“You’re talking of the Lineage,” Criscan said.

“Yes,” Lio answered, with another nervous look up.

“Which lineage do you mean?” I asked.

“The Lineage, people call it,” Criscan said, “or sometimes the Old Lineage.”

“Well…give me some help. What concents is it based at?”

Criscan shook his head. “You’re assuming it’s like an Order. But this Lineage goes back farther than the Reconstitution—farther even than Saunt Cartas. Supposedly it was founded during the Peregrin period, by theors who had worked with Metekoranes.”

“But who unlike him didn’t end up under three hundred feet of pumice,” Lio added.

“That’s a whole different matter then,” I said. “If that’s really true, it’s not of the mathic world at all.”

“That’s the problem,” Lio said, “the Lineage was around for centuries before the whole idea of maths, fraas, and suurs. So you wouldn’t expect it to operate according to any of the rules that we normally associate with our Orders.”

“You are speaking of it in the present tense,” I pointed out.

Criscan again looked uneasy, but he said nothing. Lio glanced up again, and slowed.

“Where is this going? Why are you guys so nervous?” I asked.

“Some came to suspect that Estemard was a member,” Lio said.

“But Estemard was an Edharian,” I said.

“That’s part of the problem,” Lio said.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Criscan, “for me and you, anyway.”

“Why—because you and I are Edharians?”

“Yes,” Criscan said, with a flick of the eyes toward Lio.

“Well, Lio I trust with my life,” I told him. “So you can say anything in front of him that you might say to me as a fellow Edharian.”

“All right,” Criscan said. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’ve never heard about this, since you have only been in the Order of Saunt Edhar for a few months, and you’re just a—er—”

“Just a Tenner?” I said. “Go ahead, I’m not offended.” But I was, a little. Behind Criscan, Lio made a funny face that took the sting out of it.

“Otherwise you might have heard rumors about this kind of thing. Remarks.”

“To what effect?”

“First of all, that Edharians in general are a little nutty—a little mystical.”

“Of course I know some people like to say that,” I said.

“All right,” Criscan said. “Well, then you know that one of the reasons people look askance at us Edharians is that it seems as though our devotion to the Hylaean Theoric World might take precedence over our loyalty to the Discipline and the principles of the Reconstitution.”

“Okay,” I said, “I think that’s unfair but I can see how some people might harbor such notions.”

Lio added, “Or pretend to harbor them when it gave them a weapon to wave in Edharians’ faces.”

“Now,” Criscan said, “imagine that there was—or was thought to be—a Lineage of what amounted to ultra-Edharians.”

“Are you telling me that people think there’s a connection between our Order and the Lineage?”

Criscan nodded. “Some have gone so far as to lodge the accusation that the Edharians are a sham—a false front whose real purpose is to act as a host body for an infestation of Teglon-worshippers.”

Given the number of contributions Edharians had made to theorics over the millennia, I didn’t have any trouble dismissing such a ludicrous claim, but one word caught my attention. “Worshippers,” I repeated.

Criscan sighed. “The kinds of people who spread such rumors—” he began, “Are the same ones who think that our belief in the HTW is tantamount to religion,” I concluded. “And it suits their purposes to spread the idea that there is a secret cult at the heart of the Edharian order.”

Criscan nodded.

“Is there?” Lio asked.

I’d have slugged him if I could have gotten away with it. Criscan didn’t know about Lio’s sense of humor and so he took it pretty badly.

“What did Estemard actually do when he was pursuing this avocation?” I asked Lio. “Was he reading books? Trying to solve the Teglon? Lighting candles and reciting spells?”

“Mostly reading books—very old ones,” Lio said. “Very old ones that had been left behind by others who in their day had likewise been under suspicion of belonging to the Lineage.”

“Seems interesting but harmless,” I said.

“Also, people noticed that he was unduly interested in the Millenarians. During auts, he would take notes while the Thousanders sang.”

“How can anyone really follow the meaning of those chants without taking notes?”

“And he went into the upper labyrinth a lot.”

“Well,” I admitted, “that’s a bit odd…is it a part of the myth surrounding the Lineage that its members violate the Discipline—communicate across the boundaries of their maths?”

“Yes,” Criscan said. “It fits in with the whole conspiracy-theory aspect. The slur on the Edharians in general is that they consider their work to be more profound, more important than anyone else’s—that the pursuit of the truths in the Hylaean Theoric World takes precedence over the Discipline. So, if their pursuit of the truth requires that they communicate with avout in other maths—or with extras—they have no compunctions about doing so.”

This was sounding more and more ridiculous by the moment, and I was beginning to think it was one of those nutty Hundreder fads. But I said nothing, because I was thinking about Orolo talking to Sammann in the vineyard and making illicit observations.

Lio snorted. “Extras? What kind of extras would care about a mystical, six-thousand-year-old theorics problem?”

“The kind we’ve been hanging around with the last two days,” Criscan said.

We had come to a complete stop. I stepped forward up the road. “Well, if everything you’re saying is true, we’re not doing ourselves any favors by being out here.”

Criscan took my meaning right away but Lio looked puzzled. I went on, “Saunt Tredegarh is filling up with avout from all over the world. The hierarchs must be keeping track of who has arrived, from which concent. And we—a group of mostly Edharians from, of all things, the Concent of Saunt Edhar—are going to be late…”

“Because we’ve been bending the rules—wandering among the Deolaters,” Lio said, beginning to get it.

“…looking for a couple of wayward fraas who exactly fit the stereotype that Criscan’s been talking about.”

Lio and I were at the summit a few minutes later. We had left Criscan huffing and puffing in our wake. All of the weird talk had made us nervous and we had practically run the rest of the way—not out of any practical need to hurry, simply to burn off energy.

The top of Bly’s Butte looked as if it might have been a lovely place back in the days of Saunt Bly. It existed because there was a lens of hard rock that had resisted erosion and protected the softer stuff beneath it while everything for miles around had slowly washed down. There was enough room on top to construct a large house, say, the size of the one where Jesry’s family lived. A lot of different structures had been crammed onto it over the millennia. The bottom strata were masonry: stones or bricks mortared directly onto the butte’s hard summit. Later generations had poured synthetic stone directly atop those foundations to make small blockhouses, guard shacks, pillboxes, equipment enclosures, and foundations for aerials, dishes, and towers. These then had been modified: connections between them built, worn out, demolished or rusted away, replaced or buried under new work. The stone—synthetic and natural—was stained a deep ochre by the rust of all the metal structures that had been here at one time or another. For such a small area it was quite complicated—the sort of place children could have explored for hours. Lio and I were not so far out from being children that we couldn’t be tempted. But we had plenty else on our minds. So we looked for signs of habitation. The most conspicuous of these was a reflecting telescope that stood on a high plinth that had once supported an aerial tower. We went there first. The telescope looked in some ways like an art project that Cord or one of her friends might have made in a welding shop from scraps of steel. But looking into it we could see a hand-ground mirror, well over twelve inches in diameter, that looked perfect, and it was easy to figure out that it had a polar axis drive cobbled together from motors, gearboxes, and bearings scavenged from who knows where. From there it was easy to follow a trail of evidence across the platform and down an external stairway to a lower platform on the southeast exposure of the complex. This had been kitted out with a grill for cooking meat, weatherproof poly chairs and table, and a big umbrella. Children’s toys were stored with un-childlike neatness in a poly box, as if kids came up here sometimes, but not every day. A door led off this patio into a warren of small rooms—little more than equipment closets—that had been turned into a home. Whoever was living in this place, it wasn’t Orolo. Judging from phototypes on the walls, it was an older man with a somewhat younger wife and at least two generations of offspring. Ikons were almost as numerous as snapshots and so this was obviously a Deolater family. We gathered these impressions over the course of a few seconds before we realized we were trespassing on someone’s home. Then we felt stupid because this was such a typical avout mistake. We backed out so fast we almost knocked each other down.