The water was from a well! But how did they get it up the Rock Spire? To make it travel against gravity such a tremendous distance, it was astounding!

Magic. It had to be magic. No conventional wellpump could move so much water straight up, over such a distance. Magic had to draw the water from the ground.

He'd bet that that lava tube he climbed wasn't the only tunnel piercing the spire. There had to be one big wellshaft in there as well, drawing up water from the ground so far below.

After drinking his fill, he looked up at the statue one more time, studying it. So that was what a regular, run-of-the-mill, Sha'Kar looked like. Well, there was absolutely no doubt now that the Selani and the Sha'Kar were related. He knew that from meeting that Sha'Kar woman, but now there was absolutely no room for error in that assumption. That woman may have been a fluke among her kind, but now he'd seen two examples of Sha'Kar, and they both matched Selani physiology. His eyes drifted down to the base of the statue, and he saw that spidery script that he'd become so familiar with back at the Tower, the written language of the Sha'Kar. The letters were carved into the stone, and were large enough for his eyes to make out, despite his inability to make out fine details. He had no idea what it said-

– -at least until he looked at the line below. That was written in Sulasian, albeit a very archaic form of it. It took him a while to decipher it. That line, he could read. It read May happiness and good fortune find you.

Curious. That line was considerably longer than the Sha'Kar script. The Sha'Kar writing was only eight characters long. Did it say something different? No. Something told him that it said the same thing. He didn't know why he knew that, but he did. Almost like it was something that he had always known, yet hadn't realized until that moment.

Almost like a memory long submerged, coming back up to the surface.

That made something click in his head. No wonder nobody could read it! Every character in the Sha'Kar language represented a word instead of a letter! It explained why there were so very many different characters. He'd looked through the books and realized that often, he didn't see the same character in the same paragraph. He'd never thought to think about why it was that way, but now he did, and the reasoning made sense. He would bet that Keritanima already knew what he just realized, but Keritanima was much smarter than he was. He wasn't too proud to admit that.

No wonder. If every character was a word, it would be next to impossible to break the language without some kind of written translation to go on as a base.

But how did he know that they said the same thing? He looked at the Sha'Kar script, and it… tickled at him. He didn't have any other way to describe it. Something about it seemed very familiar to him now, when he hadn't felt that way before. Somehow, he knew exactly which characters represented which words in Sulasian, though their order was different. What was may happiness and good fortune find you in Sulasian roughly equated to to-you happiness and good fortune may yet come.

He blinked. He could make that out? How, for the Goddess' sake? He didn't know the first thing about Sha'Kar outside the spoken tongue.

Think, kitten, the voice of the Goddess came to his mind. Think for a moment, and the answer will come to you.

You did it? he asked within his mind.

No, actually, I didn't, she admitted with a laugh. What happened to you the last time you touched the Weave?

The voices from the past, he thought. Am I getting that again?

In a way, she replied. The memories of the Weave are beginning to reveal themselves to you, and among them is the memory of the written form of Sha'Kar. It is an aspect of your power. The Weave is much more than a simple source of magical power, as you have discovered. It holds inside it the memory of many things, though most of them are connected with Sorcery in one way or another. What's happening is that a part of you you don't even know is there is seeking out those memories, and making them a part of you. You've been doing that for a while now, Tarrin, though you never knew it.

"What do you mean?" he asked aloud in the manner of the Cat.

How did you learn to do the things you do with High Sorcery? she asked. You use magic unseen in the world for a thousand years, and you use it flawlessly, without anyone teaching you. How do you do that?

That brought him up short. "I, I just knew," he replied uncertainly.

Silly kitten, the Goddess laughed within his mind. You knew because you could feel the memory of it in the Weave. Before, only memories of spells and magic were finding you, because your need for them was so great that it caused you to extend past the boundaries of your own power. Now the more mundane memories of the Weave are beginning to come to you. Among them are the memories possessed by the Sha'Kar. Including their written language.

The ramifications of that were not lost to him. The entirety of the knowledge of the katzh-dashi were not written in books. They existed within the Weave itself! The Weave served as the greatest library in the world!

It meant that anyone who could read the memories of the Weave could see anything that anyone ever did that was related to Sorcery! All the vast knowledge of the Ancients had been within his grasp the entire time!

"Does that mean that I could find-"

No. The location of the Firestaff has been erased from the memory of the Weave, because Sorcerers aren't the only ones who can read the memories. Long ago, the Wizards and Priests could cast spells that gave them a limited ability to extract knowledge from the Weave. They called them spells of Augury. Because they could find the Firestaff through the Weave, the Elder Gods all joined together and eradicated all traces of the Firestaff from the Weave, from the books of mortal kind, and from the memories of very nearly all. Only a few maintained that knowledge, so they could put forth the clues necessary to lead you to the Firestaff now.

That made sense to him, but something else bothered him. "Is that why I'm remembering things I never knew? Because I need to know Sha'Kar to read the Book of Ages?"

No. I told you before, the location of the Firestaff is not in the book. But you need the book to find your way. Since you're starting to gain access to information that may confuse you, let me explain. The Book of Ages contains the majority of the known history of mortal kind in its pages. It contains lore of lost knowledge, even things that the Weave does not retain. Among those things is a comprehensive guide to learning the written Sha'Kar language.

That is why you need the book, Tarrin, she said bluntly. The manner in which you're starting to decipher Sha'Kar isn't very comprehensive. It's very fuzzy and prone to mistakes, and as you've noticed, learning things in that manner isn't very reliable. The book holds everything you need to learn written Sha'Kar the right way. My children did write everything down, kitten. Not everything is held in the Weave, for the very reason I just gave you. Trying to conjure memories from the Weave isn't as precise as sitting down and reading a book.

Tarrin made the leap intuitively. "Those books we took from the Cathedral!" he gasped.

Yes, whatever happened to those books? she asked winsomely. As I recall, you left them sitting in the middle of my courtyard. Forgot all about them, didn't you?

His heart about came out of his mouth. They left them out in the open! They were probably mildewed and disintigrated-

Calm down, kitten, they're fine, the Goddess chuckled. I'm watching over them even as we speak. They're still as fresh and legible as the day you brought them into the courtyard.

"Thank the Goddess," Tarrin sighed automatically.