At last, the prosecutor called Asanti.
The archivist processed to the stand. Her dress billowed behind her; her long heavy braids rose in a knot atop her head. She might have been attending her own coronation, for all the concern she showed as she settled into the witness chair.
The prosecutor took a thick folder from his briefcase. Sal needed no inside information to know what that folder held. He wanted to prove Asanti used magic, and there were more than enough records on file.
“Archivist Asanti. You stand accused of abusing the trust the Church has placed in you, to lock away and guard magic. Do you, in front of this court, deny these challenges?”
“Yes,” Asanti said.
“Do you recognize this device?”
“I expect so,” Asanti said, before he could hand her the photograph. Nervous chuckles shot through the audience. Sal wished she had not done that. Humor never played well. “This is the Orb. The Society has used it for hundreds of years to track magical disturbances.”
“And this device?”
“This is also the Orb.”
“Do these items look the same to you?”
“Largely.” She handed him back the photographs. “The underlying principle remains the same.”
“But there are differences.”
Asanti seemed entirely too pleased with herself. “Yes.”
“Describe those differences.”
“Earlier this year, the Orb ceased working as designed. We spent much of the year trying to restore it to its initial function.”
“By incorporating new magical devices.”
“Yes. And learning more about its properties.”
“How?”
“Experiments,” she said.
“Did you learn about the device’s properties in any way other than pure experiment?”
“We spoke to its designers.”
Shocked silence. Sal glanced right, reflexively. Menchú was turning an imperial shade of purple.
“You spoke to heretics.”
“We spoke to Team Four,” Asanti said, “yes. Who were branded heretics when they pursued their research into magic beyond the limits allowable at the time. They’re a bit batty, but quite nice if you get to know them. The battiness largely comes from their existence beyond time, I should imagine.”
The prosecutor stared at Asanti, who did not seem to notice. Sal remembered a cartoon from the old Saturday morning days: The coyote finally catches the roadrunner, only the roadrunner has grown enormous, while the coyote’s shrunk to ant-size. And the coyote holds a sign up to the audience that says, “Well, folks, I caught him. Now what do you expect me to do with him?”
Asanti looked pleased as the roadrunner.
“Team Four,” the prosecutor tried, “are—”
“Heretics.” Asanti cut him off. “So you’ve said. And I spoke with them. As I spoke with experts in the world of magic, as I searched forbidden tomes, as I sent Team Three out to gather artifacts the Church lost hundreds of years ago.”
“And yet”—and here the man went off the rails, because he was articulate enough to ask the question, logically minded enough to frame it, but too focused on the kill to remember that you never, ever went off-script when a witness offered you such an easy opening—“you claim you did not abuse our trust.”
Sal saw the mistake. And Sal saw Asanti see it, and smile before she took advantage.
“Of course. I did nothing of the sort. The Orb helps us all do our jobs. Magic, in fact, helps us all routinely. Every team uses it. Team One’s weapons and armor, Team Two’s various expedient means, our Orb and our shroud. We’ve wavered on this subject for hundreds of years: what magic was okay to use, what we thought we could control, what we had to repress. Now the world is changing under us, and we have to change with it, or die holding the low ground while floodwaters rush in. I have honored the trust this church showed me, and I’ve saved lives doing it. This mealy-mouthed equivocation about what magic’s okay and what’s not, this obsession with control—that’s your issue. Saving the world is mine.”
After that, not even the gavel helped.
• • •
Menchú stormed down the long, dark, unfinished stone hallway to Asanti’s cell. There were guards outside the barred door; he gave them the same look he’d given the ones outside the hall, and they didn’t bother asking him to present credentials. They just opened the door and walked away.
The cell within had been fitted out for princes of the Church in centuries past, and someone, somewhere, had maintained the furniture, even installed a modern bathroom. Asanti lounged on a Louis XIV armchair, wearing bunny slippers and a robe, her hair in a towel, reading Donne.
“Are you suicidal?”
She turned a page. “I think that went rather well, actually.”
“Well?” He was shouting. She glanced up over her book and her reading glasses. He pinched the bridge of his nose and paced, praying, until he calmed down. “They’re furious. The monsignors are fuming. You have three quarters of the Society talking about Team Four, because nobody loves a taboo subject quite so much as employees of a secret organization, and meanwhile the conservative faction wants you gone, if not dead.”
“They’ve wanted me gone, if not dead, for years. I’m just giving them the pretext.” She turned another page.
“You’re not even reading that.”
“I read fast.”
“Not that fast, and not Donne.”
“I can’t be blamed for the poor literary selection in this cell. I asked for books, but they were worried I might use them to witch myself free.” She wiggled her fingers, half-mockingly. His heart ached for her smile.
“Asanti. Please. Put the book down. We need to talk.”
She closed the volume and set it on her lap. Her fingers stroked the leather cover. “Arturo. What’s on your mind?”
“They’ll kill you.” The rest of the team wasn’t here; there were no kids to care for, no pretenses to maintain.
“They won’t be so bold. They’ll cast me into the outer darkness, maybe. But they don’t want to attract attention. Besides, I scare them too much. They’ll worry I might curse them from the stake.”
“I can’t believe you’re joking about this.”
“We saved a city, Arturo.” She set the book on the table and tapped its cover. “We joke about saving the world, and we’ve done it before, but if we’d made a mistake in Ireland, there wouldn’t be a Belfast now. We’re doing the right thing. And if they want to sit there, full of righteousness, and claim we should have let that city die—I’ll make them feel the fire in which they’re burning.”
“There are other ways to do it,” he said. “Better ways. Slower ways, but ways that work. Reform from within. Say you’re sorry. Say you did what you had to do, but you regret that you had to do it. Eat crow. You know more than anyone how important our work is. And we need you.” She read him with those cool, neutral eyes, like you read a chess player across the board, rather than someone you’d worked beside for years. How had they come to this? After all they’d been through together, after all the lives they’d saved and all the disasters they’d averted, watching one another like strangers watching strangers? “I need you.”
She wavered, for an instant. He saw the uncertainty, which he’d not seen for so long he had almost believed her incapable of it. But her face closed. “I know, Arturo. You all need me. Which is why I have to do this—here, now. I can’t let us stay fools forever while the world ends around us. The system you love is broken. Belfast’s only still here today because of the work we put in this year, learning about magic. We’ve come so far in so little time, but we have to go further to survive what’s coming next. I can’t leave them to their ignorance, Arturo. They have to know.”
“Convince them slowly. Convince them in private.”
“I can’t. You know more than anyone how that works: assurances of change in private, while publicly they close ranks. Gradual change m
eans no change at all, because the people in charge can always say we don’t notice how much better the situation’s grown. Our only chance is to make this a referendum: to force them to decide, together. This is bigger than either of us. Certainly bigger than me.” She said it tenderly, but he heard the steel beneath the velvet. “I have my reasons for doing things this way, and I need you to understand them.”
Was this all he could do for her? Watch? Stand back? Let the inevitable occur?
“I can’t,” he said.
• • •
Grace caught Sal on her evening run through Vatican City. Rome wasn’t built for running, with its narrow, clogged sidewalks, fast drivers, and sidewalk cafes, but deep-wired American circuitry insisted on the jog no matter how unpleasant, more insistently the greater the unpleasantness in question.
Dumb, but national character was hard to shake.
So Grace shouldered her way through the crowd, and caught Sal waiting for a streetlight (still not quite used to Roman street-crossing habits), and said, “They’ll kill her.”
Sal only jumped a little when Grace spoke, and it occurred to Grace that she hadn’t bothered to make herself heard as she approached. “Nice evening to you, too.”
Speaking of American habits Grace could have done without: small talk when there were important issues to cover. “You were right. They’ll kill her. She’ll force their hand. She’ll push them farther than they can go, and then she’ll push more, because she has an ideal fixed in her head. They’ll have to shove back. And then—” The light changed. Sal jogged across, and Grace followed, shouldering past priests. “And then it’ll be too late to stop them. We need to get her out. Quietly. Maybe get her to the Maitresse. Maybe to Alexandria. Somewhere she’ll be safe. When she’s out of the picture, they can say whatever they want—they can claim they offered her exile, and she took it. It’s not treason,” she said as they reached a miraculously empty stretch of sidewalk. “We’re protecting them from themselves. When they realize how much we need her, they’ll beg her to come back.”
“It’s a theory.” Sal had to pause between the words. She was breathing hard and heavy in the Roman June. There were advantages to living under a curse, Grace thought. She felt the heat, though muted.
“You don’t believe they’ll let her live.”
“I think,” Sal said, “that if we’re going to do this, we need Liam.”
• • •
Liam was pacing outside the clinic when Sal found him.
He hadn’t tried to sneak in again. They were watching for him. Not that he’d have had any trouble getting in to see Frances without sneaking—the orderlies would take him straight back to her room if he asked. The problem was, if he asked, they’d take him straight back to her room, and expect him to enter.
So he paced outside the clinic, hands in pockets, listing in his head the various ways he was an idiot and a wanker and a fundamentally useless scrap of flesh. He was carrying his shoulders up beside his ears, hunched as if expecting a blow from on high. He tried to relax, and failed utterly, which was the condition in which Sal found him.
“We need your help.”
“Do you,” he said, and paced around her. “Well, it just so happens I’ve placed a personal moratorium on aid for the next, say, six weeks or so—a bit of penance and a bit of, what’s the term they use on the internet these days, oh yes, self-care.”
She didn’t follow him. Her silence stretched as he walked away. He stopped when he could not bear the strain, and turned back.
“Grace and I have a plan to help her. But we need to be in on this together.”
“Do we really?” Liam did not need to ask which her Sal meant. There was only one her, the one they still could help. Not the one he’d failed already.
“She’s saved us all, one time or another,” Sal said.
“This is the world, Sal. We do what we must, and then we pay for it. She’s paying now, and eagerly.”
“She’s paying more than she should. You know that just as well as I do. And you know that she’ll make herself pay even more than that, unless we stop her.”
“Of course. So we should presume to know what outcome’s right for her, and for the Church, and why not for all God’s little creatures while we’re at it.”
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you.” She crossed her arms, and judged him. She was always judging him, behind those eyes. They had that in common. “You’re a hero. You acted like one in Belfast.”
“And look what happened: Asanti on trial, and Frances quite likely fucked up for life, by people I helped train, by a demon I brought into this world.” His voice went low and fierce.
“Asanti and Frances,” Sal said, “risked everything to save people they cared about, and their risk, their decisions, had little if anything to do with you. I know Belfast hurt. I know getting your past back hurt. But there’s more at play here than your feelings. Your choice is what you’ll do next. Will you go inside that room? Will you come with me? Or will you stay here, pacing and looking lost?”
The clinic door waited for him.
He wanted no part of whatever cocked-up rescue mission Sal and Grace had contrived. Asanti stood penance. If anyone recognized that, and respected it, Liam should. But Sal was also right.
He could not wait here anymore. Pacing in a hall healed no wounds, expiated no sin. The right path would be to turn from Sal, and walk into the clinic, and go to Frances’s bedside, and apologize.
The door waited, closed.
Liam said, “Tell me about your plan.”
3.
Nobody listened to the prosecutor’s closing argument. Onlookers packed the seats and aisles and wall spaces, and their breath soured the air, but none wanted to hear why Asanti was guilty. They had made up their minds on that question, and no evidence, no discussion of stolen artifacts or Society duties or proper procedure or the dangers of magic and demonic possession would change them. The archivist was guilty; why belabor the point? They had come to hear her speak.
And so, after half a day of unnecessary retrenchment, they got what they wanted.
“The Church made you,” Asanti said, “to protect people. The Church built this Society because you were the best option in a grim age. You closed magic away because you could, and because you did not dare to use it.”
Robes shifted as legs shifted beneath them. Cloth roughed over stone kneaded the courtroom silence, and the squeak of leather leavened it.
“The world has changed in two ways. We know more than we once knew. The fifteenth century is over. That’s a good thing. We have tools of science, and mathematics, and philosophy, and we’ve applied so few of those tools to the knowledge beneath our feet. Are there angels? What do the creatures of magic know of God? Is the world of magic super-nature, or merely a different nature? We don’t know the answers to these questions, and yet the answers are knowable. This church sponsors science: research into cosmology, into quantum physics, into the origins of the universe. Why regard this aspect of the world as evil? Just because a bunch of fifteenth-century Europeans believed it was? It’s dangerous, yes. So we need to understand it. I’ve worked, this year, to understand it, and I used that knowledge in Belfast. Horrible things happened. But even more horrible things would have happened if we hadn’t used magic.”
She brought her hands together, and the sound echoed.
“We have reached the point where we can study magic without dying. And, more important: We have long passed the moment when we could close magic away. Look at yourselves. You have been run ragged the last two years. That’s not because our resources were cut, that’s not because we’ve lost political support. There is more magic in the world than there was two years ago. The tide is rising, and we were not paying attention. So: The Network made books, something unprecedented, as far as we know. The Hand infiltrated the Vatican, an action equally without precedent. How many more unprecedented events need to become precedented before we admit that the world is c
hanging beyond our power to manage? We cannot lock magic in a box and hope it goes away anymore. We cannot fight it without understanding it.”
She turned to face the judges. Fox glowered from the bench, but said nothing.
“We need to stop pretending we’re fine while the world burns outside our door.”
“Archivist Asanti,” Fox said. “Are you changing your plea?”
“No,” Asanti replied. “I have betrayed no one. I have served this Society, and my office, better than any of you. The question your decision will answer is this: What does it mean to keep faith? To hold with our traditions, and betray a world? Or to let ourselves change, and keep that world alive?”
She sat.
No one breathed.
The audience stayed, watching, long after the judges bid them go.
• • •
When Menchú reached Monsignor Fox’s office, he found the man pacing in fury while Thavani Shah sat behind his desk, legs crossed, watching with the impassivity of a woman who’d known too many drill sergeants to be disturbed by a rant. She saw Menchú waiting at the door; Fox did not.
“—have any idea the kind of position she’s putting us in, though of course she knows, it’s the sheer overweening perversity of her that startles—”
Menchú knocked, and Fox broke off his tirade and whirled on him, robes flaring. Shah tried not to smile, but didn’t make a very good go at it.
“Monsignor,” Menchú said.
“Father.” Fox closed his eyes and folded his arms. He was a big man, and folding his arms took a long time. Menchú and the Team One monsignor had never been close; Fox kept his business to himself, and put out the bureaucratic fires while his team started real ones. They had spent too many meetings arguing about Asanti’s new direction and the Society’s mission. But he ran a good team. “What can I do for you?”
As Menchú searched for words, Shah stood and excused herself. She shut the door behind her. Menchú could not read the last look she traded with him. Closed, the office felt very quiet. He wondered if Fox soundproofed his office. What did he discuss here, that he didn’t want the rest of the Society to know? Had this office, too, been bugged by Team Two? Interesting questions, but distractions, now.
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