The next panel showed the same people at work.
Some of them were carrying stones, and others were working a forge, and one figure with long ears sat beside a child who was holding a flat tablet, pressing a stylus into its surface.
Cael stopped in front of that one for a long time, and then took his journal from his coat and began to copy it.
Valen had been looking at the writing that ran along the top of the frieze, a row of tiny curling symbols cut into the stone above each picture.
He had seen shapes like them once, years ago, on a worn clay tablet in the oldest part of an elven archive, and the memory came back to him slowly, like a name he had almost forgotten.
"I can read some of it," he said. "Not much. Perhaps one word in ten."
"Which words?" Marcus asked.
Valen moved along the wall with one hand held just above the stone. "Gather," he said. "Water. Together. This one, I think, is the name of the tree, but I don't know how to say it."
