Isabelle had to allow that Quill might have a point. She had two advantages over her expeditionary rivals. The first was a sliver of behemoth bone from the bonekeel of the Conquest. Placed in a navigational orrery, it showed exactly where in the sky the wreck was, just not how to overcome the obstacles between here and there. For the obstacles she had a guide, Hailer Dok, a Gyrine Windcaller with a noticeable honesty deficit, who had taken Lael through the Bittergale and claimed to have discovered a path anyone could use, though how there could be a stable path through a constant vortex Isabelle could not guess. Dok further claimed that Lael’s expedition had been driven off the wreck by a swarm of monstrous insects.

“You mean other than the bugs,” Isabelle said.

“In addition to the bugs, yes,” Quill said. “And I can help sift the wreck itself, extract and preserve that which is of historical curiosity in addition to monetary value.”

“And what do you get out of it?” Isabelle asked.

Quill glanced at Sireen. La reine’s expression gave away nothing of what she was thinking. Her bloodshadow flowed into a wide pool at her feet that looked thicker and wetter than any shadow should be.

Finding no guidance there, Quill shrugged, or possibly just twitched, and said, “You may recall that the Conquest set out to raze the City of Gears and cast down the tyrant.”

“I recall reading about it,” Isabelle said. No one outside her very small circle of intimate advisers knew that she had inherited any memories of her past lives at all, much less that she recalled bits and pieces of the Kindly Crusade itself.

Quill twitched as if he were on the verge of a great spasm, but it subsided and he said, “Yes, that is what I meant. To aid in the theological destruction of the irredeemable heretics, the Maximi took along Prime Architect Cassius of the Temple in Om. Cassius was on the Conquest the day it was lost. Needless to say, he never returned, but the College of Artifexes always keeps a seat for him at the conclave, and the Omnifex speaks with his voice and his vote.”

“Which gives him two votes to everybody else’s one,” Isabelle said. “Of course, given the size of the College of Artifexes, one extra vote is hardly an insurmountable advantage.”

“It’s a keen symbolic advantage,” Quill said. “Or, at least it will be until someone brings back Cassius’s remains and his regalia from their long exile. Then a new Prime Architect can be created, and the Omnifex’s power as executor of the absent diminished.”

Temple sniveler grasps at old bones, suckling for power like marrow, the chorus sneered. A scavenger of great men long turned to dust.

Isabelle had gotten good at not twitching when the chorus licked her ear, but their cynicism did inspire a question.