"Oh yes," Elisabeth said, with an emphatic nod. "Sorcerers make pacts with demons and in return for some horrible kind of price, they gain a measure of power. They write down spells in the language of the Otherworld into books and those books get so soggy with magic they become almost alive. And if something happens to those books, like the ink smudges or a page tears, they can turn into horrible monsters called Maleficts and devastate a whole countryside."

That last, at least, wasn't wild rumor. Maleficts still happened with some regularity back home, even with all the care librarians took.