The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [95]
Stephen hadn’t been born a poor man. His family, as he had once been wont to proclaim, were the Cape Chavel Dariges. His father’s estate was an old one, situated on rambling sea-chewed bluffs above the Bay of Ringmere and built of the same tawny stone. The oldest rooms had been part of a keep, though only a few of the original curving walls remained. The main house boasted fifteen rooms, with several attached cottages, barns, and outbuildings. The family raised horses, but most of the income came from owning farmland, waterfront, and boats.
His father’s scriftorium was considered a good one for a private collection. He had nine books; Stephen knew them all by heart. Morris Top, a league away and the most sizable town in the attish, had a scriftorium with fifteen books, and that was held by the Church.
The college at Ralegh, by far the largest university in Virgenya, possessed a grand total of fifty-eight scrolls, tablets, and bound books.
Here, Stephen stood inside a round tower containing thousands of books. It rose in four levels, with only the narrowest walkspaces at each story. Ladders bridged the vertical distances; books were moved up and down by means of baskets, rope, and winches.
Things had changed since the last time he’d been there. Before, it had bustled with monks copying, reading, annotating, studying. Now, besides himself, there was one lone monk who was frantically packing scrolls into oiled leather cases. The fellow waved but went quickly back to his work.
Stephen didn’t recognize him, anyway.
His natural awe faded as the situation reasserted itself. Where to start? He felt overwhelmed.
Well, the Casti Noibhi was an obvious choice. He found it on the second tier and, leaning against the rail, thumbed through its pressed linen pages. He quickly found the epistle fragments written in what was supposed to be the original encrypted form. He saw right away that the symbols, as he had suspected, were mostly from the old Virgenyan script with admixtures of Thiuda and early Vitellian. That was more by way of confirming his guess than anything else.
Nodding, he made his way to another section and selected a scroll of funeral inscriptions and elegiac formulae from Virgenya. The scroll itself was quite new, but the inscriptions had been copied from carved stones up to two thousand years old.
The epistle’s cipher likely was built around one of the languages from the time of the insurrection. The major ones were ancient Vitellian, Thiuda, Old Cavari, and Old Virgenyan. From those four languages were descended most of the tongues spoken in the world Stephen knew.
But there were other languages with different lineages. Most were far away; the Skasloi had ruled lands beyond the seas, and their slaves had spoken languages very different from those in Crotheny. Those wouldn’t have figured into the revolt here. There was also the slave cant, of which later scholarship knew almost nothing. Stephen rather doubted that his ancestors would have used that as their secret language, since the Skasloi themselves had had a hand in inventing it.
There were also Yeszik, Vhilatautan, and Yaohan. Yeszik and Vhilatautan had descendants spoken in Vestrana and the Iutin and Bairgh mountains, and a few tribes, like that of Ehawk, spoke Yaohan languages.
He stopped. Ehawk.
Stephen realized with a flash of guilt that he had forgotten him. What had happened to the boy? One moment he had been there, gripping his arm, and the next…
He would ask the fratrex to inquire with the slinders. It was all he could do. He should have done it already, but there was so much to do, so little time.
Right.
The more obscure the language, the better code it made, all on its own. So he needed what lexicons he could find concerning all the mother tongues. Indeed, his intended destination was supposed to be in the Bairghs; that meant some knowledge of the Vhilatautan daughter languages might also be useful.
Immediately he set about finding those tomes. When he had lowered them by basket to the floor,