He woke up before the bell.

  He always woke up before the bell. A practice that was rather natural than enforced, the kind that still clung onto him even when all his other habits slowly, or maybe, abruptly slipped away like sand between your fingers. It gave him time to be already standing. Already present. Already small.

  Small was safe. Small was a skill he learned that way you learn to favour an injured leg -- without thinking about it, until one day you realise you have forgotten to walk any other way.

  He rose. He folded his blanket with the precision of someone who had done it for years and now didn't need his attention to do the same. His hands worked but his mind was quiet, listening the sound of the city waking up.

  This was something he still did. The sounds of the city came in through the window and his mind assembled them without permission: the harbour bells, the call from the minaret three streets over, the particular rhythm of the grain cart on the cobblestones below that meant it was the fourth day of the week, the sound of the palace kitchens beginning, the distant authoritative voice of the head steward whose voice carried through stone the way water found cracks.

  He knew this building the way you know a body -- not its history, not its name, just its rhythms, its moods, the cracks between the stones, the door on the eastern corridor that stuck in cold weather.

  He put on his robe. Plain, undyed, the kind of fabric made to last rather than to be seen. He had owned it for two years now. Before that, a different robe, the same colour. Before that, another, though it was a little different -- slightly torn at the bottom left corner. He did not think about what he had worn before that.

  He did not, in general course of things, think about before.

  The scriptorium was already lit when he arrived.

  Theodore sat at his station. The work for the day had been laid out: a sheaf of administrative records to be copied in triplicate, an official correspondence to be transcribed from a deteriorating original, and a land registry update that would take most of the afternoon.

  He looked at the deteriorating original for a moment. The ink had faded at the edges, the parchment foxed and fragile, but the central text was intact. Somebody's words, preserved past their intention.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He picked up his pen.

  This was what his days were made of:

  Ink and parchment. The scratch of the nib. The small physical satisfaction of a straight line of text, of a page filling evenly from top to bottom, of a copy that matched its original without error. He was very good at this. He had been told he was very good at this twice, which in this place was the equivalent of excessive praise, and both times it had produced in him nothing except a faint distant recognition, like hearing your name called from very far away.

  He had been educated for governance. He had been taught law and military strategy, rhetoric and philosophy, the histories of a dozen empires, the management of grain stores and tax collection and the complicated cartography of alliances. His tutors had given him the tools to run a kingdom.

  He used them to copy other men's documents in a windowless room.

  The irony of this had stopped being interesting to him approximately three years ago.

  In the afternoon, he is sent to the records hall to retrieve some documents. This is the part of his day he would have said he preferred, if he had been a person who preferred things. The records hall was in the older part of the main building -- high vaulted ceilings and alcoves fitted with wooden shelves that had not been replaced since they were built. The documents here went back centuries. Some of them predated the current empire entirely.

  He found the document.

  He put the document under his arm and left the records hall.

  He delivered the document.

  He returned to his station.

  He picked up his pen again.

  Evening.

  He was halfway through the final page when the lamp flickered.

  He looked up.

  The room was the same. Lamplight. Shelves. The smell of ink and parchment and the faint cold of the stone. Nothing had changed.

  And yet.

  He had the sudden, distinct sensation of being watched.

  He turned around.

  Empty room.

  He sat for a moment, pen hovering above the page, and listened to the building with the attention he gave to everything — methodical, unsentimental, practical.

  Nothing.

  He turned back to his work.

  The feeling did not entirely leave.

  It sat at the edge of his awareness like a sound at the edge of hearing, present and sourceless, and he wrote the last half page under its watch with the slow steady hand of a man who had learned not to react to things he couldn't explain, because reacting to things cost more than he had left to spend.

  He finished the page.

  He cleaned his pen.

  He folded his hands on the desk and looked at the finished document for a moment -- someone else's words, perfectly preserved, in handwriting that had been called excellent twice.

  Then he rose, extinguished the lamp, and went back to the room with the narrow window and the folded blanket, and lay down, and closed his eyes.

  He did not dream.

  He had not dreamed in a very long time.