Stalking Darkness

it, then examined the writing itself. “It’s old, four or five centuries at least. Poorly kept at first, though later carefully preserved. And the vellum is human or Aurënfaie skin, rather than kid.” He paused again, examining the stitching holes on the left edge. “These are still intact, showing that it was carefully removed from a book, rather than torn. It was already damaged by dampness, though. Judging by the color I’d say the page was steeped in poison after that, but that’s obviously been neutralized or we wouldn’t be handling it.”
    “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