“But if I’m one of a hundred ants all pushing on the same raisin, I can feel the raisin moving, can’t I-so the raisin itself is a way that they communicate with one another. But, if I’m a lone ant on a battlefield-”
“Thistlehead, it’s Provener.”
“Okay,” he said, and turned his back on me and started walking. It was this penchant for dropping conversations in the middle, among other odd traits, that had earned him a reputation as being less than intact. He’d forgotten his sphere again. I picked it up and threw it at him. It bounced off the back of his head and flew straight up in the air; he held out a hand, barely looking, and caught it on the drop. I edged around the battlefield, not wanting to get combatants, living or dead, on my feet, then hustled after him.
Lio reached the corner of the Cloister well ahead of me and ducked in front of a mass of slow-moving suurs in a way that was quite rude and yet so silly that the suurs all had a chuckle and thought no more of it. Then they clogged the archway, trapping me behind them. I had alerted Fraa Lio so he wouldn’t be late; now I was going to arrive last and be frowned at.
Aut: (1) In Proto-and Old Orth, an act; an action deliberately taken by some entity, usually an individual. (2) In Middle and later Orth, a formal rite, usually conducted by an assembly of avout, by which the math or concent as a whole carries out some collective act, typically solemnized by singing of chants, performance of coded gestures, or other ritual behavior.
In a sense the clock was the entire Mynster, and its basement. When most people spoke of “the clock,” though, they meant its four dials, which were mounted high on the walls of the Pr?sidium-the Mynster’s central tower. The dials had been crafted in different ages, and each showed the time in a different way. But all four were connected to the same internal works. Each proclaimed the time; the day of the week; the month; the phase of the moon; the year; and (for those who knew how to read them) a lot of other cosmographical arcana.