With just a trace of embarrassment, Alias tried the doorknob, but it would not turn. She tried other doors, and even a window, but found them all held fast. With a huff she spun about and marched back down the footpath.
At the road she turned east and walked down the left-hand fork of the road that followed the River Ashaba south. “I’m going to find someone who remembers me,” she declared. “Syluné will remember me. She didn’t know me well, but she never forgets anyone.”
In her haste she was oblivious to the shouting that came from the tower behind her.
14
The Scribe and the Old Man
“What do you mean, more forms?” Akabar bellowed, finally losing his temper. Secretly he hoped that his shouts would gain the attention of someone besides the bureaucratic fool of a scribe who stood before him—someone with the insight to understand the importance of his problem, someone who would rescue him from this morass of paperwork. Someone like Elminster.
“Well, ummm, here,” Lhaeo the scribe said and pointed to a place on a form Akabar had completed over an hour ago. He blinked at the southern mage through a strange set of thick lenses wrapped in wire which perched precariously on his nose. “Here, where you mentioned that you have more than one wife, you should have gone to line twenty-three and listed all your wives’ mothers’ names, instead of line twenty-two, where you listed your first wife’s mother’s name. That error is going to require a special schedule HL, in order to keep our files straight.”
“Files?” shrieked Akabar. “Look around you!” he demanded. “Does it look as if anything has been filed here in the last millennium?”
The question was purely rhetorical. The scribe’s outer office, which also served as a waiting room for those seeking audience with the great Elminster, was a firetrap waiting for a spark. Parchment scrolls, leatherbound tomes, sheaves of loose leaves of paper, empty folders clearly labeled Important or Confidential, and bark textbooks stained with berry ink, and chalk dust lay on every available horizontal surface or leaned against a vertical surface. Colored streamers, on which were scrawled the most exotic letters, hung from the ceiling.
Besides the gray slate used to write temporary messages, such as Attend Azoun’s Coronation and Warn Myth Drannor of Attack, there were stone and clay tablets and sheets of soft metals to hold more permanent messages, the ones to be handed down through history—Pick Up Laundry and Pay Lhaeo.
All this, of course, was a tribute to Lhaeo’s ability to intimidate adventurers and keep them from disturbing Elminster. Akabar sensed this to some extent. At least, he could not believe that anyone, including Lhaeo, really gave a bat’s dropping for what he wrote down. His perception was that Lhaeo’s forms were some sort of test of his patience or intelligence or desperation. If he just stuck it out long enough, he was certain, Lhaeo would finally recognize his worthiness as a candidate and remind his master that a southern mage waited in the outer office.
However, Akabar had been waiting five hours—three at the inn and two in this dismal, cramped room. His patience was spent, his intelligence exhausted on figuring out the ridiculous forms. Desperation was his final strategy. He considered dashing from the room to the tower, but without Lhaeo’s guidance through the maze of halls and doors and rooms, he wasn’t sure he could find it. Even if I did find the stairs, Akabar mused, I have no guarantee that Elminster is in the tower.
Lheao shrugged. “You must understand, Elminster is a very busy man. This is the only way we have of determining if a problem is truly important enough to warrant interrupting his already overcrowded schedule.”
“Just what size dragon does it take to land in this room to merit the sage’s attention?”
“Oh, Elminster doesn’t consult with dragons,” Lhaeo assured the mage. “Consults on dragons, perhaps, but not with them. The sage is very, very busy, and he does not, as a rule, waste his time with dragons. That’s what adventurers are for. And if, um, when you get in to see him, I would advise you to mention dragons as little as possible.”
“Look,” Akabar said, “I understand that the sage is busy. When I got his message to hurry over, I assumed he would see me on his dinner break or something.”
“Dinner break?” The scribe used a delicate finger to push the wire rims around the lenses higher up his nose. “I don’t think Elminster has taken a dinner break since, let’s see … umm … this is the Year of the Prince, then that makes it …” Lhaeo consulted a calendar.
“Does anyone ever make it past this blizzard of parchment?” Akabar growled.
“Well,” Lhaeo sat and thought for half a moment. “There was a delegation from the Forest of Anauroch.”
“Anauroch is a desert, not a forest,” Akabar said.
“Well, now it is, yes.”
“Was that supposed to be a joke?” Akabar snapped.
“Am I laughing?” the scribe asked, looking at Akabar over the rim of his glasses.
“No.”
“Then it couldn’t be a joke, could it?”
“Look,” said Akabar, “I realize the sage can’t spare time for everyone. I wouldn’t bother him with a petty problem. I’m a mage of no small water. Another member of the sage community, Master Dimswart of Suzail, was unable to handle all the complexities of my case. He recommended I see Elminster. I traveled all this way to do so.”
“Oh!” Lhaeo exclaimed, his eyes lighting up behind the thick lenses. “You’re a referral! Well, then we need to start again with a different set of forms. One moment, I’ll get them.” The scribe put his hand in a drawer and drew out a bird’s nest of shredded paper. “No, this can’t be them. They must be in that other cabinet.”
Akabar counted to ten.
Far below, someone knocked on a door, but in his search for the referral forms, Lhaeo ignored it.
“Here we go,” the scribe announced. “Last copy, too, so we need to fill out an acquisition memo to file with the local merchants for the next shipment of parchment.” The referral form passed dangerously close to a candle flame. “Oooch, singed it a little, but, uh, we can just, yes, we can just make out an addendum form to explain that the singed parchment was my fault.”
From below, someone knocked again, only louder.
“Isn’t someone going to answer that?” Akabar asked.
“Well, no.”
“Why not?”
“It’s way after business hours. We’re closed.”
“But, I’m here,” Akabar said, then nearly bit off his tongue.
“So you are. We’ll need another form for that. Nocturnal visitors.”
The knocking stopped.
“Now, please, include as much information on the sage Dimswart as you can recall. What you asked him on this line, what he answered on this one, what he didn’t tell you on this one. Any reasons you may have to believe he may have been incorrect on this line.”
Akabar dipped a quill in the inkpot and began again. He wished he’d brought Alias along. Broadswords had such a nice, satisfying way of cutting through red tape. It wasn’t until a minute later, upon discovering there was a form to fill out because Alias, not he, was the sage’s real client, that Akabar lost his temper again and renewed his loud verbal assault on the sage’s scribe.
Syluné’s hut was atop a low rise overlooking the road and the River Ashaba. Alias remembered the dwelling as small but comfortable, covered with vines, with smoke always drifting from a chimney for a cooking fire. She remembered Syluné as a radiantly beautiful woman with shining silver hair. Kith had told her that Syluné was at least a century old but kept young with her magics. Alias had always suspected that Kith planned to use her power toward the same goal, improving and maintaining her looks.