Three Parts Dead

6

Elayne Kevarian meditated on the rooftop of the Sanctum of Kos as the sun declined behind its mask of thick clouds. Before her and beneath her, Alt Coulumb hungered for the coming night.

She was levitating two inches above the ground, and would have reprimanded herself had she noticed. Levitation was a reflex of immature Craftsmen. Students floated in air to feel in tune with the universe, but like any other unnatural posture, hovering caused more tension than it relieved—especially in this city, where Kos’s interdict prevented any flight higher than a fist’s breadth above the ground.

Thoughts wandered through the corridors of her mind like phantoms in an old house. Judge Cabot, her best contact in Alt Coulumb, was dead. Murdered with crude Craft designed to throw suspicion onto a third party. Had the gargoyle—the Guardian?—been purposefully framed, or did the killer simply set a trap for whoever might stumble by?

This case lay at the bottom of it all, like a fat and voracious catfish in a muddy river: the Church of Kos, the greatest divine institution left in the West, hub of thaumaturgic trade on this continent, wilting with its divine patron. Elayne didn’t believe incompetence was at fault. Cardinal Gustave made the right noises, and the documents seemed in order. Nor did it seem likely that Kos died of natural causes. Perhaps one of the Church’s far-ranging plans had gone awry. Or else … Treachery.

She tasted that word in her mind, exhaled it with her breath.

If it had been treachery, then the traitors were every bit as aware as the Church that Kos had failed, had fallen. Somewhere, they marshaled their forces.

Tara was a good kid. Smart. She would wrestle something like truth from the archives—truth, that strange monster often pursued but rarely captured. Meanwhile, Elayne watched, laid deep strategy, and prepared.

Soon her opposing number would arrive, a Craftsman chosen to represent the powers to whom Kos was bound by contract and debt. The creditors would select someone respected for age and strength, who had stood trial in dark matters and emerged strong and sure. Someone familiar with Alt Coulumb.

A handful of Craftsmen and Craftswomen in the world fit that description. She knew most of them.

Winds circled within clouds of slate, and the sun was setting. She and Tara had brought the storm with them to the city. Tomorrow, there would be work to do.

*

Abelard paled, and Tara feared he might collapse again. “God?”

She bit her lower lip and tried to think how to explain. “It’s not Kos. Not precisely. What you think of as your god is a manifold of power and information and relationships, deals and bargains and compromises congealed over millennia. For the last century at least, your scribes recorded the Church’s contracts and compromises in this archive. Our blood in the iron bowl triggered dormant Craft that combined information from those thousands upon thousands of scrolls into a three-dimensional image we can navigate, manipulate, and come to understand.” With a gesture she indicated the landscape of the divine corpse.

“He looks dead.”

“He is dead. How did you expect him to look?” She started walking. Abelard followed her, footsteps tender on the god’s marble flesh. “You’re familiar with what’s called a convenient fiction?”

Abelard answered with the flat tone of rote recitation. Good. Retreating to familiar concepts might help him cope. “A convenient fiction is a model used to approximate the behavior of a system. Like engines. Often, a mechanic doesn’t need to worry about compression chambers and heat exchange. He only needs to know that the engine transforms fuel into mechanical force. That description of an engine as a box that turns fuel to movement is a convenient fiction.”

“I’ve never heard that example before,” Tara admitted.

“What example do you use?”

“Reality.”

They skirted the enormous pit of Kos’s navel, broken and lifeless like the landscape of a distant planet.

“You’re saying that this,” Abelard said tentatively, “is not my Lord’s body at all, but a convenient fiction. You think of him as a giant corpse because … because it helps you evaluate him in the context of your black arts.”

“More or less,” she replied. “I’m sure the blueprints and daily logs of your furnaces tell you all sorts of things about your god. This is like a giant blueprint for another facet of him. It’s easier for me to understand than furnaces.” She saw a discoloration in the distance to her left: ichor welling up from within Kos’s body to form a river on his vastness.

When they reached the slick shelf of the god’s ribs, Abelard scampered up like a monkey, moving with a deceptive, jerky grace in his long brown and orange robes. Tara removed her heels and threw them overhand up the slope, pulled off her stockings, and attacked the ledge with fingers and toes. When she reached the top, she was slick with sweat and breathing hard. She couldn’t quite climb the last swell of protruding bone and muscle, and Abelard helped her up, nearly falling himself in the process.

“Where did you learn to climb?” she asked after she recovered her breath and patted her hair back into place.

“The boiler room,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Thousands of pipes, all shapes and sizes, and ladder after ladder. There’s no better place than the Sanctum of Kos to be eleven years old. Though maybe there are better places to be sixteen,” he conceded.

Instead of donning her shoes again, she stuffed her stockings inside them and put them in her purse. The divine flesh was cool beneath her feet. “The Hidden Schools are not a good place to be either eleven or sixteen. Fine place to be twenty-one, though, if twenty-one is something you wanted to be.”

“Nothing fun for kids?”

“Plenty of fun things for kids, but most would kill you if you did them wrong.”

They walked on. Abelard at last surrendered and tapped cigarette ash onto his god’s skin, no doubt repeating to himself that this was a model, not the actual divine corpse.

“Does all this walking serve a purpose?” he asked after a while.

“I’m inspecting the body,” she replied. “God-meat decays like the human variety. Small dark things, neither god nor man, sneak in and chew at it. Spiritual lampreys: ghosts, half-formed concepts that might become the seeds of new deities. We can tell from the damage they inflict on the flesh how long a god has been dead. Other signs indicate the cause of death.”

“What do you see?”

“Some confusing things.”

“For example?”

“For example.” She let out a rush of breath that fell over the quiet corpse-scape like a heavy robe on a cold floor. “We’ve passed pools of ichor—divine blood, divine power. Little ones, consistent with a god who died recently. The maggots have dined, but not much. There are more wounds than there should be, though, and they’re distributed, where they should cluster. Scavengers are drawn to weak points in the body’s defenses. Then there’s the flesh itself. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”

“It’s cold, and hard.”

“Where it should be warm, yes?”

“If He were alive.” Abelard shuddered when he said the last word.

Poor kid. “The heat of gods fades slowly. He should still feel lukewarm, at least. Also, there’s not enough blood.”

“What?”

“A body with much blood in it doesn’t remain firm for long. The blood—the power—attracts pests that accelerate decay. This has not happened with Kos. Your deity had much of his blood removed before he died. The drain wasn’t sudden, or the skin would be more discolored. His power faded slowly, over time.” She looked up. “Do you know what might have caused this?”

Abelard shook his head, mute.

“Has there been anything strange about Kos’s behavior in the last few months?”

“Not really. He’s been strong as ever.” He faltered, as if wondering whether to continue. She didn’t wait for him to make up his mind.

“Save for what?”

“Save … He has been slow to respond to my prayers for the last few weeks. He always came, but it sometimes took half an hour or longer to attract His attention.” Abelard’s gaze fell to the ground beneath his feet. “On the night He died, I thought he was ignoring me. Perhaps He found me unworthy. Perhaps I was.”

“Did other people have this problem?”

He shifted from foot to foot, unwilling to face her. “The Everburning Lord doesn’t often respond directly to prayer. Even the most faithful may receive little more than a moment of His grace. Once in a while, maybe a couple words from Him.”

“Don’t priests get a direct line?”

“There’s a range of faith in the priesthood, as in the laity, but the Technicians of the Divine Throne, who oversee the patch between the Everburning and the city grid, we meet God whenever we come to our post. Or we should.”

“If you had a problem, others might have as well. Did you mention it to anyone?”

“To Cardinal Gustave, when we spoke this morning.”

“You didn’t report anything before his … before two nights ago? Didn’t ask for help?”

“No.” Abelard exhaled smoke. His eyes were red.

“Why not?”

“Would you run to Lady Kevarian at the first sign of trouble, if this investigation grew difficult?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m the youngest Technician in the office,” Abelard said. His voice was quiet, and his quietness cut her. “Positions open up once every few years. I barely made it this time around. If I let on I had trouble speaking with our Lord, what do you think would happen? There are scores of people hungry for my place.” His narrow shoulders slumped, as if he was melting beneath the folds of his robe.

“The others might have kept silent as well.”

“I heard them talking. Maybe they hid their problems, as I did, but Cardinal Gustave sounded surprised when I told him. It was just me.”

She reached out and gripped his frail, thin arm. He didn’t pull away.

No wind blew in this space beyond the world. Not even the sound of their heartbeats intruded on the silence. “I thought,” he said at last, “that if I helped you, I might be able to deal with His death. Find some meaning in it.”

“My boss and I aren’t in the meaning business,” Tara replied. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Abelard did not look up from the god at his feet. “But what am I supposed to do? My faith was weak before. Without my Lord, what’s left?”

Millions of people live without gods, she wanted to say. They live good lives. They love, and they laugh, and they don’t miss churches and bells and sacrifice. She weighed all the words that leapt to mind, and found them wanting. “I don’t know.”

He nodded.

“I’d still like your help.” Silence. “What would he want you to do?” She pointed to the body at their feet.

Abelard sagged. “He’d want me to help—help Him, help the city, help the world. I want to. Helping is the only way I have left to honor Him. But I don’t know how.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do.”

“We’re like insects here. Less than insects. How can we make a difference?”

“Maybe the problem isn’t as big as you think. Maybe we’re trying to see it from too close. Want to get a better view?”

He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. When he looked up, they were dry. “What do you mean?”

She glanced up. He followed her gaze into the black.

“You can fly?”

“Not outside. It takes too much power for me, even if flight weren’t interdicted in your city. But this is a shared hallucination. We can do anything here, as long as it doesn’t change the truth behind the picture.”

She raised her hand.

There was no sensation of movement, because they were not truly flying. Gravity broke, and they ascended.

As they rose, Kos shrank. At first, the slopes and valleys of his ribs and the swells of his oblique muscles filled Tara’s field of vision. Then she saw his whole chest at once, sculpted and magnificent. The stomach she saw next, and for the first time she detected edges to the universe of him, an endless gulf separating the peninsulas of his arms from the plateau of his mighty chest. His face glowed softly, its features almost but not quite those of a man. They shifted as she watched, now blurred and unfocused, now clear and distant as the tiny upside-down image in a magnifying glass. A single detail remained constant: the corners of his mouth quirked into a knowing smile, the smile of one who had seen the earth as a distant blue marble, one who swam in the liquid flames of the sun.

I’ve seen the world from a distance, too, Tara thought, full of awe and ambition. Someday I’ll match you stroke for stroke.

“Those wounds,” Abelard said, pointing down. “Those are from the creatures you mentioned earlier? The maggots, the ghosts?”

“Yes.” Though they had been large as lakes when Tara and Abelard walked beside them, they were barely visible from this height. Little gouges, as if someone had taken a chisel to Kos’s flesh. “But those…” She indicated large round gaps in the god’s arm and leg and throat and chest, punctures from which no blood issued. “Those aren’t wounds.”

“They look awfully woundlike,” Abelard said.

“A defect of the system. You see there’s no blood around their edges, no sign of forced entry.” He blanched and wavered, but seemed to be handling this part well enough. “They’re patch points. When a god makes deals with other people, deities, or Craftsmen, they borrow his power, his blood, through those holes. Out when it’s paid out, and in when it returns, increased by the terms of the contract.” She frowned. “Here, it’s easier to see this way.”

She turned her hand, and glowing conduits of power coalesced about the gaping patch points. Blood coursed up half of them, tinted red, sluggish and reluctant, drawn by contracts stronger than iron now that it was no longer sent forth in a free rush by the ceaseless pulse of Kos’s divine will. Down the other conduits, blue-tinted blood returned, swift and pure.

“The red tubes send his power out into the world, and the blue tubes bring it back. More blood is going out than returning. You can see, even maintaining the current contracts costs your Church by draining away the little innate power that would defend Kos’s body against the maggots.”

“And you’ll what, fix it so Kos brings in more than He sends out? Restart His heart? Make Him live again?”

She considered lying. Abelard hadn’t asked for any of this. He wanted to be reassured, wanted to hear that yes, within a few weeks the madness would be over and Kos whole.

She considered it.

“The Craft doesn’t work that way,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

“We can make something from this body that will honor Kos’s obligations, but we will have to cut out other parts of him. Alt Coulumb will be warm this winter, and the trains will run on time. Gods and Craftsmen throughout the world will continue to draw on the power of Alt Coulumb’s fire-god, but the entity you call Kos is gone.”

“What will be different?”

She tried to think of something encouraging to tell him, but failed. “It sounds like Kos was a hands-on deity. Knew the people of Alt Coulumb by name. That will change. He used to visit your dreams, in the long nights of your soul. I imagine the faithful felt his radiance throughout the city. No more. Even his voice won’t be the same.”

“But we’ll have heat, and trains.”

“Yes.” Don’t sneer at heat and power and transportation, she wanted to say. Hundreds of thousands in this city would die without them even before the winter, from riots and looting, pestilence and war.

She kept silent.

“There’s no other way?”

“What would you propose?” she asked.

“Surely some of my Lord’s people loved Him more than they needed His gifts. Couldn’t that love call Him back to life?”

“Maybe.” She chose her words carefully. “He could take refuge in their love to escape his obligations. Consciousness is a higher order function, though. A god requires the faith of around a thousand followers before displaying rudimentary intelligence, and that’s if those followers ask nothing in return for their love. If a heavily contracted god, like Kos, tried to do what you describe, he would be barely alive, and in constant, excruciating pain from the contracts that tore at him. If you asked him, he would probably rather die.”

“It sounds horrible.”

“It is.”

He said nothing for a while, and neither did she. There was no sound but their breath.

“He loved this city, you know. Loved His people, and the world.”

“Yes,” Tara said. She didn’t know if this was true, but she didn’t care. Abelard did.

He tapped ash from his cigarette and it floated down the miles below. “How do I help?”

She removed a pad of paper and a quill pen with a silver nib from her purse, and handed them to him. “Start by taking notes.”

*

Somewhere, there was a bright room in a high tower, with windows that opened on a field of mist. Other towers rose from the mist, too, forming a forest in the sky beneath a moon that burnt the world silver.

The sun had set, and night was come. Within the bright room, people were hard at work. A young woman bent over a laboratory bench, making careful incisions in a cadaver. Next to her, a jowly older man scanned tables of densely written figures. At a chalkboard in the corner, two students reviewed an equation from an obscure branch of thaumaturgy. Conversation, when it occurred, was hushed. Each individual diligently pursued their portion of the project at hand. It was a laboratory among laboratories, a perfect, organized system.

As the pretty young vivisectionist inhaled so, too, did the thaumaturgy scholars at the blackboard; when she exhaled, so did the man with his tables. Chalk left white lines on slate as the scalpel parted skin and fat. Sluggish blood flowed. The supervising student at the window sipped his tea and swallowed. A foot came down in one corner of the room and a hand was raised in another. Whispered questions received muted answers. Students relinquished equipment precisely when their successors required it.

The Professor strode through the laboratory, breathing in time with the rest—or they breathed in time with him. His light steps on the worn checkerboard floor were the taps of the primum mobile on a wheel that moved their world. The beats of his heart drove blood in their veins.

He held a clipboard and a pencil. Once in a while, in his ceaseless circuit, he made a note, erased an older mark, modified a sum, or sliced out a sentence. The work of ages lingered on that clipboard, and many were the men and women who would have killed for its contents.

His eyes lingered on the vivisectionist’s legs as he passed her table. They were well curved beneath the hem of her lab coat. Supple. And her work was exact.

Pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of the flesh. Unimportant compared with the keen joy of the mind.

He moved to the window where the supervising student waited. The Professor tilted his head back to regard his own image in the window glass: round, high brow, bushy brown beard, pince-nez glasses perched on a broad nose. Reflected in his orbit was the world of his lab.

He closed his eyes, and saw the ties that bound.

He knew the student next to him was about to say something, and prepared his answer as he waited for the words. “You received a letter, Professor. They want you in Alt Coulumb.”

He listened to the music of his world, to gentle footfalls, to the murmured symphony of conversation and the slick passage of blade and needle through dead human meat, to the splash of fluid in glass bowls and the flow of blood. Always, he listened to the flow of blood. He thought about the vivisectionist’s legs.

He accepted the letter, examined the lead seal, and broke it with a narrowing of his eyes that cut through the dull metal like a hot razor. Removing the folded creamy paper within the envelope, he held it up to the light and read.

“Well,” he said at the proper moment. “Tomorrow morning I descend.”

The clouds beneath them were a field of black, and the moon shone down.

*

Tara approached the last of the blue-tinted conduits, and measured its girth with a piece of knotted string. As the string drew taut, glyphs appeared on the conduit’s surface in silver spiderweb script. “This is the return from the Iskari Defense Ministry’s Naval Division, which amounts to principal plus ten percent guaranteed over rate of inflation, accounted monthly, priority secured, drawn off the stomach chakra.”

“That’s not usual, right?” Abelard had mostly filled Tara’s notepad with sketches and figures. He possessed an excellent draftsman’s hand, far more exact than Tara’s own. As they worked, he had asked a slow but constant stream of questions, trying to learn enough about their task to help rather than merely assist. The questions kept Tara focused, at least. Document review, even for so momentous a case as this, even with your career on the line, was always a chore. “Most of the patches so far have drawn off the arms, or the legs, not the chakras themselves.”

“It’s not usual. Nor is it especially unusual.” She double-checked the glyphs to ensure she had read them correctly. “Different circumstances call for different contracts. The Is’De’Min is a grotesque, many-tentacled entity ruling over a population of millions, challenged to the south by Deathless Kings, to the north by Camlaan, and to the east by Koschei. This contract is earmarked for use in their own defense. If they rely on Kos for firepower, they have to be able to call upon it at a moment’s notice, no matter what. The contract is dangerous for Kos because the power leaves him at such a fundamental level, but it nets him a high rate of return, absolutely guaranteed.”

“I see. This is a likely culprit, then.” He made a check mark.

“What do you mean by that?”

Abelard hesitated, but at last he answered, in a determined voice without stammer or flinch: “It was probably what killed Him. You said the chakras move up from basic life functions to the most advanced—tailbone, groin, stomach, heart, throat, forehead, crown. This is the farthest south any of the deals have gone. If there was a draw here at the wrong time, it might have taken too much power, and the rest of Him shut down.”

“Couldn’t have happened. It’s too small a contract.”

Abelard regarded the blue conduit and its red mate skeptically. Each was thick around as an old redwood tree.

“Too small to do that kind of damage, I mean,” Tara said. “It looks large to us, but compared with the rest of the body? Have some respect for your god and your Church. They would never let anyone patch in this far down if there was a chance they might kill the system.”

“Kos.”

“Excuse me?”

“At least call Him Kos, please. When you say it like that, ‘your god,’ ‘the system’…”

“Sorry. But my point stands.”

“I thought you said Kos was weak.”

“Weaker than he should have been, yes, but not that weak.”

Abelard made a note. Even the angle of the cigarette in his mouth suggested doubt.

“You don’t believe me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I’ll show you.” She untied her string from the conduit and pulled back, skidding and turning on nothingness until she drew even with Abelard.

“What now?” he asked.

“I’m going to turn back time.”

She began before he could protest or ask for clarification.

It was an illusion, of course, but an impressive one. Every record in the Sanctum’s archive bore a date and a time stamp. Tara could manipulate the Craft that modeled dead Kos to show his body from minutes, hours, weeks ago. When she raised her hand, time flowed backward.

Blood and ichor rushed in reverse down the conduits that pierced Abelard’s god. The festering sores and decayed pits on his skin shrank and closed without scabbing over; horrible hungry things writhed in the darkness, their inverted drones taunting and tearing at the strings of Tara’s mind. The body swelled beneath them, grew supple. Light streamed from the flesh, and especially from the heart, an unconscious, vital flow of grace from the god to his mortal servants. When time wound back to the third day, Tara felt rather than heard a great pounding, like distant explosions echoing over a desert. The backbeat of the universe.

His heartbeat.

It battered her soul, demanding worship. Awe quickened at the base of her spine.

You, she thought to it, are an echo. A spirit grown fat trading on its own majesty. I’ll be damned if I let you see me yield.

She summoned ice to her mind, endless fields of it, cool starlight and the black between the stars that human minds stitched together into meaning and Craft. There is no difference between us, she shouted into the vortex of that heartbeat. I cast you out, and stand unassisted.

Her knees wanted to bend.

She closed her fingers, and the whirl of time ceased. “We’re close to the night of your watch, moving forward at thirty times normal speed.”

Abelard had clapped his hands to his ears. Rapture shone from his face. Useless, but at least he was watching.

“See how smoothly the blood flows? And the light, of course, and the heartbeat.”

“What?” he shouted over the noise.

“The heartbeat!”

“What?”

She was about to try again, when the conduits that tied Kos to the shambling horror of the Iskari Defense Ministry erupted with brilliant light. Enough power flowed through those contracts to collapse the walls of a city, to sink a fleet or tear a dragon limb from limb in flight. The light rendered Kos’s body in harsh monochrome, and faded as fast as it had burst upon the dark.

When it faded, the heartbeat was gone.

“Amazing,” Abelard said, his voice faint and reverent. Then, “It looks like the Iskari contract was a factor to me.”

Tara’s cheeks flushed. She took a deep breath, and another.

“That can’t be it,” she said at last.

“Sudden burst of light, and nothing. What more do you need?”

She rolled time back again, to the peak of the Iskari contract’s brilliance. Her calculations had been perfect. Well, not perfect perhaps, but good enough. The contract was too small to destroy Kos, yet there it shone, glorious, and seconds later, the god died.

“That’s strange.” She rolled back time at one-twentieth speed. The Iskari contract flared, faded, died, alone. “Very strange.”

“An ‘I’m sorry I shot down your idea’ would be nice.”

“No other contract even flickers. And the Iskari didn’t draw any more than their pact allowed.”

Abelard looked from Tara, to his God, and back. “So?”

“I’m sorry I shot down your idea. It looks like you were right—the Iskari pact dealt Kos his dying blow. There was no other significant draw on Kos at that time. But I was right, too; the Iskari didn’t drain enough power to hurt your god if he was as strong as the Church records show. He must have been weaker. Much weaker. To die from the Iskari pact, Kos must have been half the strength your people thought, maybe less.”

Abelard shook his head. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know yet, but it’s great for us. The Church didn’t know Kos was weak, so the Iskari pact wasn’t negligent, which means we keep more control over Kos’s resurrection. Now, all we need to do is figure out what happened in Iskar.”

“Aren’t we going to look for the source of His weakness?”

“Of course, but that information isn’t here. The problem’s deeper than your Church. Tomorrow, we’ll dive into raw Craft, and find where Kos’s power went. For now, Iskar is our best lead.”

“We know what they drew, and when. What more do we need?”

“We need to know why. The Iskari made that pact for self-defense, but I haven’t heard any news of war from Iskar or the Old World. If your god died because the Iskari abused their pact, we gain ground on his creditors, and even more control over the case. We might be able to bring some of the old Kos back after all.”

She released her grip on the visualization. The world around her blurred, cracked, inverted. This time, at least, Abelard didn’t scream.

When the cosmos righted itself, they stood flanking the iron bowl in the center of the archives, surrounded by scrolls. A faint odor of iron and salt lingered in the air, the smell of steam from boiled blood. The room was darker than before, but more familiar, too. Abelard clasped the notebook to his chest. His skin was slick with sweat and his eyes were wide from the transition, but he’d get used to this stuff in time. Already he looked more confident than when he had met her on the Sanctum’s front steps.

She pulled her watch from her jacket pocket and checked its skeleton hands. Eight in the evening. Not bad.

“Where can I find a newspaper in this town?”

Abelard’s expression was blank. “A what?”