Tara’s throat was tight, but she had to speak, and so she did, choosing each word with slow care. “The King in Red stole from you. If you died, what he took would be his by right of salvage—but you didn’t die, so his title isn’t clear. He holds parts of you that weren’t remade into Justice. If we get them back, and this is a big if, we can restore your former strength. Kos’s debtors won’t be able to use you against him. But the King in Red is a powerful Craftsman. Alone, I couldn’t beat him in a hundred years. Proof would give me leverage. That’s why I need documentary evidence.”
“I wish I could help you,” she said. “Documents are Kos’s style. Fires must be monitored, tended. The engineers came to him, or he to them, because they are of a kind. I am different. Stone is stone, the moon the moon. Each is its own temple.”
“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—