There had always been talk that House Vecum’s private library contained some items of unusually esoteric merit and, as is often the case with old collections long held in private hands, the Inquisition had appointed an emissary to oversee the disbursement of its contents. One can never be too careful. Even without any malicious intent on the part of its owners, a thousand-year-old collection might have something pernicious festering at the back of a shelf. I have personally seen great tragedies unfold because of the unwitting ownership of the blasphemous.

I have seen a page of faded manuscript kill a world.

We gathered in the empty house, high on the steepest scarps of the island’s peaks. It was the end of autumn, and the first ice was glinting in the harbour, the first dark, deep-ocean gales were building out in the west. Migratory birds mobbed the skies outside the high windows, preparing for departure. Servants hurried from draughty room to draughty room, nursing warmth out of the corroding heating systems that Bader Vecum had allowed to ail alongside his health.

Inquisitor Cyriaque led the symposium. With his interrogator, Voriet, and three savants, he had spent two months sifting the collection. He was now presenting his conclusions to a body of his peers from the ordos, along with an invited audience of academics, for deliberation. Eighteen volumes had already been sequestered without consultation. The Inquisition does not invite opinion on some matters. But there remained one hundred and fifty-one items where a strong argument could be made for careful academic study rather than strict prohibition. Chancellor Manivar of Shurfath was particularly insistent on this possibility.

‘Shurfath’s reputation,’ he said, rising to his feet at the start of the symposium, ‘which I may be so bold as to suggest extends beyond Gudrun and the subsector to the local Imperium Sector range, depends so much upon the quality of our collection. And that collection, at its core, has been the great work of House Vecum, whose broad and admirable curiosity has allowed them to accumulate a vast and irreplaceable archive of books down the ages. While we understand the necessity of restricting some volumes, from time to time, for the social good, we urge the worthy ordos not to sequester the entire catalogue. It is not all contaminated because of one or two unwise inclusions. Please allow as much of the whole as possible to be transferred to the academic files of Shurfath and its fellow institutions at home and abroad.’

I was broadly in agreement with the chancellor’s wishes. I had reviewed the questionable pieces, and there was nothing in them that warranted censorship. Depriving scholars of access to such material blunts our collective knowledge.

But, you may remark, I would say that, wouldn’t I?