The word the woman said aloud was adro.
It was a word in the dialect of a city-state on the eastern edge of a small continent on a world the Painter was not watching closely, and it meant, approximately, not where it should be.
The dialect was the seven-thousandth descendant of the language the girl by the field had spoken eons ago. The word adro had drifted, in those hundred and forty thousand years, through approximately four hundred and twelve forms, and in each of those forms it had retained the same approximate meaning, and the retention was not a coincidence, because the people who used the word had, generation by generation, found themselves needing it.
The woman behind the instrument said adro, and three things happened.
The first was that the woman's colleague, two stations down the long curving room of the observatory, looked up from her own instrument and said, automatically, without thinking, where.
This was the second domino.
