The Trail of Jovaar Qal (Gilmour)

Roy Gilmour

"I've got it, thanks." She kept her voice dull to depersonalize the rejection, as if slightly more tired than she was. Weeks they'd traveled together, but prudence still demanded you never let someone else fill your canteen, especially not when something had changed -- in this case, arrival. And certainly not Gilmour, a master of the intersection between objects and black magic. She went with him to the fountain and filled up, then sat and drank on a stone bench nearby.

"Al-Kaateb, you say. Not a name I know, but I haven't spent much time in this region. If he's a historian and a linguist, he might also be able to provide some insight on the epic poem I mentioned, the one that's anonymized but suggestive of what we're looking for. That's on top of his thoughts on the Qal alias. Don't mind me, just thinking out loud here." She took another long drink and leaned back against the sandstone wall. "I wonder who Qal was in daily life. I'd imagine he'd have selected the kind of identity that facilitated his studies and lifestyle. Then again, maybe he was bound to some other life, and necromancy was his escape. Or hers, for that matter. I envision, say, a well-educated member of some lord's harem." 

Harrier chuckled to herself, stood, refilled the canteen, and tied it to her belt again. "So where was the hut?"

Roy Gilmour

"Fortunately, you brought me."

Harrier eyed the man who'd shoved them away. He was keeping his distance, going about his business with one eye on them. She turned away and muttered something under her breath.

Some magicians specialized in techniques and styles that lent themselves well to speed, to use in the moment. Harrier, admittedly, lacked those sorts of abilities, by and large. With a little preparation, though, and given time to work, she could ritualize concepts and goals into slow, passably profound effects. After maybe five minutes of mumbling, around a corner from their watcher, she felt a subtle touch on the back of her mind. From her bags she produced a jade pen, an ink stick, and paper. When the pen trembled in her hand, she nodded to Gilmour and led him a couple of streets away, into a shady nook between a palm tree and a weathered statue.

She mixed the ink in a soapstone tray, then dipped the pen and laid out the sheet of paper.

"Write for us, al-Kaateb," she said. The pen began to write.

Roy Gilmour

Harrier still knelt in the dust by the wall, looking down at the paper. She should have felt unnerved to have Gilmour behind her, reading over her shoulder, but she didn't. The puzzle was all.

"Let's table those two elements for the moment, because I think there's a good deal to unpack. Don't ever worry about thinking out loud, Gilderoy. I'm about to do the same."

She adjusted her position a little, settling her weight, and squinted down at the shaky handwriting on the paper. The jade pen toppled and lay on its side, twitching.

"My first thought is this: he's aiming to convince both himself and us that he's happy and valuable in this condition -- possessing the pen. He's saying that he's the one who shares knowledge on his own terms, suffers under its burden -- that's him admitting that he's longed to express himself, but he can't speak, couldn't write before this. I suppose it could also be something about how knowledge is difficult to hold, how knowing too much will steal your happiness. But I have trouble thinking he saw knowledge as a burden, since he spent so much of his life focusing on its acquisition. It's a pride thing. And care, he mentions care. Perhaps he means the struggle to remember while stripped of a mortal mind. Perhaps he's referring to the way he cared for his books in life.

"The books. Those are the untold, that is, silent, that is, unspoken secrets that one can hold. Lost to time and eons -- perhaps he's saying some of his books, or their contents, were very old. Or perhaps he's saying that he sought an especially ancient book. He might also be referring to the loss of his library when he died.

"Then he comes back to Harat Kal Haraat. Still don't know what it means, but the placement in the poem might be significant. Because if we've reached the theme of a lost library or book -- his, or one he sought -- it might be a title or an author or a clue to the materials' location. Seek and you will find, he says. In context, does that refer to the materials, or to the key, or both -- for example, if the symbolic or real key symbolically or actually unlocks the library, ergo its secrets, ergo power over life and death? The obvious inference is that the key is necromantic knowledge, of course, so maybe the key is also a reference to a book. Or maybe there was an actual physical key -- maybe hidden under the dust of the floor when they came for him? Maybe hidden about his person and buried with him?"