“Who’s there?” came a voice from the walls above.
I’d no cornicen, no herald to sound my arrival, and at any rate to come to the scholiasts a great lord with pomp and circumstance seemed wrong to me, who had meant to come a mendicant long ago. Letting go of Valka’s hand, I stood forward, and said, “Sir Hadrian, Lord of the House Marlowe Victorian, come at the behest of His Radiance, the Emperor.”
A pale face peered over the gatehouse parapet, eyes narrow. A boy, I thought, no older than twenty. Perhaps no older than fifteen. “Visitors?” he said, “a lord and knight, you say? And these others?”
“My companion here is Doctor Valka Onderra, a lay scholar of the Demarchy—these others are our guards.”
“Guards?” the boy said. “We’ll have no violence here, sir. The primate says all weapons must be left at the gatehouse. All shields and terminals, too. No machine may pass under the day gate. It is Stricture.” He stood a little taller, leaning out between the merlons. “We’d no word anyone was coming.”
“I am the word!” I exclaimed, stepping forward. “The Emperor himself has commanded that I have access to your archives, that my companion and I should be admitted at once.”
“No one gets in without a letter of approval, sir,” the sentinel answered me, and I wondered at the nerve of him. He was brave, that much was certain. He wore no shield-belt, nor were there signs of guards or any weapons near at hand—so much of Colchis’s defense was relegated simply to the Orbital Defense Force. Satellites locked in stationary orbit above the Library kept precision beam weapons forever alert, operators aboard scanning the highlands for unauthorized approach. None of that would have stopped an irascible lord firing a phase disruptor, however. “In the tube, please.”
As if on queue, a pneumatic tube’s hatch sprang open, producing a padded cylinder. Glancing at Valka and Pallino, I smiled and—removing my glove—took the Emperor’s ring from my finger. I placed it into the cylinder, sealed it, and, returning it to the tube, pulled the lever that sent the tube rushing back up the tower to the bored sentry.
“This isn’t a letter.”
“Well spotted, lad!” Pallino interjected, unable to help himself. “It’s the Emperor’s own Earth-buggering signet ring.”
“I can’t let anyone in without a letter of approval from the Imperial Office underwritten by a member of our Order and notorized by the governor-general in Aea.”
Varro stepped forward. “I am a brother of the Chalcenterite Order, novice. Take that ring to your Dean or straight to the Primate at once.”
“I’m not allowed to leave the gatehouse, brother, sir,” the boy said. “Provost’s orders.”
“You’re also bound to obedience by Stricture, son,” Varro answered. “And as your senior, I am ordering you to deliver that ring to the hierarchs.”
“You could be an imposter!” the boy countered.
Behind me, Pallino grunted. “This is what they put at the gates of the Imperial Library? Mother Earth’s tits, I know recruits less thick.”
“They don’t get a lot of foot traffic,” I said. “Any real threat would have been stopped well before they got boots on the ground.”
“Then what’s the point of them walls?” Pallino asked.
“To keep the brothers in,” Varro replied, a touch ominously. He wasn’t wrong. The scholiasts’ athenaea were crafted to isolate the brothers and sisters of the Order, not to protect them from outside—and to prevent the contamination of their theoretical cloisters with praxis and experiment. The Order was consecrated to pure theoretical work. No scholiast could so much as touch a machine without special dispensation from his lord, for risk that they—whose ancient predecessors had crafted the daimons that ruled the Mericanii—might give rise to such abomination once more. Face impassive, Varro stepped forward and addressed the sentinel. “I know they don’t teach you this in Elementary Protocols, but consider: Which is more likely? That I am an impostor, and that a band of impostors would come to your gates and knock? Or that there is simply something you—a novice—don’t know?”
Silence then for the space of two heartbeats.
“I’ll go to the Dean, brother.”
Valka hid her smile behind her hand.
Ten minutes passed, twenty. There came a soft rain from the west where gray cloud reared above the grayer seas at the margins of the world. Valka produced a hood from the lining of her red leather coat, but I simply turned my face to the heavens. How long had it been since I’d last felt rain? A dozen waking years? More?
The grinding of metal bolts shook the ground beneath my feet, and I turned in time to see the metal doors slide open. Not completely, but wide enough only to permit a single woman in faded greens to step between the metal doors.
“Which of you is Sir Hadrian?” she said, sweeping our party. But her eyes settled on me even as she finished, and—bowing low—she extended one knobby hand with the Emperor’s ring clasped between thumb and forefinger.
I took it. Though it was not called for, I returned her bow. “I am, counselor.” I introduced Valka, Varro, and the others. “We have traveled far to come here. My companion and I wish to study in your archives.”
“To study . . . what?” she asked.
She had not given a name, nor any rank. Taking her for a hierarch of some rank, I bowed again. “Teacher, forgive me, but there are things better left unsaid in the open air. That is why no message was sent, no telegraph from Forum. I am on a mission of special significance to the Solar Throne in my capacity as one of Caesar’s Knights Victorian. I will speak only to your Primate. Forgive me.” As I spoke, I restored the Emperor’s ring to my finger, but did not restore my glove, opting instead to retain only the left one to cover my disfigured arm and hand.
The woman surveyed me a moment, face utterly unreadable, controlled. Without any hint of emotion. Suspicion? Concern? Fear? She stepped aside. “The Throne has not sent us a ring in more than five hundred years,” she said. “Not since Cressgard. You and your men must leave your weapons and terminals at the gate here.”
I moved to step past her and cross beneath the threshold.
Colchis.
The edge of the world.
There was still an edge here. Not between civilization and frontier, but between the secular world—my world—and the theoretical world of the scholiasts.
And I crossed it then, with Valka and the others just behind.
CHAPTER 53
THE GOLDEN AGE
“YOU MUST FORGIVE BROTHER Van,” said Primate Arrian—master of all Nov Belgaer Athenaeum and the Imperial Library. “The boy was doing his duty. He is young. I apologize, Lord, for leaving you to stand in the rain.”
“It’s no trouble,” I said, accepting the straight-backed wooden seat the Primate offered me. Valka sat beside me. Varro stood behind. The Primate’s quarters were low-ceilinged and close, with a warm fire crackling merrily in the fireplace, burning what appeared to be moss. Another novice, a young woman clearly of palatine birth, sat on a stool with a clipboard on her knees. Ink stained her hands and the front of her green robes, as she struggled with the old-fashioned pen and writing tablet.
Arrian took his seat behind the large desk. The furniture was plain, but well made, carefully polished and maintained. Everything from the worn bookshelves, to the scrolls in their honeycombed niches, to the weathered stone walls themselves ached with age.
“What brings you to Colchis, Lord?” Tor Arrian asked. He was an older man, but by the red of his hair—going gray in places—I guessed that he was a cousin of the Imperial line.
I glanced at Valka, having decided to not quite tell the truth as I had before the Emperor.
“The Mericanii, Primate,” I answered after a pregnant moment.
Whatever Tor Arrian had expected, this was not it, for despite his scholiast’s training I saw his eyelids flicker. The gir
l’s pen scratched to one side. “The Mericanii?” the Primate said. “Why? I will admit our knowledge of current events is sparse in athenaeum, but I know you, Lord Marlowe. You are focused on the Cielcin, are you not? Why turn to—of all things—the Foundation War?” My eyes turned to the scribe. Even in the offices of a scholiast primate behind the walls of an athenaeum, there were ears. No cameras or microphones, but there were recording devices of a kind. “Ekaterin is my daughter,” Tor Arrian said. “You need not worry.”
His daughter? That caught me by surprise. Scholiasts do not have children. A bastard, then? An intus? She looked healthy enough. Perhaps she was one of the lucky ones.
Smiling at the primate, I continued my lie. “On my travels, I discovered evidence of contact between the Mericanii daimons and certain . . . extraterranic agencies.”
“Xenobites?” The scholiast lord almost, almost arched his eyebrows.
“Possibly.”
“We have no such information here,” Arrian said. “Wherever did you learn such a thing?”
Eyes shifting to Valka, I hesitated. She answered for me. “Vorgossos.”
The scholiast’s composure cracked, and he nearly laughed, echoing, “Vorgossos . . . you’re not serious.”
But Valka and Varro alike had come to Vorgossos. Both had spoken with Kharn Sagara. The Chalcenterite answered, speaking from over my shoulder. “It is true, father. The planet exists. You will forgive me, but it seems the reports from Legion Intelligence have not yet reached you here.”
“Vorgossos . . .” The primate repeated the name. “Next you will me that Ys is real! Camelot?”
Valka crossed her arms. “If your acolytes had not taken my terminal, I might have shown you.”
“Shown me?” the primate said. “You have holographs?”
“I have memories,” she said, putting one finger to her temple. She offered no further explanation. The intaglio on her arm spoke to her Tavrosi ancestry, and that was enough.
Tor Arrian looked away.
“I met a man on Vorgossos who said the Mericanii conducted probing missions deep into the galactic volume. That some of their missions produced interesting results.” I did not say what Brethren had said, that its fellow eldritch machines had perceived the Quiet across the stars and the centuries. “It is possible some of these incidents were early contact between the Mericanii and the Cielcin—long before our own people reached the Veil of Marinus.”
But the primate was shaking his head. “Lord Marlowe, how much do you know of astrophysics?”
I raised one eyebrow, sensing the trap but not the shape of it. “Enough as any sailor not tasked with piloting a ship.”
“Little and less, then,” Arrian said, eyes finding the ceiling. “The Mericanii never developed the warp drive. Any probes they might have sent would not have gotten far before our ancestors caught up with them, certainly before they penetrated as far as the Veil.” He was right; the Mericanii had ruled Earth for nearly two thousand years before the Advent and the Foundation War, but that limited them to a sphere of influence with a radius of two thousand light-years around Earth. The Veil of Marinus was more than twenty thousand light-years from Earth, near the heart of the galaxy. If by some chance our ancestors had missed one of the machines’ ancient probes, it would still be on its way, tracking toward the core and galactic north at nearly the speed of light, time dilated and distorted in its wake.
Undaunted, Valka leaped to my defense. “But the Cielcin are a nomadic people. ’Tis possible, if unlikely, that one of these incidents described by this man on Vorgossos might have been early contact with the Cielcin. Prior human contact might explain Cielcin belligerence when they attacked Cressgard centuries ago.”
Arrian’s handsome palatine face composed itself into a frown—a most un-scholiast expression. “That would require a cultural memory reaching back more than fifteen thousand years on the part of the Cielcin. And I thought all evidence suggested they only became a spacefaring culture in the past few thousand years.”
“They are longer lived than we are,” I said.
“And ’tis possible we misunderstand their origins,” Valka agreed.
The primate shook his head again. “This is a fool’s errand.”
“With respect, primate,” I said, and bowed my head, “it is my errand.” I placed my ungloved fist on the tabletop, displaying Sir George’s ring. The Emperor’s ring. “I am of His Radiance’s Knights Victorian, here at his special command. You are bound, and I command. I request and require your cooperation.”
Tor Arrian’s frown deepened, and in that frown I recognized the face of the Emperor. Who had Arrian been in his former life? A brother? A cousin to the throne? Had he known William XXIII as a boy? Had they played together in the gardens of the Peronine Palace? His green eyes stared at the ring. Surely he knew it.
Both hands flat on the tabletop, he answered, “You must understand how irregular this is. The Strictures are most explicit with regard to what we can and cannot do. We are bound, you say. This is true. All men are. The information you request and require is in Gabriel’s Archive, sealed since it was transported here at the founding of this institution. Sealed by order of Emperor Gabriel II after the Pretender’s defeat. Sealed because even my order was not to be trusted with Mericanii artifacts. It will take more than a ring to open those doors, my lord. You have come all this way for nothing. I am sorry.” He stood, and bowed low over the table, his hands tucked into his flowing brocade sleeves. “But I answer to higher authorities than you.”
“Higher than the Emperor?”
“To tradition. If William wishes to break with tradition, he must tell me himself,” he said. “You have the freedom of this institute and the library—save the monastery on the crag, of course—unless you wish to join our order.”
“Not today,” I said icily, standing myself. “I am grateful for your hospitality, primate. But.” If Tor Arrian insisted on playing the game to the letter, so be it. I would cross every T and mark every vowel if that was what it took, even if it took months to clear.
“But?” Arrian raised an eyebrow.
“But,” I said coolly, “I will be transmitting directly to His Radiance on Forum. You will open those doors for me, primate. Depend on it.” And with that I turned and strode from the room in a flowing of black coattails.
* * *
“ ’Tis only a minor setback,” Valka said, gripping my arm as we strode down a pillared gallery from the primate’s offices.
Varro cut in, following softly behind. “I will return to the city and see the request is wired through.”
“You have the Emperor’s codes?” I said.
“I do,” he said.
“Very good. Take Doran and two men with you,” I said. “Now that we know the situation on the ground here, please send to the Tamerlane. I want Prince Alexander brought down. If we’re to be dug in here for months, he might as well get an education out of all this.” We swept down a flight of stairs as I spoke, guards marching in lockstep behind.
Varro assented, and added, “If might make a suggestion?”
“Certainly.”
“If we are to be at anchor here for some time, it might do to let the men ashore. Many of them have not had proper shore leave in decades—a number of them have not even left the Tamerlane except to fight. This isn’t Forum. They’re not like to get into any political trouble.”
“Political trouble,” I said, thinking of Lieutenant Casdon. “Very good, counselor. Make the arrangements with the governor-general. I’ve no wish to flood her city with lonely sailors all at once. Perhaps there are some remoter locations the men might visit in smaller groups. Less chance for mayhem.”
Varro bowed and withdrew, hurrying along one leg of the quadrangle we’d descended into with Doran and his guards.
“What’s the point of a library if they won’t let yo
u read anything?” Pallino said when the scholiast had gone.
I could only sigh. It was a tiresome delay, but for once in my life, time was not of the essence, and so I did not complain.
* * *
The athenaeum citadel was, as I have said, bounded by a high, circular stone wall. But I feel this presents too simple a picture of the place in which I now sit. For a start, this picture leaves off the monastery on the crag overlooking the main athenaeum. On that high crag, old men retreated to contemplate the stars and to study the soul, muttering of philosophy in dusty halls, writing books that descended their winding stairs and vanished into the cavernous halls of the Imperial Library, perhaps to be read one day by some novice destined to tutor some great lord, perhaps not.
The Library itself stood at the center of the compound, a massive drum tower perhaps half a mile in diameter, the only structure in the place not built of common stone, but of steel, with high, narrow windows rising for fifty stories above the low stone buildings and spires of the lecture halls and refectories, observatories, conservatories, and greenhouses. Part of the mountain it seemed, an admonishing finger or defiant fist upthrust from the body of the highlands and Colchis itself.
It was but the tip of the iceberg, for beneath its mighty spire there were deep halls and chambers and winding labyrinths, walls packed and lined with books, and more than books: with scrolls and pamphlets, with ancient storage drives, microfilm, and quartz storage crystals—though the scholiasts possessed no praxis to read such things within their walls. How many billion texts molder yet within its walls? How many trillion?
The Library and athenaeum institute of Nov Belgaer that surrounded it was a labyrinth and a microcosm unto itself, replete with aqueducts and gardens, amphitheaters and classrooms—all the essentials necessary for maintaining a community of thousands and facilitating their lives of consecrated research.
Quarters had been found for us in a quiet dormitory near the outer walls, and while we waited for Varro and Doran to return from Aea with Alexander, Valka and I ate in the refectory alongside green-robed brothers and sisters of the Order and were permitted to explore those parts of the compound nearest the main gate, where dwelt the novices and those full scholiasts whose vocation it was to interact with the world outside. Pallino was never far behind, dogging us with his men.
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