The four bundles and the empty ring

3 Some called such instruments the Urim and Thummim; some accounts used the name for a seer stone also. Nathoni requested that the inventory say which was on the table.

4 This request improved the inventory without settling the heavens.

5 Then Tylarion looked toward the instrument, and words arrived with a confidence exceeding that of his ordinary correspondence.

6 Nathoni wrote them down.

7 When he reached a sentence that seemed to make everyone agree with Tylarion, he asked to hear it again.

8 Tylarion said that the first hearing had been remarkably clear.

9 Nathoni replied that clarity was precisely why a second hearing could afford to exist.

10 The instrument offered no objection that anyone could record.

11 They compared the sentence with the sentences around it, and found that a question mark had been promoted into a command.

12 Moroni returned it to its former employment.

13 A visitor asked whether the instruments would remove every disagreement among readers.

14 Moroni said that this had not been their observable effect upon the translators.

15 And the work continued: one attended to the words, another to the writing, and both to the possibility that something had been missed.

16 The light in the room came from a lamp. The margin did not require the lamp to become a seer stone.

1 Upon the first bundle was a serpent beside a road; upon the second, a key beside a smaller key whose purpose had been forgotten.

2 Upon the third was a pearl within an open circle. Upon the fourth, a mirror in which the engraver had included himself.

3 And I shit you not, there was also an empty ring.

4 Tylarion supposed that a fifth bundle had been lost. Nathoni supposed that someone had left room.