"I don't think so," said the genie. "After all, how do you test an item for magic that supposedly refuses all magic?"
I let a smile crawl onto my face, the first in the past twelve hours. "So old Granduncle Maskar was horn-swoggled in the first place." I chuckled at the thought. "I would love to see the look on his face when he gets my letter explaining that.1"
Ampratines made a solemn, low cough. That kind of cough he always makes when he disagrees completely, but cannot bring himself to say something outright. I cast my companion the eye, and he looked up, into the middle distance.
"If your granduncle never had the device," he said solemnly, "that means he would have to now get the device. And who better to get the device than someone who has already gotten the fake one?"
I let that sink into my ale-stained brain. "So the best thing is to not be here at all when he gets the word, eh?"
"Quite."
"Ah, well," I said with a sigh, draining the last of the ale and setting the dead soldier next to the others, "so much for an expatriate life in Scornubel. I think we need to move farther south, farther away from Waterdeep."
"I thought you'd think so," said Ampratines, with a smooth flourish producing our bags, "so I already took the liberty of purchasing the coach tickets. We leave in an hour."
Epilogue
Wes found his attention drawn yet again to the thin tome that had scared him earlier.
"The gods must be playing with me," he thought. "But the story about Jeffrey disappearing just might have some truth in it. How pleased the abbot would be with me if I solved the mystery."
He was torn between running from the room and wanting to finish Jeffrey's story. His hand shaking, he reached for the book and continued to read.
Jeffrey had gone to the north corner reading room and been at a loss to know where to start cleaning. The room was such a mess. Gathering a mop and bucket, he had lathered up the floor and then used a long-handled broom to sweep the cobwebs from the ceiling.
"Whew!" thought Wes. "This isn't me at all. I didn't mop the floor, and I haven't done the cobwebs yet." He felt a little guilty at this last thought and quickly returned to the story.
Jeffrey was tired after all the cleaning, so he had taken a short break. He leaned against a solid bookshelf and leapt back with a start as it moved.
"Whoa!" yelped Wes, and he pushed the tome away again. "This is too similar. How can this be happening?"
This time, it took several minutes before Wes felt ready to pick the book up again. Despite the cool room, he was sweating profusely.
He read that Jeffrey wanted to hide away from the monks for a while, even though he knew they would be angry when he eventually returned. The room was lit from an unseen source and filled with shelves, many of which had books or scrolls on them. A small table with a hard-backed chair was the only other furniture in the room.
Jeffrey selected a scroll at random and began to read. The scroll told a brief tale of a magical sword that could slay giants. Replacing the scroll, Jeffrey chose another and read its tale.
After many scrolls and tomes, Jeffrey spotted a very thin leather-bound volume wedged behind a shelf and…
This time Wes did scream. He hurled the book across the room and huddled close over the table as his whole body shook.
"It's not real. It's just a story," he told himself over and over again. Rocking back and forth and mumbling the short litany, he soon regained control of himself and decided it was time he finished the cleaning in the reading room.
As he moved toward the door, keeping well away from the thin tome, Wes felt a tugging inside him. Despite his fears of the story, he just had to know how it all turned out. He crossed the room and picked up the book. Wes found his place and continued to read…
As Jeffrey, in the book, skimmed the thin volume he had found, he read a story of a young probationer who had been taken in by the library when he was orphaned. The monks thought him lazy and good for nothing, and he had been chastised by one of the brothers for failing to keep the dining room clean. The young man's name was Niles, and Jeffrey recalled tales of Niles's being the probationer who had mysteriously disappeared more than a hundred fifty years before. Jeffrey had thought them no more than tales to frighten other probationers, but on the chance that there might be some truth to them, he had read further. If he could solve the mystery of Niles's disappearance, Jeffrey saw himself becoming something of a hero at the library.
Wes fought down the urge to run away, and forced himself to keep reading. Whatever this was about, he was a part of it now. He was more than a little worried about the two probationers who had disappeared, and what they had been doing just before, but his curiosity was winning the battle. He went back to the story.
Jeffrey had also opted to continue to read Niles's story, and Wes was hardly surprised to learn that Niles had been sent by the abbot to this very room to clean it for some scholars who were expected the next day. Like Jeffrey and Wes, Niles had spent around an hour cleaning the room before taking a break, and like Jeffrey and Wes, Niles had found the secret room with all the scrolls and volumes about magical and arcane things.
Niles, too, had read many of the volumes before finding a slim tome bound with leather, wedged behind a bookshelf and covered with cobwebs. And, like those who were to follow, Niles had read the story of a young probationer, Edmund, who was considered lazy and worthless. He had served in the library two hundred years prior to Niles's time.
Wes had to stop for a moment to calm himself. Just how many probationers had disappeared from here since the library was built? The answer may well lie in this story. He took a deep breath and read on.
Wes's temples started to throb with confusion: just who was the reader and who the subject of the story? Each time the story started over, the new point of view made Wes's head spin. It took a few minutes for Wes to work out how to follow the story without getting confused. Each story so far began with a probationer finding the room, and soon after, there was a short description of the library as it had looked when that part of the story was written. This was not just a history of disappearing probationers, but a history of the library itself. By focusing on when the many extensions to the library had been built, Wes found the story much easier to follow.
Niles had been a probationer just after a time of great change. The library had acquired a huge collection from the king of Cormyr. Cormyr had been at war for almost four years, and had emerged victorious after one of its wizards found the key to ending the war in the library. A huge collection, part of the spoils of war, had been given to the library by the grateful monarch. There hadn't been room to house the new collection, and two new wings had quickly been built to accommodate it. All this had happened during the two hundred years from the time of Niles until that of Edmund, the last probationer to go missing.
Wes put the book down again, and took a few deep breaths. The library had been here a lot longer than he had believed, if this story were true. And Wes wasn't even close to the middle of the book yet. He figured that was where the first probationer's story would be, and he hoped the stories would all reach their climaxes in the second half. He was up to five hundred years. The library could be closer to two thousand years old rather than one thousand, as most people believed.
Brother Frederick, the abbot, the visiting scholars, and everything else he should have been attending to were forgotten as Wes returned to his search for the start of the story.
Robar had gone missing two hundred fifty years before Edmund, in a time when the library's expansion had been quite slow. Only a few new volumes were added to the collection each year, and building wasn't a rushed affair. The large rooms in the south wing, and the ornate figures on the south wall, were added then.