Empire of Exiles

Book 1: Books of the Usurper

by Erin M. Evans

Genres: Fantasy action & adventure; Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

Magic, mystery, and revolution collide in this fantasy epic where an unlikely team of mages, scribes, and archivists must band together to unearth a conspiracy that might topple their empire.

“The beginning of a truly epic tale. Deft worldbuilding and wonderful verbal fencing that is a delight to read. In these pages, you are in the hands of a master.” - Ed Greenwood, creator of the Forgotten Realms and internationally bestselling author

Twenty-seven years ago, a Duke with a grudge led a ruthless coup against the empire of Semilla, killing thousands. He failed. The Duke was executed, a terrifyingly powerful sorcerer was imprisoned, and an unwilling princess disappeared. 

The empire moved on. 

Now, when Quill, an apprentice scribe, arrives in the capital city, he believes he's on a simple errand for another pompous noble: fetch ancient artifacts from the magical Imperial Archives. He's always found his apprenticeship to a lawman to be dull work. But these aren't just any artifacts — these are the instruments of revolution, the banners under which the Duke lead his coup. 

Just as the artifacts are unearthed, the city is shaken by a brutal murder that seems to have been caused by a weapon not seen since the days of rebellion. With Quill being the main witness to the murder, and no one in power believing his story, he must join the Archivists — a young mage, a seasoned archivist, and a disillusioned detective — to solve the truth of the attack. And what they uncover will be the key to saving the empire – or destroying it again.

Release date: November 8, 2022

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 448

Sample

Year Eight of the Reign of Empress Beneditta

The Imperial Archives

Arlabecca, the capital of the Imperial Federation of Semillan Protectorates

(Twenty-three years later)

Quill had been hoping, before he came to the Imperial Archives, when all this was just forms and plans and schedules, that Brother Karimo had been exaggerating. But here in the entry hall with the shouts of Primate Lamberto echoing over them, he had to agree: dealing with the Kirazzis made people uncommonly irrational.

Primate Lamberto’s voice carried much farther than the head archivist’s, but Quill could tell by the way his bellows kept cutting off abruptly that up in her office, the head archivist was giving as good as she got from the formidable primate. Brother Karimo kept looking anxiously up the stairs that led out of the enormous hall.

“I don’t think she’s going to throw us out,” Quill said.

Karimo turned back to him and smiled. “You haven’t met the head archivist before. It’s still a possibility.” He glanced once more at the stairs. “Better than when the Dowager Duchess Kirazzi died, though. No one’s thrown a punch and I don’t think anyone’s set a fire.”

“Saints and devils,” Quill said, but Karimo turned back to the stairs.

Quill glanced over at the woman behind the reception desk, a pale, pretty archivist in robes of dark blue with a silver chain running from shoulder to shoulder. Her melting brown eyes fixed on the two scriveners of Parem waiting for their superior in a way that seemed somehow speculative and predatory. Quill gave her a little wave and she frowned.

“Are either of you facilitating those requests?” she demanded. “The Kirazzi ones?”

“Karimo is,” Quill said, elbowing the other young man. Karimo jumped and Quill nodded toward the archivist with an expression full of meaning. Karimo often got the attentions of admirers—he was good-looking in a way that a half dozen protectorates would have claimed. Dark curls, golden skin, light, tapered eyes. Unfortunately for those admirers, Quill was usually the one who had to point his dearest friend toward them because he was never paying the least bit of attention.

Karimo followed Quill’s gaze and shook his head with a faint smile. “Don’t fraternize with clients.”

“She’s not a client,” Quill pointed out.

“She’s an archivist,” Karimo said. Quill gave the young woman an apologetic sort of shrug, but she only continued her speculative study of Karimo.

“Anyway,” Karimo went on, “you’re the one interested in this place—you should stay.”

“If it were up to me, in a heartbeat.” The enormous doors to the Imperial Archives dominated the opposite wall, gleaming with their legendary opal mosaics. Symbols and representatives of every protectorate—every culture that shaped the Imperial Federation, every people whose wisdom and treasures had been safely gathered behind those doors—gleamed in a rainbow of shades.

Quill let his gaze drift between them: The elongated Alojan holding a bone flute. The Khirazji woman, adze and compass in hand, her braids picked out by iron banding. The Borsyan man, the curls of his pale, thick beard suggested by the undulating edge of the opals. The Orozhandi holding the horned skull of some ancestor, her own horned head tilted down as if in conversation. The Kuali with her shepherd’s crook, the Beminat with a jaguar mask and axe, the Datongu with his ornate basket, the Ashtabari with tentacles clutching a variety of religious icons Quill didn’t remember the meanings of. The Minseon man with a drawn bow, his hair sleek and eyes keen, who truly managed to look like Quill’s next-eldest brother despite being made of rainbow stones.

A ring of palest white embraced the ten figures: the Salt Wall that surrounded Semilla. Beyond, the jagged edges of a changeling army bristled in more opals of red and green and brown, the force that had appeared as if from nowhere and destroyed all those nations from within, forcing them to flee to Semilla. Eyes and arms and teeth splayed from those strange figures—as if the fearsome shape-shifters were mid-transformation. Or maybe that was what they looked like when they weren’t wearing someone else’s face—Quill certainly had never seen such a creature, locked away as they were beyond the Salt Wall.

At the center, divided by the doors’ split, stood the tenth figure: the Semillan emperor who had reigned during the Salt Wall’s sealing, Eschellado, his face the imperial mask of gold instead of more opals.

All the imperial masks were beyond the doors. The archives held the treasures of ancient Semilla and all her protectorates, all those things carried away from the end of the old world that must be kept safe and sure. There was no end to the stories: Whole libraries rescued from kingdoms burning before the changeling army. Intact temples to dead gods. The proclamations of every emperor. The skin of a changeling queen. Diamonds as big as your head. Once, he had heard, a live mammoth, but that was madness—

“You’re thinking about all the junk in there right now, aren’t you?” Karimo teased.

“You’re not even a little curious? I mean, the Kirazzi items aren’t that interesting, but they can’t stop you looking around while you’re standing there. There’s certainly a collection of Emperor Eschellado’s notes about the formation of the protectorate government—if you try to convince me you don’t want to see that, I’ll call you out as a changeling.”

Karimo shook his dark-curled head. “Eyes on the task, brother.”

“I’ve got two eyes,” Quill said. “I can do both. Just like you can make sure they find the Kirazzis’ things, nice and tidy, and ask this girl out for a coffee.”

“‘Do not be slack in your own business but busy in others’.’”

“I cannot wait until you’re through The Precepts of Bekesa and on to some other way of lecturing me about how you can’t have fun.”

Karimo chuckled. But his gaze went up the stairs again.

It would be Karimo who stayed. Brother Karimo had been assisting Primate Lamberto for several years now and had the older man’s trust. The primate was highly positioned within the Order of the Scriveners of Parem, the juridical order that managed most of Semilla’s legal needs. The primate and his assistants traveled Semilla, spreading the strength and order of the imperial laws and assisting powerful and interesting clients. Assisting the primate was, in all, an excellent position, one Quill’s parents found ideal for his station. Even if it didn’t suit Quill very well.

Karimo, on the other hand, had his eyes always on the task: the client, the request, the complexities of the law, and the words that made those complexities solid and complete. He prized the duty of the Paremi in a way Quill had always found unsettling in others but somehow right and understandable from Karimo: The law is what makes us more than beasts, more than the changelings, more than even just ourselves. The law keeps us safe.

And if Karimo had given Quill a greater appreciation for their duties and their oath, Quill liked to think he’d managed to remind Karimo he could be dedicated and still live a life, deal with “clients” like people sometimes, and look up from his work.

Mostly. Karimo was still watching the staircase.

“Look, she keeps eyeing you,” Quill started to say.

But then the door to the office above banged open, and the primate and the head archivist reappeared. Quill and Karimo shot to their feet. The archivist behind the desk only folded her arms over her chest.

The primate came to a stop before them. He was a big man, pale and paunchy, with a fluff of coiled gray hair looped up beneath his miter and half-hooded eyes. Unlike Quill and Karimo, he wore his robes of office instead of traveling robes, and decked in scarlet and gold finery, Primate Lamberto looked very imposing.

And very annoyed.

“The head archivist,” he said, “has kindly acceded to our legal and approved requests. Finally.”

The head archivist snorted from the foot of the stairs. Mireia del Atsina was an older woman, with a bridge of silver braids framing a narrow, tanned face that suggested at least a little Ronqu blood, and steady gray eyes that declared a Borsyan progenitor or two. She wore the same dark, crisp dress as the girl behind the desk, but hers was accented by a silver chain of office, weighted by the sigil of the imperial crown, a lacquered red cross in the middle of a stylized nest of live branches.

“Next time,” she said, “get them approved properly and we don’t have to do this.”

Quill glanced at Karimo, who didn’t meet his eye. The whole trip to Arlabecca, Primate Lamberto had been very clear that whatever Quill was used to, this request had its own set of expectations. This was a highly discreet undertaking, for a very important client, and so there would be irregularities that must be set aside because of expediency and discretion.

Such as the permissions, signed off not by the empress’s secretary but by the Alojan noble consul, Lord Obigen.

“You don’t need to bring it up,” Primate Lamberto had assured Quill and Karimo. “In fact, until you are within the archives, you don’t need to say a solitary word. Your help will please some very powerful people.” He hadn’t, Quill suspected, thought the issue with the permissions would come up as quickly as the entrance hall, necessitating the long, contentious conference with the head archivist.

“Who gets the bronzes?” the woman behind the desk called out.

Mireia shut her eyes. “Sit down, Zoifia.”

“It’s just a question—”

“Sit down!”

Primate Lamberto grimaced. “I see the Imperial Archives are as… loose with regard to decorum as ever.”

The head archivist regarded him blandly. “Were you introduced to Archivist Kestustis, Most Reverend? She is one of the foremost experts on pre-Sealing cast-bronze works in the entire empire and the possessor of a very strong bronze affinity. When her services are available again, she will find your bronzes and identify them down to the mines their component metals were pulled from. She is twenty-two. The trade is, on occasion, she might offend someone’s sense of decorum.” Zoifia began to retort but Mireia raised a hand, silencing her. “I assume you’re not loitering around yourself this time. Which of them are you leaving to spy?”

Lamberto drew back with a grimace. “Brother Karimo is very experienced, and I will thank you not to besmirch—”

“Most Reverend?” Karimo interrupted. Both Lamberto and Quill looked over at him, startled. Karimo did not interrupt the primate.

“If you please,” Karimo went on, “I think you should leave Brother Sesquillio behind. He is very interested in the work of the archives—he’s been saying so since we left the tower, you know—and beyond that…” Karimo faltered. “Beyond that, you have clients today and tomorrow which I know are difficult matters and which I would feel more comfortable being the one to help you prepare for.”

“Or you could leave no one,” the head archivist suggested, “and let us get on with our jobs.” The primate did not so much as look at her, narrowed eyes on Karimo as if he were trying to find some sleight of hand in the words. Karimo only stared back.

Quill straightened, stinging a bit at the implication that he wasn’t capable of scribing for one of Lamberto’s clients alone. Besides, while the requests involved the archives, they came from the Kirazzi family, and if there were a more complicated client out there, Quill doubted Lamberto would take them on, wealthy or not.

But at the same time, oh how he wanted to lose this argument.

“With all due respect, brother,” Quill began.

“Please.” Karimo shot a look at Quill, bright with desperation. “Anyway, I think you’ll enjoy this assignment. Is it all right, Most Reverend?”

Primate Lamberto studied his two assistants, puzzled, and Quill was certain Karimo’s surprising suggestion would be cast aside like a mis-scribed contract.

“It will do,” the primate said slowly. “Brother Sesquillio, you… you can accompany the head archivist back to her office. She will apprise you of the limitations the archives insist upon.”

“Yes, Most Reverend,” Quill said, scooping up his scribe kit and his ledger.

I’ll explain later, Karimo mouthed as he passed.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Quill said, uncertain of what he’d just skimmed the edge of. The archives. The Kirazzis. Or just some tension between the primate and Karimo, some private battle. He glanced back down the stairs as he climbed them, but the other Paremi were already gone.

Whatever it was, Quill reminded himself, Karimo could solve his own problems.

And Quill would get to see the Imperial Archives.

Mireia led him to a room dominated by an enormous wooden desk, dark with age and heavily carved. The light slicing through three windows narrow enough to be arrow loops was somehow sufficient to fill the room and illuminate a wall covered with dark blue satin ropes hanging down from the ceiling, each labeled with a name in delicate script on a cream-colored tag.

“Sit,” she said, gesturing at a pair of chairs. Quill did, as she came to stand behind the massive desk. “I assume Lamberto told you not to breathe a word with regard to what this is all about.”

Quill made himself smile. “The Kirazzis merely wish to borrow some of their belongings back from the archives.”

“Let’s skip the things already written on the forms,” Mireia said, “and go on to the truth. Which of the Kirazzis hired you?”

Had Primate Lamberto not said even that much? “I… I don’t think they want their business aired.”

“Let me make this simple: Is your client Ibramo Kirazzi?”

Quill frowned. The empress’s consort, the son of Redolfo Kirazzi—but nobody, so far as Quill knew, who was associated with anything approaching mischief. In fact, he’d had the distinct impression that Ibramo Kirazzi held himself apart from anything his family did these days.

“No, no.” Quill pulled out his notebook, flipped to the page where he’d written up what he needed to know, copied from the primate’s notebook on the road. This had not been a client he or Karimo was allowed to sit down with, and Karimo had been the one to draw up the requests—but Quill had gotten the information down eventually.

“It’s… the Duchess Kirazzi,” he said. “The new one. I think that’s his cousin?”

“And the newly crowned duchess wants the Flail of Khirazj? She thinks that’s a good idea?”

It was a terrible idea, Quill was in full agreement on that much. When Redolfo Kirazzi had ridden against the previous emperor in his attempt to take the throne for the emperor’s lost niece, the Grave-Spurned Princess—but really, as everyone knew, for himself—he had always carried the Flail of Khirazj, a symbol of the ancient god-kings the Kirazzi family descended from. A reminder he was greater than what he seemed, a challenge that he was greater than Semilla.

“I cannot say what the duchess thinks is a good idea, esinora,” Quill said politely. But then he added, “I hear it’s for a Salt-Sealing event. Something in the temple at Palace Sestina.”

“And with it she requires…” Mireia lifted the requests and read from each page in turn. “One illuminated book, titled The Maxims of Ab-Kharu, bound forty years ago with Kirazzi crest on endpapers. One prosthetic arm”—she leveled a sharp gaze at Quill over the papers—“bone and hide, belonging to the late Djacopo Kirazzi. And two bronze statues of Khirazji queens, Bikoro dynasty: one with a headdress of three feathers, one with a scorpion crown. What sort of event is this?”

Quill frowned. His notes only had three items in dispute. Gods and devils, how had he missed one? Had Karimo folded in some other request by mistake? “Statues? Are you sure about those?”

“Am I sure?”

Quill shut the book, pushing down the edge of panic with the gesture. Of course Karimo hadn’t made an error. Quill had been sloppy and missed an item. Eyes on the task, he thought. He could do this. Handling clients was what he was best at.

“It seems my notes are in error. I guess Brother Karimo was correct about my scribing.” He smiled winningly at the head archivist. “But to be honest, being graced with a ducal title doesn’t necessarily shower good sense on a person. We try not to pry into private matters,” he added.

“Even with the Kirazzis?”

Quill took a deep breath and repeated Karimo’s words. “The Kirazzi family have paid their debts to society. They make no more mischief than you or I. And legally, while the majority of the items seized in the forfeiture of Redolfo Kirazzi’s effects are the possessions of the empire, the Flail of Khirazj remains joint property with the royal bloodline of that preexisting kingdom.”

“I understand how the laws work,” Mireia said wearily. “But you know as well as I do that the flail is a different beast.”

Quill folded his hands. “The requests were approved.”

“By Lord Obigen, who will sign any damned request given to him, if he thinks it takes him somewhere politically,” Mireia said. “He wants his second wall. Probably wants Duchess Kirazzi to gift him the land around Sestina.”

She sighed, then went to the long blue cords, taking three of them in her hands and considering. “While the primate is keen to pretend this is nothing at all, I’m sure the Paremi and the Kirazzi family understand that what you’re asking for is akin to kicking a hornet’s nest, midwinter,” she said. “Maybe nothing, or maybe you’re waking something that’s going to hurt a lot of people.”

“That isn’t our intent,” Quill said.

But he knew. Everyone knew, including the Kirazzis. No one talked about Redolfo Kirazzi with anything approaching practicality for fear they’d find themselves endorsing treason or worse. And there was no pretending these requests weren’t peculiar—the flail, an old hand, and Lord Obigen—but would they be so peculiar from anyone else? A duty was a duty, and ultimately it wasn’t Quill’s place to say.

“I shall be out from underfoot as soon as possible, esinora.”

She snorted. “You assume that because we are the Imperial Archives this is merely a matter of shuffling down a row of boxes and fetching what you want, don’t you?”

Quill hesitated. “I don’t dare imagine what the archives contain, esinora.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Sounds like you’ve heard stories. The mammoth?”

Quill hesitated. “That’s not true, is it?”

“If it ever was, it’s starved by now, but—this is the issue—I cannot say anything for sure. There are centuries of artifacts and writings and more in the archives, the treasures of no less than every Imperial Majesty, every king and queen and duke and warlord and reza and chief, every people that escaped the changelings. Not every Imperial Majesty allowed access. Not every Imperial Majesty had archivists. We are in the middle of a race which we were only allowed to begin halfway, and someone kept flinging pomegranates into our path. You want something from twenty-three years ago. Some of my archivists are still cataloguing things from the Salt-Sealing of the Wall.”

Quill could not have hidden his shock, he felt sure. Almost a hundred years had passed since the Salt Wall had been completed. He wondered how much the Kirazzis were paying per day. “When… when do you expect to be caught up enough to find Redolfo Kirazzi’s effects?”

“Oh, slam the shitting gates,” Mireia said. “I’m not going to make you wait. They can stop and look—they do it all the time. I mean to say that you all are a nuisance, and you in particular are likely to be underfoot for an uncomfortably long time, but your primate wants his fingers in every pie and he has the right.” She looked up, at last, from the three cords. “You never saw Ibramo Kirazzi? Swear it?”

Quill sat a little straighter. “No. Why? Why would it matter?”

Mireia nodded once and gave the center rope three sharp yanks. “I suppose it doesn’t,” she murmured, “since it’s nothing to do with him.”

It settled atop the uneasy feeling the strange request had already churned up in his stomach. Quill folded his hands on his knees and focused instead on how soon he would be within the fabled Imperial Archives.

The official title given to Amadea Gintanas was “Archivist Superior of the Imperial Collections (South Wing),” which she felt was a great many words to say “a solver of problems.”

Managing the archivists and collections housed in the southern portion of the Imperial Archives asked for many skills in service to many problems. Amadea spoke four languages, had a passing familiarity with six more, including several ancient ones from beyond the Wall, and was, specifically, the one you called when you needed Early Dynastic Khirazji translated. She knew how to preserve many treasures against time and the elements. She knew how to date clayware and basket weaves and stone carvings. She knew the faces of the Orozhandi skeleton saints and the names of the thirteen sage-riders of Min-Se and the forms of their dresses. She could level a worktable, repair a torn binding, and fix a Borsyan cold-magic panel without taking her fingertips off.

Amadea knew how to track the affinity patterns of her specialists, how to talk them down when their magic aligned and overtook them. She knew how to make a perfect cup of coffee, how to soothe a heartbreak or the crash that came when an alignment ended, a burst of anxiety or grief or shame that needed a kind word and a firm reminder that everything was all right.

Amadea Gintanas did not know what to do about the rabbit skull sitting on her desk.

“This is the eighth time this week he’s pulled something like this.” Radir, one of her newest generalists, stood opposite her desk. His dark, heavily lashed gaze was locked furiously on Amadea. “He put it under my worktable. I went to sit down and there’s this… this thing snarling up at me.”

Amadea considered the skull, the sharp points of its horns and the fierce arch of its teeth. In the cold-lamps, its shallow orbits glowed eerily, and the lacy bone of its narrow maxilla filled with shadows. A flash of gold traced the bone around the horns’ bases—an Orozhandi ancestor gift, and a cheap one considering how faint the gold and how heavy the traces of glue. It wouldn’t look friendly in the dark.

“Are you sure it didn’t fall?” she said.

“From where?” Radir demanded. “You need to assign me elsewhere. I’m done.”

Amadea folded her hands in front of her. “Where is Tunuk right now?”

Radir hesitated. “In the Bone Vault.”

“Where he is not supposed to be left alone,” she noted.

“He seemed fine.” Radir rubbed the back of his neck. “He’s not in alignment. Bone doesn’t come into alignment for four more months.”

“He’s not in alignment,” Amadea agreed, “and how very conscientious of you to keep track.”

“Why do you need someone to keep an eye on him if he’s not in alignment?”

Amadea smiled. “Because alignment raises the risks of a specialist being caught in an affinity spiral. It doesn’t create the risks. You know this.”

Radir shook his head. “He wasn’t going to go for a walk just because I said so. He hates me. I want… I want to be here, but I don’t know how to keep doing this. Maybe I’m not good enough. He keeps saying he wants you back.”

That was when the bell on the wall started jangling. Amadea pressed fingers to her right temple. “You might remind Tunuk that isn’t going to happen.”

Radir huffed out a breath and said, softer, “I’m worried he might spiral again just so you have to. I don’t know how to stop that.”

Amadea was beginning to worry about that too. “Tunuk knows that if he does any such thing, he will be sequestered,” she said as she came around the desk. “Listen, he has a good heart, but Tunuk is prickly at his best. And a month out from a spiral, he is not at his best.” Her own words tugged on Amadea’s heart, flooded her thoughts with the memory of Tunuk, a month ago, huddled in the shadows, frozen in place by plaques of bone that clustered over his skin.

“Now, a month is long enough,” she continued, telling herself, telling Radir, “that he can probably be left alone with the bones for a bit, and maybe he will appreciate the longer lead. But he needs you.”

“He doesn’t appreciate anything I do.”

“He’s not himself right now,” Amadea reminded Radir. “And our job is to help the specialists when they can’t help themselves. Which they don’t always appreciate.”

“It’s a shit job,” Radir said.

“Sometimes it is a very shit job. But someone needs to do it.” She sighed. “Obviously, the Bone Vault isn’t for you. I will work on finding you a replacement, but it will be a while, and right now, even if Tunuk can work alone for a bit, it can’t be for long. I’ll go talk to him. And if it keeps up, you’ll come back to tell me.”

The bell on the wall jangled again and she scooped up the rabbit skull. “Go. Take a walk. Buy some cakes or sit and have a coffee or go see that young woman you’ve been courting. I have to see what Mireia wants and then I’ll go return this and talk to Tunuk.”

Radir left, and Amadea followed, pausing to check her face in the looking glass that hung over a shelf of figurines. Despite how careful she’d been, fixative gummed her olive temple and the dark streak of her right eyebrow. She licked the corner of her handkerchief and scrubbed at it, noticing as she did the new shaft of silver sprouting from her hairline. Amadea cursed under her breath and pinched the hair out.

You are entirely too old to be vain, she thought, mostly because she ought to hear it. Not because she believed it. She gave the remainder of her part a cursory examination for more traitors before smoothing her hair back down and heading out.

One-handed, Amadea opened the little tin in her pocket and pulled out a knob of scented beeswax. She warmed it in one hand as she walked. An archivist washed well before touching precious things, and old magics kept the archives cool and dry. Good for the artifacts, terrible for the skin. She studied her cracked cuticles a moment, rubbing the beeswax more firmly into them with a thumb, before swapping the skull to her other arm and the beeswax to the other hand.

Vain, vain, vain, she scolded herself as she glanced over the walkway’s edge, through the ornate ironwork grating down at the archives floor below, to the archivists moving among the uncountable treasures collected there. When civilization had fled the changeling forces, they brought all manner of precious things to Semilla, and in their subjects, their materials, the names they bore, the shapes they made, lay a map to a world no one living had ever laid eyes on. Beyond the Salt Wall, the remains of those kingdoms and countries lay in ruins, but their traces were treasured and preserved in the Imperial Archives.

Amadea drew another deep breath, full of dust and past and promise, as she came to the foot of the iron stairs that wound down to the main floor. Sometimes it was a shit job, but mostly it was exactly where Amadea belonged.

“Did she call you?” Zoifia demanded as Amadea came into the entry hall, her voice rising and rising. “Do you know if she’s giving Stavio my bronzes? Did you know there are Bikoro dynasty bronzes in there that no one’s catalogued? I don’t know them anyway, and Stavio—”

“Good afternoon to you, too. Who is it?”

“A queen consort and a queen regnant, and if they’re Bikoro, I think—”

“I mean who is making the requests, not who are the statues.” Amadea stopped and eyed Zoifia.

When Amadea had first come to the archives, she had envied the specialists. They had such clear and certain purposes. Not quite sorcerers out of stories, but born somewhere on the stairs to that platform of exaltation and madness, the specialists could connect with worked materials, “speaking” with bone and ink and metals and gems and more. Each material responded to its specialists, granting them information and even limited manipulation, but that skill ebbed and flowed. Sometimes the connection was so thin, so off, a specialist could only feel the soft, specific song of their material—yes, I know this one.

But when they came into the peak of their power, each turned to each and the magic became greedy and dangerous. A bronze specialist in full alignment could find a pin in a mud puddle, could repair an urn cast a thousand years ago, could even—for the most powerful affinities, at their very deepest depths—coax tin and copper and trace metals together, make something new like a sorcerer could. But each taste, each use, demanded more, and if the specialist wasn’t careful, they would begin a spiral of magic that ended only when they were completely merged and entombed by their material, one forever more.

Needless to say, keeping track of alignments and keeping aligned specialists distracted were the greatest of Amadea’s problems—and bronze was moving swiftly into alignment. She considered Zoifia’s tapping fingers, that too-familiar manic note in her voice, even as she brushed aside anything that wasn’t bronze.

“How are you feeling?” Amadea asked.

“I’m fine,” Zoifia said, tossing her wild curls.

Sometimes Amadea thought