There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane.
Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed—but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks—and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time—after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter Nine would emerge permanently damaged.
Enough of the Book. A more interesting question: why was I here? It seemed that Suur Trestanas wanted me removed from the community for as long as the Inquisitors were among us. Chapter Three wouldn’t have taken me long enough. Four might have done it, but she’d given me Five just in case I happened to be one of those persons who was good at memorizing numbers.
The dawn aut—which was attended only by a smattering of avout who were especially fond of ceremonies—woke me every morning. I snapped my bolt off the wooden pallet that was the cell’s only furniture and wrapped it around myself. I pissed down a hole in the floor and washed in a stone basin of cold water, ate my bread and drank my milk, set the empty dishes by the door, sat on the floor, and arranged the Book, a pen, a bottle of ink, and some leaves on the surface of the pallet. My sphere served as a rest for my right elbow. I worked for three hours, then did something else, just to clear my head, until Provener. Then, during the whole time that Lio and Jesry and Arsibalt were winding the clock, I was doing pushups, squats, and lunges. My team were working harder and getting stronger because of my absence, and I didn’t want to be weak when I emerged.
My teammates must have somehow figured out which cell I was in, for after Provener they’d have a picnic lunch in the meadow right beneath my window. They didn’t dare look up or wave to me—Trestanas must be glaring down at them, just waiting for such a mistake—but they’d begin each lunch by hoisting tankards of beer in someone’s honor and quaffing deeply. I got the message.
Plenty of ink and leaves were available, so I began to write down the account you have been reading. As I did so, I became haunted by the idea that there was some pattern woven through the last few weeks’ events that I had failed to notice. I put this down to the altered state of mind that comes over a solitary prisoner with nothing to keep him company save the Book.
One day about two weeks into my penance, my morning work-shift was interrupted by strange bells. Through my door I could see a stretch of the bell-ropes that ran from the ringers’ balcony up toward the carillon. I moved round to the other side of the pallet, turning my back to the window, so that I could observe the jerking and recoiling of those ropes. All avout were supposed to be able to decode the changes. I had never been especially good at it. The tones melted together in my ears and I could not shape them into patterns. But watching the movements of the ropes somehow made it easier; for such work my eyes were better suited than my ears. I could see the way in which a given rope’s movement was conditioned by what its neighbors had done on the previous beats. In a minute or two, without having to ask anyone’s help, I was able to recognize this as the call to Eliger. One of my crop was about to join an order.
After the changes were rung, half an hour passed before the aut began, and it was another half an hour of singing and chanting before I heard Statho intone the name of Jesry. This was followed by the singing of the Canticle of Inbrase. The singing was vigorous but rough around the edges—so I knew it was the Edharians who were inducting him. During all of that time, it was difficult for me to concentrate on the Book, and afterwards I could get very little done until after Provener.
The next day those changes rang again. Two more joined the Edharians and one—Ala—joined the New Circle. No surprise there. We’d always expected her to end up as a hierarch. For some reason, though, this one kept me awake late into the night. It was as if Ala had flown off to some other concent where I’d never see her again, never get into another argument with her, never compete with her to see who could solve a theorics problem first. Which was absurd, since she was staying right here at Edhar and I’d be dining with her in the Refectory every day. But some part of my brain insisted on seeing Ala’s decision as a personal loss for me, and punished me by keeping me awake.
There was a little lesson hidden in the way I had deciphered the Eliger changes by seeing them. For as I continued to write out my account of the preceding weeks—all the while nagged by the sense that I was missing something—I eventually came to the part where I set down my conversation with Fraa Orolo on the starhenge, and his muffled argument with Trestanas immediately afterwards, down by the portcullis. As I wrote this, I looked out my window to the place where it had happened, and noted that the portcullis was closed—even though it was daytime. I also had a view of the Centenarians’ portcullis. It too was closed. Both of them had been closed the whole time I’d been here. With each day that went by I became more and more certain that the starhenge had been altogether sealed off, and had been from the very moment that the Master of the Keys had slammed the grate down behind me and Orolo on the eighth day of Apert. This closure of the starhenge—which I was pretty sure was unprecedented in the entire history of the Concent of Saunt Edhar—must have been the topic of the angry conversation between Orolo and Trestanas.