The remainder of the afternoon passed slowly. The Pe Choi silently went about his picking and scraping, while Kerektu hiKhanmu copied glyphs onto a scroll. Harsan set out several manuscript fragments and juggled them this way and that to see if any fitted together. No one wanted to resume the previous conversation.
Eventually Chtik p’Qwe threw down his tools and left. An hour or two thereafter a temple slave brought Harsan’s dinner on a tray, sent, apparently, by the Pe Choi. Harsan started up at every little sound in the outer corridor, thinking that it might be the Lady Eyil. But she did not come. Kerektu hiKhanmu finally wiped his pen nibs and departed, leaving the two guards to seal away the artifacts for the night.
Harsan had thought of one more experiment, however. This must be tested when neither of the priests of Change was present.
“Would you not leave the relics with me for a little longer?” he asked Reshmu. “I am in the midst of something.”
The guard shrugged, and black-browed Gutenu yawned. Neither made objection.
Out came Zaren’s farseeing device, and Harsan pried at one of the larger lenses with impatient fingers. It came free of its wax, and he carried it to the table where the first hemisphere lay. A moment of fumbling and adjustment, and then strange lines appeared in the glass, though much twisted and blurred. The tiny grooves on the flat side were circular, and his eye followed them dizzily from one edge of the glistening whitish surface to the other. There was something about them…
He saw what it was. The grooves nowhere crossed one another but ran in an ever-narrowing spiral round and round to a central point-which would have been in the very middle of the round hole. He followed them back again in the opposite direction and came to the outer rim of the hemisphere. Just there, on the convex exterior, below the starting point of the grooves on the flat side, an almost invisible triangle had been incised into the metal. The rows of squarish symbols seemed to begin at this triangle too, marching away around the outer surface until they ended in a glyph of some sort at the deepest point of the curved hemisphere.
Excited now, he pulled the third lump of rust apart. Bits of corrosion flaked away, and he would have some explaining to do to Chtik p’Qwe in the morning. A glance through the lense told him that the second hemisphere was identical: the same concentric circles on the flat side, the same spiralling to a central point. This, however, was marked upon the summit of the protruding peg with a triangle. Another triangle on the outer edge indicated the entrance to the whorl. There was one more difference: the concentric grooves ran in the opposite direction to those of the first hemisphere.
He held the two pieces gently, positioned them so that the two little outer triangles lined up, and pushed the pegged half down into the other’s hole. Then he twisted them together in the direction of the concentric circles. The two halves revolved easily, moving almost of their own volition in his hands. Then they stopped. He could rotate them no further.
And he knew.