A path strewn with glossy green leaves takes me to an overlook point at the cliff’s edge, where I can see the broad bay far below, at the foot of Sanctuary Mountain. The water gleams like a burnished shield, or perhaps it is more like a huge shimmering pool of quicksilver. I imagine myself leaping from the stone balcony where I stand and soaring outward in a sharp smooth arc, striking the water cleanly, knifing down through it, vanishing without a trace.
Returning to the main Sanctuary complex, I happen to glance downslope toward the long narrow new building that I have been told is the detention center. A portcullis at its eastern end has been hoisted and a procession of prisoners is coming out. I know they are prisoners because they are roped together and walk in a sullen, slack way, heads down, shoulders slumped.
They are dressed in rags and tatters, or less than that. Even from fairly far away I can see cuts and bruises and scabs on them, and one has his arm in a sling, and one is bandaged so that nothing shows of his face but his glinting eyes. Three guards walk alongside them, carelessly dangling neural truncheons from green lanyards. The ropes that bind the prisoners are loosely tied, a perfunctory restraint. It would be no great task for them to break free and seize the truncheons from the captors. But they seem utterly beaten down; for them to make any sort of move toward freedom is probably as unlikely as the advent of an army of winged dragons swooping across the sky.
They are an incongruous and disturbing sight, these miserable prisoners plodding across this velvet landscape. Does the Master know that they are here, and that they are so poorly kept? I start to walk toward them. The Lord Invocator Kastel, emerging suddenly from nowhere as if he had been waiting behind a bush, steps across my path and says, “God keep you, your grace. Enjoying your stroll through the grounds?”
“Those people down there—”
“They are nothing, Lord Magistrate. Only some of our thieving rabble, coming out for a little fresh air.”
“Are they well? Some of them look injured.”
Kastel tugs at one ruddy fleshy jowl. “They are desperate people. Now and then they try to attack their guards. Despite all precautions we can’t always avoid the use of force in restraining them.”
“Of course. I quite understand,” I say, making no effort to hide my sarcasm. “Is the Master aware that helpless prisoners are being beaten within a thousand meters of his lodge?”
“Lord Magistrate—!”
“If we are not humane in all our acts, what are we, Lord Invocator Kastel? What example do we set for the common folk?”
“It’s these common folk of yours,” Kastel says sharply—I have not heard that tone from him before—“who ring this place like an army of filthy vermin, eager to steal anything they can carry away and destroy everything else. Do you realize, Lord Magistrate, that this mountain rises like a towering island of privilege above a sea of hungry people? That within a sixty-kilometer radius of these foothills there are probably thirty million empty bellies? That if our perimeter defenses were to fail, they’d sweep through here like locusts and clean the place out? And probably slaughter every last one of us, up to and including the Master.”
“God forbid.”
“God created them. He must love them. But if this House is going to carry out the work God intended for us, we have to keep them at bay. I tell you, Lord Magistrate, leave these grubby matters of administration to us. In a few days you’ll go flying off to your secluded nest in the Outback, where your work is undisturbed by problems like these. Whereas we’ll still be here, in our pretty little mountain paradise, with enemies on every side. If now and then we take some action that you might not consider entirely humane, I ask you to remember that we guard the Master here, who is the heart of the Mission.” He allows me, for a moment, to see the contempt he feels for my qualms. Then he is all affability and concern again. In a completely different tone he says, “The observatory’s scanning equipment will be back in operation again tonight. I want to invite you to watch the data come pouring in from every corner of space. It’s an inspiring sight, Lord Magistrate.”
“I would be pleased to see it.”
“The progress we’ve made, Lord Magistrate—the way we’ve moved out and out, always in accordance with the divine plan—I tell you, I’m not what you’d call an emotional man, but when I see the track we’re making across the Dark my eyes begin to well up, let me tell you. My eyes begin to well up.”
His eyes, small and keen, study me for a reaction.
Then he says, “Everything’s all right for you here?”
“Of course, Lord Invocator.”
“Your conversations with the Master—have they met with your expectations?”
“Entirely so. He is truly a saint.”
“Truly, Lord Magistrate. Truly.”
“Where would the Mission be without him?”
“Where will it be,” says Kastel thoughtfully, “when he is no longer here to guide us?”
“May that day be far from now.”
“Indeed,” Kastel says. “Though I have to tell you, in all confidence, I’ve started lately to fear—”
His voice trails off.
“Yes?”
“The Master,” he whispers. “Didn’t he seem different to you, somehow?”
“Different?”
“I know it’s years since you last saw him. Perhaps you don’t remember him as he was.”
“He seemed lucid and powerful to me, the most commanding of men,” I reply.
Kastel nods. He takes me by the arm and gently steers me toward the upper buildings of the Sanctuary complex, away from those ghastly prisoners, who are still shuffling about like walking corpses in front of their jail. Quietly he says, “Did he tell you that he thinks someone’s interfering with the plan? That he has evidence that some of the receivers are being shipped far beyond the intended destinations?”
I look at him, wide-eyed.
“Do you really expect me to violate the confidential nature of the Master’s audiences with me?”
“Of course not! Of course not, Lord Magistrate. But just between you and me—and we’re both important men in the Order, it’s essential that we level with each other at all times—I can admit to you that I’m pretty certain what the Master must have told you. Why else would he have sent for you? Why else pull you away from your House and interrupt what is now the key activity of the Mission? He’s obsessed with this idea that there have been deviations from the plan. He’s reading God knows what into the data. But I don’t want to try to influence you. It’s absurd to think that a man of your supreme rank in the second House of the Order can’t analyze the situation unaided. You come tonight, you look at what the scanner says, you make up your own mind. That’s all I ask. All right, Lord Magistrate? All right?”
He walks away, leaving me stunned and shocked. The Master insane? Or the Lord Invocator disloyal? Either one is unthinkable.