“Those two slices are less than half the pie. What’s this big blue piece?”
“Transactional work,” Bede said. “My role. The reason this office looks the way it does. The reason, if you pay attention, you’ll catch Technical Cardinal Nestor giving me the side-eye at council meetings. This income relies on our partners’ faith we’ll remain stable and make good on future obligations. And the red element down here, the quarter slice, that represents specific promises to perform—cities that rely on Kos for power, our contracts with the Iskari Defense Ministry, that sort of thing.”
“This is way too simple. I’ve seen these contracts in person. They’re huge, complex. A breakdown like this—”
“My boy, believe me, I do not mean to elide the complexity of our work. You’ve seen the circulatory system firsthand, an honor I have not received. This merely indicates where the blood comes from, and where it goes. Some in this church overlook the importance of the Evangelate’s work, because it bears so little connection to their naive sense of a church’s role. But if our deals collapse, which they will if our partners lose faith, Kos will suffer effects comparable to those of a body deprived of half its blood.” The Cardinal closed the folder, returned it to his desk, and locked the desk. He sat. He laced his fingers together and watched Abelard over the lacing. “I hoped you could talk to God for me.”
Ash dripped from Abelard’s cigarette onto his robe. He brushed the ash away and stamped out the cinder, leaving a gray smear on the carpet. “Sorry,” he said.
“Overdue for a wash.”
He knelt and tried to scrape the ash out of the fibers of the rug. “You don’t have some spot treater? I mean, sorry, but it does stain.”
“You have an interesting way of ignoring questions.”
He stopped scraping, and stood instead, hands in pockets, weight shifting from foot to foot. Smoke drifted from his cigarette. “You want me to convince Lord Kos not to support Seril if She needs Him.”
“That’s the most elegant solution, as our partners learn of the goddess’s return. I will assure them she stands alone—aside from her involvement in Justice. Her obligations are not our Lord’s. She is a separate entity. There may, naturally, be tests of that position, as Ms. Abernathy said this evening.” The fingers de-laced. “Seril is not strong enough to stand on her own—or to refuse His aid if He offers it. We need to convince Him to leave her to defend herself. I’d go to Him, but since Gustave’s treachery He has been more reserved with the Council of Cardinals than ever.”
“Can you blame him?”
“This is not a question of blame. It is a question of what is, and what must be.” The incense on the altar burned low. Bede replaced it. “I know how this looks. You distrust me, as does my Lord. I do not relish being held in such low esteem by a bright young priest and by the Master I serve, but these are strange times and I forgive you both. But, Abelard, this is the only way I know to save us.”
“Tara’s research—”
“Is a long shot. You know this, as does she. We cannot rely on her success. Not every hard decision is an evil plot.”
Abelard took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. God was in the smoke, and God was in his heart, and God was in the blood that burned through his veins and the air into which he exhaled, and others too, all through the city, a constant heartbeat. To live was to be loved was to burn.
—the world, o monks—
He remembered how cold he had been without that fire.
“I’ll talk to Him,” he said. “But I can’t guarantee He’ll listen.”
“I ask no more,” the Cardinal Evangelist replied.
20
Aev chased Shale over rooftops and down dark alleys and from skyscraper to skyscraper. The whelp was small and weak, but fast—a flash of stone in motion behind a pinnacle, a glint of emerald from an antenna. He changed to human shape once and almost lost her in a crowd in the Pleasure Quarter, until she spotted him slinking down a peep show alley without regard for the fleshlings gyrating meatily in the red-lit windows. She swooped to cut him off at the alley’s end, but he must have seen her—his stone ripped free of flesh again and in three seconds he’d reached the rooftops. In four he was gone, leaving in his wake a shocked dope peddler and a number of fleshlings who’d ceased, however briefly, those meaty gyrations.