How are they arranged?

On their backs? Or stood up in stacks?

As though she has willed it into existence, a tendril of fog comes trickling over the roofline.

Again she slips past the watchman and descends the twisting lanes to the harbor. She finds Himerius asleep beside his skiff and when she wakes him he frowns as if trying to resolve multiple girls into one. Finally he wipes a hand across his face and nods and urinates a long time onto the rocks before dragging the boat into the water.

She stows the sack and rope in the bow. Four gulls pass overhead, crying softly, and Himerius peers up at them, then rows to the priory on the rock. This time she is more determined. With each movement up the wall, her fear thins, and soon there is only the movement of her body and her memory of the holds, her fingers keeping her against the cold brick, her legs sending her up. She reaches the scupper, crawls through the mouth of the lion, and drops into the big refectory. Spirits, let me pass.

A three-quarter moon sends more light filtering through the fog. She finds the stairs, ascends, travels the long corridor, and steps through the door into the circular room.

It’s a ghostland, brimming with dust, little ferns growing here and there from clumps of damp paper, everything moldering to pieces. Inside some of the cupboards are vast monastic records so big she can hardly lift them; in others she finds tomes whose pages have been conglutinated by moisture and mildew into a solid mass. She fills the sack as full as she can and drags it down the steps and lowers it to the skiff and walks one pace behind Himerius as he carries it through the misty lanes to the house of the Italians.

The clubfooted servant gives a jaw-cracking yawn as he waves them into the courtyard. Inside the workshop, the two smaller scribes are collapsed on chairs in the corner, sound asleep, but the tall one rubs his hands as though he has waited for them all night. “Come, come, let’s see what the mudlarks have brought.” He upends the sack onto the table between an array of lit tapers.

Himerius stands with his hands to the fire while Anna watches the foreigner go through the manuscripts. Charters, wills, transcriptions of orations; requests for requisitions; what appears to be a list of personages who attended some long-ago monastic gathering: the Grand Domestic; His Excellency the Vice-Treasurer; the Visiting Scholar from Thessalonica; the Grand Chancellor of the Imperial Wardrobe.