"Quite so."
Oblivious now to everything but the task at hand, Seregil tugged absently at a strand of hair.
"Let's see. The writing is Asuit Old Style and it's written in that language, which originated with the hill people north of Plenimar. From that we can infer that our author was either from that region or a scholar of languages."
"As you are, dear boy. I assume you can read it?"
"Hmm—yes. Looks like the ravings of a mad prophet. Very poetic, though. "Watch with me, beloved, as demons strip the fruit from the vine." Then something about horses—and "The golden flame is married with darkness. The Beautiful One steps forth to caress the bones of the house " No, that's not right. It's "the bones of the world.""
Moving to the table, he pulled a lamp closer.
"Yes. I thought it was just a few errors with the accent marks, but it isn't. There's a cipher here."
Nysander passed him a wax writing tablet and a stylus. "Care to try it?"
Scanning back through the document, Seregil found sixteen words with misplaced accents. Listing only the wrongly accented letters, he came up with twenty-nine.
Frowning, he tapped the stylus against his chin, "This is a bitch of a thing."
"More difficult than you know," said Nysander. "It took my master Arkoniel and myself over a year to discover the key. Mind you, we were working on other things at the time."
Seregil tossed aside the stylus with a groan.
"You mean to tell me you've broken this already?"
"Oh, yes. That is not the task, you see. But I knew that you would prefer to work with the original and draw your own conclusions."
"So how does it work?"
Joining him at the table, Nysander turned the wax tablet over and began to write rapidly. "To begin with, the accented letters come out to nonsense, a fact it took a discouragingly long time to discover. The key is a combination of syllabification and case. As you know, Old Asuit is an inflected language with five cases. However, only three-the nominative, dative, and genitive—are used for the cipher. For instance, look at the words making up the phrase 'of the world."»
Seregil nodded thoughtfully, muttering to himself, "Yes, it was that misplaced accent that threw me. It should be over the second vowel of the last syllable, not the first."
"Correct. As 'world' is in the genitive case and the misplaced accent appears in the antepenultimate syllable, you use the last letter of that word. If it occurs in the same case but on the second, or penultimate, syllable, then you use the first."
Seregil looked up and grinned. "I didn't know you were such an accomplished grammarian."
Nysander allowed himself a pleased wink. "One learns a thing or two over the centuries. It is truly an exquisite system, and one fairly secure from inadvertent detection. In the nominative case, an erroneous accent over the antepenult indicates that you take the last letter of the word immediately following the one wrongly accented, and so forth. In the dative case only the accents over the penult have any significance. The upshot of it all is that you come out with just fifteen letters. Properly arranged—keep your eyes on the writing now—properly arranged they spell out 'argucth chthon hrig.""
"Sounds like you're getting ready to spit—" Seregil began, but the words died in his throat as the writing on the page swirled into motion. After a few seconds it disappeared entirely, leaving in its place a circular design resembling an eight-pointed star that covered most of the page.
"A magical palimpsest!" he gasped.
"Precisely. But look more closely."
Tilting the vellum closer to the lamp, Seregil let out a low whistle; the entire design was made up of the finest calligraphic writing. "Our mad prophet must have written this with a hummingbird's quill."
"Can you read it?"
"I don't know. It's so cramped. The script is Konic, used by the court scribes in the time of the early Hierophants, but the language is different, as if the writer wanted to approximate the sounds of one language with the alphabet of another. Yes, that's exactly what he was doing, the clever old bastard. So, attacking it phonetically—"
Muttering under his breath, Seregil slowly worked his way through the tangled writing. Half an hour later he looked up with a triumphant grin. "Pure Dravnian! Nysander, it's got to be Dravnian."
"Dravnian?"
"The Dravnians are a tribal people scattered through the glacial valleys of the Ashek Range, north of Aurenen. I haven't been up there since I was a boy, but I've studied the language. Great ones for sagas and legends, those Dravnians. They have no writing themselves, but this captures the sound of it. This fellow was certainly a student of obscure tongues. Once you untangle all this mess, it's just the same few words written over and over again to form the design. Written in blood, too, by the way and probably his own if he was loony enough to create something like this."
"Perhaps," Nysander broke in. "But can you make out what it says?"
Seregil glanced up at him, then let out a crow of triumph. "Ah ha! So that's what this is all about. You can't read it!"
Nysander affected a pained look. "I would remind you of the oaths you have given—"
Seregil held up a hand, grinning smugly. "I know, I know. But after all your restrictions and secrecy, I think I've earned the right to gloat a little. All it says is, "Stone within ice within stone within ice. Horns of crystal beneath horns of stone." Or vice versa. There's no way of telling which is meant to be the first line. Why he would go to such extremes to hide anything as obscure as this is beyond me, though."
"Not at all, not at all!" Nysander clapped Seregil on the shoulder, then began pacing excitedly. "The palimpsest begins in Asuit Old Style, an archaic language of Plenimar, which predates the Hierophantic settlements. The seemingly meaningless hidden phrase "argucth chthon hrig" operates as the key word to the hidden writing. This, in turn, is composed in the alphabet of the Hierophantic court, based at that period on the island of Kouros, yet in the language of an obscure tribe of the southern mountains across the Osiat Sea near Aurenen. I had reason to suspect as much but you, dear boy, have provided the final clues. What an amazing document!"
Seregil, meanwhile, had been doing some further pondering of his own. "The Dravnian tribes keep to the highest valleys of the Ashek Range, building their villages along the edges of the ice fields. "Stone within ice within stone within ice." And the horns of stone part reminds me of a story the mountain traders used to tell, something about a place up there where demons dance across the snow to drink the blood of the living. It was called the Horned Valley."
Nysander halted in front of Seregil, grinning broadly. "You have a mind like a magpie's nest, dear boy! I never know what odd bit of treasure will tumble from it next."
"If the Homed Valley really exists, then all this" — Seregil tapped the stained vellum—"it's not just some convoluted riddle. It's a map."
"And perhaps not the only one," said Nysander. "According to recent intelligence from Plenimar, several expeditionary forces have been dispatched west toward the Strait of Bal. We could not imagine what they were up to, but the Ashek peninsula lies in that direction."
"At this time of year?" Seregil shook his head.
Crossing the Bal meant making for the southern rim of the Osiat Sea, a place of dangerous shoals and forbidding coastlines in the best of weather. In the winter it would be worse than treacherous. "So whatever this "stone within ice" thing is, the Plenimarans want it pretty badly. And I take it you don't mean for them to get it?"