Tyrion stopped, putting the cittern aside and letting his fingers rest.
“Wait,” said Lyralliantha. “What was that, at the end?”
“Nothing.”
“No there was something there,” she insisted. “You were returning, filled with a bleak apathy, and something happened. Why did you stop?”
“I was tired,” he lied. In truth he didn’t want to share his last moment with Kate. It was too private, too precious, and ultimately, too painful.
“Our bargain was that you would share your memories with me,” she stated. “Are you reneging on our deal?”
Tyrion struggled to find a good response, “No—I just…” After a moment he continued, “I’m just tired. I will show you the rest, but not right now. It’s too much.”
A look of sympathy passed over her normally still features, “You experienced more in a few short days, than I have felt in all the years I have been alive. I will wait.”
Well, you’re only nine, what do you expect? He kept the observation to himself, though. “Thank you.”
She had stepped away and stood a few feet apart from him now. “I will take my leave of you, but I have a question before I go.”
“What is it?”
Moving forward she touched the spellwoven slave collar, “If this were gone, if you were free, what would you do?”
His mind went blank. The possibility had been so remote he hadn’t dared to consider it before. “I’m not sure.”
“You could return,” she suggested. “Kill the one who stands in your way, and take the red-haired woman as your mate.”
“Kate?” he looked askance at her. “Her husband is my friend, and besides, if I killed him, she would never forgive me.”
“Is forgiveness a necessity?”
It was at moments like this that he realized how utterly alien the She’Har perspective was. “She wouldn’t love me if I killed the people she loved to get her. It doesn’t work like that.”
“She wouldn’t have to know,” said Lyralliantha. “She cannot perceive aythar. You could kill him subtly and then take his place later. Would you be happy then?”
It was a cold blooded thought, and it might have chilled Tyrion more if it hadn’t crossed his mind already. I’m almost as bad as they are. He gave her the answer he had given himself, “If he were a stranger, I might consider such a thing, but Seth is my friend. I love him as well. I cannot hurt him.”
“Why not?”
It took him a moment to formulate an appropriate reply. “Friendship, and love…” he began, “… are unifying emotions. They bind you to others in such a way that they are no longer ‘other’; they are a part of your ‘self’. If you hurt a friend, you hurt yourself.”
“You believe that if you killed your friend you would also die?” The look on her face made it clear what she thought of such a notion.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Certainly not.”
“Then this friendship of yours is simply a self-delusion,” she countered, “an imaginary construction.”
“Surely you can understand,” said Tyrion. “The She’Har do not kill one another arbitrarily. You work together to provide for everyone.”
“You misunderstand us,” she corrected. “Before using humans, we did kill one another, for entertainment and to select for fitness. We work together for survival. If one must be sacrificed, for the good of the grove, we do so without regret. This female you desire, if we had such strong attractions, such as this ‘love’ you experience, we would kill one another for its sake.”
“Well, humans do sometimes kill one another over a lover,” agreed Tyrion, “but to kill a friend for such a thing is self-defeating. Friendship and love may be self-delusions, as you called them, but they are all the more meaningful because of that. Value, quality, meaning, those things are only found in the impermanent, the temporary, and the intangible; things that don’t exist physically or do not last for long. The solid, the enduring—the permanent things of our world…” he illustrated by knocking on the wood beneath him, “…those things are the least valuable, because they endure. That’s why the beauty of a flower is so cherished, because it only lasts for a short time. That is exactly why love is of such inestimable value. We treasure it because it is intangible and fleeting, much like our lives.”
“You have become a poet, Tyrion,” she noted, “but you still describe a mental illness.”
“Then why do you bargain with me to feel my emotions?” he returned pointedly. “Why do you listen to my music?”
A flicker of something passed over her face, and she moved away, physically withdrawing from the conversation. “I do not know,” she answered. She continued more softly, “Perhaps your madness is contagious.” And then she was gone.
Chapter 45
Tyrion awoke the next morning fresh and newly energized. His mind felt clear, and he knew that whatever had passed during his dreams, it was ready to reapply itself to the problem of dealing with She’Har spellweaving.
Eating the last of his travel bread for breakfast, he examined the spellwoven canopy that sheltered his platform. It remained just as it had been the last time he looked; fantastically intricate all the way down to the smallest level he could perceive, where it became a series of six-sided figures all linked together.
Experimenting, he tried to create hexagonal figures of his own at that scale, but although he could ‘see’ them in his magesight, his fine control of aythar was nowhere close to being able to form things so tiny.
Just because theirs are so small, doesn’t mean mine have to be.
Trying again, he created his own hexagons. That was easy enough for him, after all the practice he’d had creating shapes for the past few years, and he made them each the size of his palm, so that he could observe them easily.
Unfortunately, they behaved just like all his normal constructs; as soon as he stopped supplying aythar, they vanished. He tried drawing one into the wood beneath his feet. It lasted longer after he removed his attention, waning gradually, but it still lost its potency. So a physical or visible symbol can retain power for a period of time, but it still isn’t permanent.
Something was tickling the back of his mind, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
He returned his focus to the symbol he had scratched into the wood. It still held a residual amount of aythar. Symbols and words, lines and shapes, all of them can augment and focus power more effectively. The memory of his fight with Syllerond came to him then, reminding him of the moment he had commanded his enemy to ‘burn’. His power had been far more potent then, than he had expected.
At the time he had meant to explore the idea, but he had never gotten around to it. He certainly had time now, though. Deciding to start small, he created a luminescent sphere of pure blue light. He first made it using only thought, and then he repeated the operation while giving an audible command, “Light!”
His first globe winked out as soon as he ceased concentrating on it, but the second one was not only brighter, but it persisted when he turned his attention away, fading slowly. After several more attempts, he was pretty sure he could create a globe that would last for hours, if he put enough power into it initially.
What if I combine spoken words with written symbols?
He couldn’t find anything suitable to work on, so he descended to the ground below and searched until he found a rock almost the size of his fist. Focusing his aythar into a fine point, he etched the word ‘light’ upon it and then held it up and sent his power into it. “Light!” he said firmly as he imagined what he desired.
Sure enough the stone began to glow with a brilliant light. The real question was how long it would last. He waited for several minutes, but he could still detect no difference in its brightness.
“This might take a while,” he told himself before pocketing the stone. It glowed brightly even through the fabric of his trousers.
That would make for an interesting icebreaker at parties
, he thought, looking down at the glowing bulge in his pocket.
When he returned to ‘his’ platform, he found Byovar had just arrived. Having been gone a week he hadn’t been sure if the She’Har would show up to continue the language lessons. Lyralliantha joined them a minute later.
“I’m surprised we are continuing,” said Tyrion. “It seems a waste of your time.” He was referring to his expected death at the end of the month.
“It was at her request,” said Byovar in his flawless, unaccented Barion. “It is not a painful task. You have been a good student—for a human.”
Tyrion looked the She’Har male up and down and replied in his less than perfect Erollith, “Well, you’ve been a good teacher—for a She’Har.” He meant it as a joke, but he didn’t expect the She’Har to laugh. Nor would he take offense; the She’Har were insensitive in more than one way. While they frequently said things that would be considered highly rude or downright insulting in human society, they were also difficult to offend. A truthful statement would almost never be considered insulting among their kind.
His jest did spark one insight as he reviewed it a second later. Among the She’Har very little teaching needed to be done. Most knowledge was imparted while they were being grown, so the art of teaching was probably not well refined in their society. Some, such as lore-wardens like Thillmarius, possessed far greater knowledge, but even that was passed down from the trees via the loshti. Actual person to person instruction was very rare for them.
“We have few teacher, but Byovar is one of our best,” said Lyralliantha, taking Tyrion’s statement as a compliment. “He is an oddity among our people.”
“Some would say the same of you,” responded Byovar.
Lyralliantha inclined her head, acknowledging his remark before addressing Tyrion again. “I called Byovar to continue, since you seem determined to live.”
“Please forgive me if my aspiration is an inconvenience for you,” said Tyrion, which caused Byovar to chuckle. Certain types of humor did seem to appeal to them, though he had trouble predicting what they might find funny.
“Not at all,” said Byovar. “Unlike most, I find teaching to be illuminating. I have learned much while training you in our language.”
“Oh?”
“You approach our language and culture with an open mind and few preconceptions. Your questions and mistakes as you grasp for understanding have led my own mind to new insights,” explained Byovar.
“Speaking of questions…”
The male She’Har smiled faintly, “Yes?”
“Do your people have a written language?” asked Tyrion. “I have seen no sign of it.”
“We have little need to mark things, or to record knowledge in the ways your people once did,” said Byovar, “Despite this, we do have a system of writing, though it is seldom used.”
“Would you show me?”
“I doubt you can learn it in a few short weeks,” observed the She’Har.
“I find learning to be a worthy exercise, regardless of whether a final goal can be obtained,” said Tyrion.
The male She’Har created a flat white plane, using nothing more than his aythar. The end product was a square paper-like magical construct. He repeated the process, giving the second one to Tyrion and showed him how to write upon it using his finger as if it were a pen.
“Unlike your language, which has an essentially phonetic alphabet, Erollith is written using a unique symbol for each word. This makes learning it rather difficult because there are thousands of distinct symbols, and they must be individually memorized…”
“Phonetic?” asked Tyrion.
“Your letters represent sounds. By putting them together you spell out what the word sounds like. Based on that, you can also guess the spelling of new words when you hear them, or create a spelling if none exists already,” lectured Byovar.
“Oh.”
“Erollith is different. We have a large but mostly fixed set of words. To add a new word, the elders must decide on a new symbol to represent it, since we can’t just ‘spell it out’ according to how it sounds. Our history, and thus our language, is very old, however, so it is rare that we find the need to add a new word.”
Tyrion rubbed his chin, “I see. Can you tell me if this is a word in Erollith?” Using the white pad, he sketched one of the symbols he had seen built from the hexagons in Lyralliantha’s spellweaving. Because it was created from hexagons touching one another along single facings and in a two dimensional plane, the symbol itself was composed of lines that branched off from one another in increments of sixty degrees.
Byovar seemed surprised. “That is the word for ‘fiber’,” he replied in Barion. “Did Lyralliantha teach it to you?”
“In a sense,” said Tyrion. “I saw it in the spellwoven canopy over us, repeated many times.”
“Your vision must be very acute,” said Byovar in a neutral tone. “We generally only know the finer composition of spellweaving in an academic sense rather than direct experience.”
“Can you tell me the meaning of these symbols?” asked Tyrion. He began rapidly sketching out the outlines of some of the other designs he had spotted in the spellweaving.
In the course of a few minutes he had identified the words for ‘water’, ‘join’, ‘leaf’, ‘opaque’, ‘green’, and many others. The more Byovar explained, the more Tyrion realized that the symbols used had no special significance, other than being part of a general description of the object they were being used to construct.
There’s nothing any more special to them than the word ‘light’ written on the rock in my bag over there, he observed mentally. So why are they so damned impossible to break?
Tyrion had run out of questions, so Byovar returned to teaching him the written language in the manner he had originally intended. “Before bombarding you with lots of word symbols to recognize, you should first understand the structure of our writing. In Barion you write from left to right, and when you run out of room you move to a line below that, proceeding in the same left to right direction. What you probably don’t know, is that once humans had many other written languages, some of which followed different patterns.”
“Such as?”
“Some were written right to left, and others were written top to bottom with secondary lines following to the left. Erollith however, does not follow any of those quadrilateral conventions,” explained Byovar.
“Quad—what?”
“Quadrilateral,” repeated the She’Har. “It means ‘four sides’, but I’m referring to the fact that most of your languages were designed with a flat square medium in mind. Your scripts were all created with the eventual intention of being written on something rectangular, and they proceed in a linear fashion from beginning to end.”
Tyrion thought about this for a moment, mulling it over in his mind. “I’ll have to accept your word on most of that, but it seems to make sense. Erollith doesn’t follow a similar pattern?”
“Our written language is based on a hexagonal pattern, in a similar fashion to the spellweaving that you seem to be able to read. The beginning is always the center, and the text may branch away in more than one direction from that point. A truly complete discourse in Erollith is time consuming to fully construct because it must include all six to be considered complete,” lectured Byovar.
“Six directions? I’m not understanding. How would you relay a story in that fashion?”
“Many lesser writings only include two or four directional elements,” continued the She’Har. “But all of our greater works must contain all six. Starting from your central symbol, which is the main topic, you have the ‘future personal’ at the top; to the right of that is the ‘past subjective’; below that on the right you have the ‘future subjective’; the bottom is the ‘past personal’; next to it on the bottom left is the ‘future objective’; and the top left is the ‘past objective’.”
As he spoke, Byovar sketched the elements on his ‘paper’ to
illustrate what he was describing. He began by drawing a hexagon in the center and then adding six additional hexagons, one connected to each of the original’s six sides. The central one he labeled ‘topic’, and the others were given the designators he had just named.
“Our simplest stories would include nothing but a single line of characters proceeding from the center and moving upward along the ‘future personal’ axis. This is the form that most verbal conversations follow, although when discussing scholarly matters we tend to speak along the past to the ‘future objective’ axis, while matters of art follow the subjective axis,” explained Byovar.
Tyrion’s head was spinning. “That’s confusing on an entirely new scale. Why do you need three different past to future lines?”
“A proper narrative includes all pertinent information. The personal axis provides information about the narrator, both before, during and in the future discussed. The objective axis provides factual information historically and in the predicted future while the subjective axis provides more subjective information in the same manner, indicating artistic or emotional elements that may pertain to the topic, both in the past and moving toward the future.”
“How in the hell could anyone write something like that?”
Byovar smiled. “Most of our writers are trees, Tyrion. They do not ‘write’ in the conventional sense. They grow their wisdom into three dimensional sculptures for us to observe. The three past tenses all decline from the center when written, while the three future ones rise on an incline. The past directions are called the three ‘roots’ while the three future ones are called ‘branches’.”
“You’re starting to make my head hurt,” replied Tyrion.
“It gets better,” said Byovar. “As a ‘writing’ progresses, it may ‘branch’ at later points, beginning new stories within the story. As a rule, though, future branches may only branch into more future branches inclining upward, and root divisions may only split into more past roots declining downward.”