Archivist Vel unfastened the rusted iron clasp of the third folio with both of his crooked hands and laid the heavy pages open across the center of the reading frame stand. The title brushed across the flyleaf read: SALVAGE & DEMOLITION TALLY: NORTH-ROAD QUARRY & Abbey PRECINCTS (WINTER OF THE SEVENTH CHARTER, WITH LATER ROAD APPENDICES).
Before turning to the inner sanctum cells from two hundred years ago, Seyun’s eyes caught a section of much newer brown ink sewn into the back of the front flyleaf. A three-page appendix titled Way-Shrine Road Clearance & Unclaimed Salvage (Last Twenty Winters), written in the cramped, slanted hand of Archivist Vel himself and his immediate predecessor.
“Master Vel,” Seyun said, pausing with his brush-holder over the fourth line of the appendix, dated eleven winters ago in the autumn month. “What are these later entries attached to the front of the siege roll?”
Vel leaned closer to the lamp, squinting through the yellow light at the cramped writing. “Even after the Monastery of the Last Question was pulled down two hundred years ago, the deep air-flow shafts beneath the upper sanctum remained buried under the rubble on the burial road. Every few winters, when a heavy autumn rain washed out the shale above the Third Way-Shrine, a village herb-gatherer or a young outer-court scout from the valley sects would wander off the road, stumble across a warm air-vent where the Court’s seal-wardens were taking measurements, and disappear. Whenever a White Heron patrol found an…
