Ghost Fields - Book One of The Fields of Mendhavai Trilogy

Chapter Twelve

CHAPTER TWELVE

It took Compa four days to translate the book in its entirety. He’d started out slowly, getting frustrated as many of the words, similar to some other language he’d learned, continued to elude him. Through hard work and determination, and very little sleep, he had a whole new book with every word copied into Rowheem, the common tongue. He hadn’t yet taken the time to actually read the translation.

I’d grown bored again without his company and attention, and so I spent those days wandering keep and town, helping where there was need, with mending, cooking, cleaning, and other domestic chores. The people were glad to have my presence again in their homes and it brought on a wave of guilt for the way I’d neglected them as friends lately.

The scribe and I had taken a late lunch today, again in the study with the hearth blazing to ward off the chill of an early snowfall. Samae relaxed in front of the blaze, her pregnant barrel bulging, and I sat at my desk, lazily scribing in the diary I’d also neglected recently. It was another of my family’s traditions to keep a personal account of our lives for future generations. That was how Compa had come across the secret room.

“My Lady!” he nearly shouted, standing up from the small table near the hearth, startling the she-wolf awake. He tipped the stool onto the floor in his haste and nearly tripped over it as he rushed to my side at the desk. He slapped the book in the foreign language down on the desk before me, open to a drawing spread across the two pages. It depicted a fanciful stone temple and, to the right of the temple entrance, an arch of stone that was obviously tall enough to permit a man mounted astride his horse to ride through without difficulty. In my mind’s eye, I could place the image on the paper over the ruins at the hill with a near perfect fit. It appeared Compa had copied it exactly, only changing the language of the notations.

He pointed to the arch.

“That,” he said, grinning, “is a Portal Stone.” He looked up at me expectantly. I shook my head, indicating I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

He sighed heavily in mock frustration. “A Portal Stone,” he repeated, meaningfully, raising an eyebrow. After a brief pause, waiting for a dawning of understanding in me that was not forthcoming, he continued. “It connects to other Portal Stones around…” he shrugged and gestured grandly around him. “You step through it, disappear from here,” he poked his finger at an imaginary location on the polished surface of the desk, “and reappear here,” another poke in a different spot, “in the blink of an eye.”

I looked up at him and arched an eyebrow in disbelief.

“Really!” he exclaimed boyishly. “I’d prove it to you if the Stone at the ruins wasn’t broken, and if I knew for certain another Stone was still erect in a safe place.”

“Well,” I said, “Can the one at the ruins be rebuilt? And if it can, how does one activate this portal? Surely it isn’t working all day, every day. That would be extremely dangerous to any communities near one.”

He looked thoughtfully at me. “I suppose you’re right. Perhaps that’s why that temple and the Stone were destroyed, though I’ve yet to find any other evidence of knowledge of this place. I suppose you could ask the stonemason to go out and see the ruins and see what it would take to at least rebuild them. After that, you can figure out how to reactivate it. And I’d really like to go back. I didn’t have a chance to finish copying the text that was etched into the stone. We’ve stumbled upon an ancient forgotten language, though it’s very similar to Varsanian, which I was taught at the collegium. If it weren’t for that teaching, which I very much resented at the time, I’d not have been able to make hide nor hair of the book.”