“The largest and oldest graveyard on the planet is within walking distance.” Norbert pointed.

In that direction were no fireflies at all. An unoccupied lane ran toward a broken well house. The only houses present near the well had folded themselves flat against the ground at sunset, in simple-minded obedience to the landscaping laws, centuries forgotten, of the Palatines who ruled before the rise of the Summer Kings.

Beyond were some nomadic tents occupied by Nemorals, little bubbles of leafy fabric that slowly moved across the grassy slopes keeping pace with a small flock of night-grazing ruminants. During the time of the Oneness, when all the trees and beasts of Earth had been a single bio-organism, their walking tents had been iron-sided pavilions covering acres and adorned with shields of warlords and skulls of foes. The Nemoral peoples had been more feared than earthquakes or asteroid strikes, and their hordes of mastodons doubled as cavalry, and the endless herds had trampled nations. These ghosts of forgotten conquerors loitered near spaceports, selling their daughters as breeding slaves to underpopulated worlds, while their sons played jigs for thrown pocket change, or told fortunes, or fixed cock fights, or cut purses. Long ago they had ceased to beg for passage to some far globe where they might find prairies wide and free.

Beyond this tent herd was a dark wood of pre-posthuman design called oak. The woodland fell away in a series of steep slopes and flat glades almost like steps. Perhaps some ancient river, now dry and vanished, had carved the land into oddly rectilinear shapes, or perhaps this was the residue of some ancient construction, or a convulsion of the layers of thinking material active beneath the planetary crust.

But in the further distance, a hill as flat-sided and steep-shouldered as a table stood out from the broken clefts and canyons of the woodland. In silhouette glinting in the aquamarine moonlight could be seen a tall steeple, peering between the trees.

“Behind the Chapel of Saint Joseph of Copertino is the Spaceman’s Yard,” Norbert intoned. “Yonder is the ossuary where the wealthy members of the order, driven mad with long faring across the Vasty Deep, insist on shipping their bones to this world to inter them. Think of the freight mass we could save if our guild brothers were less sentimental about the location of their last port of call!”

“And … have you picked out a headstone, sir?”

“Hardly! If I die on this senile world with its hellishly bright sun, I am having my bonesticks shipped home to Rosycross, so the flarelight can bake them clean of all your filthy diseases and leftover nanites from forgotten wars. That is my home. Why do you grin?”

“This is not a grin but a smile of goodwill, sir. I also do not wish my bones to rest on this world, or, come to think of it, anywhere.”

8. The Worm of History

Norbert gazed at the squire speculatively.

“If you wish not to die, squire, then turn back.”

“Do you still doubt me, sir?”

“You are an enigma, Squire End Ragon. Enigmas are a source of doubt during a duty like this, and doubt means hesitation, and hesitation means death.”

“You, too, are an enigma, sir,” the squire retorted. “This soil underfoot is officially part of outer space as much as a space station, as timeless as a tomb. In one step, we are officially on Earthly ground and in the current year, and our mission most illegal. Turn back yourself, Praetor, find an unmarked coffin, and slumber until the interdiction on Rosycross lifts. All the wives of the starfarers awaiting their return preserve their youth in just this way: the whole village is built on coffins. Finding one is easy.”

“Enigma? I am lucidity itself: All these streets are all from Earthly history, and the lights, too glaring and too yellow, are meant for Terrestrial eyes. I cannot sleep here. The Guild is my only world now. The Guild is both my father and my ghost, and so I serve. But you are Earth-born. A thousand tiny clues betray you: every street through which we passed was strange to you. How can you be a stranger to all these years? The village is older than a millennium.”

The squire said, with a small smile, “A millennium is nothing.”

Norbert did not turn his head, but used sensitive pinpoints in his cloak surface to study the man’s face and form carefully, both on the visible light bands, and higher and lower on the spectrum. Uneasiness moved like a sea beast below the surface of his mind, a shapeless fear, and he called upon the artificial part of his nervous system to impose courage.

“Which way, sir?” the squire inquired. “The wheel-road through the wood is patrolled, and the bridge to the Spaceman’s Yard is watched, and the Swans forbid mortals to fly at night.”

For in the distance, to the north, was a long curving line of floating lamps, clustered perhaps above some traffic on an unseen road. The line of lights curved through the woods, swinging wide to avoid the area of clefts and steep-sided dells, then climbed in a series of switchbacks, and finally leaped across an unseen canyon in a smooth arch, paralleling a bridge that led to the high ground where the cathedral and the graveyard stood.

Norbert said, “We take a direct path. Avoid the oaks and walk near the dream-apple trees. The dream-apple is native to Rosycross, and will not report us. Did not the Starfaring Guild protect them from bio-revanchist Bacchants who sought to hew them down? The taller ones are old enough to remember that.”

The squire said, “It is said to be dangerous to approach any graveyard except by gate. The curse of the Judge of Ages falls on those who trespass.”

“Ah!” said Norbert. “The curse did not fall on Zolasto Zo, did it? If the curse is sensitive to bloodlines, it will spare me.”

“Just you? Do you have a means to protect a loyal adjutant in your service from this curse?”

“If you trust me to rewrite the information aura surrounding your shed skin cells, yes. But that requires you shut off your genetic spoofing protection, whatever you may have, and let me give you a temporary skin.”

Without a word, the squire tapped a command on the red amulet he wore on his wrist, doffed his glove, rolled up his sleeve, and offer his arm to the assassin. Norbert drew his knife and pierced the vein in the squire’s elbow. The squire scowled as cold sensations traveled up his arm to his heart.

“Interesting,” Norbert observed. “I could have programmed any disease or neural change imaginable into that injection. Your nanomachinery cannot combat my picotechnology.”

The squire said, “It is like a children’s game, is it not? Atoms undermine molecules which undermine machines which undermine men. But there is something that undermines us all, and that is eternity. And yet I hear there is one man who has vowed to defeat eternity.”

Norbert was wondering what the squire was driving at. “You speak of the Judge of Ages?”

The squire frowned, irked. “No. His vision is limited to the short term; his motive is mere animal attraction, that spasm of brain chemicals called love. I am speaking of the Master of the World, the Master of the Empyrean, the Master of History, the Master of the Hidden and Hermetic Knowledge! His goal is to overcome entropy! On that day, death itself shall die, and he shall call himself the Master of Life, the King of Infinite Space and Lord of the Eschaton!”

“I cannot fault him for a dearth of ambition,” said Norbert wryly. “But that is quite a jawful of titles.”

“Deserves he not all these and more? We would all be as extinct as apes were it not for him, nor either Monument ever been known, nor a single snowflake of antimatter been burned to uplift civilization. Our civilization sprang from him, and Jupiter is his son.”