What ceiling remains is blank, smooth, and unadorned, as though she has climbed inside the braincase of a big, punctured skull, and on the walls of this little chamber, scarcely visible in the moonlit fog, doorless cupboards run from floor to ceiling. Some are filled with debris and moss. But others are full of books.

Her breath stops. Here a heap of rotting paper, here a crumbling scroll, here a stack of bound codices wet with rain. From her memory comes the voice of Licinius: But books, like people, die too.

She fills the sack with a dozen manuscripts, as many as it will hold, and drags it back down the staircase, down the corridor, guessing at various turns. When she finds the great room with the tapestry, she ties the throat of the sack to one end of the rope and scrambles up a pile of rubble and crawls through the scupper, pushing the sack before her.

The taut rope makes a high, ratcheting whine as she lowers it down the wall. Just as she decides that he is gone, that he has left her here to die—Himerius and his skiff emerge next to the wall, wrapped in fog and much smaller than she expected them to look. The rope goes slack, the weight comes off, and she drops the end.

Now to climb down. To glance below her feet starts a feeling in her abdomen like she will be sick, so she looks only at her hands, then her toes, easing her way down through the ivy and capers and clumps of wild thyme, and in another minute her left foot touches the thwart, then her right, and she is in the boat.

Her fingertips are raw, her dress grimed, her nerves frayed. “You were gone too long,” hisses Himerius. “Was there gold? What did you find?”

The hem of night is already pulling away as they come round the edge of the breakwater into the harbor. Himerius pulls so hard on the oars she worries the shafts will snap, and she removes a first manuscript from the sack. It is large and bloated and she tears the first leaf trying to turn it. The page appears to be full of little vertical scratches. The next is the same, column after column of tally marks. The whole book seems to be like this. Receipts? A register of something? She withdraws a second book, a smaller one, but this too appears to be full of columns with unvarying marks in them, though this one is water-stained and possibly charred as well.

Her heart drops.

The fog suffuses with a pale lavender light, and Himerius ships the oars a moment and takes the second codex from her and smells it and stares at her with his brows bunched.

“What is this?”