Finally, she found what she was looking for. A plain brass handle, carefully concealed behind a dusty scroll. She thought of calling her guard over, but what danger could lay behind the secret door?

She pulled, gently at first, and then with gradually increasing strength. She had to put one foot against the wall, but it inched wider. She could see the hole behind it now, but she did not have the strength to open the gap further.

“j’ark!” she whispered urgently. He hurried over, taking care to shield his candle. Seeing the gap his eyes widened. With dark shadows around his eyes, it made him look like a surprised badger. Tirielle covered her smile quickly.

“You found it!” he exclaimed, taking her shoulder in a friendly embrace. She wished he would just once forget himself and kiss her, even if it was only on the cheek.

“I can’t open it any wider,” she said, setting aside her daydreams. “I’m not strong enough.”

“Here, let me,” he said, and bunched his shoulders, pushing against the shelf instead of pulling. It slid out easily, and Tirielle could finally see the door behind it.

They looked at each other for a moment.

“Let’s see what’s in there, shall we?” said j’ark with a smile. “After you.”

She blushed at his smile, as she often did. He never noticed. She pulled the crumbling tapestry covering the secret passageway aside, and pushed a creaking, small door set into the wall inward. The darkness inside was pitch. Her candle did little to illuminate it. She stepped carefully inside, and looked around.

Candles, rich in dust and cobwebs, were set into sconces in the wall. She lit each as she passed, and descended worn stone stairs. She wondered how long it had been since anyone had walked these stairs. Surely none of the readers still living. It had been long forgotten, this passageway. She reached the bottom of the stairs, facing another door, and looked back to make sure j’ark had followed her. She could easily make out his reassuring smile now that the stairway was well lit.

She took a deep breath and turned a rusted handle on the door, pushed and stepped inside.

She clapped her hands in unashamed delight.

“We found it!” she capered for a moment, and then coughed when she saw j’ark watching her, a small smile playing on his lips. “Well, I’m happy,” she explained, unnecessarily.

“As am I,” said j’ark, still smiling slightly, and turned to look around the room.

It was a large room, the size of a Lady’s bedchamber, with one chair and one desk set in the centre. A glint of gold told them that the scroll they were looking for was in the room — somewhere. Everything was covered with a thick layer of dust, cobwebs, too, which shimmied in a breeze from an air grate set in one wall. No doubt the grate led outside. It was too small for anyone to crawl through.

It would be so easy to become trapped down here, never found…she panicked for a second, until she remembered that the doors all opened inward. They could not be blocked from outside. Besides, she told herself, Typraille covered the only entrance to the old section, and he would let none pass.

“Light the candles,” she said to j’ark, “and let’s find what we came for.”

Wordlessly, he complied, setting candles aglow from his own light. The room brightened, and she finally understood what the room was for. It was to keep the most important of texts from all the ages from the eyes of the Protectorate. It was a treasure trove of knowledge — she looked at the aged tomes adorning the shelves and felt her heart quicken. Some questors might hunger for gold and jewels, or ancient, strangely alien bones, perhaps armour and weaponry long forgotten by the people of the current age. But this, surely, was worth more than any of those other things. The secrets of an age, she thought, looking at the title of one book bound in some strange leather from no beast she had ever seen. It was a reliquary, but the relics were books.

She pulled books and scrolls from the dusty shelves at random, her pulse throbbing wildly in her neck. Revelations, legends, scriptures, scrolls, tomes…there was so much here! She could spend a lifetime just reading. She could find the history of world before the Protectorate culled it all. Such secrets these books could hold!

Here were banned works, preaching heretical religions of love. The discoveries of the inventors Mor Abalzoth and Sethram Cabe, the philosophies of cadence (hinted at but never fully known), the religious heresies of Trithlasa the Runt…her head sang with the possibility, and she almost found herself in tears to be among such ancient gods — to be among them and to have to leave them behind!

There was papyrus that nearly crumbled to her touch, scrolls written in forgotten languages, parchment, vellum, dark works on human skin, beautifully illustrated. From her own knowledge of books she knew that such works must have taken more than twenty years to complete. Many she flicked through were so huge that they had never been completed. Some were even written in what could only be the languages of beasts, in strange petroglyphs and hieroglyphs that she could not begin to understand, images that shifted under the gaze, trying to escape being read.

But she was looking for one in particular, as j’ark reminded her with a gentle, stilling hand upon her shaking shoulder. She realised she was crying. Her shoulders shook.

“I’m fine,” she told him, putting down a book that was uncomfortably heavy. She sat with a sigh in the chair.

“It seems criminal, to walk away from the revelations of ages past,” he said, echoing her private thoughts.

She was glad she was not forced to explain her tears. He understood much more than she gave him credit for. He was more than a mere warrior. All of the Sard were, more priest than man, more silk than steel.

“There is just so much. How will we find it?”

“It is a scroll, so that narrows our search. It rests inside a golden tube, sealed against the air. It should not be too difficult to find.”

“Then,” she said sadly, knowing that once it was found she was unlikely to return here, and that this knowledge could never be spoken of lest the Protectorate found it and destroyed it, “Let’s get to it. The night is already full, and there are so many books.”

“I know,” said j’ark. “It makes my head swim.”

”But we have little time. Typraille will no doubt be getting bored, too. At least, I hope he has not found himself a fight.”

“No fear of that. He can be as unobtrusive as a mouse if he wishes.”

She nodded, and walked around the room, pulling scrolls from the shelves at random, blowing the dust from their protective covers, or rubbing them with her sleeve. Each she found that was golden, she took to the chair to read.

The night passed far too quickly. Without the motion of the moons to tell time by, it seemed as though she had been reading until sunlight. She sat and rubbed her eyes. She had read until the candle wax blossomed. An hour, at the most.

Tirielle sat back in her chair and stared at the candle burning low, insane dribbles of wax standing in stark disobedience against the regimented backdrop of tidy manuscripts and scrolls neatly packed into alcoves and dark wood shelves. All around her a millennia’s worth of noble thought stood idle, waiting for the writer’s progeny to find the words again. Not one looked happy to be forgotten.

“We’ll never find it, even though we know it’s here.”

“I never thought I’d see you despair,” said j’ark uncertainly. “You seem to find strength where others of us merely fail.”

Tirielle stretched her back and stifled a yawn. “There’s just so much. It could take an accomplished reader years to find it.”

“We’ll find it, don’t worry. Here, this is the last of them.” He placed a gold-covered scroll beside the others on the desk. There was a considerable mound. The ones she had finished with she had returned carefully to their tubes, and placed on the floor beside the desk. Too many in one pile, not enough in the other.