Three Parts Dead

9

Tara fled down dream corridors from a great and terrible fate. Or was she indeed fleeing from a great and terrible fate, and not toward one?

Demons and gargoyles hounded her, talons gleaming with her blood. In terror she turned and struck, and soon her knife gleamed with theirs, but there were more of them, endless and brutal, and she ran. A turn in the strobe-lit hallway confronted her with an old wooden door, painted white with a brass knob. A sign was pinned to the wood, a child’s scrawl: gone.

Whatever she fled, or sought, it was beyond that door, nameless and writhing.

She turned the knob and pushed. Shadows scrabbled around the doorjamb, long and slender and hooked like spider’s legs. The howling, clawed things neared behind her. She steeled herself and leapt through.

Blackness melted and ran like wax. She heard a voice.

*

“Quite to the contrary, Professor. I wasn’t surprised to get your letter. Though I admit the curse was a shock.”

Ms. Kevarian reclined in an ornate armchair the color of fresh blood, and sipped the dregs of a vodka tonic. Her lips were more full and red than in waking life, and her skin, while not precisely flush with youth, possessed a pleasant rosy hue. Her hair, too, was darker. She seemed a woman still innocent of the years of sleepless nights and deep Craft that would sculpt her into Elayne Kevarian. Only her eyes betrayed the illusion. “I thought we were beyond such games.”

With a practiced slump of her wrist, she held out her drink to be refilled, and Tara plucked it from her. The hand that took the glass did not belong to Tara, though. It was too pale, skin alabaster against the black cotton of what appeared to be a waitress’s uniform shirt, and its nails were painted red. Tara would have dropped the glass in shock had she been in control of her body, but that hand, hers and not hers, carried out its duty automatically.

She set the glass on the table in front of Ms. Kevarian, removed a tiny bottle of vodka and a tonic spritzer from the tray she carried, set the tray on the table, and mixed the drink. Tara experimented, trying to set aside the vodka bottle or push the glass away, but could not control her movements. Odd. This was her dream, wasn’t it?

It was fortunate Tara had no control over her dream body, or she would have spilled the drink when Ms. Kevarian’s companion spoke. “You know, we used to enjoy our jokes, you and I.”

“Jokes?”

The bearded, barrel-chested man in the sport coat looked no younger in this dream than when Tara had last seen him in the Hidden Schools, leading the faculty to cast her out, flame and starlight shining like a crown about his brow. Professor Denovo.

She handed the vodka tonic to Ms. Kevarian and straightened, reclaiming her tray. Professor Denovo paid her no mind. She was hired help, beneath notice. He held a tall glass of beer and gestured vaguely with his free hand as he spoke. Tara remembered the cadence of his voice from lecture halls long distant.

“Please don’t take it poorly, Elayne. We will, regrettably, be working against each other in the coming months, but that hardly requires us to be uncivil.”

“We will,” Ms. Kevarian corrected, “be working together.”

“Exactly,” he said with a smile that showed the tips of his upper teeth. “You working for the Church, I for its creditors. It’s in neither of our best interest for Kos’s demise to last longer than necessary.”

“This won’t be another Seril case, Alex.”

“Of course not.” He dismissed the idea with a wave of a hand and a contemptuous expression, as if scooting away a student’s distasteful paper. “But you needn’t be so vindictive. We were in the creditors’ employ during the Seril case. Naturally we strove for their advantage.”

“This is necromancy,” Ms. Kevarian said. “There is no winning, and no losing. Death is our enemy. We’re both trying to overcome her.”

Denovo laughed like a river. “A remarkably traditional paradigm considering your own work’s influence on the field. I think I will hold a conference on the subject once my schedule clears. Adversarial Relationships in Necromantic Transaction, that sort of thing. There’s been a metric ton of Iskari theory on the subject in recent years, to say nothing about what’s come out of the Shining Empire. Camlaan’s always half a decade behind the times, of course.” He waited for her to comment or interrupt, but when she did neither he returned his attention to his beer.

“What does your party want out of this?”

“Oh, you know clients. Never agree on anything. The radicals want the Church destroyed, or transformed as in the Seril case. There’s a conservative faction, content to leave matters largely as they lie. And the Iskari, of course.”

“Of course.” Ms. Kevarian cradled her glass in both hands, as if it were a slender neck that she was about to wring. “Where do you stand?”

“With my employers. What about you, my dear?”

In the ensuing pause, Tara experienced a moment of terrifying frisson. The interlocutors’ dream bodies and the elaborate illusion of time and space fell away, and seated across that table from each other were two forces, irreconcilable and profound and not altogether human, locked in a duel so intricate their conscious minds were barely aware of its complexity. The vision endured for an instant, then broke, and left them old colleagues sharing a drink once more.

One corner of Elayne Kevarian’s mouth turned up. “On the side of Kos Everburning.”

“I never took you for a sentimentalist.” He said that word as if it referred to a form of parasite.

She sipped her drink, and looked up at him. Now she was smiling indeed. Tara thought she preferred Ms. Kevarian’s previous expression. This one chilled.

*

Tara opened her eyes in a bare room with pale blue walls and an unfamiliar ceiling. Through the gap between the curtains she saw the raw gray of what might have been twilight, but exhaustion told her was the first hint of dawn. Cloth scratched her bare skin: a hospital gown.

Ms. Kevarian stood at the foot of the bed, waiting, arms crossed.

“How long was I out?” Tara croaked.

“Not long. Abelard contacted me soon after your collapse. We’ve no proper facilities for a Craftswoman’s recovery, but the Infirmary of Justice is the best in the city. I added some of my soulstuff to your own, to bring you around faster. I thought you might not wish me to trouble the firm’s insurance policy by requesting their aid.”

“Thank you.” Tara recoiled from the thought of asking Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao for help. The firm would not approve of her nearly dying after two days on the job.

“You were acting in our interest, and I want to ensure you continue to do so. Besides, this is a learning experience. I expect that in the future you will be more careful than to engage an adversary of unknown power without preparation or backup.”

She nodded, and the world shook around her. “Raz. Did I save him?”

“Hard to tell. Captain Pelham seems whole, but I haven’t picked his brain in decades. Any damage will be more apparent to you than me.”

“I’ll…” A dew-slick glass of water rested next to a tin pitcher on the bedside table. She almost dropped the glass twice as she worked it to her mouth. Her throat absorbed the liquid like a dry sponge. “I’ll see him after I get dressed. Where is he?”

“A few rooms away, angrily maintaining that there’s nothing wrong with him and he’s fit to return to his ship.”

She poured herself another glass of water. “I’ll move quickly. I imagine he still sleeps most of the day?”

“Yes. He’s spent years training himself to endure the sun. Pain, burning, exhaustion. Some kind of macho thing, but he still goes to bed every morning. Talk to him, learn whatever you can, and come to the Court of Craft. We have to contest a preliminary motion before the judge at eleven.”

Her mouth went dry. Standing before a judge after one day on site was borderline insane. They didn’t even know why Kos had died. How were they supposed to hold a preliminary hearing? “If you don’t mind my saying so, boss, I think that’s premature.”

She nodded. “As do I. Unfortunately, we are not the only parties at play.”

“I saw…” She broke off. There was no easy way to say this. “I thought I saw you in a dream. Talking with Professor”—Shivers caught at her voice, and she stilled them by force of will. “Professor Denovo.”

“He’s the lead Craftsman for the creditors,” Ms. Kevarian said with a curt nod.

“It wasn’t a dream?”

“It was certainly a dream. It was not, however, your dream. Denovo contacted me last night, proposing a meeting to discuss the case. As he would not arrive in town until this morning, we met beyond the Gates of Horn, through which true dreams flow. It was not a productive meeting, but given your history together I tacitly included you to prepare you for working with him. Or against him, as he would put it.”

“You pulled me into a dream without my consent, and kept me there,” she said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

“You are my employee and my apprentice, Ms. Abernathy. You’ll find there is little I cannot do to you, your notions of the possible notwithstanding.”

“How did you do it?”

“You came to a choice within your dream. A door, it often looks like, if Dr. Kroen’s research is to be believed. I twisted the dream so your choice led to an end of my choosing. This is not a robust strategy—you’ll be more cautious of dream doors now that you know it, for example—but it works.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Neither of them spoke. Ms. Kevarian doubtless had negotiations to perform, individuals to interview, paperwork to complete, but she remained. Perhaps she smelled a question in the air.

At last Tara gave it voice. “Boss, last night, in the dream. It seemed like you and Professor Denovo had a history together…”

“I was his partner,” she said after Tara trailed off. “During the Seril case. We were both young, and he was my supervisor. We had a professional relationship.” She uncrossed her arms and rested her hands on the railing at the foot of Tara’s bed. “I hired you because you’re brilliant, and because of the way you stood up to him. I didn’t expect you would need to face him again so soon.” She paused. “What would you have done, out of curiosity? Had you encountered him without warning?”

Tara considered. “Killed him. Or tried to.”

Ms. Kevarian nodded. “Crisis averted. Get your clothes on, and interview Captain Pelham. I expect to see you in court by ten thirty.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and reached for her pants.

*

Abelard paced the bare waiting room, lost in smoke and thought, taking little notice of his surroundings: a few plants in cheap earthenware pots, beige tables and beige chairs. A drunk slept on a couch in the corner, covered with a flimsy beige blanket.

An orderly approached and Abelard palmed his cigarette. She sniffed for the source of the tobacco stench; her eyes met Abelard’s, wide and watery with the pain of the cigarette ember against his skin. He offered her an uneasy smile as she passed, her mouth tight with suspicion and disapproval.

When she was gone, he returned the cigarette to his lips with a gentle sigh. The first puff came as biting, painful relief.

“They’ll catch you, you know,” Cat said from her perch on a low table. She was browsing a report on the night’s events, which a Blacksuit had delivered to her in the hours before dawn.

“Eh.” Abelard shrugged. “I’m only hurting myself, right?”

She shot him an odd look.

“What?”

“Don’t they teach you priests public health?”

“They didn’t teach us anything public. It would defeat the purpose of being an arcane order.”

“I thought that just meant you didn’t get Saturdays off.”

That had been a joke only in part. He heard the anger beneath it. “Cat, I would have sneaked out, but the advancement exams were coming up, and after I became a Technician there was so much to learn.…”

“Yeah,” she said, distantly. “There was so much to learn for two and a half years?”

He stopped. “Was it really that long?”

“I’ve gotten two rounds of bonuses. At least that long.”

“Kos,” he swore, and the tip of his cigarette flared with the exhalation. “Two years, and I show up on your night off, no reason, with this strange woman.”

“Who’s nice, don’t get me wrong.”

“I show up, asking for your help, with no more than a hello.”

“If I hadn’t thought I would get a fang out of the deal, I probably would have told you to stick it.”

He rolled his eyes. “And you tell me these are bad for my health.”

“They are.”

“So’s getting some … creature to chew on you.” His mouth hung open after he said the words, as if he could breathe them back in. He tried to say something else, anything else, but all that came out was a slow “Ah.”

“You’re right,” she said. When he did not respond, she raised her eyes from the scroll. There was a flatness to her features. Color had not returned to her face or limbs, hours after she removed the Blacksuit. She shook her head. “Shit, maybe it was better back when Seril was here. Before Justice, the Blacksuits, all of it. I don’t know. When I work, I’m Justice. Then it ends, and all that’s left is this pit.” She lingered on that pause, tasting the sentence in her mouth like stale breath. “You know the feeling now, I guess.”

“You heard.”

“Justice told me. She thought I should know why you were working with a Craftswoman.”

“Do all the Blacksuits know?”

“No. She wants to keep this secret. People will panic when they hear.”

“And you won’t?”

She shook her head. “He was more your god than mine. I’m sorry.”

“I saw His body,” Abelard said at last. “Laid out against the dark. Tara showed me. But…”

“What?”

“There was something missing.” He flicked ash into a potted plant. “I don’t know. It must be worse for you. The parts of Kos I cared about, heat, steam, flame, passion, they don’t die. Since I knew Him, and since I loved Him, I’ll still see Him in everything I love. Seril died long before our time. You never knew her.”

“Justice.”

“Excuse me?”

“Her name is Justice now.” Cat rolled up the scroll and held it before her. Had it been a sword, she would have been staring at its tip. “You’re right. It’s not the same thing at all.”

“Cat…”

“I said don’t worry about it. You have your own problems. You…” Something choked her off.

He approached her slowly, as if she were a cornered and wounded animal. She had always been able to retreat beyond her body to places he couldn’t follow, ever since they had ceased being children together and started to grow up. He wished he could follow her into that space behind her skin.

He hadn’t made a noise, but when he crossed some invisible border around her she raised her head like a startled drinking bird, and fixed him with a bird’s alien eyes. He wanted to say something.

He certainly didn’t want Tara to interrupt, from behind, with a “hello.”

He turned, but not nearly as fast as Cat rose to her feet.

Tara looked fine. Precisely fine, not well nor so shrunken as she had seemed hours before. Pallor lingered beneath her brown skin, but her eyes were bright. She wore dark pants and a dark shirt and flats, and a flower print hospital gown over the ensemble, open down the front.

“Nice coat,” Abelard said. She cocked an eyebrow at him.

Cat stepped forward, and snapped to attention. “Ma’am.”

Cat’s newfound formality gave Tara pause, but she continued: “Thank you both for bringing me in. Cat, especially, for…” Her brow furrowed. “You scared off the gargoyles. You’re a Blacksuit? Or did I dream that?”

“No, ma’am.” She bowed her head, a sharp, mechanical movement. “Lieutenant Catherine Elle, bound to the service of Justice.” She proffered the scroll. “Yesterday Alt Coulumb saw its first Flight of Stone Men in nearly forty years. We’re working to ensure they will be the last.”

“You don’t need to be this formal.”

“I do, ma’am.” Cat tapped the scroll in her left hand. “I’ve been assigned to protect you. We can’t let you go unshielded with Stone Men in the area.”

Tara stiffened. “Protect me? Against what?”

“Against the Stone Men, for one. And against whatever danger you may encounter in our city.”

“I don’t need protection.”

“I have my orders.”

“What if I refuse?”

She blinked, slowly, considering. “This is Alt Coulumb. Justice’s will is paramount.”

“Shouldn’t they assign someone else? You have a personal relationship with my assistant.” She indicated Abelard with a nod. “No offense.”

“I’ve known Abelard since I was a girl. He won’t stand in my way. Also, I think you overestimate the individual prerogative officers of Justice have in their work.”

“Individual prerogative. You mean free will?”

“Ah.” Cat frowned at that question. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Interesting.” Tara’s expression remained clouded. “Welcome to the team. We’ll discuss specifics later, but we’re on a tight schedule. Can you lead me to Captain Pelham?”

*

Tara’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dark room. The vampire lay spread out on the bed, long, slender, and naked from the waist up, sheets pooled around his hips, a fallen mast surrounded by twisted sails. Scars webbed his torso, earned from blade and fire before his death. One was a long, wicked, narrow burn that had not been caused by natural flame.

His chest neither rose nor fell.

“Your line,” she said, “is, Thank you for saving me.”

He laughed. “As I reckon things, we’re even. One rescue from drowning and one from, well…” His red eyes flicked left, to Abelard and Cat standing against the wall behind her. She had warned them to keep their distance. The stress of last night, combined with her hasty mental surgery, might have damaged Raz’s self-control. A Craftswoman’s blood was unappealing to most vampires, as a shot of rubbing alcohol was unappealing to most alcoholics. Theirs, though …

“What is the last thing you remember?”

“I was going to meet a client,” he replied. “Get paid.”

“At Club Xiltanda?”

His eyebrows rose. “Xiltanda. Huh.”

“Is that a surprise?”

A pause followed, about the length of a breath. Rhetorical habits died hard. “I,” he said, “am cursed by peculiar clients. There are not many owner-operators of my … persuasion. Clients with needs beyond the natural often choose the Kell’s Bounty over larger and better-equipped vessels because they know we’ll serve their needs and ask few questions. Understand?”

Tara nodded.

“For this reason, we have a reputation that makes it hard to get normal work.” His eyes narrowed. “Don’t look at me like that. It’s not as if I chose this.”

“You did,” she noted. “Vampiric infection won’t work unless you accept it.”

“Better unlife than death, as your boss said when she gave me the option.” His anger spent itself on her silence. “I suppose you’re right, though. I made the choice, even if it didn’t seem like a choice at the time, and its consequences have leapt in and out of my wake ever since. Like dolphins.” He made an arcing motion with one hand, and Tara saw nine feet of silver-blue glittering wet in moonlight above a silent sea.

“You were hired by a Craftsman.”

“I was hired south of Iskar in the Northern Gleb, in a port about thirty miles from the border of King Clock’s land. A man sought me out. Six feet tall, maybe, with thin, sallow features. Narrow mustache, long nails. Moved like a snake. Fringe of white hair.” He wiggled his fingers in a vague semicircle around the edge of his scalp. “Wore a silver skullcap. He…” Raz’s features twisted in confusion. “He wanted us to deliver a package. A chest of magesterium wood, with little silver runes. Told us to bring it east, to the Golden Horde…” He frowned. “No. Not to the Horde. We delivered it to Iskar. I can’t remember which city.” The words came out strangled. Had he been human, his forehead would have been beaded with sweat.

“When we first met, you said the Bounty came to Alt Coulumb from Iskar via Ashmere. Why stop there?”

“We needed repairs, fast ones. Most of the ship had to be replaced. Burned sails and a broken mast. Demon scars on the hull, a hundred small holes in the keel. It would have taken weeks had there not been a good Craftswoman at the docks.”

“I thought sailors didn’t like Craftswomen touching your ships.”

Raz bared his fangs. “Your boss robbed me of the luxury of such superstition a long time ago.”

Tara considered her next words. Raz was in a delicate mental state. Beyond the blackout curtains, orange light threatened the horizon. Morning weakened him, but if she pushed too far too fast he might break. In his rage he could cross the room and tear out her throat before the sun caught him, whether he liked the taste of her blood or not.

“Raz, when was your ship damaged?”

He looked at her as if she’d spoken nonsense. “In the battle.”

“Which battle?”

“With the Iskari treasure fleet. Three days ago.”

Good, she said to herself. Play dumb a while longer. Bolster his confidence. He likes telling stories. Ask him for one. “Treasure fleet?”

His grin turned rakish. “The Iskari still have colonies in the Skeld Archipelago and on Southern Kath. Diamond mines, silver. Oil. Magesterium wood. Every year, the navy brings treasure home in ships so big it seems wrong to call them ships anymore. Hulls of mystic wood worked by Craftsmen and reinforced with silver and cold iron. Sheets of steel, sails preserved by demonic pact. Charms and wards calm the waves about them, keep the winds loyal and turn attacks away. The Iskari treasure fleet.” His voice rose in rapture, and sank to a sigh. “Beautiful sight on a blue morning. Impossible to take.”

“Impossible?” she asked in her most curious voice.

“That’s what everyone said.” He turned to the window, his gaze passing beyond the curtains, beyond the city, to the sea. “They were right, but we came close. Night hid our vessels from enemy eyes and curses. The Craftsman called dead ships from the depths to aid us, crewed by lumbering monsters that once were men. Without him, we would have broken on their defenses. Without us, his clumsy dead things would have been too slow to cordon off the fleet. The Iskari called sea serpents to rake our hull and breathe lightning on us, but we pressed the attack until the fire came.”

This part Tara knew. The fire struck near dawn, Iskari time, around two in the morning in Alt Coulumb. Walls of flame and billowing columns of steam erupted from the suddenly boiling ocean as the treasure fleet’s admiral invoked the Defense Ministry’s contract with Kos Everburning. The pirates scattered, dead ships sinking again beneath the waves. Kos’s wrath scorched the Kell’s Bounty, burnt her sails and shattered her mast and raked her hull. The crew clustered on deck and prayed desperately to whatever gods might hear them—one or two Kosites begging for His mercy—until the fire died with its Lord.

“The treasure fleet escaped in the flames,” Raz explained. “We seized what we could from the wreckage of the ships we burned, and made for Ashmere.”

“Was that,” she said, like a girl taken in by a fantastical bedtime tale, “before or after you delivered the package in Iskar?”

The question brought Raz up short. “What?”

“Did you deliver the package before or after the battle?”

“Package…” He shook his head. “What package?”

“The one the old Craftsman asked you to deliver. Did you deliver it and then have this battle, or have the battle and then deliver it?”

“What battle? We dropped off the chest and went straight from Iskar to Ashmere. That’s it.” Raz’s words hung in the air. He heard them, and understood them, and his expression grew dark. “I…” His eyes were wide and red. He looked the way Tara herself must have the morning before, drowning until he threw her the line.

She sat on the edge of the bed and laid her hand on his bare arm. His skin was cold, of course. “You’re not crazy. You made a stupid deal with what sounds like a desperate man, or maybe a desperate woman, but you’re not crazy.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I found you at the Xiltanda, someone was trying to burn out your mind. That kind of thing is incredibly hard to do, even standing right next to a person. To do it from a distance, he must have had your permission.” She waited for him to respond, but he said nothing. “You met a Craftsman who needed your expertise and wanted anonymity. He proposed a trade. A large share of the treasure, for your memories of the event. The attack failed, but last night he took his part of the bargain anyway. He tried to burn out your mind, and I don’t think he intended to stop with your memories of the attack.”

His tongue shot out to wet lips that did not need to be moistened with saliva he no longer possessed. Another tic. Tara wondered how many little human mannerisms survived in him. “I don’t remember a deal.”

“That would have been the first thing burned out. I’m sorry.”

“I remember the wizard with the skullcap. The magesterium wood box.”

“Raz,” she said slowly, and she hoped kindly. “Memories are stories the mind tells itself, based on what it believes happened. Can you think of a Craftsman you know who’d wear skullcaps and robes? Might as well expect me to flounce about in a skull bikini. The secret mission with the mystery box is straight out of a DeGassant adventure serial. When those memories were burned out of you, your mind tried to bridge the gaps with half-remembered snatches of story. Cliché mystery-play villains. Plots that have bored a thousand readers. Be glad I stepped in when I did. The mind’s awfully inventive. A few more minutes and it would have been impossible to convince you there was a difference between your story and the truth.”

Raz slumped back into the pillow. “Will these memories go away?”

Lying would be too easy. “No.”

“Ah.”

“If you’re careful, and honest with yourself, you’ll be able to reconstruct what you did in those days. You won’t forget the other story, with the wooden box. Your memories will lead you back there once in a while, and you’ll catch yourself recalling things you know aren’t real.”

Beyond the drawn blinds, the first errant rays of sunlight peeked through the deep urban canyons of Alt Coulumb. “This city,” he said. “Nothing here ever quite works out for me.”

“You’re a strong guy. You can handle it.” She gave him a moment before asking her last question. “Do you remember anything about the person who really hired you?”

“No.”

“Thank you, Captain Pelham.”

She began to rise, but his hand settled around her arm like an iron cuff. His nails, sharp and hard as diamonds, dug into her skin. If he squeezed a little her flesh would tear.

She counted the length of her breath.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. This is not something people often say if they are not about to hurt you, but Tara believed him.

“I know.”

“You seem like a good kid, Tara.”

“Thanks.”

“Is this what you want?”

She wanted her arm back. “What do you mean?”

“Working for a big firm. Ripping my brain open on a rooftop at midnight. Is this what you want?”

There were a lot of answers to that question, but only one came to mind. “Yes.”

His grip slackened. Her arm slid free.

“Can you close the curtains the rest of the way before you leave?”

“Sure.”