The Translator's chambers occupied the northeast tower of the Grand Temple, six floors above the main courtyard. Someone had furnished them with the particular thoroughness of people who expected to be judged on their thoroughness: thick rugs, a writing desk of dark wood, bookshelves already stocked with approved texts, a bed with four posts and curtains that would be suffocating in summer.
Kael stood at the window and looked at the city.
Valdenmere at night was a collection of lights that told you nothing true about itself. From this height, the Temple district looked almost peaceful, the towers and spires arranged against the sky with the accidental elegance of a thing that had grown rather than been planned. Further out, the merchant quarters, the residential warrens, the dockyards at the river's edge, all of it softened by distance into something that resembled order.
He knew it did not resemble order up close. He had lived in three of those districts before the university, and in a fourth after. Order was a story cities told about themselves.
He turned away from the window.
His personal belongings occupied two trunks, both modest. Books, mostly. A few changes of clothing. The notes from seven years of research into the linguistic structures of Threnadic, the divine language, research that had culminated in a paper arguing that the language of the gods was a political construction maintained by the Translator institution, not a genuine supernatural phenomenon.
The paper had been, he had been told by three separate senior colleagues, brilliantly argued and professionally catastrophic.
He looked at the iron pendant on his chest.
The irony was not lost on him. He had spent seven years arguing that the Translator's role was an elaborate fiction. The gods did not speak to humans. The language attributed to them was a manufactured system of symbols and sounds, developed over centuries and maintained by an institution with obvious political incentives to perpetuate the myth. His paper had included nineteen pages of linguistic analysis, four appendices, and a conclusion that had used the word "fabrication" twice.
Three months after publication, the Selection Committee of the Grand Temple had delivered their notification. He had been chosen. The seventeenth Translator.
He had attempted to refuse. The attempt had lasted eleven days, during which he had been visited by four Temple representatives, two agents of King Rhett's court, and one person who had not identified herself but who had looked at him with the patient attention of someone with many resources and no particular urgency.
He had accepted.
He changed out of the ceremonial clothes, which were someone else's idea of what a Translator should look like. He put on his own clothes. He sat at the writing desk and opened the first of the approved texts, a history of the Translator lineage from the First Appointment to the present.
He read for an hour. The history was well-written and almost certainly incomplete.
At some point past midnight, the anointing oil had dried on his forehead and the cedar smell had faded, leaving only that sharper undertone. He had encountered the scent before, he realized. In the university's natural philosophy lab, where the third-year students worked with chemical preparations.
He could not place it precisely. The thought sat at the edge of his attention, patient, waiting to be recognized.
He set it aside and read until the candles burned low, and then he slept.
The dream was nothing he could name in the morning. Only the sensation of it remained: something pressing against the inside of his skull, looking for a way in, finding the edges of his thinking and testing them with a methodical thoroughness that felt less like a presence and more like a process.
He woke with a headache behind his eyes and the iron pendant cold against his chest.
He noted these facts and got up.