“If there are eight of them, why are they called Tetrarchs?” Orolo demanded, drawing an exasperated look from Jesry’s father, who had been listening intently—he was taking notes.

“There were four of them originally and the name stuck,” Arsibalt said.

Jesry’s father seemed to relax a bit, thinking that the interruption was over. But we were just beginning.

“What’s a New Counterbazian?” Lio wanted to know. Jesry’s brother shushed him. To my surprise Jesry rose to Lio’s defense. “We didn’t tell you to shut up when you were bellowing about your infestation.”

“Yes you did.”

“I’ll bet it’s a euphemism for one of those Warden of Heaven nut jobs,” I said to Lio. This brought a cataract of shushing down on me. Jesry’s father sighed as if he could thereby rise above all of this, and cupped a hand to his ear, but it was too late; we’d planted a branching tree of arguments and recriminations. The mayor was going on and on about the beauty of our clock, the majesty of our Mynster, and the magnificent singing of the fraas and suurs. At no point did he say anything that was not as sugary as words could be, and yet the feeling I got was one of foreboding, as if he were urging all of his constituents to mass before our gates with bottles of gasoline. The argument between Jesry and his brother decayed into sporadic sniper fire across the table, suppressed by glares and arm-squeezings from exasperated females who had wordlessly squared up into a peacekeeping force. Jesry’s brother had decided that with our hair-splitting debates about how many Tetrarchs there were, we’d shown ourselves to be a lot of insignificant pedants. Jesry informed him that this was an iconography that dated back to before the founding of the city-state of Ethras.

In some eerily quiet way that he must have learned from a book of Vale-lore, Lio had vanished. Strangely for one who studied fighting so much, he hated conflict.

I waited until the bell had rung to induct the newcomers, then excused myself and walked out during the standing ovation. I felt like getting some fresh air. By tradition, the revelry would wind down and the cleanup gather momentum until the gates closed at dawn, so it was unlikely I’d miss much.

The meadow was lit partly by the harvest moon and partly by light diffusing through the skirts of the great canopy, which, when I turned around to look back on it, looked like an enormous straw-colored moon half sunk into a dark sea. Lio was silhouetted against it. He was moving in an odd, dance-like fashion, which for him was hardly unusual. One end of his bolt was modesty-wrapped, but the other was all over the place—flinging out like a bucket of suds, then wafting down for a few moments only to be snapped back and regathered: the same thing he’d been practicing on the statue of Saunt Froga. It was strangely fascinating to watch. I was not his only spectator: a few visitors had gathered around him. Bulky men. Four of them. All wearing the same color. Numbers on their backs.

Lio’s bolt slapped down on top of Number 86 and draped him, making him look like a ghost. The lower part was all in a thrash as he flailed his arms to throw it off. His head was a stationary knob at the top—hence a fine target for the ball of Lio’s foot, which was delivered in a perfectly executed flying kick.

I started running toward them.

86 went down backwards. Lio’s momentum carried him to the same place. He used 86’s torso to cushion his landing, and rolled off smartly, staying low like a spider and snapping his bolt free. 79 was coming in high. Lio spun clear of the line of attack and in so doing got his bolt around 79’s knees. Then he stood up, bringing 79’s knees with him; 79’s face dove at the ground and he didn’t get his arms up—excuse me, down—fast enough to avoid getting a mouthful of turf. For just a moment after Lio spiraled his bolt loose, 79 remained poised upside-down with his legs splayed. Lio absent-mindedly rammed his elbow down into the vee as he turned to see who was next.

Answer: Number 23, running right at him. Lio turned and ran away. But not very fast. 23 gained on him. It was his fate to step on Lio’s bolt, which was dragging behind Lio on the grass. This demolished his gait, which had been clumsy to begin with. Lio sensed it—as how could he not, since the other end of that bolt was lashed around his crotch. He whirled and yanked. 23 somehow remained on his feet, but the price he paid for doing so was that he ended up staggering, bent forward at the waist, leading with his head. Lio planted a foot in his path, got a hand on the back of 23’s head, and used the other’s momentum to flip him over his knee. 23 didn’t know how to fall. He came down hard on his shoulder and pivoted around that to a hard landing on his back. I knew what was coming next: Lio would follow with a “death blow” to the exposed throat. And that is just what he did; but he pulled it, as he always had with me, and refrained from staving in the man’s windpipe.

One remained. And I do mean one, for he had a large numeral 1 on his back. This was the man with his arm in a sling. With his good arm, he had been been rummaging through the pockets of the fallen 86. He found what he had been looking for and stood up, holding something that I was pretty sure was a gun.

His spine-clamp exploded in light, flashing alternately red and blue. He uttered a common profanity. He dropped the gun and collapsed. Every muscle in his body had lost tone in the same instant, jammed by signals from the clamp. All four of the attackers were down now, and the meadow was quiet except for the plaintive warbling of their jeejahs.

A solitary person, somewhere nearby, began clapping. I assumed it was a sline who’d had too much to drink. But looking toward the sound, I was surprised to see a hooded figure in a bolt. He kept shouting an ancient Orth word that meant “hail, huzzah, well done.”

Stalking toward this fraa, I shouted, “I hope you’re stinking drunk, because if not, you’re an idiot. He could have gotten killed. And even if you really are that big of a jerk—don’t you know there’s a couple of Inquisitors skulking around?”

“It’s okay, one of them skulked out to get away from that idiotic speech,” the fraa said.

He pulled back his hood to reveal that he was Varax of the Inquisition.

I can’t guess what my face looked like, but I can tell you that the sight of it was the most entertaining thing Varax had seen in a long time. He tried not to show it too much. “It never ceases to amaze me, what people think of us and why we’re here,” he said. “Will you please forget about this. It is nothing.” He looked up at the top of the Præsidium. “Larger matters are at stake than whether a young fraa at the remote hermitage of Saunt Edhar practices his vlor on some local runagates. For God’s sake,” he continued (which sounded funny to me since few of us believed in God, and he didn’t seem like one of them; but maybe it was just an oath used by cosmopolitan people in the sorts of places where our concent was thought of as a “remote hermitage”). “For God’s sake, raise your sights. Think bigger—the way you were doing this morning. The way your friend, there, does when he decides to tackle four larger men.” And with that Varax drew his hood back over his head and walked back toward the canopy.

He passed the Warden Fendant and the Warden Regulant hurrying the other way. The two of them parted and stood aside to let him pass. Each nodded and uttered some term of respect that no one had ever bothered to teach me.

Both of the Wardens were looking rather tightly wound. In ordinal time, the boundary between their jurisdictions was clear: it was the top of the wall. During Apert, things became complicated as the wall ceased to exist for ten days.

Suur Trestanas was for throwing the Book at Lio. Fraa Delrakhones was satisfied with how things had come out, with a few quibbles: when Lio had noticed the four slines sneaking out the back, he ought to have alerted someone instead of going out to confront them himself.