a series of six-sided figures all linked together.

Experimenting
,
he tried to create hexagonal figures of his own at that scale, but although he could
‘see’ them in his magesight, his fine control of aythar was nowhere close to being
able to form things so tiny.

Just because theirs are so small, doesn’t mean mine have to be.

Trying again, he created his own hexagons. That was easy enough for him
,
after all the practice he
’d
had
creating shapes
for the past few year
s, and he made them each the siz
e of his palm, so that he could observe them easily.

Unfortunately
,
they behaved just
like all his normal constructs;
as soon as he stopped supplying aythar, they vanished. He tried drawing one into
the wood beneath his feet. It lasted longer after he removed his attention, waning
gradually, but it still lost its potency.
So a physical or visible symbol can retain power for a period of time, but it still
isn’t permanent.

Something was tickling the back of his mind
,
but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

He returned his focus to the symbol he had scratched into the wood. It still held
a residual amount of aythar.
Symbols and words, lines and shapes, all of them can augment and focus power more
effectively.
The memory of his fight with Syllerond came to him then, reminding him of the moment
he had commanded his enemy to ‘burn’. His power had been far more potent then, than
he had expected.

At the time he had meant to explore the idea, but he had never gotten around to it.
He certainly had time now, though. Deciding to start small, he created a luminescent
sphere of pure blue light. He
first
made it using only thought, and then he repeated the operation while giving an audible
command, “Light!”

His first globe winked out as soon as he ceased concentrating on it, but the second
one was not only brighter, but it persisted when he turned his attention away, fading
slowly. After several more attempts
,
he was pretty sure he could create a globe that would last for hours, if he put enough
power into it initially.

What if I combine spoken words with written symbols?

He couldn’t find anything suitable to work on
,
so he descended to the ground below and searched until he found a rock almost the
size of his fist. Focusing his aythar into a fine point
,
he etched the word ‘light’ upon it and then held it up and sent his power into it.
“Light!” he said firmly as he imagined what he desired.

Sure enough the stone began to glow with a brilliant light. The real question was
how long it would last. He waited for several minutes
,
but he could still detect no difference in its brightness.

“This might take a while,” he told himself before pocketing the stone. It glowed
brightly even through the fabric of his trousers.

That would make for an interesting icebreaker at parties,
he thought, looking down at the glowing bulge in his pocket.

When he returned to ‘his’ platform
,
he found Byovar had just arrived. Having been gone a week he hadn’t been sure if
the She’Har would show up to continue the language lessons. Lyralliantha joined them
a minute later.

“I’m surprised we are continuing,” said Tyrion. “It seems a waste of your time.”
He was referring to his expected
death at the end of the month.

“It was at her request,” said Byovar in his flawless
,
unaccented Barion. “It is not a painful task. You have been a good student—for
a human.”

Tyrion looked the She’Har male up and down and replied in his less than perfect Erollith,
“Well, you’ve been a good teacher—for a She’Har.” He meant it as a joke, but he didn’t
expect the She’Har to la
ugh. Nor would he take offense;
the She’Har were insensitive in more than one way. While they frequently said things
that
would be considered highly rude
or downright insulting in human society, they were also difficult to offend. A truthful
statement would almost never be considered insulting among their kind.

His jest did spark one insight as he reviewed it a second later.
Among the She’Har very little teaching needed to be done. Most knowledge was imparted
while they were being grown, so the art of teaching was probably not well refined
in their society. Some,
such as
lore-wardens like Thillmarius, possessed far greater knowledge, but even that was
passed down from the trees via the loshti. Actual person to person instruction was
very rare for them.

“We have few teacher, but Byovar is one of our best,” said Lyralliantha, taking Tyrion’s
statement as a compliment. “He is an oddity among our people.”

“Some would say the same of you,” responded Byovar.

Lyralliantha inclined her head, acknowledging his remark before addressing Tyrion
again. “I called Byovar to continue
,
since you seem determined to live.”

“Please forgive me if my aspiration is an inconvenience for you,” said Tyrion, which
caused Byovar to chuckle. Certain types of humor did seem to appeal to them, though
he had trouble predicting what they might find funny.

“Not at all,” said Byovar. “Unlike most, I find teaching to be illuminating. I have
learned much while training you in our language.”

“Oh?”

“You approach our language and culture with an open mind and few preconceptions.
Your questions and mistakes as you grasp for understanding have led my own mind to
new insights,” explained Byovar.

“Speaking of questions…”

The male She’Har smiled faintly, “Yes?”

“Do your people have a written language?” asked Tyrion. “I have seen no sign of it.”

“We have little need to mark things, or to record knowledge in the ways your people
once did,” said Byovar, “
Despite this, w
e do have a system of writing, though it is seldom used.”

“Would you show me?”

“I doubt you can learn it in a few short weeks,” observed the She’Har.

“I find learning to be a worthy exercise, regardless of whether a final goal can be
obtained,” said Tyrion.

The male She’Har created a flat white plane, using nothing more than his aythar.
The end product was a square paper-like magical construct. He repeated the process,
giving the second one to Tyrion and showed him how to write upon it using his finger
as if it were a pen.

“Unlike your language, which has an essentially phonetic alphabet, Erollith is written
using a unique symbol for each word. This makes learning it rather difficult because
there are thousands of distinct symbols
,
and they
must be individually memorized…”

“Phonetic?” asked Tyrion.

“Your letters represent sounds. By putting them together you spell out what the word
sounds like. Based on that, you can also guess the spelling of new words when you
hear them, or create a spelling if none exists already,” lectured Byovar.

“Oh.”

“Erollith is different. We have a large but mostly fixed set of words. To add a
new word
,
the elders must decide on a new symbol to represent it
,
since we can’t just ‘spell it out’ according to
how it sounds
. Our history, and thus our language, is very old
,
however, so it is rare that we find the need to add a new word.”

Tyrion rubbed his chin, “I see. Can you tell me if this is a word in Erollith?”
Using the white pad
,
he sketched one of the symbols he had seen built from the hexagons in Lyralliantha’s
spellweaving. Because it was created from hexagons touching one another along single
facings and in a two dimensional plane
,
the symbol itself was composed of lines that branched off from one another in increments
of sixty degrees.

Byovar seemed surprised. “That is the word for ‘fiber’,” he replied in Barion. “Did
Lyralliantha teach it to you?”

“In a sense,” said Tyrion. “I saw it in
the spellwoven canopy over us, repeated many times.”

“Your vision must be very acute,” said Byovar in a neutral tone. “We generally only
know the finer composition of spellweaving in an academic sense rather than direct
experience.”

“Can you tell me the meaning of these symbols?” asked Tyrion. He began rapidly sketching
out the outlines of some of the other designs he had spotted in the spellweaving.

In the course of a few minutes he had identified the words for ‘water’, ‘join’, ‘leaf’,
‘opaque’, ‘green’, and many others.
The more Byovar explained
,
the more Tyrion realized that the symbols used had no special significance
,
other than being part of a general description of the object they were being used
to construct.

There’s nothing any more special to them than the word ‘light’ written on the rock
in my bag over there,
he observed mentally.
So why are they so damned impossible to break?

Tyrion had run out of questions
,
so Byovar returned to teaching him the written language in the manner he had originally
intended. “Before bombarding you with lots of word symbols to recognize
,
you should first understand the structure of our writing. In Barion you write from
left to right
,
and when you run out of room you move to a line below that, proceeding in the same
left to right direction. What you probably don’t know
,
is that once humans had many other written languages, some of which followed different
patterns.”

“Such as?”

“Some were written right to left, and others were written top to bottom with secondary
lines following to the left. Erollith however, does not follow any of those quadrilateral
conventions,” explained Byovar.

“Quad—what?”

“Quadrilateral,” repeated the She’Har. “It means ‘four sides’, but I’m referring
to the fact that most of your languages were designed with a
flat square
medium in mind. Your scripts were all created with the eventual intention of being
written on something
rectangular,
and they proceed in a linear fashion from beginning to end.”

Tyrion thought about this for a moment, mulling it over in his mind. “I’ll have to
accept your word on most of that, but it seems to make sense. Erollith doesn’t follow
a similar pattern?”

“Our written language is based on a hexagonal pattern, in a similar fashion to the
spellweaving that you seem to be able to read. The beginning is always the center
,
and the text may branch
away in more than one direction from that point. A truly complete discourse in Erollith
is time consuming to fully construct because it must include all six to be considered
complete,” lectured Byovar.

“Six directions? I’m not understanding. How would you relay a story in that fashion?”

“Many lesser writings only include two or four directional elements,” continued the
She’Har. “But all of our greater works must contain all six. Starting from your
central symbol, which is the main topic, you have t
he ‘future personal’ at the top;
to the right o
f that is the ‘past subjective’;
below that on the right yo
u have the ‘future subjective’;
th
e bottom is the ‘past personal’;
next to it on the bottom
left is the ‘future objective’;
and the top left is the ‘past objective’.”

As he spoke
,
Byovar sketched the elements on his ‘paper’ to illustrate what he was describing.
He began by drawing a hexagon in the center and t
hen adding six additional hexagons, one connected to each of the original’s six sides.
The central one he labeled ‘topic’
,
and the others were given the designators he had just named.