At the same moment I opened the door to the starhenge. Daylight flooded through. I cringed. How could this possibly go unnoticed?

Calm down, I told myself, only four people are in the well where they can see this. And all eyes are on Fraa Paphlagon.

Looking down one more time, I discovered a flaw in that logic. All eyes were on Fraa Paphlagon—except for Fraa Paphlagon’s! He had chosen this moment to tilt his head back and gaze straight up. And why not? It was the last time he would ever look on this place. If I’d been in his situation, I’d have done the same.

I could not read his facial expression at this distance. But he must have seen the light flooding through the open door.

He stood frozen for a moment, thinking, then slowly lowered his gaze to face Statho. “I, Fraa Paphlagon, answer your call,” he said—the first line in a litany that would go on for another minute or two.

I passed onto the starhenge and closed the door softly behind me.

I had been expecting that everything would be filmed with dust and speckled with bird droppings—Orolo’s fids spent an inordinate amount of time up here keeping things clean. But it wasn’t too bad. Someone must have been coming up here to look after it.

I came to the windowless blockhouse that served as laboratory, passed through its light-blocking triple doors, and fetched a photomnemonic tablet, blanked and wrapped in a dust jacket.

What image should I record on it? I had no clue what it was that the hierarchs didn’t want us to see, so I had no way of knowing where I should aim a telescope.

Actually, I had a pretty good idea what it must be: a large asteroid headed in our direction. That was the only thing I could imagine that would account for the closure of the starhenge. But this didn’t help me. I couldn’t take a picture of such a rock unless I aimed Mithra and Mylax directly at it, which was impossible unless I knew its orbital elements to a high degree of precision. To say nothing of the fact that aiming the big telescope in these circumstances would draw everyone’s attention.

But there was another instrument that didn’t need to be aimed, because it couldn’t move: Clesthyra’s Eye. I started jogging toward the Pinnacle as soon as this idea entered my head.

As I climbed the spiral stair, I had plenty of time to review all of the reasons that this was unlikely to work. Clesthyra’s Eye could see half of the universe, from horizon to horizon, it was true. The fixed stars showed up as circular streaks, owing to the rotation of Arbre on its axis. Fast-moving objects showed up as straight paths of light. But the track made by even a large asteroid would be vanishingly faint, and not very long.

By the time I’d reached the top of the Pinnacle, I’d put these quibbles out of my mind. This was the only tool I had. I had to give it a try. Later I’d sort through the results and see what I could see.

Beneath the fisheye lens was a slot carved to the exact dimensions of the tablet in my hand. I broke the seal on the dust jacket, reached in, and got my palm under the opaque base of the tablet. I drew off the dust jacket. The wind tore it out of my grip and slapped it against the wall, just out of reach. The tablet was a featureless disk, like the blank used for grinding a telescope mirror, but darker—as if cast in obsidian. When I activated its remembrance function, its bottom-most layer turned the same color as the sun, for that was the origin of all the light now striking the tablet’s surface. Because the tablet was out in the open with no lenses or mirrors to organize the light coming into it, it could not form an image of anything it saw—not of the bleak winter sun lobbing across the southern sky, not of the icy clouds high in the north, and not of my face.

But that was about to change, and so before doing anything else I drew my bolt over my head and shaped it into a long dark tunnel. If this precaution actually turned out to be necessary—that is, if this tablet ever found its way to the Warden Regulant—I’d probably be found out anyway. But as long as I was up to something sneaky, I felt an obligation to do a proper job of it.

I introduced the tablet into the slot below the Eye and slid it home, then closed the dust cover behind it. It would now record everything the Eye saw—beginning with a distorted image of my bolt-covered backside scurrying out of view—until it filled up, which at its current settings would take a couple of months.

Then I’d have to come back up here and retrieve it—a small problem I had not even begun to think about.

As I was descending the Pinnacle, thinking about this, something big and loud and fast clattered across the empty space between me and the Millenarians’ crag. It scared the life out of me. It was a thousand feet away, but it felt as immediate as a slap in the face. In tracking its progress, I sacrificed my balance and had to collapse my legs to avoid toppling from the rail-less stair. It was a type of aerocraft that could rotate its stubby wings and turn into a two-bladed helicopter. It made a slicing downward arc, as if using the Mynster as a pylon, and settled into a steep glide path aimed at the plaza before the Day Gate. My view of this was blocked from here, so I rose carefully to my feet, ran down to the base of the Pinnacle, then sprinted across the lid of the starhenge. Realizing that I was about to hurl myself from the Præsidium—something I no longer cared to do—I aimed myself at one of the megaliths, put on the brakes, and stopped myself by slamming into it with my hands. Then I peered around its corner just in time to see the aerocraft—rotors now pointed up—settling in for a landing on the plaza. The rotor wash made visible patterns in the surface of the pond and splayed the twin fountains.

A few moments later, two purple-robed figures came into view, having just emerged from the Day Gate. Varax and Onali stripped off their hats so that the wind from the rotors wouldn’t do it for them. Two paces behind was Fraa Paphlagon, leaning forward into the hurricane and hugging himself, clawing up handfuls of wayward bolt so that he wouldn’t be stripped nude. Varax and Onali paused flanking the aerocraft’s door and turned back to look at him. Each extended an arm and they helped Paphlagon clamber inside. Then they piled in behind him. Some automatic mechanism pulled the hatch closed even as the rotors were spinning up and the aerocraft beginning to lose its grip on the plaza. Then the pilot rammed the throttles home and the thing jumped fifty feet into the air in a few heartbeats. The wings tilted. It took on some forward velocity and accelerated up and away over the pond and the burgers’ town, then banked away to the west.

It was just about the coolest thing I’d ever seen and I couldn’t wait to talk about it in the Refectory with my friends.

Then I remembered that I was an escaped prisoner.

By the time I got into the chronochasm, Voco was long since over. The sound of voices still crowded the well, but it was dwindling rapidly as the naves emptied. Most were leaving the Mynster but some would ascend the stairs in the corner towers to resume their work in the Wardens’ courts. I banged and clanged in my haste. As I got lower, though, I had to be more judicious in my movements in spite of the fear that the quickest of the climbers would get there before I could.

The first ones up were two young hierarchs on the Warden Fendant’s staff who were climbing as fast as they could in the hope that they could get to their balcony and catch a glimpse of the aerocraft before it flew out of sight. I reached the Fendant court from above just before they reached it from below. Caught on the walkway, I looked for a place to hide. This level of the Mynster was cluttered with things that only a Warden Fendant could think of as ornaments: mostly, busts and statues of dead heroes. The most awful of these was a life-sized bronze of Amnectrus, who had been the Warden Fendant at the moment of the Third Sack. He was depicted in the pose where he’d spent the last twenty hours of his life, kneeling behind a parapet peering through the optics of a rifle that was as long as he was tall. Amnectrus was cast in bronze but the rifle and the lake of spent shell-casings in which he was immersed were actual relics. The pedestal was his sarcophagus. I dove behind it. The two fleet-footed ones sprinted down the walkway, headed for the west side of the balcony. They passed right by me. I got up, took the long way round to avoid any more such, and plunged down the steps to the Regulant court. I dove to the floor behind the half-wall that ran around the walkway, then levered myself up to hands and knees. In that attitude I scurried round until I found my cell. I’d never thought I’d be happy to see the place.