The legendary treasure-vault turned out to be approximately one arm-span wide and high. The floor was dirt. Arsibalt had spread out a poly tarp so that perishable things—“such as your bony arse, Raz”—could exist here without continually drawing up moisture from the earth. Oh, and there wasn’t any treasure. Just a lot of graffiti carved into the walls by disappointed slines.

It was just about the nastiest place imaginable to work. But we had almost no choices. It wasn’t as if I could sit up on my pallet at night and throw my bolt over my head like a tent and stare at the forbidden tablet.

We employed the oldest trick in the book—literally. In the Old Library, Tulia found a great big fat book that no one had pulled down from the shelf in eleven hundred years: a compendium of papers about a kind of elementary particle theorics that had been all the rage from 2300 to 2600, when Saunt Fenabrast had proved it was wrong. We cut a circle from each page until we had formed a cavity in the heart of this tome that was large enough to swallow the photomnemonic tablet. Lio carried it up to the Fendant court in a stack of other books and brought it back down at suppertime, much heavier, and handed it over to me. The next day I gave it to Arsibalt at breakfast. When I saw him at supper he told me that the tablet was now in place. “I looked at it, a little,” he said.

“What did you learn?” I asked him.

“That the Ita have been diligent about keeping Clesthyra’s Eye spotless,” he said. “One of them comes every day to dust it. Sometimes he eats his lunch up there.”

“Nice place for it,” I said. “But I was thinking of night-time observations.”

“I’ll leave those to you, Fraa Erasmas.”

Now I only wanted an excuse to go to Shuf’s Dowment a lot. Here at last politics worked in my favor. Those who looked askance at the ROF’s fixing up the Dowment did so because it seemed like a sneaky way of getting something for nothing. If asked, the ROF would always insist that anyone was welcome to go there and work. But New Circles and especially Edharians rarely did so. Partly this was the usual inter-Order rivalry. Partly it was current events.

“How have your brothers and sisters been treating you lately?” Tulia asked me one day as we were walking back from Provener. The shape of her voice was not warm-fuzzy. More curious-analytical. I turned around to walk backwards in front of her so that I could look at her face. She got annoyed and raised her eyebrows. She was coming of age in a month. After that, she could take part in liaisons without violating the Discipline. Things between us had become awkward.

“Why do you ask? Just curious,” I said.

“Stop making a spectacle of yourself and I’ll tell you.”

I hadn’t realized I was making a spectacle of myself but I turned back around and fell in step beside her.

“There is a new strain of thought,” Tulia said, “that Orolo was actually Thrown Back as retribution for the politicking that took place during the Eliger season.”

“Whew!” was the most eloquent thing I could say about that. I walked on in silence for a while. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. If you couldn’t be Thrown Back for stealing mead and selling it on the black market to buy forbidden consumer goods, then what wouldn’t bring down the Anathema? And yet—

“Ideas like that are evil,” I said, “because some creepy-crawly part of your brain wants to believe in them even while your logical mind is blasting them to pieces.”

“Well, some among the Edharians have been letting their creepy-crawly brains get the better of them,” Tulia said. “They don’t want to believe in the mead and the speelycaptor. Apparently, Orolo brokered a three-way deal that sent Arsibalt to the ROF in exchange for—”

“Stop,” I said, “I don’t want to hear it.”

“You know what Orolo did and so it’s easier for you to accept,” she said. “Others are having trouble with it—they want to make it into a political conspiracy and say that the thing with the mead never happened.”

“Not even I am that cynical about Suur Trestanas,” I said. In the corner of my eye I saw Tulia turn her head to look at me.

“Okay,” I admitted, “Let me put it differently. I don’t think she’s a conspiracist. I think she’s just plain evil.”

That seemed to satisfy Tulia.

“Look,” I said, “Fraa Orolo used to say that the concent was just like the outside world, except with fewer shiny objects. I had no idea what he was getting at. Now that he’s gone, I see it. Our knowledge doesn’t make us better or wiser. We can be just as nasty as those slines that beat up Lio and Arsibalt for the fun of it.”

“Did Orolo have an answer?”

“I think he did,” I said, “he was trying to explain it to me during Apert. Look for things that have beauty—it tells you that a ray is shining in from—well—”

“A true place? The Hylaean Theoric World?” Again her face was hard to read. She wanted to know whether I believed in all that stuff. And I wanted to know if she did. I reckoned the stakes were higher for her. As an Edharian, I could get away with it. “Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know if he would have called it by that name. But it’s what he was driving at.”

“Well,” she said, after giving it a few moments’ thought, “it’s better than spending your life swapping conspiracy theories.”

That’s not saying much, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud. The decision Tulia had made to join the New Circle was a real decision with real consequences. One of which was that she must be guarded when talking about ideas like the HTW that they considered to be superstitions. She could believe in that stuff if she wanted; but she had to keep it to herself, and it was bad form for me to try to pry it out of her.

Anyway I now had an excuse to hang around at Shuf’s Dowment: I was trying to act as a peacemaker among the orders by accepting the ROF’s standing invitation.

After breakfast each morning I would attend a lecture, typically with Barb, and work with him on proofs and problems until Provener and the midday meal. After that I would go out to the back part of the meadow where Lio and I were getting ready for the weed war, and work, or pretend to, for a while. I kept an eye on the bay window of Shuf’s Dowment, up on the hill on the other side of the river. Arsibalt kept a stack of books on the windowsill next to his big chair. If someone else was there, he would turn these so that their spines were toward the window. I could see their dark brown bindings from the meadow. But if he found himself alone, he would turn them so that their white page-edges were visible. When I noticed this I would stop work, go to a niche-gallery, fetch my theorics notes, and carry them over the bridge and through the page-tree-coppice to Shuf’s Dowment, as if I were going there to study. A few minutes later I’d be down in the sub-cellar, sitting crosslegged on that tarp and working with the tablet. When I was finished I would come back up through the cellars. Before ascending the flagstone steps I would look for another signal: if someone else was in the building, Arsibalt would close the door at the top of the stairs, but if he were alone, he’d leave it ajar.

One of the many advantages that photomnemonic tablets held over ordinary phototypes was that they made their own light, so you could work with them in the dark. This tablet began and ended with daylight. If I ran it back to the very beginning, it became a featureless pool of white light with a faint bluish tinge: the unfocused light of sun and sky that had washed over the tablet after I had activated it on top of the Pinnacle during Fraa Paphlagon’s Voco. If I put the tablet into play mode I could then watch a brief funny-looking transition as it had been slid into Clesthyra’s Eye, and then, suddenly, an image, perfectly crisp and clear but geometrically distorted.