The Gallery of Preserved Decrees was not a library. It was an ossuary of words.
The hall stretched two hundred paces into the underground dark beneath the Grand Synod, twelve feet wide and vaulted with ribbed arches of grey fiery tufa. There were no bookshelves, no glass vitrines, and no wooden reading desks. Instead, the walls themselves were lined with hundreds of years of royal legal conquest.
Thousands of parchment scrolls, treaties, surrender covenants, and deeds of annexation had been glued directly to the stone surfaces with boiled hide-glue, overlapping one another like the scales of a huge, dead reptile. Some were small, yellowed rectangles of coarse sheepskin dating back to the First Siege of Khorat. Others were vast, six-foot sheets of bleached thick parchment, stiff with golden light and the dried blood-seals of exterminated baronies.
There was the Treaty of the Red Salt Flats, wherein three hundred thousand pastoral nomads had legally surrendered their wells in exchange for unhusked barley. There was the Annexation of the Iron Guilds, its margins stained with the greasy fingerprints of hanged blacksmiths. And higher up, near the curve of the ceiling, hung the Sequestration of the River Thanes. It was sealed with seventy-four black ribbons.
