At the very front of the room was a Doll: faceless, as usual, but with much more of a suggestion of features sculpted into the front of its head than the rest of them had. It sat at a desk facing the Gate; there were some stacked papers to one side of the desk, and what looked like a series of seals lined up neatly, fitted into a wooden holder, at the front of the desk. Yarn, dyed long ago and now a faded gray, had been fastened to its head in place of hair or a wig, and tied back into a tail at the back of its head. It was fully clothed, as far as Kordas could tell, in a shirt, breeches, and shoes, with the Imperial tabard over all.

Behind the Doll and the desk were rows of shelves, stretching far into the dim reaches of the room, which was the biggest single enclosed space he had ever seen in his life. Bigger than the Imperial stables. Bigger than the Audience Chamber or the Great Hall. Big enough to have contained all of those spaces, and still have room left over. Between the shelves were pillars and buttresses, linked by walkways and ladders. Atop the shelves were scaffolds bearing oddly proportioned items, crates or warped pieces of unknown import. And on those shelves, which were two stories tall, were boxes of the sort he kept papers stored in, back in his office in the manor, except it was not inconceivable that there were tens of thousands of them. His head swam to think just how much written material must be here.

This surely must be, literally, all the Imperial records stretching back to when the Emperor was just one King among many, and before.

Dolls moved among the shelves, removing boxes, adding papers, putting boxes back. As one, they all paused in the same instant, looked at the trio for a moment, nodded their heads, and returned to their work.

“Whoa,” Beltran said.

“This one is the Record Keeper, Duke Kordas, and you may always speak freely here,” it said, in a stronger voice than a whisper. It gestured up; Kordas looked at the ceiling and saw that the sigil that permanently prevented scrying had been carved into the wood up there. “This room cannot be scryed, because all the secrets of the Empire are here.”

It took him a moment to comprehend that. “All of them?” he managed to ask, when the reality of the situation hit him.

The Record Keeper nodded. “All of them,” it repeated. “And you can well imagine how much people would pay to be able to scry them. This one is the oldest Doll in the Palace. This one is the first Doll made. What every Doll ever made knew, this one knows.”