Inside the main hall under the black-tiled roof, the air smelled of dry alder smoke, boiled turnip greens, and old linseed oil rubbed into oak floorboards. There were no silk hangings or gilt calligraphy scrolls on the walls. Only four wooden pegs holding spare hemp practice jackets, a chalkboard slate mounted beside the door for diagramming footwork angles. A long pine frame stand table scrubbed so many times with river sand that the softer grain stood in pale ridges between the knots.
At the warm end of the table closest to the brick hearth, Archivist Vel sat hunched over a clean quire of heavy linen account-paper that Daro had brought out from his desk drawer. With a saucer of lampblack ink and a trimmed goose quill held exactly between his crooked, stiffened fingers, the sixty-year-old clerk was already midway through transcribing the first complete backup copy of the six mulberry-tissue leaves from the Archive of Quiet Names. Released from the terror of the cliff face, Vel worked with calm, absorbed power—reproducing both the original equipment-count cipher and the plain-text translation of Aven’s death entry, Master Uren’s three marks, Nara Soth’s Hollow Summit transfer, and Vaska Ren’s needle supply order side by side on the page.
