Halfway, in almost total darkness, she had another shock of apprehension. She thought for a moment it might be her fatigue as the Prior had said, but she closed her eyes and entered her palace and made a very small working—an open net of woven ops to catch the workings of others. It was a working she had learned from Gabriel.

She released it. And settled like a spider in a web to “see” what she might see in the aethereal.

She dropped out of her palace and felt her way forward, a portion of her awareness now tucked away in her palace.

Just at the end of the tunnel, four men were sitting in the shade of a grape arbor in the courtyard.

One of them was Gabriel—she’d know his voice anywhere. The big man was clearly Ser Thomas—a nose taller than any other man she’d ever met.

“Gabriel,” she said sharply.

He rose.

“There’s something—” she said, and extended her hand.

He reached out in the real.

The other two men were almost as big as Ser Thomas—a big red-headed knight of her own Order, who she knew by repute and by the sheer size of his nose. Ser Ricar Orcsbane.

And a black man the size of a small house, or so it seemed. The men rose as she approached and bowed—the black man very elegantly, by putting his hands together and bending at the waist.

“Sister Amicia, of the Order of Saint Thomas,” Gabriel said, and repeated it in passable Etruscan. His smile was tired, but warmed her nonetheless.

In her heart, she thought, I must get him to pay attention.

“This magnificent gentleman is Ser Pavalo l-Walīd Muḥammad Payam.” Ser Gabriel spoke the name cautiously—for once, it was a language he did not know. But the dark-skinned man bowed again and smiled at the sound of his name.

“You went to mass,” Amicia said. “I saw you.” She made herself smile, but she seized Gabriel’s hand and tried to drag him by main force into her memory palace.

“He says he craves your blessing.” Gabriel shrugged. “I have been to mass before and was not slain by lightning, nor do my infernal legions always make trouble.”

“He took the host,” Tom Lachlan said. “I expected the chapel to collapse.”

Between one sentence and the next he was there with her.

“There’s something out there—there. In that direction.” She pointed at the simulacrum of her sensory net in the aethereal, which was ripped asunder somewhere above her and to the north. Direction and distance were not the same in the aethereal as in the real.

Gabriel looked at the screen of aethereal force she had projected.

In the real, Amicia put a hand on the dark-skinned man’s hand and said a small prayer for his soul.

“I tried to get the infidel to come to mass,” Tom said. He grinned. “I mean, if the captain was there, what would one more damned soul matter?”