“There is conspiracy here to reduce Warriors to nothing!” the Examiner calls out, his voice breaking.

“You yourself are now a Builder,” Bitterness says.

“As are you!”

“We should confront the New Council, force them to hear us. The Didact—the original Didact—is our only hope in this conflict—we should join him!” the Examiner insists.

Those who most recently transferred to Builder Security are uncomfortable with this assertion. Conflicting loyalties could put them in an awkward position with the Master Builder, who currently holds the power.

“It is too late now,” Bitterness says. “The time for strife and indecision has ended! Let us keep our composure and accept that the facts are still in dispute.” She faces me, her sightless eyes strangely acute. She has been blind for centuries. Her armor sees for her. “Yet now you push forward a strategy the Didact passionately opposed for more than a thousand years. Strange reversal! How can you, or the Master Builder, be trusted?”

Her words finished, she steps back into the circle.

Follows a longer and more telling silence. Bitterness has struck a chord, given voice to doubts most have held since the destruction of the Capital planet … Doubts that have grown to an awful strength with our sad line of defeats and retreats.

Am I not the Didact, in truth, in my mind? Am I truly less? How could I not foresee that this problem would rise so quickly to the level of a crisis in command?

But I have. The sum of a fight among equals, or with a superior, is to allow the other’s strength to put him where you want him. There is one personality who may yet unite us all … if he plays his new role well. A tremendous risk, that.

A new voice from outside the circle breaks the pause. The strongest among us has arrived.

“You can’t fault this new Didact. I outwitted his original twice before, you know.” The Master Builder’s slighter figure enters the Cartographer behind the single projected Halo, and for a moment he is cast in shadow. “I forced him into exile, practically sealed him into his Cryptum, and when he returned from that exile, I lured him, hooked him like a silly fish—and sent him to an even darker fate. I ask you, who’s the greater strategist?”

The Master Builder joins the circle, then moves to the center, his penetrating black eyes searching all with benign amusement. He lingers on my face only for a moment, with a sidelong after-glance. “If anything,” he says, “this new Didact is a sharper and more capable character, certainly now. As for the other … The old Didact and I have just had a brief visit. Whatever business he has here will soon be completed. He already makes preparations to leave.”

“We desperately need a strong central command!” Bitterness announces. “And we need it now!”