“All that’s beside the point,” Sim interjected. “The problem is the organization.”
“Cataloging,” Wil said. “There have been many different systems over the years. Some masters prefer one, some prefer another.” He frowned. “Some create their own systems for organizing the books.”
I laughed. “You sound like they should be pilloried for it.”
“Perhaps,” Wil grumbled. “I would not weep over such a thing.”
Sim looked at him. “You can’t blame a master for trying to organize things in the best way possible.”
“I can,” Wilem said. “If the Archives were organized badly, it would be a uniform unpleasantness we could work with. But there have been so many different systems in the last fifty years. Books mislabeled. Titles mistranslated.”
He ran his hands through his hair, sounding suddenly weary. “And there are always new books coming in, needing to be cataloged. Always the lazy E’lir in Tombs who want us to fetch for them. It is like trying to dig a hole in the bottom of a river.”
“So what you’re saying,” I said slowly, “is that you find your time spent as a scriv to be both pleasant and rewarding.”
Sim muffled a laugh in his hands.
“And then there are you people.” Wil looked at me, his voice dangerous and low. “Students given the freedom in the Stacks. You come in, read half a book, then hide it so you can continue later at your own convenience.” Wil’s hands made gripping motions as if clutching at the front of someone’s shirt. Or perhaps a throat. “Then you forget where you have put the book, and it is gone as surely as if you had burned it.”
Wil pointed a finger at me. “If I ever discover you have done such a thing,” he said, smoldering with anger, “no God will keep you safe from me.”
I thought guiltily about three books I had hidden in just this way while I was studying for exams. “I promise,” I said. “I won’t ever do that.”
Sim stood up from the table, rubbing his hands together briskly. “Right. Simply said, it’s a mess in here, but if you stick to the books they have listed in Tolem’s catalog, you should be able to find what you’re looking for. Tolem is the system we use now. Wil and I will show you where they keep the ledgers.”
“And a few other things,” Wil said. “Tolem is hardly comprehensive. Some of your books might require deeper digging.” He turned to open the door.
As it turned out, only four books on my list were in the Tolem ledgers. After that, we were forced to leave the well-organized parts of the Stacks behind. Wil seemed to take the list as a personal challenge, so I learned a great deal about the Archives that day. Wil took me to the Dead Ledgers, the Backward Stair, the Bottom Wing.
Even so, at the end of four hours we’d only managed to track down the locations of seven books. Wil seemed frustrated by this, but I thanked him heartily, telling him he’d given me everything I needed to continue the search on my own.
Over the next several days, I spent almost every free moment I had in the Archives, hunting the books on Elodin’s list. I wanted nothing more than to start this class with my best foot forward, and I was determined to read every book he had given us.
The first was a travelogue I found rather enjoyable. The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain. Third was a book of rhetorical philosophy, ponderously written.
Then came a book detailing wildflowers in northern Atur. A fencing manual with some rather confusing illustrations. Another book of poetry, this one thick as a brick and even more self-indulgent than the first.
It took hours, but I read them all. I even went so far as to take notes on two of my precious pieces of paper.
Next came, as near as I could tell, the journal of a madman. While it sounds interesting, it was really only a headache pressed between covers. The man wrote in a tight script with no spaces between the words. No breaks for paragraphs. No punctuation. No consistent grammar or spelling.
That was when I began to skim. The next day when confronted with two books written in Modegan, a series of essays concerning crop rotation and a monograph on Vintish mosaics, I stopped taking notes.
The last handful of books I merely flipped through, wondering why Elodin would want us to read a two- hundred-year-old tax ledger from a barony in the Small Kingdoms, an outdated medical text, and a badly translated morality play.
While I quickly lost my fascination with reading Elodin’s books, I still delighted in hunting them down. I irritated more than a few scrivs with my constant questions: Who was in charge of reshelving? Where were the Vintish dictums kept? Who had the keys to the fourth basement scroll storage? Where did the damaged books go while they were waiting to be repaired?
In the end, I found nineteen of the books. All of them except
I arrived at Elodin’s next class ten minutes early, proud as a priest. I brought my two pages of careful notes, eager to impress Elodin with my dedication and thoroughness.
All seven of us showed up for class before the noon bell. The door to the lecture hall was closed, so we stood in the hallway, waiting for Elodin to arrive.
We shared stories about our search through the Archives and speculated as to why Elodin considered these books important. Fela had been a scriv for years, and she had only found seventeen of them. Nobody had found
Elodin still hadn’t arrived by the time the noon bell rang, and at fifteen minutes past the hour I grew tired of standing in the hallway and tried the door to the lecture hall. At first the handle didn’t move at all, but when I jiggled it in frustration, the latch turned and the door opened a crack.
“Thought it was locked,” Inyssa said, frowning.
“Just stuck,” I said, pushing it open.
We entered the huge, empty room and walked down the stairs to the front row of seats. On the large slate in front of us, written in Elodin’s oddly tidy handwriting was a single word: “Discuss.”
We settled into our seats and waited, but Elodin was nowhere to be seen. We looked at the slate, then at each other, at a loss for what exactly we were supposed to do.
From the looks on everyone’s faces, I wasn’t the only one who was irritated. I’d spent fifty hours digging up his damn useless books. I’d done my part. Why wasn’t he doing his?
The seven of us waited for the next two hours, chatting idly, waiting for Elodin to arrive.
He didn’t.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Hidden City
While the hours I’d wasted hunting for Elodin’s books left me profoundly irritated, I emerged from the experience with a solid working knowledge of the Archives. The most important thing I learned was that it was not merely a warehouse filled with books. The Archives was like a city unto itself. It had roads and winding lanes. It had alleys and shortcuts.
Just like a city, parts of the Archives teemed with activity. The Scriptorium held rows of desks where scrivs toiled over translations or copied faded texts into new books with fresh, dark ink. The Sorting Hall buzzed with activity as scrivs sifted and reshelved books.
The Buggery was not at all what I expected, thank goodness. Instead, it proved to be the place where new books were decontaminated before being added to the collection. Apparently all manner of creatures love books, some devouring parchment and leather, others with a taste for paper or glue. Bookworms were the least of them, and after listening to a few of Wilem’s stories I wanted nothing more than to wash my hands.
Cataloger’s Mew, the Bindery, Bolts, Palimpsest, all of them were busy as beehives, full of quiet, industrious scrivs.
