The next day, in fact the next two days, Brokols and Eltrienn Cadriio did not visit a teacher of Hrummlis, for it had occurred to Eltrienn that most teachers would be engaged in the festivities. Also, Brokols needed to move from the first-floor apartment that Eltrienn had arranged, to a top-floor apartment. He supervised it personally. He had a small but heavy casket of gold and a little leather bag of diamonds to finance his activities. He'd had to sign for them of course, and he'd have to account for them when this was over, so he had no intention of letting them out of his sight when anyone besides he and Stilfos, his assistant, had access to them.
The move accomplished, he had his antenna installed on his roof, along with his wind generator, explaining them as religious instruments. It had been decided, in planning the mission, that the ambassadors would explain as religious anything whose meaning or function they wanted to conceal.
That night in his apartment, in the oil-lit privacy of an inner room, Elver Brokols used his wireless telegraph, the pride of Almaeic technology, to tap out in code a resume of his day for Kryger aboard the Dard, which had left Theedalit and was sailing northward toward the Djezian coast. Then Brokols went to bed, letting the small, breeze-powered generator recharge his storage battery.
It was important that he become competent in the Hrummean language as soon as possible. Therefore, much of the third day was spent in his roof garden, working on it with Eltrienn. They went over the basic differences in sounds—in Djezian the stress was almost always on the penultimate syllable; in Hrummean it was more variable, differing with the word and even shifting with the rhythm and stress of the sentence.[See Note] Djezian pronunciations tended to be glottal, Hrummean palatal, and Djezian vowels tended to be shortened and homogenized, even, to a degree, in stressed syllables. The alphabets were almost identical, and differences in the sounds assigned to the letters were fairly consistent.
Most of the time, Brokols' servant, Stilfos, sat out of the way listening, repeating their drills more or less to himself. He needed Hrummean too.
They drilled pronunciation of representative words that were similar in the two languages, which was most of their vocabularies; the sounds differed much more than the spellings. They also drilled some of the words and idioms that were unique to Hrummean. Already, when Eltrienn spoke slowly and simply in Hrummean, Brokols understood much of what he said. It seemed to both of them that a few more days should find him conversing rather freely, with only occasional stops for clarification.
During a morning break, looking out at the harbor, they'd seen serpents. And later, thunderheads were visible, a line of them moving coastward to the south. It seemed to Brokols that the death of the two serpents would have no ill effects after all.
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Note: Hrummean writing indicates the syllable with major stress by doubling the final letter in the syllable, most often a consonant. And because in Hrummean the stress sometimes shifts in different sentences, a word may be spelled slightly differently in different contexts. This contributes to the flow of Hrummean poetry in a major way, permitting techniques that are unavailable in most languages.