"Spellsilver oxidizes, you need to store it in oil. If you bring me a sample I'll know immediately if you did it right."

Delias bobs his head in agreement. "Of course it would! - At least, that would obviously follow, if your theories of it are correct! ....This will probably take at least until tomorrow, but I will bring a sample to you as soon as we have it." 

He beams at her and then leaves. 

Outside the room, but keyed to the wards, Ketar - who is very young, clever at least according to the standardized tests used in the capital, and has a moderate-strength Thoughtsensing Gift - is still doing his best to read Carissa's mind. At least while she's maybe thinking thoughts which are interesting. He's been told to save his strength and reserves whenever he can, and the briefing he got from Ellitrea, who works directly for ALTARRIN WHO IS TERRIFYING, was pretty confusing? He's not incredibly sure what he's supposed to be watching for. 

Carissa is trying not to think very much, and she's very good at it. She's here; she's going to make them magic items. She hasn't even asked if the normal afterlives attach to here; it's important, obviously, but there's no reason for anyone to tell her the truth. There might be a mention in these books, or that might be fabricated, or she may have spent five years unconscious when they put her to sleep so they could write these books.

Whatever. They'll at least tell her what she's supposed to believe.

Ketar is UPSET and CONFUSED but his job is to watch and take detailed notes and definitely not to have opinions on them. 

There are a lot of books! The stack is in roughly chronological order; from oldest to most recent, it starts with the first two volumes of A Grand Reckoning Of All Times And Places From the Cataclysm To Today, a copy of My Reign, the Chroniclers of the Founders, three volumes of the Court Annals of the Nine Good Emperors, the University Records of Lyanthar and finally concluding with A Personal History Of Woeful Days and The History of Mykos of Endiya. Off to the side are Lives Worthy Of Imitation and The Campaigns of Pelin the Great.

Think of a sentence. 'Carissa Sevar does not have the skill to achieve this and yet has some kind of compulsive itch to try anyway.' Twelve books. What's left over when you count up the number of letters in the sentence and divide by 12. Three. 

She picks up 'My Reign' and starts reading. 

(Ketar is trying very hard to parse whatever is going on in Carissa's thoughts right now but he feels like he's missing kind of a lot of context?) 

It's a fairly short monograph by the Second Emperor on the mess he inherited on taking power, and how he fixed it. He has a terse, efficient style that is really good at swiftly conveying information in as few words as possible, but there's also a lot of background assumptions that he isn't sharing. His predecessor, the First Emperor, had been murdered along with all of his advisors by religious fanatics; the mage-storms that were an aftereffect of the Cataclysm were wreaking havoc, making even basic farming unpredictable; and the careless use of blood magic by desperate mages had not only made the storm problem worse, but aided the domination of the empire by warlords, some ex-generals, some purely bandits.

It starts with a few paragraphs on the military campaigns against the warlords, in which his campaigns were characterized by ruthless efficiency, though also by a strong preference for putting compulsions on competent enemies rather than killing them, before going on to his thirty-year career as Emperor trying to fix his problems by legislation, conquest, and direct rule.

He describes the considerations he made writing his law code (he thought that financial deterrence was more effective and efficient than physical punishment), explains why he legalized blood magic (he needed it to get the mage-power to keep the weather good so more people didn't starve - there are explicit mathematical calculations of expected value, and descriptions of how the actual numbers matched up to his predictions), why oaths of office were enforced by compulsions (the obvious reason), and why he cracked down on all churches (lots and lots and lots of cases of priests and religious organizations doing violence, along with, again, an expected utility calculation).
 
The vast majority of the work, however, is spent on month-to-month descriptions of crises, and how he handled famine after famine after army of brigands after storms washing away his only roads after barbarian raiders after rebellious generals after more famines. Most of these solutions involved either Gates, a magical technique for crossing distance very quickly, or compulsions, which seem to be about on a level with a permanent Dominate Person, at least how he's using them; all of his descriptions include what he expected would happen, what he did happen, and how he updated his methods based on that.

It ends with a note saying he was murdered six years after writing it, and is accompanied by various commentaries by later scribes, praising his wisdom, offering theories about the events, occasionally providing useful clarifications like "this wasn't a city when he was writing, just a village" or occasionally "actually, what he really meant was the precise opposite of what he said."

It's weirdly dath ilani, for an Emperor in a world with thought less developed than Golarion's. And it's obnoxiously Good, but at least the kind of Good you want holding a fortress at your back, if not the kind of Good you want to be in the personal custody of.

Next.... can she see any inputs not from her immediate environs through the skylight? Birds? Stars?

It's still only late afternoon, so no stars, just a blue sky with intermittent wispy clouds, not the kind that look inclined to rain anytime soon.

The protective magic laid on the glass makes everything beyond it slightly shimmery and unfocused. (It's possible to cast the Velgarth-style mage-techniques precisely enough to avoid this, but it's difficult and takes longer and hardly anyone bothers, especially not for something like this.) 

The clouds move in the wind, slowly. If she watches long enough, she might catch a brief glimpse of some birds flying past, quickly and high above, so that they're only visible as specks.

(Animals tend not to like being near powerful magic. The Palace radiates magic in all directions, and it's not like the roof has any appealing food that might tempt the birds to fly closer.) 

Could be an illusion anyway, not a good source of randomness. This world probably has prophecy, anyway. What's 4,116 * 8,559. 35,228,844, the digits add to 35, eleven books remaining, that makes two. The second volume of A Grand Reckoning Of All Times And Places From the Cataclysm To Today, then. 

....

...........

Ketar is going to Mindspeak Ellitrea even though she's supposed to be resting because he is deeply confused about whatever their supposedly-from-another-world visitor (and he's starting to believe that more, now) is doing with her mind??? 

A Grand Reckoning is, as you would expect, gigantic. The author, one Lokan of Olmer is extremely verbose, unwilling to use one word where sixteen will do, and peppers absolutely everything with quotes from classical texts. Fortunately, these quotes from classical texts are often written by very good author, which makes it much more reasonable, considering that he also prefers to copy sections of earlier histories into his than to restate them in his own words.

Also, despite the name, it's a history of the Eastern Empire, since apparently the author doesn't consider anything else worth writing about.

The second volume begins with the foundation of the Empire; there's horrible famines everywhere and mage-storms and the land is in chaos, but the First Emperor, descended from the great heroes of Tantara and Predain, brought Order and Civilization and Justice and all other good things in life. Fortunately, there are quotes - here's his Imperial Policy Statement about bringing Civilization and Humanity to the wastes, here's his advisor, Arved's, terse notes about what Tantara and Predain did to solve the problems they are now facing (Arved is obviously a major stylistic influence of the Second Emperor, though tragically not on Lokan).

The First Emperor manages to be even more sickeningly humane than the Second Emperor; blood magic is explicitly outlawed as making all the problems worse, and compulsions are only used on serious criminals to prevent reoffense. Lokan brings quotes from all sorts of sources to describe it - scribes in the imperial chancery taking notes of records, students at the school the First Emperor establishes for mages, the recorded testimony of 'enemies of the empire' criticizing it for conquering them - as well as memoranda from leading advisors, all tied together with reasonable competence.

The main imperial advisors in this period are Kesnas, the Emperor's top general (who, by his memoranda back home asking for more money, is constantly fighting and defeating the armies of vast tribal confederations in glorious battle, none of whom have anywhere *near* the amount of magic the Empire does, or as well trained-troops), Arved, who is largely managing the construction of infrastructure and weather-control with a whole lot of explicit predictions, and Vadan, who is in charge of diplomacy and 'internal security' and is quietly being paranoid in everything he writes, though nowhere near enough, since the Emperor and all three of his advisors are murdered by halfway through; the rest of the book talks about the civil war after his death.

(Which is very nasty; the Emperor's young son and daughter are briefly used as puppets to legitimate Kesnas's second-in-command, who calls himself Emperor until he's murdered in a mutiny; from then on there's too many sides and they're all using blood magic and the sources are very bad and mostly Lokan making sweeping generalizations, before the Second Emperor rides in on a white horse, crushes the warlords in a description sixteen times as long and about half as informative as *My Reign*, and ends the book.)

What even is blood magic. It's written about like it's horrible but as actually described it's not some dread ritual at all,  just sacrificing people for power.

Maybe it damns them or something. 

She starts skimming, about halfway through, doing weird things with numbers in her head to decide how far to skip ahead.

Ketar feels like it's kind of self-evident why sacrificing people for power is something you want to avoid as much as possible? Since they're people? And, like, isn't the entire point of everything to save more people? He's not sure what she means by 'damned', the concept doesn't make sense in his head, he wants advice from someone more experienced - 

- he's still really confused about the weird things she's doing with numbers, too, but Ellitrea snapped at him in Mindspeech that she wasn't worried and he should just keep taking notes. 

So he's doing that. They are not especially coherent notes, but he's watching her thoughts so intently and trying so hard to understand. 

Pull a silver coin out of her bag, flip it. Queen Crown Crown Crown Queen Queen Crown. Second volume of the Court Annals of the Nine Good Emperors, opened to about halfway through.

Whaaaaat is she doooing? 

Ketar is getting the feeling that this isn't just important, it's also surprising. He's being so good at taking notes. 

(He mostly hasn't really followed her mental commentary so far, but he totally read the Court Annals of the Nine Good Emperors in school, so maybe he can pull off something impressively useful for this part, not just meeting the bare minimum standard - which he's pretty sure he must be meeting. because he hasn't been yanked away and replaced by someone older and more experienced -)

The Court Annals are not verbose, they're just dry. A year-by-year summary of everything that happened. New school founded. Gate-network expanded. Penalties for priests strengthened. Festival for birth of emperor's son. Sacrifice to spirit of past emperor. Tax revolt, tax revolt crushed, parade for successful general, investigation into causes of tax revolt, punishment of former governor. New trade mission to Iftel successful. Minor war with Sarmus, general victorious. Construction of new roads to New Ashuel...

Eventually it gets to the imperial succession; which is equally dry; Emperor Anathos III appointed one of his leading advisors, Torio, his successor; several decades years later he passed away in his sleep at the age of 230, and Torio took over apparently without a pause. It's hard to read without your eyes glazing over.

....like someone's using hostile mind-control to make you think there's nothing important here?

... More like it's a really boring book. The author was trying to imitate the terse style of the Second Emperor and clearly Did Not Have What It Took.

That gets a pass, she supposes. 

Next she'll say the titles out loud in ...Osirian...and read the one that's alphabetically first in her guess at the Osirian spelling. The History of Mykos of Endiya.

Ketar is still mentally trying to catch up, and being quietly confused, and....maybe slightly insulted?

He likes the Court Annals. It's a satisfying book to read. The most satisfying book he's ever read, actually. It has facts and numbers that you can check - and most of the time, although not all the time, it even tells you where to look to check that the numbers are right, and when it doesn't it explains why not.

He feels kind of sad on behalf of Carissa, even though she's a political prisoner whose mind he's reading and it's sort of ridiculous to pity her. Though he doesn't think that what he's feeling is pity, exactly. He doesn't have a word for it. 

He keeps taking very detailed notes. 

It's more recent than any of the others!

It starts off with Mykos describing himself, is a provincial scholar born in a secondary city of no more than journeyman ability who flunked the examination for the imperial civil service and turned to history as a consolation, but his book is lively, well-written, and casually racist; he considers anyone not Jaconan (from his writing, the dominant ethnicity of the empire) obviously inferior, and the Imperial City the place to be. His history is following the reigns of Cesion III and Bastran IV, the latter of whom is Emperor while he writes.

The early pages include a description of the early parts of Cesion's reign; he's depicted as good-hearted, witty, but rather inclined to let his advisors bully him; Mykos is laughingly cynical about the motives of some of them and the ways they get around their imperial compulsions and Thoughtsensing to try to benefit their families and their home towns, and Cesion is really not inclined to punish them, even though he's a much stronger mage than they are and Emperor to boot. He's extremely negative on one of Cesion's last emperor's chief advisors, though, a man named Shakari; by his description, n ambitious dark-skinned foreigner full of cunning plots, an enemy of both the nobility (the backbone of the empire!) and of the civil service (we do everything!), critical of the Great Founders, and eager to amass power. He's eventually Gate-struck while out traveling; the heartbroken Cesion, who had relied on his advice, carried out a full investigation and never found the culprit.

Jaconans are the best, got it. What identifying traits do they have, or is it like Chelish people from Corentyn and Chelish people from Kintargo where you can just tell even though you couldn't put it in words? Should she make herself an item of persistent Alter Self so she can be Jaconan?

Imperial compulsions, Empire has all the nobility under geases, how reasonable. The nobility just schemes to - benefit their hometowns? Seriously? Probably it's just an indirect way of saying 'amass independent power bases and/or live in luxury with your many slaves'?