The next day was mercifully uneventful, right up until dinnertime. Hester and I shared stew (again) and slightly nervous small talk about the weather and my readings and his wanderings. I was nervous, anyway. Hester seemed as unflappable as ever. Or oblivious?
Finally, we stood and returned our bowls, and then we strode to the central library.
Gena intercepted us in one of the galleries, and pulled us (literally, by my sleeve) out into the grassy center of the cloister. Out there, we were partially shielded from the gallery traffic by gangly, freshly-mulched and bare rose bushes. We were also mostly shielded from the rush of the winds that seemed to tug at gowns and robes at all hours in this mountaintop sanctuary.
“I’m cutting it close; any moment they’ll notice the problem and begin rounding up as many librarians as they can find to help with the search. You didn’t see me here.”
“But we—” began Lord Hester, concern writ on his face.
“Shush. You explain that later, Howe. Remember, you’re looking for any of the three Librariarchs. They usually wear golden stoles with black stripes. Justina is a middle-aged woman with copper hair. Theodric is a tall, elderly man with long, grey hair and a beard. Effelham is the youngest, barely older than me. Shaven bald. Got it?”
“Yes,” I replied, as Hester thought.
“Good. We’re going to spend tonight in the Crown and Clasp in Anteianum. You can thank me later. Meet me there as soon as you can. Ae guide your eyes and hands.”
With that, Sister Gena bustled out into the flow of apostles in one of the arcades before Hester could think of stopping her with questions, and the two of us were left with our duty.
We had a seat in the library. Hester hung his cloak over his chair and I folded my hands in my lap and settled in with a sigh, preparing for our long watch.
That was when a man with a golden stole burst from the back room and hurtled past us, soaring on wings of pure terror and trailing a tangle of fine white robes and beard behind him as he went. That was Theodric, by the length of his beard, achieving a speed I had not thought possible of an elderly librarian. A woman matching Justina’s description shouted from behind us, having emerged from the back collections of the library after him, “COME BACK HERE AT ONCE, APOSTATE!”
“I thought that would be harder,” I said, scrambling to my feet.
“We’re not done yet,” Hester replied, reversing the motion he had used to doff his cloak. We hurried out the front door after the retreating Librariarch.
But the old man had made good his escape. Hester and I stood atop the stairs at the entrance to the central library. Before us was a wide quadrangle of grass swaying in the highland breeze. One of the great halls (the Hall of the League, perhaps?) rose across from it. Beside us on our right, an arcade leading to a residence building, and to our left, a cluster of lecture halls clumped around a chapel. No less than three dozen apostles were in our sight, but none of them were Theodric.
“How…” we both mumbled, blinking in the late afternoon sun.
I shook some cobwebs out of my head. “No, actually, I’ve seen stranger things.”1
“Nothing to it but to meet Gena, right?” Hester wondered.
I thought. “No, no. The trail is still fresh.”
“What trail?” Hester asked, staring glumly at the rippling green grass of the monastery grounds.
“He had to run because Justina knows his face. He can’t stop running until he’s beyond her reach—well beyond the walls of this monastery. His life depends on it.”
“So… a watchman will have spotted him!” Hester exclaimed.
“Or will be spotting him soon. Let’s be on our way!”
“There’s no watchman?!” Hester exclaimed.
I put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s not this poor fellow’s fault.”
“Oh! Oh. My apologies, good brother of the apostles,” he said, taking a few steps back from the apostle’s personal space. Being a good foot taller than the man, I was afraid he had made the wrong impression in his haste.
The apostle’s posture possessed a hint of defensive crouch mixed liberally with the arch of a cornered house cat. He took a moment to regard Hester’s retreat, and after a beat, he straightened up. “Oh! It’s, um, no problem at all. The monastery doesn’t keep a watch at the gates. It doesn’t need to. Ae interferes little in the politics of the world, but she would certainly warn us of wolves on the prowl.”
I had a gander about. The monastery was surrounded by an immaculate stone wall, each block shaved to perfect holy proportions and polished to shine in the afternoon sun. The monastery would literally glint like a gem in the distance when viewed from down the hill in Anteianum on some days. This section consisted of a long, straight stretch at the top of a tall embankment that sloped bare for some distance down into a floor of pine and spruce. The tips of those trees were below our toes now. The stone we stood on was not merely an extravagant stone walkway as I had assumed earlier: it was, itself, a grand stone stair bridge that rose from the mountainside floor to the height of the trees around it to meet the gate.
“I don’t imagine you get many wolves. Metaphorically speaking.” I added. “No sane commander would dare assault walls like this. Or this gate… marching an army three abreast up a bridge into the teeth of these parapets and arrow slits? Madness.”
Hester gave me a strange look, then turned back to face the apostle. “Ahem. Have you seen Librariarch Theodric? He was in a hurry. We wished to speak with him.”
“Afraid not. This is the only path down. If he was past in the last half hour I would have seen him.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry for the fright; I’m afraid our business has me quite excited.”
“No harm done. Ae guide you,” he said, walking on.
“But such strong fortifications? In a mountain? Trivially easy to siege,” I muttered. I had spotted the end of the path; I needed only to walk there. Hester stared at me despondently, like his only ally had descended into lunacy in his hour of greatest need. “Camp a dozen men at the foot of the bridge and you could starve hundreds out of the fortress. The gardens? Pah. Won’t feed but a few of them. But imagine if your siege subject included Anteianum. Nobody could encircle that. The whole city, with two fortresses? Not to mention the political problems. Laying siege to the apostles…”
“Wait,” Hester said, piercing his own fog. “You mean… you’re right. You’d be insane to assault this fortress… but you’d be insane to even build this fortress. No harbor, no sally ports…”
“Unless you could resupply from Anteianum during the siege. Which means…”
“Secret tunnels.”
I sent Hester back to the central library to receive Justina’s apologies that he would be unable to view the great work, while I questioned some apostles. I returned to the central library to discuss.
“She said that the work had been stolen and she promised to contact the House Eastmost when it was recovered,” he reported.
“That was very honest of her. A bureaucrat’s instincts would normally be to offer some vague excuse about an inability to keep an appointment.”
“Are these a boar-o-cat instincts or are they your instincts?”
“Hey. One of these Librariarchs is a grand larcenist. Is it so strange to imagine that the others could be careerists or mediocre functionaries?”
“Fraction-fairies…” Hester chewed on that, then apparently decided he had enough context clues to have a guess at it. “Not strange, but unkind. Anyhow, did you learn anything?”
By questioning a few apostles with duties near to the library (a stable keeper, a gardener, a winemaker’s assistant), I had narrowed down the trajectory of Theodric’s great escape to, roughly, the southeast quadrant of the college. Several important elements of the greater whole of the college could be found there, including the Hall of the League, the gardens, a few yards outfitted for calisthenics, and the East Hall: a huge building hosting libraries, lecture halls, and offices. I told as much to Hester.
“Hmm,” he said. “In most fortifications, sally ports and secret exits have their interior entrance not too far from the wall. It’s laborious and wasteful to dig long tunnels.”
“True, though I will note that this place is not most fortifications.” I noticed myself speaking with an urgent, conspiratorial hush.
“Aye. It is overdone. Admirably overdone,” he hastened to add, “in its holy office. Still. Overdone or not, it is probably done right. Supplies taken through the tunnel need to get to a destination, and the less exposure to the elements or to prying eyes the better, usually.”
“That doesn’t narrow it down much. In a siege they could employ either of those main halls as places of storage and as inner keeps.”
We sat in silence. The hubbub in the college had been steadily growing louder around us in the last few hours, and I marked it then, sitting in the central library. News of Brother Theodric’s flight, rumors of his apostasy, and the scandal of the missing Great Work buzzed in the air. The prospect of combing two large—and famous2—buildings for secret passages during a crisis sure to spur the vigilance of every bystander weighed heavily in the air over our little study table.
“Let me… try something, shall I? Give me a moment,” I said, standing. Hester nodded seriously.
Just a few minutes later, I returned to the table, feeling a bit better already. Books have that effect on me.
“Good news?” Hester asked.
“Yes,” I said, grinning, and plopping down the History of the House of the Goddess: The College of Apostles in the Time of the Three Bishoprics.
Hester eyed the title. “Not news about where Theodric went, then.”
“Well, yes! No, but also yes,” I said, a bit annoyed that all I had to mark my moment of triumph was that brick of a quip. “The East Hall was an addition, commissioned by High Bishop Ulthos and finished by High Bishop Trent.”
Hester, who seemed much more in his element talking about castles than he seemed talking about the perturbations of uniform bodies, caught on immediately. “An addition! The walls were already standing?”
“The walls predate the East Hall by decades.”
“So you suppose the secret tunnels were built, or at least designed, when the walls were built. Before the East Hall. Hmm. Could the East Hall have the entrances anyway? Could it have replaced whatever building originally served as the entrance?”
“Unlikely,” I said, thumbing through the thin, high quality pages of the book to find the relevant passages. “Chronicler Yla claims that Ulthos faced the wrath of the gardeners3 when he commissioned the East Hall over top of their gardens. He had to go to great lengths to placate them and avoid losing his chancellorship. This was apparently a matter of great debate at the time.”
“So… not the East Hall. That leaves the Hall of the League.”
“One of the most historic places in all the Seven Kingdoms.”
“Do we know what lies below it?”
“Secret passages, I hope.”
Hester and I made directly for the Hall of the League. An arcade ran from the library, past the refectory, straight to the front entrance of the Hall. And what an entrance it was: soaring oaken doors, ten yards tall, bound in heavy bronze that had been sculpted into the shape of faceless angelic warriors, resting their hands on hip-high round shields and holding their spears at perfectly measured verticals. Each of the two doors must have weighed thousands of pounds.
But after being unlatched, they swung on their hinges with the barest touch.
There was something to that as a symbol of the place itself. The Hall of the League is, like much of the college, a public place, an artwork dedicated to the people of the Seven Kingdoms and their patron goddess in equal measure. But it was also a place of true substance. Ae had brought her Word here, to this mountaintop, to the simple highland shepherds who would take it to heart and deliver the mortal souls of the world unto a new era. The Ivian League had been formed here. Sefnir the Mighty had bent his knee here, bringing and end to the rampage of the Hyng and pledging hundreds of thousands of new faithful to Ae. The sixth session of the apostles had ratified the Commandment to the Literate here. The league had been dissolved here, and Ae had cast aside her spear.
To look upon the place was to feel the history, to see the ghosts of the past stirring in the galleries even now. Here was the font from which the present world sprung. History seemed to eddy about, if you just looked closely enough at the perfect stillness.
The entrance gave an unobstructed view of the chancellor’s podium facing it. The galleries rose in seven tiers to the left and right, wooden masterworks in their own right constructed to perfect proportions in order to provide comfort in long sessions, ease of access for elderly apostles, and small, level working spaces for examining materials or taking notes on ongoing deliberations. The evening’s waning natural light sifted in through gigantic arch-shaped windows, each peaked by a sun-shaped stained glass window. Currently, the west set were casting gentle kaleidoscopic shadows in a neat row across the east wall.
By the time I snapped myself out of my reverent trance, Hester had already located one of the two doors behind the podium (well behind it; there were about twenty yards of empty floor to traverse behind the podium) and was striding toward it as if I were still following. I caught up, awkwardly.
“Those doors…” I began, awed by how my own voice rang so loud and clear in the enormous hall.
“Lead to back rooms, I should think. Each is large enough to move supplies through if the hall is to be made a storehouse.”
“… might be forbidden to guests,” I finished.
“Just as likely it’s permitted. We shall ask forgiveness instead of permission,” Hester said, not breaking his stride.
“Oh.” I looked around at this place. We seemed trivial within it. To me, that meant that it refused us; that we were unworthy. But to Hester… perhaps it just meant that he was carrying on unnoticed.
The back rooms were not at all what I had expected. Rather than the expert masonry that dominated the rest of the architecture of the college (and indeed the hall itself), these hallways were full lumber. They were simple and cramped, relics of the early college, perhaps.
They were utterly empty. Hester turned west past a pair of unremarkable doors and then north again, and I followed close behind, wondering if perhaps he had some sort of… knack for this, the finding of secret passages.
“What are we looking for?” I asked.
“Stairs down.”
“Oh.”
But after a few more minutes of plodding around in silence, we had canvassed the entire building. It was smaller than I imagined. There were probably about three dozen small rooms here, each not much larger than a monk’s cell, laid out along two main north-south halls, one east-west hall, and a secondary hallway that wrapped around the back side of the westmost rooms.
We stood in the dead center empty halls and looked around for a moment.
“We’re close,” Hester said.
“How do you figure?”
“The building’s not very large.”
“But there aren’t any stairs down.”
“Which means the entrance must be on this floor instead of the basement. There being no basement.”
“Right then, I guess.”
“We’ll have to start into the rooms.”
“Hold on,” I said. “I’m not sure we have that sort of time. We might not be the only ones searching, shortly. Or, worse, the apostles might call a session…”
“On so short a notice?”
“Probably not, you’re right. But we don’t belong back here, and we need to hurry.”
“Fair. Have you an idea? Otherwise I shall hurry to begin the search.”
I thought out loud. “So we’re looking for supplies. Secretly delivered, like to be stored or distributed in the hall itself. But all these doors are too small; much smaller than the two leading back here. Unless one of them wasn’t…”
I rubbed my forehead.
“There’s another door here somewhere. Hidden somehow.”
“I am afraid not,” a deep voice declared from somewhere very near to me. “There are no doors here.”
I turned to face Hester, who was obviously not the source of the voice. We shared an alarmed look.
“Face me, young men.”
I turned around to the north, and a huge golden-bearded man in a monk’s humble garb stood before us. He wore a short sword in a lacquered scabbard on his hip.
“I uh… wh… what’s that…”
“Be at ease. We are all good men under Ae’s aegis. But I must command you to leave.”
“But there is a door!” Hester said, striking a note of triumph.
The man frowned.
“You were watching us,” Hester continued. “You only intervened because we’re about to find it.”
“Do you… why are you telling him? Everything? Shouldn’t we be a bit more circumspect?” I complained.
“No. What should we be hiding?” Hester said.
I stammered uselessly, I am disappointed to report.
“Leave,” the man said.
“No,” Hester said.
“He has a sword! That’s prohibited in the college! He might use it!” I said, my personal level of alarm growing well beyond the meager bounds I had previously set for it.
The man shook his head. “It is against the code to wear weapons here, yes. Consider me an exception. I am a man of Ae’s Word.”
“The door is probably right up there in the north hall. You’d put yourself between us and it, of course,” Hester said.
The man’s frown deepened, and he rolled up his sleeves. I took a pace back.
But Hester was already on the move. I felt a sudden rush of cloak and mass at my side as he leapt forward and a fight erupted in front of me.
It was over before I knew it. My eyes only registered a swift, violent twisting of two bodies, partially obscured by the whipping of long, flowing garbs.
Hester, later, offered me a thorough account of the fight. At the first sign of confrontation, he closed the distance as fast as he could, grabbing at the man’s habit with his left hand. The monk backed away a step, protecting his scabbard with his left hand and sweeping away the attempted grab with his right—an important confirmation of Hester’s suspicions that his opponent desired not to bare steel and shed blood. Knowing this, Hester continued with his bare-handed attack, throwing two punches to force the back-stepping monk to defend and then barreling into a tight grapple. After each took some attempts at muscling the other to the ground with raw strength, the monk tried grabbing Hester’s wrist to pull him forward and trip him over his instep, but Hester anticipated this and met the monk’s momentum with an exquisitely placed (I am told) elbow to the face.
At the end of it—and this is where my own senses caught up—Hester kneeled over the man.
“That’ll bruise, but no blood loss. Help me tie him up.”
I knelt down to help. The man was dazed, numb. Hester rolled him over and held his hands behind his back as the man offered clumsy, useless resistance. “Why?” I asked in panic, even as I took the rope Hester produced from somewhere on his person.
“He’ll get up in a few seconds unless we do. This will buy us a few minutes to get going.”
“Oh. So…” I pulled the knot as tight as I dared.
“He was an apprentice warrior, I think. Fine and thorough training, but he’s not mastered it yet. Sort of… following the dance steps to the number, right?”
“Right, obviously,” I glanced about, anxiously. “If there’s an apprentice, won’t there be a master somewhere? We need to be going.”
“Unnf,” the man said.
“You are right, of course,” Hester said. He stared directly up the hall. “Those doors there. See it? The seam in the masonry between them. That entire wall opens up somehow or another.”
I saw it then. The door set facing us directly in the T-shaped intersection was set within a section of wall that, if you looked closely enough, appeared to be parted from the rest. “How in the world…?”
“When people bar your way you often need only look right behind them. When I looked there it was plain as day.”
“Right. So that’s certainly wide enough for a wagon of supplies to come through. Let’s be inside, shall we?”
Through the door was a meeting room. There were no windows, so I lit a tiny arcane light—one of the few spells I had durably, permanently memorized4—so that we could close the door and better hide our snooping. The room was dominated by a square, unfinished oak table. A few unremarkable stools huddled around it.
“It lacks a certain grandeur, don’t you think?” I remarked.
“Well, yes,” Hester said.
“Seriously. In a place like this, where every woodcraft exalts the goddess’ works? This hastily built thing?”
“Maybe it has something to do with the passage,” Hester said, probably indulging what he thought was a silly line of thought.
I held my little flickering light closer and examined for a minute.
“Hmm.”
Hester was feeling around the floor in the back for knobs or further seams. “What?”
“Something isn’t right here.”
“Out with it, then,” Hester said without looking up from his work.
“This…” I squinted at the table in the dim light. “The legs aren’t joined. They’re… well, how do you describe this? It’s like they were carved…”
Hester stopped and turned to face me, still kneeling. “Skilled carpenters can disguise their joints pretty well, can’t they?”
“Well yes, but…” I began, scratching my beard with my free hand. “Just look.”
Hester stepped over. “I thought we were in a hurry.”
“We are, just… look at this, will you?”
“What, you don’t see a joint? I think I see, it’s slotted in from the bottom here…”
“No, that’s just a crease,” I insisted. “You can see if you look closely…”
“Hmm. I can’t see there very well. What about here? Give me your light.”
“Well, I can’t, but…”
“Oh, fine.” He took my hand by the wrist and pointed my index finger toward a point on the other end of the bottom surface of the table. We were both kneeling beneath it now. “Right here…”
My index finger, and the little point of light at the tip of it, touched the underside of the table.
And then we both fell.
And I was about to see even stranger things. ↩
Fame in the postfoedus era is a funny thing. As the languages of the Seven Kingdoms have drifted apart in their dialects, now united almost as much by the trade-tongues of the veld as they are by their heritage in the old Ivian League, the literati find themselves reading and writing in spheres. For every object of interest in a realm—the East Hall, the King of Anteianum, a great winter storm—there may exist half a dozen reflections of that object in different languages, emphasizing different parts or indeed flipping the orientation around entirely, if I may indulge in the metaphor.
There do exist scholars and officials in far flung realms who correspond with each other frequently, of course. Whereas foreign merchants struggle with each other by flinging bits of mutually intelligible nouns back and forth, strung together by wild gesticulations and occasional Yaria phrases, foreign written correspondents are almost always initiated into that storied fellowship of writers of the stately and holy hand, Classical Ivian, and we are all quite proud of it. I must admit, though, the merchants probably end up getting their points across better. Most correspondence written in Classical Ivian has all the stately dignity of an adolescent boy with too many knees and elbows trying to ride an unbroken horse. I should know; I write quite a bit of it. ↩
Never cross men and women of infinite patience, no matter how mild their manner. ↩
Arcane light is, essentially, an extremely simple projection of one of the distant flickering elements of the majestic sea of stars down onto Mundus. “That star, as I see it, belongs here” is the basic conceptual formula for the spell. How elegant! “As I see it,” by the way, is how it becomes such a tiny point of light in one’s hands. A star is much too majestic to project in its wholeness anyway. ↩