CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 
Hradčany Castle, Prague, March 1584
Three days later, and at last Frommond calls from Kitty’s bed.
“John,” she says. “Come.”
And he is on his feet in a moment, caught in a maelstrom of terror in case his plan has not worked and that Frommond summons him to see Kitty not recovering, but dying. He tries to judge her tone of voice, but cannot, and in the end, of course, there is nothing else for it.
He pulls back the curtain, and Frommond gives him the faintest of tight smiles.
“Oh thank God,” he breathes.
“She’s cooler, isn’t she?” she asks. “I think she is.”
Dee presses his fingers to Kitty’s forearm.
“Yes,” he says. “I am sure of it. And her skin. It is less flushed.”
And her pupils are no longer the size of buttons, either, but of beads. That is an improvement, he is certain, and he almost grips her in a hug, but he contents himself instead with a squeeze of Frommond’s hand.
“Thank you,” he murmurs, and by Jesu he means it, though Frommond brushes his thanks aside, for if Kitty had died—well, it does not bear thinking about. Expiation would hardly be the start of it. Frommond has past the last few days been dousing Kitty with iced water, and feeding her small beer all, helped in spells by Marlowe, who has proved an unexpectedly useful nurse, while Edward Kelley has ignored them all and burned through a dozen good candles poring over Ripley’s Bosome Book and brushing up on the twelve gates of alchemy. Dee meanwhile had paced the floor in a fever of anxiety, constantly checking the doors, and thinking that Kitty is at least getting no worse, and that the fire still burns, and so the hours have inched past. He has tried to occupy himself applying the last flourishes to the Book of Loagaeth: a stroke of red ink here, green ink there, to help clarify the wonderful diagrams he has concocted. Sometimes he tries to understand what is written and is gratified when he cannot, and he is growing ever more convinced that he has penned a work of rare and beautiful genius.
“Has the emperor sent word?” Frommond asks.
“He has asked after her health,” Dee confirms, but there has been nothing else. He has not yet taken Dee’s bait, and if he does not do so, then the whole scheme—every single thing he has worked for over the last eight months—will have been for nothing. It would have been better had he never left England, never have set off from Mortlake.
Still though.
Kitty will not die.
He will not have that on his conscience.
He gives weary Frommond one last squeeze of the hand, and later he stands by the windows and scratches a monad in the ice. It makes him smile.
The clouds have come now; they are thick and gray and filled with yet more snow.
Dee thinks about de Guise and wonders where he will be now. He hopes he is having a miserable time on snow-choked roads.
Late afternoon, early evening, and the emperor has still not sent for Dee.
He puts another log on one of the fires and kicks Kelley’s foot where he sleeps over Ripley’s Bosome Book.
“You are snoring, Master Kelley,” he tells him even though, for once, he was not, but Kelley needs to know the twelve gates of alchemy by heart if this is going to work.
To and fro Dee paces, around and around, back and forth until, just as it is properly dark outside, he hears a knock on the pornographic door.
“Who is it?” Marlowe asks, sword drawn.
It is a servant, he is told, knocking on behalf of His Excellency Jacob Kurtz, the emperor’s chancellor, who waits without. Dee gives Marlowe the nod, and Marlowe opens the door with lingering, prurient pleasure.
Greetings are exchanged, and Kurtz first asks after the patient.
“May I see her?”
“Of course,” Dee says. “She has taken the medicine the angelic spirits prescribed, and we have said the requisite prayers, but we do not claim to be her physicians and have no claim to her person.”
If Kurtz notices the bed is significantly less curtained than once it was, he says nothing, but stands at its foot and studies Kitty de Fleurier where she lies covered in a sheet and two blankets, with a cold cloth across her eyes, and Frommond sat beside her, cross-legged and anxious.
“Does she respond?” Kurtz asks.
“We believe so,” Dee answers in case Frommond says no. “Slowly.”
Kurtz crosses himself.
“Thanks be to God,” he murmurs.
“Oh, amen,” Dee agrees. God did, after all, provide the Calabar beans, even if he planted them in a somewhat inconvenient spot.
“I will be pleased to report her progress to the emperor,” Kurtz tells them, “who will be pleased beyond measure.”
Dee feels the smile fixing to his face.
Yes? And?
“And he has sent me to summon you unto him, Doctor Dee, for a private audience, if that is convenient to you?”
He feels inundated with warm relief. At last.
“Now?”
“If you’ve a mind?”
Dee nods tightly, as if it is inconvenient.
“Keep the doors very locked,” he whispers to Marlowe.
“Very?”
“You know what I mean.”
He does.
And so Dee sets off, following the chancellor through the pornographic door where a company of halberdiers wait to escort them to the emperor. They are big men, in lavish uniforms and extravagant mustaches, and probably not as effective as once they were, or in tight spaces, but they carry a certain weight, and the corridors clear before them. Dee sees one of the black-clad Spaniards slip aside and down a corridor like a rat. Damn, he thinks, he will be off to alert Van der Boxe.
They stamp along behind the halberdiers along broad, stone-flagged corridors, up and down which two horsemen might comfortably ride abreast, and then out into the square where the snow has not been permitted to settle and across toward a building that has unmistakable elements to remind one of a stable: half doors and fodder troughs in copper gone green. Candles burn within, and fires, too, and there are more halberdiers at the doors. They are opened as the men approach and the halberdiers wheel in front, leaving Kurtz, who has not had much to say on their walk, to lead Dee through the doors and into a vast sand-strewn, triple-height arena, the sides of which are lined with actual stables, from the upper doors of which peer the finely sculpted heads of a score of beautiful gray horses, each with a colorfully dressed stable lad standing in attendance. The smell is extraordinary: horses; leather; beeswax candles; apple wood smoke; and sand washed in rose oil.
A hundred candles are lit, and there are braziers and sconces everywhere, and across the sand another elegant, high-stepping horse that Dee guesses is probably Andalusian is being exercised on a long rein by a slight but muscular man for the entertainment of the occupant of a throne upon a dais that sits alone in the middle of the sand: Emperor Rudolf, of course. He makes a small movement, a come-hither tapping of his fingers and thumb, and Kurtz advances, leading Dee across the sand that is as fine as flour.
“How is our little Kitten?” the emperor asks without taking his eye off the horse.
“She responds well to the angelic spirits’ physic, Your Highness.”
“Is she well enough to stand?”
“Not for some time, Your Highness. She is still very weak.”
“When will she be well enough to see us?”
“I cannot say, Your Highness, not being a physician. I am a humble philosopher who possesses nothing save such gifts as God grants.”
Dee is about to go on, to mention further supplication to the angelic spirits, but he has lost the emperor for now, and he waits for the horse to ride around behind him, watching Rudolf’s eyes as they follow it, and then the emperor looks back at Dee and Kurtz as if he has forgotten why they are there.
“What?” he says.
“Perhaps Count Łaski told you of our recent Action during which the angelic spirits told us?”
“Oh, Count Łaski. Yes.”
He says no more, and Dee is left at a loss. It was the emperor who summoned him. What does he want? But Dee knows royalty loves to test the world’s patience.
“Łaski, he tells us great many things,” Rudolf says eventually. “He tells us of your Actions with the angelic spirits, and of your scryer, Doctor Kelley, who summons them into his crystal.”
“That is so, Your Highness. Doctor Kelley’s connection to heaven is extraordinary. It is unlike any enjoyed by mortal man since the death of Enoch.”
The emperor nods.
“Łaski tells us that he has seen it with own eyes. And that the angelic spirits had messages for him.”
“The angelic spirits did likewise say they had certain and specific messages for you, Your Highness, should you ever wish to honor us with your presence at one of our Actions.”
The emperor gives him a hooded-eye look, and the meagerest nod of acknowledgment, and then he glances away to watch his horse again, and to leave the matter unresolved for now, for the angelic spirits’ invitation presents the emperor—and his advisers—with a complicated question of precedence. All men are equals before the crystal, and should Rudolf join Dee and Kelley, he must do so as a guest at a commoners’ table and inevitably undergo a strong dose of lèse-majesté.
The horse passes behind Rudolf’s right shoulder and he returns his gaze to Dee.
“When we spoke before, you mentioned a book. A book that is being dictated to you by the angelic spirits?”
“Oh,” Dee says, feigning shock. “The Book of Loagaeth. Forgive me, your Highness. I—should not have said anything. I spoke out of turn.”
“Tell me more of it.”
Rudolf is looking closely at Dee, waiting.
“The angelic spirits say it is written in the language that God gave Adam before the Fall,” Dee is forced to admit. “And in which he named all things, and which was last spoken upon this earth by Enoch.”
“Go on.”
“But should any man now learn its secrets, and come to speak it himself, then that man will be granted dominion over all things on the earth, even unto the seraphim and cherubim.”
A horse thunders past Dee’s shoulder, but this time Rudolf does not take his eyes from Dee. He stares openmouthed, although that means nothing, and he says nothing, and just waits for Dee to continue.
“But its comprehension is the work of a lifetime,” Dee tries to put him off. “And none save the very finest scholar will ever even begin to grasp its most basic tenets.”
“And you have this book?” Rudolf asks.
“It sits unfinished,” Dee lies. “The angelic spirits are yet to hand down the last words, the final details, and then it shall be complete. I am not certain to what purpose they wish it put, for its great power is far beyond my meager understanding, though Master Kelley seems to grasp its fundamentals if not its specifics.”
Rudolf manages to lick his broadly parted lips. Dee sees why he prefers to conduct his business in the dark, for he is a strikingly odd-looking man. The horse has come around behind Dee’s shoulder again, and still Rudolf looks at him.
“We should like very much to see this Book of Loagaeth when it is completed,” Rudolf says. Dee rounds his eyes, and bows, but says nothing. Silence stretches. The emperor waits.
“It will be so, Your Highness,” Kurtz speaks for Dee.
And with that, Rudolf sits back and returns his attention to the horse once more. After a moment, Kurtz taps Dee’s arm to indicate the audience is over, and they must retreat backward out of the arena.
On the way back to the Kunstkammer they walk shoulder to shoulder between the halberdiers, and Dee feels curiously companionable, as if they have been through an experience together, and he asks Kurtz if that was an in any way unusual audience with the emperor.
“One of the best,” Kurtz thinks. “Sometimes he has two horses running, and he looks at you not once.”
“He loves his horses,” Dee says.
Kurtz nods.
“Is he getting any more, do you think?” Dee asks.
It is a strange question, of course, and Kurtz looks at him strangely.
“Why you ask?”
Dee lets out a long sigh.
“It was something Mistress de Fleurier said in her sleep,” Dee lies. “And something the angelic spirits mentioned also: about a man coming from the west, bringing horses from the south, and I wondered if—well, I wondered what it meant.”
Kurtz knows this is nonsense and half guffaws, and Dee tries to explain his clumsy question.
“You heard what I told the emperor. Too often I do not know what the angelic spirits mean.”
“You mean the Duc de Guise, Herr Doctor Dee. It is obvious.”
Kurtz is not a fool.
“Do I?” Dee asks, all innocence.
“He is coming here at Mistress de Fleurier’s request. He is bringing two Arabian horses, he tells her, as a gift for the emperor.”
“Ahhh,” Dee says. “That makes sense now.”
“Hmm,” is all Kurtz will say.
They walk in silence for a moment, then Dee asks if Kurtz knows de Guise.
“Only by reputation.”
“Do you know why he comes?”
Kurtz shrugs.
“To borrow money?” he supposes. “Is usually the thing. Or to sell something, like you have.”
“Like me? I have not come to sell anything!”
Kurtz gives him a long level look.
“Your book of Log-whatever? That is not for sale?”
Dee feigns a loss of words. He comes to a stop and the halberdiers behind nearly crash into him. Meanwhile Kurtz has walked on. Dee must trot to catch him up.
“It is not for sale,” he announces.
“If he offered you—what?—ten thousand silver thalers, now, you’d not take it?”
“Absolutely not. It is—”
“—Worth much more than that?” Kurtz laughs. “You do surprise me, Doctor!”
“Well, yes, it is, but it is not for sale. I have not come to Prague to sell it.”
“Then why are you here, Doctor? Once upon a time there was no Doctor Dee, and now there is only Doctor Dee.”
“I was exiled from my own country,” Dee reminds him. “Expelled. And Count Łaski invited me to come with him, and that is that.”
“So you wash up here, in Prague, at the court of the emperor whom you know to have a weakness for philosophers and kabbalists, and alchemists and so on?”
“What would you have done?”
“Done? It is not a question of what I would have done. It is a question of what I would not have done.”
“Which is what?”
“Not have conjured spirits when that was against the law.”
Dee is silenced for a moment, and they walk on.
“I don’t blame you, Doctor,” Kurtz explains. “A man such as yourself must make a living.”
It always astonishes Dee how proud people are to have inherited their wealth, and how they sneer at those who have not. It’s like a scab, he thinks, to protect a wound.
“But you have roused some powerful enemies,” Kurtz goes on. “Trodden on some very sensitive toes.”
Dee nods.
“Van der Boxe’s men have been trying to break into the room the emperor gave us,” Dee tells him.
“I thought he might. He wants Kitty back under his control, and if he can’t have her, he wants to be certain you can’t, either.”
“He might kill her?”
Kurtz shrugs.
“I thought he had tried, with this poison—”
Dee stops again.
“Poison?”
Kurtz stops and turns to face him, puzzled.
“Yes. Of course, poison,” he says. “Surely you must suspect it?”
Dee feels himself flushing.
“Well,” he says. “I suppose it crossed my mind.”
Kurtz sets off again, talking over his shoulder, knowing Dee will catch up with him.
“But then I could not work out why Van der Boxe might do such a thing, since she is de Guise’s only link to the emperor. Anyway, things are getting to the point now: Van der Boxe can’t let Rudolf’s attention stray before de Guise arrives in Prague next week.”
Dee comes to a stop again.
“Next week?”
Kurtz nods.
“He has already reached Pilsner, to the west, but means to be here by Ash Wednesday, he has written, for this so-called Day of Rage.”
This news is so alarming that Dee will have to postpone thinking about Kurtz’s mention of poison, and of the Day of Rage, and devote his thoughts to what to do now: his scheme had relied on some time at least between Kitty’s recovery and de Guise’s arrival. Without that—
But here they are, back at the pornographic door again.
“I will post more guards,” Kurtz tells him. “And instruct them to yield to no one but myself.”
Dee thanks him.
Marlowe opens the door with a smile. The room is dark and cold, and there is frost on a broken window.
“Had another little intrusion,” he says, holding up his other sleeve, ripped in two places. “Worse than moths, ain’t they?”
He has obviously seen them off, but that does not explain his good cheer.
“Come and have a look,” Jane calls from the bed.
It is Kitty.
“Jesu!” Dee cannot help exclaim, for it is as if there is a different woman in the bed. The swelling is down, the color rectified, and when he touches her wrist, she is no longer a furnace.
“She’s been talking,” Jane tells him. “Murmuring really, in her sleep.”
“Keeps saying the same thing,” Marlowe adds. “We reckon it’s a name. Emily or Amelie or something.”
“Must be her sister,” Frommond supposes.
“Well done!” he congratulates them. “Well done.”
“It is not our doing,” his wife tells him, and there is an accusatory edge to her words that brings him up. He avoids her eye. One day there will be a time to discuss the Calabar beans, but later, perhaps. Later.
“How was Rudolf?” Marlowe asks.
When he tells them that de Guise is coming sooner than expected, and that when he does, he will retake control of Kitty and they will lose their reason to be in the palace, they are silent, and they look to the patient.
“But why are we here anyway, Doctor?” Marlowe asks, after a while.
And both look at him expectantly.
Perhaps it is time? he thinks. Perhaps he should now tell them? It has been a plan he has kept so long to himself that he can hardly now tease it out, for it is become like a crumpled letter, clenched in his fist, and then swallowed to be kept from prying eyes. Now though, with the news of de Guise’s infinitely more imminent arrival, it needs updating, urgently, and if he takes Jane and Marlowe into his confidence, they might have some better suggestion than that which he has hit upon.
Only there are already elements to this scheme that from the outset have brought him sleepless, shame-filled nights, and which, if he is honest, he has prayed he need never think about again. The thought of confessing them—above all to Jane—makes him sweat, and bilious to the core.
“I had thought,” he begins. “I had hoped to deter the emperor from giving de Guise the money he needs for his invasion of England.”
They nod. This is obvious enough. They all know this.
“To do that,” he goes on, “I had, at the very least, to get an audience with him, during which my aim was not only to divert him from giving the money to de Guise, but also in the longer term distract him from concerning himself in the wider struggle in Christendom.”
“Why don’t you just stab him or something?” Marlowe asks.
“Because firstly Bess—Her Majesty—will not countenance procuring the death of fellow princes, and secondly, the emperor’s heir is his brother Matthias, who is staunchly Catholic and will do anything his uncle King Felipe of Spain tells him. It would be like replacing the Archbishop of Canterbury with Torquemada. And thirdly, I am not an assassin. I have never knowingly, willingly, willfully killed anyone.”
“All right,” Marlowe says, in a tone that suggests Dee is being unreasonably sensitive.
“Now since it is well known that the emperor has an almost unhealthy fascination in what the unlearned might call the esoteric, my scheme was to use any audience I might get to tempt him into joining one of our Actions with the angelic spirits.”
“And what good would that do?” Marlowe asks.
“I hoped he would listen to the angelic spirits, who would turn him against de Guise, and in favor of England, but also to describe to him the power of the Book of Loagaeth.”
“The Book of Loagaeth? That thing you have been scribbling in all this time?”
He cannot help but give Marlowe an exasperated look.
“I have not been scribbling,” he tells him. “I have been writing down that which the angelic spirits have told me to write.”
“Can we see it?” Jane asks.
Dee is about to say no, but then he thinks, Where is the harm? He finds his bag, hidden under the physicians’ covered table and brings it to them. It is a great lump of old vellum he’d bought from a stationer in Moorgate before they left, and it is gathered loosely, yet to be stitched, let alone bound. Some pages are ordered and ruled: tables of tables; sixty-four rows and sixty-four columns, each square filled with a tiny symbol, or letter, or number. Other pages are filled with Enochian text, and diagrams that he has attempted to draw after Kelley’s oftentimes lurid descriptions of plants, and flowers, strange beasts, even humans going about their business. Sometimes, depending on where they were on their journey, Dee had access to different colored inks—green, red, blue—and he used them to draw the things Kelley described.
“It is astonishing,” Jane says. “But what is it?”
Dee manages a laugh.
“That is almost exactly the point,” he says.
“Fuckin’ looks the part,” Marlowe says, flipping through it.
It is sometimes not easy to remember that Marlowe can even read, but then again, reading would not help understand the Book of Loagaeth.
“But what does it all mean?” Jane wonders.
“That is the very question I hope the emperor will ask.”
There is a long silence while they all look at the book. Kitty lets out small moans. Kelley is asleep, slumped across a chair, the Bosome Book on the floor.
“So you came all this way to put this before Emperor Rudolf,” Marlowe wonders, “in the hope that he would… what? Dedicate the rest of his life to decrypting this?”
Dee cannot help but beam at him.
“Exactly,” he says. “The angelic spirits say that whosoever can understand this book will understand God’s secret levers and will have dominion over all the earth, even unto the heavens. He will understand everything, you see? How the stars move; how fish breathe; why the plague came among us. He will be able to control everything: tides; winds; elephants; his friends and his enemies. With such powers, there is nothing a man might not achieve.”
Marlowe bobs his head.
“I like it,” he says.
“And you forget that the Great Conjunction in the fiery trigon portends some great change, this summer, when one ruler shall rise above all others. So.”
And Dee feels warm self-congratulation ease through his system.
“But that does not solve the problem of de Guise’s mustering of support for his invasion,” Frommond reminds him.
“No,” he agrees, feeling suddenly less pleased with himself. “No.”
“Do you have any ideas?” she asks.
He looks at her very carefully.
“I have one,” he says.
“But?”
“But it is a low thing,” he says. “A very low thing.”
He does not tell her how very low he has already stooped. He never will. He looks at Kitty. She is snuffling now. Perhaps she is hungry after producing all that heat on beer alone? Meanwhile Frommond has tilted her head back and flattened her eyes to look at him askance down the length of her nose.
“Go on,” she tells him.
“Now I am not saying this is the only thing to be done. I am just saying this is one thing that might be done. A thing that might be done.”
“What is it then?”
“She—Kitty—is de Guise’s only link with the emperor, isn’t she? Without her, de Guise might—might—get an audience with the emperor, just as I did, in the stables, but if Rudolf has already taken our bait with the Book of Loagaeth, de Guise might not even get that. With Kitty under the duke’s control and advancing his case, though, not only will he get an audience, he will get his money, for Kurtz says she has Rudolf wrapped about her finger.”
Marlowe starts to laugh, a bitter, incredulous snicker.
“You want her dead?”
Dee throws up his hands.
“No! No! Jesu! No! I promise.”
He can see a thunderhead of disgusted fury roiling up within Frommond, but he means what he says: No. He does not wish Kitty dead. If he did, he would not have gone to all this trouble with the beans. It is true that that was Sir Francis Walsingham’s first suggestion when he came to the Tower that night after Dee had been arrested, and that this evening, when Kurtz told him that de Guise was due within the week, it had likewise been the first thing that occurred to him. But from the moment back in Winchester House, the first time Dee had met Łaski, when Łaski told him that de Guise had somehow managed to turn Kitty de Fleurier to his own purpose, he had guessed how the man might have done it: by snatching someone close to Kitty’s heart, and keeping him or her from Kitty until Kitty had done what he wished of her. It was what he had done to Isobel Cochet, after all, and it had worked, hadn’t it? From that moment Dee had sworn he would do anything not to kill her. He owed that to Isobel Cochet, at the very least.
And with that in mind, he had even been relieved when Jane overheard Kitty in the garden, for it confirmed his suspicions, and justified some of the risks he had taken, which he’d done so only because he could not bring himself to plot to kill anyone. The memory of Isobel, drowning in the sands off Mont Saint-Michel, will never leave him, and he would never willingly bring about anyone’s death. It is why he brought with him the distillation of belladonna and various other plants that he had carefully grown in the herb garden behind his second laboratory back in Mortlake. He’d brought a vial of the poison, carefully concealed in a cutout in a book, with which he coated the insides of those beautiful butter-yellow gloves, knowing that whoever next wore them would be brought to the very threshold of death’s door.
But he had also brought with him a handful of slowly wizening beans that had been given to him by Sir Francis Drake, who had brought them back from Calabar, in the Bight of Benin, where they are primarily used in witchcraft trials among the Chamba peoples, and which, if taken in too large a dose, are poisonous, but if taken in the right dose, actually reverse the effects of poisoning by belladonna.
What was that Paracelsus’s dictum that Łaski had quoted in Winchester House all those months ago? Sola dosis facit venenum. It is only the dose that makes it a poison.
“But so long as de Guise has Kitty’s sister, he has Kitty, doesn’t he?”
This is from Marlowe, and then he sees something that not even Dee had seen, in part because of the practicalities: “You mean to kill the sister?”
Jane claps her hands to her cheeks, aghast.
“Of course not!” Dee tells them both. “Of course not. I would never— Jesu! That would be even worse.”
“Well, what then?”
He takes a breath and then: “We must tell her that her sister is dead.”
They both sit back, and all three gaze at Kitty lying there in the bed, almost within touching distance. She is better, yes, but still far from well, still far from out of the woods, and would not such a shock kill her? Jane shakes her head.
“She is just come back from the brink, and you want to tell her… that her sister is dead?”
That is better than actually killing her sister, Dee almost reminds her; better than actually killing her.
“If we tell her that the sister has died in some accident, that it was painless but that it was the fault of de Guise, then she will turn the emperor against him. That is all we need. Then we admit we made a mistake. Or we let her discover it.”
“What, like a nice surprise?” Marlowe asks.
“Something like that.”
“No,” Jane says. “That will kill her for sure. You did not hear how she was when she learned the sister was not coming. I do not use the word ‘heartbroken’ lightly. And that was a mere delay. She is already weak. Telling her that the poor sister is dead will be the end of her.”
Dee lifts his hands.
“What then? What else can we do? De Guise will come and force Kitty to persuade Rudolf to give him the money, and it will no longer matter if he subsequently becomes too distracted by the Book of Loagaeth to join the crusade against England, because there will, for all intents and purposes, be no England.”
“There must be something else,” she says.
“I am bereft of ideas,” he tells her. Because he is. The last few months have taken their toll, he can feel. This is not what he is meant to be doing. He should be at home in his laboratory, or in his orchard studying the scheme of heaven, or attempting to raise money for his voyage to find the Western Passage to Cathay, but instead he is here, in Prague, a tolerated invader with a shortening lease, arguing with his wife about whether or not to kill an innocent woman or her sister.
At that moment a knock resounds on the pornographic door.
It is word from the emperor: he wishes to join an Action in the morning.
Dee feels such a rush of relief he must sit.
“Praise God,” he breathes. “Praise God.”