Should I share that scene too with you, reader? The gentler version of what Carlyle may be about to face? It was long ago, my first day as a slave, the day I donned my Servicer uniform, still hostile in my heart to the changes that were remaking me, and unused to coming as a suppliant. But I had to see Jehovah Mason again. Some weeks had passed since my trial, my first encounter with He Who Changed Me, and my soul was still one great wound after my transformation. My old self had been so armored in conviction that it had never hesitated, even as I made all the world my enemy. My new, raw self did not yet know to name these icy stab-wounds ‘doubt.’ I had to see Him again. If the only way was to throw myself upon the mercy of the looming dragon who seemed to control access to this Prince, so be it. I slipped my tracker, and slinked my way to the alley behind Madame’s. A young and fierce Chevalier dragged me inside, and hurled me at the feet of Brother Dominic, seventeen then and not yet ordained. How did kind Fate have me find him? Naked in his cell, his youth-firm breasts and hips just starting to swell with Venus’s fertility, all callously bare, as when a bandit chief plays with his drawn sword, watching the wide white eyes of prisoners follow his naked blade. Dominic’s posture was all power, his expression too as he dismissed the Chevalier only after a lazy, appraising stare which said that he could have enjoyed this servant during our meeting had it been worth his time. Brother Dominic chuckled at my stammering petition for an audience with He Who Had Shattered My Illusory World, and he consented at once to teach me of the real world, and what my place in it must be if I wished to have access to our Master. Dominic had pets in those days, gifts from Madame, a lion, a leopard, and a wolf bitch, almost tame, and as he lectured me on the Enlightenment, and secret politics, and the rules a slave must follow when addressing God, his pet beasts squabbled, competing to lick the meat-sweet monthly drippings from his cunt. Such a scene I prayed might wait for Carlyle Foster in Dominic’s room, but Providence was not so merciful.

“Wait, that’s not Sister Heloïse, I… Wait!”

Carlyle sought escape at once, but the two maidens who had been his traitor-guides flitted away fast as summer butterflies, and bolted the door too firmly for pounding fists to even rattle it. That room reminds one why prisons and monasteries are both composed of ‘cells.’ It is dim, no softness, no color, no throw pillows or smiling toys, just bare walls, raw wooden furniture, and books in piles, much fingered but not loved. Madame insists on printed books for her creatures’ education despite the expense, for an electronic text ceases to be quite real the instant it leaves the reader’s lenses, easy to forget. Paper, with its must and bookmarks, lingers in the corner of the eye, refusing to be unread. Dominic has all the theologians as his roommates: Calvin, Ramanuja, Augustine, lazing on every surface of the room like flies so persistent that one no longer bothers to shoo them away. Carlyle found Dominic there on his knees, his back to the door, hands clasped in prayer, with the shapeless folds of a monk’s long habit pooling around him like sacking. It was a Dominican habit, a black mantle over white beneath, the rough layers rustling with the rhythms of his prayer, like the wings of a hooded hawk. Dominic’s feet, half hidden in the folds, were bare, and his wig discarded, so it no longer hid the blush-red bare patch of his tonsure. Nothing remained of his daily gentleman’s costume except the tracker at his ear and the long, hooded sensayer’s scarf draped across his shoulders like a priest’s stole. On the wall above, where Dominic focused his devotions, hung the room’s sole decoration, framed in plain gold against the bare plaster: a portrait of Jehovah.