Black Jade. David Zindell

stairs leading to the doorway and into the library’s single room. There, sitting at long wooden tables, a dozen Brothers bent over reading old tomes; a dozen more worked hard to preserve the knowledge of the oldest and most fragile of them, transcribing words onto new paper with ink-blackened quills. This scratching sound filled the quiet room. The many dusty, crumbling books stacked on the shelves along the four walls seemed to await renewal at the Brothers’ hands. I counted some seven thousand of them. As we learned, every one of them had been indexed and accounted for. I did not understand how one of them could have been lost.