Death After Death

Chapter 177: Silent Study

Simon spent days looking through the Tome of Bahgmorrda, making notes and scribbling over them or crumpling them up and throwing them away, but that was all for show. He’d already solved the code, and the only difficulty was going slow enough to take it all in without giving himself away.

On its surface, the thing looked like the grimoire he’d stolen from Festuvian so long ago. That was to say, it was half full of garbage and meaningless rituals. Amidst those rituals, though, were words of power. He didn’t discover any new ones, but in many cases, the ones that were mentioned were used in ways he’d never seen them. That was enough to rapidly expand his knowledge.

The first word he dug into was Vrazig. Simon had used that one plenty to strike people down with lightning. It was his favorite assassination spell. He’d also learned from the strange orcish graffiti that it had connotations of entropy when it was pronounced as ruin. It was more than that, though.

Truthfully, all the words were, as he was quickly finding out. He’d once thought that each word only had a single power and a single meaning. Actually, I once thought that lesser was only associated with healing and greater with fire, he thought with a smirk as he remembered how foolish he’d been. There was far more to it, though.

In the case of Vrazig, there was lightning and ruin, but that was because they were both related to air. Well, wind, really, he corrected himself. It had elemental qualities, which made sense, but it also seemed to be related to chance.

That made Vosden its opposite since it was earth, but that was also true of Delzam, which turned out not to be just related to curing but a reordering of things.

Simon happily went through the book, a few pages at a time, collecting more associations and linkages. He pretended to scribble notes while he acted like his frustration continued to deepen. At dinner that night, he told the Head Librarian through a series of notes that he was trying a substitution cipher using common words, and he hoped for some results soon.

The man was polite enough, but the manner of his responses and his expression when he read Simon’s updates told him all he needed to know. As far as his superior was concerned, this was busy work, and he didn’t expect results.

That was good news as far as Simon was concerned, and he spent the next week drinking deep of this new font of knowledge. They think that taking my tongue is a setback, but in my next life, they will live to regret this, he told himself as his knowledge broadened.

That said, it was only when he figured out the nature of the illustration near the end of the book that he really had a breakthrough.

The thing was a series of disconnected shapes. Most of them had coded symbols on them, but a few were left blank, with only a question mark. He eventually decoded the elemental symbols, and a few minutes after that, most everything else, thanks to the process of elimination.

Vrazig was air, so it opposed earth, but it was also chaos, so it opposed order.

Vosden was earth, so it opposed air, but it was also strength, so it opposed weakness.

Meiren was fire, so it opposed water, but it was also heat, so it opposed cold.

Zyvon was water, so it opposed fire, but it was also transfer, so it opposed boundary.

Slowly but surely, a number of conclusions were built up from these basic oppositions. For most of the time that Simon had known a single word of power, he’d thought of them as discrete things, but really, they were almost a language onto themselves. Though it wasn’t quite a language that he was used to, with adverbs and punctuation, he could see how it now had nouns and verbs.

Each word modified the next, and though he wasn’t sure how much that increased the cost of the spell, he could see how that could increase the specificity of the effects. That kind of precision and flexibility would allow him to do any number of complex things with only a few more syllables spoken.

After only a week of studying this profane tome, Simon felt like his brain was melting from the implications. He felt like he’d been using the powers he’d found all wrong. Up until now, it was like he’d been spamming a fast kick in a fighting game without ever bothering to learn the combos.

It was good that he’d waited for so long to reveal even that much because their response was to take the thing away from him immediately and pass it off to the reader of the Grimoire section of the library. That frustrated Simon, but truthfully, he’d expected it, which was why he’d done exactly as he did. Let them struggle to learn even a tenth of what I did, he thought as he reflected on everything he knew now.

Aufvarum (disperse, minor)

Barom (illusion, light)

Celdura (plan, shape)

Delzam (cure, order)

Dnarth (connection, distant, hidden)

Gelthic (ice, weakness)

Gervuul (greater, power)

Hyakk (flesh, healing)

Karesh (location, protection, understanding)

Meiren (creation, fire, life)

Oonbetit (focused, force, motion)

Uuvellum (null, boundary)

Vosden (earth, metal, strength)

Vrazig (lightning, ruin, wind)

Zyvon (transfer, water)

Every word of power that Simon knew now had more than one association, and he suspected that there was still more to learn. Hopefully, he’d find all of that and more as he delved even deeper into the library.