The fire in the undercroft brazier had burned down to a low bed of orange coals by the time Thomas noticed Hamo was still there.
It was late enough that the night-shift had gone quiet, the walnut rotor settled into its steady, wordless hum, and most men would have gone up to their beds an hour ago. Hamo remained on his stool at the edge of the light, a wax tablet balanced on his knee, working through the flow calculations for the spring thaw with the same unhurried, deliberate hand he brought to everything.
"You don't have to finish those tonight," Thomas said.
"I know." Hamo didn't look up. "I find I do my clearest thinking after the others have gone. There are fewer voices to argue with, including my own."
Thomas pulled a second stool close to the coals and sat, in no particular hurry himself. It was the kind of quiet that invited a longer conversation than either of them usually allowed themselves, and he found, once he'd sat down, that he didn't especially want to get up again.
"Can I ask you something, Brother Hamo?"
"You may ask. I reserve the right to answer badly." A faint, dry note in it — as close as Hamo ever came to a joke.
"Victoria thinks I owe you a conversation I've been putting off for three years."
Hamo set the tablet down at that, slowly, and for a long moment he said nothing, watching the coals settle and shift in the brazier. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost its usual clipped precision.
"I have wondered, from time to time, whether you would ever ask."
"I wasn't sure you wanted me to."
"I did not. For a long while, I did not." Hamo folded his hands, his eyes still on the fire. "You must understand what I believed, standing on that hill. I had given my whole life to a single, simple architecture — God at the top, the Church beneath Him, the King beneath the Church, and every soul in its ordained place, all the way down to the mud. It was not a cruel belief. It gave the world a shape a frightened man could hold onto. And then I saw a light in your hand that answered questions no priest had ever been able to answer, and I understood, with perfect clarity, that either my architecture was true and you were an instrument of the Adversary, or my architecture was false and I had spent my whole life kneeling to a shape that didn't exist. There was no third answer that I could see. I chose to believe the first, because the second was unbearable."
"And now?"
"Now I have spent three years calculating the exact pressure a column of water exerts on a limestone seal, and I have found that the mathematics does not care in the least which of us was right on that hill." He said it plainly, without bitterness. "The water behaves the same whether God ordained it or not. I did not expect that to be the thing that unmade my certainty. I expected some grand revelation, a voice, a sign. Instead it was a ledger of numbers that simply held true, day after day, regardless of what I prayed."
Thomas watched the coals rather than the monk's face, giving him the same courtesy Hamo always gave others — the freedom to speak without being watched too closely while doing it.
"I nearly killed you," Thomas said.
"You did not touch me. I touched the device myself, against your own warning, because I could not let a heresy stand unchallenged in front of a bishop's own procession. Whatever price I paid for that, I chose it with my own hand." Hamo's fingers moved, unconsciously, to the inside of his forearm, where Thomas knew a old scar ran pale beneath his sleeve. "I lay in the mud for three days afterward, unable to stand without my vision swimming. Do you know what I thought about, in that fever?"
"No."
"The sound it made. Before the light took me, it screamed — a thousand voices, all at once, none of them words I recognized. I was certain, absolutely certain, that I had heard the voice of Hell itself, and that I would die with that sound as the last thing I ever knew." He allowed himself something that was almost a smile, thin and rueful. "It was, I learned much later from Elias, the sound your device makes when a great deal of information tries to pass through a broken connection all at once. A fault in the wiring, he called it. Not Hell. Wiring."
"I'm sorry no one told you that sooner."
"I would not have believed it sooner. A man in a fever does not want an engineer's explanation. He wants his cosmology back, one way or the other." Hamo finally turned to look at him, and in the low light his eyes held none of the burning fanaticism Thomas remembered from that hillside — only a tired, hard-won steadiness. "I have made my peace with an uncomfortable position, Thomas, and I will tell it to you honestly, since you have finally asked. I do not know if God exists. I did, once, without a single doubt, and I do not any longer, and I have not replaced that certainty with its opposite either. I exist now in the space between the two, doing sums for a man I once tried to destroy, because the sums are true and the water needs to go somewhere and it turns out a soul can survive quite a long time on usefulness alone, when it can no longer survive on certainty."
"That sounds like a lonely place to live."
"It is. I will not pretend otherwise." Hamo picked the tablet back up, turning it over once in his hands without looking at the numbers. "But I will tell you the thing I have never said aloud to anyone, including myself, until this moment. The children in your schoolhouse ask me, sometimes, why the water runs the way it runs, and I find that I can answer them honestly, without lying to them the way I once lied to entire villages about the will of a God I claimed to speak for with perfect confidence. There is a mercy in that I did not expect to find on the other side of losing my faith. I have traded certainty for honesty. Most days, I believe I got the better half of that exchange. Some nights, standing over the flume in the dark, I am not so sure."
They sat with that for a while, the fire ticking down further, neither of them in any hurry to be the one who ended it.
"For what it's worth," Thomas said eventually, "I don't have certainty either. I know how the machine works. I have never once known if I was right to build it."
"That," Hamo said, "is the first entirely honest thing I have ever heard you say about your own work. I confess I find it more reassuring than any of your calibration reports." He rose, finally, tucking the tablet under his arm, his old joints protesting the hour. "Get some sleep, Thomas. The water will still need calculating in the morning, whatever either of us believes about it tonight."
He left Thomas alone with the coals, and it was some time before Thomas climbed the stairs himself, turning the conversation over the whole way, aware that something between them had shifted — not resolved, not healed exactly, but finally, after three years, spoken.