“Don’t sink into the past, ma’am,” Vry counselled her. “That’s the way of old men. Look ahead, look outward. There’s no profit in interrogating the dead.”
So unused to argument had Shay Tal grown that she had difficulty in refraining from scolding her chief disciple. She looked and saw, almost with startlement, that the diffident young thing was now a woman. Her face was pallid, with shadows under her eyes, and Oyre’s the same.
“Why are you two so pale? Are you ill?”
Vry shook her head.
“Tonight there’s an hour of darkness before dimday. I’ll show you then what Oyre and I are doing. While the rest of the world was sleeping, we have been working.”
The evening was clear at Freyr-set. Warmth departed from the world as the younger women escorted Shay Tal up to the roof of the ruinous tower. A lens of ghost light stretched upwards from the horizon where Freyr had set, reaching halfway to zenith. There was little cloud to conceal the heavens; as their eyes became accustomed to the darkness, the stars overhead flashed out in brilliance. In some quarters of the sky, the stars were relatively sparse, in others they hung in clusters. Overhead, trailing from one horizon to the other, was a broad, irregular band of light, where the stars were as thick as mist and there occasional brilliances burned.
“It’s the most magnificent sight in the world,” Oyre said. “Don’t you think so, ma’am?”
Shay Tal said, “In the world below hang fessups like stars. They are the souls of the dead. Here you see the souls of the unborn. As above, so below.”
“I think we have to look to an entirely different principle to explain the sky,” Vry said firmly. “All motions here are regular. The stars advance about that bright star there, which we call the polar star.” She pointed to a star high above their heads. “In the twenty-five hours of the day, the stars rotate once rising in the east and setting in the west like the two sentinels. Doesn’t that prove they are similar to the two sentinels, only much farther from us?”
The young women showed Shay Tal the star map they were making, with the relative positions of stars marked on a vellum sheet. She evinced little interest, and said, “The stars cannot affect us as the gossies do. How does this hobby of yours advance knowledge? You’d better to sleep at night.”
Vry sighed. “The sky is alive. It’s not a tomb, like the world below. Oyre and I have stood here and seen comets flaring, landing on the earth. And there are four bright stars that move differently from all the others, the wanderers, of which the old songs sing. Those wanderers sometimes double back in their passage across the sky. And one comes over very fast. We’ll see it presently. We think it’s close to us, and we call it Kaidaw, because of its speed.”
Shay Tal rubbed her hands together, looking apprehensively about.
“Well, it’s cold up here.”
“It’s colder still down below, where the gossies lie,” Oyre retorted.
“You keep a watch on your tongue, young woman. You’re no friend of the academy if you distract Vry from her proper work.”
Her face became cold and hawklike; she turned away quickly, as if to shield Oyre and Vry from its sight, and climbed back downstairs without further words.
“Oh, I shall pay for this,” Vry said. “I shall have to be extra humble to make up for this.”
“You’re too humble, Vry, and she’s too haughty. Scumb her academy. She’s scared of the sky, like most people. That’s her trouble, sorceress or no sorceress. She puts up with stupid people like Amin Lim because they pander to her haughtiness.”
She clutched Vry with a sort of angry passion and began to list the stupidities of everyone she knew.
“What upsets me is that we did not get the chance to make her look through our telescope,” Vry said.
It was the telescope that had made the greatest difference to Vry’s astronomical interest. When Aoz Roon had become lord, and had gone to live in the big tower, Oyre had been free to grub through all kinds of decaying possessions stored there in trunks. The telescope had come to light tucked among moth-riddled clothes which fell to pieces at the touch. It was simply made—perhaps by the long-defunct glass-makers corps—being no more than a leather tube which held two lenses in place; but when turned upon the wandering stars, the telescope had the power to change Vry’s perceptions. For the wanderers showed distinct discs. In that, they resembled the sentinels, though they did not emit light.