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rule as he did in God. When the time was right he would have chosen a successor but such matters seemed beyond him now even
though the choice was only between Parsi and Gant. It would not have been Bosco. Bosco was suspected of thinking and sometimes of new thinking. Aware of these reservations, Bosco had made other plans.
    A reaper and sower even more gifted than Chancellor Vipond of Memphis, Bosco had reacted quickly to the catastrophe of Cale’s killing of Picarbo and his subsequent escape. But it is a great help when you know that God is on your side also to have brains, along with a belief that God helps those that help themselves. Bosco had put it about tothose who needed to know that it was Antagonist spies who had murdered Picarbo and that Cale had been forced to accompany them to uncover a plan to murder the Pope. Where Antagonists were concerned no accusation was too outrageous. ‘A big lie,’ he was fond of saying to Redeemer Gil, the nearest Bosco had to a confidant, ‘is more easily believed than a small one and a simple one more readily than anything too complicated.’ He had therefore commissioned Redeemer Eugen Hadamowski, his propaganda Burgrave, to write a book, the Protocols of the
Moderators of Antagonism , outlining the details of such a plot. They had then, after careful searching, found the body of a Redeemer who shared all the most exaggerated features generally held to be typical of an Antagonist: he had green teeth (a lucky symptom of the disease from which he had died), thick lips, a large nose and black curly hair. They had thrown his body into the sea just off the Isle of Martyrs, where they knew the current would carry it, and let the general willingness to believe in such conspiracies do the rest. The Protocols did not, however, confine themselves just to the details of the ghastly plot itself, but also expressed fear that an unusually brave and holy Redeemer spy was out and about and that through great risk and holy cunning had infiltrated the Antagonist plotters to try to save the Pope. More cunningly it claimed that an Antagonist fifth column had converted an undisclosed number of Redeemers to their
heresy and that many of these apostates had worked their way to important posts in both Gant’s Redeemers Triumphant and Parsi’s Office of the Holy See, where they fed vital secrets to their masters and awaited the opportunity offered by any moments of weakness in the faithful. The Protocols also reluctantly conceded that despite all their efforts little headway had been made against the religious purity of Bosco’s Redeemers in the Sanctuary.
    Bosco’s belief that the Protocols could be as crude as a four-year-old’s painting of the Hanged Redeemer as long as the faithful were convinced by their origins turned out to be more true than he could have reasonably hoped. The body’s apparently one-in-a-million chance arrival from the sea was proof that there was no conspiracy. So natural did it seem that the question of its fakery never arose. The Office of the Holy See and the Redeemers Triumphant were reduced to arguing that while the threat was clearly real, the Antagonists were mistaken about the heretics in their ranks. Nevertheless there were mighty purges. Torture as such was forbidden to be used on Redeemers but the Office of Interrogators had no need of racks and branding. A few nights without sleep, followed by ducking in water, soon had entirely innocent men – innocent of heresy at any rate – confessing to collusion and apostasy and
trafficking with devils all followed by the naming of names. Bosco watched with considerable satisfaction as a great number of his enemies were burnt at the stake by a great many of his other enemies. The authority he gained as a result of his own rule at the Sanctuary being accused by the Protocols of being a model of resistance to Antagonism gave him a renewed influence sufficient to launch the attack on