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them were the ones she knew and loved best.
    This church’s façade was one of those, but she didn’t linger. She slipped a five-Euro note from her pocket and slid it into the collection slot. In that same movement she found and threw the hidden switch to unlatch the church door. Each Noantri Summoned before the Conclave was told about the switch and how to operate it. Livia had been told the first time; now, she regretted to say, she knew.
    Inside the church she took off her dark glasses and moved through the sanctuary to a point behind the altar. The crypt door stood ajar. She removed her hat, smoothed her hair, listened for a moment to the thumping of her heart, and headed down the uneven stone steps into the dank air of the crypt.
    At least she was on time.
    The stairway curved down to a brick-arched, stone-floored room whose niches held meticulously stacked bones and pyramids of skulls. Rosettes made from hands and arcs made from ribs adorned the walls. Four centuries of the poor and the unclaimed had found sanctified ground here, their bones painstakingly cleaned and positioned for the devout to reflect upon as they prayed. Not for the first time, Livia considered the oddness of her people’s penchant for the trappings of death. It was akin, she had decided, to the woven streams that flowed through the carpets of the Bedouins.
    This church, though, odd as it was, was an excellent choice for meetings of the Conclave. Like so many of Rome’s small churches, Santa Maria dell’Orazione was now rarely used, and the crypt visited even less often. A discreet and sizable annual contribution from the Noantri to the church’s burial society procured private access to the crypt at any time; thus the latch in the collection box. For uninterrupted meditation, officially, and no priest or bone cleaner had yet sought to investigate more deeply. The Conclave would be undisturbed, and the weight of centuries in the scents of earth and rock would, as always, serve to remind those who met here of the consequence of their deliberations.
    The crypt housed an eternal flame, also appropriate. Its flicker was often the only illumination, but now, as was usual when the Conclave met, great iron candelabra on either side of the room cast pools of wavering light. Puffs of air from cracks in the ancient walls danced shadows against the blacker darkness. As she stepped through the doorway, Livia heard no sound but her own footsteps and their timid echoes, fading as she walked forward and stood before the Conclave.
    All were assembled, silent, waiting: the twelve Counsellors sitting in rows right and left, and between them the Pontifex, whose dark gaze made Livia uneasy even when she encountered him in the most casual of circumstances. Here, in the hush of stones and skeletons, it was all she could do not to squirm. She stood silent; it was protocol that the Pontifex should speak first, though in truth Livia could not, at that moment, have spoken at all. A shuddering conflict had enveloped her, familiar from her first Summoning. Like all Noantri, Livia felt an immediate comfort, a sense of grateful belonging, in a group of her own people. It was physical and instantaneous, a calling of blood to blood. The relief of it had flooded around her when she walked into the crypt. But here, it was illusion. These black-robed Counsellors were not her friends. Standing before them the first time, she’d sensed individual flashes of sympathy behind the unanimous disapproval. This time, though she didn’t yet know why she was here, nothing but anger filled the dank air.
    “Livia Pietro,” the Pontifex said, his deep, slow voice echoing in the stone chamber. “I’m dismayed to see you before us once again.”
    Not as much as I am, Livia thought, but she only nodded in acknowledgment.
    “Years ago, when you were called here,” the Pontifex went on, “you spoke eloquently. You admitted your error in judgment, but you pleaded movingly the case of Jonah