I couldn’t look at Carlyle. I feared a mirror, feared seeing in Carlyle those same tormented eyes that I had had when I first saw Madame’s, and learned that it might have been for nothing that I slew Apollo. The sensayer’s vocation had been Carlyle’s Apollo, a thing so noble that its very presence on this Earth proves Earth worth saving. Carlyle had sacrificed it, prostituted it, for Julia first, luring in powerful parishioners, pretending she believed it was for their good. Carlyle prostituted it again for Thisbe, and for me, concealing Bridger while pretending to her other parishioners that she did not hold in her hands the Proof that all hearts crave. She lied to them, to her parishioners. And then, when Dominic had tortured from her her confession of Deist hypocrisy, no sooner had Carlyle purged her conscience through that contrition, but she had prostituted her priesthood once again to Papadelias, betraying Julia, betraying Thisbe, lashing out in the same rash spite which now leads Cousins everywhere to perpetrate, in pacifism’s name, atrocities. These are not my accusations, reader, they are Carlyle’s, the many spines of the iron maiden of self-hate that she erects about herself in her despair. Dominic does not ply his art here without consent. And this was not the worst. The worst, the evil that made Carlyle think even Pascal’s tortures were too light for her, was the revelation that her very birth had turned Merion Kraye into Casimir Perry, Madame’s homemade Horseman of Apocalypse. And now I came to announce more damage done:

“Have you heard about the Sanctum Sanctorum, Brother?”

“I heard something had happened.” Dominic followed me into English. “An attack.”

“Persons unknown have breached the inner vaults, and publicly exposed our Master as Imperator Destinatus. They also stole the MASONIC Oath of Office, and Caesar has sworn his inviolate oath that he will make war to get it back, and…” I bit my lip.

Dominic’s brows narrowed, but his forehead could not wrinkle—his freshly regrown skin was too elastic, virgin, like a child’s. “And what?”

Bending to swab up my vomit let me avoid seeing Carlyle’s desperate eyes. “And some of the Gag-gene files were there too, and have fallen into public hands, including… well, actually, the only one they have made public is…” I did not have to finish.

“Here’s a true boon, Sister Carlyle!” Dominic cried. “Now our whole race knows thy guilt from beginning to end. There’ll be plenty of help to remind thee of it now. How generous He is, this Local God, to send thee such a scourge.”

I realized now that Dominic must already have seen what happened through our Master’s tracker, or the news, or been informed by Mitsubishi agents. His questions were a performance, for Carlyle, a stroke of the flail of which I was one more knotted cord.