The second conversation with Silas was worse than the first.
It happened that night, at the same chapel, at Silas's request. Silas had spent the day in the nave with the faithful, in the small slow way of a priest who needed to be seen by his people in order to keep them steady. He came to the chapel in the second hour after dusk, with the wooden case at his belt, and his face had on it the kind of careful set that men wore when they had spent the day deciding that the easier of two arguments was not going to be the one they made.
You are going to obey it.
I have not decided.
You will decide tonight. The longer you do not decide, the more clearly you decide for the figure. Inaction is action, on a board like this. He counted on inaction when he sent the figure. If you sit at this desk for another night without moving, you have done what he wanted you to do.
You don't know that he sent the figure.
Major. I have given you the only honest reading of the figure that I am capable of giving you. I have told you that the being I have served for three decades did not send him. I cannot prove a negative. I am not asking you to take my word as evidence. I am asking you to take my word as direction. I have been on the right side of this question for thirty years. I have nothing to gain from being wrong about it tonight.
And what would you have me do.
Move. Push. Pursue. Do not give him the gift of your stillness. The angel — the figure — told you to stand down for a reason. The reason is that standing down serves him. Whatever serves him is the action you should not take.
I do not act on inversions, Silas.
You act on what you can read. I am asking you to read with my eyes for one night. I am not asking you to give up your judgement. I am asking you to spend your judgement on the question of which of us is more likely, on this specific narrow question of celestial intent, to be right.
You have been answered once, you said. By a being you would not name to me, in a place you would not describe to me, on terms you have spent thirty years considering proof. You have one piece of evidence. You will not show me what is in your case. You ask me to spend my judgement on your reading of an order I personally received. I am not in the business of spending my judgement on other men's readings.
You were not chosen.
He said it again. He said it the same way. It was not a taunt. It was a statement. Raven, who had stood through it once already that day, found that the second hearing did not soften the sentence. It did the opposite. The sentence, on the second hearing, was the smallest possible distillation of the disagreement between them. Silas had been chosen. Raven had not. The two of them were, on the question of what the figure in the tent had been, working with categorically different equipment, and the equipment was not — and this was the worst part — comparable. There was no test that would resolve it. There was no instrument they could agree on that would, when applied, give them both the same reading.
You're saying it was fake.
I'm saying you were deceived.
By what.
By the same thing we're fighting.
He had said the sentence the previous morning. He said it again now with the same flat certainty. It was, on the second saying, no easier to hold up against the alternative. The alternative was that Silas's reading was wrong. The alternative was that the figure had been what it said it was, and that Raven had been told, by a being whose authority on the question outranked any judgement of his own, to leave the warlock to his betters. The alternative was that Silas, in his thirty years of discipline at a forgotten cathedral, had become so attached to the small private feather in his small wooden case that he could not, today, recognize his own master's voice in any tongue but the one the master had used the night the courtyard had been saved.
The alternative was plausible. That was the trouble. Both readings were plausible, and the plausibility of both was the point. Raven understood that. He had been turning the question over for a full day. He understood that the architecture of the situation had been chosen, by the man on the other side of the work, with the precise intention of making it impossible for the two men in this chapel to agree.
He did not say any of that to Silas. He did not need to. Silas, who had been reading him for two days now, knew it.
Find him.
We tried that today.
Try harder. Use the case. Use whatever it is you have. I will not act on your reading without something to put my hand on. Give me something.
I will try. I do not — I do not promise that I can.
Try.
He left Silas in the chapel. He went back to his tent. He did not, that night either, sleep. He sat at the small desk with the lamp turned up and the maps in front of him, and the maps did not do for him what they had done for him every other night of his career. They did not give him a move. He could read every line on them. He could not, looking at any of the lines, see which way to point his column.
For the first time in twenty years, he did not know what the next correct action was.