Wulfsyarn: A Mosaic Read Free Page B

inner music. Her face was waxen and unhealthy and it was impossible to tell her age. Her size was little more than that of a nine-year-old human child.
    Wilberfoss felt his anger evaporate. “What do you want?” he asked, and then added foolishly, “Do you know what time it is?” As though in answer the monastery clock tolled twice.
    “Yom sorry to waken you, Senior Confrere Wilberfoss,” said the woman in her thick accent and never speaking to him directly but aiming her voice to the side of his face. “Yis asked to call you urgently. Yis told to use special pitch so only you would wake. There is a secret. You're to come to Magister Tancredi’s rooms immediately.”
    “Why? What is this secret?”
    “Yo no know.”
    “Trouble?”
    “Yo no know. Yis just asked ...”
    “Tancredi just told you to come and get me?”
    “Yes. Magister Tancredi sounded worried. . . mmm . . . yes, worried and excited too. Yo no think it is a bad worry. But you're to come immediately.”
    The big maxi peered down into the diminutive woman’s bland unquestioning face. She was one of the Children of the War as they were called: a tribe of several hundred humanoid beings who worked and lived at the Pacifico Monastery of St. Francis Dionysos. Congenitally blind, stunted in their growth and yet miraculously still able to breed, the Children of the War survived only in the benign, albeit unnatural, environment of the monastery. They were all that were left of an entire race and had been rescued from a dying world at the height of the War of Ignorance. That war ended over four hundred years ago.
    “What is your name?” asked Wilberfoss.
    “Miranda.” The voice which breathed the name was little more than a whisper.
    “Thank you for your message, Miranda. Please return to Magister Tancredi and tell him I’m on my way. Tell him I’m just getting some clothes on.”
    The small figure bowed. “Yom doing that now.” She whispered and turned and hurried away. Jon Wilberfoss watched her go. She joined the shadows under the dark fused arches. She moved with complete confidence in the permanent night of her blindness. She glided rather than walked with her arms outstretched and her fingers brushing the columns. Her gown billowed. She could almost have been flying.
    Before she disappeared from view into the stacked honeycomb of cells that made up this lower part of the monastery, Miranda paused and brought her hands together in three quick gestures. Wilberfoss heard the hard click of stone on stone.
    Wilberfoss shivered, but not with the cold. He experienced one of those strange moments of frisson and, as the ancients would have said, he felt as though someone had walked over his grave. He laughed at himself. “Reading the echoes,” he thought. “She’s just reading the echoes. I’ve seen them do this a thousand times. Everything seems strange at two o’clock in the morning.”
    And with that he closed his door and hurried inside to get dressed.

2 Apropos the Gentle Order
    And so, while Jon Wilberfoss tiptoes about in the sleeping house, making himself a drink and gathering his clothes, I will tell you about the Gentle Order of St. Francis Dionysos.
    There are many official histories of the Order of St. Francis Dionysos and all of them are equally bad. They either offer mechanical history which gives a date and a fact and no analysis or they disappear up the dark tunnel of mysticism at just the point at which they should be clear and skeptical. While this is sad, it is not surprising. Ours is, in the main, a practical order devoted to the saving of life and there remains within it, I suspect, more than a tinge of the anti-intellectualism which characterized its founders. Theory follows practice with us, and only those with time on their hands can afford the luxury of an historical perspective. Besides, historians, rightly considered, are both the greatest radicals and the greatest revolutionaries since they show the causes and