Free from The Order of the Seal
The Long Watch
Before The Invisible Player, there was The Long Watch.
PRAGUE · 15 MARCH 1939 · 9:00 P.M.
The Reich took the city before breakfast. Beneath the Clementinum, sixteen men wait, and a grieving boy climbs the tower with his brother's pistol. Read it before The Invisible Player. Free, for readers on the list, and not for sale anywhere.
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The Story
About The Long Watch
Prague, 15 March 1939. The Reich took the city before breakfast.
Beneath the Clementinum, sixteen men wait. They are the Order of the Seal, and they have guarded what lies in their archive for two thousand years. Now empty lorries enter the city, and the Order knows what they are here to be filled with.
Balzan, the Order's Centurio, has one night to decide whether the archive can be defended or must be destroyed. Then a woman arrives at the library door with a warning. Her elder son died at Chomutov. Her younger son is the weather observer who climbs the tower every evening at nine, and tonight he has taken his brother's pistol up with him, alone with a German officer.
One hundred and seventy-two steps. A grieving boy. A shot that would bring the Wehrmacht down on everything the Order has ever kept.
And in the square below, someone is watching to see how the pieces fall.
The invasion has begun, but something older has returned.
Before The Invisible Player, there was The Long Watch. Free for you now, and not for sale anywhere.
Publication Information
Book Details
Files Released by the Order
What Are the Archives?
The Archives are the sealed records of the Order of the Seal. For two thousand years, its Archivists have preserved reports of encounters, operations, people, objects and events that never entered the public record.
Access is restricted. Some records are withheld even from the commander of the Order and may be opened only by the Head Archivist.
The documents presented here, and at the end of every Order of the Seal book, are selected extracts released by the Order itself. They concern the real historical people, places and events surrounding each story. They are not the complete files.
Why the Order has begun releasing them has not been explained.
Report: 15 March 1939
Shortly before four that morning, President Emil Hácha submitted to German demands and ordered the Czech armed forces not to resist. German columns crossed the border at six. By nine they controlled the roads, government buildings and approaches to Prague Castle. The city had been taken before much of its population had finished breakfast.
At the Clementinum, a different record was expected to continue as though nothing outside had changed. Meteorological observations had been taken there every day since 1775, at seven in the morning, two in the afternoon and nine at night.
By the morning of the invasion, the series had continued for more than one hundred and sixty-four years. The public record contains figures for the day and proceeds without interruption into the 16th of March. It does not establish who climbed the tower, whether all three observations were made at the appointed hours, or when the figures were entered.
One theory holds that at least part of the entry was reconstructed after the event so that the oldest continuous weather record in the country would remain unbroken. No surviving material available to the public proves or disproves that theory. The figures remained in the official series and became the accepted record of the day.
The corresponding file held by the Order of the Seal does not identify the observers or confirm the readings. It records only that German personnel entered the Clementinum, the public series continued and the hidden archive remained secure.
Those who served inside the Clementinum on the 15th of March knew whether the measurements were genuine. Their account has never been released.
Public record: unbroken.
Original observations: unconfirmed.
Archive: secure.
Archive Branch, Prague
The public record gives the official date, the weather and the occupation. The Long Watch opens the sealed file.