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sit with Shault. From what I could tell, while he was subdued, he occasionally spoke, and not just in monosyllables.
    After dinner, I did attend services at the Anomen Imagisle, on the south end of the granite isle that held the Collegium. I did have to stand on one side, in a spot reserved for the duty master. Except for the imagers emeritus, of course, everyone stood through the services.
    A small choir of imagers offered the choral invocation, and they sang well, a talent I certainly did not possess, and after that Chorister Isola followed with the wordless end to the invocation. She still remained the only woman chorister of the Nameless that I’d ever seen, not that choristers were restricted to being men, since no one could know or presume whether the Nameless was male or female, or indeed both at once. After that, she opened the main part of the service.
    “We are gathered here together this evening in the spirit of the Nameless and in affirmation of the quest for goodness and mercy in all that we do.”
    The opening hymn was “Without the Pride of Naming,” and I sang it softly, for the benefit of those near me, but I did speak more loudly through the confession.
    “We do not name You, for naming is a presumption, and we would not presume upon the creator of all that was, is, and will be. We do not pray to You, nor ask favors or recognition from You, for requesting such asks You to favor us over others who are also Your creations. Rather we confess that we always risk the sins of pride and presumption and that the very names we bearsymbolize those sins, for we too often strive to arrogate our names and ourselves above others, to insist that our petty plans and arid achievements have meaning beyond those whom we love or over whom we have influence and power. Let us never forget that we are less than nothing against Your nameless magnificence and that all that we are is a gift to be cherished and treasured, and that we must also respect and cherish the gifts of others, in celebration of You who cannot be named or known, only respected and worshipped.”
    After the confession and offertory, Chorister Isola stepped to the pulpit for the homily. “Good evening.”
    “Good evening,” came the reply.
    “And it is a good evening, for under the Nameless, all evenings are good.” She paused momentarily. “In this time of year, harvest is drawing to a close, and before long, the winds will turn chill. With that cold that will end the year, many of us will feel a loss, often an unnamed loss, as if a year passing is a year lost. Yet there are those who seize upon the year, the name of the year, as if it were a vintage. You will hear people say, ‘755 was a good year, better than 754 . . . ’ ”
    Certainly, the past year, 755 years after the founding of L’Excelsis, had been a year of profound change for me, and in that sense, it had been better.
    “. . . yet when we focus on the names, whether those names are those of years or of people, or of places, we cling to the names as if they were locks on doors or bars on windows that would protect us. Names are but a false security because they do not reflect all that is. The number of a year does not capture the events of that year, the warmth of loves found, the bitterness of loved ones and friends lost, or the satisfaction of accomplishments. . . . The greatness of Rholan the Unnamer lies not so much in his rejection of names, but in his affirmation of life beyond names and labels. . . . The very name of the place where we meet—the anomen—is a reminder that we should hold to what is and not to the names of such places, just as we should recall the experiences of the years we have lived and not merely their numbers. . . .”
    I listened as she finished the homily, glad that she was a good chorister, and one who made me think, even as I doubted whether the Nameless did indeed exist.
    For some reason, her homily triggered thoughts about my own losses, but