Thou, hypocrite, art the one who invited me to pray in the first place.
True, reader, and I too succumbed at the time to that universal human hubris we call prayer. I prayed for a smaller thing, that Carlyle might find Dominic in some more kindly mood, a gentled doom; one tainted by parricide dares ask no more. But if I have encouraged you, reader—a nobler creature, worthier of our Maker’s ear—to raise your thoughts in prayer, it was not to deceive you, not to mockingly declare that our Creator is a deaf, unyielding Clockmaker after all. No. He hears, our Maker, all of our advice, I know He does, and Acts on it, as suits His Will. His Plan. Which is not our plan. I bade you pray because He answers sometimes, in His distant way, and when He doesn’t, it always means something to be heard—the prisoner shouting his last words from the gallows understands that. I will not offer you philosophy’s old comforts, what the theologians cramming Dominic’s shelves repeat so many times. I will not say that Providence requires trust, and patience, that what seems cruel from our limited perspective will turn out to be for the best in the end. I will not tell you that He left Carlyle to Dominic because it was somehow better for Carlyle, or the wider world, or you. There is a Will behind this universe, reader, that I know. There are miracles, and a Divinity behind those miracles, Who has a Plan, but have you ever, reader, heard me claim that that Plan is benevolent?
“The Canner Device didn’t get switched on by accident, did it?” Carlyle asked the instant Voltaire closed the door behind him. “You switched it on before I got here, so we’d be interrupted and you could make me say you were my sensayer.”
Dominic chuckled. “You’re a sharp one. I see why Julia likes you.”
“Forcing me to say it won’t make me actually accept it.”
“Forcing thee?” A laugh rose in Dominic’s throat, thick as honey. “And what force did I use? Did I threaten thee? Did I tie thee down and beat thee?”
“No, but—”
“What other sensayer, pray tell, is capable of handling thee now? Who else can talk to thee of Bridger, miracles, and of thy fall? Wouldst thou rather return to trading lies with Julia?”
Carlyle again evaded Dominic’s eyes, gazing across the stacks of Theophrastus, St. Ignatius, and Chandrakirti. “No.”
“I can grant thee access, to this house, to Madame, to Mycroft, even to Ma?tre Jehovah.”
Carlyle gulped. “What is Jehovah? They have a power too, like Bridger, don’t they? A second Intervention?”
A long breath. “That privilege too, to know, to speak to Him, that may be thine in time, but only here. I can be thy patron, and together we can use all the resources gathered here to guide and protect Bridger until he fulfills his Maker’s purpose.”
It was easier for Carlyle to feel strong with her eyes closed. “You know, I never expected to say this, but you’re right. I didn’t understand at first why God would show Themself to me, but you’re right, maybe we are stronger because we fell. God didn’t just show Bridger to me, They showed them to you, too. They chose us, us two.” Her cheeks relaxed, almost enough to smile. “I thought I was sent to keep Bridger away from you, but maybe not. Maybe the two of us are supposed to save Bridger from Mycroft Canner together.”
Dominic paused and let his tongue play across the flavors of his mouth, his victory. “Then turn thy tracker off.”
“What?” Carlyle clutched by instinct at the device at her ear.
“We can’t plot to rescue Bridger with Mycroft Canner listening. Turn it off.”
Carlyle hid behind her hair. “I don’t…”
“Foster, I’m not going to rape thee. It’s not even in my mind. Bridger likes thee and thinks I’m a monster. Thou art the only person in the world who could possibly persuade the boy to work with me. Thou thinkest I would jeopardize my only window to This Universe’s God just for some quick sex? Turn it off.”
“You said it again, ‘This Universe’s God.’” The Cousin wiped her cheeks at last, hoping, I imagine, that there would be no more tears.
Dominic fingered the ends of his own sensayer’s scarf, coarse white cloth on one side and black on the other. “Thou shalt not ask thy sensayer about his religion. That is the law.”
Carlyle sighed. “For a minute there you’d stopped being a hypocrite. You can’t just say it outright like that. You’re supposed to dodge around the question, not admit point-blank that I struck home, that tells me what you believe anyway. You think Jehovah is a god.”
The monk’s eyes flickered. “Thou wishest me to use the formulaic dodges they teach us in sensayer training?” Dominic stretched, sleeves falling back to reveal red-speckled bandages fresh on his arms. “Thou knowest the same tricks, and can spot them if I use them. Isn’t it better that I volunteer to be the hypocrite, rather than making us both pretend?”
Carlyle frowned at the bandages. “Are you all right?”
Dominic’s glance barely acknowledged the injuries. “It’s nothing. Minor bites. I had set a … rat trap on our back stoop, and found instead a rather fierce stray dog.” He leaned toward her. “Thou canst not put it off forever, Carlyle Foster. Choose now: am I thy sensayer, patron, and ally in guiding Bridger’s miracles as thy God intended? Or am I thine enemy?”
Carlyle raised a steady hand, and groped for her tracker’s off-switch.
“Wait, Carlyle!” I cried through the tracker to her ears alone. “You’re asking the wrong question! I used to think the same way, that Bridger was an answer to my prayers, but if the miracle was meant for us, we would’ve been given what we prayed for directly, without a child as intermediary. Providence pays infinite attention to detail. Whatever God is doing requires Bridger’s specific power to make toys real, and it has to be wielded by the child Bridger, and the adult that Bridger will grow up to become. This Intervention isn’t for you, or me, or any one person, it’s for the whole world, the human race, the universe! The real question isn’t ‘Why me?’ it’s—”
Carlyle cut me off, chopped off the monster Mycroft Canner’s words, half said. But I knew Carlyle Foster. She was a sensayer. She had read those volumes that lurk in Dominic’s cell, and hundreds like them, the thoughts and prayers of the dead, pious and impious, so many of whom had prayed as fervently as she to see a miracle. To see Proof. However desperately she did not want to hear it, a true sensayer could not keep herself from following my logic, and arriving at the question, that same question great Achilles asked when gray-eyed Athene appeared before him by the tearstained ships, when war had already swallowed ten bloody years: “Why now? Divinity, child of the thunder-wielding heavens? Why come now?”
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
If Anybody in the World Can
Bridger closed Apollo’s Iliad and slid the time-grayed volume back into his pocket where it always lived. “Next I want to rescue Mycroft.”
Should I not have given him the book? You say I have put a lighted torch in the hands of an infant, but what more do I know than a child of the infinity of the Universal Plan? I had no right to deny what was so obviously meant for him. The book was given to me and I to Bridger—what line of inheritance could be more clear? Thou hast lied to me, Mycroft. Thou claimedest thou wert raising Bridger to be a normal child, then a normal man, so he might grow up to wield his powers on behalf of all of us, but it was a lie: thou art raising him to be Apollo Mojave. No. Thou darest deny it? Thou speakest of the two of them with the same worship, steepest the boy in history and philosophy no average child needs, and now thou hast made him keeper of this little book whose import I can guess if not its precise contents. You are wrong, reader. If I had wanted Apollo back, there was a statue in Romanova waiting to be awakened by Bridger’s touch.