Crimson Under Glass

POV: Isolde

The ink on my fingers never fully washed out. Not even with the rough soap they kept by the basin at the archive entrance. The stain sat in the small lines of my knuckles.

I checked in before the morning bell. The gate clerk barely lifted his head. He dragged his pen across my name and waved me.

The lower archive smelled the way it always did. I hung my coat on the third hook from the left, and went straight to the east section where yesterday’s unfinished batch was waiting for me.

Forty-three folders. I counted them before I left last night.

The bills did not exist. Petra’s next payment did not exist.

I cleared the first shelf fast. The second one took longer because someone had misfiled three folders in the wrong order.

By the time I got to the third shelf, I was deep in the rhythm of it.

Then I saw the folder.

It was sitting spine-out in the middle of the third shelf from the bottom.

The other folders had shifted slightly on either side to make room for it and that kind of spacing did not happen by accident, someone had put it there deliberately.

That folder had not been there when I left last night.

I knew every folder on that shelf. The archive was empty. The gate clerk was three corridors away and not paying attention to anything except his morning log. There was nobody there but me.

I reached out and touched the spine to pull it forward.

My fingers caught. The folder was warm. I pulled it off the shelf.

No label. Every other folder in this archive had a label. The labeling system had been running for over a century without a single exception. There was no such thing as an unlabeled folder in the lower archive of House Vaelthar.

Except this one.

My first thought was to put it back. Slide it right into the gap, finish my forty-three folders, check out at midday, go home, and be the kind of person who did not find things.

I opened it.

The first page was a blood tithe transfer record. Same format as everything in this section, same notation system, same column layout. For about three seconds I thought I had read the whole situation wrong and this was just a misfiled document and the warmth had been some trick of the building’s ancient pipes.

Then the numbers landed.

The amounts were not just large. Four times, five times beyond anything that had ever moved through this section. And the accounts they were moving through were accounts I did not recognize. Different accounts that shared a record notation format with files I managed but did not appear anywhere in the actual files I managed.

Transfers this large did not pass through accounts assigned to me without showing up in my records. Unless someone had made sure I would not see them.

I read the page again from the top, and I closed the folder.

Then I stood there holding it, and the quiet in the archive had changed completely.

Behind me, at the far end of the corridor, something moved.