"Now," I said, "you cannot have me seriously believe that thoughts cannot inspire other thoughts."
"Of course they can," she said. "But they inspire them here," tapping her brow with her spoon. "And then that moves down here," tapping her solar plexus. "But you misunderstand my premise, perhaps. If you have a single thought, a single notion, and you communicate it to me, then it seeps down into me and creates a feeling. But if you inspire a feeling in me... it may leap up to create any number of thoughts. And while feelings are common to us all, Farren, thoughts can be very individual. Ideas can be new. There is no new feeling beneath these suns of ours, but a new idea? Yes."
"So you mean to tell me that art is more important than science," I said, bemused.
"I mean to suggest that art has more power than is precisely understood," she answered. "Because it has the potential to create more new thoughts than a single new thought may. One thought may create a chain of new thoughts. But one feeling might create multiple chains of thoughts--"
"—ah, no, I do not believe this at all!" I said, laughing. "For surely if there are no new feelings under the suns, then they cannot possibly create new thoughts. They've already been felt by everyone."
"I admit," she said soberly, "my notions may be un-scientific and overly influenced by environmental factors beyond my control."
"Such as?" I said, grinning over the rim of my cup.
"The late hour," she said. "The fine, sedating quality of the sound of the rain. The sensual distraction of the food..."
"And of course, the company has nothing to do with it," I said, all innocence.
"Oh my," Seraeda said, reaching for the platter with the cake. "I am sure that is most of it!"
And that, aunera, is how we spent the next two hours... in harmless and very enjoyable flirtation interspersed with philosophical conjecture and far, far too much tea and cake. I was quite diverted, which is how I failed to learn that the lord of Qenain returned in the night, and that Shame went to him immediately to put paid at last the taint in Qenain.
And that is how I came to be laughing over tea and talking with a woman while the object of my assignment dashed himself against the wall of Qenain's error and shattered.
The first I knew of my failure was when the physician's assistant rushed into sight, his long shadow drawn across the tile floor by our candles' light. He was moving as quickly as decorum allowed... nearly running, despite the encumbrance of both propriety and robes.
"Osulkedi!" he cried on seeing me. "You are wanted! The lord has fallen and the priest of Shame is missing!"
"What?" I said, rising, as Seraeda exclaimed, "The lord is here?"
"The lord is prostrate beneath the hands of my master," the assistant said, wide-eyed with distress. "In the conservatory!"
A heartbeat's pause, horror. Then Seraeda said, "Come!" and darted from her chair. I followed her and the assistant, wondering what madness had occurred. The lord? Here? In the middle of the night! And Shame missing! What had happened?
My arrival at the conservatory did nothing to illuminate the situation. The lord was indeed there, fallen on the floor; the physician was hovering over him with his instruments. An assortment of startled Servants were scattered around the room, but of Shame there was no sign. I turned to the physician's assistant. "Did you check our rooms?"
"We sent a Servant there and found no one," the assistant said. "The priest sent a Servant to fetch my master here, but when we arrived he was gone—"
And then Ajan burst into the room, frenzied. "Where has he gone!" he demanded. To me, "Where has he gone!"
"I don't know," I said, struggling to preserve some sense of calm against the panic swelling into the room's inhabitants. "Physician," I said. "What ails the lord?"
"He has fainted," was the answer. "And now he is fevered. It looks very much like the soul-sickness." He nodded to his assistant. "Come, let us move him to his bed and make him comfortable. We will have a long vigil now, and must split it between the lord and his chief observer."
This news flashed through the Servants like a sword through flesh. Now two had fallen ill to taint! Who would be next?
Ajan took in the entire situation, then left, abrupt and purposeful. Seeing the set of his shoulders, I felt a thrill of fear and said to Seraeda, "Stay, find out what else you can."
"Where are you going?" she called as I started after Ajan.
"To find Shame!" I said.
And then I was in the hall, and I picked up my robes and ran after the Guardian. "Ajan! Wait! We don't even know where he is!" Expecting the Guardian to take the corridor that led back to our quarters, I almost lost him when he didn't. "Ajan! Ajan?"
He did not reply, and I was reduced to dashing in his wake, hoping for an explanation and instead feeling a growing sense of unease, one that erupted into panic when we left the house entirely.
"Where—"
"Vashkavr!" Ajan cursed, ears back.
We had reached the stables, and Shame's beast was missing.
"Ancestors," I whispered. "Where on these earths has he gone? In this weather and in the dead of night!"
Ajan hauled a saddle off a pad. "Go!" he said. "Take that one."
I glanced in the direction he'd jerked his chin and found a noble-looking steed already tacked in some light saddle and bridle. "But surely you—"
"I will need a real saddle," he said ominously. "Now, go, while there are still tracks!"
"The rain," I began.
"Isn't that hard! The marks will be there, but not for much longer!" he snarled. "GO, osulkedi!"
And I went, his command whipping me as surely as any from above the Wall of Birth, for in some things, the Guardians take all precedence. That is how I found myself on the lord's own beast, riding awkwardly into the drizzle. And Ajan was right: it was not yet raining hard enough to destroy the evidence of Shame's departure. Clinging to the back of the animal, I pointed it down the road and kicked it on, and ancestors save me but I was still not much of a rider. Pelting into the dark, with the rain striking my face and blinking eyes, on a steed far more spirited than I was equipped to handle well...
But that was only part of the nightmare. The other, larger part was knowing that somewhere out in the wild was a priest who had fled his own unfinished Correction with his penitent left soul-sick at his most vulnerable moment.
