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but I do not have any gold to pay you for the spell."
"I have no need of gold, High Mistress Pelia. All the merchants are dead,
their shops are in ruins. What would I buy with gold?" I replied, shrugging.
"Nothing. You need it, I have it, and I am happy to let you copy the spell.
Besides - in the years your grimoire was in my possession, I copied three
spells from it that I did not already have. To my way of thinking, that means
I owe you three spells."
"Thank you again, Master Eddas."
"It's nothing, High Mistress. I'll let you copy the Spell of Disenchantment
from my grimoire tonight, and also two others I think may be of use to you -
battle spells you may find helpful. If you find you don't like them, however,
we can simply pick two others you will like. Not all are battle spells - in
fact, most of the three hundred spells I've collected in my grimoire are
spells you may find useful."
Pelia gaped. "Three hundred spells?! I barely have thirty!" The women around
her murmured to each other, apparently impressed.
I managed to keep my expression composed. My tome was a cubit long, a cubit
wide, and two hands thick - over twice the size of hers - and each of the
nearly three thousand pages were made of fine, thin vellum of elven
manufacture. What did she think I'd put in it, cooking recipes? I didn't waste
my time filling my grimoire with irrelevant things, as she had - it was a
spellbook, not a notebook. The mages of the Dyclonic Circle were trained to
use their grimoires as a research tool and as a weapon of war, not as a
scratchpad for things we didn't want to forget. Where her tome was apparently
just a blank book she'd bought and began writing in, mine was the same as that
of the other mages of the Dyclonic Circle - it was a sturdy pair of hinged
steel plates covered in soft black leather and pierced by six holes, with the
pages bound in between by seven stout cowhide thongs as wide as my finger.
Five thongs went from hole-to-hole, and the last two were tied over the top
and bottom of the book, rather than across the spine. This applied pressure in
such a way as to not only hold the book together, but to prevent the pages
from moving or spreading out as it was opened. When I needed to add pages, I
simply loosened the bindings, laid the back cover over each new page one at a
time as a guide to carefully cut the holes in the new sheets to be added with
my knife, then bound it all together again. This also allowed me to organize
my spells and create a useful index.
Page 89
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Two of the first spells I placed in my grimoire as an apprentice were a
blotting spell, allowing me to clean up errors and spilled ink on the pages,
and an erasing spell, allowing me to erase and re-enter the page numbers when
I re-organized my spells or added new ones. As such, my grimoire wasn't simply
a collection of spells entered from the first one I'd written to the most
recent. No, it was an organized, indexed research tool and weapon of war, as a
grimoire belonging to a proper master battle-mage of the Dyclonic Circle
should be. Her grimoire was chaotic, disordered; part diary, part spell-book,
part notebook of things she didn't want to forget. The spells she had in it
were good ones, mostly healing magic, but finding them required you either
know where they were or you spent several minutes paging through her book. Her
grimoire may have been perfect for her, but for me, it was a total mess.
Of course, my attitude towards the creation and maintenance of a proper
grimoire was influenced by the fact I'd spent decades instructing apprentices
and performing research, and my standards for judging the grimoire of another
mage were somewhat more strict as a result. If I'd seen an apprentice of the
Dyclonic Circle with a grimoire that looked like hers, they'd have been
scrubbing the floors of the Black Tower for a month. I tried to remind myself
that other mages didn't have the same high-standards I had set as a
schoolmaster and researcher simply because they weren't really needed by them,
and besides - I wasn't even a member of the Dyclonic Circle anymore. After a
brief mental sigh, I put a smile on my face and replied.
"Well, to be honest, it's not quite three hundred, High Mistress. Two hundred
and ninety seven. I'll have to bind in some more pages if I wish to add to
that, however."
"I am truly impressed, Master Eddas. That's the single largest collection of
spells I have ever heard of."
"Thank you, High Mistress," I replied, as was polite. I decided I didn't need
to tell her it was the largest single collection of spells in the history of
the Dyclonic Circle, probably more than any single mage in the entire history
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