glyphs, and the new words confused their boundaries; the bloodstains, for surely it was blood, blurred some of it also. Without time and the knowledge of the languages, it was impossible to sort them out. Still, Cheyne wondered why anyone would write over the other words-and the closer he looked, the more he realized that the glyphs were sort of burned onto the page, rather than inked.
// only I spoke Old High Sumifan. If only anyone here did. Anyone that I could find again, he groused, thinking of the elusive elf.
The long journey west he'd set for himself seemed more than he could accomplish in the clear morning light and the rising desert heat. By the time he'd slipped from the mess tent and slunk into the city again, miraculously finding the same hole in the outer wall he'd used the day before, he had also recalled that he would need to somehow get past the western erg, and after that, the Wyrvil ores' stronghold. Even sketchy memories of a quick run across the scrubland and salt flats of that barren waste when)avin had first brought him home were almost enough to check his confidence.
Cheyne, at ten, had seen his first and only ore, then-it was a dead one, but the thought of the creature's two-inch incisors, jutting brow, and green-tinged skin still made him uneasy. Even in death, the thing had seemed so feral and wild, more like a beast than a sentient being.
But I have grown up since then, Cheyne reasoned. Perhaps my memory is more terrible than true,
Cheyne gently closed the little book and placed it securely inside his pack.
Business began early in Sumifa: the Mercanto's gates swung open precisely as the gnomon's shadow struck the fifth mark on the sundial. Cheyne strode through and made his way to a stall he had noticed the day before. Several ex-caravan guides had gathered there already and stood waiting for other work, their hoods