"Huh." Anything magic?

Most of it is! Almost none of it is recognizable, even to Vanyel. 

"This looks kind of dangerous to touch. Not that I'm not tempted."

"If we go slowly I can at least tell you if things are going to explode. ...You can touch that brooch, if you want, it's not magical at all." 

It's a beautiful piece, half-completed, in the shape of a hummingbird; the inlaid mosaic of tiny agate-pieces as feathers is mostly unfinished. 

"How did he have the time," Mahdi marvels.

"Maybe he was one of those bizarre people who only need four hours of sleep a night, I know a Herald like that. And - I figure he didn't have time, after the war."

He leans in to try to read Urtho's notes, and is stymied by the fact that it's both in an extremely archaic form of a language he barely knows how to read in the first place (Shin'a'in and Tayledras use a different script from the Valdemaran one, ideographic rather than a phonetic alphabet), and also that Urtho, apparently, had the worst handwriting. 

He has permanent Tongues which solves one but not both of those problems.

Well, if he can puzzle out the handwriting then Vanyel can try to interpret what the magical terms mean; Urtho also apparently wrote in a frequently-abbreviated shorthand that's pretty obscure to someone who never even met him. 

"Should we copy it or something? I have a feeling some of this could be really valuable but I don't think we have time to read all of it and it feels weird to just take it." Shrug. "Though I guess I'm not sure why." 

"Are we okay with using our magic here, there's a cantrip for quickly copying books."

"I think it's fine, if it's going to be lower-energy than my light anyway - there aren't any wards in here, I guess all his defences were further out. Some of the magic projects might be a little unstable, since they're incomplete, but at a glance, I'd have to raise a Gate next to one for that to actually be a problem, and also most of them aren't powered anyway." 

"It's a cantrip so it's very little energy." And he can pull some blank notebooks out of his bag and copy things, one page at a time.

There are maybe a hundred total looseleaf sheets scattered around the room (they're individually very dense.) 

Then it will take him about fifteen minutes. He hands Hagan the map to mark the latest rooms while he does it.

He can't label anything but his mapping is very neat and precise.

"Do you always draw maps of everywhere you explore? That's a good idea."

Vanyel is poking around looking at things with mage-sight. "...Ooh. I think this is a focus for a paired scrying-spell, I didn't know that was possible." He points at two hand-sized wooden boxes, the lids flipped up to reveal matching mirrors on the inner surface. 

"Ooooh, cool. We have that but I don't know anything about how it works. A lot of places, not mapping neatly will come back to bite you. It's also a good way to catch missing rooms."

"Though that's less true in a wizard's tower, unbounded as we are by petty mortal concepts of space and time," he says, still copying.

Vanyel chuckles a little to himself. Keeps looking around. Most of the other magic artifacts are a lot less scrutable. 

Secret doors or trapdoors?

There do not appear to be any further secret doors or trapdoors from the secret room, at least not any findable ones. 

Ah, well, can't have a secret room in every room. He'll also check the staircase carefully, on their way back up.

There are totally THREE different hollow steps, which can with some grease and Fetching be opened to reveal tiny compartments with very old notebooks in them. 

Hagan likes this guy. Aside from his decision to destroy the world trying to kill Leareth, that seems a bit iffy. 

Mahdi can copy those too, if they're still in readable condition.

Well, the handwriting is not any more legible, but the ink is only somewhat faded and the paper itself seems perfectly preserved - it actually looks like it's not precisely paper, it has the strength of cloth.