They don't know how to look, Ramus thought. They may think they can understand language, but everything that matters is between the lines.

The library was contained in a large, low hall behind a shop selling furniture, paintings and exotic tapestries from Pengulfin Landing. It had been a storage building many years before, and the ranks of rough timber shelves were still there, freestanding down the middle of the hall and fixed to all four walls. When one of the old Chieftains of Long Marrakash had decided to gather as many books, scrolls and parchments together as they could, the shop's owner had sold the hall for a good price. The books and other recordings had been gathered and moved in, and since then this had been a virtual shrine to all those who strove to know the past. It was also a place of much frustration, as few books were written in exactly the same language. Most utilized some common Noreelan lettering, but each writer had adapted the language to their own aims, using symbolism, unique dialects, graphical representations, imagery known and unknown and preferences that often amounted to personal code.

Ramus walked toward the rear of the hall, passing the Burnt Past. When the library was first gathered, a group of shamans came one night and tried to burn it down. They destroyed a thousand books before they were stopped, and the library keeper had left the damaged shelving as he had found it, a sort of shrine to all that lost history. It pained Ramus every time he saw it, because it represented knowledge that could never be regained.

There was no one else sitting at the tables and chairs at the back of the hall. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down, closing his eyes as he let the smell and feel of the place envelop him. He loved it here. So much potential, so much history, and he was quite certain that many of these books, if translated correctly, would change the world as they knew it today.

And so could these, he thought, looking at the parchments. He smoothed them out on the table and spread them so he could see all three at once.

He did not recognize much of the lettering, although some of the root formations looked vaguely familiar. What he had seen—and he was certain that Nomi had not spotted this—was that the symbols and strange lettering were contained within defined borders. There was no way of telling whether or not the pages were supposed to follow one another, or even in which order, but all of the pages displayed one fundamental similarity: a thick vertical line dividing the page into a space taken up by writing and an area of blankness.