“The Cardinals are afraid—they think I’ll undermine them by going directly to God. And I fear them, too. Cardinal Gustave was a pillar of strength, and he betrayed us all. Do you think he could have done that without help?”

The metal heart throbbed around them.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “conspiracies don’t tend to be the massive webs you’d imagine from mystery plays and adventure novels. More often you have a few people willing to do bad things to get results, and a few more who look the other way while everything stays quiet. That’s what happened to me back at the Hidden Schools. Professor Denovo had been binding wills, stealing minds, for years. But he was famous, and his lab produced groundbreaking results, so people looked away. They didn’t ask. They didn’t even whisper. And when my friend Daphne and I started to work with him, we were so excited we didn’t realize the danger until it was too late.” She waited, and listened to gears.

“What happened?” he asked after a while. His voice sounded flat and small.

“She broke. Wrung out from the inside. They sent her home comatose. The shock freed me. I destroyed Denovo’s lab in revenge, and got myself graduated with extreme prejudice, and Ms. K found me, and you know the rest.” She envied the priests their smoke, sometimes. Cigarettes gave you something to do with your heart: you concentrated everything you should be feeling to an ember and let it burn. “Nobody in your church had anything to gain by doubting the official story about Seril. That’s all Gustave needed. That’s why you’re important, why you should be at that table, asking questions Nestor and Bede are too hidebound to ask.”

He wasn’t looking at her.

“Dammit,” she said, “I’m trying to help,” and realized when he froze that she’d let too much anger out. “Sorry. It’s not like I have some immense fund of experience and wisdom to draw on. I lived on the road longer than I’ve been a professional Craftswoman. You think the Cardinals distrust you, gods, would you like to borrow my skin for a while? I’m a Craftswoman, and I’m young, and I’ve ironed the accent out of my voice but they still know I come from yokel country. I can do things they can’t, and that’s all I have over them: their crazy atavistic fear of people who can raise the dead and carve their names into the moon. So they listen to me. But I need help. I can’t do this alone.”

The words burst from her like rust water from a tap, rough and fast and without warning. They left a bitter taste in her mouth.

Abelard whispered something she couldn’t hear over the noise of the boiler room and her own heartbeat.

“What?”