That we did not, and, as I felt the car speed skyward, leaving escape behind, I parted my jaws obediently. I was glad to have a prop between my teeth as electric thunder made my frame convulse. My pulse skipped, and the remnants of the flesh part of my heart staggered like a cripple unused to tottering alone. The tracker at my ear went silent, and my lenses flashed one last white burst, then went blank.

«Disgusting! Dog, thou’rt positively infested with Utopian vermin!» Hands brushed my shoulders, and a shower of ants and a slim snake fell on the floor around me, sparkling with luminous static as their short-circuited Griffincloth skins searched for instruction. «Do they make flea collars that work against U-beasts? If not yet, I must demand that they design one.»

A sob rocked me, not fear but gratitude learning that such magnanimous spirits as Voltaire Seldon and Mushi Mojave, who had ten times Madame’s right to heap tortures upon me, had instead planted these precious sentinels to guard my life. The strangest surprise in all this was that Madame’s accomplice, with the bit already between my teeth, did not gag me, but pulled it out and let me speak.

«Madame,» I choked, my words half muffled by the cushions that pressed against my face, «if you wanted me, you only had to—»

«Hello, stray,» her accomplice growled, low.

All at once it made sense: the deception, the restraints, the scene Madame had staged to make me so fearful for the duke that I had dropped my own defenses; the hands which now bound my ankles lest I kick for freedom were more practiced even than her own. «Brother Dominic,» I sputtered, «please—»

«Thou’rt going to help me kill the blasphemer.»