The city bells had long struck midnight when Bitterlich caught up to Quill again, this time in the tunneled-out apartments the Temple kept for visiting guests of middling rank. Bitterlich in rat form slipped in through a crack in the wall, bypassed a rat trap that had been universally ignored by generations of rats before him, and poked his whiskered nose into a drawing room currently furnished only with a trunk and two squabbling clerics.

Quill stood next to the alchemical stove, his back turned to a larger man in the robes of a temple quaestor. Bitterlich recognized Quaestor Czensos’s grating metallic voice even before he espied his clockwork hand. The man had a habit of making himself a nuisance to Impervia wherever the Temple’s mandate ran afoul of imperial business.

Bitterlich scooted under a nearby table in and amongst the legs of the benches and eased in for a better listen.

“Was it not you who sent for the reliquary?” Czensos’s glower was dark and disdainful.

“Why do you ask questions to which you already know the answer?” Quill asked. “The delivery was to be made in secret.”

“And yet the heretic managed to steal it.”

Bitterlich’s ears could not have gotten more pricked if someone had starched them up. What was this? Quill had sent for the reliquary? Why?

“From the middle of a ceremony in which it should not have been involved,” Quill said. “I did not ask Marceau to display it, and he should have known better.”

“Fear not on that score. The orator will be punished for his part in this debacle, but his crimes are of stupidity. You, on the other hand, had contact with the Skaladin.”

“Yes, I reported that to the Temple months ago, to you in fact. Now, would you care to explain to me why you think I would have conspired with Hasdrubal to steal an artifact which was due to be delivered peacefully and unobtrusively into my hands? I imagine your chain of thought will be fascinating.”

“You need not have knowingly conspired with the heretic to become his pawn.”

“You imagine he suborned my reason in the short half hour we spent talking about unrelated things? You assign your enemies too much power and it warps your thinking.”

Czensos made a derisive snort. “You are not one to speak of warped thinking, or do you forget? I have seen your powers of reason fail in such matters before.”

Quill shook his head. “I saw you mistake fear for prudence and dogma for evidence. I have seen you go out of your way to inflict pain on your victims.”

“Victims?” Czensos sneered. “Victims, you say. You mean the abominations living amongst my faithful flock, tempting them to sin, corrupting their souls with false compassion. Those victims? Evil is to be destroyed, not coddled.”

“Your fear corrupts you more than any abomination ever could,” Quill said.