Petrine

amazement, his face did something the confrere knight had never seen it do before—the thin lips dragged themselves into a smile. “Ah. Hakkonsen. Yes. I have a task for you.”
Erik wondered whether it was too late to bolt for the door. It was either bolt—or sneeze soon. If there were two things Erik was certain of, the first was that Abbot Sachs disliked him violently; the second was that this incense was driving him mad. But as a confrere Knight he was, by order of Bishop-Commander Von Schielbar, under the authority of the leader of the Servants of the Holy Trinity in Venice.
That remained true even if Erik had forcefully reminded the abbot, less than a fortnight ago, of the limits of his authority. The months they’d spent here in Venice had made their dislike ­mutual; the incident in the church over sanctuary had brought it into the open. In the two weeks that had gone by since, the abbot had spoken not a single word to Erik, prior to now.
The only official notice of the clash had been a summons to the quarters of Von Stublau, where the knight-commander began a stern lecture on the proper conduct of knights when dealing with abbots. It had been as brief as it was stern, ­because Erik had turned on his heel and left before Von Stublau finished his third sentence.
The Prussian had been outraged, no doubt. But not even Von Stublau was prepared to press the matter any further. Erik’s conduct in the church had given him a reputation among all the other knights as a man to be dealt with very, very gingerly. The more so when the reaction of official Venice to the incident in the church made it as clear as crystal that Erik’s behavior had been the only thing that had saved the Knights from what might very well have been a political disaster.
As Sachs had discovered two days later, not even the usually sympathetic Doge wanted to hear the abbot’s side of the story. Canal-brats are canal-brats, you idiot, not “servants of Satan.” Such had been the entirety of Foscari’s opinion, before Sachs had been summarily dismissed.
And the Doge’s reaction had been mild compared to that of Metropolitan Michael, who, by all accounts, had been livid when Father Ugo’s story reached him. The prestige of the Pauline orders, always low with the Petrine patriarch, was now as low as it could possibly get. Rumor had it that the patriarch had only been dissuaded with difficulty