The Unbroken Watch

The register has not missed a night. That is the entire claim and the entire difficulty, because a single gap would leave Thelune holding something merely very old rather than something unbroken, and those are not the same article. So the orders are arranged around continuity first and astronomy second. Somebody goes out. Somebody has gone out through sieges, through the failure of the instruments, and through nights that killed the person who went.

Publication is half the obligation and the orders treat it as exactly half. Anyone may have the tables, they are sent wherever they are wanted and handed to whoever asks, which is why no one has ever needed to steal them and why the covenant bringing Serath’s protection guards a thing with no contents worth carrying off. What is worth having cannot be taken. A copy of the register is a copy. The register is the practice, and the practice is a site, a set of instruments, and a line of people who were each there in turn.

Visitors arrive at intervals hoping the register will settle Kalemdil, Thelune having been watching on the night and having written down what it saw. They are given the entries, which have been public for three thousand years. The entries record positions and times. They do not record why, the orders have never pretended otherwise, and the look on the faces is said to be always the same.

Of the other rumor the orders say nothing whatever. Seers are supposed to have come from here. Not lately, and not on any paper they will put a name to.