30

“What relic is your priest dragging us off to see?” Spencer whispered to Livia as the old monk led them down the side aisle.

“I have no idea. Or why.”

She watched Father Battista and Father Kelly walk side by side a few steps ahead, a young man and an old one, sharing the same piety, the same comprehension of the world. Father Kelly’s faith had been shaken by what he’d learned today, but Livia expected—she hoped—he’d recover his equilibrium. She’d meant what she told him: she did believe faith was a precious thing. Her own was more complex than his; she wasn’t sure at all that that was a good thing, but it was a truth there was no point in denying.

She’d been raised to believe in the same God Thomas Kelly did, though she’d never been as ardent as he. Since her Change, she’d pondered often the question of a deity and also of an afterlife. As she’d told Father Kelly, Noantri could die, though she had not been completely forthcoming with him on that subject: of the three ways death could come to a Noantri, she’d described only two. What she’d said about fire was true, though, and she’d been just half-joking when she’d reassured him that they’d all be devoured when the sun flared out. What then? On that large subject, she’d come to no conclusions. But she was sure of three things.

One was that she could think of no reason why a benevolent God, Thomas Kelly’s God, could not be credited with creating the microbe that Blessed the Noantri with their long, rich lives. Thomas Kelly saw the microbe, and the Noantri, as evil. The Unchanged always had, and through the millennia when the Noantri’s need for blood nourishment had made them an imminent threat, that view had been understandable. It wasn’t true any more than evil accounted for a cat killing a mouse; but you could see the mouse’s point. Which led Livia to her second article of faith: that the Concordat was an unqualified good.

The explanation Cardinal Cossa had given Thomas Kelly of how the Concordat came to be was no more the full story than Livia’s account of the death of a Noantri had been. It was true as far as it went and so was the history she’d added for him in Spencer’s study, but there was more she knew and hadn’t told him. And there was a secret at the heart of the Concordat’s story that she didn’t know. That Martin the Fifth had seen the advantages of ending the Church’s virulent and everlasting assault on the Noantri was true enough; but at the time of the Concordat, before Community, before the Law, the Noantri were a fragmented, furtive people. Calling a halt to the hunting, the persecution, was one thing, and would have permitted Martin to concentrate his strength on pressing matters of consolidating papal power. But to sign an agreement with her people, committing the Church to obligations in perpetuity? As a group, in 1431, the Noantri had commanded neither strength nor wealth enough to put in Martin’s service in exchange. Why had he done it? And why had the Church continued to abide by it through six centuries?

Possibly the answer to that last question was simple: peace was peace. Even early on, it might have been clear to Church fathers that once the Concordat was signed, the Noantri ceased being a danger. Thus the Church could turn its attention elsewhere.

As to the larger question, though, Livia had pondered it often, but had come to accept the fact that she did not, probably would never, have an answer. That knowledge was accorded to no Unchanged save the highest ranks of the Church, and to no Noantri outside the Conclave. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter. Whatever had brought the Concordat into being was itself a Blessing.

But though most of the Unchanged didn’t know the Concordat existed at all, and the Noantri knew it only insofar as they were required to follow its provisions, the third thing Livia was sure of was that the life she and her people were able to lead because of the Concordat, the life she had come into when she’d Changed, the life so rich and full they had come to think of it as Blessed, was only possible if the agreement was faithfully kept by both parties.

Jonah refused to accept this truth, but he was wrong. And only if she found the lost copy of the Concordat and delivered it to the Conclave did he have any chance of living long enough to understand that.