프롤로그 The Falling Lamp

================================================================================ THE SUNDERED CROWN PROLOGUE — The Falling Lamp ================================================================================ The Star-Tower of Caelum, the eighth moon, the four-hundred-and-seventh year of the Founding. Six winters before the Yellow Banner. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The stair to the Star-Tower had two hundred and sixty-four steps and Halen of Greyford counted them every time he climbed. He counted because the College required it of new augurs in their first year, and he counted now in his fourth year because the habit had outlasted the requirement. He had once tried to break himself of it. He had failed. It was, his old master had said, a small price for a clear head, and clear heads were what the College sold. He carried his sighting-circle in a leather satchel against his hip and the night's ephemeris under his arm. The wind off the Whitewater came up the stair behind him as he climbed; by the third landing his lantern guttered and he stopped to shield it with his cloak. From the high arrow-slit he could see the city. Caelum lay below him in two great bowls of light, the inner and the outer, divided by the black wall of the Iron Citadel. The bowls were not as bright as they had been a season ago. The lamp-tax had been raised in the second moon, and the merchants of the outer city had begun to leave their alleys dark. He climbed on. At the upper door he showed his sash to the guard, who had known him since he was a boy and waved him through without looking at it. The room beyond was the Star-Tower's open chamber: a circular floor of slate set into the granite, ringed by a low parapet, open to the heavens above. In its center stood the great brass instrument the College called the WHEEL — a ringed armillary the height of a man, geared to follow the rotation of the heavens, calibrated against the seven principal stars of the autumn sky. The chief augur was already at the Wheel. Old Master Vellan was eighty-one years old and walked with a stick in the daytime, but at the Wheel he stood straight as he had stood at thirty. He did not turn when Halen came in. "You are late," he said. "Fortunately the heavens are also late tonight. We will read together." "Master." "Bring the lantern closer. The Hammer is rising." Halen brought the lantern. He set it in the small alcove cut into the parapet where the College set its working-lamps, sheltered from the wind on three sides, open to the slate floor on the fourth. The flame steadied. Old Vellan bent to the Wheel. For a long time neither of them spoke. The wind ran around the parapet and went on. The city below them murmured the way large cities murmur at night, the way that is closer to a single sound than to many. Halen took his readings: the altitude of the Hammer, of the Anvil, of the Sieve, of the Scale. He marked them on the wax slate with the brass stylus the College gave to each of its augurs and required to be returned at death. Old Vellan watched him work, and once corrected him, and once did not. When Halen had finished his sightings he set the slate beside the lantern and looked up at the sky. "Master," he said. "I see it," said Old Vellan. The Eye was wrong. The Eye was the seventh of the Seven Stars, the smallest in the autumn sky, the dimmest, the last to clear the eastern horizon on any night of the working season. Halen had never in his life been able to read it without the help of the long brass tube called the FAR-SIGHT. It had always been there. It had always required squinting. Tonight, with no Far-Sight, with no aid at all, he could read it from where he stood. It was not the brightest star above Caelum, but it was brighter than it had been the night before, and brighter than it had been six nights ago, and the chart in his hand told him it was brighter than it should have been at any season since the College had begun keeping its records. "How long?" said Halen. "Eleven nights," said Old Vellan. "I did not call you up before because I wished to be certain." "What does it mean, Master?" The old man did not answer at once. He bent again to the Wheel. He turned its outer ring by half a degree. He read the new alignment. He stood up. "It means," he said, "that the Eye is opening." Halen waited. "In the Tables of Caranthir," said Old Vellan, "the Eye opens four times. Once at the founding of the Imperium, when the heavens regarded the work of Tarsius Aurelian and found it good. Once at the close of the great civil war of the second century, when the rebel Houses were broken at the Tonneric Narrows. Once, less certainly, at the death of the third Aurelian Empress in childbirth, though some scholars hold that to be a copyist's error. And once — " he paused — "in the year of the falling of the Old Republic, before the first Aurelian rose to put it back together." "The Eye opens before changes." "The Eye opens to see them." Halen looked back at the sky. The Eye burned, small and steady, the seventh Star of the seven. He could not tell whether it had grown brighter while they had been speaking or whether his own eyes had merely adjusted. He thought it had grown brighter. He could not have proven it. "Master," he said. "We must take this to the Court." Old Vellan smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He was eighty-one years old and had served four Emperors and had walked these stairs every clear night for sixty-two years, and Halen had only ever seen him smile that particular smile twice before. "My boy," said Old Vellan, "the Court will not hear it." "They must hear it." "They will not." "It is the Eye." "It is also a small star in the autumn sky, and the Court has not looked at the autumn sky in twelve years. The Court looks at the Emperor's bedchamber and at the Emperor's boys and at the price of Karrak fur. The Court has a Robed Minister who puts the Tables of Caranthir at the bottom of his correspondence-box every morning, and he has been doing so since before you were born. We will take this to the Court tomorrow. The Court will note it. The Court will require us to file a copy in the third archive. The third archive will lose it within the season. By the eighth moon of next year no one in the Iron Citadel will remember that we were here tonight." "Then why," said Halen, "are we standing in the cold?" The old man set his hand on the Wheel. "Because someone must," he said. "Because in fifty years a young man will climb these stairs and find the chart, and he will know that someone stood here on the eleventh night and counted true. Because the Tables of Caranthir are not kept for the men who cannot read them. They are kept for the man who can." The wind came up off the Whitewater again. The lantern flame in the alcove guttered and stood up and guttered again and went out. Old Vellan looked at the dark place where the lantern had been. He looked at it for a long time. "That is the second omen of the night," he said quietly. Halen waited for him to explain. He did not explain. The old man bent again to the Wheel, and turned the outer ring another half-degree, and began the second reading, and they stood together in the cold open chamber until the Eye crossed the meridian and began its slow descent into the west. They did not speak again until the eastern horizon paled, and when they spoke it was about the order of the morning's work. Halen of Greyford carried the chart down the two hundred and sixty-four steps of the Star-Tower at first light. He walked the Long Forum to the Iron Citadel. He filed the chart with the appropriate Robed Minister, who took it without reading it and set it at the bottom of his correspondence-box. The Robed Minister was a thin, soft-spoken man named Corven, the Second Minister of the Inner Treasury, and he accepted the document with the small courtesy he gave to all such filings, which was to nod once without looking up. Halen left the Citadel by the lesser gate. He walked back across the Forum in the cold dawn. At the foot of the Star-Tower he stopped, and he looked up the stair, and he did not climb it. Old Vellan was already at his rest. Halen went to his own narrow room in the College dormitory, and he wrote out a fair copy of the chart in his own hand, and he wrote underneath it a single sentence: THE EYE IS OPENING. THE LAMP HAS GONE OUT. SOMEONE MUST KEEP THE COUNT. He folded the copy three times and put it in the wooden box at the foot of his bed, beneath the spare cloak and the second pair of boots. He did not look at it again. He did not need to. He shut the lid, and the lid made a small unimportant sound, the sound of any wooden box closing on any morning. He sat down on the edge of his cot. He had not slept. He noticed, distantly, that his hands were colder than his face. Outside, in the College courtyard, a kitchen door opened, and a woman called for a boy who was apparently late with the bread. The bread-boy answered. Halen heard him answer and did not understand a word of it; the boy was Karrak by birth and had not yet learned the city's tongue, and his answer came out in the long vowels of the eastern steppe. He thought, for a moment, that he should pray. He did not know any prayer that would fit. The College taught observation, not petition; the Robed Ministers had their state prayers, and those were not for nights like this; the village his mother had raised him in had a small shrine to the river-spirit at the bottom of the orchard, and that was where one went for a child's fever or a missing cow. He sat in the cold light without praying. Behind him — two hundred and sixty-four steps up, in the open chamber of the Star-Tower — Old Vellan slept at last on the narrow cot beside the Wheel. Halen knew this because he had watched the old man bend over the brass and turn the outer ring through one final reading just before the dawn, and he had recognized the small slow movements of a man preparing to lie down. He did not climb back up. He sat on the edge of his cot until the bell in the College tower began the eighth hour, and then he stood, and washed his face in the cold water of the basin, and went out to begin the day's appointed work. In the wooden box at the foot of the bed, the lid stayed shut. ================================================================================ END OF PROLOGUE ================================================================================