“No!” But the Evangelist was grinning. “I pray at my Lord’s pleasure.” He removed a cloth from the altar cabinet and began to polish the medallion, which phrase, he remembered with a quirk of the mouth as involuntary as it was unpriestly, had taken quite a different meaning when he and the fellows of his novitiate hit puberty. One hundred circles spiraling out from the center, clockwise and counterclockwise, each side, while reciting the Prayer of the Burn. The cloths themselves, once sooted, would be burned, and the ashes distributed to the poor. They had healing powers. After six years of vigils, and two of Technical Novitiate, Abelard could have recited the Prayer of the Burn with full colophon in reverse and played two hands of contract bridge at the same time.

—The world, o monks, is burning—

Religion, he reminded himself, was more than miracles. The word’s root meant to bind—binding man to concept through ceremony, and man to man through ceremony as well. “Man” being gender neutral in this case, of course, though he imagined trying to make that argument to Tara and amended his thought to “person.” Not that “person” scanned as well, but perhaps that was a commentary on the thought, or the language, or the culture that framed the language that framed the thought, or the relationship between thought and culture and language because what was culture but the product of thoughts framed by language framed by—

Abelard, Cardinal Gustave had said in their first confession after he joined the Technical Novitiate, in that grated, shadowed booth with the wooden bench that creaked when you sat upon it wrong, Abelard, faith is a business of the mind and heart, but it must be a business of the body, too, because God is in the body as He is in the world. That is why we build, and study what we have built. Things and deeds matter more than words.

Then again, that attitude hadn’t worked out well for Cardinal Gustave.

—The world, o monks, is burning—

“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.”