What the Sky Was Drawn From

The last record ended at the temple door, with the guardian down and eight trails running on ahead. This one begins at that door.

It was a double door, and it was ancient. That is the first thing he wrote, and he wrote little else about it. Bren looked in first. Beyond lay a wide floor under a ceiling thirty feet high, and across it a great many constellations and numbers. Grek looked in after him and saw what Bren had not: a series of climbing pitons set in the central area. The place had been trapped, and the trap was now disarmed. The note doesn't say who disarmed it, or when. Eight people had come this way before them.

Inside, the stone changed. The inner structure was much older than the outer, built in a different age. He noted it and moved on. A xenodruid reads a building the way he reads a trunk: the outer rings are the newest, and the core is what the tree started as.

He gave most of his attention to the stars. They covered the walls, and hundreds more were set into the floor. They weren't scattered. The constellations formed specific patterns, and he knew most of them. He didn't know two. One was a jagged line of six stars, which he recognised from the imagery of Ibra, the god of the cosmos and its mysteries. The other was a perfect circle of twelve. He photographed them.

Then he noted something odd. The skies on these walls were drawn as seen from the southern hemisphere, and the temple stands in the northern. The east wall had a hundred windows, and the sky outside them was not the sky painted inside.

Note the sky above the place you stand.
Then note the sky the builders drew.
Do not assume they are the same.
A people draws what it keeps, not only what it sees.
Note the star you know. Pass it.
Note the star you do not know. Stay.
The familiar teaches nothing new.
The stranger in the pattern is the lesson.
Do not name it before you have carried it home.
Carry it carefully. Carry it exactly.
So copy. So keep.
The sky will not wait. The record can.

— the Observances, from the Readings on the Night

Novitiates are taught this Reading outdoors after dark, with a slate, and told to draw only the stars they cannot name. Most of us fill the slate with the ones we can, because it feels like progress. He did what the Reading asks. He passed over the stars he knew, stopped at the two he didn't, and took their picture.

Not everything in the hall had been made safe. A trap went off, a storm of light that the note calls a starstorm, and it struck hard. The note gives the blow an exclamation mark, and his notes rarely spend those. It doesn't say whom it caught. Whoever it was came out of it covered in lights, and stayed that way for ten minutes. The note adds, resignedly: cannot hide basically.

The Field Canon keeps a short entry on this, built from his notes:

ON TRAPS (later additions)
A disarmed trap tells you only that one trap was found. Keep looking.
A trap that marks with light ends your stealth before it ends you. Plan for the first.
(Kopalo, from field notes; Castrovel.)

— the Field Canon, on Traps, later additions

To the south was a sanctuary with a high ceiling, overlooking the settlement below. A figure lay on the ground there. He wrote down two things about it: four arms, and likely female. He doesn't say whether she was alive. The guardian had spoken of a stranger still inside. The note doesn't say this was her, so I won't.

The west wall had three doors and more art of the stars. This time it was a night sky as seen from Ukulam. In front of the wall stood a stone platform, octagonal, about three feet high, with something on top of it. He doesn't say what.

Then a doctor told them about Tahoman. The note doesn't say which doctor, or how one came to be in that temple. It says only that Tahoman was a cult leader, and below that, on a line of its own, the number twelve. I have thought about that number more than it probably deserves. There were twelve stars in the circle. The records don't connect them, and I can't either.

Then it came to a fight: a leader, and others with the leader. The records keep it in his fight shorthand. Against the followers, one blow landed, one glanced off their armour, and one meant to burn got through. One struck the leader solidly. Vines rose and held for a long stretch, though the note doesn't say whose. Something in the fight shook Bren, and it took him a while to steady.

The records stop there, in the middle of it. Somewhere behind them was a circle of twelve stars that he couldn't name, photographed and kept. He had done what the Reading asks. He had copied the sky exactly and left the naming for later.