Abelard ached from a day sprinting around the city preaching to preachers. The dawn song had conveyed Ramp’s challenge, and fear of the coming struggle burned through the city. Abelard went where Hildegard sent him, spreading grace to parish priests and local deacons. The Lord, he repeated, is pleased by the Goddess’s return. He asks for our faith as He fights on her behalf.

Even among priests, reactions ranged: acceptance, rage, glory, denial. One man, bent-backed and broken-voiced and old enough to remember Seril leaving for the wars, wept. Abelard held his hand.

Tonight Lord Kos would have many long talks with His chosen shepherds.

But their flocks took the news harder.

So Abelard had come to the Guild for evensong, in case of need.

“We can’t deal with this many.” Sister Evangelist Hildegard pressed beside him in the throng: crimson robed, dark skinned, hair bound in a kerchief. “The Suits rerouted traffic down through Providence, but any trouble and we’ll be crushed.” Bodies filled the square and the blocked street. “Those guys make matters worse.” She pointed up to the rooftops, where a ring of silvered Blacksuits stood.

“Justice can keep the peace.”

“You don’t stop a riot by punching people.”

“If you punch enough of them, maybe.”

“That would just make things worse.”

“Stun nets?”

“Can kill. Let’s hope the Criers give a good show. If they don’t—” She clapped Abelard on the shoulder. “Good thing we have a saint handy.”

The doors of the Crier’s Guild opened, and the crowd hushed.

*   *   *

Zurish tribesmen don’t have 120 words for snow. It rains every day in the jungles of Southern Kath, but folk who live there lack the 70 names for water falling from the sky that armchair wits on six continents commonly ascribe to them. Grow up in the Northern Gleb and you’ll see a lot of sand, but it’s all sand in the end.

Gabby Jones knew this. But the myths had roots: live with anything long enough and you’ll learn its grades. Girls from Northern Zur, where the sun takes three months of vacation every year, know the differences between snow that falls like a rock and snow that floats like a feather and snow that burns.

In the same way, performers learn varietals of silence. There’s the cut-rate hush of the obligatory concert on a too-hot summer afternoon, and the sweet tense calm before a loved but rarely seen performer steps onstage. The sad quiet with which a crowd awaits a casualty report sticks and clings. The silence of a barroom when a sweating Crier calls “Extra”—the pause before an enormity’s announced—that silence cuts surer than glass.

But such silences take their form only when the performer steps onstage. Behind the Crier’s Guild front door, at the head of her choristers, Gabby heard the crowd’s rumble: angry, expectant, exited, confused. Robes swayed as her singers shifted.