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As at Quedlinha: different scribes at many different periods had added to the list As she leafed through the catalog, she sahere a square Dariyan script, all capitals, changed abruptly to the rounded Scripta Actuaria favored by the early churchup the minuscule letters that marked the ascendancy of Salian clerics under the influence of Taillefer’s court schola These days, the siant

What riches the catalog laid bare before her eyes! Not only Ptoloisterial Matheues, various geographies of heaven and Earth by diverse ancient scholars, the Memoria of Alisa of Jarroith its detailed instruction in the art of memory, and more volumes on natural history and astronomy than she had ever seen before in one place She skipped over the s of the church es marked black for caution The nuainst various heresies held no attraction but, as she had hoped, there were forbidden texts on sorcery, like Chaldeos’ The Acts of the Magicians and The Secret Book of Alexandros, Son of Thunder

How a and odd that a library of this scope should exist in the sphere of Soateway she would find her heart’s desire?

A s as a thorn The ht eye Hadn’t she read somewhere that in Somorhas lay only dreams and delusions?

"It cannot be so," her voice whispered, al "In the city of reat library stands in the third sphere, where the Cup of Boundless Waters holds sway, the ocean of knowledge available to mortal kind"

That was true, wasn’t it? Best to make use of the ti the location of St Peter of Aron’s The Eternal Geo that others waited patiently behind her to use the catalog, hurried away At every moment, with every footfall, she expected one of the robed clerics to challenge her What are you doing here? Who are you? Where have you come from?

No one ever did It wasn’t that they didn’t see her Gazesaway as easily as if she were soer at all

The corridor she had thought would lead her to the room of astronomies led her instead, unexpectedly, to a chapel elaborately decorated with gilded la the life of St Lucia, guardian of the light of God’s wisdom Her knees bent as if of their own volition, and in this way she knelt behind a pair of clerics robed in white and cloaked with the scarlet, floor-length capes that in the world below distinguished presbyters in the service of the skopos

Strange how her thoughts scattered every which way Because she could not calhts to God, she listened The two clerics kneeling right in front of her evidently did not have cal in low voices while, at the front of the chapel, an elderly man led a chorus of sweet-voiced monks in the service of Sext

"Didn’t you hear? He saved poor Brother Sylvestrius a lashing" "Nay, how can Brother Sylvestrius possibly have given offense? He scarcely speaks a word as it is, and sometimes it seems impossible to me that he even knows the rest of us exist because he’s so busy with his books"

"It was nothing he said, but what he wrote in the annals"

"Nothing deliberately disparaging, surely? That’s more Biscop Liutprand’s style"

"Of course not Sylvestrius wrote a dispassionate account of the crowning, rather than a flattering one"

"And Ironhead couldn’t abide it He’d rather hear one of those noxious poets singing his praises as though he were the next Taillefer rather than what he really is"

"You knohat a rage Ironhead can get into"

"Truly, I do, and have the mark here on my cheek to prove it Yet how then did Sylvestrius escape the lash? Nay, nay, you need not say I knoho must have intervened"

"Truly, Brother, he is the sole gentling influence now that the Holy Mother, , lies ill He is the one person who stands between Ironhead’s coarseness and barbarity and the lives of so ht struck them hard with a vision of God’s mercy, they bent their heads in sincere prayer as the old presbyter in front began the Gloria