“What are you going to call them—us—now?” Quin asked.

“I have no idea. What matters is that, under the Second Reconstitution, there are two coequal Magisteria. People can come up with words for them later.”

We had reached a place where the crater’s formerly knifelike edge had already softened to a round shoulder under the action of rain and wind. It was dotted with a few opportunistic weeds and etched with colored lines strung between stakes. “The boundaries will run wherever we put them. Here’s one.” I plucked at a red string.

Quin was aghast. “How can you just do that? Go out and stake a claim? The lawyers must be going crazy.”

“We have a small army of Procians running their mouths for us. The lawyers don’t stand a chance.”

“So everything on this side of the string is your property?”

“Yes. The walls will run parallel to it, just inside.”

“So you’ll still have walls?”

“Yes. With gateways—but no gates,” I said.

“Then why bother building the walls?”

“They have symbolic content,” I said. “They say, ‘you’re passing into a different Magisterium now, and there are certain things you must leave behind.’” But I knew I was not being altogether forthright. Half a mile away I could make out half a dozen people in bolts, peering through instruments and pounding in stakes: Lio and the crowd of ex-Ringing Vale avout he ran with now. I knew exactly what they were discussing: when war breaks out between the Magisteria and we plug the holes in the wall with gates, we’ll want interlocking fields of fire between this bastion and the next to repel any assault on the intervening stretch of wall…

I whistled between my fingers. They looked over at us. I pointed to the bundles of stakes that Quin and I had just dropped. A couple of the Valers began sprinting to fetch them. Quin and I turned to descend the way we’d come. But we were pulled up short by an answering whistle, which I recognized as Lio’s. I looked his way. He gestured down the outer slope of the crater wall, trying to get me to see something. There wasn’t much to reward looking: just a long slope of boiled earth, burned wood, shredded insulation, and pulverized stone. Farther away, a flat place where pilgrims like Quin had parked their vehicles. Finally, though, I saw what Lio wanted me to see: a vein of yellow starblossom rushing up the slope.

“What is it?” Quin asked.

“Barbarian invasion,” I said. “Long story.” I waved to Lio.

Quin and I turned around and began the descent into the crater. We had enough time to go on a detour to a certain terrace that my Edharian fraas and suurs and I had built soon after we had come to this place. Unlike most of the terraces, which were beginning to sprout plants that would eventually grow up into tangles, this one was covered with scrap-metal trellises that would one day support library vines. Some months ago, Fraa Haligastreme had paid us a visit from Edhar, and he’d brought with him root stock from Orolo’s old vineyard. We’d planted it in the ground beneath these trellises, and since then visited it frequently to see whether the vines, in a fit of pique, were committing suicide. But they were sending out new growth all over the place. We were near the equator, but almost two miles high, so the sun was intense but the weather was cool. Who would’ve thought that rockets and grapevines liked the same sorts of places?

As we were walking back down to the lake’s edge, Quin—who had been silent for a while—cleared his throat. “You mentioned that there were certain things you have to leave behind when you enter this new Magisterium,” he reminded me. “Does that include religion?”

One measure of how much things had changed was that this didn’t make me the least bit nervous. “I’m glad you brought that up,” I said. “I noticed that Artisan Flec came with you.”

“Flec’s been going through rough times,” Quin wanted me to know. “His wife divorced him. Business hasn’t been so good. The whole Warden of Heaven thing sent him into a tailspin. He just needed to get out of town. Then, Barb spent the whole drive, er…”

“Planing him?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I just want to say, if his presence here is not appropriate…”

“The rule of thumb we’ve been using is that Deolaters are welcome as long as they’re not certain they’re right,” I said. “As soon as you’re sure you’re right, there’s no point in your being here.”

“Flec’s not sure of anything now,” Quin assured me. Then, after a minute: “Can you even have an Ark, if you’re not sure you’re right? Isn’t it just a social club, in that case?”

I slowed, and pointed to an outcropping of bedrock that protruded from the curving wall of the crater. Smoke was braiding up from a fire that had been kindled on its top, before the entrance of a tent. My fraa was up there burning his breakfast. “Flec should hike up to Arsibalt’s Dowment,” I suggested. “It is going to be a center for working on that sort of thing.”

Quin made a wry grin. “I’m not sure if Flec wants to work on it.”

“He just wants to be told?”

“Yes. Or at least, that’s what he’s used to—what he’s comfortable with.”

“I have a few Laterran friends now,” I said, “and one of them, the other day, was telling me about a philosopher named Emerson who had some useful upsights about the difference between poets and mystics. I’m thinking that it’s just as applicable in our cosmos as it is in his.”

“I’ll bite. What’s the difference?”

“The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.”

“Someone here must have said something like that once,” Quin said.

“Oh, yes. It’s a great time to be a Lorite. We have a whole contingent of them here, gearing up for the great project of absorbing the knowledge from the four new cosmi.” I looked toward the tent-cloister where Karvall and Moyra and their fraas and suurs had encamped, but they’d not emerged from under canvas yet. Probably still tying their outfits on. “Anyway, my point is that guys like Flec have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the mystical, as opposed to poetic, way of using their minds. And there’s an optimistic side of me that says such a person could break that addiction, be retrained to think like a poet, and accept the fluxional nature of symbols and meaning.”

“Okay, but what’s the pessimistic side telling you?”

“That the poet’s way is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty, that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.”

“Well,” Quin said, “it sounds like you’re going to be spending a lot of time up on that rock with Arsibalt.”

“Well, someone has to keep the poor guy company.”

“For guys like me and Flec, do you have anything? Besides hammering stakes into mud?”

“We are actually building some permanent structures,” I said, “mostly on the island. The new Magisterium needs a headquarters. A capitol. You came just in time to watch the cornerstone being laid.”

“When will that happen?”

I slowed again and checked the position of the bright place in the sky. The sun was almost ready to burn through. “Noon sharp.”

“You have a clock?”

“Working on it.”

“Why today? Is this a special day in your calendar?”

“It will be after today,” I said. “Day Zero, Year Zero.”

Chance or luck had endowed us with half of a causeway to the island: a launch gantry that had gone down like a tall tree in a gust of wind. It was twisted, fractured, and half melted, but still more than able to bear the weight of humans and wheelbarrows. Halfway from shore to island, it ramped beneath the surface. Beyond there we had extended it with pontoons of closed-cell foam, anchored by scavenged cables to the submerged part of the gantry. The last few hundred yards still had to be managed on small boats. Yul liked to swim it. “We would like to build a simple cable-car system,” I told Quin, as we rowed across the gap, “but it is a serious praxic challenge to anchor a tower in the soil of the island, which is still loose. That might be something where father and son could work together.” For Quin, Barb, and I were all crossing together. I don’t think Barb had come along for the companionship so much as because the breeze had shifted and carried the scent of cooking food from island to shore. From his perch in the bow, Barb had already identified the barbecue pits and other such attractions he would be visiting first. “You have an oven!” he exclaimed, pointing to a smoking masonry dome that had just interrupted the skyline.