or he was a genius. In which case I might never decode them.
I looked up to find Brynner watching me. “How long have you been there?”
He shrugged. “I was thinking about something.”
“In the bathroom.”
“Yes.”
I waited for him to catch the awkward drift. “While you were using the bathroom.”
“Yes. I was thinking about you.”
If this was the smooth-talking man who waltzed women through his bed like a drive-through, the world’s women were in worse shape than I thought. “Go on.”
He sat down. “I was thinking maybe I would help you with the translation. I’ll answer your questions and help you put things together.”
“What do you want from me?”
He picked up a book. “Lessons. Dad taught me by writing the combination to our pantry lock in hieroglyphics. I’m hoping you have better teaching skills.”
It stank of a trap. The question was, Who was trapping whom? “You’re sure that’s what you want to ask me for?”
“Certain. Dad and I weren’t on speaking terms when he died. These are all I have left of him.” He flipped to a page at random.
I wanted to tell him that part of his father sat right beside me, living and breathing. I knew he might be playing me. Using this just as a reason to be near me. Still, I understood as well as anyone the need to remember people I loved. My parents left us a trust fund, but I’d have traded every dollar for a letter from my mom, or her diaries.
I could help Brynner understand everything he had left of his father.
I opened the Universal Weighted index files and pushed the laptop toward him. “If you want to learn to read them right, you’d need to put in a few months’ study on these. When you knew them by sight, we’d be ready to move to the first stage. Logograms. The duck. The crocodile. The gull. All of those mean what they look like. Then you’d learn to write them by name and know them by number.”
“Number?” Brynner rubbed his chin. “Dad never mentioned numbers.”
I nodded. “Universal Weight is a numbering system for glyphs. Pick a number between one and two thousand.”
He watched me like I was about to perform a magic trick. “Sixteen.”
“Ayine, a double loop, opening to the left. Transliterated as an air gap in the work. Th’ok.” I smiled at his amazement. “How about b’sa, a closed n, indicating ‘clay.’ Universal Weight of thirty.”
Brynner reached into a middle pile and took out a journal. He glanced back and forth between it and the screen. “Nuswut. An antenna, a barbecue, and a Jewish prayer hat. That’s number three.”
I almost choked, laughing so hard. “Wheat, knut, and d’sar. It means ‘king.’ But yes, its Universal Weight is three.”
He flipped to the back, his frustration visible.
“You have to understand I spent years studying this. You spent years learning to kill things.” I reached out and patted him on the shoulder.
“There’s a barbecue king at the end, too.” He tossed the journal aside and picked up another one. “Goldfish getting eaten by a camel.” He looked up at the laugh I worked so hard to stifle. “I lost a lot of weight the first year Dad taught me.”
If I were as bad at shooting as Brynner was at translating, I’d kill sixteen of the wrong people with every bullet. “That’s nwa, the fish and the pack mule. Weight of seven, implies fortune, usually good.”
He didn’t respond, flipping to the back of the journal. “There’s a goldfish here.”
I grabbed the book from him, confirmed his brain damage didn’t include basic pattern matching, then chose another book at random. “Amun, weight of sixteen.” And on the back page, I found another Amun glyph. “Hand me them one at a time.”
And one by one, I laid them out, matching colors and weights. Midway through them, I found it. Number one. I opened it, skipping the first ideoglyph. My mind picked apart the glyphs, discarding the conceptual meanings—those were a jumbled disaster. The logograms, too, didn’t match.
My breath caught in my throat. With one hand, I reached out to grab him by the cheek, pulling him closer to look at the symbols with me. “Look. It’s phonetic. He’s writing phonetically. On the eighth—eighteenth of d-december, I decided that I would hua.” I stopped. Hua. Hua what? The symbol, the open cup. “‘Master.’ It’s a proper glyph. I would master the— form. Language. I would master the language of the old ones.”
English. Phonetic English, mixed with ideoglyphs, demarked with numbers