“Luis. Luis Quinn.”

A voice, through the brilliant, lordly rage. For an instant Luis Quinn considered turning and using this blade, this divine, hellish edge on the tiny, whining voice that dared to deny him, imagined it curting and cutting until there was nothing left but a stain. Then he saw the houses and the doors and windows close around him, felt the thatch stroking his shoulders, the man beneath his blade, the helpless, ridiculous man and the glorious fear in his eyes above the masking kerchief. In the last instant before you face eternity you still maintain your disguise , he thought.

“Fly!” Luis Quinn thundered. “Fly!”

The assailant crabbed away, found his feet, fled. Quinn pushed past the pale, shaken Falcon and descended to the jetty where moments — it seemed an age in the gelid time of fighting he knew so well from the dueling days — before they had been dickering with the canoe feitores. A marveling look at the blade — no shop in Brazil had ever made such a thing — and he flung it with all might out over the heads of the canoemen into the river. His ribs ached from the effort: had the angelic knife left an arc of blue in its wake, a wound in the air? Now Falcon was at his side.

“My friend, I seem to have outstayed my welcome.”

The church was death-dark, lit only by the votives at the feet of the patrons and the red heart of the sanctuary lamp, but Falcon was easily able to find Quinn by following the trail of cigar smoke.

“In France it would be considered a sin most heinous to smoke in a church.”

“I see no vice in it.” Quinn stood leaning against the pulpit; a vertiginous affair clinging high to the chancel wall like the nest of some forest bird, dizzy with painted putti and allegorical figures. “We honor the cross with our hearts and minds, not our inhalations and exhalations. And do we not drink wine in the most holy of places?”

The stew of the Rio Negro day seemed to roost in the church. Falcon was hot, oppressed, afraid. Twice now he had seen the rage of Luis Quinn.

“Your absence was noted at supper.”

“I have a set of exercises to complete before I continue my task.”

“I told them as much.”

“And did they note the attack at the landing today?”

“They did not.”

“Strange that in so contained a town as São José the friar has nothing to say about a deadly assault on a visiting admonitory.” Quinn examined the dying coal of his cigar and neatly ground it to extinction on the tiled floor. “There is wrong here so deep, so strongly rooted, that I fear it is beyond my power to destroy it.”

’’’Destroy,’ that is a peculiarly martial word for a man of faith.”

“Mine is a martial order. Do you know why I was chosen as admonitory in Coimbra?”

“Because of your facility with languages. And because, forgive me, you have killed a man.”

Quinn snapped our a bark of a laugh, flattened and ugly in his uncommon accent.

“I suppose that is not so difficult a surmise. Can you also surmise how I killed that man?”

“The obvious deduction would be in the heat and passion of a satisfaction.”

“That would be the obvious deduction. No, I killed him with a pewter drinking tankard. I struck him on the side of the head, and in his helplessness I set upon him and with the same vessel beat the life from his body, and beyond that, until not even his master could recognize him. Do you know who this man was?”

Falcon felt his scalp itch beneath his wig in the stifling heat of the church. “From your words, a servant. One of your own household?”

“No, a slave in a tavern in Porto. A Brazilian slave, in truth, an indio; recalling now his speech, I would guess a Tupiniquin. The owner had made his fortune in the colony and retired with his household and slaves to the Kingdom. He did not say much to me, only that he had been instructed to refuse me any further drink. So before all my friends, my good drinking and fighting friends, I took up the empty tankard and struck him down. Now, can you guess why I gave myself to the Society of Jesus?”

“Remorse and penance of course, not merely for the murder — let us not bandy words, it was nothing less — but because you were of that exalted class that can murder with impunity.”

“All that, yes, but you have missed the heart of it. I said that mine was a martial order: the discipline, friend, the discipline. Because when I murdered that slave — I do not choose to bandy words either — do you know what I felt? Joy. Joy such as I have never known before or since. Those moments when I have taken or administered the Sacrament, when I pray alone and I know I am caught up by the Spirit of Christ, even when the music stirs me to tears: these are not even the faintest echoes of what I felt when I took that life in my hands and tore it out. Nothing, Falcon, nothing compares to it. When I went out, in my fighting days, I merely touched the hem of it. It was a terrible, beautiful joy, Falcon, and so so hard to give up.”

“I have seen it,” Falcon said weakly. The heat — he could not breathe, the sweat was trickling down the nape of his neck. He removed his wig, clutched it nervously, like a suitor a nosegay.

“You have seen nothing,” Quinn said. “You understand nothing. You never can. I asked for a task most difficult; God has granted me my desire, but it is greater and harder than Father James, than anyone in Coimbra, ever imagined. Father Diego Gonçalves of my Society came to this river twelve years ago. His works the apostles themselves might envy; whole nations won for Christ and pacified, the cross for two hundred leagues up the Rio Branco, aldeias and reduciones that were shining beacons of what could be achieved in this bestial land. Peace, plenty, learning, the right knowledge of God and of his Church — every soul could sing, every soul could read and write. Episcopal visitors wrote of the beauty and splendor of these settlements: glorious churches, skilled people who gave their labor freely, not through coercion or slavery. I have read his letters on the ship from Salvador to Belém. Father Diego applied to the provincial for permission to set up a printing press: he was a visionary man, a true prophet. In his petition he included sketches of a place of learning, high on the Rio Branco, a new city — a new Jerusalem, he called it, a university in the forest. I have seen the sketches in the College library at Salvador; it is sinfully ambitious, maniacal in its scale: an entire city in the Amazon. He was refused of course.”

“Portugal’s colonial policy is very clear; Brazil is a commercial adjunct, nothing more. Continue, pray.”

“After that, nothing. Father Diego Gonçalves sailed from this fort seven years ago into the high lands beyond the Rio Branco. Entradas and survivors of lost bandeiras told of monstrous constructions, entire populations enslaved and put to work. An empire within an empire, hacked out of deep forest. Death and blood. When three successive visitors sent from Salvador to ascertain the truth of these rumors failed to return, the Society applied for an admonitory. ”

“Your mission is to find Father Diego Gonçalves.”

“And return him to the discipline of the Order, by any means.”

“I fear that I understand your meaning too well, Father.”

“I may murder him if necessary. That is your word, isn’t it? By rumor alone he has become a liability to the Society. Our presence in Brazil is ever precarious. ”

“Kill a brother priest.”

“My own Society has made me a hypocrite, yet I obey, as any soldier obeys, as any soldier must.”

Falcon wiped sweat from his neck with his blouse sleeve. The smell of stale incense was intolerably cloying. His eyes itched.

“Those men who attacked us: do you believe they were Father Diego’s men?”

“No; I believe they were in the hire of that same father with whom you dined so well so recently. He is too greasy and well fed to be much of a plotter, our Friar Braga. I questioned him after the Mass; he lies well and habitually. The wealth of the Carmelites has always been founded on the red gold; I suspect their presence is only tolerated here because they descend a steady supply of slaves to the engenhos.”