One by one he leafs through the mildewed codices, tipping his candelabra this way and that, and Anna notices things that she missed the first time: his hose are torn on one knee, and his coat is tarnished at the elbows, and ink is spattered up both of his sleeves. “Not this,” he says, “not this,” then murmurs in his own language. The room smells of oak gall ink and parchment and woodsmoke and red wine. A looking glass in the corner reflects the candle flames; someone has pinned a series of small butterflies to a linen board; someone else is copying what looks like a navigational chart on the corner table—the room overflows with curiosity and ardor.

“All useless,” the Italian concludes, rather cheerfully, and stacks four silver coins on the table. He looks at her. “Do you know the story of Noah and his sons, child? How they filled their ship with everything to start the world anew? For a thousand years your city, this crumbling capital”—he waves a hand toward a window—“was like that ark. Only instead of two of every living creature, do you know what the good Lord stacked inside this ship?”

Beyond the shuttered window the first cocks crow. She can feel Himerius twitching beside the fire, all his attention on the silver.

“Books.” The scribe smiles. “And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?”

She shakes her head.

“Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second scribe, decades later, had to recopy that copy, transform it from a scroll to a codex, and long after the second scribe’s bones were in the earth, a third came along and recopied it again, and all this time the book was being hunted. One bad-tempered abbot, one clumsy friar, one invading barbarian, an overturned candle, a hungry worm—and all those centuries are undone.”

The flames of the tapers flicker; his eyes seem to gather all the light in the room.

“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives. From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills. The young sultan is assembling an army, and he has new war engines that can bring down walls as though they were air.”

Her gut lurches. Himerius inches toward the coins on the table.

“The ark has hit the rocks, child. And the tide is washing in.”