“It’s too bad you didn’t tell me that before,” said Sammann curtly. Not for the first time I got the feeling that we avout were children and the Ita, far from being a subservient caste, were our minders. I was about to apologize. Then I got the feeling that once I started apologizing I’d never be able to stop. Somehow I managed to arrest my embarrassment before it reached the mud-on-the-head stage.

(on the speely: an old building being blown up; people celebrating)

“Okay, well, now that you mention it, Fraa Jad went out of his way to make sure I came away with them,” I said, and pulled from my shirt pocket the folded-up phototypes of the big hole in the ground. I spread them out on the table. Three heads converged and bent over them. Even Ganelial Crade—who had taken to pacing back and forth as he yammered on his jeejah—slowed down for a look-see. But no light of recognition came into his face. “That looks like a mine. Probably in the tundra,” he said, just to be saying something.

“The sun is shining almost straight down into it,” I pointed out.

“So?”

“So it can’t be at a high latitude.”

Now it was Crade’s turn to be embarrassed. He turned away and pretended to be extremely involved in his jeejah conversation.

(on the speely: phototypes of a kidnapped child, blurry footage of the kid being led out of a casino by a man in a big hat)

“I was wondering,” I said to Sammann, “if you could, I don’t know, use your jeejah to start scanning the globe and look for such features. I know it would be like finding a needle in a haystack. But if we were systematic about it, and if we worked in shifts for long enough—”

Sammann responded to my idea in much the same spirit as I had to Crade’s suggestion that this thing was in the tundra. He held his jeejah up above the picture and took a phototype of the phototype. Then he spent a few seconds interacting with the machine. Then he showed me what had come up on its screen: a different picture of the same hole in the ground. Except now it was a live feed from the Reticulum.

“You found it,” I said, because I wanted to go slowly and make sure I understood what was going on.

“A syntactic program available on the Reticulum found it,” he corrected me. “It turns out to be a long way from here—on an island in the Sea of Seas.”

“Can you tell me the name of the island?”

“Ecba.”

“Ecba!?” I exclaimed.

“Is there a way to figure out what it is?” Cord asked.

Sammann zoomed in. But this was almost unnecessary. Now that I knew it was on Ecba, I was no longer inclined to see this hole as an open-pit mine. It was clearly an excavation—it was completely encircled by mounded-up earth that had been taken out of it. And a ramp spiraled around to its flat bottom. But it was too orderly, too prim for a mine. Its flat bottom was neatly gridded.

“It is an archaeological dig,” I said. “A huge one.”

“What’s there on Ecba to dig up?” Cord asked.

“I can search for that,” Sammann said, and got ready to do so.

“Wait! Zoom out. Again…and again,” I asked him.

We could now see the dig as a pale scar several miles south-southeast of a huge, solitary mountain that ramped up out of a wrinkled sea. The upper slopes of the mountain were patched with snow but its summit had a scoop taken out of it: a caldera.

“That is Orithena,” I said.

“The mountain?” Cord asked.

“No. The dig,” I said. “Someone has been digging up the Temple of Orithena! It was buried by an eruption in Negative 2621.”

“Who’d do that and why?” Cord asked.

Sammann zoomed back in. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that the whole dig was surrounded by a wall. It was pierced in one place by a gate. Inside, several structures had been erected around a rectangular courtyard—a cloister. A tower sprouted from one of these.

“It’s a math,” I said. “Come to think of it, I once heard a story—probably from Arsibalt—that some order had gone to Ecba and started trying to dig their way down to the Temple of Orithena. I thought it was just a few eccentric fraas with shovels and wheelbarrows, though.”

“I don’t see any heavy equipment on the site,” Crade pointed out. “A few people with shovels could dig a hole that deep if they kept at it long enough.”

This left me a little irritated, since it ought to have been obvious to me; after all, our Mynster had been constructed in the same style. But Crade was right and there was nothing I could do but agree as vigorously as I could so that he wouldn’t explain this any further.

“This is all very interesting,” Sammann said, “but it’s probably a dead end for us.”

“I agree,” I said. Ecba was on another continent; or, to be precise, it was in the Sea of Seas which lay among four continents on the opposite side of the world.

“Orolo is not in the mountains,” Ganelial Crade announced, pocketing his jeejah. “He passed through here and kept right on going.”

(on the speely: two very beautiful people getting married)

“How do you know this?” Sammann asked. I was glad of it. Crade was so sure of himself that I found it draining to confront him with even simple questions. Sammann seemed to derive wicked pleasure from doing so.

Crade rose to it. “He got a ride as far as here from some Samble folk who were going this way, and stayed the night before last in the back of my cousin’s fetch, just a couple of miles from here.”

“The back of his fetch? Doesn’t your cousin have a spare bed?” Sammann asked.

“Yulassetar travels a lot,” Crade answered, “the back of his fetch is nicer than his house.”

“You say this happened the night before last?” I asked. “I had no idea we were so hot on his trail!”

“Getting colder every minute…Yulassetar helped him get outfitted yesterday morning, and then Orolo hitched a ride on a northbound drummon.”

“Outfitted how?” Cord asked.

“With warm clothes,” Crade said. “The warmest clothes. This is something Yul knows a lot about. It’s what he does for a living. I’m sure that’s why Orolo sought him out in Norslof.”

“Why would Orolo want to keep going north?” I asked. “There’s nothing there, am I right?”

Sammann pawed at my cartabla—which had a larger display than his jeejah—zoomed way out, and slewed it north and east. “Practically nothing but taiga, tundra, and ice between here and the North Pole. As far as economic activity is concerned, there are fuel tree plantations for the first couple of hundred miles. Beyond that, nothing but a few resource extraction camps.”

The view on the cartabla seemed to contradict him, as it was densely netted with roads that came together at named places, many of which were ringed by concentric beltways. But all of these were depicted in the faint brown color used to denote ruins.

(on the speely: a fiery rocket launch from an equatorial swamp)

“Orolo’s going to Ecba!” Cord proclaimed.

“What are you talking about?” Crade demanded.

“Ecba is not on this continent, you have to fly!” I said.

“He’s going over the pole,” she explained. “He’s headed for the sledge port at Eighty-three North.”

We were in the habit of referring to the Sæcular Power as if it were one thing down through the ages. This seemed simple-minded or even insulting to some extras—though they did essentially the same thing when they spoke of the Powers That Be. Of course we knew it was an over-simplification. But for us it was a useful convenience. Whatever empire, republic, despotate, papacy, anarchy, or depopulated wasteland lay beyond our walls at a given moment, we could slap this name on it and predicate certain things of it.

What you are reading does not attempt to set forth details as to how the Sæcular Power was constituted in my day. Such information can be had anywhere. It might even be interesting if you know nothing about the history of the world up to the Terrible Events; but if you have studied that, everything since will seem like repetition and all the particulars as to how the Sæcular Power of my day was organized will remind you of more or less ancient forerunners, but with less majesty and clarity since the ancients were all doing it for the first time and believed they were on to something.