“Sounds like a warning!”
“Any time you get that many in a room, there’s no dialog worthy of the name—it’s all stilted. Filtered.”
“Political?”
“Of course. Just—just don’t try to out-politic these guys.”
“Because I’m a complete idiot when it comes to—”
“Exactly.”
We ran on silently for a few more strides, and she thought better of it. “Remember our conversation, Raz? Before Eliger?”
“You were going to nail down the political end of things,” I recalled, “so that I could memorize more digits of pi.”
“Something like that,” she said, tossing off a chuckle just to be a good sport.
“And how’s that plan working out?”
“Just tell the truth. Don’t try to be tricky. It’s not in you.”
Half of the visible universe was now grey granite. We ran up steps whose only purpose was to support steps that held up other tiers and hierarchies and systems of steps. But at some point things flattened out. An entrance was dead ahead of us, but the wrong one. Peregrins were supposed to enter from the direction of the Day Gate, so we had to run a quarter of the way around the Mynster and go in the grandest of all the entrances, which I’d have stared at for half an hour if Tulia hadn’t grabbed my chord like a leash and hauled me through. We ran through a lobby sort of thing and into a nave that was so large I thought we’d gone outdoors again. An aisle ran up the center. Three-quarters of the way along, I could see the tail end of a procession of avout, shuffling toward the chancel. Tulia dropped back, gave me a slap on the bottom that could have been heard from the top of the Precipice, and hissed: “Follow the guys in the loincloths! Do what they do!” At least thirty heads turned to stare; the pews were sparsely occupied with Sæculars.
I dropped to a brisk walk—needed to get my breathing under control—and timed it so that I caught up with half a dozen “guys in loincloths” just as they got to the screen at the head of the aisle. Following them through, I found myself sharing a big semicircular chamber—the chancel—with an assortment of hierarchs, a choir, the guys in the loincloths, and several other contingents of avout.
Inbrase was another one of our mathic auts. A formal program, hinged at several instants when coded movements were performed, ancient phrases called out, or symbolic objects manipulated in certain ways, and ventilated by musical entertainments and speeches from purpled hierarchs. A Sæcular would have seen it as ludicrous foppery if not outright witchcraft. I tried to get back into the spirit of things and see it as an avout was supposed to. That, after all, was the point of Inbrase: to get peregrins back into the mathic frame of mind. To that end, it was more fabulous and impressive than daily auts such as Provener. Or perhaps that was just how they did everything at Tredegarh. Their hierarchs really knew how to put on a show—to grab the audience in the way that great actors did in a theater. Their raiments were really something, and their numbers were intimidating; the Primate was flanked not just by his two Wardens but by echelons of other hierarchs, and not junior ones either, but people who had sub-entourages of their own, and looked as if they might have been Primates themselves. I was looking, I realized, at some sort of high council of Primates who had all been Evoked from their concents, presumably so that they could run the Convox. Or the mathic side of it, at least. Somewhere on the other side of a screen there must be a cabinet of Panjandrums who were as important in the Sæcular world as these hierarchs were in the mathic.
I felt like a scabby mendicant, and considered it a brilliant stroke of good fortune that I was standing next to an order of avout who wore only handkerchiefs. As I looked at those, however, I began to see that these were actually bolts that had frayed away to almost nothing. The loose fibers that dangled from their fraying ends had clumped together into ropy dreadlocks that these men (they were all men) used to tie the remaining snatches of fabric around their midsections. It was our tradition at Edhar to allow one end of the bolt to fray. The most ancient members of our order, however, when they succumbed to old age, might be buried in bolts with fringes a few inches long. In this order, it seemed, bolts were passed down from older to younger avout. Some of them must be thousands of years old. One of these strange half-naked fraas had a pot belly, and the rest were gaunt. They belonged to a race that tended to live near the Equator. Their hair was wild, but not so wild as their eyes, which stared into the space above the chancel floor without seeming to register anything. I got the feeling they weren’t used to being indoors.
The other six contingents wore full-sized bolts in complicated wraps. That was all they had in common with one another. Each of the groups was accessorized with a completely different system of turbans, hats, hoods, footgear, under-bolts, over-bolts, and even jewelry. Plainly, we at Edhar were at the austere end of the spectrum. Perhaps only the Valers and the guys in the loincloths were more ascetic than we.
After we’d worked through the opening rounds of pomp, the Primate stepped up to say a few words. It was possible to hear people sighing and settling in the dark naves behind the screens. I risked looking down at myself and saw dirty bare feet, a rough, dull-colored bolt in the crudest possible wrap (the Just Got Up Special), scars that were still red, and bruises faded yellow-green. I was the token Feral.
One of the other Inbrase groups—the most numerous and dressed-up—stepped forward and sang a number. They had enough strong voices to pull off six-part polyphony without showing the strain. What a fine gesture, I thought. Then the group next to them rattled off a monophonic chant, using modes and tonalities I’d never heard before. I saw the next group worrying cheat sheets out of their bolts. Finally then, understanding came over me, and I got the feeling one gets only in an especially sadistic nightmare: I was perfectly trapped. Each group had to sing something! I was a group—of one! And it wasn’t going to work for me to sheepishly wave my hands and beg off. No one at the Convox would think that was cute; no one would think it was funny.
It wouldn’t be that bad, I told myself. Expectations would be low. I was a reasonably competent singer. If someone had stuck a piece of music in front of me and said “go!” I could have winged it—sight-read the thing. The hard part was deciding what to sing. Obviously these other groups had sorted it out weeks ago—chosen pieces that said something about who they were, what they thought about at their concents, what musical traditions they had developed to glorify the ideas most precious to them. The musical heritage of the Concent of Saunt Edhar could stand in the same ranks as those of much larger concents. I felt no insecurity there. A sizable contingent from Edhar had already arrived, though, and celebrated Inbrase. Arsibalt and Tulia had no doubt taken the matter in hand and organized a performance, anchored by Fraa Jad’s world-shaking drone, that the rest of the Convox was still talking about at their messals. What, then, was left for me? Harmony and polyphony were out of the question. I wasn’t good enough to blow everyone away with sheer skill. Best to be simple—not to overreach, not to make a fool of myself. Very few soloists were good enough that people would actually want to listen to them for more than a minute or two. I just had to do my bit, to show respect for the occasion, then step back and shut up.
But I didn’t want to just rattle off some random scrap of lesson, which would have been easy, and would have sufficed, because—and I well know how insane this is going to sound—I wanted to touch Ala. Jesry was right about one thing: I was not going to see her until she had made up her mind. But she had to be somewhere in this Mynster, and she had no choice but to listen to what would come out of my mouth. Singing an old lesson we’d learned at Edhar might have evoked nostalgic feelings in her breast but it would be safe and dull. Jesry had been to space. But I was capable of having adventures of my own, learning new things, taking on qualities that Ala knew nothing of—yet. Was there a way of expressing that in music?