There was so much to say that neither of us knew where to begin, so we just stared at each other and made incoherent sounds for a few moments. Which was probably just as well since I didn’t want to say anything in the Regulant court. “I’ll walk with you,” I said, and turned to fall in step alongside him.

“You have to talk to Tulia,” he muttered, as we were ascending to the Fendant court. “You have to talk to Orolo. You have to talk to everyone.”

“Going to your new job?”

“Delrakhones has me doing an internship. Hey, Raz, where the heck are you going?”

“The starhenge.”

“But that’s—” He grabbed my arm. “Hey, idiot, you could be Thrown Back!”

“It’s more important that I do this than that I not be Thrown Back,” I said. Which was pretty stupid, but I was feeling rebellious and not thinking very hard. “I’ll explain it to you later.”

I had led Lio off the inner walkway, which was too crowded for comfort, and out toward the periphery of the Fendant court as if we were going to stand on the ledge. Along the way we had to pass through a narrow arch. He made an after-you gesture. I stepped into the arch—and realized at the same instant that I’d just turned my back on him. By the time that had penetrated my brain, he had my arm wrapped up the wrong way. I had a choice: move, and spend the next two months with my arm in a sling, or not move. I chose not to move.

My tongue still worked. “Good to see you again, Thistlehead. First you get me in trouble—now this.”

“You got your own self in trouble. Now I’m going to make sure you don’t do it again.”

“Is this how they do things in the New Circle?”

“You shouldn’t even try to speak of how Eliger came out until you know what’s going on.”

“Well, if you’ll let go of me so I can get up to the starhenge, my next step will be the Refectory where I’ll get all the latest.”

“Look,” he said, and levered me around so that I could see back the way we had come. A hush had fallen over the stairs. I was half afraid we’d been seen. But then I saw a procession of black-clad figures in tall hats on their way up. They passed into the chasm above and began to clang on the ironwork.

“Huh,” I said, “no wonder it’s so clean up there.”

“You’ve been up there!?” Lio was so startled that he tightened his grip on me in a way that hurt.

“Let go! I promise I won’t go any farther up,” I said.

Lio released my arm. I slowly and judiciously got it arranged in a more human position before standing up to face him.

“What did you see?” Lio wanted to know.

“Nothing yet, but there’s a tablet up there I have to retrieve that might—might—give us a hint.”

He considered it. “That will be a challenging operation.”

“Is that a promise, Lio?”

“Just an observation.”

“Do those Ita go up there on some kind of a predictable schedule?”

Lio parted his lips to answer, then got a shrewd look on his face and said, “I’m not going to tell you that.” Then something occurred to him. “Look, I’m late.”

“Since when do you care about that?”

“A lot has changed. I have to go. Now. Talk to you later, okay?”

“Lio!”

He turned to look back at me. “What!?”

“Who was Fraa Paphlagon?”

“He taught Fraa Orolo half of what he knew.”

“Who taught him the other half?” I asked, but Lio was already gone. For a minute I stood there listening to the upward progress of the Ita, wondering whether they checked the equipment for tablets. Wondering where I could get myself an Ita disguise.

Then my stomach growled. As if it were wired directly to my feet, I headed for the Refectory.

It had been ten years and a couple of months since I had watched a moving picture, but I could still remember a kind of scene where a spaceman walks into a starport bar, or a steppe rider into a dusty saloon, and all goes silent for a few moments. That was how it was when I entered the Refectory.

I had arrived early—a mistake, since it gave me no way of controlling who I would sit with. A few of the Edharians had come early and staked out tables, but they glanced away from me when I tried to catch their eye. I got in the queue behind a couple of Edharian cosmographers, but they turned their backs on me and put on a show of discussing, with great intensity, some new proof that they had found in the ten years’ worth of books and journals that had been dumped on the threshold of the library at Apert.

It was the Reformed Old Faanians’ night to serve dinner. Arsibalt gave me an extra dollop of stew and shook my hand—the first warm greeting I had received. We agreed to talk later. He seemed happy.

I decided to sit down at an empty table and see what happened. Within a few minutes, fraas and suurs of the New Circle began to cluster around me, and each had some jovial remark to throw my way about my time in the cell.

After a quarter of an hour, Fraa Corlandin showed up cradling something old, dark, and crusty, like a mummified infant. He set it down on the table and peeled off some wrappings. It was an ancient firkin of wine. “From our chapterhouse to you, Fraa Erasmas,” he announced, in lieu of a greeting. “One who has endured extraordinary penance deserves an extraordinary libation. This won’t give you those weeks back. But it will help you forget everything about the Book!”

Corlandin was being a little bit clever. I was glad of it. Given his liaison with Suur Trestanas—which I assumed was still going on—this moment was bound to be awkward. The wine was both a kind gesture and a way of sliding past that awkwardness. Though as he fussed with the stopper I felt a little uneasy. Was this also meant to be a celebration of my joining their order?

Fraa Corlandin seemed to be reading my mind. “This is strictly to celebrate your freedom—not to encroach on it!” he said.

Someone else had fetched a wooden case and opened it to reveal a matched set of silver thimbles, each engraved with the crest of the New Circle. A fraa and a suur plucked these one by one from their velvet-lined niches and polished them with their bolts. Corlandin busied himself with the stopper, a brittle contraption of clay and beeswax, difficult to remove without shattering it and contaminating the wine. Just to watch Fraa Corlandin was to feel a link to a time when concents had been richer, classier, more well-endowed, and—though this made no sense at all—somehow older than they were now.

The cask was obviously made of Vrone oak, which meant that the wine inside of it had been made, in some other concent, from the juice of the library grape, and sent here to age.

The library grape had been sequenced by the avout of the Concent of the Lower Vrone in the days before the Second Sack. Every cell carried in its nucleus the genetic sequences, not just of a single species, but of every naturally occurring species of grape that the Vrone avout had ever heard of—and if those people hadn’t heard of a grape, it wasn’t worth knowing about. In addition, it carried excerpts from the genetic sequences of thousands of different berries, fruits, flowers, and herbs: just those snatches of data that, when invoked by the biochemical messaging system of the host cell, produced flavorful molecules. Each nucleus was an archive, vaster than the Great Library of Baz, storing codes for shaping almost every molecule nature had ever produced that left an impression on the human olfactory system.

A given vine could not express all of those genes at once—it could not be a hundred different species of grape at the same time—so it “decided” which of those genes to express—what grape to be, and what flavors to borrow—based on some impossibly murky and ambiguous data-gathering and decision-making process that the Vrone avout had hand-coded into its proteins. No nuance of sun, soil, weather, or wind was too subtle for the library grape to take into account. Nothing that the cultivator did, or failed to do, went undetected or failed to have its consequences in the flavor of the juice. The library grape was legendary for its skill in penetrating the subterfuges of winemakers who were so arrogant as to believe they could trick it into being the same grape two seasons in a row. The only people who had ever really understood it had been lined up against a wall and shot during the Second Sack. Many modern winemakers chose to play it safe and use old-fashioned grapes. Developing a fruitful relationship with the library grape was left to fanatics like Fraa Orolo, who had made it his avocation. Of course, library grapes hated the conditions at Saunt Edhar, and were still reacting to an incident fifty years ago when Orolo’s predecessor had pruned the vines incorrectly, poisoning the soil with bad memories encoded in pheromones. The grapes chose to grow up small, pale, and bitter. The resulting wine was an acquired taste, and we didn’t even try to sell it.