“Fine,” she said. “Where do you put it in the memoir-travelogue-section?”
“I’d organize them geographically,” I said, enjoying the game. I flipped more pages. “Atur, Modeg, and…Vint?” I frowned and looked at the spine of the book. “How old is this? The Aturan Empire absorbed Vint over three hundred years ago.”
“Over four hundred years,” she corrected. “So where do you put a travelogue that refers to a place that doesn’t exist any more?”
“It would be more of a history, really,” I said more slowly.
“What if it isn’t accurate?” Fela pressed. “Based on hearsay rather than personal experience? What if it’s purely fictional? Novel travelogues were quite a fashion in Modeg a couple hundred years ago.”
I closed the book and slowly slid it back onto the shelf. “I’m beginning to see the problem,” I said thoughtfully.
“No, you don’t,” Fela said frankly. “You’re just glimpsing the edges of the problem.” She gestured to the stacks around us. “Let’s say you became Master Archivist tomorrow. How long would it take you to organize all this?”
I looked around at the countless shelves retreating off into the darkness. “It would be a lifetime’s work.”
“Evidence suggests it takes more than just one lifetime,” Fela said dryly. “There are over three quarters of a million volumes here, and that’s not even taking into consideration the clays or scrolls or fragments from Caluptena.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “So you spend years developing the perfect organizational system, which even has a convenient place for your historical-fictional-travelogue-memoir. You and the scrivs spend decades slowly identifying, sorting and reordering tens of thousands of books.” She looked me in the eye. “And then you die. What happens then?”
I began to see where she was going. “Well, in a perfect world, the next Master Archivist would pick up where I left off,” I said.
“Hurrah for the perfect world,” Fela said sarcastically, then turned and began leading me through the shelves again.
“I’m guessing the new Master Archivist usually has his own ideas about how to organize things?”
“Not usually,” Fela admitted. “Sometimes there are a several in a row who work toward the same system. But sooner or later you get someone who’s sure they have a better way of doing things and everything starts from scratch again.”
“How many different systems have there been?” I spotted a faint red light bobbing in the distant shelves and pointed towards it.
Fela changed directions to take us away from the light and whoever was carrying it. “It depends on how you count them,” she said softly. “At least nine in the last three hundred years. The worst was about fifty years ago when there were four new Master Archivists within five years of each other. The result was three different factions among the scrivs, each using a different cataloging system, each firmly believing theirs was the best.”
“Sounds like a civil war,” I said.
“A holy war,” Fela said. “A very quiet, circumspect crusade where each side was sure they were protecting the immortal soul of the Archives. They would steal books that had already been cataloged in each other’s systems. They would hide books from each other, or confuse their order on the shelves.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Almost fifteen years,” Fela said. “It might still be going on today if Master Tolem’s scrivs hadn’t finally managed to steal the Larkin ledger books and burn them. The Larkins couldn’t keep going after that.”
“And the moral of the story is that people get passionate around books?” I teased gently. “Hence the need to spot-check the reading holes?”
Fela stuck out her tongue at me. “The moral of the story is that things are a mess in here. We effectively ‘lost’ almost two hundred thousand books when Tolem burned the Larkin ledgers. They were the only records on where those books were located. Then, five years later, Tolem dies. Guess what happens then?”
“A new Master Archivist looking to start over with a clean slate?”
“It’s like an endless chain of half-built houses,” she said, exasperated. “It’s easy to find books in the old system, so that’s how they build the new system. Whoever’s working on the new house keeps stealing lumber from what’s been built before. The old systems are still there in scattered bits and pieces. We’re still finding pockets of books scrivs hid from each other years ago.”
“I sense this is a sore spot with you,” I said with a smile.
We reached a flight of stairs and Fela turned to look at me. “It’s a sore spot with every scriv who lasts more than two days working in the Archives,” she said. “People down in the Tomes complain when it takes us an hour to bring them what they want. They don’t realize it’s not as easy as going to the ‘Amyr History’ shelf and pulling down a book.”
She turned and began to climb the stairs. I followed her silently, appreciating the new perspective.
CHAPTER NINETY-ONE
Worthy of Pursuit
FALL TERM SETTLED INTO a comfortable pattern after that. Fela slowly introduced me to the inner workings of the Archives and I spent what time I could spare skulking about, trying to dig up answers to my thousand questions.
Elodin did something that could, conceivably, be referred to as teaching, but for the most part he seemed more interested in confusing me than shedding any real light on the subject of naming. My progress was so nonexistent that I wondered at times if there was any progress to be made at all.
What time I didn’t spend studying or in the Archives I spent on the road to Imre, braving the coming winter wind, if not looking for its name. The Eolian was always my best bet for finding Denna, and as the weather worsened I found her there more and more. By the time the first snow fell, I usually managed to catch her one trip of three.
Unfortunately, I rarely managed to have her wholly to myself, as she usually had someone with her. As Deoch had mentioned, she was not the sort who spent a lot of time alone.
Still I kept coming. Why? Because whenever she saw me some light would go on inside her, making her glow for a moment. She would jump to her feet, run to me, and catch hold of my arm. Then, smiling, bring me back to her table and introduce me to her newest man.
I came to know most of them. None were good enough for her, so I held them in contempt and hated them. They in turn hated and feared me.
But we were pleasant to each other. Always pleasant. It was a game of sorts. He would invite me to sit, and I would buy him a drink. The three of us would talk, and his eyes would slowly grow dark as he watched her smile toward me. His mouth would narrow as he listened to the laughter that leapt from her as I joked, spun stories, sang….