The metal heart throbbed around them.
“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “conspiracies don’t tend to be the massive webs you’d imagine from mystery plays and adventure novels. More often you have a few people willing to do bad things to get results, and a few more who look the other way while everything stays quiet. That’s what happened to me back at the Hidden Schools. Professor Denovo had been binding wills, stealing minds, for years. But he was famous, and his lab produced groundbreaking results, so people looked away. They didn’t ask. They didn’t even whisper. And when my friend Daphne and I started to work with him, we were so excited we didn’t realize the danger until it was too late.” She waited, and listened to gears.
“What happened?” he asked after a while. His voice sounded flat and small.
“She broke. Wrung out from the inside. They sent her home comatose. The shock freed me. I destroyed Denovo’s lab in revenge, and got myself graduated with extreme prejudice, and Ms. K found me, and you know the rest.” She envied the priests their smoke, sometimes. Cigarettes gave you something to do with your heart: you concentrated everything you should be feeling to an ember and let it burn. “Nobody in your church had anything to gain by doubting the official story about Seril. That’s all Gustave needed. That’s why you’re important, why you should be at that table, asking questions Nestor and Bede are too hidebound to ask.”
He wasn’t looking at her.
“Dammit,” she said, “I’m trying to help,” and realized when he froze that she’d let too much anger out. “Sorry. It’s not like I have some immense fund of experience and wisdom to draw on. I lived on the road longer than I’ve been a professional Craftswoman. You think the Cardinals distrust you, gods, would you like to borrow my skin for a while? I’m a Craftswoman, and I’m young, and I’ve ironed the accent out of my voice but they still know I come from yokel country. I can do things they can’t, and that’s all I have over them: their crazy atavistic fear of people who can raise the dead and carve their names into the moon. So they listen to me. But I need help. I can’t do this alone.”
The words burst from her like rust water from a tap, rough and fast and without warning. They left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Abelard whispered something she couldn’t hear over the noise of the boiler room and her own heartbeat.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t thought. This is hard for you, and you’re a long way from home.”
“That’s not what you said.”
He stared at the tip of his cigarette. Then he turned to her. The darkness made his face a mask, and she remembered those mosaic saints twisted by the tortures that earned their place in heaven. “I said, I don’t think I trust God anymore.”
She waited.
“I carried Him inside me for three days and didn’t notice, even when He worked miracles through me.”
“Kos hid himself. And he was only half-conscious, or less, the whole time. Mostly dead, and scared for the shreds of life that remained to him.”
“Did He have so little faith as to doubt He could turn to me in His need? Did He fear I would refuse Him? Gustave fell from pride—he did not hear the Lord’s will. Did Kos doubt my faith?”
“No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Ask him, then. He’s your god.”
“Would He tell me the truth?” Abelard raised his hand, and flames surrounded it. Tara flinched from the sudden light and heat.
“How long have you been able to do that?”
Abelard waved away the fire. “He’s given me gifts. I don’t know if the truth is one of them.”
“Trust him,” she said. “He’s not that bad, as gods go. And he needs your help. So do I.”
“When you came to Alt Coulumb, I had years of novitiate left, decades to grow in faith before anyone asked me to make big decisions.”
“And by all rights I should be a junior associate somewhere, making bank, not sleeping, paying down my student loans, following orders like a golem all day. That’s not how it worked out. I don’t mind, except when I look at my account balance. But we’re here together. We can do this.”
“Maybe.”
“Abelard, you did the right thing under pressure. You will again.”
“I wish I had your confidence.”
“I wish I had your student loans.”
“I don’t have student loans.”
“Right.”
Either he didn’t get the joke, or didn’t think it was funny. He sat beside her, limp. She wished she could reach inside his skin, snatch him from whatever mental cavern he’d chosen to hide within, and pull him free. “Look. We both stumbled into weird spaces in our careers. People need things from us we’re not sure we can give. Doubt’s healthy. But we can’t let it cripple us.”