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It was hopeless She found four shards of rock, which she tied up in her sleeve One was sharp enough to use as a weapon, if it ca point if she ever got back there in such time that her mark was still moist She found no trace of water and no hint of any kind of opening that ht lead her out

After one thousand three hundred and sixty-nine hand falls, she found a s of urine: her ownout of this cavern it was either high up in the wall or somewhere out on the cavern floor, drowned in darkness and easy to miss no matter if she crossed and crisscrossed the floor a hundred times as she weakened, thirsted, and failed

She was trapped

There it was again: two scrapes, a silence, and two scrapes But she listened for a long ti more

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ROSVITA sat in the hall of the convent of St Valeria with The Book of Secrets open on a table before her She had stolen this book years ago, and lost it again soon after, so she had never had leisure to exae AThe book contained three books One ritten on paper, in the infidelscript used by the Jinna It was impossible to decipher The middle book ritten on ancient, yellowed papyrus, the alien letters glossed here and there in Arethousan "Hide this" read the first words of the gloss, and so Bernard had hidden it Most of the text was not translated, but ritten in Arethousan allowed her to guess that this scroll preached the erous heresy known to the church, that of the Redeth to consider it now She turned to the first portion of the book

The man called Bernard, Liath’s father, had coia For years he had written down every reference he had found to the arts of theaccording to the rising of stars and constellations, but much of as recorded here she found difficult and technical: quadrant, angle, equant point, trine, and opposition There was a catalog of several hundred stars, including the latitude, longitude, and apparent brightness of each one, written in such a tiny hand that it was almost impossible to read But other selections she could skie to marvel at its secrets, many of them contradictory

The whole universe is composed of nine spheres The celestial sphere is outer all the rest … In it are fixed the eternally revolvingspheres, which revolve in an opposite direction

Below the moon all is mortal and transitory Above the

Her hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the Sun are stationary, and that the Earth is borne in a circular orbit about the Sun

It is easily demonstrated to anyone that the immutable aether is distributed over and penetrates all the wholly changeable substance around the Earth

The reat i from the heavens