66
The next few days were spent digging through the Workshop Library.
The Library mostly only had scrolls and blueprints. But, when pulling out a scroll, a small thin book had fallen into Milo’s hands. It had been secreted behind the scroll.
Frowning, he looked at it.
Nothing special. Paper glued together. A plain front cover with dwarven runes which no doubt was the title of the piece.
After finding that book, he soon found another.
“Fed?” He held one of them up. “Are these manuals?”
I have no information on them, Milo.
“Hmm.” Milo wondered how many more were in the Library.
Books were what he needed right now. While the blueprints had small notes, and the walls in the fortress had lines of runes, it wasn’t the same as a book. It might be easier to learn the language from the book, he thought.
They were also light and easy to carry.
After a few hours, he’d found dozens of them. Mostly thin. Anywhere between fifty to a hundred pages.
All very plain covers.
He picked up one which had a clock gear on the front and thought it might be a manual of some kind. That might make it even easier. If he could figure out some words related to machine components, maybe they’d repeat in the book?
Then he could slowly piece together sentences.
Taking the book back to the Security Room which doubled as an office and study space of sorts, he laid it out on the desk and placed his journal down beside it.
He’d been collecting all the runes so he could try to define the alphabet to start. He thought that would help him learn to pronounce the words. With the recordings of dwarves, he could then relate what he was reading to what he was hearing.
Hopefully.
That was his plan, at least.
For a few hours he worked with the little book.
What he was searching for were the common runes. The ones repeated more often than not. Slowly, he marked those as important and started restructuring his alphabet to put them in order of which was used more than the others.
When he was sort of happy with it, he started playing some of the recordings on the screen.
The first video was a dwarf shouting about something.
That was mostly what the dwarves did, Milo noticed. They shouted and grouched about things. It looked like they were obsessed with the quality of materials.
It was almost comical sometimes.
He watched a dwarf lose his mind over one of the glass components which was clearly an eye. He couldn’t be completely sure, but he thought the dwarf was upset about the realism of the coloring.
He kept pointing at little things and pushing the eyeball closer to the viewer.
Like he was saying; “Look here! This is the problem!”
Milo tried to pick up the sounds in their speech. The oh and ee sounds seemed common. The problem was for large parts of a recording, one sound would be repeated and, for others, another.
Then the dwarves spoke rapidly.
Sometimes too rapidly.
It was hard to pick up repeated sounds as they were often too emotional to break down.
Some dwarves were also worse than others.
One, with a red beard he kept plaiting into long snakelike ribbons, was the worst. Milo couldn’t understand him at all and as soon as that dwarf came onto the screen, Milo plucked the crystal out in frustration and tossed it over his shoulder.
He wanted to shout at the dwarf to slow down.
But the dwarf was dead. He’d been dead for centuries at least.
And that thought then made Milo feel guilty and ungrateful. The Workshop wasn’t his creation. It was theirs. His golems weren’t his, either. They were made using the plans the dwarves had developed.
Sighing, he turned and picked up the crystals he’d thrown aside and gently put them back in the box they were being stored in.
The box was an old carton taken from the Mess.
Suddenly, that didn’t seem respectful either.
He got to his feet, feeling his stomach grumble. He was hungry. That hunger was making his thoughts flick from one subject to another. It wasn’t helping.
As if by magic, the door opened and Selma entered with a couple of sandwiches on a plate. “I thought you’d be hungry,” she said.
He smiled at her. “Thank you. I was just thinking about food, actually.”
“You’re welcome.” She giggled as he took the plate. A strange sound coming from someone who was seven feet tall and strong enough to crush his head between her fingers. She seemed very excited as he lifted the first sandwich to his mouth. “I made them myself!”
He took a bite.
And chewed while nodding happily.
The sandwich was very strange. In it was salad. That was normal.
And cheese. Also normal.
A few slices of bacon. Again, normal.
The layer of honey, however, was a bit unusual.
He didn’t need to ask why the honey was there. It was there because he’d once told her he liked honey sandwiches.
And, to Selma, if he liked honey and liked bacon, then they were fine to go together.
That was all very reasonable.
But there weren’t many ways to explain to her why honey and mayonnaise didn’t really belong in the same sandwich. He chewed, thinking about this while eating his bacon, salad, cheese, and honey and mayo sandwich.
Her big blue eyes were wide and her mouth tight as she waited for his opinion. He knew if he told her the mayo and honey problem, she’d deflate. And he didn’t have the heart to do that.
Which again had him wondering why.
Shouldn’t he be ordering her around? She was his creation. A construct. Not human. Yet, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
She leaned closer, gulping a little as she swallowed in anticipation.
“How is it?”
He smiled through the sandwich. In honesty, it didn’t taste that bad. Not bad enough that he wouldn’t eat it when he was hungry. He nodded at her. “It’s really good,” he told her. “The mayo and honey is interesting. It’s sweet and sour.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, standing straighter and nodding as though she’d actively thought about it that way. “I was going to use jam and mayo, but I thought you like honey more, so it would be real tasty!”
He took a seat again and moved the book aside so he could eat.
Selma flopped onto the chair beside him and, before he could say anything, reached out and took the sandwich. She held it up with two hands.
“Say ah!”
He stared at her for a moment. This feeding thing was getting out of hand, he thought.
But she had worked hard to make the sandwiches. And then brought them to him. Would it be fair to get grouchy at her now?
Maybe he needed to sit them all down and tell them to stop.
That would be the more mature way to deal with things, he thought.
Opening his mouth, he tried not to sigh. “Ah.”
She giggled as he took a big bite. It was a little bit of a struggle. She’d filled the sandwich thick with salad, and some of the mayo and honey slid down the side of his mouth.
She reached out and dabbed it clean.
He really did feel like a baby.
“Tania will be down in a couple of hours,” Selma said, giving him another bite after making him say ah again. “She’ll take you to the bath. Mila will join you, too.”
“You won’t?”
Selma shook her head. “I’m taking Master Finklestern’s classes this afternoon. I promised Belt I’d spar with him again.”
“Oh.” Milo nodded. The two seemed to enjoy sparring together. “How’s that going?”
“It’s alright. He’s very strong. A few weeks ago, he found a new trick. He can wrap lightning around his whole arm now.” She shook her head. “It’s a bit hard to pretend it hurts, because I forget. But Master Finklestern is real happy with him. They want me to work harder on my lightning, too.”
“We’ll have to do something about that,” Milo muttered, suddenly feeling more pressure. There was so much to do!
“It’s okay for now,” Selma said, pushing the sandwich towards his face again. “Everyone thinks I’m a ditz, so they don’t expect much.”
He frowned at her, feeling a brief spark of irritation. Who told her that? “You’re not a ditz.”
“I know that,” she said. “I just think different.”
“That’s right.” He chomped on the sandwich and chewed aggressively. “Don’t let Tania push you down.”
“Oh, she don’t mean it when she says it.” Selma grinned. “She’s just Tania. That’s how she shows she likes me. With teasing words.”
“Right.” He swallowed some of the strange sandwich. “Still. I don’t like you feeling bad about anything.”
“Aww.” Selma leaned in and gave him a hug. “You’re the bestest engineer ever.”
He patted her back, but still frowned.
Who was making her feel like she wasn’t smart?
Then she sat up straight again and lifted the sandwich. “Say ah.”
“You really don’t have to do that, you know.”
“I know.” She beamed brightly. “Say ah.”
He said ah.
She paused before putting the sandwich in. Then she giggled.
He felt his cheeks flush. “What?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s just funny how your tongue sits when you say it.”
He rolled his eyes at her.
Golems.
Like the dwarves who’d created them, they were so weird.