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With that he turned and left, and Wy
Wy
She quickly ate her own meal, pocketing the roll for later, and shouldered her satchel once more.
"Where am I to study the translations?" she asked.
Tärpodious grunted and gestured to the archway behind himself. "In there."
Wy
There were few shelves in the small antechamber. It was probably an old storage room turned into a temporary holding place for material waiting to be reshelved. Dust trails on the floor suggested the shelves had been recently moved. The room now contained a table for her special workspace. The table had been placed in a direct sight line with the room's doorless opening.
Tärpodious had been told to watch over her.
Why did Sykion and High-Tower always have to paint her as untrustworthy? But the arrangement was better than none—and all she pla
"Thank you," she said politely, and stepped into her prepared space.
Four heavy stacks of scribed sheets lay upon the table, some bound and some not. Beside them rested a large makeshift book, laced together with temporary waxed string—the codex. Forgetting hurt pride, Wy
"Come."
Whether Chap's daughter understood or not, she trotted in, sniffing the floor and sca
"Stay in here with me," Wy
The female cocked her head, whined once, and went back to sniffing about.
"Come here," Wy
The majay-hì didn't look at her.
Master Tärpodious glanced over his shoulder, watching with his lips pressed tightly together in disapproval. Wy
Chap's young daughter hadn't traveled as her father had. Likely she didn't understand spoken words, let alone human tongues. But perhaps she'd heard a little of the an'Cróan dialect, enough to understand a few basic words—if she chose to.
Wy
The female craned her head around, and then sneezed. Snorting to clear her nose of dust, she wandered about the room, but finally settled beside the chair.
With a long exhale, Wy
Some sheets were bound in thin volumes of hardened cloth covers. It was easy to discern that these were complete sections, perhaps whole chapters, kept together because they related to a particular text. But others were merely neat, loose collections awaiting further translation or transcribed passages. Wy
Translation had been ongoing for half a year. A good deal of work had been accomplished from the look of things, but Wy
But which ones were they?
And more important, she had to be able to cross-reference which pages existed in the codex but weren't present on the table—as the murderer had taken them. These would be the pages she needed to examine, and she wouldn't receive an ounce of guidance from her superiors.
She opened the codex, flipped to its rearmost pages, and breathed in relief. The record of scheduled work had been kept intact, all the way to the project's begi
Cathology was the second smallest of the orders, next to metaology. Of course High-Tower's name appeared time and again, as well as two others. But there were also domins and masters from the other orders, as needed. Ghassan il'Sänke appeared infrequently. It seemed even he, as an outsider, had seen only a minimum of the work.
Wy
She didn't know how her superiors had tabulated the originals, so she checked the reference against the codex's schedule of completed work. This thin volume had its last addition made on the fourth of Billiagyth—Leaf's Shower—the last third of autumn by the elven calendar used throughout the region. And that was within the present moon.
Taking up loose pages, Wy
Both were scripted in the Begaine syllabary, but the left column represented the original language, while the right was a translation into Numanese. Her estimate of how much work had been completed had just been cut in half again.
Many passages didn't make sense, for only bits and pieces had been finished. In some she found strings of dots between the syllabic symbols, which indicated the number of words that remained unreadable or untranslatable from the original. There were also long strokes across entire columns for anyplace in a text that was too faded or worn to count words. And there were margin notes wherever a readable word or phrase had defied translation so far.
Yet the passages before her clearly held information regarding a war—or rather, battles fought in locations she'd never heard of. She struggled through broken terminology and gained a sense that different sections, further separated by blank lines, were written from the perspective of differing authors. But one dimension of content remained constant.
Details, such as numbers of combatants lost or territory taken or estimation of enemy forces slaughtered, were related as cold facts in past tense. As if death and suffering were irrelevant to those who recorded it long ago. The countless dead were of no more consequence than an itemized account of possessions, of no personal value in being lost.
Taken as a whole, in quick estimate, the numbers were staggering… unbelievable.
Wy
How had her superiors decided which pages to translate first? By sampled content topic? By estimated order in which they'd been written?
She picked up another collection of pages, looking for translator's notes on the text's internal chronology. But even strange dates mentioned were noted as vague or approximate and without correlation. In most cases a time reference wasn't present at all, leaving only a guess concerning the chronology of how one text might fit among the others.
Wy