Isabelle said, “Back to the point, your brother took the oath to hunt down the descendants of Primus Maximus. He claims he is done with the vendetta, but here you are.”

“I have always opposed vendettas, or at least since I shook off the shackles of unreasoning devotion. That the Temple sanctifies vendettas in the first place is a betrayal of its entire purpose. I am not my brother’s agent or his spy.”

Bitterlich said, “Does he know about your other quest?”

“No,” Quill said. “He would have hauled me back to Vecci to tell our father, who would then have pursued the course he deemed most advantageous for the dynasty. My opinion would have borne little weight. My family has not rejected me entirely, but they consider the unhallowed unworthy, and the gravebound of little consequence.”

“One more thing,” Isabelle said. “That business about Cassius’s regalia.”

“The story is true,” Quill said. “Cassius’s staff was also said to have survived the Annihilation of Rüul, if only by being absent from the city at the time of its obliteration.”

Isabelle left Quill to rest, or to stew, and took herself out on the quarterdeck, where there was room to pace. Her chorus still squabbled like angry upstairs neighbors having a fight in the middle of the night, and she could not escape the feeling that she’d missed something important in Quill’s testimony.

If Quill’s guess was correct and the Vault of Ages was on Craton Auroborea, it would shake the world to its foundations. Even the rumor of it would launch a hundred more expeditions like this one. Actually finding it, even if it was nothing more than a cold, dead hole in the ground, would likely spark a war.

The worst possible outcome was that the Vault was everything Legend said it was; the Savior was just waiting there for some fool to come along and set him loose, to finish the work of the saints and restore the Primus Mundi, the world as it had been before Iav let the Breaker in. The saints had tried that, built the city of Rüul for that purpose, and destroyed themselves in the process.

She would never understand the allure of the mythic past, the notion that somehow the present was a mistake and the future a place to be shunned. Yet that was the scenario she had to plan for. Always prepare for a hard winter, as Jean-Claude would say.

Isabelle’s timepiece chimed. It was nearly time for her next dose of medicine. She returned to her quarters. Compared to the rest of the ship, the great cabin was a spacious, sumptuous place, stretching the whole back of the ship. She’d subdivided it to make a room for her passengers but there was still enough space for a bed, a desk, and cabinets. It had space for extra hammocks to accommodate Isabelle’s women.