Chapter 653: The Keeper of Hours

The lord of the Meridian Palace received them at midnight, because that was when he was awake.

His name was Ilario Thane, and he did not look like a Transcendent. He looked like a scholar who had forgotten to go to bed for forty years: a slight man of no particular age in a shabby dark robe, with ink on his cuffs and an hourglass on a chain around his neck. His eyes were the strangest thing about him. They were pale and clouded, as milky as the stars over the plateau, and when he turned them on Vane they did not quite focus.

"Blind," he said pleasantly, before anyone could ask. "I looked at the sun for too long when I was young. I wanted to see what it was made of. I found out." He tapped the hourglass. "I see quite well in other ways."

[Authority: Fixed Stars (SSS)]

[Danger: Error]

"And please don’t do that," Ilario Thane added. "It makes the stars itch."

He had received them in the largest of the domes, a vast round room of white stone open to the sky at its center, where a brass telescope as long as a ship pointed up into the dark. Every wall was shelves. Every shelf was books, and scrolls, and loose sheets of star-charts weighted down with lumps of meteoric iron. Valerica had walked in, looked at the shelves, and stopped breathing.

"You’ve come from Isadora and Bastien," the astronomer said. "And Thessaly before that. The wind told me you were coming. The wind tells me a great deal I’d rather not know." He folded his ink-stained hands. "So. You want me at Thessaly’s table."

"Yes," said Vane.

"And you want something else. People always want something else." The clouded eyes moved, very slightly, to Valerica. "Here, the custom is simple. Knowledge for knowledge. Nothing is given. Everything is traded. What have you brought me?"

Isaac told him about the ice.

He did it well. He did it the way his mother would have, plainly and without decoration: the forty-four miles, the warmth underneath, the swell that rose and was frozen at its crest, the old books in the vault beneath the Great Hall that called the Glacial Palace a lid. Ilario Thane listened without moving. When Isaac reached the part where Nyx had said it’s dreaming about the shore, the hourglass at the astronomer’s throat stopped running, the sand hanging motionless in the narrow neck.

Then Valerica told him about Oruth: the lake of fire that a man could stand beside, and the roots of the mountain going down into the cold, and something at the bottom of them, drinking.

When she had finished, the sand began to fall again.

"Warm in the north, and wanting to rise," Ilario Thane said softly. "Cold in the south, and wanting to be warm." He was quiet for a moment. "My astronomers have been charting the sea from above for thirty years. The temperature of the water. The color. The tides. We’ve known something was moving down there for a decade. We didn’t know there were two of them." He turned the hourglass over in his fingers. "That’s worth a chair. I’ll come to Thessaly’s table."

Valerica let out a breath.

"And the other thing?" the astronomer said. "The thing you actually came for."

"A chart," said Vane. "Three hundred years ago, a Palace went down into the sea, somewhere west of the Hesket shelf. We need to know where."

The room went quiet.

"Ah," said Ilario Thane. "The one that went down."

"The Drowned Palace."

"That’s what the young call it. My predecessors had a less polite name." He did not move. "Yes. We saw it go. We were watching the sky that night, as we always are, and three of my predecessors turned their instruments down to the horizon instead and watched it sink. One of them drew where it went." He tilted his head. "That chart is the single most valuable thing in this Palace. It’s the only one in the world. Isadora has asked me for it. Thessaly has asked me for it. The Emperor’s grandfather sent an army to ask me for it, and the army went home."

"What do you want for it?"

The clouded eyes moved past him.

They came to rest on Mara.

She was standing beside Isole near the door, with her ledger under her arm and the ice falcon on her shoulder, and she had been reading the spines of the books on the nearest shelf. She looked up as the room went still.

"The glass at Aelstrom couldn’t see her," Ilario Thane said. "Sarai Vell’s glass, which has never failed on eleven thousand children. Thessaly told me. Isadora’s falcon has been watching her for three weeks and doesn’t understand her either." His voice was very gentle. "I would like to look at her. Properly. With the instruments. Not to take anything. Only to know."

Vane was already moving. He was standing between Mara and the astronomer before he had decided to, and he felt Ashe come up on his left and Nyx on his right, and the air in the dome went heavy.

"No," he said.

"I won’t hurt her."

"I know you won’t. The answer’s still no."

"Vane," said Mara.

He looked down. She had stepped round him, quite calmly, and was standing in front of him now, looking at Ilario Thane with the steady, measuring look she gave to columns of figures that did not add up.

"You want to know what I am," she said.

"Yes."

"So do I." Mara considered him. "Not today."

The astronomer was silent for a long moment. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled. It was a small, delighted smile, like a man who has just watched a star do something it should not.

"Not today," he agreed. "That’s a perfectly good answer. I’ll ask again on another day." He turned the hourglass over. "But then I’m afraid the chart costs something else."

"What?" said Vane.

"The oldest custom of the Meridian. Older than the Palace." Ilario Thane lifted one ink-stained hand and pointed straight up, through the open roof, at the stars. "Above this dome there is an orrery. A model of the heavens. Every body in it is real mass, held in its orbit by nothing but the will of the one who holds it. My predecessors built it to test their students. To hold it is to understand the sky." He lowered his hand. "Hold the orrery for one turning of this glass, and the chart is yours. No one has done it in sixty years."

The room was very quiet.

Valerica stepped forward.

She did it without any drama at all. She simply walked out into the middle of the dome, under the open sky, with her hands in the pockets of her coat and her face perfectly composed, the way she walked into every room that mattered.

"I’ll do it," she said.

Ilario Thane turned his clouded eyes on her for a long time.

"Yes," he said softly. "I thought it might be you. The sky’s been humming since you landed." He held out the hourglass on its chain. "At dawn, then. When the stars are going out. That’s when they’re hardest to hold."