Late that night, Sharl joined Greg on watch. There were too many of them to all sleep in the rest at night, like they did in the early days. The youngest children were prioritized for spots in the safety of the protection crystal. Most of the adults and older children spent the nights in the closest cleared and secured rooms, separated by families. Normally Sharl or Greg stayed in the room with their oldest while the other took a turn at the night watch. While Irene slept in their room they felt safe enough to both be on watch together. It gave Sharl the opportunity to talk to her spouse with some privacy.
“Irene told me some startling things today,” Sharl announced.
“She tells me startling things all the time,” Greg responded. “What did she tell you?”
“Did you know she goes back to the Speedwell every year? She visits us on her way in or out of the structure, which is why we usually see her twice a year. She told me that was where she was this last year,” Sharl told her spouse.
“The Speedwell?” Greg said in shock. That answered Sharl’s question on if Greg was keeping secrets from her. Sharl told him about the colony villages and how Irene assured her that they could go there if needed.
“I don’t think I want to do that,” Greg said. “I feel like we have just figured out how to live well here. I don’t want to have to start over again.”
“Good,” Sharl said, “I feel the same, but Irene is right about it might be a safe place to retreat to if the friction between red and blue breaks out into war.”
“I don’t think it will come to that,” Greg denied, but his fingers were crossed. “Did she say anything about squares in dark space?” Greg asked. He knew that was what Sharl went to ask Irene about.
“She said she saw one on a ruined green years ago, she gave me a sketch of where it was. I think it would be a waste of time to go there now. There is no way it is still there. She promised to tell us if she found a new one,” Sharl responded.
“Good,” Greg responded. “She is a better scout than most of Darien’s crew. If there is one out there she will find it for us.”
“She also told me the queen is Dr. Whitman,” Sharl said.
“Yeah,” Greg responded. He showed no surprise at this news.
“You knew?” Sharl asked.
“Yeah, I thought you knew too,” Greg responded. “Dr. Whitman was the only one who figured out the heal spell. The queen started out as the healer of Londontown.”
“I guess I just never put it together,” Sharl admitted. “That means the queen is old. I mean really old. Irene told me a friend of hers from the flight crew passed away this winter. What will happen when the queen dies?”
“I don’t think much will change. Everyone knows Londontown is actually ruled by her son Phillip. Do you remember him? He was an apprentice in the medical department that came out with her,” Greg commented.
“Vaguely,” Sharl replied. “Dr. Whitman was a rather forceful presence. Everyone around her kind of vanished into the background.” Sharl remembered the doctor as a bossy woman certain of her own importance. If Sharl thought about the apprentice it was only to feel sorry for him that he had such an arrogant woman for his mother. It was shortly after the doctor's arrival on the survey team that things started to go sideways. “Irene thinks the queen is senile,” Sharl commented. “She thinks Control tried to fix her, but didn’t know how.”
“Actually, dementia is a good explanation for some of the odder things she ordered us to do,” Greg commented as he thought back to those early days. At first Greg thought the doctor was just ambitious and wanted to be ‘in charge’. She was fascinated by the idea of magic. She sent a lot of good people to their deaths trying to awaken their magic. Her orders got weirder and weirder, until Greg couldn’t figure out what the point was. That was when his team broke away. That group wasn’t this one. Most of the members of that original team were dead now. This group was the result of the merging of the survivors of multiple teams.
“I also heard Irene talking to Billy. She was telling him how to fight with magic. She listed off a long string of spells I don’t know,” Sharl said, changing the subject.
“She knows a lot. I think she ‘knows of’ a lot more than she can cast. She says the wall inscriptions can be decrypted to give hints. She also told me you can find hints in the tile murals, the floor tiles and some piles of debris. Although she calls the debris piles ‘abstract statues’,” Greg responded.
“Really?” Sharl asked. “Why didn’t you tell me any of that before?”
“It didn’t seem important. It is not like we have time to wander around looking for wall inscriptions,” Greg said with a shrug.
“There is one down by the sanitation facilities,” Sharl said.
“Is there?” Greg asked. “I didn’t notice.”
----------------------------------------
“So how do you read it?” Sharl asked Irene. It was the morning after her conversation with Greg. She asked Irene about the wall inscriptions at breakfast. Irene didn’t hold back with her description of how you could decode them. Hopelessly confused, Sharl asked Irene if she could show her. Irene thought about it for a while before replying that she could try.
“This is a nice one,” Irene said. “It is a tier one imbuing spell from the force tree. I call it rooted. You cast it and touch the ground with the weapon. The weapon becomes fixed.”
“What good would that be?” Sharl asked.
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“I use it to brace my spear when a boar is charging me,” Irene said. “If you can hold your aim and jump away at the last second, the boar will impale itself.” That sounded a little suicidal to Sharl. Although if she cast a shield spell at the jump it might be possible.
“How do you know?” Sharl asked.
“I recognize it. See these symbols?” Irene asked, pointing out the tiny symbols the inscription was made up of. “I call this font Roman. You can see that most of this inscription is made up of the over and underlined X. That is the zero symbol or maybe a spacer symbol might be a better description.” Sharl studied the small carvings. What Irene was calling a spacer symbol looked a lot like the roman numeral ten. There were other symbols mixed in. One looked like an upside down V, and other like a W.
“What are these other two?” Sharl asked, pointing out examples of them.
“You're going to be good at this,” Irene declared. “The inverted V is two and the W is four. Read these from the bottom up. Pick a column in the center someplace and tell me the order of the non-zero symbols.” Sharl picked a column and started reading.
“Two, four, two, two, four, two, two, four…” Sharl continued for a while until Irene stopped her.
“That’s enough. So that is the order of the symbols to cast the spell. The spell is repeated over and over. So really your choices are two, four, two or two, four, two, two, four, two. Obviously there are longer versions that could also be repeating, but this is roman. Roman is usually a tier one spell, so it won’t be longer,” Irene explained. “Actually tier one spells are usually only two or three symbols long, so it is two, four, two.”
“Ok,” Sharl said. “What script is used for tier two spells?”
“They are done in something I call Cuneiform. There is some variance in that. I’ve seen tier zero spells in Roman and tier one spells in Cuneiform. Tier two spells are five to six symbols, so if two, four, two didn’t work, you could try the longer six symbol version,” Irene explained. She leaned her staff against the wall and pulled two styluses out of her pocket. She handed one to Sharl. “Now comes the fun part.”
Irene started pointing out the larger patterns that repeated in the inscription. She used the stylus to draw diagonal lines at different spacings across sections that repeated right to left. She explained how to use the number of symbols, and number of unique symbols in the pattern to determine how many lines to use. She instructed Sharl to do the same on patterns that appeared bottom to top.
It took a long time. Irene finished first. She stepped back and inspected Sharl’s work. Irene made a couple corrections as Sharl finished.
“Step back here and kind of blur your vision,” Irene instructed. Irene stepped forward and pointed out a section that was heavily covered by their two different hatch marks. “Can you see the spear here?” Irene asked. “The weapon is an indication that this is an imbuing spell.” Sharl didn’t see it. She tried to blur her vision.
“No, not really,” Sharl admitted.
“The handle is here,” Irene used her stylus to outline the section as she spoke. “The spear point starts here. See how the dark double hatched area gets wider?”
And suddenly Sharl saw it. There was a spear on one side of the panel. On the other side was a kind of inverted T. Actually there were more lines under the T, each one shorter than the line above it.
“What is the inverted T?” Sharl asked. Irene smiled, happy at Sharl’s observation.
“That is the rooted symbol,” Irene responded. She picked up her staff, which she’d set against the wall and swung it around, setting it firmly on the ground. “See,” she said, holding her staff vertically in front of the inverted T, “that is the spear handle, and the bottom lines here are the ground.”
“I don’t think I would have gotten that,” Sharl said.
“I didn’t either on the first try,” Irene said. “These panels really only give hints. They often have slightly different drawings for the same spell. Putting them together gives you a better idea of what the spell does. Also you can get hints from other things too.”
“Greg mentioned mosaics and statues,” Sharl commented.
“Exactly,” Irene said. “Fountains, pools, the trim around a door, you never know when you might find a hint to something.”
“How did you ever figure this out?” Sharl asked.
“Actually a friend did it. She used the Speedwell’s computers,” Irene explained. Sharl heard the grief in Irene’s voice and thought this friend was likely the member of the flight crew who passed away recently. Irene sat down on the floor looking at the inscription. She invited Sharl to join her. “So that is how you decrypt a tier one inscription. A tier zero inscription is actually easier, but tier two and above get much harder.”
Irene explained how to do a tier two inscription. It did sound worse, although this time Sharl was able to follow the description. There were multiple possibilities. At each step there were checks to be done to see if you used the correct option. Sharl suspected the decryption might take days.
They were discussing the different symbols Irene had seen and what she thought they meant when Greg arrived with Bill in tow.
“He insisted on coming to see what you were doing,” Greg explained to his spouse. “The rest of the herd is in daycare,” he said before Sharl could ask. In this suburb, daycare was the rest proper with at least two adults keeping watch. One watched the children while the other watched for danger. Some of their children were getting too old for daycare, like Bill. They were going to have to come up with a better solution for them soon.
“Look Dad!” Bill exclaimed, “it’s your spear!” The boy ran up to the inscription to give it a close inspection.
“What spell is it?” Greg asked.
“Rooted,” Sharl answered. “It fixes your weapon to the ground so that a charging animal will impale itself.”
“That’s interesting,” Greg responded. “It could be useful.”
“It is tier one,” Irene offered, “in the force tree, so you need to know a tier zero weapon skill in that tree before learning it. Do you know force tap? That would work.”
“I do,” Greg responded. “I’ll have to think about how I could learn it safely.”
“You can learn it by facing off with something small like a rat. If you keep a club or something handy, you can just bash the rat over the head if necessary. It times out pretty quickly but it is a little unnerving when you can’t pick up your weapon the first time it works,” Irene offered. “It is faster to learn a spell in front of an instruction inscription like this. If you start trying it right here in front of the inscription, there is a chance that Control will send out an animal. It is likely that the animal will be something large like a boar, so it would be more dangerous.” Greg looked to where Bill was studying the inscription.
“I think we will forgo that option for now,” he replied, not wanting to endanger his son.
“Thank you for showing me this,” Sharl said to Irene.
“Oh, it's nothing,” Irene responded. “I should have shown you earlier. I have to believe a lot of people have figured them out, at least the early ones. I don’t see any other way so many spells have been discovered. It is almost impossible to just accidentally cast one, once you're past the simplest ones.”
“From your description it sounds near impossible to decrypt the higher tier ones without a computer,” Sharl commented.
“Yeah, I know,” Irene said. “I think I must be missing some method,” she admitted. “Maybe you will figure it out.” Sharl very much doubted that she would figure out something that eluded Irene for years.