Dimwater's Dragon Read Online Free PDF Page B

her eyes away from the painting and shut the memory out from her mind. She twirled out of her father’s chair and walked along the long row of cherry-wood bookshelves, scanning the titles as she walked. Her eyes browsed from the floor to the ceiling, not finding anything in particular she wanted to read that day. That is, until she came to an odd set of books. Surely she must have seen them before, for she had been in the study hundreds maybe even thousands of times over the years. But she could not recall seeing this boxed set. Each book had black leather binding with gold letters stamped into the spine. The letters were an ancient hybrid of cuneiform and Peish, the language of the dwarves. More peculiar than this extremely rare language, was the fact that each of these books was locked into an ebony shell with a glass front.
    Her hand almost instinctively went back for her lock pick, but this time her mind cut in faster and she stopped. She reached up to move the box and see if she might open it some other way, but the very box itself was secured into the bookshelf. She would have to settle for reading the words on the spines of the books and nothing more.
    She studied the ancient hybrid language for several minutes trying to remember what she knew of the dwarven language, which was even less than what she knew of the dark elves’ languages. Not one to give up easily, Kyra turned around and moved toward the opposite wall where her father kept his language books. She traced along the shelves with her fingers. She glanced over the shelf filled with several manuscripts and books about the history and proper usage of Common Tongue. She grimaced as her eyes saw those books, for they had been instruments of torment for her. The proper use of Common Tongue was a subject that her father had painstakingly shoved into her mind from a very young age. She could remember many times during lessons with her father that she would ask if she could go to the bathroom or if she could get a drink, only to have her father reply with something along the lines of “I hope you can,” or if she were terribly unlucky, she would receive a ten minute lecture on the difference between the use of the words ‘may’ and ‘can.’
    Other language references on the shelf included those for Terryn and Silamite, the various dialects and languages of the elves known as Taish, a couple of rare records on the Orcish languages as well as one on the language of the goblins, and an extremely small record of giantish and ogretic. None of those were the ones that she was looking for. Kyra was looking for the language of the dwarves. She found more than half of an entire shelf dedicated to tomes and references about the dwarven history of language and finally the languages themselves. Like the elves, there were many different races of dwarves, all with their own complete language system and many had more than one writing system. However, despite the vast amount of books kept in her father’s study, there was only one book that addressed the hybrid language that she was looking for. While all of the other books about the Peish language were extremely thick and complicated, this book was only sixty pages long. She pulled it from the shelf and open the first page to see an alphabet conversion chart. There was a list of cuneiform characters and symbols on the left page. On the right page was a corresponding list of dwarven runes.
    She took the book back across the study to find the sealed books. Kyra set her finger to the first book and pointed to the first symbol. Then she looked down to her cipher, looking for what letter the complex symbol stood for. However she found that instead of representing one letter, the complex character in fact represented an entire word, thus saving space upon the spine of the book.
    Kyra flipped the page and found a similar list to the first, but this one translated the dwarvish runes into Terryn letters or words. It had been a while