The Black Script
Keener heard it first. With a huff, the hound raised his head and pricked his ears towards the door, waiting for the sound to come again. After a moment, a soft breeze passed about the room, rustling the charts and papers that covered almost every surface. The candleflames turned and bent as one, the shadows lengthened on the high stone ceiling, and the blazing hearth seemed to dim for a moment. The old man at his workbench did not look up, his eyes fixed on the yellowed parchment beneath the optical glass, its faded script descending in strands, letter-by-letter, like the tracings of dew on a leaf.
“Who is it?” asked Alcidimus and made a small adjustment to the glass. As he did, the script twisted and swam before resolving again. At this magnification, even his waning sight could make out the edge of each brushstroke, where the once-soft fibres had absorbed the long-dried ink. It took him but a moment to find his place. For nearly a fortnight now he had studied the parchment, pored over every part of it ten dozen times or more, examined every curve and serif, each ridge, crease and fold, until it seemed to him like the scape of some vanished land. And yet, for all his efforts, he had been unable to discern the barest inkling of its meaning.
Keener did not answer but remained with head aloft, poised and listening. From a great distance there came at last the muffled sound of a door being pushed shut, followed by the echo of footsteps. Far below in the south transept, beneath the Window of Wisdom now dimmed and pale, someone was beginning the long climb to the chambers of the Master Reader.
Less than an hour before, Alcidimus had watched from his balcony as the sun set between the Towers of Affinity and Remembrance, its golden light matching the honey-coloured stone of their conjuratories and grotesques, the spires of the colleges like a forest below, Relvaux, the great imperial capital, sprawling beyond. The evening sky lay reflected in the distant waters of Lake Faen and for a long moment there were two suns, arcing slowly towards one another, filling the world with light. And then the moment passed and the sun continued its solitary descent towards the city. Some three score years Alcidimus had been a scholar in this place and still the sight of it never ceased to move him. But with the passing seasons, his strength had ebbed and the climb to his chambers seemed longer with every step until the very thought of leaving and returning made him weary. Of late, it seemed that only the parchment and its mysteries drew him on.
The footsteps grew louder. Who is it, he wondered, that visits at this hour? The Great Library would be empty now, the fellows and students gathering for dinner in Hall like starlings settling in a tree. His own meal had already been brought to him with a minimum of ceremony by Gundred earlier; she would not return until the morrow. Sometime after dinner but before the third nightbell, Summer would look in to tidy his papers and pester him with questions about the day’s work. She would see the cold onion soup untouched on the side table and the mutton bones next to Keener’s basket and scold him for being a foolish old man. But the steps were too slow and too heavy to be Summer's, and the hour too early.
Vasqo, he realized.
In the early years, Vasqo had often arrived without warning, asking Alcidimus to inspect whatever fresh curiosity he’d brought back from his latest expedition: an obsidian glyphstone recovered from a shipwreck off the coast of Kholukkhel; oracle-bones from a tomb in the foothills of the Abbra-Alph. Look, here, at the inscription, Vasqo would murmur, his face bright with mazement, note the curious markings along its edge. Before long, it became something of a game between them: Vasqo would produce some article from his travels and wager a bottle of good wine that Alcidimus could not name its provenance. It pleased him that he rarely required a third guess and had never needed a fourth.
But that was all long ago. As time went by, Vasqo’s endeavours bought him not only renown but also the offer of a position at court; one which – to Alcidimus’s surprise – Vasqo accepted. After that, the Master Reader saw much less of his friend and former pupil. The word among the Fellows was that Vasqo’s star had risen swiftly in the imperial firmament but, when the younger man did visit, he did not speak of his work and Alcidimus did not ask. Instead, they would talk long into the evening about the study of languages, rival philosophies, academic quarrels, and college gossip. He wondered privately if Vasqo did not seem grave, as though affected by some loss, but again he did not pry for it seemed to him that his friend welcomed the distraction. It is Lord Vasqo now, Alcidimus reminded himself with a smile, for his office is too lofty to be held by a commoner.
As the years passed, the emperor’s demands on Vasqo’s time grew and his visits became fewer and farther apart. Then, nearly a fortnight ago, the younger man arrived at his door and Alcidimus marked the change at once. With a laugh, Vasqo produced from his cloak a bottle of wine that he had smuggled in past the librarians, together with an engraved leather case. “A new mystery for you!” he’d cried and thrust the case into Alcidimus’s hands. “Better than any I have brought you before.” At first glance, the parchment within had appeared blank save for a clutter of tiny red letters on its left edge, garbled and seemingly meaningless. Peering closer, he could just made out the writer’s mark: A red cockatrice vigilant. The mark of Kleodius. An undiscovered Kleodius cipher would be remarkable enough, but Vasqo bade him hold the paper up to the light. At once, Alcidimus saw that its surface was crowded with columns of delicate script, all written in a black ink that had become almost transparent with age. Much too old, he realised, to have been written by Kleodius. Most bewildering, it was written in a language entirely unknown to him.
In an instant, everything that he knew was cast into disarray. Alcidimus was learned in a half-dozen languages and could read, albeit haltingly, some two dozen more, yet the black script was unlike anything he had seen before; something both ancient and yet, in all his years of experience, utterly new. In that moment of realisation, his curiosity had flared like a torch revealing a great cave of treasures. How was it possible, he wondered, that he had lived so long in pursuit of the Word in all its mutable forms, only to discover this now, in the twilight of his studies? Already a horde of questions sprang to Alcidimus’s lips but his friend could not tarry. He left the parchment and the wine and promised that they would toast its successful translation on his return.
“One month,” Vasqo had said. More time, thought Alcidimus as the footsteps drew closer. I should have asked for more time. But even if I had, he would not have waited. Damn his impatience.
Alcidimus had started with the red script, for Kleodius’s story was one he knew well. Some two hundred years ago in the reign of Beophulous the Wise, Kleodius was famous for three things: his talent for devising impenetrable ciphers, his unparalleled knowledge of the ancient mysteries and his workshop named Trigestal. At the height of his powers, however, Kleodius had disappeared, along with all his works. His servants scattered, Trigestal fell into ruin, and his lands were claimed by the Auspex in neighbouring Cardellia. Rumours persisted that he had built another workshop elsewhere but no trace of it was ever found. As for Kleodius himself, he was never heard of again, the passing years adding lustre to the mystery of his disappearance. In his younger days, Vasqo had sometimes spoken of searching for the second workshop but Alcidimus had no idea he yet pursued it after all this time.
As it was, the red script had proved, if not straightforward exactly, then at least amenable to methodical enquiry. A previously unknown cipher by Kleodius might have taken any other scholar weeks, even months to unravel but Alcidimus, who’d made extensive study of Kleodius’s works, was familiar with his feints and ploys. Though it seized him like a fever, he solved it in just four days. Come at once, the red script began, I have found the Golden Door.
Bring my books and instruments and leave the rest. Let the Auspex have Trigestal, for now I have another to outshine it. Retrace the path of Tecwyn of Old to the Dragon’s Tooth; the Bright Vale lies beyond. This page will tell you the rest. Heed its warnings.
So, Alcidimus had thought, the rumours were true. But he’d taken no satisfaction from the discovery. For, even as the red script yielded up its secrets, the riddle of the black script consumed him. It was written in vertical columns like Silde but it otherwise bore little resemblance to that ancient tongue. Their shapes reminded him somewhat of the earliest Olve pictograms but what they might be pictures of he could not guess. As a system of writing, it appeared at once simple and impossibly elegant. So much so that its characters began to appear in his dreams, their script flowing like the slender braids of a river into more familiar shapes. But whenever he brought the glass to focus upon them, they would shift and turn once more and drain into the parchment as though it were cracked and stony ground.
Each day, he carried out fresh tests and enchantments on the black script, pursued new hypotheses and conjectures – an undiscovered branch of Tolhec perhaps? A previously-unknown syllabary of proto-Ulmish? - but to no avail. Poor Summer had borne the brunt of his research. Each morning she’d arrive after breakfast and he would hand her the day’s list of the books he required. But no sooner had she gone to collect the first items than he would already be adding to it and revising it, so that she spent the better part of each day on the stairs carrying books to and fro. This much she did without complaint, if not several audible sighs.
She openly rebuked him, though, for his habit of demanding some manuscript from the very bowels of the building, only to realise, when at last she brought it to him, that he did not need it after all, at which point he would tell her to take it back, loathe as he was to deprive a fellow scholar of any work he was not using. “Do not send me as you would Keener to fetch a stick,” she had cried, “I am neither your maid nor your hound!” After that, she’d gone to reassure Keener who had sat up at the mention of his name.
“You treat the dog more gently than me,” Alcidimus had said.
“He is more gallant,” she’d retorted, stroking Keener’s neck as the hound drooled and slobbered over her hand. “It’s not his fault his master is a villain.”
In the days that followed, Summer twice declared that, if he did not mend his ways, she would stop bringing him books altogether but she never made good on her threat. Instead, he begin to find among the volumes she brought certain other titles he had not asked for. At first he thought it an error that A Study of Senescence had been mixed up with books on the dialects of Khind. The next day, however, he found On Dotage among the works he had requested, and, after that, The Lamentable Tale of Master Lackwit. “You’ll like that one,” she said as she left. “If the words are too difficult, you can follow the pictures.”
She was, despite her demonstrably foul temper, a most thoughtful child and frightfully clever. So much so that it saddened him to think that she was bound to depart ere long. He knew little of her family, some minor house from Sanquhar or some such place, but in these matters they were all alike. For a time her studies might be tolerated, indulged even, but sooner or later her lord father would summon her home and marry her off. If she were fortunate, her future husband might recognise and encourage her gifts. She would, in any event, have little choice in the matter and none, he guessed, that she might find palatable. She did not speak of it, however, and, having pursued a fully cloistral life himself, Alcidimus had no wisdom of his own to offer on the subject.
Nor, it seems, on any subject, he brooded. For several days now, he’d pondered nothing but the black script but felt no closer to uncovering its meaning. Most troubling was his impression that, despite their almost wilful obscurity, he’d encountered the strange black letters once before, long, long ago: a passing reference in a dusty old codex, perhaps, or an annotation scribbled in the margin of some minor tome? It was quite impossible to recall, for the vasty depths of the Great Library were but a furrow compared to the penumbral gloom of his own memory, an abysm into which all the scrolls and books and manuscripts he had ever read, too many to name or number, slowly and endlessly sank. And yet the faint stirrings of familiarity did not cease. Every now and then, he would read something and hints and fragments of the memory would surface like flotsam – a room in a library somewhere – Archmoor perhaps? — a page spread out in front of him and—
Nothing. Try as he might, he could not coax the image to return. In his frustration, Alcidimus thought of asking one of the Fellows for help, but he’d promised Vasqo not to speak of the parchment to anyone. In his desperation, he wondered if he might not bend the wording of the injunction and ask about the black letters without mentioning the parchment, but he could think of no way to do so without inviting precisely the sorts of questions that Vasqo doubtless wished to avoid.
Who, then, could he turn to? There were but a half dozen scholars in all the Calandras whose knowledge of the ancient tongues was equal to his own and only one that he felt certain he could trust with something like this: Sidonius. Yes, he thought, Sidonius will know. And so Alcidimus had written his old friend a letter containing a passable facsimile of a portion of the black script. It would take some time to receive a reply – Sidonius was past eighty now and lived in Torrick, several days to the south – but already Alcidimus felt as though a burden had been lifted.
That same night, he had a different dream. Now, instead of draining away, the dark ink pooled and rose from the parchment, spilling out onto the bench and the floor, a black tide filling the room until, at last, he could not lift his head to keep from drowning. At that point he’d woken, gasping for breath, the taste of blood and ashes on his tongue. It was not long before dawn broke but the memory had stayed with him throughout the day, crouched at the edge of his thoughts.
The footsteps stopped at last, followed by a firm knock.
“Enter,” Alcidimus called out. Keener stirred slightly at the sound.
The door opened. A tall man entered. With his proud bearing and blunt face, Lord Vasqo Rhone looked more warrior than scholar and his long brown hair was only just beginning to grey. He wore dark robes lined with fur and a thin livery chain made of gold.
“A month,” said Alcidimus, frowning as he turned back to the parchment.
“Before you start,” his visitor began.
“A month, you promised. A moon’s full turn. The large one, not the small one, but all the same.”
Vasqo began to speak again but Alcidimus cut him short. “Thirteen days don’t make a month,” he declared, adjusting the glass. “A man of your station should know that much. Or at least be able to count.”
The man waited. “And, contrary to what you may have heard,” Alcidimus went on, “being early’s not a virtue. It’s just an imposition.”
His guest did not acknowledge this piece of wisdom and hung his cloak by the door. When Alcidimus did not continue, Vasqo drew up a nearby chair and sat down. “Old friend,” he began once more, now only half-apologetic.
“‘Old friend’ indeed,” Alcidimus snorted. “You trespass! You trespass on my time and, what is worse, my concentration. You think the muse of philology sits beside a barrel, dispensing her inspiration with a spigot? No, my lord. She is sparing with her gift. With your interruption this evening, my attention is fled and will not soon return.”
“You’re reading now, even as we speak,” said Vasqo, laughter in his voice. “Hells take your muse, you petulant old fraud.”
“If that was meant to be flattery, you’re not very good at it,” said Alcidimus. “Aren’t you supposed to be some great worthy at court?”
“I praise you to others,” said his guest. “I’m too wise to praise you to your face.”
Alcidimus gave him a sideways glance. “Very well then, what is it? What brings you here, weeks too soon?”
“Don’t be angry,” said Vasqo. “I know full well what I promised. But a matter has arisen, something we ought to discuss—"
“Kleodius’s second workshop,” said Alcidimus, no longer prepared to wait.
Vasqo stopped, shocked. “You’ve deciphered it already?” he asked, his eyes bright and shining with something like awe. “The red script?”
Alcidimus nodded, his own face a portrait of sly triumph. “Here, let me tell you what it says,” he said, reading aloud: “Come at once, I have found the Golden Door…”
When he finished, he half-expected his friend to leap from his seat. But instead Vasqo sat silent a long while, staring at the parchment and rubbing his beard. Would that I could read his expression also, Alcidimus thought. He could hear the crackle of the hearthfire and Keener stirring in his sleep. Somewhere in the distance, the second nightbell began to ring.
“I think it is time we opened that bottle, old friend,” said Vasqo at last.
Alcidimus nodded and went in search of a pair of cups amidst the charts and papers. He found some on the sideboard, beside a heavy-looking volume he did not recognise. Diseases and Infirmities of the Mind, the title read. Another of Summer’s gifts. “The Bright Vale,” he said as Vasqo poured. “The Golden Door. Do these mean aught to you?”
“No. No part of his legend that I can recall. More than one gold door in the Calandras. And no shortage of valleys, bright or no.”
“And the Dragon’s Tooth?”
“A mountain called the Dragon’s Tooth?" Lord Vasqo Rhone shook his head and handed Alcidimus his cup. It was strong and sweet: a fortified wine from Johdee or Sinnd most like. “It’s like calling your cow Daisy. There’s at least three peaks by that name in the empire alone. One near Castle Winter, another in Aleutrick, and one in the Hybleane Peaks that you can see from Foxfeldra. None have any connection to Kleodius that I know of. The path of Tecwyn of Old, though. That sounds promising, doesn’t it?”
Alcidimus laughed. “Alas, there are several Tecwyns of note. Two in the Lays of the Arendy alone: the Tecwyn who slew a behemoth that became an island in the mouth of the Verring; and a priest named Tecwyn who heals Urnost when he was wounded by the Giant of Deakish.”
“Then there is Tecwyn the Swift, the legendary Kelunish trickster who challenged a mountain storm to a foot race; Tecwyn the Fat, one of the merchant kings that Thinfol robs in The Song of Grandish; a Tecwyn who was Tyrant of Sarpend for a dozen years until he was drawn and quartered; and Tecwyn Vasilax, a court poet during the reign of Irsid the Second who claimed, rather improbably, to have recovered the fabled lost Codex of Emec. He was afterwards consumed in a cloud of fire, though, so perhaps he was on to something.”
“A rash of Tecwyns,” Vasqo mused. “I did not expect so many.”
“Those are just the ones my assistant found in an afternoon. As for any of them having had a path or followed a path or had a path named after them, I cannot say. Since deciphering the red script, all my time has been devoted to the black.” As he spoke, Alcidimus turned back towards the parchment. Beneath the glass, its magnified surface almost glowed in the light of the candleflame.
“Have you any idea as to its meaning?”
Alcidimus shook his head. “Naught. It has been almost ten days now. I have spent all my wisdom upon it, to no end. Perhaps the task is beyond me, I do not know,” he said with an edge in his voice. For what is my end in life but to discover meaning? And if I fail in this, he thought, what earthly good am I?
“Do not despair,” urged Vasqo. “You have found the first proof in almost two hundred years that Kleodius’s second workshop exists. What is the black script compared to that?”
“Yet Kleodius knew the black script’s meaning. Heed its warnings, he said—"
“Peace, old friend,” said Vasqo, placing his hand on Alcidimus’s arm. “If anyone can solve it, it will be you. Among us all, you have always been the wisest.”
Alcidimus nodded, unexpectedly at a loss for words. Something passed across his vision, causing him to blink. When he looked again, it seemed as though the script beneath the glass had altered somehow, become clearer. Perhaps it is the light, he thought. Somewhere behind him, the hearthfire was burning brightly now and the room was growing warm.
“One thing occurs to me,” he asked, keen to change the subject. “Who was Kleodius writing to?”
“Oh that. It was his steward, a former pupil named Lerred. After the sack of Trigestal, most of Kleodius’s servants fled to Dawnshore but Lerred remained behind…” Vasqo went on but Alcidimus was distracted. He leaned forward and squinted at the parchment. Something about the black script had changed.
“Is something the matter?” Vasqo asked.
“My apologies,” he said. “Please go on.” The figures beneath the glass were now as sharp and as clear as a shadow at noon. As he did so, he felt a sudden rush of recognition.
Beware the void place, the letters read.
Alcidimus recalled the suffocating blackness of his dream and felt the fear coil in his stomach. For days now, he’d studied each line of the black script several dozen times but now at last he saw their true meaning as clearly as though it was something that he had always known. His hand trembling, he pushed the glass to the beginning and began to read:
In the bright vale the shadows deepen
And frost lines the golden door.
Seals fixed to keep his wisdom and his folly.
Seals fixed to keep his gift of ash and lies.
“Alcidimus?”
“Yes, yes,” he replied, without looking up, “Go on, my friend, I’m listening, I assure you.” In truth, he was paying no attention and began to feel light-headed. As Vasqo went on, he continued to read:
Pass the seals and descend the deepest stair.
Pass reason and hope into his tomb.
Beware the void place and the threshing floor.
Beware the sorrow and the madness within.
Despite the blazing hearth, Alcidimus felt a chill. The words disturbed him though he struggled to understand why. It was not just that the text was filled with obscure portents, though those were troubling enough. It was as though the black letters prefigured something else beyond their referents, some unnameable dread the truth of which had already been vouchsafed. When he had finished, he sat back and tried to fathom what he had read but his ears rang and his mouth was dry. What strange knowledge is this, he shuddered. The room was now uncomfortably warm and thick with unease.
Somewhere behind him, Vasqo was speaking but Alcidimus struggled to focus on his words. The younger man’s tone seemed different somehow, soft and dull: “That you were a man of your word. That you would keep our confidence. But Reiner insisted. Said it was too important a matter to trust to any man’s honour.”
“Reiner,” said Alcidimus absently, “Honour. Yes, of course.” He tried to follow along but his ears kept ringing. As he looked at the parchment, the writing started to blur and there seemed to be a halo about the candleflame.
“He said that we should permit no hazard to our enterprise, even an unwitting one,” Vasqo went on, his voice hollow, “I argued against him but you know how he can sway a crowd. They would have sent some slip-string from Rel Corvala but I said that, if it were to be done, then it should be by mine own hand. It will come on swiftly, if that is any comfort.”
“Yes,” nodded Alcidimus, struggling to concentrate. “Yes.” At once he felt very thirsty. He looked for his cup but the bench had become an uncertain mottle of light and dark shapes. Something is amiss, he thought, as his fingers began to tingle.
“Please old friend,” said Vasqo. “You see, don’t you? You understand what this is. What is happening.”
Alcidimus looked back at him but his friend’s features had also begun to shine and blur and shift. For several long moments, he gazed at the spectacle until, at last, he realised what Vasqo meant. Dilation of the pupils, shortness of breath, numbness. He could almost see the entry in the Golden Treatise before him, listing the symptoms, its illuminated margins, the careful illustration of the tall stalks with their heavy bulbous heads. In small amounts, the extract of the dried plant was most efficacious in the relief of pain. Too much, though, and the patient would become insensate and eventually cease to draw breath altogether: a gentle end, it was said, as killings went. Too slow-acting to be useful as a poison, the pothecaries admixed it with juice from the corobane plant in order to hasten its effects. In consequence, the preparation had a sickly taste, the old texts noted, which poisoners would disguise by the use of strong flavours in food or drink.
“Sweetdeath,” said Alcidimus, as his fingertips began to numb. “You laced the wine with sweetdeath.” He tried to stand but his arms and legs were too heavy and would not oblige.
The blur nodded. A slow nod, mournful. “Please, do not struggle. It will go easier for you if you do not struggle.”
“You would kill me,” he gasped weakly, “to keep your secret?”
“No,” said Lord Vasqo, with a flash of anger, “I tried to save you from it. That was why I came this eve; to take back the parchment. If you failed to translate it, I reasoned, you could pose no risk to our venture. Alas, I came too late, for you had already solved the riddle. Without knowing it, you forced my hand. You were too wise, my friend. You were ever too wise.”
“But the parchment,” he protested, blinking in confusion. “I have not told you its full meaning.” Listen to me, he thought. How pitiable I sound, trying to bargain. The poison worked quickly: already the numbness was spreading up his arms and legs.
“You mean the black script?” Vasqo shook his head. “We already know what it says. It was the red script we needed to decipher.”
He reeled. How? He wondered. How could they know? The study, his little world for all these years, had become now a haze of light and dark. His arms were almost completely numb now but he could feel the weight of Vasqo’s hand on his sleeve. “Rest now, old friend. Rest. Though it grieves me to do this thing, our cause is just. You have done a great good here. I promise you, a great good.”
Alcidimus shrank inwards, feeling incomprehension at Vasqo’s betrayal but grief for himself most of all. Even now that he stood at the precipice, he could not say which was worse: his horror at his friend’s deed, the poison in his blood, or the awful truths hinted at by the black script. The numbness had begun to spread into his chest. Each breath was harder now, each exhalation more shallow. A thought came to him, though whether it was out of spite or guilt or desperation he could not say. “Your friend ... was right,” he wheezed, a faint smile twisting his features, “Reiner … was right.”
There was a short pause. “What do you mean?” asked Vasqo, all trace of his previous concern gone.
“I did not keep … your confidence … my lord,” Alcidimus forced the words out, weary and bitter. “I told someone … Sent them … a letter.”
He felt the pressure on his arm tighten. “A letter?” he could feel Vasqo shaking him. “Who? Who was it? Whom did you tell?”
He was being shaken again, harder this time, but the weariness surrounded him now, cocooned him. Only the light of the candleflame remained, the parchment a bright smear beneath it. Somewhere he could hear Keener turning and whimpering in his sleep. His own breaths were slight things now, and his heart skipped like a stone across the surface of a lake. As his eyes began to close, the fading light danced and reformed into glyphs: The Golden Door. The Tomb. The Void Place. Once more, he caught the briefest glimpse of their meaning and felt the dread of that terrible knowledge.
For a moment, he thought he heard footsteps coming from below. No, that cannot be right. Vasqo is already here, at my side. Had he finally slipped into delirium, his last thoughts tumbling like scrolls down some endless stair? Summer, he thought. It must be Summer. He felt his chest quicken, trying to summon the strength to call to her, to warn her, to run, to flee. Beware Lord Vasqo, he wanted to cry out with the last of his breath and the final beatings of his heart. Beware his schemes. Beware his schemes and the darkness to come.
