Lio and I read some histories of the Battle of Trantae during the next week, and pounded stakes into the ground to mark important sites, such as where General Oxas, pierced by eight arrows, had fallen on his sword. I constructed a rectangular frame, about the size of a dinner tray, with a grid of strings stretched across it. The idea was that I’d set this up on the parapet and look through it like a windowframe as I sketched; if I continued to use it in the same way throughout the summer, then each illustration would tally with the next. One day we’d be able to line them up in a row and then people would walk down the line and see the weed-war unfold like a speely.
Lio spent a lot of time thrashing around in the brush along the riverbank looking for particularly aggressive specimens of various kinds of weeds. Yellow starblossom was going to represent the Sarthian cavalry, red and white their allies.
We were both waiting for the moment when we would get in trouble.
Sure enough, a couple of weeks into the project, I looked up during supper to see Fraa Spelikon come into the Refectory, accompanied by a younger hierarch of the Regulant staff. Conversation dimmed for a moment—sort of like when the power threatens to go out and the room becomes brown. Spelikon looked around the Refectory until he found my face. Then, satisfied, he snatched up a tray and demanded some food. Hierarchs were allowed to dine with us, but they rarely did. They had to concentrate pretty fiercely not to let Sæcular information slip out and so this was no way to have a relaxing meal.
Everyone had noticed the way Spelikon had looked at me and so, following the brownout, there was a brief jovial uproar at my expense. For once in my life I wasn’t worried. What could they accuse me of? Conspiring to let weeds grow? Probably they had misinterpreted what Lio and I were up to. The only hard part was going to be explaining it to a man like Spelikon.
The younger hierarch—Rotha was her name—ate quickly, then rose and walked out of the Refectory hugging a fat wallet of papers that swiveled as her hips moved. Spelikon ate more heartily but refused offers of beer and wine. After a few minutes he pushed back, wiped his lips, stood up, and came over to me. “I wonder if I might have a word with you in Saunt Zenla’s,” he said.
“Certainly,” I said, then glanced across the room at Lio, who was dining at another table. “Would you like Fraa Lio to join us or—”
“That will not be necessary,” Spelikon said. Which struck me as odd, and left me with physical symptoms of anxiety—pounding heart, moist palms—as I followed Spelikon around the Cloister to Saunt Zenla’s.
This was one of the smallest and oldest chalk halls, traditionally used by the most senior Edharian theoricians to collaborate or to teach their senior students. I’d only been in the room a couple of times my whole life, and would never have dared to barge in there and claim it like this. It had one small table, large enough for at most four people to sit around it on their spheres. Rotha had already covered the table with stuff: a constellation of glow-buds whose pools of soft light merged to illuminate a stack of blank leaves and a few manuscripts, or excerpts of them. Several pens lay in a neat row next to an uncapped ink-bottle.
“Interview with Fraa Erasmas of the Edharian chapter of the Decenarian math of the Concent of Saunt Edhar,” Spelikon said. Rotha scribbled out a row of marks on a blank leaf—not the customary Bazian characters, but a kind of shorthand that hierarchs were trained to use when taking down transcripts. Spelikon went on to tell the date and the time. I was mesmerized by Rotha’s skill with the pen—her hand swept across the whole width of the leaf in as little time as it took to draw breath, leaving in its wake a row of simple one-stroke glyphs that, it seemed to me, couldn’t possibly convey as much meaning as the words we were speaking.
My eyes wandered to the other manuscripts that Rotha had set out on the table. Most of them were also written in that same shorthand. But at least one was in traditional script. My script. Bending closer, I was able to make out several words. I recognized it as the journal I had started keeping when I’d been in the penance cell in the Mynster. I saw the names Flec and Quin, and Orolo.
My movements had gone all jerky. Some primitive threat-response mechanism had taken over. “Hey, that’s mine!”
Spelikon saw to it that this was written down. “The subject admits that Document Eleven is his.”
“Where did you get that?” I demanded, now sounding no older than Barb. Rotha’s hand flitted across the leaf and immortalized it.
“From where it was,” Spelikon answered, amused. “You do know the whereabouts of your own journal, don’t you?”
“I thought I did.” One of the niches outside of Saunt Grod’s chalk hall, up high where only a few people could reach it. But to take someone else’s leaves out of a niche was just about the rudest thing an avout could do. It was only acceptable when someone had died or been Thrown Back. “But,” I went on, “but you’re not supposed to—”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of what we are and are not supposed to do,” Spelikon said. As he spoke these words he made a gesture with his hand that stilled Rotha’s hand, so none of it was written down. Then he made a different gesture that undid the spell, and she began to write again. “This inquiry does not concern you directly and, in fact, need not take up very much of your time. You have already supplied most of what we wish to know in the leaves of your journal. Clarification and confirmation are all that we require. On the day before Apert, did you serve as amanuensis during an interview conducted in the New Library between Fraa Orolo and an artisan from extramuros named Quin?”
“Yes.”
“Document Three, please,” Spelikon said. Rotha drew out another manuscript, also written in my hand: my transcript of Orolo’s interview with Quin. I didn’t bother asking where they’d gotten it. Obviously they’d been rooting around in Fraa Orolo’s niches too. Outrageous! But for all that, I was beginning to relax. There was nothing wrong with the conversations Orolo had had with those artisans. Even if the Warden Regulant wouldn’t take my word for it, well, others had been in the library the whole time and could vouch that it had all been harmless. This must be some petty and misguided harassment of Fraa Orolo that would come to nothing, and—I hoped—make Fraa Spelikon look like an idiot.
Spelikon had me confirm that Document Three was mine before going on: “There are discrepancies between the account of the Orolo—Quin conversation as you transcribed it at the time, and the version you later set down in your journal.”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m not like her.” I nodded at Rotha. “I can’t take shorthand. I only wrote down what was germane to the research that Orolo was doing.”
“Which research do you mean?” Spelikon asked.
I’d thought that was obvious, but I explained, “His study of the political climate extramuros—part of normal preparations for Apert.”
“Thank you. There are several such discrepancies, but I’d like to draw your attention to one, late in the Quin interview, concerning the technical capabilities of speelycaptors.”
This was so unexpected it blanked my mind. “Uh, I vaguely remember that topic coming up.”
“Your memory was not vague at all when you wrote this,” he said, and reached down over Rotha’s shoulder and picked up the journal. “According to this, Artisan Quin said, at one point, and I quote, ‘Flec didn’t make a speely.’ Does that make your memory any less vague?”
“Yes. The day before, at Provener, we had sent Artisan Flec to see the Ita so that they could show him to the north nave. Flec wanted to make a speely. But later Quin told us that it hadn’t gone as planned. The Ita didn’t allow Flec to operate his speelycaptor in the Mynster.”