Gypsies

1

Cardinal Simon Palestrina—of the Vatican Congregation of Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, and now de facto a legate to the Court of the Novus Ordo— wrapped his cloak against the October wind and grimly regarded the approaching coast of the New World.

The bleakness of the coast was mirrored in the Cardinal’s face. The severity of his expression, the pallor of his cheeks, had won him a reputation as a dour, almost Jesuitical scholar. In fact he was a Manichean Brother, and his countenance derived more from the periodic attacks of gastritis that had marked his entry into middle age than any surmised ecclesiastical purity. His friends were of course aware of it… but Cardinal Palestrina had very few friends. He suffers best, Palestrina often thought, who suffers alone.

For similar reasons, he had kept his own counsel through the course of this long transatlantic journey. In a sane world he would have made the trip by dirigible. The airships had been improved immensely since the days of the Teutonic tragedies. But the Curia was shamefully underbudgeted, even in light of events in the Mediterranean. Vatican conservatism, Palestrina thought dolefully; fear of potential allies … it could lose us this war.

Clutching the rail, he chastised himself with a vision of the Islamic hordes overrunning civilized Europe. A muezzin calling from the cathedral at Orvieto, ulemas hacking off the limbs of honest Christians. And here I stand, he thought, delayed a month on the tarry Madonna of Avignon.

It was not even a new ship. The rigging was ancient, the sails of much-mended hemp; the coal-oil engine belowdecks did more to pollute the immediate environment than to expedite the voyage. Cardinal Palestrina had spent his first week out from Genoa in a condition of relentless, rolling nausea. I will go home, he thought, and there will be wild Moslems in the basilica of St. Peter’s, and I will seek out Fr. Oswaldo of the Funding Subcommittee in whatever dungeon they have clapped him in, and I will say, I told you so.

He relished this fantasy as the Madonna of Avignon entered the windy harbor of Philadelphia.

The city appeared to be everything Cardinal Palestrina had been led to expect of the Americans. The harbor stank. It smelled of dead fish and marshland. Every summer the yellow fever bred in this miasma and ravaged the city. The piers were old, the pilings layered with the dung of the harbor gulls. The distant towers of the city itself rose huge and black, sooty monuments to the industrial supremacy of the Novus Ordo, the New Order of the Americas. How desperately they had striven to emulate the festering valleys of the Rhine and the Rhone, how thoroughly they had succeeded.

Cardinal Palestrina, allowing the other passengers to crowd past him onto the dock, felt a pang of nostalgia for Rome. An old-fashioned city, obviously— it was older by several proud millennia than anything the Americans had built. He thought of the Vatican Garden, the Leonine Wall; he thought of the street sweepers crossing the Giardino della Pigna like an army, leaving the cobbles wet and gleaming in the morning sun…

A marvel. At least when the wind was not running from the Tiber.

But this was not an authentic nostalgia, he told himself, merely a reluctance. He did not relish his work here. He was a scholar, not an Inquisitor. He was only truly at home in the company of books. He had written a hagiography of St. Eustace that the Curia Romana declared “blemishless,” and so he had been deemed trustworthy, bright but essentially incorruptible—or at least doctrinaire—and therefore suitable to carry out an act of ticklish ecclesiastical calculation. Perhaps more important, his English was very good. But the questions at hand were questions of means and ends, heresy and power, war and peace… above all, he thought, good and evil. And the dark powers were dauntingly active nowadays.

The thought was unwelcome. A spasm shot through his belly.

Sighing, Cardinal Palestrina clasped a handkerchief to his nose and descended into the New World.

He was met at the docks by a man named Carl Neumann, who drove an automobile.

The automobile was significant. The Jihadic Wars had interrupted oil traffic through the Persian Gulf; gasoline was prohibitively expensive. The Americans (Palestrina used the archaic term privately) possessed their own oilfields, of course. And their endless border crises with the Aztecs often involved mineral rights. Still, even here, an automobile was a rare indulgence.

Especially an automobile like this, large and low, immensely heavy—a kind of land boat. Palestrina, impressed in spite of himself, stowed his two small black bags in the auto’s capacious trunk and climbed in beside Neumann. The smell of upholstery was sharp and oppressive.

Neumann said, “We’re pleased you could make the trip, Your Eminence.”

Palestrina understood instantly that Neumann was one of those government functionaries who would refer to himself constantly in the plural. Neumann wore a blue tailored suit, a narrow black tie, a fedora. They shook hands; Neumann engaged the engine. Periodically, as they worked their way south through a crush of horse-drawn trucks and cabriolets, Neumann glanced over at Cardinal Palestrina’s black robes. Palestrina supposed this was the Waldensian legacy the Secretariat had warned him about: this mixture of curiosity and disdain. Annoying but, in its own way, useful. It would keep him on guard. It would remind him that he had entered a foreign country.

Not that he was likely to forget. Within the hour they had won through to a paved road leading south from the city; the forest closed around them. The Great Forest of the New World, Palestrina thought. It was legendary. Savages had lived here once. The automobile sped between endless aisles of trees. The clouds opened to show a gaudy sunset; the night came on quickly. The shadows behind the automobile seemed suddenly very dense, and Palestrina thought about wood sprites, elementals. But those were wholly European terrors—he had read that somewhere. In the New World the dangers were mainly secular.

Neumann spoke into the silence: “I’ll be your liaison for the duration of your stay here, Your Eminence. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to having me around.”

He smiled. Palestrina did not.

Neumann went on, “I can’t help but wonder about your name. Are you related to, uh, the famous Palestrina?”

“You mean the Palestrina who wrote the Marcellus Mass?” “That’s right.”

“Are you a historian, Mr. Neumann?”

“Music lover,” Neumann said modestly. “I collect records. It was the Missa Papae Marcelli that settled the issue of music in the liturgy, right?” Added, “A terrific piece. Very moving.”

Cardinal Palestrina disapproved of the secular recording of liturgical music. Though he himself did own one recording, Giovanelli’s Jubilate Deo on a Spanish lacquer disk, a secret love: he played it on his tiny electrical Victrola. “No,” he said primly. “No relation.”

Neumann seemed disappointed.

Palestrina said, “I’m really very tired. If you could tell me where you’re taking me—?”

“I’m sorry, Your Eminence. I assumed you’d been briefed. We’ll be in Washington by midnight. There’s a hotel room for you and I’ll be your guide, your contact, whatever. Then, of course, you’re looking at a daily commute to the Defense Research compound. There are people there you’ll need to meet …”

“We’ll be driving five more hours?”

“Afraid so, Your Eminence.”

God help me. “And then,, in Washington, I’ll be allowed to see him?”

“See whom, Your Eminence?”

“This prodigy, of course. This monster you’ve created. The man who walks between worlds.”

The silence in the automobile was brief but intense. The wheels ground against pavement. The headlamps played over deep grottoes of autumn woodland.

Neumann said, “Why, I assume so, Your Eminence.”

2

Cardinal Palestrina’s personal encounters with evil had been very limited.

Nevertheless he had a great respect for evil. Evil, this last century, had been what the Americans would call a growth stock. No one seemed exempt from it. Even the Church—he allowed himself a mildly blasphemous thought—even the Church had committed acts that might be called excessive. The Teutonic Inquisition, its oppression of the Jews and the Poles, doctrine wielded for political ends while Rome herself stood mute…

But that was history. History was replete with oppression. More important was that, lately, Christendom itself seemed threatened. Islam had swept like a brushfire through northern Africa, fomenting revolution against the Dutch, the French, the British; the Russians were battling rebellious Moslems on their southern borders. The Oriental races had evicted the military forces of the Novus Ordo from their Pacific outposts and banned commerce with the West. There were small wars everywhere and larger ones seemed inevitable.

All the portents were ominous. On Palm Sunday in 1982 the image of the Prince of Darkness had appeared in a cloud of trichlorophenol above San Pietro in Vincoli—hundreds had been hospitalized. This last Christmas, a rain of doves had fallen on the Palazzo Venezia. Sicily had nearly succumbed to the Turkish fleet; the Mediterranean was endangered; troops had been mustered throughout Italy and Spain. The situation was desperate, or why would he have been sent here, eking out this dubious liaison with the Americans on the chance that they might in fact have produced a secret weapon?

Because, Palestrina thought, for all their naive Protestantism and unrepentant superstition, they are more like us than the Arabs. Salvandorum paucitas, damnandorum multitude-. It went without saying. Also: politics makes strange bedfellows.

He slept a little in the automobile. When he stepped out into the fierce artificial light of the hotel vestibule he felt permanently bruised. His spine shrieked in pain. Neumann, perversely, was as fresh as ever. He smiled up at Palestrina through the window of the automobile like the framed painting of an especially insolent harlequin. “Can I see you to your room?”

“I’ll find it myself.”

“I’ll be by tomorrow to pick you up. I imagine you can use the rest.”

“Thank you,” Cardinal Palestrina said dryly.

The hotel—it was called Waterwheel or Waterfall or some such fanciful name—overlooked the Potomac. It was in the Gothic style that had been so popular a half-century ago, a maze of courtyards and false spires. He checked in, rode the lurching elevator to the fifteenth floor, opened the door to a roomful of stale air, and collapsed into the bed. He slept without changing his clothes.

He woke in the dark hours before morning. He had slept deeply but briefly and he felt as exhausted as ever, dead in spirit. He offered a silent prayer and washed his face in the echoing tiled bathroom.

Feeling claustrophobic, he opened the curtains. Across the black gap of the Potomac he could see this American city breathing flame from its night foundries, sooty and dark. He pulled up a chair and sat drinking tap water from a hotel glass. The glass had been wrapped in paper: a novelty. So many new things. It occurred to him then that he was old… for the first time in his life, he felt old. As if to underscore the point, his belly clenched in a spasm.

He was old and he had never been so far from home.

So far from God.

Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

But here, he thought unhappily, I am the Church.

He glanced at the phosphorescent hands of the bedside clock. It was 4:20 a.m. He felt bereft, spiritually empty. He put the glass on the windowsill; his head nodded forward.

He blinked, and suddenly it was dawn; the window was full of light and Carl Neumann was hammering at the door.

3

“It’s an old project, really,” Neumann said. “It began in the forties. A lot of research came together then. We had the talent—mainly refugees.”

They drove through the city of Washington toward the Defense Research Institute. Traffic was light and mainly equine. The day had dawned cold and windy, and Cardinal Palestrina imagined he could smell snow in the air. Last winter a freak storm had struck Rome; ice had battered down the hydroelectric lines. The wet, pervasive chill had invaded his office in the Vatican and etched itself in his memory. Now the same unpleasant air poured in the automobile’s ventilator grills and made Palestrina’s knees ache hideously.

“Heretics,” Palestrina said. Neumann seemed puzzled. “What?” “Heretics. Not refugees.”

“Maybe both, Your Eminence. In any case, useful men. We had Einstein and Heisenberg on the run from the Inquisition, we had Russians like Lysenko. We had Dirac and Planck. And we supported their work. Some very unique ideas began emerging from that.”

Palestrina had read profane philosophy; he was familiar with their ideas. “They were deemed heretics for a reason, Mr. Neumann.”

“But surely the fundamental notions aren’t terribly heretical? I know I’m treading on dangerous ground here”—his smile was fixed—“but the duality of nature, the light and dark creative forces, those are things your order recognizes, are they not?”

“Please don’t lecture me on theology.” To Neumann’s chastened expression he added, more gently, “We also recognize a moral order.”

“But it’s not new—the idea of looking at nature objectively.”

“Hardly. Descartes was hanged for it.”

“But it’s useful.”

“Is that what matters?”

Neumann shrugged. “I’m not equipped to judge.”

“God bids us all judge, Mr. Neumann.”

“If you say so, Your Eminence.”

The town was full of flags. The flag of the Novus Ordo was everywhere, the black pyramid with that single leering eye set in a field of red and white bars. Between the flags and Neumann’s cheerful amorality, Cardinal Palestrina began to understand Europe’s cherished horror of Americans: they feared nothing. Europe’s bastard offspring, a nation of Waldensians and Calvinists and Freemasons and worse. A chaos of perverse beliefs, which they had the temerity to call freedom of religion. Maybe there was a secret weapon. Anything was possible in such a climate. Maybe the rumors were true.

“We gave these people a free hand,” Neumann said. “We gave them the tools they wanted. There was criticism from certain sectors, of course. I mean, we’re talking about kabalistic magic, trafficking with elementals, alchemy. And the secrecy was a strain; they fought among themselves. But they were brilliant men, and they shared this need to understand certain things—stars, atoms, the plenum itself.”

“Theory,” Palestrina said, wishing he could dismiss it as easily as that.

“They predicted,” Neumann went on blithely, “that there was not a single plenum but many—worlds inside of worlds, if you can compass that, all divided by units of probability, which Planck called quanta. The theory predicted that it might be within the power of the human mind to penetrate those barriers.”

Cardinal Palestrina wanted to say that this was nonsense, chimerical, a snare and a delusion. But of course it was not nonsense, or he wouldn’t be here… Neumann wouldn’t be telling him this. The Curia had some covert knowledge of the so-called Plenum Project; Palestrina understood that Neumann was being more or less open with him.

“I admired those men,” Neumann said. “They were dedicated, they were serious. They were working at a very high level. Mind you, they didn’t pay much attention to the practical applications. An army, say, or even one man, an assassin, who could pretty much move through walls, pass through any barrier …it took them by surprise that anybody might be interested in that. Some of them were appalled when we cast the finding spells, when we sequestered civilians who showed signs of latency. Well, there is a moral question, I’m the first to admit it. But rough measures for rough times. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, right, Your Eminence?”

Palestrina felt ill.

Neumann said, “The Institute’s just around the corner.”

They were deep in the government quarter now, vast stone structures crowding against the cobbled streets, a canyon of sooty architraves decorated with didactic friezes of the Virtues, of Capital and Labor striding hand in hand toward the ostensible future. The factories by the Potomac contributed a pall of oily coal smoke; on a bad day, Neumann had said, you couldn’t tell noon from midnight.

But the Defense Research Institute was the most appalling of any of these structures. The sight of it made the day seem even colder. There was nothing here of the spirituality of the Vatican, an architecture striving toward God; nothing prayerlike in these black stone bastions, a fence of spikes rising automatonlike as the automobile approached. They drove beneath a pillared arch, the eye-and-pyramid motif engraved in the sooty keystone, and the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.

The building was immense, prisonlike. It had its own powerhouse and commissary, Neumann said, its own shops and laundry. They passed through a second stone portcullis and Neumann identified himself to a guard. The guard presented a plastic tag for Palestrina to wear on his robe; his name was embossed on it. “We’ll need a photograph of you,” Neumann said, “but this will do for now.”

Palestrina hated the tag, hated the association of himself with this place. The inner buildings loomed very large now and some of the windows were barred. He imagined he could hear the screams of the people the Institute had, in Neumann’s ugly euphemism, “sequestered.” But, he thought, surely all that is past?

“We had some trouble in the forties,” Neumann admitted. “Congressional investigations, fanatics trying to close us down. It was a turbulent decade. That’s over now, thank God. But it put our work back by at least a dozen years… and it allowed some of the lapses you may have heard about.”

“The escape,” Palestrina said. “The people who broke out.”

“I don’t like to use unnecessarily melodramatic language.”

Neumann parked the car in a space marked private—reserved. They climbed out, dashed through the cold to an immense iron door which Neumann opened with a key. The hallway inside was sterile with the light of aging fluorescent tubes; the doors were all painted salmon pink and numbered.

Neumann seemed amused by Palestrina’s disorientation. “Follow me, Your Eminence.”

“Where are we going?” Palestrina’s reluctance was an imperative now, a physical resistance.

“My office,” Neumann said. “Unless you want the grand tour right away?”

“I should speak to someone. Someone with rank… someone in charge.”

That smile.

“You’re looking at him,” Neumann said.

Neumann said he’d been at the Institute for almost thirty years now, that his fortunes had fallen and risen with the Plenum Project, that he had been coordinating it independently for the last five years. “I’m not a scientist, mind you. But as far as operations are concerned, goal-setting, management, I have pretty much a free hand.”

Neumann’s office was sere, stony, and blank. Palestrina said, “I want to see this creature you’ve created.”

“You make him sound like one of our homunculi.”

“There are homunculi working as servants at the Vatican Library, Mr. Neumann. I assure you I wouldn’t speak of them in the same tone.”

At last—Cardinal Palestrina considered it a kind of personal triumph—Neumann’s smile faded. “I hate to see you go into this with a negative attitude.”

“I don’t mean to insult your work—”

“Because, you know, the implications are tremendous. Even the Curia has acknowledged that. Frankly, it seemed like an extremely generous thing for the State Department to invite you here. We don’t normally share this sort of material even with allies.”

Palestrina bowed his head. “The stakes are considerable.”

“The oil supply,” Neumann said.

“I was thinking of the survival of Christendom.”

Neumann’s smile flickered faintly. “That, too.”

“Show me the man,” Palestrina said.

“Isn’t that a little premature?”

“I know the history of this place. Do I really have to admire the architecture?” He leaned forward. “The Vatican acknowledges your nation’s generosity. Nevertheless, a moral issue persists. That’s why I’m here.”

“A moral issue,” Neumann said blankly.

“Means and ends.”

“I don’t understand.”

Palestrina was not surprised. “Is he here?”

“Yes, he’s in the building, but—”

“Then take me to him, please.”

Neumann hesitated, annoyed, Palestrina thought, at being forced off his schedule. Finally he shrugged. “I guess there’s nothing to lose.”

4

The room was a gray stone chamber. Neumann agreed to wait outside.

Palestrina understood that, in a sense, he was at Neumann’s mercy. He could not have found his own way here; he doubted he could find his way back out. The Defense Research Institute was literally a maze, corridors turning back on themselves or twining into blank stone walls. The building housed not only Neumann’s Plenum Project but a dozen other deeply shrouded efforts: biochemical warfare, sorcels of invisibility, commerce with the dead. Every level in the bureaucratic hierarchy had its own fragmentary map of the building. The rumor, Neumann said, was that no single comprehensive map existed; no single architect had overseen the project and no living man understood the building as a whole. Neumann offered this as a legend, for its quaintness; Cardinal Palestrina found it only too easy to believe.

He entered the gray room from one of its two doors, sat down in one of its two chairs. Momentarily, the man he had come to speak to entered.

Only a man, Palestrina thought.

The man sat opposite him, silently, hands folded in his lap.

How ordinary he looked. A shabby old man in a shabby gray suit, a gray slouch hat on his head. In Rome, Palestrina thought, he would have attracted no attention. He would have been taken for one of the less successful bourgeoisie, an alcoholic shopkeeper or a retired subaltern from the cavernous bureaucracy of the Tribunals. Palestrina, scanning for omens of bad faith, found nothing more sinister here than a certain shiftiness about the man’s eyes. But his own gaze was hardly fixed. The temptation to look away—somehow, to look away from oneself—-was nearly overwhelming.

He said, “Do you have a name?”

“ Walker,” said the man in the gray suit.

The voice was odd: resonant but somehow toneless.

“Walker—?”

“Walker, stalker, hunter, finder.” His grin was vulpine. ” Walker is my family name.”

Palestrina said, “Did you know your parents?”

“No, sir. I was creched here.”

Then it was true, Palestrina thought, what the Secretariat had told him before he left, what Neumann had implied. Men and women had been bred like cattle in this building. Surgical interventions: female ova plucked from living tissue and fertilized in vitro. Clonings practiced in sterile laboratories under fertility spells. The thought of it sickened him.

Walker added, “But I know who you are… you’re the Papist.”

“They call me that?”

“No one much talks to me. But I hear them say things.”

“Then, do you understand why I’m here?” “Something to do with war.” “Something to do, I profoundly hope, with peace.”

Walker shrugged, as if to say, It’s all the same to me. He said, “You’re a judge.”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking. Do you know what it is I have to judge?”

“Me,” Walker said. The grin was persistent, childlike in a horrible way.

“Your usefulness,” Palestrina said. “Whether you can help us, whether what you’re doing can help us, in Europe.”

“What I’m good for,” Walker interpreted.

No, Palestrina thought. Not what you’re good for, but whether you’re good. Or worse: whether you are a purchase our moral budget can afford.

But he said, “In a way.”

“Oh, I’m not good for much. They made me that way.” He tapped his head. “But I can do a few tricks.” “Tell me about it.”

“Spells. Binding and finding. It’s slow work but I’m talented at it. And I can do the other thing, I guess you know about that.”

“Traveling between worlds,” Palestrina said. It still strained credulity. But here, in this room, this building…

“Across the plenum,” Walker said, “yes.” “Could you do it now—if you wanted to?” “Yes.”

“You could go”—Palestrina held out his hands palms up—“anywhere?”

“Only certain places,” Walker said. “What places?” “Where they’ve been.” The heart of the matter.

“My understanding,” Cardinal Palestrina said, “is that you were a family.”

“A long time ago,” Walker said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face: not an emotion, Palestrina thought, so much as the shade of an emotion.

He said, “Would you like to talk about it?”

“They told me to answer your questions.”

“Do you have to do what the people here tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me, then,” Cardinal Palestrina said.

Walker closed his eyes and seemed to regard the memory directly.

“There were three of us,” he said. “We were the best they could make. We had the talent. Very strongly. So they closed us in, of course… caged us with sorcels and spells. And it worked for a time.”

He knitted his hands in his lap. Palestrina could not look away as the fingers laced and unlaced: old, bony fingers.

“They gave us one name apiece. Walker and Julia and William. We all had different parents, or no parents, but we used to think of ourselves as brothers and sister. William was the oldest. I admired him a lot. He was always surprising the doctors and nurses, doing things they didn’t think he could do. I think William carried the whole plenum around inside him: he was that big, that powerful. He was like a god.”

Walker’s eyes shone with ancient feeling.

Cardinal Palestrina remained silent.

“Julia was very beautiful. Tell you the truth, Father, I felt kind of lost between them. William was big and powerful, Julia was beautiful and smart. Me, I was just Walker. Ordinary Walker. Oh, I could do the tricks, too. But not like they could. But that was all right… we had each other.”

“Until they left,” Palestrina said gently.

Walker’s expression hardened. “They talked about it sometimes. I thought it was bad. A mistake. No good could come of it. But they included me. I appreciated that. ‘They can’t hold us,’ William used to say. ‘Not all their spells can keep us here.’ And in the end, you know, he was right.”

“But you stayed behind,” Palestrina pressed.

“I couldn’t go! Or I didn’t want to go. Or I wasn’t strong enough to go…”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember them begging me. We were all older then. By then I knew that Julia and William loved each other, that they loved me but in a different way. A lesser way. So we battered down the sorcels and we were going to go where no one could find us, worlds and worlds away from this place. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t and finally I told them to go while there was still time, just go and leave me… and they did…”

“They left you?”

“Yes.”

“You resented that?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Why don’t you remember?”

“Because the proctors took me. They took me to the surgeons.” He regarded Palestrina with his head cocked, an expression that was at once sly and pathetic. He said, “They operated on me.”

Cardinal Palestrina experienced a twinge of abhorrence. “Operated—?”

Walker lifted his battered gray hat.

The scar was prominent, all these years later. It ran in a ragged circle from the tip of Walker’s left ear past the orbit of his eye socket and up into the hairline. Walker traced it with his finger. “They opened up my skull,” he said. “They took things out.”

“Things,” Palestrina whispered.

“Love and hate. Caring and not caring.”

“And left—?”

“Obedience. Loyalty. They call it loyalty.”

“My God… and you don’t despise them for it?”

Shockingly, Walker smiled. “I don’t think I can.”

No, Cardinal Palestrina thought. No, this is too much: too much cruelty, too much obscenity. It recalled a kind of torture the Tribunals had not practiced for centuries.

They had cauterized a part of this man’s soul, Palestrina thought… and how much could be murdered of conscience or outrage before a man was, essentially, dead?

So perhaps he was talking to a dead man.

The thought was chilling and unwelcome.

“You followed them,” Palestrina said. “That’s what you were trained for.”

“Followed them for years.” Again that distant look, Walker’s old eyes gone diffuse. “It’s hard work, you know. But I can smell them out. They leave trails.”

“Julia and William? You found them?”

“Eventually.”

“Brought them back?”

“Killed them.”

Cardinal Palestrina blinked.

Walker said, “It was unavoidable.”

His face was bland, affectless, smiling. Palestrina thought, He is dead. “But then it’s over, surely? Your work is finished… the project is finished?”

“There were children,” Walker said.

“I see… and they have the power?”

“They have it strongly. More strongly than they know.”

“You’ve hunted them?”

“I’ve been close to them. Often! But it’s not as easy as all that, bringing them back. These arms won’t hold them. A cage won’t hold them. That’s the paradox! It’s a lifework. Spells and geases are the only weapons we have. And they work less well far along across the worlds. But we’re very close now.” He bent toward Cardinal Palestrina; his breath was sour. “They’ve learned things in this building since I was young.”

“I’m sure they have,” Palestrina said faintly.

“And there’s one other,” Walker said. “Child of a child. Hybrid, but the genotype is true. He’s what we worked for all these years. We’ll bring him back. I’ll bring him back. And he can do what you want, you know. He’s powerful enough. A few adjustments—” Walker tapped the pale line of his scar. “He’ll do what you tell him. Lead armies against the Holy Land if that’s what you want. Call up forces across the plenum. Armies that would terrify a god, weapons that would devastate a city. It’s all out there.” Walker showed his teeth again. “Would that suit you? Is that what you’re after?”

And Cardinal Palestrina thought, It might save us.

Or damn us.

He moistened his lips. A cramp seized his belly; it was all he could do to keep from crying out. He drew a breath and said, “You can do that—you can bring him here?”

“Oh yes.” Walker put his hands in his pockets, reclined happily against the chair back. “This time,” he said, “we have help.”