A Useful Compendium of Spells for a Happy Household

Written by Pumilio in his declining years, A Useful Compendium of Spells for a Happy Household would be an excellent spell book for those wishing to maintain their laboratory and covenant in excellent order, if not for the unfortunate feud that developed between Smaragda and Pumilio in the 370s. According to Notes on Triggers (the compilation of Smaragda’s research into complex triggering mechanisms published by Hannelora Sebasticook), Smaragda counted her curse on Pumilio’s book to have been her finest accomplishment in indirect curses. No one is quite certain if Smaragda really cursed Pumilio's last work, it may simply have been Pumilio's incipient twilight, but it is clear that something ill got into this work. Almost every spell in this book is filled with strange tongue twisting phrasing, and far too many of the tongue twisters have disastrous double meanings. For instance, a spell for transforming water into a powerful cleaning solution contains the phrase "Make this water powerful in the ways of dissolution, so that even the most dissolute apprentice shall be able to easily clean ...", which must be repeated six times quickly in the casting of the spell. The easy confusion of the dissolute apprentice and the water of dissolution creates the water of the dissolution of apprentices, and an error which might normally result in a failed casting in this case results in a substance which has killed at least one apprentice (the first student of Lecticarius was fatally dissolved by the water of the dissolution of apprentices in 380).

While these spells must be handled with great care, and should never be cast from the text without a thorough and attentive reading and preparation, there is too much value in Pumilio’s text for it to simply be discarded as a hazard. In fact, most covenants these days have a copy of Happy Households. Texts on simple but necessary subjects such as household chores are far too often written by Touccians, cobbled together from lab notes without order or sense like For Those so Lazy, and they are almost never written by Lemmites (although perhaps someday some Purpurean, inspired by the absurd and pointless shopping list passages in the Unread Book, will grace us with such a work). This text, written with characteristic Christopherean diligence and pedantry, shows a clear mind turned with care to a tedious subject. The spells are well organized, clearly described, and variants are reliably and clearly noted throughout.

The one portion of the book which diverges from spells for cleaning has both interest and peril. In a discussion of variants of the paired ritual spell and common spell Let Each Instrument Know Its Home and Let Each Instrument Return to Its Home, Pumilio delves into a series of ever more violent ambush spells, ending with the ritual Let a Thousand Daggers Know Their Homes. Pumilio suggests performing this ritual twice, with the daggers rearranged for the second ritual casting. Although these spells offer intriguing possibilities, they must, as always with this text, be handled with the greatest of care: Let a thousand daggers return to their homes becomes its implicit variant My heart is the home to a thousand daggers with only a single slip of the tongue in the last phrase of the enchantment.

As a final note, it is worth mentioning that the water of dissolution is a very useful spell, and the resulting liquid can be safely used by servants or mages, but it should always be tested carefully (using a 1:10 dilution, and applied only to the smallest patch of skin, the water for the dissolution of apprentices will cause only mild damage to an apprentice) before being handled by an apprentice.