(no subject)

[sunnydalealum]

The thin slanting light of a winter midafternoon is sifting in through the high windows as two figures step into the main room of the Library of the New Watchers' Council: a vast round vaulted space lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

Andrew's seen it before; he's looking at Nita, grinning in anticipation of her reaction.

Comments

[nita_callahan]

She grins.

"I have an unfair advantage. Not," she adds, glancing down again, "that it seems to be doing that much good. 'To lift'? Seriously?"

[stilljustandrew]

"That's the simplest meaning, but I told you, Sulcaric's complicated. There could be shades of abstract -- like, to uplift, or to raise to another level of -- here, let me see the rest of the sentence again."

He writes down the word lift on a blank page in his notebook, circles it, and starts flipping pages in the syllabary again.

[nita_callahan]

"Oof."

She makes a few more notes of her own, then goes back to skimming the page.

"What does spoken Sulcaric sound like?"

[stilljustandrew]

He chews on the end of his pen for a second before answering. "I've only ever heard it spoken once," he says. "And not by a Sulcar demon, so."

Yeah, he sounds a bit subdued.

[nita_callahan]

She glances up, raising her eyebrows.

[stilljustandrew]

Beat.

"-- I guess I really didn't tell you the whole story."

[nita_callahan]

"Not really, no."

She props her chin on her hand.

[stilljustandrew]

Andrew sighs. "Okay. Long story short: somewhere in New York there's a Sulcar demon who's overproducing this substance called hysk, which in ordinary circumstances is what they feed to their young so that their brains develop properly. And someone, maybe the demon himself or maybe somebody else, is selling hysk to college students as a brain-booster drug."

[nita_callahan]

"Oh, Christ."

She sighs. "And it conveys knowledge of Sulcaric as well, or is somebody picking up books they shouldn't be?"

[stilljustandrew]

He's shaking his head. "Not ordinarily. But this one guy got a lethal overdose, and in the time it took to kill him it basically ... overwrote his brain chemistry," he finishes heavily.

"And yeah, started him speaking the language."

[nita_callahan]

". . . Jesus." She rubs her forehead. "That's -- highly unpleasant."

[stilljustandrew]

"Seriously." He shakes his head. "So yeah, our first tipoff about the whole ugly mess was we saw this poor kid on the news, being taken to a mental hospital. Strapped down and babbling in Sulcaric."

[nita_callahan]

"Hell of a tipoff. Poor guy."

[stilljustandrew]

"Yeah."

It's a tiny bit flat, but no less sincere for that. Mark might have brought it down on his own head, poor sod, but he didn't deserve that.

"...anyway. Sorry to, um, bring down the mood."

[nita_callahan]

A sad half-smile. "'Sokay. We live in tough universes."

[stilljustandrew]

Rueful: "True that. I think I only know maybe two or three people in the bar whose worlds are rougher than ours."

[nita_callahan]

"Hah. Yeah. And I don't envy 'em."

She glances down at her notes.

"Well. At least we can try to understand them better."

[stilljustandrew]

He nods. "It's the job."

Several minutes of mostly-quiet study ensue.

[nita_callahan]

"Okay," Nita says decisively. "I think I've got at least part of this. Here." She clears her throat.

"The Realms of Dust -- that's the sentient-abstract-concept -- said to the klexsiowyn -- these here give you the context for that, the aware-but-lacking-self-abstract-tradition part, but who knows what the tradition actually is -- that by complex possessive pronoun power they would lift, possibly with shades of meaning we're not getting the enemies of the Sulcar out of darkness."

She cocks her head. "That last part's literal, I think."

[stilljustandrew]

"Yeah." He's frowning at the syllabary, and simultaneously consulting a separate book. "Except if 'darkness' is literal but 'lift' isn't ..."

[nita_callahan]

"Geez." She rubs her head and laughs. "That'll be fun if it's metaphorical. Or metaphysical. I can't even pin down that stuff in English sometimes."

[stilljustandrew]

He glances up, interested. "How about in the Speech?"

[nita_callahan]

"Metaphors in the Speech are . . . weird. I mean, they absolutely exist. There are wizardries you can only do by making one thing stand in for another -- re-enactments, for example."

(One hand has strayed to the scars on the opposite forearm, tracing them absently.)

"But they're still not exactly metaphors like we understand them in English. If you say -- I don't know, if you say 'Hope is a thing with feathers' in the Speech, it passes out of a poetic image and into at least a kind of reality."

[stilljustandrew]

"So it's not so much a metaphor as ... I don't even know what you would call that. It gets literalized."

[nita_callahan]

"Enacted. Well, sometimes, anyway." She grins ruefully. "There are words for it in the Speech, but they don't always translate well."