Through Stone and Sea - By Barb Hendee & J. C. Hendee Page 0,49
this Hall of Stone-Words, so with Shade in tow, she followed Downpour out of the meal hall.
Instead of rounding the far side of the temple proper toward the passages to quarters, they slipped into the near side, traipsing the curving corridor all the way to the back. There, a wide passage lined with glyph- marked archways and doors shot deeper into the mountain.
Downpour’s brisk pace offered Wynn no time to peer about. She glimpsed little of the other rooms or halls through any opening, at least not until the wide passage ended in a final grand arch of framestones. The opening spilled into a room so tall that Wynn couldn’t see its ceiling from the outside. All she did see were three large emblems on a bare wall straight ahead, no more than three paces into the room.
Downpour paused outside the archway. “Anyone can come here whenever the temple is open.”
Wynn stared at the inside wall. The Hall of Stone-Words couldn’t be this small, even for dwarven brevity in writing.
“Hopefully something here will fulfill your needs,” Downpour added. “Now I must get to my duties.”
Downpour headed up the passage, and Wynn moved closer to the archway. Dwarves might not care for writing everything down, but certainly they had more records than this. There had to be more than three platter-size engraved symbols of complex strokes . . . or vubrí.
Certain Dwarvish words weren’t always written in separate letters. Just as the sages’ Begaine syllabary used symbols for whole syllables and word parts, the harsh strokes of dwarven letters could be combined into a vubrí. These emblems were used only for important concepts or the noteworthy among people, places, or things. They were also how the families, clans, and tribes emblazoned or embroidered their identity on some personal attire. It took Wynn a moment to untangle the three engraved upon the wall.
The two to either side—Virtue and Tradition—connected by a straight line to an engraved circle holding the central emblem of Wisdom.
Wynn stepped fully through the arch, and a sudden sense of space made her look up.
The engraved wall went only halfway to the space’s height, but it was still tall enough that she would’ve barely reached its top with her upstretched staff. Far above, amid stone arches supporting a high ceiling, metal mirrors reflected light down into the hall from three shafts in the ceiling.
Wynn stepped back and saw that the ceiling’s arch supports went well beyond the partition.
She was baffled until she noticed that neither partition’s end joined the hall’s side walls. She headed left, finding the wall as thick as she was from shoulder to shoulder, and she peeked around its end. Wynn’s mouth and eyes opened wide.
Multiple stone partitions cut across the hall at regular intervals, like the casements of a library. Each was clear of the side walls, allowing anyone to walk around them and up and down the hall’s length. The only furnishings were thick stone benches, worn by use. But there were no massive vubrí on the next partition’s front side.
Engraved Dwarvish letters filled five columns, each as wide as her spread arms. The same covered the back side of the first partition. Even the hall’s side walls had columns written in twin sets, positioned to face the spaces between the partitions. Those paired side columns stretched nearly all the way to the ceiling’s high arches.
Wynn had never seen anything like this among the dwarves, not even in her visit with Domin Tilswith. But it seemed most fitting in the temple of their poet Eternal.
“Stone-words,” she whispered, “words engraved in stone.”
Dwarves recorded only what they considered worth such permanence, such as the teachings of Feather-Tongue. Even to say “written in stone” meant that what was said must never be forgotten.
Shade pushed past, sniffing halfway down the partition’s back side before Wynn regained her wits. She followed the dog, running her fingers over the engravings’ sharp edges. Not only could she see these words, she could feel them. She flushed with unfamiliar awe as her fingers slipped from one column of crisp carved characters to the next.
“Stories,” she whispered.
She’d never even seen some of the characters before. Perhaps they were older than the written form of Dwarvish she’d learned. As she reached the third partition’s back side, she lingered on one obscure vubrí. Wynn knew she’d seen it before, somewhere upon these walls, and she tried again to decipher it.
Lhärgnæ?
She frowned, trying to remember her lessons with Domin High-Tower.