“Will I get to see that child again?” I asked. I knew my words could not escape the cage, but I hoped He did not need to hear to understand.

Jehovah Himself answered, “Yes.”

On those terms then, reader, I live, my long penance, thirteen years and counting. It is my privilege among my many tasks to hear Jehovah’s words and follow His commands, even His order on the twenty-seventh that I obey His mother’s summons return to the Salon de Versailles, whose scent still weakens me like fever. I was half in the past as I mounted the steps, thieves and Seven-Ten lists fading as I saw the Powers still staring at me through my coffin-cage. I hope now you will understand my failure as I stumble across the threshold and there let fly the name which a decade’s interrogations had not forced from me: “Saladin!”

He should not have been there. I would have given anything in the world to have him never see this place. But there he was, curled on the floor of a cage which stood just where mine had, though larger, metal bars this time instead of Utopian genius. He cried out, “Mycroft!” in the same breath that I called, “Saladin!” and we rushed to each other, the world around melting away as we embraced, the bars between us no more impediment than the core of the Earth is to its two hemispheres. He was trembling, naked except for bandages around fresh wounds, and rank with sweat.

“A pair?” Madame fluttered toward us, her skirts a garden of hand-painted Chinese silk. “Dominic, thou didst not tell me Mycroft and thy stray pup were a pair.”

“I did not know, Madame.” Dominic hobbled forward, facing Madame with as proper posture as he could manage on crutches, with his right foot dragging stiff. Remember, reader, all that time down in the cell with Carlyle, Dominic knelt, or sat, but never stood. “The beast attacked me out of the blue, I knew nothing.”

“Wast it thou, then, Mycroft, who trickedest the tracker system into registering this lovely creature as a dog?” Madame swatted at me gently with her fan, azure painted with a hunting hawk. “Thou shouldst have told me of that trick, I could have used it many times.”

I stroked Saladin through the bars, counting his injuries, and recognized around his throat the pinprick stab wounds of Madame’s mancatcher. The mancatcher may be the most medieval of inventions, a metal collar, spiked on the inside and mounted on a pole which, when thrust just right, locks around the enemy’s neck, as savage as a bear trap. Madame’s of course is not medieval but Enlightenment, gilt silver filigree with mother-of-pearl inlay, a birthday present from the King of Spain. I did not then know that Dominic had set a trap for Bridger, how he had murdered the imaginary friend ‘Redder,’ stolen Bridger’s backpack and captured three of the little soldiers, or how that bait had brought to Paris not the boy, but my beautiful monster. Still, I could envision the battle clearly, Dominic pacing in the shadows of the back stairs when Saladin lunges, all claws and teeth, tackling this rival predator who would dare target his prey. The two would match one another bite for bite, cracked rib for snapped ankle, snarling like lions until, in some opening, Madame snares the stranger with her mancatcher, as delicate as a violin bow in her hands. «Dominic,» she chides, reeling her captive high with a twist of the inlaid handle, «thou art frightening the ladies with thy ruckus. Is this delightful monster thine?»