Chapter 6: Archive Trail

Two years before the Great Comet. Southern Air Temple.

The third rack was short by seven scrolls.

I’d been checking the restricted archive against its own catalog for two weeks, going shelf by shelf with the index book propped open on the floor beside me. Two years of visits and I knew this room well enough to find anything in it without a lamp, which I’d actually had to do more than once when the oil ran low and I was too stubborn to stop reading.

Seven scrolls in the third rack had catalog numbers, descriptions, and no corresponding scroll on the shelf. They were missing from the restricted archive. Yeshi had found her forty missing from the open stacks at the Eastern Temple, which was bad enough, but those were unsecured shelves that anyone could walk up to. These were gone from behind a door that took a Tier 15 current to open, and whoever pulled them had been careful about it. The remaining scrolls had been carefully spaced out to fill the rack evenly so the shelf looked full from a distance.

I moved to the fourth rack and found three more missing. The fifth rack, where the Guiding Wind files were, was short by twelve. The shelf dividers still had the pressure marks from scrolls that had been sitting in the same position for decades. I slowly ran my thumb across one of the marks. The wood was darker where the scrolls had blocked the air.

I counted twenty-two missing from a room that most monks at this temple had never set foot in. The material covered everything from warrior monk period texts to records of Air Nomad sites I’d never even heard of, places the catalog called “auxiliary meditation retreats” or “seasonal gathering grounds” in the Earth Kingdom and along the southern coast. It looked like a shopping list.

I went back to the catalog cabinet. The main index was on the top shelf, but I’d been walking past a second record for two years without opening it. A small cabinet near the back wall held a narrow ledger bound in stiff cloth. I’d always figured it was a maintenance log, which would have been funny given that I was probably the only person who’d been in this room more than twice in the last decade. I opened it.

It was a checkout record. Elders could borrow materials for study or teaching, and the ledger tracked who took what and when they brought it back. Most of the entries were decades old, written in faded ink by people who were probably dead by now. Scrolls borrowed for a season, returned, the date noted in the margin. Boring stuff.

Then about five years back a new hand showed up. The writing was small and precise, the handwriting of someone who spent most of their waking hours with a brush. Every entry was the same format. Scroll number, date, and a notation.

Norri, by order of Elder Youdron.

The return column on every single one was blank.

I knew who Youdron was. Everybody at the temple knew who Youdron was. He’d been on the Council of Elders back during Roku’s era, which made him older than anyone on the current Council, older than even Pasang. He’d retired from active governance years before I was born. As far as anyone could tell, his life consisted of sitting in the eastern garden feeding cabbages to a bison named Amra and showing up to the occasional ceremony. The younger monks treated him with respect but nobody asked him about anything.

I didn’t know who Norri was.

I put the ledger back, closed the cabinet, and spread the remaining scrolls back to their adjusted positions. The Tier 15 current clicked the door shut behind me and the corridor was dark. I stood there for a while.

Youdron had the access and the authority. He also apparently had a younger man willing to do the legwork. Locking the material behind a door hadn’t been enough for him. Now the uncomfortable stuff needed to disappear for good.

I’d spent four years training myself not to care about things I couldn’t change, and mostly it worked. But somebody was destroying the Hollow Wind forms, the proof that what Dorje and I were doing on the south terrace came from somewhere real. Without those scrolls I was a heretic making things up. With them I was a student recovering something that had been taken away.

I went back the next evening and sat down with the ledger dates. Norri’s entries came in clusters, three or four within a single week, then nothing for two months, then another cluster. So he wasn’t living here. He was passing through and grabbing what he could each visit before moving on. If the timing was regular I could work out when he’d be back.

I started watching the archive entrance every evening after meditation. I brought a scroll as cover and found a spot against the far wall where I could see the restricted door. Twenty minutes a night, seventeen nights in a row, and nobody came. I was starting to think I’d miscounted the intervals.

On the seventeenth evening I was reading a geography text about river systems in the Earth Kingdom, trying to figure out whether the Foggy Swamp was reachable by land from the southern coast. I almost missed him.

He came in quietly. He was in his early twenties, lean from walking a lot. His robes were travel-worn at the hems and patched at one shoulder with thread that didn’t match. He carried a satchel across his chest held tight against his body, and his fingers were stained with ink all the way down into the nail beds. He walked past the regular shelves without glancing at them and went straight for the restricted door. He held a current against the frame, the mechanism clicked, and he was inside.

I put my geography text down and counted. Eleven minutes. When he came out the satchel was fatter than when he went in, pressing against the strap where it crossed his ribs. He shut the door and walked back through the archive toward the exit without looking around. I was a ten-year-old kid sitting against the far wall with a scroll. Why would he look around.

My jaw went tight. He’d just taken more of them.

I followed him at a distance through the lower corridor and past the communal hall. He turned toward the visitors’ quarters on the north side. He walked like someone who’d done this exact route enough times that he didn’t think about it anymore.

I didn’t approach him that night. I went back to the dormitory and lay on my mat and went over the numbers. If the clusters held, he’d be back tomorrow or the day after. I wanted at least one more visit to make sure I had the pattern right.

He came back two days later. Same time, same route, eleven minutes in the restricted room, and satchel heavier on the way out. He stayed at the temple for three more days. I saw him twice sitting with Youdron in the eastern garden, the two of them on the stone bench near the edge with their heads together talking low. Youdron looked like what he always looked like, a very old man having a quiet conversation. Amra the bison was grazing about ten feet away. At one point Youdron broke off whatever he was saying to toss Amra a cabbage, then went right back to talking. The satchel was on the bench between them.

On the fourth day Norri loaded the satchel into a riding harness on Amra and flew east. I watched from the upper terrace until the bison was a dot against the mountains.

He was gone for six weeks. I counted every day. When he came back the satchel was flat. He went to the restricted archive, came out with it full, sat with Youdron in the garden, and left again.

I waited one more cycle because I wanted to be sure I wasn’t wrong. Maybe he was returning scrolls to a different spot and I was miscounting. Maybe the satchel had something else in it. He came back seven weeks later, same routine. I checked the restricted archive the morning after he left. Two more entries without scrolls. That made twenty-four.

The next time he came through, I was ready.

I caught him in the corridor outside the archive on his second evening. It was after dinner and the halls were empty. He was heading toward the visitors’ quarters with the satchel against his ribs.

“I need to talk to you about the restricted archive,” I said.

He stopped. He stood with his back to me for about two seconds and then turned around. Up close he was taller than I’d expected. His eyes moved over me once, quick.

“I’m sorry?” he said.

“You’ve been taking scrolls out of the restricted archive. Twenty-four of them so far. I’ve been watching you for months.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

His hand on the satchel strap tightened maybe a quarter inch. His face didn’t change.

“I think you have the wrong person,” he said.

“Your name is Norri. It’s in the checkout ledger. Every entry for the last five years has your name on it.” I could hear the edge in my own voice. “I need to know where those scrolls are going.”

He looked at me for a while. Adults usually give kids a quick glance and go back to whatever they were doing. He was actually looking. I could see him trying to figure out how a child had gotten into the restricted archive and found the ledger.

“How do you have access to the restricted archive?” he said.

“I can hold a Tier 15 current.”

“But you’re a novice.”

“And?”

He looked at the satchel, then at me. “You should come with me. There is someone who can explain this better than I can.”

That was all he gave me.

I followed him.

Youdron’s chambers were in the oldest section of the temple, past the dormitories, down a corridor where the stone had been worn smooth by centuries of bare feet. The door was plain wood. Norri knocked twice, waited, and knocked once more. Someone spoke from inside. Norri opened the door.

The smell hit me first. Ink, paper, and scroll sealant, strong enough that it must have been soaking into the walls for years. The room was mostly desk, covered in scrolls, ink stones, and brushes in a wooden holder. The shutters were half-closed. Then I saw the wall behind the desk.

Finished scrolls were stacked from the floor to about shoulder height. There were dozens of them, way more than twenty-four. Some were wrapped in cloth, some loose. All of them were labeled in the same small careful hand.

Youdron was sitting at the desk writing. His brush made careful strokes in a script I didn’t recognize. I could read Air script well enough to work an archive in the dark, and whatever this was, it wasn’t that.

He looked up. He was very old, older than anyone I’d seen at this temple. His eyes were clear and sharp. They went straight to me.

“Elder Youdron,” Norri said from behind me. “This is Sonam. He’s a novice. He found the ledger and he’s been tracking my visits to the archive.”

Youdron set the brush down on its holder, careful not to let the wet end touch the desk. He folded his hands over the scroll.