The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [96]
Stephen wasn’t certain how many hours had passed when Ehan found him, but the glass dome above had long since gone dark, and he was working by lamplight at one of the large wooden tables on the lowest floor.
“The new day is upon us,” Ehan said. “Have you no need of sleep?”
“I’ve no time for it,” Stephen said. “If I really must be away from here by sunrise—”
“It might be sooner,” Ehan said. “Something’s happening down in the rewn. We’ve got a watch, but we’re not certain what it is. What are you about?”
“Trying to find our mountain,” Stephen said.
“I don’t suppose it’s simple enough as to be on the map?” Ehan asked.
Stephen shook his head wearily and smiled. He realized that despite everything, this was the happiest he had been in a long time. He wished it didn’t have to end.
“No,” he said. He put his finger on a large-scale modern map that showed the Midenlands and the Bairghs. “I’ve made a guess how far someone could ride in eighteen days from Wherthen,” he said. “The fratrex is right; the Bairghs are the only mountains that our ‘fastness’ could be in. But as you said, if there’s such a mountain as Vhelnoryganuz, it’s not marked here.”
“Maybe the name has changed over time,” Ehan suggested.
“Of course it has,” Stephen said, then realized he’d sounded a bit pompous.
“What I mean, is,“ he explained, “that Vhelnoryganuz is old Vadhiian, the language of the Black Jester’s kingdom. It means ‘Traitorous Queen.’ Vadhiian isn’t spoken anymore, so the name would have been corrupted.”
“But it’s just a name; you don’t have to know what it means to keep repeating it or teach it to your children. Why would it change? I mean, I can understand if it was renamed…”
“I’ll give you a for instance,” Stephen said. “The Hegemony built a bridge across a river in the King’s Forest and called it the Pontro Oltiumo, which means ‘the farthest bridge’ because at the time it was on the frontier, the bridge most distant from z’Irbina. After a while, the name got transferred to the river itself but was shortened to Oltiumo. When new people settled there, speaking Old Oostish, they started calling it the Ald Thiub, ‘old thief’—because oltiumo sounded sort of like that the way they pronounced it—which the Virgenyan settlers in turn corrupted into Owl Tomb, which is what it’s called to this day.
“So a mouthful like Vhelnoryganuz easily could have ended up as, I don’t know, Fell Norrick, or something like that. But I can’t find anything on the map that looks like a simple corruption.”
“I see,” Ehan said. But he seemed distracted.
“So the next thing I thought of is that maybe the mountain is still called ‘Traitorous Queen,’ but in the current language of the area; that happens sometimes, though that’s a weird name for a mountain.”
“Not really,” Ehan said. “In the north we often refer to mountains as kings or queens, and one that claimed the lives of many travelers might be referred to as traitorous. What’s spoken in the Bairghs?”
“Dialects related to Hanzish, Almannish, and Vhilatautan. But to make matters more difficult, this map is based on one made during the Lierish regency.”
“So you’re stuck.”
Stephen smiled wickedly.
“Oh, then you’ve figured it out,” Ehan amended, starting to sound impatient.
“Well,” Stephen said, “it occurred to me that Vadhiian was never spoken in the Bairghs, so the name we have for the mountain is already a Vadhiian interpretation of a probably Vhilatautan name. Once I started thinking that way, I pulled out the lexicon of Tautish and started comparing.
“Vhelnoryganuz in this case might be a mistranslation of Velnoiraganas, which in old Vhilatautish would mean something like ‘Witchhorn.’”
“And is there a Witchhorn in the Bairghs?”
Stephen put his finger on the map next to the drawing of a mountain with an odd shape,