“Day Sixty-nine? What does that mean to the rest of us?”

“Well, it’s about two weeks after the solstice and nine days before Orolo got Thrown Back.”

“Okay. So what does Sammann do on Day Sixty-nine?”

“Well, normally, when he gets to the top of the stair, he unslings a bag from his shoulder and hangs it around a stone knob that sticks up from the parapet there. He cleans the optics. Then he goes over and sits on the parapet—it has a flat top about a foot wide—and takes his lunch out of that bag and spreads it out there and eats it.”

“Okay. What happens on Day Sixty-nine?”

“In addition to the shoulder bag, he is carrying something cradled in one arm like a book. The first thing he does is set this down on the parapet. Then he goes about his usual routine.”

“So it’s sitting there in plain view of the Eye.”

“Exactly.”

“Can you zoom in on it?”

“Of course.”

“Can you read its title?”

“Turns out it’s not a book at all, Lio. It is another dust jacket—just like the one Sammann found up there the first day. Except this one is big and heavy because it contains—”

“Another tablet!” Lio exclaimed, then paused to consider it. “I wonder what that means.”

“Well, we have to assume he had just picked it up elsewhere in the starhenge.”

“He doesn’t leave it there, I assume.”

“No, when he’s finished eating he takes it with him.”

“I wonder why he’d choose that day of all days to snatch a tablet.”

“Well, I’m thinking it must have been around Day Sixty-nine that Fraa Spelikon’s investigation of Orolo really began to pick up steam. Now, you might remember that when I sneaked up there during the Anathem, on Day Seventy-eight, I checked the M & M—”

“And found it empty,” Lio said with a nod. “So. On Day Sixty-nine, Spelikon probably ordered Sammann to fetch the tablet that Orolo had left in the M & M. Which Sammann did. But Spelikon didn’t know about the one you’d put in Clesthyra’s Eye, so he didn’t ask for it.”

“But Sammann knew,” I reminded him. “He had noticed it on Day Two.”

“And had made up his mind not to tell Spelikon. But on Day Sixty-nine he didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d just grabbed Orolo’s tablet.” Lio shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would he risk letting you know that?”

I threw up my hands. “Maybe it’s not such a risk for him. He’s already Ita. What can they do to him?”

“Good point. They can’t be nearly as afraid of the Warden Regulant as we are.”

I was a little bit irritated to be reminded that we were afraid, but, considering all of the skulking around I’d been doing lately, I couldn’t argue.

I’d been getting better, I realized. Recovering from the loss of Fraa Orolo. Forgetting how sad and angry I was. And when Lio mentioned the Warden Regulant, it reminded me.

Anyway, there was a long silence now as Lio assimilated all of this. We actually got some work done. On the weeds I mean.

“Well,” he finally said, “what happens after that?”

“Day Seventy, cloudy. Day Seventy-one, snowing. Day Seventy-two, snowing. Can’t see anything because the lens is covered. Day Seventy-three, it’s brilliant weather. Most of the snow has melted off by the time Sammann gets there. He cleans the place up and has lunch. He’s wearing goggles.”

“Like sunglasses?”

“Bigger and thicker.”

“Like what mountain climbers wear?”

“That’s what I thought at first,” I said. “Actually, I had to watch Day Seventy-three several times before I got it.”

“Got what?” Lio asked. “It was bright, there was snow, he wore dark goggles.”

“Really dark,” I said. “I don’t think that these were ordinary goggles like an outdoorsman would wear. I’ve seen these goggles before, Lio. When I saw Cord and Sammann in the machine hall, during Apert, they were wearing these things to shield their eyes from the arc. An arc that’s as bright as the sun.”

“But why would Sammann suddenly start wearing such a getup to clean the lenses?”

“He doesn’t actually have them on while he’s cleaning. They’re dangling around his neck on a strap,” I said. “Then he puts them on and eats his lunch as usual. But the entire time that he’s eating, he’s staring directly into the sun. Sammann is watching the sun.”

“And he never did this before Day Sixty-nine?”

“Nope. Never.”

“So do you think that he learned something—?”

“Something from Fraa Orolo’s tablet, maybe?” I said. “Or something Spelikon told him? Or perhaps scuttlebutt from other Ita in other concents, talking, or whatever they do, over the Reticulum?”

“Why watch the sun? That is completely off the track of what you have been doing, isn’t it?”

“Completely. But it’s something. It is a big fat hint. A gift from Sammann.”

“So, have you started looking at the sun too?”

“I don’t have goggles,” I reminded him, “but I do have twenty-odd clear sunny days recorded on that tablet. So starting tomorrow I can at least look at what the sun was doing three and four months ago.”

The next morning, after a theorics lecture, Jesry and Tulia and I went talking in the meadow. It was the first really fine spring day and everyone was out walking around, so it felt as though we could do this without being conspicuous.

“I think I found the IFOSA,” Tulia announced.

“You mean the HIFOSA,” Jesry corrected her.

“No,” I said, “if Tulia has found such a person, it is no longer Hypothetical.”

“I stand corrected,” Jesry said. “Who is the Important Fid?”

“Ignetha Foral,” Tulia said.

“The surname sounds vaguely familiar,” Jesry said.

“The family has been wealthy for a few hundred years, which makes them old and well-established by Sæcular standards. They have a lot of ties to the mathic world—especially Baritoe.”

Saunt Baritoe was adjacent to landforms that made a huge and excellent harbor when the sea level was behaving itself, when it wasn’t buried in pack ice, and when the river that emptied into it had not dried up or been diverted. For about a third of the time since the Reconstitution, a large city had existed around Baritoe’s walls—not always the same city, of course—and so it had the reputation of being urban and worldly, with many ties to families such as, apparently, the Forals. The Procians were powerful there, and in their Unarian math they trained many young Sæculars who later went into law, politics, and commerce.

“What are we allowed to know of her?” Jesry asked.

The question was aptly phrased. Once a year, at Annual Apert, our Unarians reviewed summaries of the Sæcular news of the year just ended. Then, once every ten years, just before Decennial Apert, they reviewed the previous ten annual summaries and compiled a decennial summary, which became part of our library delivery. The only criterion for a news item to make it into a summary was that it still had to seem interesting. This filtered out essentially all of the news that made up the Sæcular world’s daily papers and casts. Jesry was asking Tulia what Ignetha Foral had done that was interesting enough to have made it into the most recent Decennial summary.

“She had an important post in the government—she was one of the dozen or so highest-ranking people—and she took a stand against the Warden of Heaven, and he got rid of her.”

“Killed her?”

“No.”

“Threw her into a dungeon?”

“No, just fired her. I speculate that she has some other job now where she still has enough pull to Evoke someone like Paphlagon.”