On ‘inquisitor’ He looked to smiling Chagatai, who was distracted now, distributing flirtatious glances among passersby. On ‘translator’ He looked to me. I suspect my bow looked more like a flinch as the Blacklaw Tribune’s eyes fell on me. Do you expect kinship in her glance? Do you associate, as many do, my savagery with her wild kind? No. Her eye holds the same horror any sane person feels toward Mycroft Canner. She does not know me, nor my Saladin, nor how we hold her kind almost divine, as wise Greeks held happy Diogenes, and all the Cynics strong enough to break free from the puppet strings and live. She only knows that I made the world more bitter, more afraid of killers, more afraid of her. I made her world worse. But Chagatai knows me, Chagatai behind whom I hide, her homecoming swagger shelter enough to make me brave as she and Natekari trade greeting kisses on both cheeks. The pair have crossed swords, I suspect, or had sex. Or both. It can be difficult to tell the difference.

Chagatai knew the Town Hall’s steps as perfectly as she knew the chapel-house she had kept for Jehovah in Avignon. That house was gone now, not burnt down like Madame’s, but too vulnerable to remain His home, so Ἄναξ Jehovah donated the property to a university, to safeguard its collections, moving Himself to Alexandria’s Sanctum Sanctorum.

Chagatai shooed our Master and myself like children through the Great Hall door as shimmering Delians spread to cover the exits with their sprites, and will-o’-wisps, and training. It felt like Olympus inside, reader, a hall of gods arrayed on creaking theatre seats which seemed to me like thrones. I do not mean universal Gods like Jehovah and His Peer, nor immortal gods like Zeus. I mean what you, Master Hobbes, named with reverence a ‘mortal god,’ that earthly power, charged to keep peace and defend its own, which answers to nothing between itself and the Immortal God above. States. Sovereigns. It is not possible to call them all Leviathans, tiny as they are, but each Blacklaw is as much a Sovereign as MASON. Oh, there was a balcony in the back of the hall for Hive Members, and some Whitelaws and Graylaws mixed in the back, but they were people, while the front rows seemed to my eye a ring of Emperors.

Thou canst not see it, Mycroft, but our Thomas here is smiling.