Through the room's rear open door, Ghassan barely made out someone upon his bed. Wynn's vampire lay still in the dark bedroom, though Ghassan did not know whether the undead actually slept. Chane had been injured in the conflict, although he bore no physical wounds. Wynn insisted they bring him back and that Ghassan get them all inside without detection. It had been tricky, not letting either of them know how the guards out front were suddenly gone from their post yet again.
Once Chane was put to bed and¦fro Wynn slumped upon the study's small couch, Ghassan had left them for a while. He had a more unpleasant task to face.
Now, as he closed the door, Wynn spoke up before he could offer an explanation of his whereabouts.
"You went to speak with High-Tower and Premin Sykion," she said, "about what happened tonight."
He sighed. "Yes, and I thought you would be asleep by now."
"Did they believe you?"
"Unfortunately, yes," he said, "though they have only my word… and yours. But we have broken more guild rules than I can name."
"What do you mean, 'unfortunately'?"
Ghassan did not want to explain, but it was better that she knew. "I would guess they have believed you all along."
The opened scroll began quivering in Wynn's hand.
"What you know," he said, "are things that no one outside our walls should ever learn."
Wynn stared up at him. She looked beaten down. In having been denied for too long, outrage flushed her olive-toned cheeks.
"They treated me…" she began, choking on her words, "like an imbecile, like an insane little child!"
"They could not afford the panic," he countered. "Or subsequent denial and denouncement of the guild, should others believe you—or learn what might be in those texts. Truth would not hold against the beliefs of many that the world has always been as it is."
"What about the captain?" she snapped. "He survived… he knows!"
Ghassan sighed again and shook his head. "True, he now faces a crisis of faith, but not as much as you assume. The history taught by his religion, so much like secular perspectives, is false… but the philosophical teachings of the Blessed Trinity of Sentience are still sound. If he can distinguish that, then he may realize he has not truly lost anything.
"But by his example, we should not be so forthright with those who do not wish to know, do not need to know. The guild is safe for the moment. Translation can continue in a more expedient fashion."
"Yes, the project," Wynn whispered spitefully, and lowered her head.
Ghassan still found her to be a puzzle. She knew far too much, yet always remained determined to do what was right, no matter the personal cost. At the same time, she did not really want to thrust the truth in everyone's face.
Wynn Hygeorht simply wanted acknowledgment from those who already knew. But she had received the exact opposite from the very people and way of life she cherished. It was stranger still that upon the edge of such dangerous times, Ghassan almost trusted in her judgment.
"You struggle over more than just the illusory blindness of your superiors," he said.
Wynn picked up her journal on the floor, the one in which she had scribed words from the scroll.
"This," she whispered, and held up the scroll as well. "I think you know—or suspect—more than you've said."
"It's no more clear to me than to you," he answered. "All poetic metaphor, simile, and symbolism."
And his instinct to silence her forever returned.
Even a rumored hint of such abominations as the wraith, and what it might represent, would create panic beyond control. Suspicion and paranoia would grow, along with heated denial and possibly open conflict between differing ideological factions. Ghassan had seen such things before within his homeland and the Suman Empire at large. But Wynn had served an essential purpose tonight. Perhaps that purpose was not yet completely fulfilled.
She opened the journal, scanned the scroll's copy page, and pointed to a brief string of ancient Sumanese, perhaps Iyindu and Pärpa'äsea. Her finger traced one haphazardly translated phrase.
"Can you guess at this at all?" she asked. "What is 'chair of a lord's song'?"
With a tired breath, Ghassan took the journal from her.
If Wynn's hasty strokes were accurate, the script indeed appeared to be Iyindu, both an old dialect and a writing system little used anymore in the empire. Fortunately it was not Pärpa'äsea, which was more obscure. But he did make out one error.
"You have the last of it wrong," he said. "It is not prepositional but an objective possessive adjective, a form not found in Numanese. The first word is not 'chair' but 'seat, so it would read…"
Ghassan paused, studying Wynn's attempt at translation, and then he looked down to the corresponding Iyindu characters. The word "maj'at" meant "seat," but the final character of Iyindu script had been doubled. Had Wynn copied it wrong as "maj'att"?
"Fine," Wynn said, "so what does 'seat of a lord's song' mean?"
"Seatt," il'Sänke whispered, adding the sharpened ending of the last letter.
Wynn straightened, craning her neck, but she could not see and so scrambled up to peer at her scroll notes.
"Seatt?" she repeated. "Like in 'Calm Seatt'… or Dhredze Seatt, the Dwarvish word for a fortified place of settlement?"
Ghassan frowned. "Possibly… but the other part of your translation needs correction as well. Iyindu pronunciation changes according to case usage, though the written form of words remains the same."
Wynn huffed in exasperation.
"You translated based on 'min'bâl'alu, " il'Sänke continued, "which is not just a song but an ululation of praise for a tribal leader. In this case, and declination, the spoken pronunciation would be "min'bä'alâle."
Wynn stiffened, as if in shock.
Ghassan wondered if she was all right. Before he asked, a breath escaped her with a near-voiceless question.
"Bäalâle Seatt?" she whispered.
Ghassan had no idea what the truncated reutterance meant.
The phrase kept rolling in Wynn's mind.
"Do you know this term?" Domin il'Sänke asked. "Something you have heard?"
Oh, yes, she'd heard it twice before.
She'd never seen it written, except when she recorded its syllables in Begaine symbols within her journals of the Farlands. Even then, she knew the first part of the term wasn't Dwarvish as she knew it. If il'Sänke had read that one brief mention in her journals, he wouldn't have remembered it among the stack she brought home.
The first time Wynn heard of Bäalâle Seatt was from Magiere.
They'd reached the glade prison of Leesil's mother in the Elven Territories, and Magiere lost control of her dhampir nature. Most Aged Father had somehow slipped his awareness through the forest and into the glade's trees. He witnessed everything. At the sight of Magiere, appearing so much like an undead, terror-driven memories surged upon the decrepit patriarch of the Anmaglâhk. Magiere lost her footing amid the fight and touched a tree. Through that contact she'd slipped into Most Aged Father's remembrance.
Lost in his memories, Magiere heard one brief passing mention of a Dwarvish term.
Most Aged Father, once called Sorhkafâré, had been a commander of allied forces and alive during the war of the Forgotten History. He received a report of the fall of one "Bäalâle Seatt," and that all the dwarves of that place perished, taking the Enemy's siege forces with them. But no one knew how or why.
Wynn peered at the scroll. Here was that place-name again, hinted at in the obscure hidden poem of an ancient undead.