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The Marquess Lanthevel shrugged off his late afternoon meeting with Lord Chavar. Forgetting to be there was the clearest and most public message he could possibly send, much more satisfying than a private refusal behind closed doors. Most of the court had been watching him intently all day, waiting for the smallest hint of how his private supper with Edrehasivar the Upstart had gone. No one would fail to notice Uleris Chavar cooling his heels in the same receiving room that Lanthevel and his secretaries usually favored for after-Parliament business.
Lanthevel felt his step quicken as he left parliament further and further behind. It was a relief to take an entirely wrong hallway and mix with the flow of craftsmen and scholars heading into the outer city. In only a short distance, the delicate wall carvings became shabbier, cracked and unrepaired; then they ceased altogether.
It was even more of a relief to see the Old East Gate open before him and to feel the bright cold air come swirling in. The wind tugged at his outer robe, pulling him out into the city — and for a moment he played with the idea that he had never been called to Parliament, that he was just another scholar in the city.
It would have been a glorious city to be a scholar in. The district between the Untheileneise Court and the University proper had more students and scholars packed into it than any five ordinary cities. Here, the wide streets splintered into a labyrinth of back alleys and almost-streets, filled with boarding halls, scroll shops, copyists, public letter writers, and tiny cafes selling the cheapest of soups.
The wind had shifted from bracing to truly unpleasant by the time the Marquess got to the stretch of back alley known as the Street of Keys. However, there were still other people out in spite of the weather. He picked his way over the mix of half-frozen mud and cobblestones. A group of ragged young students were singing off-key drinking songs outside a tavern, and a few older scholars were hurrying by on the way to someplace else. The smell of garlic and sweet-broth soup drifted out of a curtained shop door, and Lanthevel almost followed the scent in. However, he told himself, “We can have soup any day. Today is special.”
And so he quickened his step, not to avoid the cold, but in anticipation. It was so rare that he had time to come this way — and, yes, there it was in all its glory: The Winged Lion.
With a storefront painted to rival the most magnificently illuminated manuscript, the little shop was an old and traditional scrollery that still clung to pretensions of serving an exclusively aristocratic audience. Pushing through the heavy door curtains felt like coming home. There was the display case showing the most costly scrolls that were meant to be hung as art. There were the series of viewing couches and the fussy little proprietor ready to fetch and carry for his customers. Then beyond that was a series of racks filled with more mundane scrolls.
The owner knew better than to try to sell him any of the newer wall hangings, but Lanthevel still made a polite pilgrimage to the display cases. He might be willing to insult the Lord Chancellor or even the Emperor, but he wasn’t so foolish as to insult his best source of imported manuscripts.
One of the illuminated scrolls was an elegant white and silver illustration of the founding of the Ethuveraz, and Lanthevel's mind drifted to the emperor's birthday. Maybe he could find something for him here? Two days ago he would have thought that a laughable idea. He had planned to give the new emperor something expensive but bland, an unremarkable gift for an unremarkable emperor. Now he found he wanted to give a genuine gift.
He wondered whether a scroll or a book would make a better gift. Should he go with tradition or modernity? After a long enough pause to signal his appreciation for the shop’s art, the Marquess made eye contact with the shop owner. “Mer Cselar, we were hoping you could recommend any texts about embroidery work from Csedo or northern Barizhan.”
Nebremis Cselar frowned slightly and tapped his fingers several times on the display case. If he was surprised at the sudden departure from Lanthevel's usual areas of study, he showed no sign of it. “Hmm, nothing comes to mind, though we can make inquiries. Or rather, nothing of good quality. We do have one of those,” and here he lowered his voice as though discussing a scandal, “ glued-together books.”
Smiling, Lanthevel insisted, “We would be interested indeed.”
Then, forced to concede, Cselar bustled ahead of him into the back room and called out, “Son, could you give a hand to the Marquess here?” before making his way back to the front display area.
Lanthevel followed the sound of whistling into the cluttered back room and found the youngest son straightening rows of cheap, blue-covered novels. “Don’t mind Father. We think we’ve finally found you that pirate’s diary you were hoping for. Fellow traded five copies of it for some novels. We’ve got it here somewhere.”
As always, they talked the way a fire burns, leaping from topic to topic. Young Cselar wanted to ask his thoughts on the kind of rag-paper the diary used. Then they were discussing sea slang, whether it was invented by sailors or imported from other shores, and whether it sounded as ridiculous to sailors as it did to land dwellers. That led to a debate about the reliability of old sea stories, and whether the modern printed editions coming out of Barizhan had been edited to be even more sensational than the originals.
Then talk turned to how the Barizheise could possibly produce so many books, all so exactly the same. Lanthevel wondered if it was so very different from the newspapers springing up in the biggest cities. Afterall they created an entire new edition every several days.
“Yes,” said Cselar. “We had that thought too. We had been hoping the newspaper presses would give us a clue how the Barizheise book printers work.”
That led to Cselar asking if the Marquess had ever seen how a news sheet was printed. Lanthevel had not, so Cselar had to show him the carved sheet of copper he had begged from a friend at the Courtly News. “See, the metal has the words carved into it, all written backwards like a mirror. They ink it and then press it to damp paper.”
Lanthevel ran his hand over the delicate carving. “So, this copper cutting could lead to books printed in Cetho?”
“We thought so at first. Only the carving part is too slow. It would take months to carve an entire book. Still, it got us thinking, and when we had to get our signet replaced we were still thinking about it. There were all the little designs laid out in their little compartments, like a story written in pictures, and all we could think was ‘What if they were letters!’”
“Here, we’ll show you. It’s not much yet and Father thinks we’re mad.” Then they were looking at the wine press that Cselar had begun to modify into something else. “It’s not as fast as those crazy Barizheise machines. Of course the crafty bastards won’t show anyone how it’s done. Still, we think we can get 300 pages a day if we push. We’ve been talking to Dachensol Habrobar about better ways to cast the metal letters.”
Somehow metal casting led to heraldry, which led to a discussion of beasts, which led back to the earlier subject of embroidery and whether they might have any books on the topic. Looking over the little volume on embroidery, they had to agree that it was indeed an awful job of binding; but Cselar thought it could probably be rebound. Maybe. If he could find the right leather.
One thing led to another, and it was dark by the time the Marquess left with five precious new books. By morning he was back in the thick of political maneuverings and it was as though his evening of freedom had never happened.
However, it must have happened, because slightly over a week later, a courier delivered a beautiful leather-bound volume on Barizheise embroidery, complete with a magnificent new frontispiece illuminated in white and silver.