imperial archives suffered frequently from the pigeons’ excesses. The squat, somewhat ominous building was reliably protected from non-avian troublemakers by its position inside the first circle of the Great Imperial Chambers, but attacks from the air posed a continual threat to the appearance of the largest storehouse of knowledge in all of Dashtornis. The situation was made worse by the fact that the archive was built two hundred years ago under Emperor Nazalio, who was a great lover of constructivist experimentations and essentially rebuilt the city’s historical center. His Heavenly Majesty was careful to draw the attention of his architects – mundane thinkers all of them – to the obvious fact that the storehouse for such valuable manuscripts chronicling the great deeds of his heavenly ancestors simply could not take the form of a rough, rectangular prism of Seregad marble “that would seize even the most marginally refined person with despair at the mere sight of it.”
It cost the architects a great deal of effort to convince His Majesty not to tear down the almost completed building, which would have destroyed an extensive network of basements that provided the perfect conditions for storing especially valuable manuscripts, with expensive mechanisms for dousing fires and a special system of mirrors that allowed weak but natural sunlight to reach even the farthest corners of the unshakeable citadel of the wisdom of past ages. The chief architect, Cordius Palio, saw the imperial archives primarily as a fortress, a carefully guarded treasure house that could withstand direct assault, flood, fire, and riots.
He often intoned on the subject: “This structure will stand for a thousand years, and our descendants will be surprised and delighted to find a path into the world of those who laid the foundations of our great empire!”
It would have been uncomfortable to argue with the Emperor, however, so Palio agreed to a bit of architectural slight-of-hand and added an ornate but false colonnade to the front of the building and a gallery of statues of Herandia’s most learned men to its roof.
These statues earned Palio a place among the most frequent subjects of estevels brought by the archive’s contemporary workers (estevels were scraps of paper bearing curses against one’s enemies; for a small fee, supplicants could use a primitive lens to ceremoniously feed the paper to the sun’s rays, thereby subjecting the target of the curse to the power of the heavenly deity). Pigeons dropped piles of excrement on the statues’ heads and the roof of the archive with such ferocity that the Emperor, observing the building from a vantage point on his main balcony, became indignant at this flagrant insult to the imperial gaze.
“There are rumors that the Sun is sending his servants to show his wrath with our Lord,” said a handful of the Emperor’s helpful advisors.
“Let us call on the falcon, the protector of the Heavenly Throne! That will show everyone that the Lord of the Sky is on your side!” said others.
As a result, specially trained falcons had guarded the sky above the archive and the palace for almost two centuries, ruthlessly tearing to pieces any winged violators and putting a stop to dangerous unrest in the minds of the Heavenly Emperor’s subjects. City residents loved to watch the handsome bird soaring through the sky, and the young man on the front steps of the archive was no different. To get a clear picture of what this connoisseur of free flight looked like, imagine an old man, shriveled and decrepit from years of working in the archives, lungs corroded by the ever-present dust, eyes weakened by the half-light, back bent as a sign of membership in the gloomy caste that is called “bookworms”. If you have enough imagination, suppose for a moment that even this pitiful specimen was once a blooming youth. Taken together, those two images provide a fairly precise rendering of how other people saw Unizel Virando. Very few people actually knew his name. At the archive, where he was employed as assistant to the senior master in the foreign manuscripts section, everyone simply called him Uni. His close friends called him Little Uni – not because of his short stature, but because of the naïve, scattered look in his blue eyes, which he inherited from his mother, and his excessively polite, even timid, manners.
Tossing the golden curls away from his forehead, Uni kept his eyes on the proud hunter. He felt a melancholy envy of the bird’s unchained freedom and graceful flight. For a young man who spent most of his time in the archive’s musty vaults, the falcon was a visible symbol of something bigger and more important. It called to him, but what it seemed to offer was fatally unachievable.
A man stepped out of the archive’s front door. “Uni, stop gaping at the birds. Barko is waiting for you. Get moving!” The man filled his lungs with the fresh air of late spring, saying his final goodbyes of the day to the dusty spirits of imperial wisdom.
“Coming, Master Gergius!” Uni said with an inadvertent sigh. He hurried up the rest of the steps and, once again, surrendered his body to torture at the hands of the dismal spirits of the painfully familiar underground vaults. The most dangerous of these fearsome creatures was his superior, senior master Barko. He was fearsome in his stubborn refusal to forget about the existence of his young assistant for long periods of time, thereby preventing Uni from studying the archive’s contents to his heart’s content.
It would be untrue to say that Uni hated the archive’s old (and sometimes gloomy) walls. Quite the opposite, when he first entered that narrow world four years prior, he realized with delight that fate had given him an incredible gift. The labyrinthine halls of the archive held his body like a prison, but his spirit, fed by the contents of a mountain of secret scrolls and codices, found a path to an entirely new and unknown world of knowledge. The archive contained books on every subject. Anything published anywhere in Dashtornis – whether by the timid hand of a scribe or by the lifeless block of a wood press – eventually found its way here, to the main archives of the Heavenly Empire. The Arincilian jungles, the deserts of Mustobrim, the deep forests of Torgendam, and the teeming cities of Capotia – the whole world, more than one could see in a lifetime, revealed itself in wonders, dangers, and the strange customs of foreign people. With access to so many books, Uni taught himself the languages of many of these strange, yet fascinating people and spent hours imagining the conversations he could have with them, pretending to be a fierce warrior from Arincil’s House of the Eagle, or a brave captain working on a merchant fleet from Capotia, or even a shaman from a wild barbarian tribe roaming the plains of the Great Expanse.
His work did not take up much of his time. It was a necessary duty that he had to carry out so that he could spend the rest of his time doing what he loved, but he came to resent it as a petty encroachment on the graceful and intelligent world where he existed on an entirely different plane. How could anyone think it fair to ask a man who had already spanned the Known World with his ravenous mind to catalog new scrolls or copy out an excerpt from a dusty old tract on the art of cookery? His superiors at the archive seemed intent on finding ever more primitive tasks for Uni, blatantly exploiting his kind, compliant nature.
On this particular day, for example, he wondered wistfully why they had to send him to carry a copy of some pointless romantic ballad to the client who ordered it. He knew the answer: Gergius and his elderly accomplices at the archive contrived to save on couriers because they hoped to put some of those savings in their own pockets. The only exception to this rule was Barko, with whom Uni shared a love of foreign languages and an utterly impractical outlook on life (both highly unusual qualities for subjects of the empire). If Barko was looking for him that late in the day, it was probably not for a minor task. Uni hoped it wasn’t an errand that would take him all the way across the city. He had an important event scheduled for the evening, perhaps the most important event in his life.
At the thought of Siana, the young archivist seemed to grow falcon’s wings and flew down the labyrinth of hallways, making turn after turn from memory, up and down stairs and through doors with heavy, ornate metal locks. Siana was the one and only girl for him. It was the kind of infatuation that can start with a glance and conquer forever the heart of a sensitive young man. Mystically unattainable, it was a vision of love that thrilled the mind and fired the blood. It was love unexplored, unearthly, and all-consuming.
Uni was proud of himself because, unlike the abstract multitude of young men who sat around sighing