Everyone was quiet for a while, because every one of us—including I—was startled by what had just happened: I had bossed Jesry around. Unprecedented! But I didn’t care. I was too busy caring about other things.

“Right,” Jesry said, and stomped off into the dark with Barb in tow. The rest of us stood there silently until the sound of Barb’s questions had been drowned out by the seething of the fire and the burble of the river over ice-shoals.

“You want to talk about the tablet,” Lio predicted.

“It’s time to bring that thing down and look at it,” I said.

“I’m surprised you haven’t been in more of a hurry,” Tulia said. “I’ve been dying to see that thing.”

“Remember what happened to Orolo,” I said. “He was incautious. Or maybe he just didn’t care whether he got caught.”

“Do you care?” Tulia asked. It was a blunt question that made the others uneasy. But no one edged away. They all looked at me, keen to hear my answer. The grief that had hit me at the moment Statho had called Orolo’s name was still with me all the time, but I had learned that it could transform in a flash to anger. Not jumping-up-and-down anger but cold implacable fury that settled in my viscera and made me think some most unpleasant thoughts. It was distorting my face; I knew this because younger fids who had used to give me a pleasant greeting when I encountered them in a gallery or on the meadow now averted their eyes.

“Frankly no,” I said. This was a lie, but it felt good. “I don’t care whether I get Thrown Back. But you guys are all involved in it too, and so I’m going to be careful for your sakes. Remember, this tablet might have no useful information whatsoever. Even if it does, we might have to stare into the thing for months or even years before we see anything. So we are talking about a lengthy and secret campaign.”

“Well, it seems to me that we owe it to Orolo to try,” Tulia said.

“I can bring it down whenever you like,” Lio said.

“I know of a dark room beneath Shuf’s Dowment where we could view it,” Arsibalt said.

“Very well,” I said. “I only need a little bit of help from you guys. I’ll do the rest myself. If I get caught, I’ll say you knew nothing and I’ll take responsibility for whatever happens. They’ll give me Chapter Six, or worse. And then I’ll walk out of here and try to find Orolo.”

These words made Tulia and Lio quite emotional in different ways. She looked ready to weep and he looked ready to fight. But Arsibalt was merely impatient with me for being so slow. “There is a larger matter at stake than getting in trouble,” he said. “You are avout, Fraa Erasmas. You swore a vow to keep the Discipline. It’s the most solemn and important thing in your life. That is what you are putting into play. Whether or not you get caught and punished is a detail.”

Arsibalt’s words had a strong effect on me because they were true. I had an answer ready-made, but it wasn’t one that I could speak aloud: I no longer respected that oath. Or at least, I no longer trusted those who were charged with enforcing the Discipline to which I had sworn. But I couldn’t very well say as much to these friends of mine who did still respect it. My mind worked for a while, looking for a way to answer Arsibalt’s challenge, and the others were content to stand there and poke at the dying fire and wait for me to speak.

“I trust Orolo,” I finally said. “I trust that, in his mind, he was in no way violating the Discipline. That he was punished by lesser minds who don’t understand what is really going on. I think he is—that he will be—a—”

“Say it!” Tulia snapped.

“Saunt,” I said. “I will do this for Saunt Orolo.”

Whatever you might say of his rich descendants, Fraa Shuf had had little wealth and no plan. That became obvious as soon as you descended the flagstone stairs into the cellar of the place that he had started and his heirs had finished. I write cellar, but it is more true to say that there was some number of cellars—I never made an exact count—cemented to one another in some graph that no one fully understood. It was a real accomplishment, in a way, to have left such a mess under a building so small. Arsibalt, of course, had an explanation: Shuf’s avocation was stone-mason. He had begun the project, circa 1200, as a sort of eccentric pastime. He’d meant only to build a narrow tower with a room at the top where one avout could sit and meditate. That done, he’d passed it on to a fid who had noticed the tower beginning to lean, and had spent much of his life replacing the foundation—a tetchy sort of undertaking that involved digging out cavities beneath what was already there and socking huge stone blocks into the holes. He’d ended up with more foundation than was really needed, and passed it on to another mason who had done more digging, more foundation work, and more wall-building. And so it had gone for some generations until the Lineage had begun to gather wealth beyond the building itself and had needed a place to store it. The old foundation-work had then been rediscovered, re-excavated, walled, floored, vaulted, and extended. For one of the toxic things about Lineages was that rich avout could get not-so-rich ones to do things for them in exchange for better food, better drink, and better lodging.

Anyway, by the time that the Reformed Old Faanians had begun sneaking back to the ruin of Shuf’s Dowment, hundreds of years after the Third Sack, the earth had reclaimed much of the cellars. I wasn’t sure how the dirt got into those places and covered the floor so deep. Some process humans couldn’t fathom because it went on so gradually. The ROF, who had been so diligent about fixing up the above-ground part, had almost completely ignored the cellars. To your right as you reached the bottom of the stairs there was one chamber where they stored wine and some silver table-service that was hauled out for special occasions. Beyond that, the cellars were a wilderness.

Arsibalt, contrary to his reputation, had become its intrepid explorer. His maps were ancient floor-plans that he found in the Library and his tools were a pickaxe and a shovel. The mystical object of his quest was a vaulted sub-basement that according to legend was where Shuf’s Lineage had stored its gold. If any such place had ever existed, it had been found and cleaned out during the Third Sack. But to rediscover it would be interesting. It would also be a boon for the ROF since, in recent years, avout of other orders had entertained themselves by circulating rumors to the effect that the ROF had found or were accumulating treasure down there. Arsibalt could put such rumors to rest by finding the sub-basement and then inviting people to go and see it for themselves.

But there was no hurry—there never was, with him—and no one was expecting results before Arsibalt’s hair had turned white. From time to time he would come tromping back over the bridge covered with dirt and fill our bath with silt, and we would know he had gone on another expedition.

So I was surprised when he took me down those stairs, turned left instead of right, led me through a few twists and turns that looked too narrow for him, and showed me a rusty plate in the floor of a dirty, wet-smelling room. He hauled it up to expose a cavity below, and an aluminum step-ladder that he had pilfered from somewhere else in the concent. “I was obliged to saw the legs off—a little,” he confessed, “as the ceiling is quite low. After you.”