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Kuvak seemed to sense her surprise. “Here you see what you can see from nowhere else. Only from this peak can one truly see the lingering blemish left by the war that claimed the life of Surak. The conflict between those who would follow his teachings and those who decided to march beneath the raptor’s wing. Those old scars could reopen more easily than one might think. Unless we remain on guard to prevent it.”

There was no question that it was an arresting sight. But it had little apparent relationship to the troubling questions to which Kuvak had yet to furnish any satisfactory answers: What was the Vulcan government covertly shipping into territory controlled by the Romulan Star Empire?

And, perhaps more important, why?

T’Pol’s sensitive hearing picked up a sharp noise almost directly behind her; it was the sound of gravel crunching beneath someone’s feet, at the range of only a few meters. In a rush she realized that she and Kuvak did not have Surak’s Peak to themselves after all.

Turning, T’Pol watched the approach of one slight, short figure, dressed in threadbare black monk’s robes of a cut even simpler than her own. Approaching from T’Klass’s Pillar, a nearby spire of ancient red rock, the interloper had either just surmounted the peak’s flat lookout area from the opposite side, or else had just materialized via transporter opposite the Pillar. The deep shadows inside the robe’s raised hood concealed its wearer’s identity as thoroughly as the shapeless robe muddled any resolution to the question of the newcomer’s gender. The figure walked straight toward T’Pol and Kuvak, apparently unconcerned with stealth.

“You may return to ShiKahr, Kuvak,” said a familiar voice from within the darkened hood. “We will... I will answer the commander’s questions as best I can.”

T’Pau, T’Pol thought, her eyebrows springing aloft in spite of herself.

Kuvak cast a doubtful glance at his superior, but obediently melted away into the shadows of the rocky spire after T’Pau’s gaze sharpened into something that came close to a warning glare.

“Administrator,” T’Pol said after the two women were finally alone on the windswept mountain. “Are you aware of the secret activities Minister Kuvak has conducted during your absence?”

T’Pau began walking toward the edge of the precipice beyond which lay the Forge and the distant Vulcan capital, forcing T’Pol to fall into step beside her. Although the Vulcan leader’s eyes were on the horizon, she appeared to have heard T’Pol’s every word.

“We are aware of a great many secret activities on Vulcan, among other places,” T’Pau said at length. “While you were conducting your searches, how did you find your mother’s garden?”

“Thriving,” T’Pol said, confused and taken aback by the irrelevancy of the question, at least for the moment it took her to realize that the slight woman walking beside her was really saying a great deal more than the face value of her words.

“You’ve known all along that I was here on Vulcan, seeking you out,” T’Pol said.

T’Pau nodded soberly. “And not only on Vulcan. You and your colleague Denak have made a number of offworld excursions, during which you apparently never stopped searching for us... for me.”

Despite her puzzling use of the plural pronoun, T’Pau’s equanimity seemed all but impregnable, even by Vulcan standards. Presented with such a smooth and unclimbable emotional wall, T’Pol was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain her own calm, centered state. That serenity became doubly difficult to maintain as she realized that she finally had an opportunity to pursue her original mission on behalf of Captain Archer and the Coalition.

At long last she had a chance, however slim, to try to persuade Vulcan’s foremost decision-maker to enter the fight against the Romulans.

“There are urgent matters I must discuss with you,” she said with as much tranquility as she could muster, which at the moment felt like precious little; decades-old memories of her late mother, T’Les, chiding her for the uneven quality of her emotional control,