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.