Kings of the North - Elizabeth Moon [69]
“We will escort him—”
“You will not. You will remain here,” Jeddrin said, with all the command voice he could muster. The captain shrugged; Andressat told his own guards to find them quarters in the citadel’s outer ring. The scholar followed as he himself led the way into the inner citadel and then into the palace and finally, the main library.
The room was long, almost the full depth of the building, lit by tall narrow windows with shelves between. “This is one of the archives,” Jeddrin said, watching the scholar’s face.
“It is … impressive,” the man said. He did look like a scholar, stoop-shouldered, his fingers ink-stained.
“It does not contain what the Duke of Immer seeks,” Jeddrin said. “This room has been searched and cataloged. My own archivists—” He gestured to the end of the room, where a man sat working at a desk and a woman reached to a high shelf with a long pole.
“What is that?” the scholar asked, pointing at her.
“It is for retrieving scrolls or scroll cases from the top shelves,” Jeddrin said. “My father invented it. He is the one who began the reorganization after a series of wet years brought a spring up—yes, even up here on this height—in the middle of the old archives. Things had to be moved in haste, dried, stacked anywhere room could be found, and the same weather that brought the spring gave his archivist lung-fever. Some records were lost and could not be restored, he told me—I was not yet born—and others damaged. It was some years before he could find someone qualified to begin copying the damaged materials, and as I’m sure you know, some once attacked by the black stain continue to decay—it was a race against the stain, not entirely won.”
“But why were the archives on the floor in the first place?” the scholar asked.
“According to my father, his father and his wife’s father both increased the collection—already large—buying up any antiquarian documents they could find. They were enthusiasts, and they vied in finding old and rare scrolls, books, loose sheets. My father’s father had not expected to inherit, and so had more leisure than I. But let’s see how you do with this one—” Jeddrin pulled out a scroll he knew had been written but seven generations back.
The scholar peered at it. “It’s old.”
“Yes. I’m wondering if you can read it.”
“I think—let me see—it is a record of … of goat breeding?”
“Yes. With notes of weather, diseases, and so forth.”
“I don’t recognize some of the words—” The scholar pointed.
Jeddrin said, “Rain.”
“Really? It’s not the same—”
“No. Our word for rain drops the second sound, and the breath-sound has narrowed.”
“You’ve studied this?”
“My father insisted. I was to be his scholar, you see; my elder brother was to inherit—much the same situation as with my father’s father. My elder brother slipped and fell on a vine stake and died of it; neither of us had married yet.”
“So you can read all these?” The scholar waved at the shelves.
“Of course,” Jeddrin said. “And older, besides. But now I’ll take you to the store-pile, as we call it, things still unsorted. Apparently all my ancestors collected writings; it may not be fully cataloged even in my lifetime.”
“I could help,” the scholar said.
“I think not,” Jeddrin said. “If you cannot read it, how could you catalog it?”
The store-pile filled a series of connecting rooms, divided by function. The farthest held unsorted materials, heaps and piles on floors and shelves. In the next, baskets and bins held roughly sorted items, those tainted by blackstain or blue carefully segregated from the rest, in closed containers. The two outermost rooms had tables where scribes copied out the most damaged materials.
“I employ five archivists and scribes at present,” Jeddrin said to the scholar, whose jaw had dropped. “In my father’s day, only one of these rooms had been cleared for copyists. Now two.”
“I am sure the Duke of Immer would hire