Three Parts Dead

11

Summers back home began hot and grew hotter. The sunbaked fields into pale dead yellow clay, and steam collected in toiling farmers’ lungs. Every child enduring daily chores yearned to finish her tasks and sprint off, limbs flailing, to the quarry.

It had never been much of a quarry, but for a brief period at the beginning of the last century it supplied rocks for Edgemont’s houses and fences. After idle decades the blasting powder and equipment were gone and only its sharp rock face remained, plummeting twenty feet to a deep pool of cold, murky water that seeped from unknown fissures in the earth. An enterprising priest a generation back had erected a prayer pavilion near the edge of the highest cliff, but this was rarely used in recent years save by the children who leapt from the pulpit over the quarry’s edge, down, down, screaming through sweltering air, to strike the surface of the pool with a loud splash and sink into chill darkness.

Every time Tara made that jump as a girl, she felt a moment of panic as the water closed about her and the cold of it, the cold of the world’s belly, struck her in the chest and seared her muscles and shocked her brain. If you lost yourself and opened your mouth in a desperate bid for air, the cold would reach down your throat, grasp your heart, and stop it with a squeeze.

She felt that same cold when she crossed the line of blue flame in the Third Court of Craft, thousands of miles from Edgemont. Circumstances, however, were different. In Edgemont, she only had to wait for the pool to open its mouth and vomit her out into air and light and heat. Today, she would have to earn her relief.

The world beyond the edges of the circle faded away. The diamonds set in the black canopy above were stars, the canopy itself the endless reach of space. The audience no longer existed. Abelard, Cat, the Cardinal, all were motes of dust insignificant in the emptiness.

She still felt Ms. Kevarian’s eyes upon her, though maybe that was her own imagination.

There were three people left in the universe. Tara. The Judge, grown vast by a trick of the circle’s Craft, twisted and dark, eyes shining in the expanse. And, striding into the circle with no twitch of discomfort, because of course the cold held no threat for him, veteran of a thousand battles, tweed-jacketed, his white shirt bright as a cloudless midnight’s moon, Alexander Denovo. Professor.

“Tara,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”

His voice almost undid her. It was exactly as she remembered from school, casual, familiar, polite. Not arrogant, because arrogance implied one had to establish one’s superiority. Denovo’s voice assumed it.

“Professor,” she said at last. “Good to see you’ve joined us in the real world.”

“Tara.” He linked his thumbs through his belt loops, a picture of a country Craftsman. That was all it was, a picture. Denovo liked to seem simple, to disarm others with the bumpkin’s mask and strike once they were lulled into a false sense of his civility. “I thought you would have realized by now that one world’s as good as another. The schools reach everywhere, and everywhere reaches into them.” Even his grin was casual. She felt her back stiffen. “How’s the family? Still in that little town—Edgewood? Borderhill?”

He didn’t need her to tell him the name. She wanted to snap his neck for mentioning her family. “What have you done to them?”

“Nothing!” He laughed. “I’m simply asking a friendly question to an old student. An old student who repaid my kind tutelage with blood and fire.” His tone was perfectly urbane.

“You aren’t at least surprised to see me alive?”

“You broke the rules, dear Tara, and you were punished, but I was confident you would survive. Have you found the freedom you valued, working for Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, one of the biggest partnerships in the world? Are you truly your own woman?”

“More than I was in your lab,” she said. “Are you going to make your case, or talk shop all day?”

“Certainly.” Denovo bowed, turned to the Judge, and raised one hand. “Your Honor, Kos Everburning is dead.”

The silver-blue flame roared around him, drowning out gasps from the invisible audience. The Judge knew already, from reading his Court brief that morning, but even his starlit eyes widened.

Tara raised her right hand. “Your Honor, the Church of Kos proclaims likewise. Kos is dead, and we come to grant him life.”

Great wheels of Craft revolved in the walls of the chamber around them. Gears ground against gears, and hidden silver needles automatically scribed sacred names upon circles of protection and of summoning. Abelard had been right. The Court chambers were smaller than the immensity of the black pyramid led one to believe. Most of the extra space was packed with the machines required to support human beings who dared meddle in the affairs of gods.

The Judge threw his head back, and a spiked hook of blue-white light swung out of the darkness to skewer him on his dais. His every muscle went rigid as the Craft pierced his body and mind. He was no longer precisely himself, but an interface between Tara, Denovo, and the Third Court of Craft.

Tara felt the heartbeat of the world weaken and fade as the machines and magic around her suppressed the universe’s background energy, the subtle butterfly-wing flutter every novice Craftsman could sense. It was uncanny, exhilarating. She had a stable place to stand, and from here she could move the world.

“I call upon,” she continued, “the powers of stars and of earth. I call upon the massed divine union, and I call upon the faith of the people of Alt Coulumb. Kos died honestly and through no fault of his own, and will not languish in death, but serve his people still. I invoke the first, third, and seventh protections, to secure his body against predation and decay as we do our work.” In Craft of smaller scale, like her pro bono zombies back in Edgemont, she would have done this part silently, and in a fraction of a second. This case was larger, and far more delicate. She needed to be careful and explicit, lest she tread too far too fast and leave herself undefended.

Denovo spoke next. “The lady calls for the protection of the world, of men, and of gods, to preserve her client. My clients challenge her claim that Kos died honestly and through no fault of his own. I will establish that, in point of fact, the Church of Kos bound itself to contracts that would result in its patron’s demise, specifically defense pacts with the Pantheon of Iskar. We cannot rely upon the current Church bureaucracy to maintain a functioning god.”

“It is noted.” The Judge’s mouth did not open, but his voice resounded from the chamber walls.

Tara took a deep breath. “The Iskari pacts to which Mister Denovo refers were undertaken with full knowledge of their potential consequences. The Church rightly determined they could cause no long-term damage to Kos.”

The flames on her side of the room danced.

The Judge regarded the web of fire on the courtroom floor with unseeing eyes. “Mr. Denovo presents.”

Denovo faced Tara directly. She saw what lurked beneath his pleasant, confident exterior: a network of thorns in the shape of a man, a thing that wore him like a suit. He called upon his Craft.

The space about them was charged with lines of starfire, a tapestry woven around and through itself in infinite variety, time its warp and space its weft. His will, cool and smooth as snakeskin, insinuated itself against hers, and she saw the world as he saw it, or as he wanted her to see it: a network of wire and wheels.

His Craft plunged through the bedrock of reality. The world shuddered, shivered, and began to crack, and they no longer stood within the courtroom, but on empty space, several hundred feet above the mile-sprawled corpse of Kos, pierced with contracts that tied him to gods, to governments, to Deathless Kings, to the bureaucracy of his Church Militant. He lay in the center of a globe of stars unlike any visible from earth. In death he radiated something akin to light, but deeper and more profound.

In the archives, Tara’s vision of the god had struck her full of awe, but that vision only approximated the being that lay below. This was the reality, or as close to reality as her still mostly mortal brain could come without shattering into a million shards of glass.

Across from her stood Alexander Denovo, no longer playing the country Craftsman’s role. His form had grown longer, and thorns peeked through his skin. His pupils were completely white, the white at the center of a forge fire, the white of molten metal. He stretched out his arms over the void, and fire leapt into being beneath him, scouring down like a rain of brilliant talons to rend the god’s body flesh from flesh.

*

The room went black save for the outlines of the mystic circle. Abelard’s eyes adjusted swiftly, accustomed as they were to moving in and out of the ill-lit depths of the Sanctum’s boiler room, so he was nearly blinded when lightning split the darkness without warning. Tara rose in the air wreathed by tongues of fire, and the opposing Craftsman, too, their bodies rigid. In the crackle and flash he thought he saw Tara’s skeleton through her skin.

“What the hell,” Cat said next to him. She was a monochrome statue, lit intermittently by clashing brilliant light from the circle. “What are they doing?”

“I thought you’d been to court before,” Abelard hissed back.

“I’ve been to normal court. Where they have witnesses, and evidence, and, you know, light.”

“There’s light,” he observed.

“Light, I said. Not lightning.”

As he watched the clash and roar, he noticed something else disturbing.

“She’s not breathing.”

“She’s what?”

“Tara. Not breathing.”

Cat held up a hand to shield her eyes. “Hard to see.”

“You can see her skeleton,” he pointed out. “When it sparks. Her chest doesn’t move.”

“You would look at her chest.”

“Novice Abelard.” Lady Kevarian had spoken, from her seat to his left. In the dark, the lightning glow suffused her skin.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“This may take a while. You won’t be of any help here. Take your friend and sit with the rest of the audience.”

“Shouldn’t we stay, to support Tara?”

She turned from the action within the circle to him. Her face was smooth, ancient and unforgiving as water-worn rock. He glanced back at Tara, levitating in the circle, and it occurred to him that everything Cardinal Gustave was to him in engineering and theology, Lady Kevarian was to Tara in Craft.

Abelard touched Cat’s shoulder. “We should find a seat.”

Cardinal Gustave watched them go. His eyes followed the dancing ember tip of Abelard’s cigarette, before returning to the tableaux within the circle.

Ms. Kevarian saw it all.

*

As the fire scorched toward its target, Tara pulled her knife from the glyph above her heart. It gleamed, and her physical form dissolved. She became a creature of shadow and starlight, and wrapped her will about Denovo’s fire, stilling, smothering.

She knew his goal from the shape of his Craft. He was trying to force open the conduit forged by the Iskari pact and prove that enough power could flow through it to destroy Kos, even when the god was at full power. He was wrong, but this didn’t mean he would fail. Truth and falsehood were flexible, and Denovo a hardened warrior. He would distort the contract, warp it, force it open in ways the original designers never intended. When he was done, it wouldn’t matter that the Iskari had never drawn more than they explicitly bargained for, or that neither party ever believed their contract vulnerable to such exploitation.

Unless Tara stopped him. She swooped down toward Kos’s mountainous corpse and hovered above the gaping pit where the Iskari pact connected to the god. Her goal was to maintain the pact against distortion, as Kos would have done were he still alive, and to do it without being destroyed herself.

Denovo’s quenched flame writhed against her will, within her mind. She had read once of worms that laid eggs beneath human skin, larvae festering into adulthood on a diet of blood and living meat. He would do the same if she let him, consuming her strength and twisting it to his own ends.

She released his fire from her grip, and he struck with it again, in a narrow controlled stream of hungry, probing light. Standing inside the Iskari pact, she could exploit its structure in her defense. Breathing out, she woke the sleeping contract around her, and Denovo’s assault broke on an invisible wall.

So far, so good.

Vines of light descended from the black sky, coiling about the pact. Tara sliced them with her knife, flying in a tight spiral upward, but where she cut, the vines grew back together. She had never seen such Craft before. With her every wasted slash, the vines tightened around the pact wall, weaving through one another into a constricting lattice.

No. She looked again, and saw her mistake. Not constricting. Nor were the vines truly woven through one another. Rather, they twined through tiny holes in the pact, linking it with Denovo’s mind. The two were one. As she watched, the weave started, slowly, to expand.

Tara strangled a scream in her throat. She was within the pact; her will granted it power. Without realizing, she had let Denovo inside her defenses. When he pulled, when he stretched, it was her mind he pulled against, her soul he was stretching.

It hurt. Not as badly as when she had been cast down from the schools, but badly enough. Her eyes grew wide with the pain, her shadow shocked through with crimson light.

*

For the first hour the light show was fun to watch. Once or twice Abelard thought he spied repeated patterns in the lightning’s dance, but the shape of the conflict remained a mystery to him. He didn’t even know who was winning.

“Think Tara’s having fun?” Cat asked, bored.

“Doesn’t look like it,” he replied. Her face was twisted in a mask of agony.

“She never has much fun, that one. You can tell by looking at her.”

“She’s trying to help Lord Kos.” Why was he being defensive? “Even though she doesn’t believe in Him. Give her a little respect.”

A fierce, brilliant spark burst between Tara and the short, bearded man—Denovo.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. I … It’s been a long week.” He exhaled smoke and breathed in more smoke. This cigarette was nearly burnt down to the filter. He searched within his robe for his pack. “Kos, and, well.” Anything to change the subject. “How have you been recently?”

She didn’t answer. As he tapped the pack, he thought about this woman next to him, his childhood friend, her nights spent chasing through narrow streets for a fix. He held the tip of his new cigarette to the ember of his old and inhaled, passing flame from one to the other.

“You’ll find your way through,” she said.

He wanted to reply that she didn’t know what it was like, living without a god. That she didn’t know what it was like to feel nothing where there should be warmth, companionship, love. The surviving echoes of Kos in the world, in sunlight and hearth-fire and glory, were a poor sop to the ache of His absence. She did know, of course. That was what being a Blacksuit meant. All the responsibility of a divine servant, and none of the joy.

“Her boss seems relaxed, at least,” Cat observed.

Abelard wouldn’t have used the word “relaxed.” Lady Kevarian looked impassive. Once in a while, she jotted a note on the scroll in front of her. “Her boss has been doing this longer than Tara has.”

“Yeah?”

“She was here when Seril died.”

Cat tightened beside him, and drew into herself. He laid his hand on the back of hers, as Tara hung in the burning darkness. She did not shake him off.

*

Denovo was almost unrecognizable, his features a black mask slit by alabaster eyes. He touched the quivering barrier between them, the meld of her Craft and his own, and it was the touch of a razor against her skin. “Tara.” His voice had not changed. “It’s been a long time.”

Don’t let him distract you, she told herself. Fight through it.

“You’re good at this,” he said. “Your defense is precise, and you have talent. If you hadn’t gotten yourself kicked out of school, we could have made a true Craftswoman out of you. Someone before whom the world would quake in fear.” He wandered lackadaisically around the edge of the expanding pact, here applying pressure, there easing it. His knife glistened sickle-silver in his hand as he sliced apart Tara’s defenses where they threatened his vines. “You have a frustrating tendency to make the wrong choices.”

“Like choosing to fight you?” The words came out strangled with exertion. Somewhere, her physical form was sweating.

“That’s one of them,” he admitted. “But only one.”

The vines woven through her mind began to burn.

She had expected an attack, and deadened her senses against it, but pain wracked her nevertheless. He was fast. Too fast. Craft moved at the speed of thought, and there was a limit to how fast human beings could think. Denovo pried at her defenses from all sides, artlessly but without apparent strain. He could not be spinning Craft this swiftly, unless …

“You still have them,” she said. “Your … lab.”

He cocked his head to one side, as if shocked that she found this a revelation. “My dear Tara, did you think your tantrum back at school would have any effect on my plans? You burned my laboratory, but you did not burn my students. Put not your trust in things, but in men. And women,” he amended. “I put my trust in you once, Tara.”

There was no Craft in that statement beyond a simple turn of phrase, but it made her want to vomit.

Now that she knew to look, she saw the seams in the vines of Craft coiled around the Iskari pact. Some bore Denovo’s signature style, smooth and polished and full of flare. Some were rough apprentice work, and others wrought with an unerring, boring precision the flashy Professor could never match. He was drawing on other Craftsmen. In his lab in the Hidden Schools sat a hundred students in dutiful trance, their Craft directed by his mind to his ends.

It worked. That was the most horrible part. Tara couldn’t match Denovo and his hundred students. Nobody could. Any Craft she used against them, one of their number would grasp its intricacies and counter it. Their every strike pierced her like a serpent’s fang, rushing poison through her veins. She wrestled against not one mind, but a multitude.

Her confidence shuddered, and Denovo seized the opportunity to force another opening in her defenses. Some of his light seeped in through the curved walls of the Iskari pact.

She couldn’t fight Denovo’s entire lab. But his tyrannic, directing mind, that she could fight.

Miles away, her dried blood rested at the bottom of the iron bowl in the Church Archives. Blackened into ash, yes, potency all but consumed, it was still a bond between her and those stacks of scrolls. As her attention split, and more of the pact fell to Denovo, Tara called out with starlight, called out with blood, and called up the endless numbers written on the scrolls of Kos’s Sanctum.

Denovo wanted to prove the Iskari contract was negligent, so she gave him the Iskari contract data, without the intricate visualization Craft that had allowed her to comprehend it all without going mad. Endless tables of figures written in rustred ink passed into Denovo’s mind at blinding speed, a sea of paper that would take a team of Craftsmen years to decipher.

Denovo’s shadowy eyes went blank, and his spirit form stiffened as a tidal wave of data rushed from her mind to his. Overflow. Neither he nor his students could comprehend the flood, yet they could not ignore it, in case it contained some trap or stratagem. Denovo’s Craft became rigid for a second, and that was all it took. Tara sliced through the golden vines, and this time they did not heal. She struck with her knife, and struck again, sharpening its edge with each blow. Denovo tried to stop her, but she moved too fast. She was free. She laughed, and flew.

The world broke open around her with a sound like cracking tinder.

*

The laws of physics reasserted themselves in a jumble. She had weight again, and physical extension in three dimensions. Time moved swiftly, then slowed as her mind adjusted to the confines of her body. It was a comfortable feeling, like slipping her feet into a pair of old, well-worn boots that had lain years forgotten in the back of her closet.

In the expanse of prehistory, mind and flesh evolved to complement each other. Craft could transport the soul to wage war on strange planes above the corpses of dead gods, but ultimately there were few places more pleasant than the bag of dancing meat and bones that was a living body. It was warmer here.

Tottering in her flats, eyes stung by the dim court lights, Tara wanted nothing more than an iced tea and maybe an afternoon to sit on a front porch somewhere and watch the sun decline.

The Judge was watching, and she couldn’t let herself fall. Professor Denovo stood next to her, and of course he did not have the decency to look more than discombobulated. His hair was mussed, at least, and there was a hint of tension in his face.

Tara felt stiff, too, in her back and in the backs of her legs. How long had their battle lasted, in real time?

“Sir,” Denovo said with a bow to the Judge. “I ask for a rest to consider the new information Ms. Abernathy has provided. Will you permit us to meet again tomorrow?”

“Indeed.”

When she heard Denovo’s proposal, she felt a weight settle on her stomach. It was reasonable. She had indeed given him the information, after a fashion, and he was obliged to review it.

“We meet again tomorrow,” the Judge said. “Come fire and rain, come ice and the world’s end. The court adjourns.”

As he said the final word, the hooks of Craft decoupled from his flesh, and the flame in the circle died. The Judge crumpled, hands groping for support. Attendants approached to steady the man (and he was a man once more, not the mouthpiece of the machine, as Tara was once more a woman and Denovo was once more … whatever he was), and conduct him gently from the dais. As he walked, he twitched and groaned.

Was that what Judge Cabot had been at the end of his career, a broken thing, too tainted with darkness to live well? Was that what Tara herself would be in twenty years, or forty?

Denovo extended his hand for the customary handshake, but she turned her back on him and staggered away.

“Well done,” Ms. Kevarian said when she met Tara at the circle’s edge.

Tara crossed the line, sinking into the familiar unsteadiness of the normal as if into a hot bath. The feeling, however wonderful, did not improve her mood. “I gave him,” she replied with an angry toss of her head, “exactly what he wanted. I surrendered the Church Archives to win a minor point. I am such an idiot.” She glanced around the courtroom for Abelard and Cat, and saw them shouldering through the milling audience toward her.

Denovo had left the circle, too, and was gathering his papers. Ms. Kevarian leaned in, her voice low. “We would have given him that information sooner or later. Now he has it—unexpectedly, he thinks. He’ll hope you gave him more than you intended, and will analyze it himself rather than request our help, to keep us from knowing how much he has. You won, for now. Feel the victory.”

Tara tried, but the flush of triumph would not come. The floor rested uneasily beneath her feet. “This won’t set him back for long. He’s rebuilt his lab. They’ll reconstruct the visualization Craft from scratch.”

“The lab.” Her expression darkened. “You didn’t expect you had destroyed it for good, did you?”

“Hope springs eternal.” Tara grimaced. “I thought I was thorough enough that it would take him longer to recover.”

Ms. Kevarian looked as though she were about to respond, but Abelard was there, hands outstretched, complimenting Tara and full of questions, and they had no more privacy.

Across the circle, Denovo looked up from his briefcase to Tara. His eyes in the real world were pits of tar. She had drowned in them once.

He wanted her to drown in them again.

She turned to answer Abelard’s questions.