The Rossem Project

A Perfect Day - Part 1

     The University's library was on the first floor of the divination building and consisted of six rooms, only the first of which was open to the corridor. The other five rooms were accessible only from adjacent rooms, and only to those who were judged ready to have access to their contents.

     The first room was the largest, being five or six times the size of any other room in the building, and as well as walls and shelves of books it also contained a dozen little alcoves in which students could sit in private to study without interruption. The room was quiet at the moment, with only half a dozen young people wandering up and down the aisles, scanning the book titles and occasionally taking a book down to leaf carefully through the pages. The place was generally at its busiest in the evening, between the end of the day's classes and the evening meal, when there could be as many as fifty apprentices and half a dozen qualified wizards crowding the room.

     The room was full of the acrid smell of paper preservative which brought fond memories back to Thomas as he stepped into the room. Many of the books in this room were centuries old, but even with the preserving chemicals and the liberal use of preservation spells the books would eventually crumble to dust. Thomas glanced at the door beside the entrance to the librarian’s office behind which was the copying room. How many long evenings had he spent in there? he wondered. All apprentices had to take their turn, copying the oldest books out onto new paper, writing a new book that would eventually replace the old one on the shelves. That was where they practised the art of calligraphy, so essential when copying new spells into their spellbooks, and apprentices who'd spent a long evening performing this arduous chore were easily recognised by the way they rubbed their aching wrists all the next day.

     He glanced around at the shelves of books, wondering how long it would take him to find one of the ones he’d written. That's something else Derrin's got to look forward to, he thought with a smile. Like every apprentice before him, he too would soon be bemoaning the unfortunate fact that the wizards couldn't just ca spell to copy the book by magic. A magically copied object carried a charge of residual magic, though, that interfered with any future copying spell, making it impossible for it to be copied in turn. You could only copy an original. You couldn't copy a copy, which meant that even a magically created copy eventually had to be copied by hand when it finally began to disintegrate.

     The librarian on duty, a wizened, shriveled old man who was sorting through the cards of the library's lending system, looked up at Thomas over the rims of his spindly, metal framed spectacles as the wizard stepped into the room, quietly closing the door behind him. This was the first chance he'd had to visit the library since his return to the University, three weeks ago. It was second downday, the second of three days of the week when Lara, the second moon, wasn't in the sky when the yellow sun rose. It was a bad day for the casting of high level spells, and research wizards were consequently given the day off to relax and pursue their own interests.

     Both Thomas and Lirenna's previous second downdays had been spent settling into the dwelling tree, though. The week before, Thomas and Edward Parsley had spent three hours carrying Thomas’s new armchair to the shaewoods and then wrestling it in through the front door, past the small kitchen and dining area and to the snug at the back, to replace the shae sized chair that had originally occupied the space. It had been a mighty chore, but now he had a chair he could really relax in at the end of a long day.