Three Parts Dead

10

A young man with a hollow face stood on a street corner Northside, overshadowed by steel towers and the tracks of an elevated train. He wore a jacket of rough orange cloth and cradled a lute in his thin arms. One by one he plucked its strings, tuning each to match notes that reverberated in his mind.

Pedestrians ignored him, the rich in their cloth-of-gold robes or sleek jackets, the idle ladies in layered confections of lace and cotton and silk, the workers dressed stark and severe. His fingers hovered fearfully above the lute’s fretboard, then descended.

He strummed and sang of a four-carriage pileup on Sandesky Street, Northside, sang of a critical low in the three-week barley reserves, sang of the slaughter by knife of a family of three in a Westside tenement, of the killer at large and Justice on the hunt. He sang a rumor leaked by off-duty Blacksuits too much in their cups and too loose in their tongues: the Stone Men had returned to the city. Once more their talons marked the innocent buildings of Alt Coulumb. Justice suspected them of one murder already, and citizens were warned to be watchful, lest this outbreak spell the end of forty years of freedom from heretical fanaticism. Stone Men could be anywhere, disguised as anyone.

This last point wasn’t precisely true, but it attracted attention and earned the young Crier tips. The protestations of his professional honor were overcome by the hunger pangs of his not-entirely-professional stomach.

Across Alt Coulumb, men and women of the Crier’s Guild sang this dawn song, the morning edition, until sweat slicked their faces and deep impressions of lute strings marred their calloused fingers.

A drop of sweat rolled into the young Crier’s eye, and he blinked. When he opened his eyes again, the world looked much as before.

Had he been more attentive, he would have noticed a new arrival, a man watching him from across the street through the shifting maze of pedestrians and carts and carriages. A mane of dark hair and a bushy brown beard framed his face; his shoulders were wide and his eyes round. He wore a tweed jacket, and his hands were thrust firmly in the pockets of his pleated wool slacks. His angular mouth had trapped an approving smile and did not relinquish it no matter how it struggled.

The man in the tweed jacket listened to the song. The Crier did not mention Kos, nor the death of Gods. A smart analyst could parse the endless thaumaturgy section (“For Alphan Holdings riseth in price / Two and a quarter to four and six tenths, / And Lester McLuhan and Sons doth decrease…”) and note a twitch in the energy market, but Church security held. The salient facts of Kos’s death remained unknown.

Good. Once that news leaked, chaos would burn through the city, and chaos was bad for business.

Alexander Denovo pulled out his pocket watch. It gleamed silver against the hard, cracked skin of his blunt-fingered hand. His family owned many watches, but he had built this one himself early in his study of the Craft, laboring for long hours with delicate tools, reveling in the exquisite predictability of its clockwork motion. Gears turned within its slender shell, and its face bore many dials, some marked with the usual numbers, some with mystic sigils, some with phases of the moon. One bore every letter of the alphabet. Little knobs and buttons rounded the top edge.

It was nearly time for court.

He fished a silver coin from his jacket pocket, crossed the road, and dropped it in the bowl at the Crier’s feet. The young man bowed his head in thanks and continued to sing. When he looked up, Denovo was gone.

*

“So the Iskari murdered Kos,” Cat said as she led Tara and Abelard down the halls of the infirmary, walking backward.

Abelard shook his head. “This isn’t a criminal investigation.”

“Isn’t it? Someone’s dead.”

He looked at her as though she had suggested an obscenity.

“You said the Iskari could access Kos’s power at a very basic level. He didn’t have a choice about whether he gave it to them or not, right? Even if the Iskari didn’t murder him themselves, someone could have planned that attack on the treasure fleet to kill him.”

Abelard looked to Tara for support, and she hesitated. Tara barely trusted Cat, and didn’t trust Justice at all, whatever protestations it made of its impartiality. Cat was here in part to protect her, of this Tara had no doubt, but also to watch and report back. Anything she said here, she said to Justice. Then again, the more Tara shared, the less Justice would suspect she was hiding. “It’s an interesting idea,” she said at last, “but the treasure fleet is a rich target, and this might be a case of simple bad timing. Anyone who wanted to use the pact as a weapon had to know about it first. The Church holds its archives sacred, and the Iskari Defense Ministry is a blood-mad cult that doesn’t share knowledge with outsiders. Also, the Iskari contract only hurt Kos because he was low on power already, which not even the Church seems to have known. If this was a murder, our murderer is absurdly well informed.”

Abelard, who had grown more agitated as the conversation progressed, stopped and threw up his hands. “Could we please not talk about God as if He were a corpse on the floor?”

Both women fixed him with curious expressions. He lowered his arms, but remained defiant.

“There has to be a connection,” Cat continued.

Tara frowned. “There are too many pieces to this puzzle. We’ve got a murder, an attempted assassination, a divine death, and a case of piracy that may or may not be linked to any of the above.”

“Assassination?” Cat asked.

Tara cursed herself silently for letting that slip. “Someone tried to kill my boss and me as we flew toward Alt Coulumb yesterday. Outside of the city’s jurisdiction.”

“You should have reported it.”

“I’ve been busy. My point is, there are so many puzzles it’s hard to keep them straight.”

“Don’t forget the Guardians,” Abelard interrupted, petulant.

“The Stone Men. Shit.” Cat looked as though she were about to spit in disgust. “They’re crows before the storm. They don’t need an excuse to go where they’re not wanted.”

“Hard for me to believe they aren’t tied in somehow,” Tara said, “considering that they showed up for the first time in forty years in the thick of this mess.”

“They’re drawn to doom.”

They reached a juncture in the branching hallway, and Tara stopped short. “Wait. Where are we going?”

Abelard glanced from one hall to the next. “I thought you knew.”

She rolled her eyes. “I need to get to court. Does anyone know how to reach the street?”

*

The carriage they hailed was a tiny, driverless two-seater. Cat knew a quick route to the courthouse, and sat up front to direct the horse, which left Abelard in the back with Tara.

This was not an accident. The first carriage that tried to pick them up had been large enough for four, but its right wheel locked on the axle and the two-seater beat it to the curb. Tara felt bad for the first cab’s owner, but she wanted to talk with Abelard in private and this was the easiest way to arrange it.

“Do you think Cat’s right?” he asked as she glanced back to undo the Craft with which she had bound the first carriage’s wheel.

“About what?”

He watched the pedestrians outside their window, garbed in business blacks and blues and grays save for the occasional burst of a Crier’s orange. “She thinks God was murdered.”

“Cat’s a policewoman. She knows one thing, and she knows it well. There are problems with the murder theory, as I said.”

“But it’s possible.”

“Yes,” she admitted, rather than lying.

He fell into silent contemplation. She framed a question in her mind, but before she opened her mouth, he spoke again. “What got you into this business?”

“What do you mean by that?”

He looked hurt, and she relented.

“Sorry. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have snapped.” The risen sun hung invisible behind low clouds. Skyscrapers converged into the haze.

“I was thinking about what you said to the v— to Captain Pelham.”

“Vampire,” she corrected. “You can say it.”

“Back there. About your choices. I can’t imagine being happy in the life you lead.”

“It’s not normally this hectic.” Which wasn’t an answer. Their carriage proceeded slowly through traffic. She remembered long stretches of empty dirt road winding through Edgemont fields. “I come from the country. My folks were teachers, my friends farmers. I wanted more.” It was a question she’d asked and answered a hundred times at the Hidden Schools: Who are you, and why are you here? None of the answers she had given then seemed right now. “And here I am.”

“It’s a weird kind of more. Necromancy. Black arts.”

“That was part of why I chose to study the Craft. It was different from anything I knew. I thought, whatever I get out of this life, it won’t be what I would have had in Edgemont.”

At age six, Tara had first recognized the divide between her family, refugees who fled west during the Wars, and the native clans of Edgemont with their deep roots in the land. She remembered feeling, as a child, a need to prove something to her classmates. What right had they to look down on her family for hailing from beyond their postage-stamp town? But that memory was likely false. Six years old, she probably felt only confusion: Why don’t their parents like mine? Why don’t they like me?

Abelard did not reply, and she seized the opportunity to change the topic. “What about Cat? Why does she give half her life to Justice?”

“I don’t know.” He flicked cigarette ash out the window. “We grew up on the same street. A simple neighborhood, poor enough that the people there struggled to keep up the illusion they weren’t poor. Cat wanted to serve the city, but in a different way from me. Gears, pulleys, pistons, theology didn’t interest her no matter how I tried. She saw people getting hurt, and other people doing the hurting, and thought she could make a difference through Justice.”

“Does Justice make a difference?”

He shot her an odd look. “You should know. Your boss helped create her.”

“Ms. Kevarian doesn’t really talk about her last visit to Alt Coulumb.” This was why she had gone to the trouble of getting the two of them alone. “I hoped you could give me a history lesson.”

“About what?”

“Seril. Justice. The gargoyles. They fit together, don’t they?”

Abelard’s face looked thinner than yesterday morning, as if something inside him were melting flesh and fat and muscle away. “They fit,” he said.

“Tell me.”

He squirmed, but her silence was unrelenting and at last he surrendered. “Seril was night and moon and rock, everything cold and proud and untouchable. Maybe that was why Kos loved her. She wouldn’t burn.”

“Kos loved her?” Tara hadn’t known that. A pair of gods ruling together, one for day, the other for night, one creating, another ordering. Bonds of love between opposites were powerful, stable yet dynamic. No wonder Alt Coulumb had stood for so long and grown so vast.

“They loved each other,” Abelard acknowledged. “But the God Wars were like the opening of a dam for her. She rushed to the front lines, with her priests and soldiers.”

“The old City Guard. Who became the Blacksuits.”

Abelard shot her a sidelong glance, uncertain what he should say next. As if afraid she was testing him.

A dozen disparate facts fell into place. “The gargoyles.” She couldn’t keep an edge of shock from her voice. Stupid. Why hadn’t she seen it before?

“The Guardians of Seril. The goddess created them. Moonlight and night air sank into stone and the stone came to life.” Abelard looked uncomfortable with the idea. “I wasn’t alive to know them, but my father was, and my grandfather. They say the Guardians roamed the rooftops in small bands, marking territory with their talons, writing poems to Seril that could only be understood when seen from the air. They hunted the night. If a crime occurred, they swooped down, claws out. Criminals feared them because they were implacable. They had no families, no friends, so you couldn’t threaten them. The city was safer in those days. The Blacksuits may be effective, but the Guardians were terrifying.”

“What happened?”

“When Seril went to war, they followed her. A few remained in Alt Coulumb. Not enough to keep the peace. At least, not enough to keep the peace, ah, peaceably.”

“There were deaths,” she said.

“Yeah.” He didn’t look at her. “I mean, there were always deaths, but now there were more. Criminals, mostly.”

“And a few Craftsmen.”

He looked up. “I didn’t think you knew.”

It wasn’t hard to guess. The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you’re a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your “kind,” and neighbors who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation.

All the usual things had happened. Riots, pogroms, lynch mobs. Many of the victims had not been Craftsmen at all but mathematicians and philosophers, anatomists and chemists and scholars of ancient languages. Universities around the world were razed. True Craftsmen and Craftswomen protected what and who they could from the riots, sheltering scholars with their might, ripping towers and libraries and great cathedrals from the earth and spiriting them away into the deep sky; in time these stolen buildings congregated and grew into the Hidden Schools and the other great Academies. But there had been too many to save. The great and powerful and angry, like Ambrose Kelethras and Belladonna Albrecht, struggled on the front lines against the gods, while around the world their less militant and more trusting brethren fell to murder and to the madness of crowds.

It was a dangerous era for those who used their minds.

This wasn’t the time to say any of these things, so she shrugged, and said, “It happened.” And, “Seril died on the front lines.”

“She died in battle. The Guardians in Alt Coulumb went mad with fear and fury and grief. They saw rebellion everywhere. Grandpa says the city went to war with itself. Most of the buildings that stand unscarred today were razed in the struggle and rebuilt from the foundations up. Swords can’t cut stone, so we defended ourselves with hammers. Priests called down Kos’s fire against Seril’s children. The old clergymen say God wept.” Abelard would not look at her, and she couldn’t read his voice. “When the rest of the Guardians returned from the war, they attacked the city walls and we thrust them back. It was a bad time.” He broke off. “Have you ever seen a gargoyle enraged?”

“No,” she said, pondering what the cute young man trapped within her purse would do to her if—when—freed from her binding spell. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. In his native shape he had been large and swift, his talons sharp.

“Neither have I,” Abelard admitted. “They attacked the city again and again from the forests and were thrown back each time. It was a long, hard fight. People started to believe Seril’s children were monsters all along. Personally, I think the Cardinals were relieved. They mistrusted Seril and her faithful. She was, they were, too dark, too strong, too in love with the old city to belong in the bright world Alt Coulumb was trying to join. We remade their goddess into Justice, and instead of Guardians we made Blacksuits. When the Blacksuits first joined battle, the Guardians fled to the forest, and weren’t seen again.” They hit a harsh bump in the road. Abelard grabbed the side of the carriage for support. “Until last night.”

“And Cat,” she ventured, “hates the gargoyles because they betrayed the city she tries to protect?”

“Maybe. Sometimes I think she hates them because they had a goddess, and she doesn’t.”

The carriage jolted again, but this time to a stop.

*

“Courthouse” was the wrong name for this building. Courthouse suggested nobility, distance, a polite remove from the world. There was nothing noble or distant or polite about Alt Coulumb’s Third Court of Craft. It did not stand at a remove from this world so much as inhabit another one altogether.

It was a soaring pyramid of black, pinnacle lost in low-hanging cloud. Runes covered its face, dense as crosshatching, invisible to the untrained eye though they burned in Tara’s mind. This building warped the world around it, purified it, made it real. The skyline near the pyramid’s edge flexed concave to convex as in a magician’s mirror. Tara’s heart sank. Abelard and Cat, by contrast, seemed nonplussed.

“It doesn’t look strange to you?”

Abelard didn’t say anything. Cat shook her head. “I mean, there’s always been something funny about the Court of Craft, but…”

“How many sides does it have?” Tara asked.

“Four,” Cat replied confidently.

“Five,” Abelard said at the same moment with the same self-assurance. They exchanged a brief, frustrated glance.

“Fair enough.” Tara squared her shoulders and strode forward.

There was no door in the pyramid’s front face, but as they approached the black stone, the runes flowed and rearranged into a familiar pattern. A translation would have begun, “By crossing this barrier you do undertake to bring no harm by Craft or blade to those within. Definitions of ‘harm’ include, but are not limited to, death, personal injury, injury to the will or to the memory, injury to one’s ability to pursue the interests of one’s client, acts of God, and all other forms of harm. ‘Craft’ indicates…” and so on, a protracted list of definitions and special cases. The standard contract was full of loopholes and exemptions, but it usually held, a minor miracle for which Tara was glad. There would be blood enough before the Judge today without extracurricular violence.

She walked through the runes and the stone upon which they were printed, and the contract settled against her skin like an old cobweb. Her companions did not follow at first, likely deterred by the prospect of walking into what seemed to them a blank wall. Abelard’s loyalty, or perhaps curiosity, got the better of him and he entered after Tara, brushing at his face as the contract took hold. Cat followed a moment later.

“It looks smaller on the inside,” Abelard observed.

They stood in a long and narrow hallway, well-lit and carpeted in deep red, its walls paneled with rowan wood. There were no doors to the left or right, and Tara knew that if she looked back she would not see an entrance, only the four edges of wall and ceiling and floor proceeding until perspective crushed them to a point. Far ahead stood a door of wood and smoked glass. As they approached, she read spidery letters in black upon it: KOREL ROOM.

“This,” Cat said in a hushed whisper, “doesn’t look like any court I’ve been to before.”

“What,” Abelard shot back, “they don’t usually have disappearing walls and endless hallways?”

“And there’s usually more than one courtroom in a building.”

“There’s more than one courtroom,” Tara said. “The hall only takes us where we need to go.”

“For privacy reasons?” Cat ventured.

“Privacy, and safety.”

“Theirs?”

“Ours. Courts of Craft are dangerous if you don’t belong.”

“We do, though, right?”

Rather than answering the question, Tara opened the door.

The courtroom was over a hundred yards across, circular, and walled in black. Ghostlight shone from jewels set into the domed ebon ceiling. A massive Craft circle had been acid-etched into the floor and the acid grooves filled with silver. Within the circle’s silver arc, at the far end of the room, rose the Judge’s empty dais.

Near the entrance sat an array of benches, upon which slouched their audience: a pudgy trailing-whiskered man in an orange Crier’s jacket, a few elder Craftsmen come out of curiosity, and a student with lines under her eyes, who glanced nervously at the empty benches around her, hoping more people would arrive so she could doze off without anyone noticing.

Tara felt sorry for the girl. There would be no eager masses today. Tomorrow, after rumors of Kos’s death spread, would have provided a better opportunity for a nap. The chamber would be so crowded then that nobody would notice a kid catching some sleep.

Cardinal Gustave sat at a low table to the left of the silver circle, and Ms. Kevarian stood near him, her face a professional mask. She twirled a dry quill pen between her fingers. A squad of Church personnel stood behind the Cardinal, backs pressed against the chamber’s rounded wall. They wore a range of expressions, but most were some degree of terrified.

None of the contract holders with claims against Kos Everburning had come in person, unsurprising considering that they were Deathless Kings and other gods. They would send envoys in the coming weeks to observe negotiations, but for now they merely hung immanent in the air about the desk to the right of the circle, where Alexander Denovo sat alone in his tweed jacket. His attention was bent on a yellowed scroll, and he didn’t seem to notice Tara’s arrival.

She had expected to feel more upon encountering him for the first time since her graduation: a dryness in her mouth, anger curling like a fire in her breast, a sour taste at the back of her throat, the bright purple pulse of fear behind her eyeballs. When she saw him, though, she just felt dead.

Dead. Adrift on currents of air, falling toward the Crack in the World, bloody and bruised, broken, her mind aching. His laughter echoing in her soul.

“Tara?” Abelard’s voice. Focus on it.

“What?”

“You looked funny for a second there.”

“Funny?”

“Scared, almost.”

“Not scared.” She wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but it wasn’t fear. Fear was weakness, and if she had been weak, she would have died a long time ago. “But almost.”

“You know that guy?” He pointed to Denovo, but she slapped his arm down. “What?” he asked, cradling his wrist.

“It’s rude to point.”

She brushed past Abelard toward Ms. Kevarian, who acknowledged her presence with a nod while continuing her conversation with the Cardinal. “Whatever else happens, you must be confident. Don’t break faith for a moment. Any weakness can be used against you in an engagement like this.” The Cardinal nodded, features stern, and Ms. Kevarian turned from him to Tara. “You’ve collected another friend.”

“Cat is a servant of Justice.” She indicated the other woman without turning around. “My watchdog. Says she’s supposed to keep me from getting into trouble.”

“Well.” Something about the way Ms. Kevarian said that word, long and drawn out, made Tara glance back to be certain Cat was still there. “She’ll have her hands full soon.”

“What do you mean?”

She consulted a codex splayed on the table. “Denovo will open by proposing that our defense contracts with Iskar were negligent, made with the knowledge they could lead to Kos’s death.”

“Logical.” There were two or three acceptable first moves in a complex case of Craft like this, but all involved breaking down the walls that preserved the divine client’s dead body against alteration. Tara might have chosen the Iskari contract as the first issue herself, had she been in Denovo’s place. Why was Ms. Kevarian reviewing the basics? “The truth will work as a counterargument, for once. The Iskari pact was too small to kill Kos under any conditions that could have been anticipated when it was drawn. Whatever drained Kos’s power was at fault, not the Church’s deal with Iskar.”

“Good.” She scratched a sharp black line of ink across the cream of the scroll. “Then you shouldn’t have any trouble maintaining that within the circle.”

“You’re not serious.” The stone beneath Tara’s feet felt spongy, unstable, soaked with panic.

“This will be a good learning experiene, and an excellent chance to demonstrate your value to the firm. Do either of these goals seem humorous to you for some reason that escapes me?”

“You don’t…” Tara wanted to steady herself, but the table kept shifting as she tried to rest her hands on it. She focused on her breath. “I assumed I’d have more warning, boss.”

“You do know what they say about assumptions, Ms. Abernathy.”

Before Tara could answer, a peal of thunder broke the hush of the dark stone room, and a wash of blackness obscured the light. When it passed, a man stood on the Judge’s dais. He would have been tall if he had straightened. His back arced forward like the blade of a sickle, and his sallow skin seemed ready to slough off at any moment to reveal the flesh and bone beneath. “I am Judge Cathbad, son of Norbad,” he announced in a voice deep and resonant enough to shake stone. “I call from chaos to order. I stand to witness the verities and falsehoods of Kos Everburning and his creditors. I invite counsel to approach.”

As he completed the formula, a stream of fierce blue fire rushed from his dais along the silver lines set into the floor, caught there, and burned.

Tara looked to Ms. Kevarian for reassurance, but in her eyes found only quiet expectation.

When Tara practiced for this moment at the schools, she had spent days, weeks memorizing every facet of the cases before her. There wasn’t time for that now. Maybe later, after the initial challenges were defeated.

It was this, she thought, or back to Edgemont.

She steeled herself and stepped across the line of blue flame.