We went into the complex, past the guard stations—they were all fully manned, as well—and walked toward the Speaking Room. Maybe it said something about the mind-set of wizards in general that the place was called “the Speaking Room” and not “the Listening Room” or, in the more common vernacular, “an auditorium.” It was an auditorium, though, rows of stone benches rising in a full circle around a fairly small circular stone stage, rather like the old Greek theaters. But before we got to the Speaking Room, I turned off down a side passage.

With difficulty, I got the Wardens on guard to allow me, Mouse, and Molly into the Ostentatiatory while one of them went to Ebenezar’s room and asked him if he would see me. Molly had never been into the enormous room before, and stared around it with unabashed curiosity.

“This place is amazing,” she said. “Is the food for the bigwigs only, or do you think they’d mind if I ate something?”

“Ancient Mai doesn’t weigh much more than a bird,” I said. “LaFortier’s dead, and they haven’t replaced him yet. I figure there’s extra.”

She frowned. “But is it supposed to be only for them?”

I shrugged. “You’re hungry. It’s food. What do you think?”

“I think I don’t want to make anyone angry at me. Angrier.”

The kid has better sense than I do, in some matters.

Ebenezar sent the Warden back to bring me up to his room at once, and he’d already told the man to make sure Molly was fed from the buffet table. I tried not to smile, at that. Ebenezar was of the opinion that apprentices were always hungry. Can’t imagine who had ever given him that impression.

I looked around his receiving room, which was lined with bookshelves filled to groaning. Ebenezar was an eclectic reader. King, Heinlein, and Clancy were piled up on the same shelves as Hawking and Nietzsche. Multiple variants of the great religious texts of the world were shamelessly mixed with the writings of Julius Caesar and D. H. Lawrence. Hundreds of books were handmade and handwritten, including illuminated grimoires any museum worth the name would readily steal, given the chance. Books were crammed in both vertically and horizontally, and though the spines were mostly out, it seemed clear to me that it would take the patience of Job to find anything, unless one remembered where it had been most recently placed.

Only one shelf looked neat.

It was a row of plain leather-bound journals, all obviously of the same general design, but made with subtly different leathers, and subtly different dyes that had aged independently of one another into different textures and shades. The books got older and more cracked and weathered rapidly as they moved from right to left. The leftmost pair looked like they might be in danger of falling to dust. The rightmost journal looked new, and was sitting open. A pen held the pages down, maybe thirty pages in.

I glanced at the last visible page, where Ebenezar’s writing flowed in a strong, blocky style.  

Ebenezar’s voice interrupted my reading. “Hoss,” he said. “How’s your head?”

“Full of questions,” I replied. I closed the journal, and offered him the pen.

My old mentor’s smile only touched his eyes as he took the pen from me: he’d intended me to see what he’d written. “My journal,” he said. “Well. The last three are. The ones before that were from my master.”

“Master, huh?”

“Didn’t used to be a dirty word, Hoss. It meant teacher, guide, protector, professional, expert—as well as the negative things. But it’s the nature of folks to remember the bad things and forget the good, I suppose.” He tapped the three books previous to his own. “My master’s writings.” He tapped the next four. “

His master’s writings, and so on, back to here.” He touched the first two books, very gently. “Can’t hardly read them no more, even if you can make it through the language.”

“Who wrote those two?”

“Merlin,” Ebenezar said simply. He reached past me to put his own journal back up in place. “One of these days, Hoss, I think I’ll need you to take care of these for me.”

I looked from the old man to the books. The journals and personal thoughts of master wizards for more than a thousand years? Ye gods and little fishes.

That would be one hell of a read.

“Maybe,” Ebenezar said, “you’d have a thought or two of your own, someday, that you’d want to write down.”

“Always the optimist, sir.”

He smiled briefly. “Well. What brings you here before you head to the trial?”

I passed him the manila envelope Vince had given me. He frowned at me, and then started looking through pictures. His frown deepened, until he got to the very last picture.

He stopped breathing, and I was sure that he understood the implication. Ebenezar’s brain doesn’t let much grass grow under its lobes.

“Stars and stones, Hoss,” Ebenezar said quietly. “Thought ahead this time, didn’t you?”

“Even a broken clock gets it right occasionally,” I said.

He put the papers back in the envelope and gave it back to me. “Okay. How do you see this playing out?”

“At the trial. Right before the end. I want him thinking he’s gotten away with it.”

Ebenezar snorted. “You’re going to make Ancient Mai and about five hundred former associates of LaFortier very angry.”

“Yeah. I hardly slept last night, I was so worried about ’em.”

He snorted.

“I’ve got a theory about something.”

“Oh?”

I told him.

Ebenezar’s face darkened, sentence by sentence. He turned his hands palm up and looked down at them. They were broad, strong, seamed, and callused with work—and they were steady. There were scabs on one palm, where he had fallen to the ground during last night’s melee. Ink stained some of his fingertips.

“I’ll need to take some steps,” he said. “You’d best get a move on.”

I nodded. “See you there?”

He took his spectacles off and began to polish the lenses carefully with a handkerchief. “Aye.”

The trial began less than an hour later.

I sat on a stone bench that was set over to one side of the stage floor, Molly at my side. We were to be witnesses. Mouse sat on the floor beside me. He was going to be a witness, too, though I was the only one who knew it. The seats were all filled. That was why the Council met at various locations out in the real world, rather than in Edinburgh all the time. There simply wasn’t enough room.

Wardens formed a perimeter all the way around the stage, at the doors, and in the aisles that came down between the rows of benches. Everyone present was wearing his or her formal robes, all flowing black, with stoles of silk and satin in one of the various colors and patterns of trim that denoted status among the Council’s members. Blue stoles for members, red for those with a century of service, a braided silver cord for acknowledged master alchemists, a gold-stitched caduceus for master healers, a copper chevron near the collar for those with a doctorate in a scholarly discipline (some of the wizards had so many of them that they had stretched the fabric of the stole), an embroidered white Seal of Solomon for master exorcists and so on.