Kraft had always thought that throwing money into a river was an exaggerated expression, but now he wasn't so sure. The books here were worth enough silver coins to train everyone into expert stone-skippers.
His timely intervention spared the rest from doing any more damage to the things on the floor. The information-bearing materials, made from leather and plant fibers, had warped and shrunk after repeatedly getting wet and drying out.
The terrible storage conditions had left most of them beyond repair, melted into mudlike clumps. Insects crawled through this natural hiding place, unknowingly gnawing at the dissolved, distorted words.
They looked like the remnants of a hasty evacuation. Some sudden, unexpected event must have forced the original owners to abandon this immense spiritual and material treasure.
But a closer look revealed that this seemingly reasonable guess still left some things unexplained.
The books hadn't been piled up at random. They had been deliberately spread open, one by one, across the middle of the Church. Like stalks laid out in furrows during winter and left to rot, they covered a vast area, leaving only a few narrow paths—as if someone had needed to walk back and forth frequently to check the pages.
Even the long benches used for prayer gatherings had been moved aside and set against the walls, their seats piled high with books.
"What is all this for?"
Everyone was puzzled by the same question. The scene before them clearly couldn't have been arranged by just one or two people. The head of the Monastery didn't have the authority to call out so many books from the collection on his own. Usually, they were only taken from storage in batches during the brief dry season each year, to be aired and maintained.
Unless most of the senior and