He compromised by swearing. He was getting better at swearing. As long as he didn’t blaspheme, the Master Grammarian, who still directed his studies, turned a blind eye.

He looked at the manuscript again. It was very old—probably far older than it appeared. On the surface, it was yet another re-hash of Aristotle. An astute Etruscan collector had noted some capitals—carefully illuminated—in an older hand, and had taken a magnifying glass to it.

It had been scraped clean somewhere in the east, a thousand years ago. Long before the Wild’s hordes had swept across the Holy Land and destroyed every sign of man—back when Demetriopolis and Alexandria Fryggia were thriving cities and not horrifying necropoli where only the not-dead and the boldest or most desperate adventurer or scriptorium-collector dared go.

Morgon was determined that someday, when his powers were fully developed, he would assay Demetriopolis and Ptolemaica himself. The library had once been the world’s greatest. The Suda, a collection of what appeared to be librarian’s notes on the collection, even claimed to have had manuscripts—scrolls—from other spheres. Other spheres! His thoughts went off into a whirlwind of supposition, creation and destruction like an intellectual ouroboros.

But the reality of the manuscript under his elbow drew him back. Hidden under the ancient Aristotle was something far more wonderful. It was, in fact, an Archaic essay on farming. Embedded in it were six workings, none of which had been deciphered by the Grammarian. He’d handed the whole amazing relic to Morgon with the words “You’re a genius—see if you can do anything with this.”

Morgon had spent every hour of the last forty on one passage three paragraphs long.

He had every word of the Archaic deciphered.

He had all the traditional grammatical parts of a working—the opening, which was sometimes an invocation and sometimes an enhancement of memory; the orologicum, a modern term for the process by which any one working accessed the power available from ops and potentia; and the trigger, which had a variety of elegant names in Low Archaic and usually a single High Archaic word.

He had that.

He knew the purpose of the working, as well. Flavius Silva’s Low Archaic was not on order with some of the other recently rediscovered ancients, but his words were easy enough to read, and Morgon had gone a step further by asking Tancreda to translate the whole passage, as she was a far better linguist than he.

“For the remedy of bad water for stock. Being that too often the farmer must use what water there is, whether that water be cool, flowing, and clean, or whether the farmer face a long summer and dry, and needeth to have his animals take even that which is green and full of filth.”

Morgon could see it well enough.

And the trigger was Purgo.

So—a single word, usually very powerful. The underlying working was very complex. Complex, with a simple trigger—very powerful.