Only after three hours of other questions did Grave finally turn to the larger ones.
He did not approach them directly. Instead, as he poured the last of the tea into the four cups, he remarked almost offhandedly, "You have read my friend's volume. The four-hundred-year-old one with the worn-off name."
Bruce paused.
"You know I read it."
"The Library's archivist and I have a long-standing arrangement. They do not report to me who reads what, but they do mention, in general terms, when a particular text is accessed. That old anonymous volume is consulted perhaps once a decade. When it is, I take notice."
"That volume is important to you."
"It is. The author was my teacher. Not in the technical sense, of course. He died before I was born. But he was the first mind that helped me understand what I was looking at when I began studying the fabric of my realm. I was eighty when I first read his work. I have returned to it every twenty years since."
"He's anonymous."
