“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.”
“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.