The eyes of the Sphinx looked at him cryptically, and he could not tell what was in the deep places behind those eyes.
“Know thyself,” she said very softly. “For you are small. Take what others let fall.”
Vigil turned toward the laughing guards and raised his hand in an ancient salute. It was a secular gesture, not a mudra, and Vigil released no neuroactive energy from any peripheral cells, but nonetheless, the sentries went blank faced with awe, beholding that he was a Lord of Stability in truth and not a drunk in masquerade.
They suddenly stopped laughing and snapped to attention. The one man who had dropped his wand had a panicked look in his eye, for he had not stooped to pick up the weapon, and now that he was at attention, he dared not.
Vigil wondered how he could command such respect, even as a Lord of the Stability. Then he felt a neural pressure from behind his shoulder blades and realized that the Sphinx had turned her mysterious, blind-seeming, white eyes toward the sentries, her vast stone face perhaps touched with a hint of a smile. No human was likely to surrender to mirth when eyes like those were watching.
Vigil stepped forward. He stooped and picked up the dropped peace wand. It felt childish and insubstantial after the weight of the antique vendetta wand that had shattered in his hand. He was not sure if this is what the Sphinx meant by her unclear command, but he saw no harm in it. By the customs of the Order, Vigil would have been required to surrender the sentry’s weapon if asked, but the sentry on watch was not allowed to speak unless addressed and could not ask.
As Vigil approached the tall doors, two sentries saluted and pulled wide the glass panels for him. Just then, a silvery tone rang out.
He did not recognize it and did not expect to. So many signals and trills and chimes issued from the old machines these days, even antiquarians rarely knew their meanings. But Vigil was no fooclass="underline" the Myrmidon clearly had meant him to be within those doors before that chime stopped.
Vigil made the mudra called pataka: with the thumb bent and other fingers extended. The gesture contained both denotations and impositions, because it came from the choral arts rather than the martial arts. It denoted rain, showering of flowers, taking an oath, and it was used to denote silence, but it was also used to indicate forcing doors open. The tall transparent metal panels of the ceremonial doors folded back, their thousand-year-old hinge-engines crying out in protest in the voices of women. The chiming grew louder, the hinges changed their voices, and the panels began to swing shut. The opening narrowed.
Vigil stepped forward, but one of the sentries politely but solemnly stepped in his way, raised his hand in a gesture that meant, Entrance without due identification is unauthorized. The sentry flashed a beam from his lantern into Vigil’s right eye. Vigil blinked, exasperated. There were no circuits in his door-lamp for reading the pattern of blood vessels in Vigil’s retina, nor had there been since the starfall of the Pilgrim. It was a purely ceremonial gesture, no doubt meant merely to hinder Vigil and waste his time.
But he held his head still for the doorkeep to complete the meaningless motion. Meanwhile, he raised his peace wand and indicated Peace toward the door hinges, trying to jam them. The chiming grew louder again in protest, and the door opening continued to narrow. Vigil lunged and thrust the peace wand physically between the door leaves as the crack narrowed. The doors came to rest, but the doors had evidently been programmed to respect a peace wand, so they did not clamp shut and snap the wand in two.
“None may enter the Hall once the doors are shut,” the doorkeep said stiffly, a glint of malicious satisfaction in his eye. The man was of the Pilgrim race, a Loricate, and his integument was a fine mesh of silver, turquoise, and white scales, the rippling pattern of an albino snake, like the scales of a pangolin.
It was said that on their home world, long ago, of Feast of Stephen, the ancestors of the Pilgrims were the kindliest of men, since the bishops and barons of that world would be blighted with frost and hailstorms by their Judge of Age, who was also their Terraformer and weather control officer, if the poor and destitute within their parishes starved. Centuries of transit within the climate of the Great Ship Pilgrimage loosened these severe laws of charity. Their children, landing on a world that neither worshiped the same ancestors nor practiced the same Sacerdotal disciplines, were as filled with hatred and contempt for underlings as their ancestors with charity.
Vigil knew in his heart that this was one more injustice, one more stain marring the woven garment of history, that the Plan of Rania would sponge away once her influences reached here, and the slow process of cliometry reached its climax.
“Who commanded you to delay me?” Vigil said softly.
The man used a Fox-trick to change the cellular composition of his own face. The man’s countenance stiffened, changed color, and the skin cells locked in place, becoming as a mask of silver metal. “I am uncertain what milord intends to imply, sir. This humble servant of the Order merely abides by the ancient precepts and protocols.”
Vigil said, “Then stand aside, Pilgrim lackey; for, look closely! The doors are not shut.” And he nodded at the narrow crack where the doors were resting very lightly around the peace wand, by a hair’s breadth not touching it.
The doorkeep said stiffly, “Even the Lords must abide by the conventions and protocols of the Stability. Once the doors are shut—”
“I say they are not shut and that the protocol is therefore intact. Step away, or you hinder a Lord of the Stability in the performance of his duties.”
But the doorkeep said, “The protocol clearly states that in times of dispute or accusation of irregular injunction or detainment, the Office of the Watch has discretion. Therefore, we must summon him to answer whether you may pass or no. He is within. I will send a page once the conclave is disbanded.”
Vigil was affronted by the transparency of the ploy. “This means I will miss the conclave to which I am summoned!”
The doorkeep quirked his eyebrows nonchalantly. “My concern is that protocol is maintained. It is no fault of mine that milord amused himself to wander the back avenues erratically, or beguiled the time away taking baths or molesting statues.”
“Send the page now!”
“While the doors are shut? I humbly regret to inform milord that this is impossible, sir.”
“Impossible?”
“Highly unlikely, let us say, milord…”
Vigil dropped the wand and grabbed door panels in both hands, as if he were challenging the oblong slab to a wrestling match. The sentries were too surprised to remember their face control, and they laughed, knowing the door leaves were made a spaceworthy transparent metal. They did not know, however, that Vigil’s bones were made of a material just as strong, or slightly more, and his muscles had been engineered to the peak of what was permitted to human beings, or slightly beyond; and they did not remember that no matter how hard the doors, the hinges were antiques.
Their laughter died as one of the door leaves twisted in a hideous groaning at an odd angle, awkward as a tooth pried from a jaw, and fell with seeming slowness grandly to the flagstones in a gonglike clang of noise, loud as a thunderclap.
2. The Seneschal
Emergency lamps, no doubt startled at the noise, lit up with red flares, and trumpets sounded, and a siren sang out. (He could see her in the distance. The siren was seated in a rotunda where six corridors met, the basin of a silver fountain with a conch shell in her white hands, no doubt an adjutant to one of the lake-dwelling versions of mankind, a Melusine or related order.)
Vigil stepped over the fallen door panel into the Palace of Future History and whistled for the peace wand. The peace wand hesitated, no doubt wondering whether it should return to the empty-handed sentry staring sadly from afar. But seeing the unhappy fate of the hinges, who were moaning and calling for repair, the wand no doubt thought it wiser to comply. It flexed like a snake, issued a magnetic pulse, and leaped smoothly into Vigil’s hand.