Chapter 2 - The Shape of the Cost

The Shape of the Cost

The lineage chamber was the oldest room in the Archives that the Archives still considered part of itself.

Older chambers existed. Keth'serai had been in some of them, in the years before she understood the distinction the Archives were making. But the older chambers had been left behind by the accretion of two thousand years of use, the way a house's foundations stop being where people live. The lineage chamber was where the Leth had always worked, and so the Archives had continued to consider it the center of the thing, regardless of what had been built around it.…