The time after that, I got my center of gravity low, planted my feet in the mud, made a bone connection from hip to fist, and drilled him right on the cheekbone. “Good!” he moaned, as he was climbing off me. “See if you can actually slow me down though—that’s the whole point, remember?”

I think we did it about ten more times. Since I was suffering a lot more abuse than he was, I sort of lost track. On my best go, I was able to throw him off stride for a moment—but he still took me down.

“How much longer are we going to do this?” I asked, lying in the mud, in the bottom of an Erasmas-shaped crater. If I refused to get up, he couldn’t take me down.

He scooped up a double handful of river water and splashed it on his face, rinsing away blood from nostrils and eyebrows. “That should do,” he said. “I’ve learned what I wanted.”

“Which is?” I asked, daring to sit up.

“That I’ve adjusted, since what happened at Apert.”

“We did all that to obtain a negative result?” I exclaimed, getting to my knees.

“If you want to think of it that way,” he said, and scooped up more water.

I’d never get such a fine opportunity again, so I rolled up, put a foot in his backside, and sent him headlong into the river.

Later, as Lio was engrossed in the comparatively normal and sane activity of shovel-sharpening, I got us back on the topic of what I’d been seeing in the tablet: specifically, Sammann’s behavior during his noon visits.

Once I’d gotten over that sick feeling of having been found out, I’d begun to brood over some other questions. Was it merely a coincidence that the Ita who had discovered the dust jacket was the same one who had visited Cord in the machine hall? I reckoned that either it was a simple coincidence, or else that this Sammann was some kind of high-ranking Ita who was responsible for important tasks having to do with the starhenge. In any case, it booted me nothing to speculate about it.

“Has dis Ita tried to cobbudicade wid you?” Lio asked through puffy lips.

“You mean, like, sneaking into the math at night to slip me notes?”

Lio was baffled by my answer. He showed this in his usual way: by correcting his posture. The scrape of the rock on the shovel paused for a moment. Then he got it. “No, I don’t mean in real time,” he said. “I mean, on the tablet does he—you know.”

“No, Thistlehead, I have to confess I haven’t the faintest idea—”

“If anyone understands surveillance, it’s those guys,” Lio pointed out. “If you buy into Saunt Patagar’s Assertion, sure.”

Lio seemed disappointed that I was so naive as not to believe this. He went back to work on that rock. The scraping really set my teeth on edge but I reckoned it must be putting the hurt on any spies who might be eavesdropping.

Apparently my new role at the Concent of Saunt Edhar was to be the sheltered innocent. I said, “Well, answer me this. If they have us under total surveillance, they must know everything about me and the tablet, right?”

“Well, yeah, you’d think so.”

“So why hasn’t anything happened?” I asked him. “It’s not like Spelikon and Trestanas have soft spots for me.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” he insisted. “I don’t think there’s anything strange about that.”

“How do you figure?”

He paused long enough to give me the idea he was making up an answer on the spot. He dipped his sharpening-rock into the river. “The Ita can’t be telling the Warden Regulant everything they know. Trestanas would have to spend every minute of every day with them, to take in so much intelligence. The Ita must make decisions as to what they will pass on and what they will withhold.”

What Lio was saying opened up all sorts of interesting scenarios that would take me some time to sort out. I didn’t want to stand there with my mouth hanging open any longer than I already had, so I bent down and grabbed the handle of the shovel. It wasn’t going to get any sharper. I looked around for a stand of slashberry that needed to be massacred. It didn’t take long to find one. I made for it and Lio followed me.

“That’s giving the Ita a lot of responsibility,” I said, raising the shovel, then driving it down and forward into the roots of the slashberry canes. Several of them toppled. Most satisfying.

“Assume that they are as intelligent as we are,” Lio said. “Come on! They operate complicated syntactic devices for a living. They created the Reticulum. No one knows better than they do that knowledge is power. By employing strategy and tactics in what they say and what they don’t, they must be able to get things they want.”

I took down a square yard of slashberry while thinking about what he said.

“You’re saying there’s a whole world of Ita/hierarch politics going on over there that we know nothing about.”

“Has to be. Or else they wouldn’t be human,” Lio said.

Then he used Hypotrochian Transquaestiation on me: he changed the subject in such a way as to imply that the question had just been settled—that he had won the point and I had lost. “So, back to my question: does Sammann do anything else on the tablet that sends you a message—or at least indicates he knows that his image is being recorded?” He chucked his sharpening-rock into the river.

The correct response to Hypotrochian Transquaestiation was Hey, not so fast! but Lio’s question was so interesting that I didn’t make a fuss. “I don’t know,” I had to admit, after I’d spent an enjoyable minute or so taking down more slashberry. “But I’m getting bored measuring pie-slices. And I honestly don’t know what else to look at next. So I’ll have a look.”

After that I couldn’t get into the cellar for almost a week. The concent was getting ready for some equinox celebrations and so I had chant rehearsals. The weed war was entering a stage that demanded I draw at least one sketch of it. I had to get my tangle planted. When I was free, there always seemed to be other people at Shuf’s Dowment. The place was becoming hip!

“Be careful what you wish for,” Arsibalt moaned to me, one afternoon. I was helping him carry a stack of beehive frames into a wood shop. “I invited one and all to use the Dowment—now they are doing so—and I can’t work there!”

“Nor I,” I pointed out.

“And now this!” He picked up a putty knife, which I was pretty sure was the wrong tool for the job, and began to pick absent-mindedly at a patch of rotten wood on the corner of a frame. “Disaster!”

“Do you know anything about woodworking?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted.

“How about the metatheorical works of Fraa Paphlagon?”

“That I know a few things about,” he said. “And what is more, I think Orolo wanted us to learn about them.”

“How so?”

“Remember our last dialog with him?”

“Pink nerve-gas-farting dragons. Of course.”

“We must come up with a more dignified name for it before we commit it to ink,” Arsibalt said with a grimace. “Anyway, I believe that Orolo was pushing us to think about some of the ideas that were—are—important to his mentor.”

“Funny he didn’t mention Paphlagon, in that case,” I pointed out. “I remember talking about the later works of Saunt Evenedric, but—”

“One leads to the other. We would have found our way to Paphlagon in due course.”

“You would’ve, maybe,” I said. “What’s it all about?” This seemed a reasonable question. But Arsibalt flinched.

“The sort of stuff Procians hate us for.”

“Like, the Hylaean Theoric World?” I asked.

“That’s what they would call it, as a backhanded way of suggesting we are naive. But, starting at least as early as Protas, the idea of the HTW was developed into a more sophisticated metatheorics. So you could say that Paphlagon’s work is to classical Protan thought what modern group theory is to counting on one’s fingers.”

“But still related to it?”