Neema Kraa, Junior Archivist (Third Class) sat at her desk, proofreading her latest monograph.⁴ A smell of rotting food wafted gently up from the bins and through the balcony doors. When she was first allocated this room, Neema would try to cover the smell with incense and fresh flowers. These days, she barely noticed it.

There was a tap at the door. Neema looked up in surprise. No one ever visited her here except Cain, and it couldn’t be him, for obvious reasons.

“Who is it? ” she called, enjoying the novelty of asking.

The door opened to reveal High Commander Hol Vabras. The second most powerful man in Orrun.

“Neema Kraa. ”

“Yes. ”

“I’m told you have the best hand on the island. ”

Neema lay an arm along the back of her chair. “That’s right. ”

Vabras stepped back outside, giving the two guards he’d brought with him the space to squeeze through. They set to work, clearing Neema’s desk before laying out fresh paper and brushes, an inkstone, a scroll sealed with gold wax, and a copy of The Laws of Orrun Volume XII, marked with a blue ribbon. In ten seconds they were done, and Vabras was back.

Neema stared at the drab, grey-green inkstone. “Is that—”

“The Stone of Peace, ” Vabras confirmed.

The inkstone Empress Yasthala had used to write the Five Rules, carved by her own hand from a rare piece of Dolrun Riverstone. Neema ransacked her brain, trying to think of a more priceless artefact, and came up blank.

Vabras indicated the scroll. “Two copies, by sundown. ”

Neema brushed her fingers over the gold wax, marked with five slashes. The emperor’s seal, pressed into the wax by his own hand. Imagine that. “I’d rather use my own brushes. New ones take a while to—”

“Fine. ” Vabras handed her a thumb-sized stick of ink, embossed with a feather design.

She turned the stick in her fingers, admiring its exceptional quality and depth of colour, the intense black base softened with hints of indigo. Raven’s Wing ink. Produced on the Dragon island of Helia and reserved for the highest imperial proclamations. Coronations, abdications. Executions.

Vabras had picked up the first page of Neema’s proofs. He read a few lines. “Ketuan folk tales. ”

Neema waited for the usual comments. You’re a historian, how is this history? They're just stories for children. Ephemera. What are you doing, wasting your time on such worthless crap? (That final comment scrawled across the proofs themselves, by Neema’s head of department. A dispiriting moment.)

“This is thorough, ” Vabras said.

Neema, who had not met the High Commander before, assumed he was being catty. It was either that, or he was genuinely interested in her work. Which would be a first, to put it mildly. No one cared about Neema’s studies except Neema.

She had arrived at court straight from the Raven monastery, with perfect grades and no friends. Without connections, she'd struggled to secure a decent position. And everyone knew the longer you remained in the same junior role, the harder it became to escape it. “Here in two years, here in ten, ” was the rule at the Raven palace. Neema had been in her post for three. “I’m stuck on the first rung of the ladder, ” she'd complained recently, to her head of department. He'd responded with a startled smile. “You think you're on the ladder? ”

Footnotes

4. Kraa, Neema, An Annotated Bibliography of Twelve Ancient Ketuan Folk Tales (1531, Imperial Palace Archives).