It was Tabarast's turn to frown. "True, true," he said with a sigh. "Wherefore we've got to make the most of these salvaged scraps and forgotten oddments."
He sighed again. "No matter how untruthful and incomplete they may be."
He poked at one yellowing parchment with an almost accusatory forefinger, adding, "This worthy claimant boasts of eating an entire dragon, platter by platter. It took him a season, he says, and he hired the greatest cooks of the time to make it palatable fare by trading them its bones and scales. I began to doubt him when he said it was his third such dragon, and that he preferred red dragon meat to the flesh of blue dragons."
Beldrune smiled. "Ah, Baerast," he said. "Still clinging to this romantic delusion that folk who go to the trouble of writing are superior sorts who always set down the truth? Some folk lie even to their own diaries.'
He waved at the ceiling and walls around them and added, "When all this was new, do you think the Netherese who dwelt or worked here were the great paragons some sages claim them to be...wiser than we, more mighty in all ways than the folk of today, and able to work almost any magic with a snap of the fingers? Not a bit of it! They were like us...a few bright minds, a lot of lazy-wits, and a few dark and devious twisters of truth who worked on folk around them to make others do as they desired. Sound familiar?"
Tabarast plucked up a falcon's head carved from a single palm-sized emerald an age ago and stroked its curved beak absently.
"I grant your point, Droon, yet I ask myself: what follows? Are we doomed to wallow in distortions and untruths as the years pass, with but seventeen spells to show for it...seventeen?'
Beldrune spread his hands. "That's seventeen more magics than some mages craft in a lifetime of working the Art," he reminded his colleague mildly. "And we share a task both of us love...and, moreover, are granted the occasional personal reward from Herself, remember?"
"How do we know She sends those dream-visions?" Tabarast said in a low voice. "How do we really know?"
Moonshorn Tower shook all around them for the briefest of instants, with a deep rumbling sound, somewhere a stack of books collapsed with a crash.
Beldrune smiled crookedly and said, "That's good enough for me. What do you want Her to do, Baerast? Dole out a spell a night, written across our brains in letters of everlasting fire?"
Tabarast snorted. "There's no need to be ridiculous, Droon." Then he smiled almost wistfully, and added, "Letters of fire would be nice, though, just once."
"Old cynic," the younger mage responded with an air of offended pomposity, "I am never ridiculous. I merely afford a degree of jollity that has never failed to please even more discerning audiences than yourself, or should I say especially more discerning audiences than yourself."
Tabarast mumbled something, then added more loudly, This is why we accomplish so little, as the hours and days pass unheeded. Clever words, clever words we catch and hurl like small boys at skulltoss, and the work advances but little."
Beldrune gestured at the table. "So take up some new scrap, and let's begin," he challenged. "Today we'll work together rather than pursuing separate ends and see if the Lady smiles on us. Do start, old friend, and I shall keep us to the matter at hand. In this my vigilance shall be steadfast, but as nothing to my wroth."
"Isn't that 'wrath,' m'boy?" Tabarast asked, his hand hovering once more above the table.
"Lesser beings, dearest mage of my regard, may well indulge in wrath...I feel wroth," Beldrune replied loftily, then added with a snarl, "Now take up a paper, and let's be about it!"
Tabarast blinked in astonishment and took up a paper. "...That so surpasseth all mine previous... other mages decry such . .. Yet will I prevail, the truth being my guide and guardian,' methinks, methinks, methinks, ho ho hum … Hmmm. Someone writing in the South, before Myth Drannor but probably not ail that long before, about a spell to put a mage's wits and all in the body of a beast, to make it prowl at his bidding for a night, or stay longer or forever within it should his own body be threatened or lost."
"Good, good," Beldrune responded. "Could it be Alavaernith, in the early days of working on his Three-cats' spell? Or is it too effusive for that?"
"I suspect someone other than Alavaernith,' Tabarast said slowly. "He was never so open with his secrets as this. ..."
Neither of them noticed a red-eyed, hawk-nosed man step into the room and lean for a moment against the door sill with an air of utter weariness, looking around at everything as he listened to them.
"And does he say anything useful?" Beldrune pressed. "Or can we cast this aside on the heap in the barrel?"
Tabarast peered at the page, turned it over to make sure the back was blank, held it to the light seeking oddities in (or hidden under) the writing, and finally handed it to his colleague with a sound that was half sigh and half snort. "Nothing useful, beyond telling us what someone was working on or had thought of back then...."
The hawk-nosed man stepped forward to peer at the gilt-lettered spines of tomes wedged tightly into the nearest bookshelf, then looked over at the table and carefully turned over a twisted, crumpled cage of wrought metal that had probably once held the shape of a globe. Examining it carefully, the stranger set it softly back down and peered at the writings beneath it.
"Now, this one," Tabarast said slowly, bent over the other side of the table, "is rather more interesting. No, we shan't be hurling this into the barrel quite so quickly." He held it up under his nose as he straightened, then paused as Elminster's boot made a slight sound and the dark-haired mage asked, "How goes it, Mardasper? Keeping an eye on things, as usual, hmmm?"
When there was no reply, he turned, and both mages stared across the room at the newcomer...who gave them a polite nod and smile, looked for a moment at an old and brittle scroll on the table, then stepped sideways, seeking more interesting writings.
Tabarast and Beldrune frowned at the stranger in unison, then turned their backs, drew in side by side, and continued their investigations in muttered tones.
El gave their eloquent backs and shoulders a wry, exhausted smile, then shrugged and peered at another parchment. It was something about Grafting a spike-studded torture coffin so that folk latched into it were teleported elsewhere rather than suffering impalement, and it was written with that squaring of the letters that marked its origin as the south shore of the Sea of Fallen Stars. The glint of metallic inks shone back at him, and the page had reached that soft brown state just before crumbling begins ... as old as he was, or older. El looked at the next page, sliding aside a Netherese ocular to do it.
He gave the beautiful item a second glance. The enchantments that would affix it over a wearer's eye were gone, but the gem would still, by the looks of it, afford vision of heat, and even through wood or stone a handspan thick or less. With the curled filigree around it, it looked like a giant, elegant tear that would glisten endlessly on a lady's cheek.
What a lot of work. Grafting far in excess of its usefulness, done for the sheer joy of mastering the Art and creating something that would last... and there must be a thousand times a thousand such items, scattered all over a world so rich in natural magic that all of them could be said to be frivolities.
And was Elminster Aumar, in truth, one more frivolity?
Perhaps, and perhaps he was destined to leave behind little more than these endless dusty scraps of parchment, the confused and unfinished ideas of centuries … yet that flow of mistakes and vain strivings and occasional triumphs or destructive disasters was the Art, with Mystra the gatekeeper of the Weave from which it all came and to which it all returned.