Arguments in the Scriptorium
The inquisitor's report confirmed that the spell scroll that the Royal Wizard Simon was using when he died had indeed functioned correctly. However, they concluded that, due to the low light in the basalisk's lair, when R.W. Simon read the spell scroll, he failed to distinguish the incantation of the transformation spell from the instructions for using the scroll. Once the remaining members of his party were sufficiently healed that they could speak again, they confirmed that he first read the casting then immediately went on to read the next line. That line happened to be a security clause to close and incinerate the scroll, should the Wizard who owned it find themselves disarmed. Those present reported that as R.W. Simon began to transform into a bat, the spell scroll snapped shut and burst into flames. The Royal Wizard's body was more magic than material at the moment the scroll self destructed, which caused the blast that injured his party members and killed both R.W. Simon and his page.
Scribe Elvir brushed the inquisitor's report off his desk, where it tumbled to join the pile of paper and vellum scraps that surrounded every scribe's desk in the Scriptorium, but Elvir's especially. "What horseshit. If you're casting from a scroll in a cave, light a damned torch. Besides, you tell me this wizard finishes his incantation, then said, 'to prevent the nefarious use of this scroll in dire times utter this incantation forthwith', then uttered a simple immolation rite, all without reading the rest of the sentence which clearly states never to do so while the spell is live?"
Scribe Wirt looked up from his scrollwork for a moment to measure his friend's countenance, which was strained. "Nay, not if we wrote it this year."
"What do you say?"
"We were ordered to cease most warnings in last winter's Council on the Conservation of Parchment and Vellum. I recall you were of the 'aye' crowd. Loudly."
"Be that as it may..."
"'No one should be using these scrolls who knows not what they imply' was your claim, if I recall. I've heard you say it hence."
"Well I stand by it still!"
"Aye." Elvir studied the report. "What would he have read then?"
"TO DESTROY THIS SCROLL" Wirt said, in his capital-letters voice, not looking up.
"Well there you are. Even a page would know what that promises."
"Aye."
"What is a royal wizard using our prepared scrolls for anyway?"
"Because they are, and I quote Fit for page and mage alike, dependable in the libraries of friends or lairs of foes." At this Wirt held up the scroll he was working on, which bore on its back the very motto he recited from memory.
"Well that's horseshit too. Sounds like a knave who should have known better thrice over and will trouble us no longer." Elvir held his quill up to the light from the window to check its tip.
"He might still do."
"What now?"
"I hear we are to have our own in-qu-est." Wirt drew out the last word as he completed the final flourish on a large initial on his scroll. A portion of his tongue stuck out as he regarded the letter.
"Truly?"
"Aye. Did the notice not say so?"
Elvir fished around in the pile of scraps that surrounded his station. "Wirt, Wirt, look at this. That's a good one. Why'd I scrap that."
Wirt glanced over. "Aye, is so. What's it taste like."
Elvir licked the scrap of vellum. "Sweet. Sick kind of bile. You think it were from the bad batch?"
Wirt dipped and blotted his quill. "Aye, that's your answer. No chance of casting with that, no matter your penmanship."
"That was a bad time. We still get complaints. Who's inquisiting the ink makers I want to know."
"Aye."
Elvir continued to rifle through his papers. "Aha! Let's see here." He spread the official communication flat on his tabletop. As usual, the top half of the page was crowded with elaborate initials on nearly every line, overwought and rushed, lacking any rhythm on the page.
Wirt didn't look up but grunted in assent.
"Well they put it on the back. That's just bad scriptmanship. Can't write small enough, don't scribe. Or leave off a damned initial or two." While Elvir read throught the edict, the only sounds to be heard in their shared cloister were the measured scratching of Wirt's pen and a few furtive rustles of a doormouse somewhere beneath the piles of scraps. "The devil! I'm to report? Why me? What of it? Damn the knaves!"
"Well you wrote the scroll, did ye not."
"Aye, and I did it to the letter. I wrote ten score the same, and yet we have one dead fool not ten score."
"One so far."
Elvir tossed the report aside again. "What do you say??"
Wirt was not listening. "There! Right! Yes." Wirt held up his newly finished scroll. In the slot of light from the far window, the vellum took on a sort of glow, the grains and creases in the scraped skin showing dark against a golden background. The instructions, written in mundane ink, still drying, was blacker still. The enchanted ink used for casting, said to be some combination of hackberry, walnut, and dragon piss, filling the broad strokes of Wirt's ambitious yet balanced initials, seemed to radiate a light of its own. It would retain a reddish glow until it cured fully, remaining inert until animated by the voice of a wizard or mage, or at least someone literate enough to get all the syllables out without stumbling, at which point it would flame to life once more. Elvir, breaking from his pique for a moment, crowded in close to examine the scroll with Wirt.
"Descender's a bit stout there, short."
"Aye, but better that then cross that scar and run off the line completely."
"Aye." Elvir nodded. "That first G is quite fine. What is that, six hacks high? You know they don't pay you more for that."
"Aye. I finish as much as you don't I."
"Aye, and half again as much ink while you do."
"You know we dont pay for the ink," Wirt said as he carefully tucked the scroll into the drying rack.
"Aye aye. Fine work. Knave." Elvir read the note in his hand once more. "Well if they think I'm starting anything new before this inquest, may the devil take them. Let's have our lunch now you're done as well."
The first surprise to Elvir when he entered the hall where the inquest was to happen was that some people he did not recognize were seated at the grand table beside Guild Master Enoch, head of the scriptorium, and Master Thaddeus, head of Elvir and Wirt's cloister. The second, more pleasant suprise was the meal set for everyone, including one for him at a scribe's desk set just outside the glow of most of the candles of the head table. Wirt would not believe him having two lunches in a day.
"Good day, my fine fellows," Elvir said as he sat down, more to the plate of salmon and black bread in front of him than to his superiors or the four very old guild masters flanking them at the table.
One of the oldest looking ones, an unfamiliar walnut of a woman pinching spectacles over her nose, gaped at Elvir with a slow-arriving shock.
Master Scribe Enoch set a calming hand on her arm. "Master Margaret, we encourage plain talk amongst our scribes. We belive that they do their best work when at ease, and welcome their thoughts on most things." To conclude, he made kindly but serious eye contact with Elvir.
Elvir swallowed the rather large bite of salmon he was working on. "Your... eminance." He bowed lightly towards the old woman, who huffed and looked away.
Master Scribe Thaddeus cleared his throat and everyone looked at him. "Now that we are all here and fed, let us attend to the matter at hand so our esteemed guests might retire after their long journey." Five weary "ayes" rose from around the table.
Thaddeus continued. "We have all read the inquisitor's report, and find no fault with it. Of course. This council is simply to lend the support of our knowledge of the trade to the report." The others knocked the table in agreement, save one especialy dour and gaunt fellow at the end. Must be the inquisitor. Elvir kept eating.
An elderly man with a frizz of white hair sitting next to the Master Scribe Margaret who seemed to be sinking into his robes was the first to speak. "No one ever needed security spells on our scrolls when I was a scribe," he volunteered. Silence followed. "They kept track of their spells then." More silence followed.
Master Enoch eventually replied. "Yes, Master Bertram, things were perhaps simpler prior to the Bakers Uprising, but alas we have hence been required by the Royal decree to add clauses allowing rightful scroll-owners to disable them at a word."
"Coddling," Master Margaret said into her wine.
Enoch nodded. "We pride our scriptorium on an unblemished record of compliance with all decrees."
The master scribe tucking into his food next to Master Thaddeus spoke up. "Why, though, was it right there, next to the spell." He was the rounder, untroubled sort of scribe that seemed to be in good supply in the Court. Might have been the one to hand the Wizard Simon the scroll himself. Elvir recalled preparing seemingly endless scrolls for a Master Charles in the Queen's Court last year. He'd never forget it because they each had to be edged in silver. His fingertips were blue for a week, and he couldn't eat soft bread without it rubbing off on it, which would make you sick, which is why one of the many things you could call a new scribe if you were a senior scribe was "bluebelly." Elvir was no bluebelly, and if this wasn't Master Charles he'd give the last hunk of the bread on his board, which was, to no one's suprise, far better and softer than what he and Wirt were allotted in the scribe's hall.
Master Bertram replied. "Yes, Charles, exactly --"
The dour man at the end cut him off. "We will have order. There is an agenda. But if you must be satisfied, guild protocol is clear that all safety measures be present on the front of the scroll under a heading of one hackberry's height. We have long found that, given ten casters, only three would turn to the back of a scroll, even if their life depended on it."
In the awkward shuffling of utensils and robes that followed, Master Enoch took his turn to cough with implication. "Of course we do not expect Masters such as yourselves to recall remedial guild edicts when your duties now extend so far beyond the scribe's desk, but I'm afraid we do have to split some hairs here today. Please continue, Inquisitor Francis."
"Thank you, Master Enoch. I'm afraid it's more than the width of a hair that concerns me. Though the years since we were all apprentices are many and long, surely we can remember something of the five years we all spent with fingers were stained with hackberry juice while we served our time grinding ink and ruling vellum." At that, Inquisitor Francis began to retrieve some items from his case with an absence of haste more profound than Elvir would have thought possible for anyone being watched by six colleagues. As Francis carefully, deliberately leafed through sheets of vellum, unclasped and re-clasped compartments, and arranged small items on the table in front of him, other throats were cleared and wine was poured, but no one dared look away.
After an indeterminate time, Francis announced, "I have here two exhibits. One is a Scroll of True Transformation, retrieved from the Court scriptorium, which bears the seal of this guild and as used by the cloister mastered by Thaddeus, marked as count fifteen. As the scroll used by the Late Royal Wizard Simon was count seventeen, we may assume that this scroll shares all pertinent qualities with the scroll in question. My other exhibit is a hackberry, picked yester in the Royal Scriptorium's working garden."
No one made a sound, yet a chair scooted, which baffled Elvir, as no one had moved.
"If all present can refrain from reading this scroll aloud, I shall pass this around the table so that you may all see that the headline is clearly smaller than the hackberry."
Each Master peered and nodded at it performatively until it came to Master Charles. "Frank, my dear friend," said Charles to the invisible terror of everyone in the room, "can we not forgive them for being stationed in the north, where hackberries grow smaller than at our beloved Court?"
Elvir, finishing his bread, looked to the Inquisitor's face, which was unmoved. "Master Charles, my esteemed colleague, it is not for me to forgive or condemn. Our guild edicts are as the cant of a spell, written in mundane ink though they may be, we follow these practices not for one man's opinions but for the workings of the world."
Elvir looked to Masters Enoch and Thaddeus. They said nothing to each other but cast many glances, as if sharing a carriage that had suddenly started rolling down a steep hill. "Ah Frank, you and your edicts. Carry on!" Master Charles reached across Master Margaret for the rest of the wine. Elvir wondered if there was space in his guild for a new scribe.
"They are all our edicts, Chas," the Inquisitor rejoined without smiling. Master Margaret tittered. "If we are all agreed that this headline is clearly shorter than a hackberry, perhaps Guild Master Thaddeus may account for the inconsistency."
"I -- May I see the exhibits please? They have not -- they have not made their way to me yet." The carriage had fully run away from Master Thaddeus, which Elvir did not think right. Thaddeus had always allowed them to take lunch in the courtyard, not believing the notion that serious scribes ate while working. "Serious scribes don't get bluebelly every few moons, I think," he was fond of saying. Or redbelly, thought Elvir, though that would only happen once.
Elvir spoke, unbidden. "Prithee, but we do not use a living hackberry in the North."
Master Margaret looked to Inquisitor Frank for leave to scold Elvir, but the Inquisitor replied evenly. "What is it you use, then?"
At this Elvir dug into his pockets. A shard of quill got under his thumbnail in the process, but he found what every provincial scribe eventually finds in a pocket at the end of the day or week -- a cast lead hackberry. "We use these. Call them queen's hacks." Elvir assumed he was not allowed to leave his table, so he stretched as far as he could to hold the metal berry into the light, until Master Thaddeus rose from his chair to take it and deliver it to the Inquisitor before hustling back to his seat.
While the Inquisitor held the lead berry at a fair distance, as if it were rotten, Elvir tried to pick the quill splinter out from under his thumbnail as inconspicuously as he could. The Master Scribes were watching each other, waiting for someone to speak, so he raised his it to his mouth in a flash to suck the blood away. He pulled his hand away twice as fast when he tasted the sour lightning of fresh casting ink, a dozen times stronger than the cured ink he had tasted without a second thought when Wirt suggested it. Next to the wound he spotted a glint of the enchanted ink lodged under his thumbnail, still bright and active. Bad omen, thought Wirt. All scribes are on the road to redbelly, they say, some just take a faster horse.
Someone spoke. "The Inquisitor may recall past inquests regarding inconsistent script size," Master Enoch said, keeping his voice even. "These 'queen's hacks' were introduced when I was still professing at the Royal Academy. I believe to address just this problem of hackberry trees beyond the Court failing to produce berries to the standard."
Master Charles reached out to take the queen's hack from the inquisitor. "I remember these. Used to chuck them at bluebellies." He turned to Enoch. "Cast from a berry from the tree in the Court, I'd imagine."
Enoch nodded. "Master Charles is correct."
The Inquisitor was not satisfied. "Why, then, is it so small."
Charles peered at it closely. "Probably can't cast a wet one. Imagine they waited till it dried out."
The Inquisitor turned to Elvir. "And this ring at the top?"
"For marking lines more accurately, Sir. Berries tend not to have flat parts."
Master Margaret spoke up at the same time that Master Bertram did, and everyone began speaking over each other for a spell until the Inquisitor spoke again.
"Does it not occur to anyone in the wider Queendom to look at a scroll produced in the Court next to one of their scrolls at one time or another in their busy lives?"
"Respectfully, I believe all Court scrolls are used at Court," Master Thaddeus said, reaching for the reigns of the carriage.
"'Tis very true," Master Charles said. "We use 'em up, which is why we have to order more from you lot."
Master Bertram looked distressed. "Are all scrolls in the Queendom being made this way?"
"That is the purpose of a standard, yes," Enoch replied.
"For how long has this been the case?" Master Margaret demanded.
Elvir spoke up. "I began my apprenticeship fifteen years ago, and I recall one of my early duties was to sort the queen's hacks and replace the ones worn down too much."
"Let us say an even score of years, then," Master Thaddeus said.
Master Enoch stood. "Inquisitor Francis, may we conclude that we have followed the standard, if not the edict, and perhaps we may agree that the standard was set in good faith to enable all the Queen's scribes to follow more closely to the edict?"
The queen's hack had made it back to the Inquisitor, who turned it over in his thin fingers while he thought. "You shall hear my conclusions in my final report. But be it noted that Master Enoch's reason is sound."
Elvir looked around for another scribe. Was he supposed to be taking dictation?
"More wine then before we break for the eve?" Master Charles asked in the direction of the servant's entry.
As the servants in the great hall sent Master Charles to the scribes' hall when their stock of wine ran out, and as Elvir and Wirt were already there burning one of tomorrows candles over their own jug, and as Master Charles claimed that all the Court scribes drank like water lilies, "surrounded by the drink but floating above it except for a splash here or there", and as declared his pleasure at being among proper drinkers, and as he had the authority to keep the scribes' hall serving for as long as he wanted, Elvir and Wirt learned from him a great many stories of incompetence, avarice, treachery, and greater incompetence at the Court Scriptorium as the wine flowed all around them for some time into the night.
"These are all dear secrets, lads, so drink more lest you remember anything I say!" Master Charles filled their cups, they cheered, and Elvir and Wirt followed the Master Scribe's order.
After some time, or no time at all, had passed, Elvir found himself swaying over his own desk with Sir Charles of Gartenfort, Master Scribe of the Royal Scriptorium, next to Elvir, who carried three horns of wine somehow without swaying or spilling.
Master Charles had demanded to see their stations. After some time of ruthlessly mocking the poverty of their materials and condition, he fell into quite serious appreciation of their work. Elvir had suspected that it was only blood, blackmail, or flattery that got one placed at the Royal Scriptorium, but hearing the eloquence and precision with which Master Charles, many jugs of wine in him, could discuss the work of scribing, Elvir was obliged to consider that some measure of talent was required as well.
By way of complaint, they had shown Master Charles all the work they had discarded when the bad batch of ink had been discovered, which he had before him now, as Elvir came to his senses for a moment. He was surprised to find that it was he himself who was speaking. "Look! LOOK knaves. Such fine initials. Wasted on poor ink. Who inquisits the inkmakers. Who!"
Master Charles laughed heartily. "Lads take me up their mountain and I'll ask myself." He took a horn of wine for himself from Wirt, and then one for Elvir, but somehow Elvir never got it. Master Charles leaned in. "Tis fine, though." Elvir clapped. "Aye, the Queen's Scribe says tis fine." Charles looked over at Wirt's desk. "But not as fine as these," he said, quiet for the first time in an hour as he gazed over Wirt's scrolls in the drying rack.
"He's an ink sponge! What need for these monstrous initials! Six, seven hacks high!"
Master Charles cast a dour, angry look at Elvir. "No, no, I think this one's only five and a half hacks." His broad, bearded face burst into wet laughter, joined by all. "Much too short! We must have an inquisition!" They finished the last of their wine slowly, comparing penmanship with wandering hands and reading spells from the bad batch and watching them burst into foul smelling smoke.
In contrast to the day with two lunches, on the day the Inquisitor's decree arrived, the messenger had the gall to arrive right before lunch, so all scribes were called away from their desks not for an acceptable repast in the courtyard but instead a mean and miserly reading in the hall. Master Enoch, perhaps aware of what was to come, took it upon himself to read the scroll rather than suffer Master Thaddeus the indignity of reading his own dismissal aloud to the scribes that he had, until that morning, mastered. Elvir, full of knives and bile, was ready to revolt, and would have still, but while the fire was still rising in him, and while the volume was still rising in the room of piqued scribes, Master Enoch called Wirt up to receive his own scroll, sent from Master Charles, and that was strange enough to disperse enough of the black cloud forming in the room that Elvir and Wirt could sneak away to read it themselves in their cloister while the rest of their colleagues clamored around Master Thaddeus, who had the look of death on him.
Master Thaddeus's final day with the guild was a sad one indeed. But Elvir would have taken every last one of his meals at his desk if it meant Wirt were not leaving too. The scroll sent by Master Charles announced his requirement of Wirt for a special project he was leading for the Queen.
Elvir stood, blocking most of Wirt's light while he packed up his desk. "Tell it to me again, this plan of Master Charles's. Perhaps the fifth time I will understand." The royal scroll contained a small spell which communicated the secret of the project only to Wirt, but Elvir was there when he read it so he was able to know it too. Whether it was the spell, the strangeness of the plan, or his feeling of always being full of knives he had now that made the information slippery in his mind, he did not know or care.
Wirt explained again. "You're a wizard who buys many scrolls, but you must go to your scriptorium to have them, and then only you may get what they stock at the time. So you say to the devil with that, and get instead one of these new enchanted scrolls of Master Charles, pay him tribute each fortnight, and you may call as many spells to that scroll as you wish."
"It does not expire into smoke like any other scroll?"
"Nay, it is some new sort of vellum. Dragon for all I have been told."
"They must be dear."
"Nay, tis free."
"I do not believe it."
"Believe me. But they are not sold, they are borrowed. The queen owns them all."
"Perhaps they are swan vellum then."
Wirt chuckled. "Perhaps. She will have them back if the tributes cease."
"Madness. No wizard would cease owning their own spells."
"Aye. But it means I can make as many great initials as I want."
"Why is that?"
"Well the enchanted vellum is but one size. So the length of the spell does not matter. It shall move up or down the scroll as you wish, with a flick of the hand."
"Madness. The Inquisitor will have none of it if he already believes no one reads the back of scrolls."
"Aye."
"I'll keep your desk clear for when this venture spoils and you return."
"Aye."
Elvir said nothing while Wirt continued cleaning the last of the enchanted ink from his nibs.
"You will put my name up if Master Charles is in need of more scribes, yes?"
"Aye. What plans have ye?"
"Finish today's work. Drink wine. Then tomorrow's work. Then tomorrow's wine. Perhaps become a journeyman writing runes on cottages and visit you when work brings me to the capital." Wirt laughed. "I mean it. I would."
"Aye, you would."
"Take care, friend."
"Aye." Wirt scooped up a few queen's hacks from his desk. "Have them. I'll be using real ones soon."