Dolanna did so, and after repeating the prayer over and over again until they had it memorized, they used it in earnest. It was the first time Tarrin had ever used real Priest magic, and he found it to be quite odd. He couched his request in flowery prose, as was taught to him by Dolanna, seeming to grovel verbally to be blessed with the Goddess' magic. It seemed odd to be so humble to one who laughed at his jokes and talked to him like a best friend, but if that was what was necessary, then that was what was necessary. Tarrin never forgot that the Goddess was his Goddess, and he was devoted to her and knew his place in their relationship. He chanted the prayer a bit self-consciously, but when he reached its conclusion, he could not deny the magic that responded to his words. He felt the finger of the Goddess brush against his mind, and he entered what he could only call an episode of exceptionally acute attentiveness. He became aware of absolutely every little thing around him, even beyond his normally inhuman senses, and the open pages of the Book of Ages on the table before them looked not quite so intimidating now. He actually felt confident in the upcoming task to learn the written Sha'Kar language. He actually felt much smarter than he did just a moment before, felt up to the challenge of the academic hurdle facing him.

"Wow, I feel… enlightened," Dar said after finishing the prayer.

"A strange effect," Allia agreed. "I have never felt so… smart."

"That is the noticable effect of the prayer," Dolanna nodded. "It only lasts a few hours, and we cannot use it again until tomorrow, so let us move along, Keritanima. Even in this altered state, time is very much a factor."

"Alright then," Keritanima said as Miranda started handing out blank books from one of the chests, then handed each of them one of those fancy, expensive Tellurian fountain pens and put a couple of inkwells on the table for all of them to use. "The book starts with a key for the syllabic form of the language. This is the first, it represents the phonetic sound shi."

Time became blurred to them all in that alternating form of time.

They would spend hours and hours-days even-within the realm of slower time, laboriously going over the written Sha'Kar script, hours and days spent in a silent unchanging light that seemed to eat at Tarrin's sense of normalcy, an eternal, quiet moment of daylight that did not end. It ate at his instincts, his sense of the natural order of things, and it caused him quite a bit of discomfort for much longer than it bothered the others. Symbol by symbol, glyph by glyph, one by one, they learned the Sha'Kar language. But the days and days spent within the boundary of the gift from Shellar translated to hours and hours in the real time of the outside world, giving all of them a strange sense of dislocation from everything else. Keritanima started with High Wikuni-or what she thought was High Wikuni-before realizing that the Wikuni had corrupted the language written on the pages, changing the meaning of many of the words. She could read about half of it, but for her, that wasn't precise enough. After that, they went through the book again, until they found the key to translating into Sha'Kar from Arakite. When they found that, Dar and Tarrin took over the task of training, since they were the only two who understood the written form of the Arakite language. It was here where Dar asserted himself over Tarrin, proving that his Goddess-boosted ability to remember and learn outstripped his old friend by many degrees. Tarrin happily allowed Dar to take over the sessions, since he preferred being a student rather than a teacher anyway. As they expected, Dar's memory when it came to images and things he saw-such as the glyphs of Sha'Kar-made him invaluable to them.

With Dar's help, they managed to convert the Sha'Kar keys into the base languages of all the others, and then they completely memorized the syllabic branch of the language. As Keritanima said, it was much easier than memorizing some ten thousand individual characters, but it still wasn't easy. There were three distinct forms of those syllabic symbols, each relating to a differing level of formality. Three different symbols that stood for the same phonetic sound. In all, there were over four hundred individual syllabic symbols to memorize, and what was more, they had to learn when and where each one was used. But they managed to complete it, and that allowed them to read about ten percent of the Sha'Kar writing before them, consistingly mostly of words borrowed from other languages, words adopted after the syllabic format had been created, leaving the vast majority of the language unreadable. Once that was mastered, they started on the glyphs. It was a painfully slow process, but it did progress. Inside the time-altered dome, they labored for over a month to learn the Sha'Kar language, using the memory-boosting prayer taught to them by Dolanna-which, they found out, was still bound by the time limitations of real time, making it effective for subjective days so long as they stayed within the dome-they did move forward.

It took four days. Four days in real time. In the strange dual subjective time in which they had functioned, however, it took then nearly two months to complete the education in Sha'Kar, and even that was only possible because of the aid from the Goddess. But when it was over, any of them could pick up anything written in Sha'Kar and read it perfectly. Dar and Keritanima had demanded thoroughness, teaching them absolutely every word in the dictionary-after all, they were looking for obscure and unusual information, and it would probably be written using obscure or unusual words. So they had to be masters of the Sha'Kar language to find what they were looking for.

It had been hardest on Tarrin, for he had been the one responsible for keeping the others fed. He would step out into real time, Conjure up some food, and then return. He found out that repeatedly crossing the boundary between the two times had detrimental effects on him. It made him very tired and irritable, and it gave him strange headaches. It also made his sense of the Weave go haywire when he returned to normal time, since his ability to sense the Weave was affected by the shift of time. At the end of every day-the real end-he would drag himself back to his room and collapse on the nearest piece of furniture. Jesmind and Jasana weren't too pleased at his lack of attention to them, but he was honestly too tired to care.

Four days. Four days closer were the ki'zadun, but on the other hand, the Selani were also four days closer. He figured that they'd be attacking the Dals at Ultern any day now. Suld no longer looked like a city; it looked like a fortress. The gates had all been closed and reinforced, forcing anyone wishing to enter the city to do so by ship. All the villagers surrounding the city had come inside, and everyone was hard at work preparing the city for siege. There was no way, nor a reason, to hide the preparations any longer, as houses were torn down to pile against the backs of the city gates and every man with a sword or weapon was pressed into duty to man the walls or patrol the streets against thieves and looters. The Regent for the king had given over all duty and power for defense of the city to Darvon and the Knights, and the wise old military man had deployed the forces and organized Sorcerers as well as could possibly be done.

On the start of that fifth day, they all came back to the courtyard to find the dome gone. Obviously, it had served its purpose, and now they were going to be running in real time while they started looking through the books and scrolls they stole from the Cathedral of Karas. "Well, I guess it was inevitable," Keritanima sighed. "I'd have loved to read the Book of Ages, since we'd have all the time in the world. Looks like I won't get the chance."