Scripts and Numbers

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Shape. Round, open letters, each built from an upright stroke and a bowl: a hand a village Hearth-keeper can write with a reed on cheap paper. It comes down from the old Vareth court hand, made simpler by the Chancery in the 300s so that reeves could keep tax rolls. Upright, no loops, no dots.

Letters (27): a · b · c · d · e · f · g · h · i · j · k · l · m · n · o · p · r · s · t · u · v · w · y · th · sh · ch · ng

Aldmere has no letters of its own for q, x or z, and foreign words are spelled again its way (Solvaine's Valcroix is written Valcrois). th, sh, ch and ng each get a letter, because Aldmeri leans on them: hethrin (king), esh (I), chomark (harrow), blomeng (want). The asking sound hw is written h + w. j is left over from the old court hand and now serves only for foreign names.

Numbers. Counted by tens, each figure worth more by its place, with a zero. The zero came from Zarvand through Caelvenne's banks in the 900s, when Aldmere began to owe money it had to count exactly. Before that the Chancery used tally-strokes and a great deal of parchment. Written left to right: 1146 R. takes four figures, as here.

Who can read it. About one in five. Every reeve, every Hearth-keeper, most craftsmen in the towns, few peasants. The Moot's rolls are kept in it, and so is every tax roll.

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Shape. Straight lines only, on a grid of three by three: triangles, chevrons, staves and bars. Made to be cut into a shield rim, scratched on a stone or carved on a spear shaft, never written with a pen. Every Phymon learns it in the Anvil by cutting it into wood with a knife.

Letters (22): a · b · g · d · e · z · th · i · k · l · m · n · o · p · r · s · t · u · ph · kh · x · y

No letters for c, f, h, j, q, v or w. Tharaxi has few sounds and wants fewer. x (ks) and y (the rounded ee) were added when the tongue was rebuilt: mox (we), tyx (you).

Numbers. Added up, like a tally that learned to cut corners: single marks for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000, strung together greatest first. There is no zero, because there is nothing to write when there is nothing. The Phymun count men, spears and years, and rarely more than a thousand of any. The women who run the trade and the stores keep a tally-board of their own, and no one calls it writing.

Who can read it. Nearly every Phymon man, and almost no one else: about one in thirty in Tharax. For the Bound to learn it is a crime. The Furrow's mark, a single curved line, is the only thing the Bound write, and it is not a letter.

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Shape. A running hand of loops and tails, written fast with a fine quill, the pen never lifted inside a word. Beautiful, quick, and hard to read unless you were raised on it, and that is on purpose: the Nine Houses like their ledgers readable by their own clerks and no one else. There is also a formal hand for show, the Cathedral Hand, used on monuments and the cathedral's gold, that no one writes by hand.

Letters (31): a · b · c · d · e · f · g · h · i · j · l · m · n · o · p · q · r · s · t · u · v · x · y · z · ch · ou · é · è · ô · gn · ll

Caelvennois gives whole letters to sounds other scripts spell in pieces: ch (as in ship), ou (as in soup), gn (ny), ll (a long l), and the three marked vowels é, è and ô. It has no k or w: the hard k sound is written c or qu. h, x and y are left over from the old hand and appear only in foreign names.

Numbers. The ledger figures: counted by tens, worth set by place, with zero. Taken from Zarvand's scholars (whose school became the House of Learning in 681) in 421, when the first leusore was struck and the banks needed to add. Every merchant on the continent uses them now, Castavari merchants too, who are not supposed to. Written left to right. The Hand has a stroke of its own for money owed, and the Ledger-followers hold it a holy sign.

Who can read it. About four in ten in Solvaine, fewer than two in ten in the vineyards. Every clerk, banker, cardinal, engineer and spy. The Quiet Office writes in a cipher built on it.

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Shape. Heavy, upright, crowded: thick upright strokes with pointed tops and diamond feet, joined by short bars, so that a page looks like a fence of spears. Written slowly with a broad-cut reed. The Berrode's scribes train for seven years and make perhaps a page a day. Most Castavari who can write use a quicker, sloppier hand called the Market Hand. The church frowns on it and the merchants pay the church no mind.

Letters (27): a · b · c · d · e · f · g · h · i · l · m · n · o · p · q · r · s · t · u · v · x · z · ll · j · ñ · ch · rr

ll (a y sound), rr (the long roll), ñ (ny) and ch each have a letter of their own, and so does j (a breathy h). No k, w or y: the hard k is written c or qu. h, x and z are left over from the old church hand and appear only in foreign names.

Numbers. Church numerals: marks added up for 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000, written greatest first, no zero. Every royal decree, church register and crusade muster roll uses them, and a sum of any size takes a line of parchment. Merchants, navigators and the silver mines quietly keep their true books in Caelvennois ledger figures. The Office of Truth calls these "the heretic's arithmetic" and cannot do without them.

Who can read it. About one in seven. Nearly every priest and knight, almost no peasants. The Office of Truth keeps its files in a plainer hand so that its lay informers can write them.

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Shape. Flowing and joined, written right to left with a reed pen on Talodin-reed paper. The letters are made from a few body-shapes (bowl, hook, teeth, loop, stem, sweep, oval), told apart by one to three dots above or below. Inside a word each letter joins its neighbors and changes shape a little at the start, middle and end; the standing (lone) forms are the ones children learn first. It is an abjad: the consonants are always written and the short vowels mostly are not, so Mazbaaran is written M-z-b-aa-r-aa-n and a Zarvani reads the rest from knowing the word. Three long vowels (aa, ee, oo) have letters of their own.

Letters (28): a · b · p · t · s · j · ch · h · kh · d · z · r · zh · sh · gh · f · q · k · g · l · m · n · v · y · aa · ee · oo · ' (the glottal catch)

Numbers. Made by Zarvand's scholars long before the House of Learning was founded, and the greatest thing Zarvand ever sent abroad: counted by tens, worth set by place, with a zero written as a small diamond. Figures run left to right even inside right-to-left writing, so a Zarvani page reads two ways at once. The star tables, the tax rolls of the meemakhoot, and every merchant ledger on the continent come down from these ten figures. Caelvenne took them in 421 and calls them its own.

Who can read it. About three in ten over all, and nearly everyone in the cities. Fire-temple schools teach every child of Mazbaaran the letters and the numbers together, in that order. The Deep Sands nomads do not read and call it a city sickness.

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Kaishon writes two ways at once.

The Reed-marks. Forty signs made of a few brush strokes inside an unseen square: level strokes, upright strokes, hooks, dots, sweeps and boxes. Twenty-four are initials (the consonant a syllable starts with: k, g, t, d, p, b, m, n, s, z, h, r, y, w, ch, j, sh, ts, ky, ry, hy, my, gy, kw) and sixteen are rhymes (what follows: a, e, i, o, u, ai, ei, oi, au, ui, an, en, in, on, ok, ek). A syllable is written as its initial stacked over its rhyme; a syllable with no initial is its rhyme alone. Tone is a small dot: none for level, above for rising, below for falling, beside for dipping. Any Kaishoni sound can be written with them. Conscripts, shopkeepers, women of good family and roadside shrine-keepers write in Reed-marks alone. They are written in columns, top to bottom, right to left across the page.

The Measures (logograms). Some four thousand signs, each standing for a word and not a sound, learned over ten years by anyone who sits the examinations. A magistrate's decree is written in Measures, with Reed-marks between them for the joining words. The Doctrine holds that a mind that has learned four thousand Measures has itself been measured; the examination is, in part, a test of whether you can write.

Numbers. Corner-counts: each figure sits in an unseen square. One to four are marks at the corners, added one at a time, sunwise from the top left; five is a cross through the square; six to nine are the cross and one to four corners; zero is a single dot. Counted by tens, worth set by place. Written in upright columns like everything else. The archive-city keeps accounts in them going back nine centuries, and the Tsenkin earthquake of 890 destroyed the only tables of the older way, so nobody knows how Kaishon counted before.

Who can read it. Reed-marks: about one in three. Measures: perhaps one in fifty, and that one runs the province.

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Shape. Angled staves with slanting branches and no horizontal strokes at all, because a level cut follows the grain of the wood and is lost. Made to be cut with a knife into a beam, a shield, a boat's prow or a standing stone, and read by touch as much as by sight in the long dark. Twenty-three runes. Every rune also carries one or two short notches, cuts standing free beside the stave; that is how a carver tells a rune from a scratch. Each rune is named for a Hrodvaldr word that begins with its sound (the s rune is surku, "friend"; the b rune is balnas, "world"; the f rune is falis, "farmer"), and a rune carved alone is a charm, not a letter. The Old Ones' storm priests cast them for omens.

Letters (23): a · e · i · o · u · y · b · d · f · g · h · j · k · l · m · n · r · s · t · v · th · ey · au

A long vowel (á, ó, ú) is its short rune with one more notch. The asking sound hj is written h + j. Southerners still write Hrodvald names differently every time, because they cannot hear the difference between u and y.

Numbers. Tally by fives and scores: single staves up to four, a crossed stave for five, a double cross for ten, a barred pair of staves for a score (twenty), and a diamond-stave for the long hundred, which is a hundred and twenty. There is no zero and no worth by place; a large count is only more marks, greatest first. Anything past a few long hundreds is kept by the hrinduk in verse. That is why Hrodvald history is exact about the number of ships and vague about everything else.

Who can read it. About one in twenty. Every storm priest, most hrinduk, some stelestuk, a few shipwrights. Selra Stormbrand reads runes and Aldmere's Hearthscript. Kruman reads runes. Sauld Half-Sung reads everything and writes it down wrong on purpose.

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• The Qaflan read every script above and carry letters in all of them; a caravan captain's tattoo-code is a private eighth.
• The ledger figures (Caelvenne's form of Zarvand's numbers) are the one writing every merchant on Aethorra shares.
• The Ember Pilgrims teach Hearthscript, because it is the simplest, and it spreads along the roads with them.
• Tharax and Hrodvald both distrust paper, and both keep their true records in the memories of old women and hrinduk.
• Kaishon's Measures are the only writing on Aethorra that the scholars of the Celestial Table think may be kin to the glyphs on the Tzalan pyramids. Nobody has proved it. Chelpan's smuggled scholar is trying.

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A traveler who has his letters still needs the tongues: their sounds, how names are built, and the words and phrases he will want in every realm.