So that's how it is. It isn't a kind of needling Ortus has experience being on the end of, but he is accustomed to enduring all manner of indignities. If this is what amuses the Saint of Patience, perhaps that is the lesson meant to be elicited from his name.

(Has anyone ever looked at him with interest in seeing his tongue, feigned or not? There is no memory that comes to him of such a thing. The Ninth was never a place of much passion, and what there was of it was never directed at him. It should not cut him so.)

"I prefer neither, Holy Saint, if you will forgive the choosing of the ungiven third," he says, his mouth hardly moving as he speaks, tongue veiled behind teeth, "I am rarely struck by inspiration as you describe. My work is the product of deliberation over time. I am not so blessed as many artists are, to have words come to me with such ease."

"And as you can see, Blessed Finger," he adds, the most deniable trace of acid in his self-depreciation, "There is little about me that would be a source of inspiration to anyone, even if I wished to be a muse."