Sianim 01 - Masques

the library was different this time. Aralorn wasn’t sure whether it was deliberate or just habit. Wolf traversed the twisted passages without hesitating, ducking the cave formations as they appeared in the light from the crystals in his staff, but she had the feeling that if she weren’t there, he wouldn’t need the light at all.
    The library was as they had left it. Aralorn soon started skimming books rather than reading them—even so, the sheer volume of the library was daunting. Once or twice, she found that the book that she arrived at the table with wasn’t the one that she thought she had picked up. The fourth time that it happened, she was certain that it wasn’t just that she had picked up a different book by mistake: The book that she had taken off the shelf was unwieldy. The one that she set in front of Wolf to look over was little more than a pamphlet.
    Intrigued, she returned to the shelf where she’d gotten the book and found the massive tome she thought she’d taken sitting where she’d found it. She tapped it thoughtfully, then smiled to herself—wizards’ libraries, it seemed, had a few idiosyncrasies. It certainly wasn’t her luck spell—that had dissipated a few minutes after she cast it.
    Wolf had taken no notice of her odd actions but set the thin, harmless book on her side of the table and returned to what he termed “the unreadable scribbles of a mediocre and half-mad warlock who passed away into much-deserved obscurity several centuries before: safe from the curses of an untrained magician, however powerful.”
    Aralorn, returning to the table, listened to his half-voiced mutterings with interest. The mercenaries of Sianim were possessed of a wide variety of curses, mostly vulgar, but Wolf definitely had a creative touch.
    Still smiling, Aralorn opened the little book and began reading. Like most of the books she chose, this one was a collection of tales. It was written in an old Rethian dialect that wasn’t too difficult to read. The first story was a version of the tale of the Smith’s Weapons that she hadn’t read before. Guiltily, because she knew that it wasn’t going to be of any help defeating the ae’Magi, she took quick notes of the differences before continuing to another story.
    The writer wasn’t half-bad, and Aralorn quit skimming the stories and read them instead, noting down a particularly interesting turn of phrase here and a detail there. She was a third of the way through the last story in the book before she realized just what she was reading. She stopped and went back to the beginning, reading it for information rather than entertainment.
    Apparently, the ae’Magi (the one ruling at the time that the book was written, whenever that was) had, as an apprentice, designed a new spell. He presented it to his master to that worthy’s misfortune. The spell was one that nullified magic, an effect that the apprentice’s two-hundred-year-old master would have appreciated more had he been out of the area of the spell’s effect.
    Aralorn hunted futilely for the name of the apprentice-turned-ae’Magi or even any indication when the book was written. Unfortunately, during most of Rethian history, it had not been the custom to note the date a book was written or even who wrote it. With a collection of stories, most of which were folktales, it was virtually impossible to date the book reliably within two hundred years, especially one that was probably a copy of another book.
    With a sigh, Aralorn set the book down and started to ask Wolf if he had any suggestions. Luckily she glanced at him before a sound left her mouth. He was in the midst of unraveling a spell worked into a lock on a mildewed book as thick as her hand. She’d grown so used to the magic feel of the lighting, she hadn’t noticed when the amount of magic had increased.
    He didn’t seem to be having an easy time with it, although it was difficult to judge from his masked face. She frowned at his mask resentfully.
    “Doesn’t that thing ever bother you?” she asked in an I-am-only-making-conversation tone as soon as the lock popped open with a theatrical puff of blue smoke.
    “What thing?” He brushed the remaining blue dust off the cover of the book and opened it to a random page.
    “The mask. Doesn’t it itch when you sweat?”
    “Wolves don’t sweat.” His tone was so uninterested that she knew that it was a safe topic to push even though he was deliberately avoiding her point. And he