He felt the wheel of her thoughts twist on its axle.

God burned, watching.

—Why don’t you help? Abelard asked.

You asked me not to.

—They’ll die.

You were right. Are right. If I help them, it will hurt us all. (Each word formed from a hundred voices molded by a potter’s hand from the turning clay of the city’s minds.) If I help, I risk my people, who do not know Her as I do, and do not love Her as I do.

—We can teach them.

Can we? Can they learn to love her in time?

Abelard did not know. Yes, he prayed.

You feared, before, that I did not trust you. Here we are. You asked me to let Her stand alone. Ask me again, and I will.

—You don’t play fair.

I don’t play at all, He replied. None of Us do. Ink has been spilled on the subject. Did you fear I mistrusted you, or did you fear what my trust in you would mean? I offer you a choice. No tricks. I will save them, or not, as you ask.

Abelard’s soul strained beneath those words, which were more than words, as if he were trapped between the bolt and hole of an enormous lock.

Bede had asked him to talk Kos out of doing exactly this. The Evangelist was not a bad man. He knew much Abelard did not, and his faith was deep. But so was Abelard’s.

And his friends, and His, were in danger.

—Help them, he prayed.

There came a sound so enormous Abelard mistook it for thunder.

Later, thinking back, he would realize how much it resembled knuckles cracking.

*   *   *

Tara was not, probably, about to die—appearances (demon beset and bleeding, one arm limp at her side, suit mostly shredded) to the contrary.

She owed the Hidden Schools ten souls of tuition, which made it just the low end of worthwhile to keep her—alive might be a stretch, but at least roughly compos mortis. There were, of course, consequences to being bound to unlife by a single obligation. It distorted the psyche, discarded bits of consciousness irrelevant to the bond. Craftsmen who kept their bodies into old age had stolen—or borrowed—enough from the universe that the universe wanted a return on its investment. Reinforce those obligations with extensive personal leveraging, premortem prep, and the creation of phylacteric trusts, and an individual could endure the flesh-bone transition mentally intact, depending of course on one’s philosophy of consciousness.

Die in overwhelming debt to a single provider, though, and less freedom remained to you. A Tara resurrected to repay her student loans would not remain interested in Alt Coulumb. There were stories of dead indebted Craftswomen processing contracts in beehive crypts beneath the Badlands, reviewing foundational wards in sleepless monotony. She’d never heard anyone confirm these rumors. Nor had anyone denied them.