Burning Books for Pleasure and Profit

The narrator prides himself on being the best scribe in town, a man who treats copying manuscripts as genuine craft. When Ogyga, a demanding woman acting on behalf of her sister, the local high priestess, commissions a private copy of an inflammatory text, he takes the job as he takes every job: as work to be done well, no questions asked. The story unfolds in Parker's long-running fantasy world — a variant on medieval Byzantium — as it slides into a darker age of religious violence, told partly through plot and partly through loving, technical detail on how books were actually made.