Two hours later I was standing alone at the gates of Orithena.

The wall was twenty feet high, made of blocks of fine-grained, grey-brown stone that were all the same size and shape. As I stood there, sweating in the sun, waiting for an answer to my knock, I had more than enough time to examine these and to conclude that they had been cast in molds, using some process that fused loose volcanic ash into a sort of concrete. Each was about the size of a small wheelbarrow, say the largest that a couple of avout could move around using simple tools. Anyway the courses were extremely regular, since all of the blocks were clones. Some were slightly browner, some slightly greyer, but on the whole the wall looked as if it had been snapped together out of a child’s building toy kit. The gates themselves were steel plates, which would last a good long while in this climate. After knocking, I stepped well back to get clear of the stored heat radiating from those panels, which were large enough to admit two of the largest drummons abreast. I turned and looked back at the souvenir stand, a few hundred feet down the hill. Cord, leaning back against the shady side of Yul’s fetch, waved at me. Sammann took a picture on his jeejah.

The gate was framed between a pair of cylindrical bastions perforated with small gridded windows. The one on the left sported a tiny door, also of steel. After some time had passed, I ambled over and knocked on it. Framed in its upper half was a hatch, just about the size of my hand. Ten minutes or so later, I heard movement on the other side. A door opened, then slammed shut within the bastion. A latch scrabbled. The little hatch creaked open. The room on the other side of it was dark and, I guessed, delightfully cool. But my eyes were adjusted to the blasting sun of an Ecba noon, and I could see nothing.

“Know that you address a world that is not your own and into which you may not pass save that you make a solemn vow not to leave it again,” said a woman’s voice, speaking in locally accented Fluccish. This was what she was supposed to do. Gatekeepers in places like this had been saying this, or some variant of it, since Cartas.

“Greetings, my suur,” I said, “let us speak in Orth if you please. I am Fraa Erasmas of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math of the Concent of Saunt Edhar.”

A pause, then the hatch closed and was latched. I waited for a while. Then the hatch opened again and I heard a deeper, older woman’s voice.

“I am Dymma,” she said.

“Greetings, Suur Dymma. Fraa Erasmas at your service.”

“That I am your suur, or you my fraa, is very much undecided in my mind, as you come so attired.”

“I have traveled far,” I returned. “My bolt, chord, and sphere were stolen from me as I made peregrin across the Sæculum.”

“No Convox is summoned hither. We do not look for peregrins.”

“It seems inhospitable,” I said, “that Orithena, whence the first Peregrins departed, should not open her gates for one who has returned.”

“Our duty is to the Discipline, not to any custom of hospitality. There are hotels in town; hospitality is their business.” The little hatch made a noise as if she were getting ready to close it.

“What part of the Discipline permits avout to sell soap extramuros?” I asked. “Where does the Discipline state that bolted fraas may stroll about yonder town?”

“Your discourse belies your claim to be avout,” said Dymma, “as a fraa would know that there are variations in the Discipline from one math to the next.”

“Many avout would not know it since they never leave their own maths,” I demurred.

“Precisely,” Dymma said, and I could imagine her smirking in the dark at how deftly she had turned the point to her advantage—for I was on the outside, where no avout should be.

“I grant that your customs may differ from those of the rest of the mathic world,” I began.

She interrupted me. “Not so much so that we would admit one who had not sworn the Vow.”

“Did Orolo swear the Vow, then?”

A few seconds of silence. Then she closed the hatch.

I waited. After a while I turned back, waved to my friends, and pantomimed a big shrug. It was strangely difficult to reconnect with them, even in such a simple gesture, after having stared over the threshold of the math. I’d bid goodbye to them a few minutes ago as if I’d be back in time for lunch. But for all I knew I might end up spending the rest of my life there.

The hatch again. “State your business, you who style yourself Fraa Erasmas,” said a man in Orth.

“Fraa Jad, Millenarian, would know Orolo’s mind on certain matters, and sends me in quest of him.”

“Orolo who was Thrown Back?”

“The same.”

“One on whom the Anathem has been rung down may never more go into a math,” the man pointed out. “And for that matter, one who has been Evoked, and despatched to Convox at Tredegarh, may not suddenly present himself at a different math on the other side of the world.”

I had already suspected the answer before we reached Ecba. Certain clues had bolstered my hypothesis. But, strangely, what clinched it for me was the architecture of the place. No concessions to the Mathic style here. “The riddle that you pose is a trying one,” I admitted, “however, on reflection, its answer is clear.”

“Oh? What is its answer then?”

“This is not a math,” I said.

“What is it if not a math?”

“The cloister of a lineage that was born a thousand years before Cartas and her Discipline.”

“You are well come to Orithena, Fraa Erasmas.”

Heavy bolts moved and the door swung open.

I stepped forward into Orithena, and into the Lineage.

At Saunt Edhar, Orolo had grown a little doughy, though he kept in decent shape by working in his vineyard and climbing the steps to the starhenge. At Bly’s Butte, according to Estemard’s phototypes, he had lost some of that weight and gone shaggy-headed and grown the obligatory Feral beard. But when I picked him up at the gates of Orithena and spun him around five times, his body felt solid, neither fat nor emaciated, and when I finally let him go, tears were making wet tracks down his tanned and clean-shaven cheeks. That was all I saw before my vision was blurred with tears, and then I had to break away and walk to and fro in the shade of the great wall to get my composure back. The Discipline had taught me nothing of how to cope with such an event: throwing my arms around a dead man. Perhaps it meant that I too was now dead to the mathic world, and had moved on to a sort of afterlife. Cord, Yul, Gnel and Sammann had served as my pallbearers.

It took a powerful effort of will to remember that they were still out there, wondering what was going on.

There was a little fountain in the cloister. Orolo fetched me a ladle of water. We sat together in the shade of the clock-tower as I drank. It tasted of sulfur.

Where to begin? “There’s so much I would have said to you, Pa, if I could have, when you were Thrown Back. So much I wanted to say to you in the weeks following. But…”

“It all flows back.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Those things flow back in time and as they do they change—your mind changes them—so that they no longer need talking about quite so much. Fine. Let’s talk of what is fresh and interesting.”

“All right. You’re looking well.”

“You aren’t. Scars honorably earned, I hope?”

“Not really. Learned a lot though.” But I did not really feel like telling him the story. We made idle chitchat for a few minutes until we both realized how ridiculous it was, then got up and began to prowl around. A younger fraa—if that was the correct term for one who lived in a math-that-was-not-a-math—brought me a bolt and chord, which I traded for my Sæcular clothes. Then Orolo led me away from the cloister along a broad path, beaten down by countless sandaled feet and barrow-wheels, to the edge of a pit big enough to swallow the Mynster of Saunt Edhar several times over. If we had built our monument by piling stone on stone, building up from the ground, they had built theirs by digging down, a shovel-load at a time. The walls of the hole were too steep, the soil too loose to be stable; they had shored it up using slabs of fused ash. A ramp spiraled down to the bottom. I started down it, but Orolo held me back. “You’ll notice there are no people down there. It gets hotter as you descend. We dig at night. If you insist on going for a hike, we’ll ascend.” And he gestured up the mountainside.