But at this point I had to attend to one of those details. The Sæcular Power in my day was a federation. It broke down into political units that more or less agreed with Arbre’s continents. One could travel freely within most of those units, but to cross from one to another one had to have documents. The documents were not that difficult to obtain—unless one was avout.

Since the Reconstitution, we had existed wholly apart from the legal system of the Sæcular Power. They had no records of us, no jurisdiction over us, no responsibility for us; they could not draft us into their armies, levy taxes on us, or even step through our gates except at Apert. Likewise they would not offer us assistance of any kind, except for protecting us from direct assault by mobs or armies if they felt like it. We didn’t get pensions or medical care from the Sæcular Power—and we certainly didn’t get identity documents.

It has become obvious during the writing of this that it might one day be read by people from other worlds. So I’ll say that we considered ourselves to have ten continents but that the Cousins, or anyone else who came to us from beyond and looked at Arbre fresh, would have said we had only seven—and they would have been right. We counted ours as ten because the original tally had been made by explorers working outward from the Sea of Seas, who could only guess at what might lie more than a few days’ march from its convoluted shores. It happened more than once that they bestowed distinct names on lands that were sundered by straits and gulfs, but that on further—and much later—exploration proved to be lobes of the same great land mass reaching toward the Sea of Seas from different quarters. But by that time the places had made their way into the classical myths and histories under the ancient names, which we could no more dislodge from the culture than we could withdraw one of the colossal foundation-stones that supported the Mynster.

Likewise, during the Rebirth, land had been found on the other side of the world from the Sea of Seas and had been proclaimed and mapped as a new continent. But centuries later it had been determined that the far northern reaches of that continent wrapped over the North Pole and thence extended south all the way to the Sea of Seas. It was not a new continent at all but a limb of the oldest and best-known continent, and no one had ever had a clue about it because even the aboriginal peoples who knew how to live in ice houses could not venture much above eighty degrees of latitude. To prove that the “old” and “new” continents were one, it was necessary to go all the way up to ninety degrees north latitude—the North Pole—and then descend to eighty or less on the other side. This had not been accomplished until the last century before the Terrible Events and it had not changed people’s habit of referring to the place that Cord, Sammann, Ganelial Crade, and I were on now, and the land mass forming the northern boundary of the Sea of Seas, as two different continents. The ice cap separated the two even more absolutely than an ocean would have, and no normal person ever traveled between them that way. They flew in an aerocraft or did it in a ship.

But to do it by aerocraft or ship you’d have to pass through ports of entry and show documents. Orolo had none and no hope of getting any. So he was doing what was logical, which was to exploit the fact that the two continents were in fact one. Cord had been the first to put this whole picture together in her mind.

No. She’d been the second. The first had been Fraa Jad.

“The sledge trains! That’s like something out of a children’s storybook to me,” Sammann said. “Do they still operate?”

“They were shut down for a while, but they are running again now,” Crade confirmed. “The price of metals went up. People went back to stripping the Deep Ruins.”

“We used to make parts for the sledge locomotives in the machine hall where I worked,” Cord said. “We were the largest machine hall that was so far north, so they’d send the jobs to us. It’s been a source of business for that shop for over a thousand years. We had to make them of special alloys that wouldn’t shatter in the cold.” And she went on in this vein for a minute or two; she could talk about alloys the way some girls talked about shoes. Crade and Sammann, who’d been so fascinated to hear about the sledge train idea at first, got less and less so the more Cord said of it.

In my mind I was replaying the memory of Fraa Jad in Orolo’s cell yesterday. He couldn’t have spent more than half a minute gazing at these phototypes before he’d figured it all out. Even if you were the kind of person who attributed nearly supernatural powers to the Thousanders, this seemed a little weird. He must have had some prior knowledge about this.

“This excavation,” I said, tapping my finger on the phototype.

Everyone looked at me funny. I realized that I had just interrupted Cord’s disquisition about alloys.

(on the speely: victims of a roadside massacre; their hysterical wives rending their clothes and rolling on the ground)

I continued, “I’ll bet you my last energy bar that if you look it up, you’ll find that it is 690 years old.”

“You think they started digging this hole in 3000,” said Ganelial Crade. “Why? You like round numbers?”

This was an extremely rare attempt by Crade to make a joke, and so etiquette required me to smirk at it for a moment before I answered. “I’m pretty sure Fraa Jad knew that this was going on. He recognized this as soon as he saw it. So, I’m thinking that this dig must have been launched during the most recent Millennial Convox. The Thousander math at Saunt Edhar would have sent delegates to that Convox and so they would have heard about it, and brought the knowledge back home with them—which is how Fraa Jad knew.”

Sammann, as usual, was ready to play devil’s advocate: “I’m not disagreeing, but even if you’re right, it seems strange to me that Fraa Jad could take one look at this phototype and know that it was the Orithena dig. It could be any hole in the ground. There’s nothing to peg it to Ecba.”

Until now we had been attending mostly to the phototype that showed the entire dig on one sheet. The others were zoomed-in detail shots that hadn’t made much sense before. Scanning them now, I was able to perceive the outlines of ancient building foundations, the stubs of columns, and flat areas of tiled floor. One of these was marked thus:

I pointed to it. “That’s the analemma,” I said. “The Temple of Orithena was a big camera obscura. It had a small hole in the roof that projected an image of the sun on the floor. As the seasons changed, the sun-spot hit the floor in a different place each day during their midday ritual—what we celebrate now as Provener. Over the course of the year it would trace this pattern on the floor.”

“So, you think Fraa Jad noticed the analemma on this phototype and said to himself ‘Aha, this must be the Temple of Orithena?’ That seems like pretty quick thinking to me,” Cord said.

“Well, he’s a pretty smart guy,” I returned. This was not the most polite answer. Jesry would have planed me at this point. Cord was right to be skeptical about it. I wasn’t willing to dig any deeper on this point, though. The speed with which Fraa Jad had recognized this hole in the ground suggested that he, and presumably the other Millenarians, knew a lot about it. I was worried that if we pulled any harder on this loose thread, it would lead us back to crazy talk about the Lineage.

“Oh, how interesting,” Sammann said, gazing into his jeejah, “Erasmas wins his bet. This dig in the phototypes was started in A.R. 3000.” He read another tidbit off the screen, then looked up and grinned at me. “It was started by Edharians!”

“Great!” I muttered, wishing I could take Sammann’s jeejah and drop it down a toilet.