“Oh, is it some kind of social dominance gesture?”

“Yeah. Also, busting into a private meeting in someone’s place of employment is out of bounds.”

“Well, as long as I have your boss’s attention, maybe I should let him know that—”

“You called a big meeting here at midday?”

“Yeah.”

“Or, as he would think of it, you—a total stranger—invited a whole lot of other total strangers to gather on his property—an active industrial site with lots of dangerous equipment—without asking him first.”

“Well, this is really important, Cord. And it won’t last long. Is that why you and your co-workers were having a meeting?”

“That was the first agenda item.”

“Do you think he is going to physically assault me? Because I know a little vlor. Not as much as Lio but—”

“That would be an unusual way to handle it. Out here it would be a legal dispute. But you guys have your own separate law, so he can’t touch you. And it sounds like the Powers That Be are leaning on him to let this thing happen. He’ll negotiate with them for compensation. He’s also negotiating with the insurance company to make sure that none of this voids his policy.”

“Wow. Things are complicated out here.”

Cord looked in the direction of the Præsidium and sniffled. “And they’re not…in there?”

I thought about that for a while. “I guess my disappearance on Tenth Night probably looks as weird to you as your boss’s insurance policy looks to me.”

“Correct.”

“Well, it wasn’t personal. And it hurt me a lot. Maybe as much as this mess hurts you.”

“That is unlikely,” Cord said, “since ten seconds before you walked in here I got fired.”

“That is wildly irrational behavior!” I protested. “Even by extramuros standards.”

“Yes and no. Yes, it’s crazy for me to get fired because of a decision you made without my knowledge. But no, in a way it’s not, because I’m weird here. I’m a girl. I use the machines to make jewelry. I make parts for the Ita and get paid in jars of honey.”

“Well, I’m really sorry—”

“Just stop,” she suggested.

“If there’s anything I can do—if you’d like to join the math—”

“The math you just got thrown out of?”

“I’m just saying, if there’s anything I can do to make it up to you—”

“Give me an adventure.”

In the moment that followed, Cord realized that this sounded weird, and lost her nerve. She held up her hands. “I’m not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I’m old.”

Now for the first time I reviewed everything that had happened in the last twelve hours. It made me a little dizzy.

“Raz?” she said, after a while.

“I can’t predict the future,” I said, “but based on what little I know so far, I’m afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing.”

“Great!”

“Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.”

That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs,” I said. “We have a protractor.”

“Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

“That’d be great.”

“See you here at noon. If they’ll let me back in, that is.”

“I’ll see to it that they do. Hey, Cord—”

“Yeah?”

“This is probably the wrong time to ask…but could you do me one favor?”

I went into the shade of the great roof over the canal and sat on a stack of wooden pallets, then took out the cartabla and figured out how to use its interface. This took longer than I’d expected because it wasn’t made for literate people. I couldn’t make any headway at all with its search functions, because of all its cack-handed efforts to assist me.

“Where the heck is Bly’s Butte?” I asked Arsibalt when he showed up. It was half an hour before midday. About half of the Evoked had arrived. A small fleet of fetches and mobes had begun to form up: stolen, borrowed, or donated, I had no idea.

“I anticipated this,” Arsibalt said.

“Bly’s relics are all at Saunt Edhar,” I reminded him.

“Were,” he corrected me.

“Excellent! What did you steal?”

“A rendering of the butte as it appeared thirteen hundred years ago.”

“And some of his cosmographical notes?” I pleaded.

No such luck: Arsibalt’s face was all curiosity. “Why would you want Saunt Bly’s cosmographical notes?”

“Because he ought to have noted the longitude and latitude of the place from which he was making the observations.”

Then I remembered we had no way to determine our longitude and latitude anyway. But perhaps that information was entombed in the cartabla’s user interface.

“Well, perhaps it’s all for the best,” Arsibalt sighed.

“What!?”

“We are supposed to go directly to Saunt Tredegarh’s. Bly’s Butte is not between here and there.”

“I don’t think it’s that far out of the way.”

“Didn’t you just tell me you don’t know where it is?”

“I have a rough idea.”

“You can’t even be certain that Orolo went to Bly’s Butte. How are you going to persuade seventeen avout to make an illicit detour to search for a man they Anathematized a few months ago?”

“Arsibalt, I don’t understand you. Why did you bother stealing Bly’s relics if you had no intention of going to find Orolo?”

“At the time I stole them,” he pointed out, “I didn’t know it was a Convox.”

It took me a moment to follow the logic. “You didn’t know we’d be coming back.”

“Correct.”

“You reckoned, after we got finished doing whatever it is they wanted us to do—”

“We could find Orolo, and live as Ferals.”

That was all interesting. Sort of poignant too. It did nothing, however, to solve the problem at hand.

“Arsibalt, have you noticed any pattern in the lives of the Saunts?”

“Quite a few. Which pattern would you like to draw to my attention?”

“A lot of them get Thrown Back before everyone figures out that they are Saunts.”

“Supposing you’re right,” Arsibalt said, “Orolo’s canonization is not going to happen for a long time; he’s not a Saunt yet.”

“Beg pardon,” said a man who had lately been hovering nearby with his hands in his pockets, “are you the leader?”

He was looking at me. I naturally glanced around to see what fresh trouble Barb and Jad had gotten into. Barb was standing not far away, watching some birds that had built their nests up in the steel beams that supported the roof. He’d been doing this for a solid hour. Jad was squatting in a dusty patch, drawing diagrams using a broken tap as a stylus. Shortly after we’d arrived, Fraa Jad had wandered into the machine hall and figured out how to turn on a lathe. Cord’s ex-boss almost had attacked me. Since then, both Jad and Barb had been reasonably well-behaved. So why was this extra asking me if I was the leader? He didn’t seem angry or scared. More…lost.

I guessed that by pretending to be the leader I could make a few things go my way, at least for a little while, until they figured out I was faking it.

“Yes,” I said, “I am called Fraa Erasmas.”

“Oh, good to meet you. Ferman Beller,” he said, and extended his hand a little uncertainly—he wasn’t sure if we used that greeting. I shook his hand firmly and he relaxed. He was a stocky man in his fifth decade. “Nice cartabla you got there.”

This seemed like an incredibly strange thing for him to say until I remembered that extras were allowed to have more than three possessions and that these often served as starting-points for small talk.

“Thanks,” I tried. “Too bad it doesn’t work.”

He chuckled. “Don’t worry. We’ll get you there!” I guessed he was one of the locals who had volunteered to drive us. “Say, look, there’s a guy over there wants to talk to you. Didn’t know if we should, you know, let him approach.”