Masques (Sianim #1)(27)

Aralorn grinned, "He decided it was better than digging trenches, I take it?"

Wolf nodded.

* * *

THE ROUTE THAT THEY TOOK TO 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 stuff, 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 - but 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 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 check 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 had, sitting where she'd found it. She tapped it thoughtfully, and then smiled to herself - wizards' libraries, it seemed, had a few idiosyncrasies.

Wolf had taken no notice of her odd actions, but set the thin, harmless book on her side of the table and returned to 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 muttering 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 hooks she chose, this one was a collection of tales. It was written in an old Rethian dialect that she didn't find 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.

Whoever had written the volume had been an extraordinarily good storyteller. 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. It was a story told to illustrate a moral; in this case the theme was "think before you act."

Apparently the ae'Magi (the one ruling at the time that the book was written) 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 dale a book was written or even who wrote it. With a collection of stories, most of which were folk tales, 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. He didn't seem to be having an easy time with it, although it was difficult to judge from his masked face.

"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?"

"I 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.

"You know," she said, running a finger over a dust pattern on a leather book cover, "when my father took me to visit the shapeshifters I thought that it would be really fun to be able to be someone else whenever I wanted. So I studied and learned and worked at it until I could look like almost anything I wanted. My father, though, had the uncanny knack of finding me out, and he was a creative genius when it came to punishments. Eventually I got out of the habit of shapechanging at all.

"The second time that I visited with my mother's people, I was several years older, I noticed something that time that made me think twice about shapeshifting. If a shapeshifter doesn't like something about himself, he can just change it. If his nose is too long or his eyes aren't the right color, it is easily altered. If he did something that he wasn't proud of, then he could be someone else for a while, until everyone forgot about it... they, all of them, hide from themselves behind their shapes until there isn't anything left to hide from."

"I assure you," commented Wolf dryly, "that as much as I would like to hide from myself, it would take more than a mask to do it."

"Then why do you wear it?" she asked. "I don't mean out there." She waved impatiently in the general direction of camp. "I am sure that you have your reasons. But why do you use it to hide from me too? I am hardly likely to tell everyone who you are."