The patio was a smooth slab of synthetic stone. Given that Estemard was such a zealous tiler, it seemed odd that he had not improved it. But now we noticed a stair that led up to a ledge where he had fashioned a kiln out of burnt bricks. Around it was strewn the detritus of many years’ work: clay, molds, pots of glaze, and thousands of tiles and tile-shards in the same repertoire of simple geometric shapes as those that decorated the New Laundry at Edhar. Estemard hadn’t got round to tiling his patio yet because he hadn’t found the perfect configuration of tiles. He hadn’t solved the Teglon.
“Clinically insane?” I asked Lio. “Or just well on his way?”
Criscan came up a different way. When he found us, he mentioned that he’d seen another, smaller habitation. We followed him as he backtracked around the southern limb of the complex.
We knew what it was instantly. All the earmarks of a pinprick math were plain to see. It was set off in a corner, reachable only by a long and somewhat challenging path, at the end of which stood a barrier—mostly symbolic, as it had been improvised recently from poly tarps and plywood—and a gate. Passing through the gate we found ourselves in a setting where we felt perfectly at home. It was another roofless slab. A broker of real estate might have called it a patio. We saw it as a miniature cloister. All vestiges of the Sæcular had been carefully scrubbed away; all that remained was the ancient, stained stone, and a few necessaries, all hand-made: a table and chair sheltered beneath a canvas stretched over a frame of timbers lashed together with many turns of string. A rusty paintbucket stood in the corner, lid held down with a stone. Lio opened it, wrinkled his nose, and announced that he had found Orolo’s chamber pot. It was empty and dry. The ashes in the bottom of his brazier were cold. His water jug was empty and a wooden locker, which had once been used to store food, had been emptied of everything but seasonings, utensils, and matches.
A beat-up wooden door led to Orolo’s cell, which for the most part was done up in similar style. The clock, however, was distinctly modern, with glowing digital readouts to a hundredth of a second. Bookshelves made of old stair treads and masonry blocks supported a few machine-printed books and hand-written leaves. One wall was covered by leaves: diagrams and notes Orolo had posted there using little dabs of tack. Another wall was covered by phototypes mostly showing various efforts that Orolo had made to capture images of the Cousins’ ship using (we assumed) the homemade telescope above. The typical image was little more than a fat white streak against a background of smaller white streaks: the tracks of stars. In one corner of this mosaic, though, Orolo had posted several unrelated phototypes that he had torn from publications or printed using a syndev. At a glance, these seemed to depict nothing more than a big hole in the ground: an open-pit mine, perhaps.
The rest of the leaves formed an overlapping mosaic, with lines drawn from one to the next, diagramming a treelike system of connections. The uppermost leaf was labeled orithena. Near its top was written the name of Adrakhones. From it, one arrow descended vertically to the name of Diax. This was a dead end. But a second arrow, angling down and off to the side, pointed to the name of Metekoranes, and from it, the tree ramified downward to include names from many places and centuries.
“Uh-oh,” Lio said.
“I hate the looks of that,” I admitted.
“It is Lineage stuff,” put in Criscan.
The door opened, and there was violence. Not prolonged—it was finished in a second—and not severe. But it was definitely violence and it wrenched our minds so far out of the track we’d been following that there was no question of getting back to it any time soon.
Simply, a man burst in through the cell’s door and Lio took him down. When it was finished, Lio was sitting on the man’s chest and examining, with utmost fascination, a projectile weapon that he had just extracted from a holster on the man’s hip. “Do you have any knives or anything like that?” Lio asked, and glanced at the door. More people were approaching. The foremost of these was Barb.
“Get off me!” the man shouted. It took a moment for it to sink in that he was speaking in Orth. “Give me that back!” We noticed that he was pretty old, although when he’d come in the door, he’d moved with the vigor of a younger man.
“Estemard carries a gun,” Barb announced. “It is a local tradition. They don’t consider it threatening.”
“Well, I’m sure Estemard won’t feel threatened by my carrying this one, then,” Lio said. He rolled backward off Estemard and came up on his feet, gun in hand, pointed at the ceiling.
“You have no business in here.” Estemard said, “And as for my gun, you’d better shoot me with it or hand it over.”
Lio didn’t even consider handing it over.
Now, through most of this I’d been so shocked, and then so confused, that I’d stood motionless. I had been afraid of doing anything for fear of doing the wrong thing. But the sight of my friends’ faces outside nudged me to act, since I didn’t wish to look tongue-tied or indecisive. “Since you have just asserted we have no business here,” I pointed out, “an assertion we disagree with, by the way, it would not be in our interests to supply you with weapons.”
By this time, other members of our Peregrin group had crowded onto the patio. Fraa Jad came in, shouldered Estemard out of his way, took in the cell at a glance, and began examining the leaves and phototypes Orolo had put on the wall. This, much more than being knocked down by Lio or planed by me, made Estemard realize he was outmatched. He got smaller somehow, and looked away. Unlike the rest of us, he’d only had a few minutes to get used to being in the presence of a Thousander.
“Lio, a lot of people carry sidearms out here.” It was Cord. “I can see why you got the wrong idea, but take my word for it, he was not going to draw down on you.” No one responded. “Come on, you bunch of sad sacks, it’s picnic time!”
“Picnic?” I said.
“After we are finished with our service,” Estemard said, “we have a cookout on the green, if the weather is good.” Cord’s intervention seemed to have cheered him up a little.
I glanced out the door and caught the eye of Arsibalt, out on the patio. He raised his eyebrows. Yes. Estemard has become a Deolater.
Back in the concent, we’d always pictured Ferals as long-haired wild men, but Estemard looked like a retired chemist out for a day hike.
Estemard held me in a careful gaze. “You must be Erasmas,” he said. This seemed to settle something for him. He breathed deeply, shaking off the last vestiges of the shock he’d gone into when Lio had helped him to the floor. “Yes. All of you are invited to the picnic, if you promise not to assault people.” Seeing the objection percolating through my brain toward my face, he smiled and added, “People who haven’t assaulted you first, that is. And I doubt they will; they’re more tolerant of avout than you are of them.”
“Where’s Orolo?”
Fraa Jad, still planted with his back to us, currently viewing the phototypes of the open-pit mine, startled us all by unlimbering his subsonic voice: “Orolo has gone north.”
Estemard was astonished; then the smile crept back onto his face as he figured out how the Thousander had figured this out. “Fraa Jad has it right.”
“We shall attend the picnic,” Fraa Jad announced, pronouncing the Fluccish word with tweezers. “Lio, Erasmas, and I shall go down last, in the vehicle of Ganelial Crade.”
This directive filtered out to the patio. People turned around and headed back toward the vehicles. Lio took the ammunition magazine out of the gun and handed them back separately to Estemard, who departed, reluctantly, with Criscan. As soon as they had passed out through the makeshift gate, Fraa Jad reached out and began plucking the leaves off the wall. Lio and I helped, and gave all that we’d harvested to Fraa Jad. He left most of the phototypes alone, but took the ones that depicted the big hole in the ground, and handed them to me.