I’ll start here. I worked in the King’s library. I was not important to the operation of the library, only one of the dozen or so scut workers who flew under the radar, too inconsequential to be worth the bother of firing during tighter times. My job was to dust the shelves. A simple job in theory, but one that did not have an ending point. The King’s library contains more than a million volumes and scrolls. By the time I finished one section and moved onto another, the dust was reaccumulating. I was in no hurry. It would be waiting for me when I got back around to it in a year. And so my circular existence in the library went on and would have gone on until I was old and stooped, had Leon not come into my life on that rainy afternoon so many years ago. 

“Hey Desert.”

It was Erl, from Research Support. 

“Desert, hello?”

“Sorry,” I said, pulling down the mask from my nose and loosening it about the ears. 

“Hard to hear in that thing.”

“Not much to hear around here anyhow.”

“Not for much longer. We’re about to have a crowd.”

“A crowd?”

I expected Erl to tell me about a traveling scribe from a far-flung locale come to find a particular scroll from the last age. Those sorts traveled with a following. 

“The Prince is coming tomorrow.”

“Edouard is coming? Here?”

“That’s the word. With his whole attachment. Has caught a bit of frenzy over Kingdom history in recent months they say.”

I thought about this news for a moment. It would be unwise to speculate if the Prince’s recent interest had anything to do with his father’s ailing health and his uncle’s recent visit. I pulled my mask back over my nose and tight about my ears. My voice returned to its accustomed muffled state. 

“I’ll be about my business. Stay out of the way.”

“I expected as much. Stay out of History and you should be clear.”

I nodded my thanks to Erl for the heads up and returned to my task, pulling a cloth from my belt and squinting to determine where I had left off. 

I saw him go to share his news with whoever else he could find out of the corner of my eye. I patted my mask about the mouth, releasing a cloud of dust. Desert they called me. It was not a term of endearment. It was because I wore a full cloak and mask about the face as if I was traveling in the desert. “When does the caravan leave?” they used to ask. Eventually, I’d been around for so long and my oddity was such an accepted part of the library’s workings that most workers no longer knew where the nickname had come from. Erl was one such worker. He was fresh from the College of the Citadel, too green to know that researchers don’t talk to dusters. 

The outfit was not an affectation. I learned early in my time at the library that if I did not come up with a system, I was going to lose my sense of smell and eyesight within a few years from the dim light and the constant barrage of dust particles. I learned to cover my orifices and take shallow breaths. I worked with my eyes closed most of the time. The library was laid out sensibly, with consistent shelving heights and a top-down organizational hierarchy that was unchanged for centuries. Without the rest of the library’s workers to get in the way, I probably could have spent years cleaning the entirety of the stacks without opening my eyes. 

A few hours after my run-in with Erl, I was working near a window on floor zero. It was a garden window, looking out at the clatter of hooves and feet on the cobblestones. During particularly nasty weather, all the library’s workers came together to barricade the windows on floor zero in case of a flood. There was only a drizzle on that afternoon the day before Prince Edouard’s visit. There would be no need to relocate scrolls and barricade windows. I stopped for a moment to admire the pattern of the raindrops against the ancient, warped glass. It was what I liked best about the library, the age, the solidity of it. Generations of ruling families had come and gone to the Empire, but the library predated them all. 

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

No one was entirely sure when the library was built. No cornerstone had ever been found, and from the records I read in the sublevels, the library looked much the same when The Empire conquered Quinze and took it for its capital city as it did when I shuffled through it in my desert garb. I have never believed in the eternal, but the library’s proximity to the notion had a calming effect on me. 

Thock thock thock. 

I was pulled from my reverie by the rapping on the window. A man kneeled next to the window with his knuckles inches from the glass. The glass warped his profile, but his skin was ochre colored as mine and his knocking was urgent. 

Open the window he mouthed. 

All these years later, I don’t see why I should have done it. I was a rule follower. I kept out of the way. I made a point not to be the center of attention, but to do my job well. Any account of my behavior at the time would have precluded the action I took. There is only one answer, though it does not please me. Fate moved my hand. 

I turned the latch and pushed outward. The man hopped backwards to make room for the window to swing out before belly-crawling through and flopping onto the stone floor. He disturbed several scrolls about crop rotation in Pre-Empire Van Myr and I made a mental note to fix it as I fastened the latch on the window and used the sleeve of my cloak to wipe the rain from the sill and wall. As I turned to him, he brushed off his shoulders and the front of his cloak and looked me in the eyes. Even in the dimness of floor zero it was obvious we were kinsmen. 

“They said you would be unwilling,” he said. 

He smiled at me. The skin around his mouth was momentarily lighter. My father’s had done the same. 

“If you need a place to wait out the rain, I can show you to the annex. It is late in the day but there may be tea yet.”

“I know how to find the annex. I am also aware that we are on floor zero. I can run all twenty seven floors of this abomination like a labyrinth.”

I did not correct him. 

“Then I fail to see how I can help you. Or why you did not use the entrance.”

“I am not here for the library, brother. I am here for you.”

“I don’t understand.”

But I did, not completely, not yet. But I knew what this man was about. I had heard rumors. 

“You are in a unique position here. You are in the heart of Quinze, the Citadel, the capital city of the Empire. A respected worker at a holy institution.”

I walked away and he followed. I feared to be overheard. He was two steps behind me all the way. Down we go to sublevel four, far below street level, centuries of stone and paper above us. He did not stumble in the darkness. Our breath moved dust in swirling patterns. 

“What do you want from me?”

“I’ve told you.”

“I am a duster. Whatever I can offer you is worth little.”

“Seventeen years,” he says. “Can glean a lot of information in that amount of time. Can’t you, Desert?”

“Nothing of importance.”

I felt him take a step back from me.

“You are as bad as they say. So far gone that you would lie to your brethren.”

Silence reigned. Stillness. Sublevel four was rarely traveled, even by me. The manuscripts were moldering, dead languages. Scribbles on paper that once held life. 

“There are no brethren.”

The blade against my throat was warm with the heat of his skin. His breath pushed against the cloth of my mask. 

“Blasphemer.”

“There has been nothing to blaspheme against for a thousand years. I have never seen Rodan nor been near it. I was born here and this is my home. This library. This place. It’s the only home I’ve ever known. You can threaten me and call me brother, but you have no claim on me.” 

I smelled leather and felt the blade move away from my throat. His breathing was heavy. 

“Tomorrow,” he says. “At seventh hour you will meet me here.’

“What if I don’t?”

“I will kill you,” he says. There was no hesitation in his voice. 

“I thought we were brothers.”

“I see now that I was mistaken. We will be brothers. When you see. When I show you.”

“Do you make many converts at knifepoint?”

I felt the air move as he walked past me to the stairs. His voice was quiet but clear. 

“Do you have nightmares?” he asked. 

I found I could not lie. 

“Yes.”

“You have dwelt for seventeen years in a place of accumulated knowledge. Do you ask yourself how it was accumulated? Do you think of the unnumbered deaths required to amass such knowledge? Do you think of your own brethren, their wisdom stripped from them and bound in vellum for the Empire to hoard in this place?”

“You cannot change the past.”

He was further up the stairs, his voice a whisper in the dark. 

“You should have nightmares, Desert. Seventh hour.”