Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(36)
“Your Grace,” Abelard said when he was relatively certain the Cardinal was not engaged in a drawn-out dramatic pause. “Earlier you said you go nowhere without a reason, preferably several. I don’t think you came here at this hour to contemplate relics.”
The Cardinal surged to his feet, robes billowing around his body like a red tide. “Abelard,” he said. “Walk with me.”
The Cardinal led him from the vestry past a row of chapels where priests and monks crouched praying, to a lift that ran the tower’s height. It opened on the sixty-first floor, the Evangelate Offices, and Abelard blinked. Walls of smooth dark stone were the norm in the Temple of Kos Everburning; they did not insulate well, but cheap heating bills were one of the many benefits of working for a God of Fire. The Evangelate, however, looked like a Craftsman’s office suite: tall windows of clear glass instead of stained, with blond wood everywhere, smoked glass office walls at the perimeter and low gray-walled cubicles within.
“I haven’t been up here in a long time,” Abelard said. “You remodeled.”
“We have appearances to maintain,” the Cardinal replied. “We deal with many beings, Craftsmen not least among them, who find such surroundings preferable to black stone and stoked flames.” As he led the way through the cubicles, Abelard noted a few lamps flickering. He was tall enough to peer over the cube walls; behind one he saw a young tonsured man bent over a table of figures, and a short-haired woman beside him, their heads and shoulders identically slumped.
He followed Bede into his office, which was the kind of office a man like Cardinal Evangelist Bede should have: large and spare save for a few awards on the wall and a small ornate devotional altar that gleamed from frequent use. A monthly calendar on Bede’s desk displayed woodcuts of bulldogs.
“Are you sure this gives the right impression?” Abelard said. “Your partners are dealing with a church, I mean, not a bank.”
“But the church serves as a bank,” Bede replied. “We lend and guarantee and underwrite. A Concern halfway around the globe might borrow from Lord Kos knowing nothing of his doctrine other than that He has power He is willing to lend, for reasonable rates.”
Abelard pointed to the altar. “May I?”
“Be my guest.”
He lit a stick of incense and recited a quick prayer. Bede’s voice rumbled beneath his own. When Abelard turned from the altar, the Cardinal’s head was lowered. “You’re worried,” Abelard said.
“Of course,” the Cardinal replied. “It is one thing to recognize a danger and quite another to face it.” He unlocked the top drawer of his desk and withdrew a thick black folder, which he opened, then turned so Abelard could read. “By showing you this I am, let’s say stretching, a thousand confidentiality agreements. I bind you to silence by your faith in God and your loyalty to the church.”
“I accept your charge,” Abelard said automatically. He stuck his cigarette behind his ear and ran a finger down the margin of the first page. Frowned. Turned to the second, and the third. Hesitated over a pie chart, then a bar graph, then back to the pie chart. Fanned the remaining 150 or so pages. “What is this?”
“St. Hilliard’s Grease,” Bede said. He sounded tired.
“I don’t understand. I’m pretty sure you made up most of the words here.”
“We had to. There weren’t words for what we were doing when we started doing it.” Bede unlocked the larger, second drawer of his desk. Abelard craned his neck and saw within a library of similar black folders. “This isn’t everything, of course. There are piles and piles in the church archives. I know you Technical types don’t enjoy thinking of our work this way—or of our God this way either—but we don’t have the luxury of siloed faith tonight.”
Abelard returned to the pie chart. “Does this mean what I think?”
“The yellow slice is what we’d call organic worship—that’s to say, souls available as a result of confirmed faith in Kos, priests and Alt Coulumb’s secular citizenry combined. The green slice represents missionary work, which produces a real, if variable, return on investment. Sometimes you get lucky and find fertile, troubled territory—we’ve had good success in the Northern Gleb since the struggle there began—but you can’t count on missionaries. You’re just as likely to lose your investment. And sometimes, God forbid, you suffer a disaster like the Southern Kathic expedition.”
“Those two slices are less than half the pie. What’s this big blue piece?”
“Transactional work,” Bede said. “My role. The reason this office looks the way it does. The reason, if you pay attention, you’ll catch Technical Cardinal Nestor giving me the side-eye at council meetings. This income relies on our partners’ faith we’ll remain stable and make good on future obligations. And the red element down here, the quarter slice, that represents specific promises to perform—cities that rely on Kos for power, our contracts with the Iskari Defense Ministry, that sort of thing.”
“This is way too simple. I’ve seen these contracts in person. They’re huge, complex. A breakdown like this—”
“My boy, believe me, I do not mean to elide the complexity of our work. You’ve seen the circulatory system firsthand, an honor I have not received. This merely indicates where the blood comes from, and where it goes. Some in this church overlook the importance of the Evangelate’s work, because it bears so little connection to their naive sense of a church’s role. But if our deals collapse, which they will if our partners lose faith, Kos will suffer effects comparable to those of a body deprived of half its blood.” The Cardinal closed the folder, returned it to his desk, and locked the desk. He sat. He laced his fingers together and watched Abelard over the lacing. “I hoped you could talk to God for me.”