Egderus' Secret

I am placing this here, among so many old documents, so that only the most persistent stalker may find it. Not even my secretary Markito knows of its existence, though once I am gone nothing can keep it safe but its own stillness and the busy neglect of my successors.

I am violating my oath to even commit this small confession to writing, but I also cannot bear the thought that no one will know this heartbreaking truth: I have proof that we descend.

When I was donated to Mountain House, I took the same pledge of the Order that all its members do. I was a boy at the time, but after I had become a man I still saw no reason to question orthodox doctrine concerning the Ancients, even after my extensive exposure to heresy in the Office of Inquiry. If I thought about the matter at all, I concluded that heretics were simply persons who had gone off their heads somehow, and if I disagreed with the way they were treated, it was only because I pitied them and despised their tormentors, not because I agreed with any of their mad beliefs.

Even the experience with the Historian did not change the essential confidence I had in the picture of the world that had been taught me: The Ancients were the gods of the old dispensation, who fashioned the world out of nothing and ruled it for a time, until the final battle with their enemies in which all creation was destroyed. As the old hymn has it:

A great Wolf pursues the sun
Three years across the packed snow,
Three years from autumn to spring.
At last she is caught:
The huge jaws close and crush her,
Swallowing her light.
The gods quarrel and fall out:
No daughter is safe, no son survives.
The fiends and demons burst their prison
The great Snake leaps from the sea,
Spewing poison over the land.
The sky explodes, the earth sinks.
Fire and steam attack each other.
The stars fall from their watch-posts.
At last all goes under, and a mighty Wind
Scatters the smoke into the Void.
In the Silence, a new earth
Emerges from the deep, shining, joyous, cleansed.
In the heavens, a new sun,
More glorious than her mother,
Begins her journey.

After the inquest, when I was banished to Mountain House, it became a kind of blessing no one could have foreseen. In the first place, I was still desolated by the loss of my only love, and my grief had just been redoubled by the death of my mentor, the Eighth Superius Frater, now my predecessor. Many of the brothers remembered me, and most were very kind and helpful in getting me accustomed to my new duties as Superius Frater.

The narrative of my early adventures in leadership may be found elsewhere. But eventually I more or less grew to fill my new position, and no longer was required to spend the greater part of each day trying to remember or even decipher what would need to be done the day following. And then, after many years, I recalled that my dear predecessor had promised to leave some kind of present for me, and set out to try to find it.

I had already gone through his official writings many times, but unless he had left me a message in some kind of code, I found nothing that looked like a clue about a gift left for me. And then I remembered a curious old description of the House itself, finding in it features that were strange to me. What I could not recall was where nor even when I had seen this old fragmentary writing last, perhaps not even since my last sojourn at Mountain House, when I was still a boy. And this nudged my memory sufficiently to put me on the right track.

In the old library, on the very shelf where I had left them so many years ago, were some of the books the Good Doctor had sentenced me to copy as punishment for my imagined misbehavior in the Gig affair. Among them was the collection of miscellaneous writings in which I had found the Superius Frater's sketches of various residents of the House. Only four of these notes were left — my guess was that someone else had discovered them and removed the ones most closely concerning himself and his friends. But I had to wonder why they were even there at all: could not the Superius Frater find a more secure hiding place than a book on an open shelf in the library? Perhaps he had meant these notes to be found, and by someone other than myself? Or maybe it was not the notes that were important — they seemed harmless enough — but rather the hiding place itself?

So I began to inspect the book more closely, and to think that it must contain the clue I was looking for. It was a volume made by stitching together at least three separate books, with other odd signatures and even single pages sewn in here and there. There was no way to discern who had compiled the miscellany, nor even the authors of its constituent parts. Some of its contents must have been in the House from the earliest days of its existence. But my present concern was using it to help me find something else, not to delve into its own no doubt fascinating history, a temptation that was difficult to resist.

Indeed, as I pored over the tattered compilation by daylight and moonlight, I lost track of what had caused me to seek it out in the first place: the description of the House. One night I fell asleep at my desk, my head resting on the very page I was looking for.

When little Markito came to me the next morning, his touch on my shoulder startled me out of a dream I had had many times before, in which I wandered without light or hope through a maze of rock-walled chambers. The first thing I saw was the book on my desk, open to a crude drawing of the floor plan of the House on the page facing the description I sought. I stared at it until my vision cleared, and then began to read the familiar words again, only this time with fresh eyes, and to make a detailed comparison between the description, the drawing, and what I knew the actual structure of the House to be.

Over the following days I inspected the House more closely, whenever I could find the time. For some reason I was reluctant to let anyone know what I was doing, and so took with me no one but the boy Markito, who had completely won my trust by his cheerful demeanor and utter devotion to me. I realize I must have appealed to my mentor in somewhat the same way, and see much of my younger self in the little foundling, perhaps more than is wise, considering what we were about to discover. But Markito has never once given me the slightest unease about his loyalty, and at this late time of my life I can do nothing other than to depend on him utterly.

One sentence in the description continued to baffle me. It described a cellar beneath the entryway which 'could only be reached by an ill-kept and rickety stairway hidden beneath a heavy table' in what it called the Frater's library or study. Try as we might, neither Markito nor I could locate this hidden stairway, and from outside the house there was no evidence that such a cellar even existed. We concluded that if there was such a secret stairway, it must have been covered over by new flooring at some point after the description was written.

It was Markito who first noticed what instantly struck me as the most significant aspect of the passage, once it was pointed out: not only was the writing itself in an antique script, but it was cast in the past tense, as if the description were of an arrangement of the house that was no longer in effect when it was written.

We immediately went back to the drawing, and realized that it corresponded not to the description, but rather to some intermediate stage in the construction of the House. Markito made a new drawing, after pacing off the dimensions of the present plan of the House, in which he was able to show how some walls had been torn down and others erected or moved to create the arrangement of rooms as they are now. At this point we began our inspection anew, and soon discovered evidence of numerous changes in the layout of the House, once we knew what to look for.

At last we found what had to be the spot, but there was no way to rip up the floor without incurring the curiosity of the rest of the brothers. However, Markito devised a way to get into the wall of my study, and by following a crawl space verified that there had once been a staircase just there, though it had long ago collapsed. In the next few days he also contrived a way to get down there himself, though the passageway was too small for a grown person to negotiate. I had him bring me anything that he could fit through his narrow tunnel, and soon I had a collection of objects that astounded and mystified me. I prepared an inventory, cataloguing everything that he brought me, and we kept the objects and the catalogue in the vault behind my desk.

But he also told me of room upon room of what looked to him like large and small mechanical parts belonging to what we surmised to be a vast waterworks or mill of some kind, and I knew I would have to get down there somehow, without in any way alerting the others that our secret search for my predecessor's gift had finally been rewarded. Needless to say, this was not easy, but at last I gazed upon what I have since come to regard as the Treasure of the Ancients....