Belmarniss looks at the bookshelves while she's doing that.

Economics. Military history. History of Zorvey. History of Miomir. History of Liru-a. History of the Federated Southern Islands. History of human-mermaid relations. Biographies of ancient emperors and kings. History of Sealing Day. Adventure novel. Romance novel. Collection of plays. Textbooks for two foreign languages. Travelogue. Botany. Geography and navigation. Political philosophy. Religious poetry. Secular poetry. Recent scientific publications. Magical theory. Spell collections. Dragons and phoenixes. Child psychology.

"There's room for more. What have you most often found yourself needing to talk about with strangers?"

"Uh, let's see, when have I needed to talk to strangers in a language I barely had any of... sometimes I make statements about alignments, I don't know if your magic can discern those at all, it can be reassuring in tense situations. Directions, north south east west. Proper nouns but those we don't need to have in the phrasebook. Haggling but I don't expect that to come up before I have another Tongues."

She writes directions. "Maybe you should explain alignments while you can."

"Lawful and Chaotic, Evil and Good, Neutral on either axis, nine results, these correspond to the afterlife planes, they can be detected on sufficiently powerful people with magic I do not have but even low-power people get sorted into afterlives. They are similar but not reliably identical to the commonsense concepts of the same names. I'm Chaotic Good last time somebody checked me but I get along fine with plenty of Lawfuls and some Evils depending on the details."

"I have questions about that but I'm not sure if it's the most urgent thing to have more questions about." She writes four words and doesn't at this time construct an entire grid. "Why has that been useful to discuss with strangers, though?"

"If somebody's scared of me they'll often be reassured if I say I'm Good, if somebody's doing... petty crime or something, they will be relieved if I say I'm Chaotic, if someone Lawful is concerned about how I'm Chaotic it will often be mollifying that I am also Good. Like, uh, if I went someplace and decided to buy a slave to go manumit later then this would be the thing to tell them so they'd believe me about that."

"I'm not sure you should expect that to work here."

"Good to know, if I have time to say three words I will try to pick ones more locally useful than 'I'm Chaotic Good'."

"If I knew what you should say instead I would tell you. Hmm, what else - maybe an explanation of your translation magic? And something about what you're doing here?"

"Comprehend Languages is a first circle spell that lets me understand and read any language, and it only works on the caster, 'bout an hour but since it's only first circle I can do it a bunch of times if I want. Tongues is a third circle spell that lets me understand and speak any language for about an hour, but doesn't help with writing coming or going; that one I can cast on other people. There is also a second-circle spell called Share Language which lets me grant a language I speak to another person complete with literacy; that one lasts for a whole day, so if it winds up being that I'm mostly talking to just you or while you are handy to translate, I might preferentially rely on that one going forward. I'm not sure what information I should recite to convey that efficiently for people."

"Probably not the circle thing, that won't be familiar. Hm." Tema writes something approximately summarizing that.

"Thanks."

"Do you have any idea what you'll want to do while you're here?"

"Oh, let's see. Arbitrage, maybe, or at least scoping out the possibilities for my priest friend if he shows up. - he's a priest of the god of trade. I can teach people spells, do research, that kind of thing."

"So maybe you want something about prices, and I'm not sure what recurring repetitive things might come up in teaching spells and doing research. Is the religion thing going to be important?"

"Uh, I guess he might decide the place is ripe for evangelism but that's not my speed."

"Probably not worth coming up with vocabulary about it now." She writes down some things about commerce.

And at length the Tongues spell runs out and Belmarniss focuses her attention on the shelves, looking for something that will give her plenty of high-level information.

A Brief Survey of Magical Theory? Record of a Journey from Liru-a to Thania? Great Battles of the Western Hemisphere? Sealing Day, or, the Triumph of Righteousness Over Evil?

That last looks plausibly important!

The book alternates mythic-style ancient history with recent observations.

Once upon a time there was a species of pure evil, which used others' pain as fuel for magic that warped bodies; they would use a fraction of their power to heal their victims whenever necessary, then torment them yet further. In bygone days in a great working, the details of which are now lost, they were deprived of their magic and imprisoned, powerless, in human bodies, to reincarnate as humans for all time.

There are two recentish accounts from people who claim to have recovered memories from that time, claiming there were evil ones with claws and gleaming eyes who ruled over areas of unknown size in luxury the likes of which the world has never seen since. There are quite a lot of recent somewhat more trustworthy accounts of people believed to be unable to do magic; there are some no one ever caught at anything, but in areas where they can get away with it, they find excuses to hurt people - some of them have legal outlets like slavery, some break the law, some no one can pin anything on but bad luck follows them. The modern anecdotes get pretty horrible. The author apparently met one, who was nothing but polite, and got a chance to sketch the guy's slave (the sketch is included in the book and shows notable scarring and both legs missing from above the knee). Apparently the evil fellow (the book records that they've been called demons, and the fair ones, and the old ones, and the smiling ones, and "those we don't speak of", and the cold ones, and changelings, and wrong, and sons of ruin, but itself only calls them "the others" and "people without magic" and "the supposed third species"), on being asked why he did that, just smiled and said, "What, you've learned enough of my kind to write a book, and you have to ask? I wanted to."

There are stories of their vengeance, of famine and plague following the sealing. There are stories of towns seeing their first deaths in centuries - and stories of people thousands of years old pulled out of dungeons speaking no modern tongues and weeping at the sight of the open sky. There are stories of the heroes who reshaped the world, many contradictory ones, different sets of heroes and different nations of origin.

There are ruins and tombs that have been excavated recently that might be from before, and they do seem consistent with societies with a lot of leisure time and lower-than-current infant mortality. Some of the skeletons are warped and don't look as though they were pleasant shapes to be. There are rumors about excavated jars that could possibly contain souls.

The book talks about what Sealing Day means now (it's a story of triumph and hope and courage and, for some reason, people wear extra fancy hats about it), and how it came to its current cultural position (probably has to do with a fad a couple centuries ago for morality plays about ancient history and myth), and where the current customs come from, and whether it's actually celebrated on the anniversary (maybe).

Well, "demons" is just confusing, it'd be an odd demon who could restrain themselves to one legally purchased slave. Were humans immortal before this?

Only when the others were making them so, probably.

Seems like quite a loss if they couldn't be - rehabilitated somehow - but probably she should just be modeling them as evil outsiders or something. Kind of an impressive coordination project to get them all reincarnating magiclessly.

Magical theory book?