As I came down from the pigeon loft in the tower, Gwennie met me. “You have a telephone call, Wizard.”

For a second I imagined it was Theodora. But she had never wanted me to install a magical telephone in her house, saying she would have no use for it-and since it would have been hard to conceal my relationship with her if I was always talking to her on the phone, I had to agree she had a point.

The call was instead from my old friend the bishop of Caelrhon. “Joachim!” I said with pleasure. It had been ages since we’d talked. Even when I visited Theodora in the cathedral city he was usually too busy with his duties for me to want to bother him. “How good to hear from you!”

His face was a tiny image in the base of the glass telephone: black hair streaked with gray at the temples, enormous and compelling dark eyes, and an expression of great seriousness-except sometimes when he was talking to me. I had long ago decided that I should count it a personal virtue rather than a failing that the bishop of the twin kingdoms of Yurt and Caelrhon seemed to find me more amusing than he did anyone else.

“I would like your advice, Daimbert,” he said, not smiling now. “There is something, well, strange going on here.”

“How strange?”

He hesitated. “It’s hard to say. A miracle-worker has come to town.”

This didn’t sound like the sort of thing to concern a wizard. “But that’s good, isn’t it? Why do you need my advice?”

The bishop hesitated again, just long enough for me to start to wonder if it might be serious after all. Joachim didn’t frighten easily. “I’m not sure he is really working miracles,” he said at last. “He might be working magic. But he has started to acquire a following. I need to know if he is a fraud or has truly been touched by God.”