"Keep it down, cub!" Tarrin called after her.
"So, what are you looking for?" Jesmind asked curiously, leaning up against his side as he put the book back in his lap.
Tarrin quietly explained what they were doing as Jasana basicly careened around the courtyard, running to and fro, examining the flowers, the benches, getting wet in the fountain, and pestering all the others with about a million questions, no matter how many times he told her to keep quiet. Despite being in the presence of five strangers, she acted like they were all family, behaving before and to them as she did towards her other family members, acting like her usual exuberant, energetic self. Tarrin had a feeling that it was the courtyard that was doing it to her, affecting her with its sense of peace and security to overwhelm her usual shyness towards strangers. Jesmind took the book from him, puzzling over it, then turned it over upside-down and looked at it again. "How do you know which side is up?" she asked, handing the book back to him.
Tarrin chuckled. "It starts in this corner and goes from left to right, top to bottom," he explained, pointing to the first word on the page. "If it was in columns rather than rows, it would go from top to bottom, right to left. This language can be written either horizontally or vertically."
"Why?"
"I have no idea," he shrugged. "Now then, love, let me get back to this."
Of course, it wasn't easy to concentrate on the book with Jesmind right there, but he found some way to ignore the proximity of his mate, whose scent told him clearly that she was not happy with being ignored. He managed to deflect her by Conjuring a book on military history for her to read, so she could better understand why Darvon and the soldiers were doing what they were doing out in the city in preparation for the coming siege. Jesmind was intelligent, but she didn't actively go out of her way to study things she didn't deem to be important.
By sunset, Jasana had managed to wear on every nerve in the courtyard, even her own mother's. Each of them had finished at least one book-Keritanima and Dolanna had finished three-and none of them had read anything that related to the Firestaff or its location. So they left the courtyard after Tarrin picked up the Book of Ages, which had been kept safely within the dome, and returned it to the elsewhere . They had all felt safe to leave it in the dome, but now that the dome was gone, Tarrin had a feeling that it would be best to keep it safely with him. Despite not finding anything, they were all still in a relatively good mood about the whole thing. After all, it had been the first day, and they'd barely made a dent in the first of the four chests of books and scrolls. None of them had really expected to get so lucky as to find what they wanted so quickly.
What they did do was gather around a dining table and discuss what they'd read. Keritanima had read a ledger of names on the rolls of the tower at Abrodar, in Sharadar, and the other two books turned out to be scholastic books. The first was a book of the Weave written for an Initiate, just like the books they'd read in the Initiate, and the other was a book all about the common magical spells of the other three orders, and how to most effeciently counter them. Miranda had read a history book about the fall of the Dwarves, and Allia had read a book chronicling the study of one katzh-dashi named Embor on the fluctuations of the Weave over a five hundred year period. It was a long book of dusty, monotonous observations, she had related with a grunt. Dolanna had read a book on the societal customs of the early Arakite empire and how to best fit in at the tower located in Dala Yar Arak, a tower none of them knew had ever stood, and she had also read a book of theoretical thaumaturgy, concepts and ideas for weaves that were theorized to be possible, but had yet to be researched or attempted. Dar had read a book about one katzh-dashi's attempts to take spells of other orders and researching weaves that achieved the same result, and, he admitted with a blush, had read portions of a book that turned out to be erotic poetry. He did page through the book to make sure that that's all it had in it, but didn't read every line on every page. Tarrin had only managed that one book, but everyone understood why and didn't press him about it. They'd all been there to watch him reprimand his daughter and answer questions from his mate. They had been distracting him. As they'd expected, the books were more or less about magic, but it turned out that that wasn't all that they were. Finding books on the society of Arak and erotic poetry proved that. They also had learned a little bit about those who had come before them.
"From what I read, the Ancients were more or less just like us," Keritanima announced. "They may have known more, but the same basics are there. Humans and Sha'Kar working towards the goals of the Goddess, whatever those were."
"Studying magic and maintaining the Towers," Dolanna told her.
"I think instead of reading each and every book, tomorrow we go through them and see if we can't sort them by subject," she said. "Today was important because it allowed us all to read in Sha'Kar and get used to it, but I'd like to be done with this before that army gets here, so we don't have two things on our minds. We need to weed out the books that probably won't matter. It shouldn't take too long, since most of the books make their subjects pretty clear in the first ten pages or so. We need to sort out and read the books on history, magic, and mythology."
"Why mythology?" Dar asked.
"Many old myths have some basis in fact," she told him absently, tapping her muzzle with a finger. "And sometimes they pass on information that the people at that time either would not or did not put in their histories. You never know, we may find what we need couched in the flowerly language of a child's fable."
"I never thought of that."
"I'm not surprised. Most people discount fairy tales because they're just that. Stories. Repeat a story enough times, and it stops being history and becomes legend. Legend becomes myth, and myth becomes a bedtime story." She looked at the Arkisian. "Of course, the story is all blown out of proportion because it changed so much over the years, but the nugget of truth is still hidden within the story itself."
"I think that is a good idea," Dolanna agreed. "Keritanima, if you feel up to it, you and I can return and sort them out after eating. It should not take too long."
"Sure, it shouldn't be that hard," she agreed.
"It'll be even easier if I help out," Miranda said with a cheeky grin. "I want to go get the book I wrote when we translated the Sha'Kar language, anyway. I think I might tidy it up and edit it a bit, so we can teach others written Sha'Kar more easily."
"You wrote yours in Wikuni," Tarrin pointed out.
"And you wrote yours in Sulasian, and Dar wrote his in Arakite, and Dolanna wrote hers in Sharadi. I think that represents the four most commonly spoken languages in the world, my friend," she grinned. "Between the four of us, we've penned the most comprehensive translation guides in the world."
"But they don't have everything in them," Dar admitted. "I know I stopped writing them down after I started understanding how the shape and form of the glyph told you what kind of word it was. And they don't have definitions. Just the words."
"What one won't have, one of the others might," Miranda shrugged. "So I want to borrow the ones you all wrote too. As to definitions, I don't need them. The books are for teaching written Sha'Kar. That means you have to be able to speak it first."
"I didn't know you could read Arakite, Miranda," Dar said.
"I can't. But you can, can't you, Dar?" she asked with a cheeky grin. "From what I understand, you can read Sulasian too."
"Why do I get the feeling I'm about to get roped into something?" Dar asked to himself.
"I'd never rope you into something. I'll just convince you that it was what you wanted to do in the first place," she told him with a wink. "That's how a woman does things, you know."