The Great Tithe Barn of High Karst was a huge timber structure built two hundred years ago to store the canton’s grain harvest during the feudal wars. Supported by towering cruck-frames of seasoned oak twelve inches square, its central nave was seventy paces long and thirty wide. He smelled of sweet dry hay, pine resin, and the powdery chalk used to absorb moisture.
Today, the floor of the barn had been transformed into the largest conservation workshop in the history of the realm. Down the entire length of the central aisle, thirty long frame stand tables had been set up, covered in two inches of clean, dry rye straw. Upon this bed of straw lay hundreds of damp, soot-stained, and waterlogged sheepskin folios that had been dragged from the smoldering vaults of the Citadel.
Apprentice Olla and Scribe Linnea moved down the line like senior physicians in an emergency field hospital. Each woman carried an ivory bone-folder, a pair of wooden tongs. A box of dry powdered calcium chalk. Behind them walked fifty volunteer weavers and seamstresses from the town, their woolen sleeves pinned up to their shoulders, their hands moving with the delicate, practiced care of lace-makers.
“Don’t use heat!” Linnea instructed two young girls who were carrying an iron fire bowl of hot coals down the aisle. “If you apply direct heat to wet parchment, the animal connective tissue contracts, the skin buckles into horn. The ink flakes off in powder. We use cold chalk and gentle air…
