For a moment, the sentries hesitated, not quite stepping forward, reluctant to leave their posts, but perhaps wondering if Vigil were wounded, perhaps horrified at seeing a man maimed before their eyes by so vehement a fall, or killed. But then one sentry made an involuntary gulping noise, as if trying to swallow a laugh; and that was enough.

Suddenly they were bellowing with laughter, and guffawed, and gasped, and shrieked, and howled. Each time they began to recall their discipline and smooth away their smiles, one would see his fellow’s face trying not to smile, and the mirth would explode again. One of them dropped his wand to clutch his aching sides. Vigil suspected they had been taking drafts of lager or listening to Fox music.

The Sphinx was normally inanimate, but this was a festive day, and public monuments forbidden to move on other days were allowed to ward off excessively exuberant partygoers. She raised her lioness paws and made a remarkably delicate mudra gesture. At first he thought it was a greeting, but no, it was manidhara, also called the Gesture of Holding the Immaculate Wishing Jewel. The fingers were bent as if around in invisible oval, as if holding a gem too transparent to be seen—namely, the jewel of that compassion which hears all the cries of pain of the moral world.

The gesture not only dispelled the muscle-memory of alien impositions in his limbs, it gave Vigil the calm needed to forgive the strange, perhaps insane, Myrmidon who had imposed on him. Her gesture was magnificent, for the waters around him also grew calm, and nanomachinery in the droplets—for this was a basin of living water—spattered on his clothing began to repair and regrow the fabric and circuitry of his antique garment. Little glints of light appeared and disappeared around the edges of the cuts as they mended, like a dry leaf seen in a fire, edges red and tattered, but as if such a leaf burned backward in time.

The Sphinx said, “Who is the paragon of animals, the beauty of the world, in apprehension like a god, in action like an angel, so infinite in faculty, so noble in reason? Yet the cold and ever-famished grave is a-hungered for him until for aye; and what he should do, he does not; and what he should not do, he does. Who is he? Who art thou?”

She lowered her stone paw and raised him gently to his feet.

Vigil was impressed, nearly overcome, by the kindness of this higher being. He gathered his wits, wondering what she was asking him. His internals were silent, confounded, unable to help.

Despite the terror of the assassination attempt and the freakishness of Swan and Fox and Soulless Man and Myrmidon he had met this day, despite the strange omens of Wormwood afire overhead and the predictions of treason at the Table, despite all this, Vigil felt something inside him that at first he thought was an internal creature of hidden strength. But no, it was him, part of him, a spirit not willing to be cowed, growing brighter like a yellow flame.

“What other men are, I leave to them to say. For me, I am one who remembers his sworn word. That makes me a man.”

The eyes of the Sphinx looked at him cryptically, and he could not tell what was in the deep places behind those eyes.

“Know thyself,” she said very softly. “For you are small. Take what others let fall.”

Vigil turned toward the laughing guards and raised his hand in an ancient salute. It was a secular gesture, not a mudra, and Vigil released no neuroactive energy from any peripheral cells, but nonetheless, the sentries went blank faced with awe, beholding that he was a Lord of Stability in truth and not a drunk in masquerade.

They suddenly stopped laughing and snapped to attention. The one man who had dropped his wand had a panicked look in his eye, for he had not stooped to pick up the weapon, and now that he was at attention, he dared not.

Vigil wondered how he could command such respect, even as a Lord of the Stability. Then he felt a neural pressure from behind his shoulder blades and realized that the Sphinx had turned her mysterious, blind-seeming, white eyes toward the sentries, her vast stone face perhaps touched with a hint of a smile. No human was likely to surrender to mirth when eyes like those were watching.

Vigil stepped forward. He stooped and picked up the dropped peace wand. It felt childish and insubstantial after the weight of the antique vendetta wand that had shattered in his hand. He was not sure if this is what the Sphinx meant by her unclear command, but he saw no harm in it. By the customs of the Order, Vigil would have been required to surrender the sentry’s weapon if asked, but the sentry on watch was not allowed to speak unless addressed and could not ask.

As Vigil approached the tall doors, two sentries saluted and pulled wide the glass panels for him. Just then, a silvery tone rang out.

He did not recognize it and did not expect to. So many signals and trills and chimes issued from the old machines these days, even antiquarians rarely knew their meanings. But Vigil was no fool: the Myrmidon clearly had meant him to be within those doors before that chime stopped.

Vigil made the mudra called pataka: with the thumb bent and other fingers extended. The gesture contained both denotations and impositions, because it came from the choral arts rather than the martial arts. It denoted rain, showering of flowers, taking an oath, and it was used to denote silence, but it was also used to indicate forcing doors open. The tall transparent metal panels of the ceremonial doors folded back, their thousand-year-old hinge-engines crying out in protest in the voices of women. The chiming grew louder, the hinges changed their voices, and the panels began to swing shut. The opening narrowed.

Vigil stepped forward, but one of the sentries politely but solemnly stepped in his way, raised his hand in a gesture that meant, Entrance without due identification is unauthorized. The sentry flashed a beam from his lantern into Vigil’s right eye. Vigil blinked, exasperated. There were no circuits in his door-lamp for reading the pattern of blood vessels in Vigil’s retina, nor had there been since the starfall of the Pilgrim. It was a purely ceremonial gesture, no doubt meant merely to hinder Vigil and waste his time.

But he held his head still for the doorkeep to complete the meaningless motion. Meanwhile, he raised his peace wand and indicated Peace toward the door hinges, trying to jam them. The chiming grew louder again in protest, and the door opening continued to narrow. Vigil lunged and thrust the peace wand physically between the door leaves as the crack narrowed. The doors came to rest, but the doors had evidently been programmed to respect a peace wand, so they did not clamp shut and snap the wand in two.

“None may enter the Hall once the doors are shut,” the doorkeep said stiffly, a glint of malicious satisfaction in his eye. The man was of the Pilgrim race, a Loricate, and his integument was a fine mesh of silver, turquoise, and white scales, the rippling pattern of an albino snake, like the scales of a pangolin.

It was said that on their home world, long ago, of Feast of Stephen, the ancestors of the Pilgrims were the kindliest of men, since the bishops and barons of that world would be blighted with frost and hailstorms by their Judge of Age, who was also their Terraformer and weather control officer, if the poor and destitute within their parishes starved. Centuries of transit within the climate of the Great Ship Pilgrimage loosened these severe laws of charity. Their children, landing on a world that neither worshiped the same ancestors nor practiced the same Sacerdotal disciplines, were as filled with hatred and contempt for underlings as their ancestors with charity.

Vigil knew in his heart that this was one more injustice, one more stain marring the woven garment of history, that the Plan of Rania would sponge away once her influences reached here, and the slow process of cliometry reached its climax.