“Oh,” Tara said. And then, in a different tone of voice: “Oh.” She stood and turned a slow circle, staring around her as if her room’s walls had fallen down at once. “Of course.” She clapped her hands and laughed—a deep, long wizard’s guffaw. “I have to—excuse me.”
And without another word, she ran out of the room, leaving behind a puzzled goddess and a half-eaten bowl of carrots.
19
Abelard finished his third watch vigil in the Sanctum of Kos Everburning. He knelt before the glistening brass-and-chrome altar, said the final words—until ash and dust kindle once more to flame—amended his final amen, and felt the grace of God ebb. Lord Kos was kind, and Lord Kos was gentle, and Lord Kos was a fire that consumed. And though Lord Kos had flowed through Abelard tonight, had burned in His disciple’s heart, a space lingered between them.
Kos understood, was the mad piece of it all. The Everburning Lord knew Abelard’s hidden pain and would let Abelard confront that pain on his own time. Which comprehension displayed such depth of trust Abelard staggered to conceive it, for Kos had been betrayed by His own priests before.
The altar flame twisted, casting golden light on the carved beasts and heroes that lined the sanctum walls—and the bas-reliefs, long stored and now returned, of the gargoyles and their Lady.
Abelard dusted off his knees, bowed his head in thanks, and walked to the window, tapping out a fresh pack of cigarettes. He tore the pack open, fished a cigarette from within, and rolled it between his fingers, contemplating the tobacco. Outside, below, beyond the green circle of the Holy Precinct, lay Alt Coulumb: street corner constellations, drifting smoke.
God’s curiosity and concern licked the edges of Abelard’s mind even as fire licked the cigarette tip.
Cardinal Evangelist Bede awaited Abelard in the vestry. The big man filled much of the narrow space, and his pipe smoke filled the rest. He’d been examining a relic case when Abelard entered, and did not turn from the case at first.
Abelard bowed. “Cardinal Evangelist. Glory to the Flame.”
Bede waved one hand in a vague circle. “And let all that’s ash burn once more. Was your vigil enlightening?”
Abelard removed the sacred stole from around his neck, passed it through the smoke of the incense smoldering atop the room’s small shrine, and folded the velvet in quarters before draping it over a hook. He removed, also, the flame medallion, a larger version of the one he wore beneath his robes. “I am ever at the Lord’s service.”
“That bad, eh?”
“No!” But the Evangelist was grinning. “I pray at my Lord’s pleasure.” He removed a cloth from the altar cabinet and began to polish the medallion, which phrase, he remembered with a quirk of the mouth as involuntary as it was unpriestly, had taken quite a different meaning when he and the fellows of his novitiate hit puberty. One hundred circles spiraling out from the center, clockwise and counterclockwise, each side, while reciting the Prayer of the Burn. The cloths themselves, once sooted, would be burned, and the ashes distributed to the poor. They had healing powers. After six years of vigils, and two of Technical Novitiate, Abelard could have recited the Prayer of the Burn with full colophon in reverse and played two hands of contract bridge at the same time.
—The world, o monks, is burning—
Religion, he reminded himself, was more than miracles. The word’s root meant to bind—binding man to concept through ceremony, and man to man through ceremony as well. “Man” being gender neutral in this case, of course, though he imagined trying to make that argument to Tara and amended his thought to “person.” Not that “person” scanned as well, but perhaps that was a commentary on the thought, or the language, or the culture that framed the language that framed the thought, or the relationship between thought and culture and language because what was culture but the product of thoughts framed by language framed by—
Abelard, Cardinal Gustave had said in their first confession after he joined the Technical Novitiate, in that grated, shadowed booth with the wooden bench that creaked when you sat upon it wrong, Abelard, faith is a business of the mind and heart, but it must be a business of the body, too, because God is in the body as He is in the world. That is why we build, and study what we have built. Things and deeds matter more than words.
Then again, that attitude hadn’t worked out well for Cardinal Gustave.
—The world, o monks, is burning—
“Very quiet over there, Brother Abelard.”
“Contemplation of the divine demands silence, Your Grace. Only in silence may we hear the hiss of leaking gaskets of faith, or the flapping of the fan belts of human flourishing.”
“Quoting Tooms to a Cardinal? Bold.”
Abelard’s cigarette slipped. “I’m sorry, Your Grace, I didn’t mean—”
But Bede was laughing, still before the relic case. “Abelard, do you think being called ‘bold’ is an admonishment?”
“It sounded like one, Your Grace.”
“I remember your preparations for Novitiate, evaluating the different arms of the church. I was so glad to hear from Gustave that you were called to Tech. When we spoke about evangelism, I thought, here is a man of deep and sensitive faith. Too sensitive for the harsh world. Machines and scholarship and prayer seemed more your métier than Craftwork and deals with demonic powers. And now look at you. Friends with Craftswomen. Quick with a comeback. I seldom misjudge a man to this degree.”
Abelard finished polishing the medallion and returned it to its case. Soot stained the cloth he’d used, but not enough for holiness yet; he stored the cloth as well. “Cardinal, are you here for a reason?”
“I go nowhere without a reason, preferably several. I like to ponder the relics. These aren’t our greatest wonders, the treasures of the church vaults. But it is right and good to preserve and contemplate markers of the priests and saints whose tales will be told when I am dust. Do you have a favorite?”
“St. Hilliard’s Grease,” Abelard said without hesitation.
“Why?”
“It’s the only lubricant on the shelf. Our saints leave behind an awful lot of wrenches and calipers and slide rules which, you know, they’re great for building and tightening and plotting and planning, but the priesthood tends, I think, to forget that once you build a system you have to keep it running. For every St. Raymond who invents the ball-socket valve, for each St. Veek’s golemetric engine, there’s a Sister Miriel who spends her life running around making broken things work. St. Hilliard realized the great engines of her time were falling apart too soon, and by meditating on the seeds of flame and St. Vilchard’s Oil devised—you know all this already.”
“Storytelling is a proclamation of faith,” the Cardinal said. “Continue.”
But while Abelard’s words still resounded in the caverns of his mind, it took him a stammering few seconds—with the Cardinal looking on, so patient—to find the thread again. “Her grease worked well with the machines of her time, and is still used today in systems for which we cannot rely on alchemical synthetics. St. Winnick’s Wrench is rusty, we’ve improved welding technology since St. Alban’s day so her torch is—well, not useless, but outclassed. But St. Hilliard’s Grease has a shelf life of centuries. I could take that pot down to the boiler room tonight and do good work with it.”
“Whereupon Sister Reliquarian would have you promptly immolated.”
Abelard flicked ash from his cigarette into a black-and-gold ashtray inscribed with the Fire of God. “I don’t mean I would, just that it’s possible, and I respect that. Lots of people do good necessary work that’s overlooked because they didn’t happen to build something huge, or convert a continent of barbarians which probably never existed anyway.”
The Cardinal nodded knowingly. “Ah, the Good St. Vanturok. Though it does say something about the church of his day that they were willing to trust a man who rowed into the ocean on a coracle and rowed back ten years later claiming he’d discovered a new continent.”
&n
bsp; “What’s your favorite relic?” Abelard asked, realizing belatedly that he should have made some effort to find this out before launching into an oblique condemnation of half the contents of the case.
“Despite its rust,” the Cardinal said, “I’ve always been partial to St. Winnick’s Wrench. For similar reasons to your affection for St. Hilliard, in fact: it’s an old tool, not adjustable, iron-made rather than stainless steel, and so rusty despite Sister Reliquarian’s efforts that I doubt you could use it to adjust a bolt without flaking away half the thing’s substance. But it reminds me that we must do the best with what we have. If we are to believe those Ebon Sea philosophers who claim there is such a thing as an ideal wrench, a wrench of which all other wrenches are made in imitation, then the wrenches we hold are no more like that ideal wrench than we are like the ideal being in whose pattern we are formed. Yet such are the tools we must use, and such are the men we must be.” He touched three fingers to three points around his heart—a triangle pointing up. “My thoughts tend this way when I find myself mourning the state of the world and the weakness its inhabitants, ourselves included.”
“Your Grace,” Abelard said when he was relatively certain the Cardinal was not engaged in a drawn-out dramatic pause. “Earlier you said you go nowhere without a reason, preferably several. I don’t think you came here at this hour to contemplate relics.”
The Cardinal surged to his feet, robes billowing around his body like a red tide. “Abelard,” he said. “Walk with me.”
The Cardinal led him from the vestry past a row of chapels where priests and monks crouched praying, to a lift that ran the tower’s height. It opened on the sixty-first floor, the Evangelate Offices, and Abelard blinked. Walls of smooth dark stone were the norm in the Temple of Kos Everburning; they did not insulate well, but cheap heating bills were one of the many benefits of working for a God of Fire. The Evangelate, however, looked like a Craftsman’s office suite: tall windows of clear glass instead of stained, with blond wood everywhere, smoked glass office walls at the perimeter and low gray-walled cubicles within.
“I haven’t been up here in a long time,” Abelard said. “You remodeled.”
“We have appearances to maintain,” the Cardinal replied. “We deal with many beings, Craftsmen not least among them, who find such surroundings preferable to black stone and stoked flames.” As he led the way through the cubicles, Abelard noted a few lamps flickering. He was tall enough to peer over the cube walls; behind one he saw a young tonsured man bent over a table of figures, and a short-haired woman beside him, their heads and shoulders identically slumped.
He followed Bede into his office, which was the kind of office a man like Cardinal Evangelist Bede should have: large and spare save for a few awards on the wall and a small ornate devotional altar that gleamed from frequent use. A monthly calendar on Bede’s desk displayed woodcuts of bulldogs.
“Are you sure this gives the right impression?” Abelard said. “Your partners are dealing with a church, I mean, not a bank.”
“But the church serves as a bank,” Bede replied. “We lend and guarantee and underwrite. A Concern halfway around the globe might borrow from Lord Kos knowing nothing of his doctrine other than that He has power He is willing to lend, for reasonable rates.”
Abelard pointed to the altar. “May I?”
“Be my guest.”
He lit a stick of incense and recited a quick prayer. Bede’s voice rumbled beneath his own. When Abelard turned from the altar, the Cardinal’s head was lowered. “You’re worried,” Abelard said.
“Of course,” the Cardinal replied. “It is one thing to recognize a danger and quite another to face it.” He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and withdrew a thick black folder, which he opened, then turned so Abelard could read. “By showing you this I am, let’s say stretching, a thousand confidentiality agreements. I bind you to silence by your faith in God and your loyalty to the church.”
“I accept your charge,” Abelard said automatically. He stuck his cigarette behind his ear and ran a finger down the margin of the first page. Frowned. Turned to the second, and the third. Hesitated over a pie chart, then a bar graph, then back to the pie chart. Fanned the remaining 150 or so pages. “What is this?”
“St. Hilliard’s Grease,” Bede said. He sounded tired.
“I don’t understand. I’m pretty sure you made up most of the words here.”
“We had to. There weren’t words for what we were doing when we started doing it.” Bede unlocked the larger, second drawer of his desk. Abelard craned his neck and saw within a library of similar black folders. “This isn’t everything, of course. There are piles and piles in the church archives. I know you Technical types don’t enjoy thinking of our work this way—or of our God this way either—but we don’t have the luxury of siloed faith tonight.”
Abelard returned to the pie chart. “Does this mean what I think?”
“The yellow slice is what we’d call organic worship—that’s to say, souls available as a result of confirmed faith in Kos, priests and Alt Coulumb’s secular citizenry combined. The green slice represents missionary work, which produces a real, if variable, return on investment. Sometimes you get lucky and find fertile, troubled territory—we’ve had good success in the Northern Gleb since the struggle there began—but you can’t count on missionaries. You’re just as likely to lose your investment. And sometimes, God forbid, you suffer a disaster like the Southern Kathic expedition.”
“Those two slices are less than half the pie. What’s this big blue piece?”
“Transactional work,” Bede said. “My role. The reason this office looks the way it does. The reason, if you pay attention, you’ll catch Technical Cardinal Nestor giving me the side-eye at council meetings. This income relies on our partners’ faith we’ll remain stable and make good on future obligations. And the red element down here, the quarter slice, that represents specific promises to perform—cities that rely on Kos for power, our contracts with the Iskari Defense Ministry, that sort of thing.”
“This is way too simple. I’ve seen these contracts in person. They’re huge, complex. A breakdown like this—”
“My boy, believe me, I do not mean to elide the complexity of our work. You’ve seen the circulatory system firsthand, an honor I have not received. This merely indicates where the blood comes from, and where it goes. Some in this church overlook the importance of the Evangelate’s work, because it bears so little connection to their naive sense of a church’s role. But if our deals collapse, which they will if our partners lose faith, Kos will suffer effects comparable to those of a body deprived of half its blood.” The Cardinal closed the folder, returned it to his desk, and locked the desk. He sat. He laced his fingers together and watched Abelard over the lacing. “I hoped you could talk to God for me.”
Ash dripped from Abelard’s cigarette onto his robe. He brushed the ash away and stamped out the cinder, leaving a gray smear on the carpet. “Sorry,” he said.
“Overdue for a wash.”
He knelt and tried to scrape the ash out of the fibers of the rug. “You don’t have some spot treater? I mean, sorry, but it does stain.”
“You have an interesting way of ignoring questions.”
He stopped scraping, and stood instead, hands in pockets, weight shifting from foot to foot. Smoke drifted from his cigarette. “You want me to convince Lord Kos not to support Seril if She needs Him.”
“That’s the most elegant solution, as our partners learn of the goddess’s return. I will assure them she stands alone—aside from her involvement in Justice. Her obligations are not our Lord’s. She is a separate entity. There may, naturally, be tests of that position, as Ms. Abernathy said this evening.” The fingers de-laced. “Seril is not strong enough to stand on her own—or to refuse His aid if He offers it. We need to convince Him to leave her to defend herself. I’d go to Him, but since Gustave’s treachery He has been more reserved with the Council of Cardinals than ever.�
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“Can you blame him?”
“This is not a question of blame. It is a question of what is, and what must be.” The incense on the altar burned low. Bede replaced it. “I know how this looks. You distrust me, as does my Lord. I do not relish being held in such low esteem by a bright young priest and by the Master I serve, but these are strange times and I forgive you both. But, Abelard, this is the only way I know to save us.”
“Tara’s research—”
“Is a long shot. You know this, as does she. We cannot rely on her success. Not every hard decision is an evil plot.”
Abelard took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. God was in the smoke, and God was in his heart, and God was in the blood that burned through his veins and the air into which he exhaled, and others too, all through the city, a constant heartbeat. To live was to be loved was to burn.
—the world, o monks—
He remembered how cold he had been without that fire.
“I’ll talk to Him,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee He’ll listen.”
“I ask no more,” the Cardinal Evangelist replied.
20
Aev chased Shale over rooftops and down dark alleys and from skyscraper to skyscraper. The whelp was small and weak, but fast—a flash of stone in motion behind a pinnacle, a glint of emerald from an antenna. He changed to human shape once and almost lost her in a crowd in the Pleasure Quarter, until she spotted him slinking down a peep show alley without regard for the fleshlings gyrating meatily in the red-lit windows. She swooped to cut him off at the alley’s end, but he must have seen her—his stone ripped free of flesh again and in three seconds he’d reached the rooftops. In four he was gone, leaving in his wake a shocked dope peddler and a number of fleshlings who’d ceased, however briefly, those meaty gyrations.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” he roared back at her in Stone, over the rattle of the elevated train down which he ran, leaping from car to car. Within the cars, screams and shouts—panic at heavy footfalls on metal roofs. “They needed help. The Lady willed me to go. I don’t see why you’re so mad about this.”
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