Maia and her attendant, still lugging around the cloth-draped Manifesto Shield, had an early dinner with the weary hierarch. Even though she couldn't talk directly and had to eat by lifting food behind her veil, Noora seemed to appreciate the company. The hierarch's dining room was far too large for Noora and Milara alone. From how servants had to rush to clean and set out extra places, Maia guessed it had been a while since anyone joined them.
It was Maia's job to oversee the Mandates because she was the newest member of Leadership, and she didn't know yet what all of them were and had missed some of them while tending to church business in Lavradio. Recently, she'd gone to the Great Library and discovered it was suspiciously barren regarding the hierarch's duties. Worse, the entire restricted section was smaller than it used to be. When Maia finally cornered a librarian, an unfortunate reference worker named Hector with a nervous tail, he told the guardian to talk to the deans.
"You have to ask the deans. They've been purging things, I don't know what!" The poor man was practically in tears. "They seal the doors so nobody else can get in, and take away whatever they want. They take the catalog cards, so we don't know what's missing."
Maia sighed in exasperation: another intransigent Enclave denizen too lazy to figure things out on his own. "Don't you have another list of books somewhere? Compare that to the card catalog, and you'll know what's missing."
"You're talking about the master list. It's not here. Dean Katerina took it away months ago. We're making a new one from scratch, but the missing books are still missing."
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Maia wanted to grab him by the robes and shake him. "Where do they take the books, Librarian Hector?"
He was shocked by the question. "Don't you know? The deans are burning them! You people are burning our history and filling up the empty space with self-serving, First Family crap! What are you the guardian of, anyway?" He really did cry then, and turned his face away in shame.
Maia didn't apologize; she just left him there to recover his dignity in peace. She couldn't apologize to him, anyway. The deans were probably acting on Katerina's orders at the time, so their actions amounted to official Enclave policy.
Katerina was dead now, but Maia wondered if the surviving deans were continuing her work. And, what had been her goal?
Maia didn't want to inconvenience the hierarch or accidentally demand something forbidden, but with the library missing most of its restricted section, she had to go to the source.
"Your Holiness, I confess I'm still ignorant about the Mandates. May I trouble you for a list?"
"Of course," she said through her Voice. "I would have provided one, but I assumed your office had this information already."
"All we have is a schedule," Maia explained, "with no other information. And the library was no help."
Noora's veiled head looked down at her plate while she separated the different components of her meal with a fork, segmenting her food until there was an expanse of clean plate between each type of food. Maia waited for her while the Voice stared straight ahead, ready to transmit her mistress's thoughts. Noora still hadn't raised her head when the response came. "I will make a list and send it to you, along with a description of the task and, where known, the purpose of each."
Where known? Did the hierarch not know the full purpose of her own work? Before Maia could ask, the Voice relayed Her Holiness's answer. "Some Mandates are mysteries. They've been mysteries since before my predecessor's time."