"Ugh," Miranda grunted. "This is sounding more and more difficult by the moment."
"The syllabic format will actually be the easier one to learn, because repetition breeds familiarity," Keritanima said professionally. "It's the glyphic format that's going to be a royal pain to learn. From what I see here already, the words represented by glyphs are not translated into the syllabic form. We'll have to learn every glyph and its corresponding word, one by one."
"It's going to take months," Dar groaned again.
"Clear your calendar, boys and girls," Keritanima said grimly. "We're going to be very busy for a while."
Months. In this strange altered time, that would be more like rides, but the sheer size of the task before them was intimidating. Mother, is there anything you can do to help? he asked pleadingly.
You have but to ask, kitten, she replied lightly. I seem to recall that Dolanna learned Sha'Kar in a matter of rides. Maybe you should ask her how she did it.
I know how she did it. She said she used a priest spell-can you do that for me? he asked immediately.
You have but to ask, my kitten, she said in a teasing voice. And before you ask, yes, I can grant priest spells in that altered reality. Have Dolanna teach you the spell. In fact, have her teach it to all of you. Well, except Miranda, of course. She'll have to negotiate with Kikalli over this.
"It will not take as long as you think, Keritanima," Dolanna told her patiently. "I once used minor priest magic to learn Sha'Kar. We can do so with this. It is a simple spell."
Dolanna must have read his mind. "Dolanna, I was thinking the exact same thing," Tarrin told her gratefully. "Can you teach us the spell?"
"It is a simple matter, dear one. Priest spells are prayers for a specific thing, using ritual words. I can teach you the prayer of aiding memory in moments, but be warned that it is not an absolute. The spell only aids memory. It does not cause you to automatically remember perfectly anything you see or hear. But it will cut down the time it will take to learn by a drastic amount."
"I'm feeling left out," Miranda sighed morosely.
"I can use Sorcery to keep you up, Miranda," Keritanima assured her. "Mind weaves can pass information from one mind to another. Since we're the same race, they'll work for us."
"Oh. That's fine then," she said brightly.
"Well then, Dolanna, I'm feeling particularly pious at the moment, and find I have an overpowering desire to pray," Keritanima said with a light smile. "Teach us the words, and we'll get this ball rolling."
Dolanna did so, and after repeating the prayer over and over again until they had it memorized, they used it in earnest. It was the first time Tarrin had ever used real Priest magic, and he found it to be quite odd. He couched his request in flowery prose, as was taught to him by Dolanna, seeming to grovel verbally to be blessed with the Goddess' magic. It seemed odd to be so humble to one who laughed at his jokes and talked to him like a best friend, but if that was what was necessary, then that was what was necessary. Tarrin never forgot that the Goddess was his Goddess, and he was devoted to her and knew his place in their relationship. He chanted the prayer a bit self-consciously, but when he reached its conclusion, he could not deny the magic that responded to his words. He felt the finger of the Goddess brush against his mind, and he entered what he could only call an episode of exceptionally acute attentiveness. He became aware of absolutely every little thing around him, even beyond his normally inhuman senses, and the open pages of the Book of Ages on the table before them looked not quite so intimidating now. He actually felt confident in the upcoming task to learn the written Sha'Kar language. He actually felt much smarter than he did just a moment before, felt up to the challenge of the academic hurdle facing him.
"Wow, I feel… enlightened," Dar said after finishing the prayer.
"A strange effect," Allia agreed. "I have never felt so… smart."
"That is the noticable effect of the prayer," Dolanna nodded. "It only lasts a few hours, and we cannot use it again until tomorrow, so let us move along, Keritanima. Even in this altered state, time is very much a factor."
"Alright then," Keritanima said as Miranda started handing out blank books from one of the chests, then handed each of them one of those fancy, expensive Tellurian fountain pens and put a couple of inkwells on the table for all of them to use. "The book starts with a key for the syllabic form of the language. This is the first, it represents the phonetic sound shi."
Time became blurred to them all in that alternating form of time.
They would spend hours and hours-days even-within the realm of slower time, laboriously going over the written Sha'Kar script, hours and days spent in a silent unchanging light that seemed to eat at Tarrin's sense of normalcy, an eternal, quiet moment of daylight that did not end. It ate at his instincts, his sense of the natural order of things, and it caused him quite a bit of discomfort for much longer than it bothered the others. Symbol by symbol, glyph by glyph, one by one, they learned the Sha'Kar language. But the days and days spent within the boundary of the gift from Shellar translated to hours and hours in the real time of the outside world, giving all of them a strange sense of dislocation from everything else. Keritanima started with High Wikuni-or what she thought was High Wikuni-before realizing that the Wikuni had corrupted the language written on the pages, changing the meaning of many of the words. She could read about half of it, but for her, that wasn't precise enough. After that, they went through the book again, until they found the key to translating into Sha'Kar from Arakite. When they found that, Dar and Tarrin took over the task of training, since they were the only two who understood the written form of the Arakite language. It was here where Dar asserted himself over Tarrin, proving that his Goddess-boosted ability to remember and learn outstripped his old friend by many degrees. Tarrin happily allowed Dar to take over the sessions, since he preferred being a student rather than a teacher anyway. As they expected, Dar's memory when it came to images and things he saw-such as the glyphs of Sha'Kar-made him invaluable to them.
With Dar's help, they managed to convert the Sha'Kar keys into the base languages of all the others, and then they completely memorized the syllabic branch of the language. As Keritanima said, it was much easier than memorizing some ten thousand individual characters, but it still wasn't easy. There were three distinct forms of those syllabic symbols, each relating to a differing level of formality. Three different symbols that stood for the same phonetic sound. In all, there were over four hundred individual syllabic symbols to memorize, and what was more, they had to learn when and where each one was used. But they managed to complete it, and that allowed them to read about ten percent of the Sha'Kar writing before them, consistingly mostly of words borrowed from other languages, words adopted after the syllabic format had been created, leaving the vast majority of the language unreadable. Once that was mastered, they started on the glyphs. It was a painfully slow process, but it did progress. Inside the time-altered dome, they labored for over a month to learn the Sha'Kar language, using the memory-boosting prayer taught to them by Dolanna-which, they found out, was still bound by the time limitations of real time, making it effective for subjective days so long as they stayed within the dome-they did move forward.
It took four days. Four days in real time. In the strange dual subjective time in which they had functioned, however, it took then nearly two months to complete the education in Sha'Kar, and even that was only possible because of the aid from the Goddess. But when it was over, any of them could pick up anything written in Sha'Kar and read it perfectly. Dar and Keritanima had demanded thoroughness, teaching them absolutely every word in the dictionary-after all, they were looking for obscure and unusual information, and it would probably be written using obscure or unusual words. So they had to be masters of the Sha'Kar language to find what they were looking for.