I knew the answer to the following question before I blurted it out: “Does Artisan Flec—is he a follower, a disciple, of the Warden of Heaven?”
Quin and Orolo both looked at me, agog for different reasons. “Yes,” Quin said. “He listens to their casts while he works.”
“That’s why he made a speely of Provener,” I said. “Because this Warden of Heaven claims to be part of us. If there’s anything mysterious or…well, magnificent about this place, why, that just makes the Warden of Heaven seem that much bigger and more powerful. And to the extent that Artisan Flec is a disciple of the Warden of Heaven, he feels some of that belongs to him.”
Orolo said nothing, which made me embarrassed at the time. When I thought about it later, though, I understood that he didn’t need to say anything because what I’d said was obviously true.
Quin was looking a little confused. “Flec didn’t make a speely.”
“I beg your pardon?” I said.
Fraa Orolo was still distracted, thinking about the Warden of Heaven.
“They wouldn’t allow it. His speelycaptor was too good,” Quin explained.
Being old and wise, Fraa Orolo went rigid, pursed his lips, and looked uneasy. Being neither, I said: “What on earth does that mean?”
Fraa Orolo’s hand came down on my wrist and prevented me from writing any more. And I suspect that his other hand wanted to clamp down on Quin’s mouth. Quin went on, “The Eagle-Rez, the SteadiHand, the DynaZoom—put those all together, and it could have seen straight across into the other parts of your Mynster, even through the screens. Or at least that’s what he was told by the—”
“Artisan Quin!” Fraa Orolo trumpeted, loud enough to draw looks from everyone else in the library. Then he made his voice quite low: “I am afraid you are about to tell us something that your friend Flec learned from talking to the Ita. And I must remind you that such a thing is not allowed under our Discipline.”
“Sorry,” Quin said. “It’s confusing.”
“I know it is.”
“All right. Forget about the speelycaptor. I’m sorry. Where were we?”
“We were talking about the Warden of Heaven,” Fraa Orolo said, relaxing a little, and finally letting go my wrist. “And as far as I’m concerned, the only thing we need to establish is whether he is a Throwback-turned-Mystagogue, or a Bottle Shaker, as the former can be quite dangerous.”
Kefedokhles: (1) A fid from the Halls of Orithena who survived the eruption of Ecba to become one of the Forty Lesser Peregrins. In his old age, he appears to have turned up on the Periklyne, though some scholars believe that this must have been a son or namesake of the Orithenan. He appears as a minor character in several of the great dialogs, most notably Uraloabus, where his timely and long-winded interruption enables Thelenes—who has been thrown back on his heels by the heavy sarcasm of his adversary—to recover his equilibrium, change the subject, and embark upon the systematic annihilation of Sphenic thought that accounts for the last third of the dialog and culminates in the title character’s public suicide. From the Peregrin phase of Kefedokhles’s career, three dialogs survive, and from his years on the Periklyne, eight. Though talented, he gives the impression of being insufferably smug and pedantic, whence sense 2. (2) An insufferably smug or pedantic interlocutor.
“I can puzzle out ‘Throwback-turned-Mystagogue,’” I told Fraa Orolo later. I was chopping carrots in the Refectory kitchen, and he was eating them. “And I can even guess why they are dangerous: because they’re angry, they want to come back to the place that Anathematized them, and even the score.”
“Yes, and that’s why Quin and I spent the whole afternoon with the Warden Fendant.”
“But what’s a Bottle Shaker?”
“Imagine a witch doctor in a society that doesn’t know how to make glass. A bottle washes up on the shore. It has amazing properties. He puts it on a stick and waves it around and convinces his fellows that he has got some of those amazing properties himself.”
“So Bottle Shakers aren’t dangerous?”
“No. Too easily impressed.”
“What of the slines who ate Saunt Bly’s liver? Apparently they weren’t so impressed.”
To hide a smile, Fraa Orolo pretended to inspect a potato. “The point is well taken, but remember that Saunt Bly was living alone on a butte. The very fact of his having been Thrown Back separated him from the artifacts and auts that are most impressive to Bottle Shaker-producing societies.”
“So what did you and the Warden Fendant decide?”
Fraa Orolo glanced around in a way that made it obvious I should have been more discreet.
“Expect more precautions at Apert.”
I lowered my voice. “So, the Sæcular Power will send…I don’t know…?”
“Robots with stun guns? Echelons of horse archers? Cylinders of sleeping gas?”
“I guess so.”
“That depends on to what extent the Warden of Heaven has become the same as the Panjandrums,” Fraa Orolo said. He liked to call the Sæcular Power the Panjandrums. “And that is very difficult for us to make out. Obviously, I can’t make heads or tails of it. It is just the kind of thing for which the office of Warden Fendant was created, and I’m certain that Fraa Delrakhones is working the problem as we speak.”
“Could it lead to…you know…”
“A Sack? Local or general? I certainly don’t think that this is going to culminate in Number Four. Fraa Delrakhones would have heard rumblings from other Wardens Fendant. Even a local sack is most improbable. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a bit of roughhousing on Tenth Night; but that’s why we prepare for Apert by moving all of the stuff we really care about to the labyrinths.”
“You said to Quin that radical changes extramuros had twice culminated in Sacks,” I reminded him.
Fraa Orolo let a moment go by and said, “Yes?” Then, before I could go on, he put on the merry-fraa face that he used when he was trying to humor a chalk hall full of bored fids. “You’re not actually worrying about Number Four, are you?”
I murdered a carrot and said Diax’s Rake three times under my breath.
“Three Sacks-General in 3700 years is not bad,” he pointed out. “The statistics for the Sæcular world are far more alarming.”
“I was worrying about it a little bit,” I said. “But that is not what I was going to ask before you went Kefedokhles on me.”
Orolo said nothing, perhaps because I was gripping a large knife. I was tired and testy. Earlier, I had punched in my sphere to make it a bushel basket and ventured into the tangles nearest the Cloister, only to find they’d already been stripped of produce. To find all the stuff we needed to make the stew, I’d had to cross the river and ransack some of the tangles between it and the wall.
I snatched a hard-earned carrot and aimed it at the sky. “You have only taught me of the stars,” I said. “History I have learned from others—mostly from Fraa Corlandin.”
“He probably told you that the Sacks were our fault,” said Orolo—using our, I noted, in a very elastic way, to mean every avout all the way back to Ma Cartas.
Sometimes, when I was chatting with Thistlehead, he would reach out and give me a little push on the collarbone, and just like that I’d be flailing my arms, aware that one more push would topple me. It was Lio’s charming way of letting me know that he had noticed I was standing in the wrong way, according to his books of Vale-lore. I thought it nonsense. But my body always seemed to agree with Fraa Lio, because it would over-react. Once, in trying to recover my balance, I had pulled a muscle deep in my back that had hurt for three weeks.
Fraa Orolo’s last sentence touched my mind in a similar way. And in a similar way, I over-reacted. My face flushed and my heart beat faster. It was just like the moment in a dialog when Thelenes has tricked his interlocutor into saying something stupid and is about to begin slicing him up like a carrot on a plank.