Before I tell you about the weekend proper I must tell you about the READING, because the reading is where all of it started and I do not think anyone else at the fair understands quite how much happened to me in a library.
It began with a question. Somebody mentioned, in passing, that there is an archon almost NOBODY knows very much about — and I would like you to imagine what that sentence does to a person like me. An archon. Almost nobody knows. Very much. Three separate provocations in one sentence. I went to Terlotta.
And they gave me PILES. Piles and piles of legends and folktales about Ciorell, which is a quantity of source material I can only describe as generous. Fantastical stories, most of them — things of impossibilities, creatures made entirely of carved wood that MOVED — and I am aware that folktales are not evidence, and I have marked them as folktales, but a thing repeated in a hundred stories is at least evidence that a hundred people needed to repeat it.
The topic of automatons came up more than once. More than once! And that led me to accounts of the Althorean Enclave, an organisation of alchemists and artificers, once led by the Archmage Beloc — an ORGANISATION, please note, not a place, which I established early and am rather pleased about because I nearly filed it wrongly.
And then, in the margins of one book, in someone else’s hand: the name TALOS. Scribbled. And underlined SEVERAL TIMES.
Reader, I have written in a great many margins. I know what it means when a person underlines a thing several times. That is not annotation, that is somebody who could not let it go.
So I asked about it, loudly, of everyone within reach, and I was told that Talos is a remarkable individual — an automaton itself, but capable of rewriting and recreating itself. And that Talos has a workshop in Varos.
A workshop. In Varos. Which is where I was going anyway.
I have copied all of this out fair, cross-referenced it, and begun a section. I did not know, sitting in that library, that by the end of the weekend I would have stood in that workshop and spoken to something that inscribes instructions for a living. I only knew that somebody, some time ago, had underlined a name and put the book back on the shelf.
I intend to be the one who does not put it back.
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