It doesn't really feel safe for him to be the one who denies that story and replaces it with the new one.  How's the book.

The book is about a war between some drow and some deep gnomes; the heroine is a druid, a poison specialist with a pet giant centipede, transforming into animals and turning assassin when the war becomes relevant to her.

Woah, neat.  It's nice that he and Belmarniss have similar tastes.

It ends in bittersweet victory, with the deep gnomes driven out of their paradisical Orvian vault to allow the triumphant drow clan alliance to move in, but with the pet centipede dying to save its druid's life.

Hm.  What traits does this book think that gnomes have?

Gnomes make things out of clockwork for no reason. They hate people who aren't gnomes and fly into rages at little provocation (though on the page all the examples are provoked). The war itself is pretty naked acquisitive aggression on the drow's part - they want to live where the gnomes live and the gnomes don't want them to so they have a war about it - but the book seems to think the gnomes deserved it for being dicks (read: not drow nor prepared to submit to drow enslavement).

Yeah, most of that is about what he thought.  - What sort of clockwork things do they make??

There's a clock, and there's cunning door operating mechanisms, and a bunch of things described for flavor with no obvious purpose.

Sounds like the gnomes have more technology than the author understood, so she made up something wacky.  (He's assuming the writer's a she.  He doesn't know how drow names work.)  It's kind of weird that she had the provoking be real, though.  Maybe she didn't think it was.

Belmarniss comes home not too long after he finishes the book. Casts a light and hands it to him by way of inviting him out of the kitchen.

Follow follow follow.

"Can I meet gnomes?"

"I know much less about where to find any than I do about finding the surface. The book's an older one and not from nearby and the specific gnomes might well be made up anyway."

"Are there any on the surface?"

"Yeah, surface gnomes exist, Rynaeri has a book about them."

"It sounded like they had better technology than you guys.  And smithing, and stuff.  They might be able to get more out of ideas I have from back home."  And be better to live with even if they can't.  ...Unless the racism wasn't just author bias.

"The clockwork? Clocks exist, some people like them for checking spell durations and stuff, but we don't happen to have one. We have smithies."

"The writer seemed to think they were using it a lot.  And for more than just clocks."

"If I learn of a gnome settlement that is even slightly easier to find and reach than the surface I will tell you, okay? Though you're not a gnome so I don't know that your reception would be amazing even if you did convince them you knew great clockwork stuff."

"Okay."  That's not quite what he meant, but - it really is moot if the racism's real.

"I promise you that if I knew a nice place to ship you off to that wouldn't get either of us killed in the process you would know all about it, it's just actually not there."

"I know."

"Man, if I were you I'd be having some doubts about my pretend-captor bullshitting me to keep me docile but hopefully it's at least mitigating as far as that goes that I'm not having you do much? If I didn't want to keep you safe I'd steal all your stuff and turn you out."

Oh good she doesn't think he's dumb.  ...He kind of thinks he was being dumb, for that.  It doesn't really fit with how things are, especially now that he's not moving rocks but also even then.  "Yeah, well, the thing you said.  It wouldn't really make sense."

"It wouldn't in the circumstances that exist but I know fuckall about where you're from and maybe it would make perfect sense there, how would I know." Shrug.

"I don't think it would make sense there either.  I just don't know how places that have slaves work.  ...I was kind of thinking about it before.  Just, when I was already in a bad mood.  And then I kind of forgot about it, because it doesn't actually make sense."