Rebinders

Overview

Rebinders are the menders of the Eternal Record. Wherever a volume in the endless stacks is torn, broken-spined, water-struck, or loose in its pages, a Rebinder comes to it, takes it down, and makes it whole. They do nothing else, and they know nothing else: they cannot read, they do not guard, and they take no notice of a traveller unless the traveller is holding a damaged book.

Appearance

A Rebinder is about the size of a cat, a squat body of folded and pressed paper and leather like a closed book, on six thin jointed legs of brass wire. Two longer forelimbs end in fine tools, a bone folder, a needle, a small blade. It has no eyes; it finds its way by touch along the shelves, its forelimbs tapping spines as it goes. It moves in quick, scuttling bursts, then stops dead. It makes a soft sound of shuffled paper and a faint click of wire, and it smells of glue, old leather, and dust.

Habitat and Range

They are everywhere in the stacks, singly or in small working groups, climbing the towering shelves and crossing between floating book-islands on threads of their own glue, in numbers nobody has counted.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Rebinder works one volume at a time and sees nothing but its work. It carries a damaged book to the nearest flat surface, takes it apart, mends each page, sews the gatherings, glues and covers the spine, and returns it to exactly the place it came from. Several will work together on a great volume. A book taken away from them they follow, slowly and doggedly, and they will try to take back any book from the Record that a traveller has damaged or is carrying off.

Abilities

They mend any volume, however broken, so that no trace of the damage remains, and they always return it to its place, though the Record's hallways move and loop. Nothing else about them is remarkable.

Life Cycle

Nobody has seen one made or seen one end. A Rebinder that is crushed is taken apart and rebound by others.

Uses and Dangers

They are harmless and of little use to visitors, except as guides of a kind: a Rebinder carrying a book always knows where the book belongs. Their persistence is the only trouble they cause. A traveller who leaves the Record with a damaged volume may find a Rebinder still clinging to the pack at the gate.

Lore and Belief

Travellers say the Archivists made them, or that the Record grows them as a body grows skin over a cut; nobody knows which, if either. Scholars who have been to the Record joke that a Rebinder is the only perfect scribe, since it copies nothing and loses nothing. Some believe a Rebinder will mend a book from the Material Plane if it is left in the stacks, and a few have tried it; the Rebinders take such a book and shelve it, and it has not been found again.

Where It Appears

• The Eternal Record