“Does High Inquisitor Gemon know what you’ve done yet, brother?” Glass ignored the threat. “Did any part of this come from his desk? Does the Tower even know where you’re headed? Or was this all Sherzal’s bidding? The prime instigator . . . the office is well named for her.”
“I’ve indulged you on this journey, abbess, but you will speak of the emperor’s sister with respect! Hers is the voice the Inquisition listens to. Gemon’s time is coming to an end.”
“He didn’t sanction my arrest, did he?”
“Sherzal’s sanction is sufficient.”
“So . . . Gemon hasn’t sent any senior inquisitors for this trial I’m supposed to have? There should be three judges. I hope you’re not thinking to adjudicate, brother? You’re neither senior, nor threefold . . .”
“Sherzal isn’t about to let Gemon send his favourites.” Pelter smoothed down the grey tufts of his hair, a nervous habit. “We will recruit inquisitors of the required rank and number from the environs.”
“Environs?” Glass asked.
Brother Pelter glowered at her.
“Oh,” Glass said. “You mean you’ll be picking my jury up along the way?”
Pelter gripped the seat, thrusting his face towards her. “We will present ourselves to the honourable Sherzal with a trio of senior inquisitors, abbess, and when they put you to the question it will be me who employs the iron, be it sharp, or hot, to discover the truth. So you would do well to rid yourself of any hint of mockery.”
Abbess Glass pressed herself back, away from the fierceness of the man’s face and the rank cloud of his breath. “Of course, brother.”
• • •
AS NIGHT FELL Pelter had the carriage put in at Treytown, a settlement of modest size, perhaps five hundred homes, many dependent upon the tin mines for a living. The place boasted a church of the Ancestor considerably larger than most such towns could afford and was able to provide lodgings for the inquisitor and his guards, along with a penitent’s cell for the abbess.
Come morning the local priest unlocked Glass’s door and she bore his disapproval as the yawning guards escorted her to the carriage.
“We’re making a diversion today.” Brother Pelter handed her the prisoner-ration, a brick of black bread that was supposed to last the day.
“Indeed?” Glass accepted the bread into her chained hands. She had been tightening the rope on her habit daily. If the journey had been all the way to the empire’s old boundary out in the Alden she might have arrived with the figure she’d had at twenty, though she wouldn’t have counted it a good exchange for all those hungry days. “Where to?”
“The shrine at Penrast,” Pelter said. “I had Melkir and Sera do a little investigating around town last night. It seems that the Inquisition is following reports of heresy at the shrine. An investigation led by senior inquisitors . . .”
“Who will be useful in judging at my trial,” Glass supplied.
“As I said, from the environs.” Pelter nodded.
“And who is leading this inquiry?”
“Brother Seldom and Sister Agika. Friends of yours, I believe?” Pelter allowed himself a narrow smile.
Abbess Glass folded her hands across her diminished belly and pressed her lips into a thin line. Seldom and Agika had been trusted subordinates during most of her tenure in the Inquisition’s highest seat, but the estrangement that had preceded the announcement of her departure had been the talk of the tower, and famously bitter. “It’s when your power is taken, or given, away that you discover who your friends are, brother. There’s a lesson for us all in that.”
• • •
THEY REACHED THE shrine by noon. From a distance Penrast looked like a toy discarded by some lordling child. A silver cylinder rising from the broken hilltop at a drunken angle, thirty yards tall, maybe twenty yards across. Its walls were a yard thick, a weight of silver-steel that to purchase would beggar empires greater than the one it stood in. Except no fire could melt the stuff, no blade could cut it. Abbess Glass had it on good account that an Ark-steel blade couldn’t scratch the mirrored surface. And so, by having the properties so valued in Ark-steel, but to an even greater degree, the thing moved from priceless resource to worthless curiosity.
Steps led down into the underchambers via a tunnel hewn into the bedrock. Until the Church of the Ancestor took the site over it had been claimed by the smallfolk that the Missing had fashioned the tower, or the “titan’s ring” as they called it. Now the official line was that the tribes had brought it with them from the stars.
“You’ll come with me, abbess.” Pelter gestured her down from the carriage. “The face of an old ‘friend’ will help motivate the inquisitors to step up and do their duty.”
Abbess Glass, with Sera to steady her, emerged into the cold bluster of the day. After a short transit, huddled against the wind, the three of them escaped into shelter again, now bowed over to avoid scraping their heads as they descended the steep, rocky stairs.
The Missing, or whichever of the four tribes built the place, had not bothered with building material. The walls were either bedrock, sheared away with miraculous precision, or the soil itself, fused into a smooth marble-like substance as hard as stone.
Whatever inquiry had been underway appeared to be in the end stages. The Inquisition guards on duty had a bored look. Inquisitors Seldom and Agika were not among those who favoured the more brutal methods of extracting information. Agika was a marjal touch with a gift for coaxing the truth off unwilling tongues, and Seldom had come to Glass’s way of thinking on the subject of interrogation, namely that the information came more swiftly and more accurately if the questions were presented as a concerned attempt to reduce the subject’s final punishment.
Glass waited with Sera while Brother Pelter went to speak to the inquisitors. Sera quickly fell into conversation with other guards at the doorway, men she’d not seen
