Three Parts Dead

12

After Tara, Abelard, and Cat left the courtroom, the audience lingered to discuss the proceedings in hushed, frenetic tones. They had not understood much of the battle, due to their unfamiliarity with Craft of such magnitude, but this they knew: Kos was dead.

The student watched the silver circle and said nothing. Her bleary eyes had flown open at the first lightning flash, and down the hours as Tara fought Denovo, she had crept forward until she sat perched on her chair’s edge, vibrating with the energy of a person who had seen something beautiful but lacked the words to describe it.

That one, Ms. Kevarian thought, will make a good Craftswoman some day, if the madmen who run this city don’t warp her into a priest of something or other. Perhaps the girl was safe, though. It was difficult to be a priest in a city whose gods are dead. Cardinal Gustave, silent beside her, his face a stone mask carved with stone wrinkles, would attest to that.

She was about to say something to the Cardinal when Alexander Denovo’s smooth, familiar voice interrupted her. “Fifty years ago, we never expected that someday we would take Alt Coulumb.”

She had seen Denovo approach, skirting the edge of the circle; had felt him on the perimeter of her mind. Until he spoke, she did not acknowledge his presence.

“No one had ever managed it. This city’s gods were tied to every major civilization in the world. Nothing could touch them. Half a century later,” he mused, “they’re both dead.”

“History is full of reversals.” She rolled up one scroll, stacked it atop two others, and placed all three in her bag. “Alexander, I think you’ve met Cardinal Gustave?”

“Last time you and I were in Alt Coulumb. Forty years back, maybe?”

“Yes,” the Cardinal replied, his words heavy with rage. “I was Technician Gustave when you first came to this city. Wiser and more innocent than the years have left me.” He stood and extended his hand, rigid as a mannequin.

Alexander was much better than the old priest at faking politeness. He gave Gustave a polo player’s handshake, and when their palms touched, his smile widened. “I remember! You helped us in the Seril case. It’s been far too long. How have you been?”

A flicker of pain crossed the Cardinal’s features when Alexander mentioned Seril. His fingers tightened on his staff, as if its haft were Denovo’s throat. “I am as you see me.”

“Well.” Alexander slapped the Cardinal’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Elayne and I are the best there is at this kind of thing. We’ll have Kos up and smiting the unbelievers in a flash. Just like last time.”

“No,” the Cardinal said. “Not like last time.”

Ms. Kevarian hoisted her bag to her shoulder. “Might you excuse us, Cardinal?” The old man nodded. She shot Alexander a significant look. “Professor, accompany me to the street?”

He fell into step with her automatically. Her legs were long, but he had a broad stride. She reached the door out of the courtroom first, held it open for him, and closed it behind them. They walked alone down the long hall to the exit.

“What is it, Elayne?”

“What did you plan to accomplish back there?”

“I think the Church knowingly pledged too much to the Iskari, and as such does not deserve the first and third degrees of protection. I’m acting in my clients’ best interest.”

“I wasn’t talking about that.”

“What, then?”

“You think Gustave doesn’t see right through you? The man spends his days in a confessional. He knows you don’t want to bring back the Kos he knew. You’re rubbing salt in his wound.”

“The Kos he knew, the Kos I knew, what does it matter?” He was keeping his contempt in check at least. “We’re going to make something that works. It’ll do everything old Kos did, but better. This is an opportunity.”

“Let him grieve for his god. He has little enough trust in this process without your snide comments setting him off.”

“A man can’t say what he feels anymore?”

“You never say what you feel,” she observed. “You say what you calculate will have the desired effect.”

“As if you cared about all these gods and their worshipers. Hell, I remember when we were starting out, you were more bloodthirsty than I’d ever been.”

“Forty years ago. I’ve seen a lot in that time, and become much better at serving my clients.”

“As have I,” Alexander said with a grin. “Though I always have been more certain of who my ultimate client was.”

“Yourself?”

“None other.” He bowed, sweeping one arm out behind him. “Come with me to dinner tonight.”

“So forward.”

“That’s not a no.”

“You’re here to no good purpose. You took this case because you thought you could turn it to your advantage, and if you can betray a few people at the same time, so much the better.”

“That,” he said, “is not a no either.”

She quickened her pace.

“I’ll be at the Xiltanda at seven,” he called after her. “Fifth floor, in the dark. You’ll come?”

The hallway ended in a blank wall of gray mist. She strode through it without farewell or backward glance.

“Great!” he called after her as she escaped into the day.

*

After the darkness of the Court of Craft and of astral space, Alt Coulumb’s panoply was overwhelming: towers of chrome and silver against the empty white sky, a street full of deadlocked carriages, a boy in an orange jacket singing the noon news on the corner. Tara found no joy in the light and noise. She felt Denovo’s smile like a splinter in her mind. Your family, he had said. What was the name of that little town?

Damn him.

“I don’t understand,” Abelard said. “Why did you give him the archives?”

She needed a drink and a square meal, not questions. Cat, small mercies, stood apart, scanning the street, the sky, the sidewalk for signs of danger. One conversationalist was bad enough.

She fought to produce an answer despite the throbbing pain in her skull. “I needed the archives to distract him long enough for me to win.” And soon he would use those archives against her. Tara’s victory had been well earned, even Ms. Kevarian said that, but it would not last.

“Why was he winning in the first place?”

“He’s the best Craftsman I’ve ever known. But that’s not why.” A man sold water in glass bottles from a stand near the court gates. She threw him a small coin. He tossed her back a bottle, which she caught with a tendril of Craft, opened, and drank. Cold clear water chilled her throat and calmed her heart, but the headache did not recede. “He cheats.” She took another swig. Had he done something to her, in the circle? No, not likely. The court wards would have kept her safe from his tricks.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she shot back. “Sorry. Shaken, that’s all.”

“I understand,” he said, and placed a hand on her arm. He didn’t understand. Denovo had every advantage. Tara would lose this case if she didn’t find a way to assure her victory. She would lose, and be lost to history, shut off from the world of Craft and consequence.

Breath came short to her lungs, and deep thoughts spiraled within her, but she was not afraid. When you were afraid, you ran from the object of your fear, and Tara did not intend to run.

Ms. Kevarian emerged from the court, saving Tara from further introspection. Her heels sounded staccato on the stone sidewalk. “Tara. Thank you for waiting. I needed to attend to affairs inside.”

Cat, sensing business, drew back farther to preserve their privacy.

“No problem.” Was it Tara’s imagination, or did Ms. Kevarian look flustered? “Boss, if you don’t need me for something else, I’d like to spend the rest of the day in the court library.” She pointed to the pinnacle of the black pyramid behind them. “Denovo has the Church archive data. He’ll decode it soon, and learn that Kos was low on power. I want to find out where that power went before he starts asking. Abelard and I should be able to make a good start before sundown.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You will scour the library next—that’s the correct move. However, I need Abelard for my own work.”

“I’m right here,” Abelard observed.

Ms. Kevarian turned to him. “You will accompany me this afternoon to visit the local representatives of several Deathless Kings. They have a stake in Kos’s resurrection, and we need to be on good terms with them if your Church is to survive unchanged.”

“How can I help?”

“For the most part, by standing in their offices looking like a good young cleric.”

He frowned, but did not reply.

“We need to stay ahead of Denovo,” Tara said. “Abelard knows the Church inside and out. He’s invaluable to my work.”

“Your little bodyguard,” Ms. Kevarian said, pointing at Cat, “should be able to navigate the bureaucracy at least as well. She’s an officer of Justice, after all.”

“Abelard would be better, and you know it.”

“Yesterday you chafed when I asked him to assist you, and today you don’t want to be separated from him. I need his—and your—help. Though our task may sound frivolous, trust me, it is every bit as important as your research.”

Abelard lit a fresh cigarette with the tip of the previous one. “Do I get a choice?”

“No,” Ms. Kevarian said before Tara could respond.

He gave Tara a reluctant look. She tried to return it. For a god-worshipper, he was a decent human being. More decent than most.

“Will the Deathless Kings mind if I smoke?” Abelard asked.

“Not in this instance.”

He shrugged. “Fair enough.”

A group of suited men strode out of the court, lesser toadies and plump advisors huddled around an elder Craftsman: a robed skeleton with diamond eyes who sipped coffee from an oversized black mug. Ms. Kevarian drew close to Tara, and her voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Beware of Alexander Denovo. I’ve known the man for half a century. I haven’t trusted him so far, and I don’t know any reason to start now.”

As Tara listened, her tumbling emotions fell into place. She recognized the rapid rhythm of her heart, and the rhythm’s name was wrath: wrath at Denovo’s smile, at his bumpkin’s charade, at his cheerful threats and the lives he chose to break. Her fear of the firm, of failure, crumbled before the sweet, consuming flame of rage. “I will do more than beware him,” she said. “I’m going to beat him.”

“Good.” Ms. Kevarian’s words were sharp and quiet, like footsteps in a distant passage. “But remember, your first duty is to our client, not revenge.”

“If I have to raise a god from the dead to defeat Alexander Denovo,” she replied, “I will raise a hundred. I’ll bring Kos back ten times greater than he was.”

“Well said.” Ms. Kevarian withdrew, and raised her voice. “You can return, Catherine. We’re done talking shop.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Good luck to both of you. Be careful.”

*

“Be careful, she says.” Cat sounded as if she wanted to spit.

Tara’s legs ached. Upon re-entering the Court of Craft, they had found the hallway replaced by a long, narrow flight of stairs. Tara welcomed the first hundred steps as a meditative exercise, a chance to master her emotions and prepare for the long afternoon ahead. Anger was a useful tool, but it would not help her track down inconsistencies in cryptic scrolls. The next few hundred steps served no purpose but to embarrass her. After half an hour’s ceaseless climb, she was slick with sweat, while Cat’s breath remained even and assured. Tara’s ordeal in the circle, and the previous night’s adventure, weighed on her bones like meat on a hanger. She hadn’t expected a career in the Craft to involve being beaten up so much.

Tara did not answer Cat, but the other woman continued regardless. “Be careful. As if something’s going to jump us in a library.”

“You might be surprised.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how people say a book is really gripping?”

“Don’t tell me…” Cat trailed off.

“Libraries can be dangerous.” They reached one of the brief landings that interrupted the stairs every thirty steps or so, a few square feet of flat floor hosting a teak table and a fern—either a flimsy attempt to relieve their tedium or a cunning mockery of the same. Flipping over a frond, Tara found its underside purple. “You’d still probably rather be on the prowl. Hunting down miscreants.”

Cat laughed bitterly. “Not until you’re gone. I have my orders.”

“From whom?”

“Justice.”

That word, that name, made Tara shiver despite the heat of her exertion. “Directly? You don’t have a superior officer?”

“Justice is always in charge. It’s easier that way.”

“Easier how?”

“Power corrupts people. Justice isn’t people.”

Tara let that sentence pass without comment, and cataloged in her mind the retorts she wanted to give.

Of the pair of them, Cat was the least comfortable with silence, and soon she spoke again: “I want to be where the action is, but I’m more likely to run into Stone Men with you than on the street. They came hunting for you last night, and you survived. Stands to reason they’ll try again. Maybe they’ll send the one that killed Cabot next time.”

“You still think a gargoyle was responsible for that?” Tara asked, feeling as though she were carrying an entire gargoyle in her handbag, rather than only his face.

“Justice does.”

“And you don’t ask questions once Justice has done the thinking?”

“Questions are way above my pay grade.”

“What if I asked for your personal opinion?”

“When Cabot died, his security wards took an engram of the scene.” She saw Tara’s confusion, and made a vague gesture in the air. “Mental picture thing. Like a painting in your head. If you need to know something, Justice flashes an engram into your mind when you put on the Blacksuit. Better than getting news from a Crier. The engram’s never off pitch.”

“At least the Crier stays out of your head.”

“I guess. Cabot’s engram shows a Stone Man standing over his body, talons red with blood.”

“Couldn’t a Craftsman or Craftswoman have killed him, and faked that picture?”

“You know more about that sort of thing than I do, but Justice doesn’t think so. Cabot’s wards would have alerted us if someone used Craft to break them, or to hurt him for that matter.”

“The wards didn’t tell you about the bone circle,” Tara said, though she was being unfair. She could think of a handful of answers to that objection herself, and was not surprised when Cat gave one of them.

“The circle was a standard piece of medical Craft. Cabot died because his spine was removed in the first place, along with his brain and eyes and everything. The circle just kept him alive a little longer. Besides, why would a Craftsman want Cabot dead? There aren’t many students of the Craft in Alt Coulumb, and Cabot was well liked by those that knew him.”

They climbed the rest of the way without speaking. Tara considered the other woman’s words, and indexed them for the future.

Cat reached the door at the top of the stairway first. It was made of thick, heavy wood, finished with a lattice of ash and rowan designed to ward off harmful Craft.

“Cat?”

“Hm?” Her hand hesitated on the doorknob.

“Why do you think the Guardians attacked Cabot? What was their motive?”

“They don’t need a motive for murder. Bloodthirsty creatures. They live for death and destruction. You really should stop calling them Guardians, by the way. People will think you’re on their side.”

“Gargoyles, then. Justice doesn’t think they killed him because of the case?”

“What case?”

“This case. Wasn’t Cabot slated to judge Kos before he died?”

Cat looked taken aback. “I don’t think so.”

*

“Young man,” Lady Kevarian said as the glass lift passed the thirtieth floor and continued its ascent, “you’re about to meet the senior representative of the Deathless Kings of the Northern Gleb in Alt Coulumb. His name is James, and you are to be on your best behavior.”

Through the transparent walls, Abelard saw the Sanctum of Kos rising like a black needle over the skyline. In ordinary times God’s radiance would have shone from its tip, but these were not ordinary times. “His name is James?”

“Honestly, Abelard, I spout a string of long and dangerous-sounding words at you, and you ask me about the most familiar one of the group?”

“James doesn’t sound like a Deathless King–type name to me.”

“Nor does Elayne, I imagine. Or Tara.” Somewhere during Lady Kevarian’s long life, she had learned to smile in cold amusement without moving a single muscle on her face.

“You’re not a Deathless King, Lady Kevarian.”

“Oh,” she said. “Am I not?”

“You’re a Craftswoman. Deathless Kings are bony, ancient…” She was looking at him. Her lips had joined in the smile, but her eyes remained untouched. “Skeleton things,” he finished lamely.

“How old do you think I look, Abelard? Be honest.”

“Early fifties?”

“I’m seventy-nine years and three months of age,” she said as if reading a tally. Abelard almost dropped his cigarette. “Let me show you something. Take my hand.”

She held it out, palm up. He touched her and felt a spark—but it wasn’t a spark, not a normal spark of electric charge, anyway—leap from her skin to his, or was it the other way around? His world faded, breath stilled in his lungs, and he thought he heard his heartbeat skip.

Before him stood Lady Kevarian, surrounded by empty space. Her skin opened like a hideous flower along invisible fissures and within he saw not a wet, fragile collection of human organs but the will, implacable and cold as steel, that animated the puppet of her flesh. In terror he recoiled and fell away from her, into the black. Time was long, and the world behind his eyes so dark, save for a flicker of deep red at the edge of his vision.

He couldn’t tell if she released him or he released her, but when he returned to himself he was plastered against the glass wall of the lift, Alt Coulumb and open air to his back and Lady Kevarian before him, in human guise once more. Had the lift’s wall shattered, he wasn’t certain whether he would have chosen to leap toward her to safety, or out into the abyss.

She waved dismissively. “Oh, stop looking at me like that. You’re fine.” She brushed a piece of lint off the sleeve of her jacket. “Don’t baby yourself. It wasn’t that bad.”

Come on, he told himself. Say something. “You’re so cold.”

“The Craft, young Abelard, is the art and science of using power as the gods do. But gods and men are different. Gods draw power from worship and sacrifice, and are shaped by that worship, that sacrifice. Craftsmen draw power from the stars and the earth, and are shaped by them in turn. We can also use human soulstuff for our ends, of course, but the stars are more reliable than men. Over the years a Craftswoman comes to have more in common with sky and stone than with the race to which she was born. Life seeps from her body, replaced with something else.”

“What?”

“Power.” Her teeth were narrow. “We soak in starlight or bury ourselves in the soil or apply preservative unguents to ward against time, but eventually the flesh gives way. We become, as you put it”—she counted the words on her fingers—“bony, ancient, skeleton things.”

Her monologue had given him time to breathe. “And Tara?”

“Is on the path to immortality. A cold and lonely immortality, to be sure, and not one a hedonist would find rewarding, but immortality nevertheless.”

He tried to imagine Tara’s dark skin paling and her flesh fading away, tried to imagine what she would look like as a walking, brilliant skeleton. That was almost worse than Lady Kevarian’s touch had been. Almost. “James?”

“One of the first generation of Craftsmen. His people were colonists of the Northern Gleb for Camlaan, and remained through the Wars to found one of the first true Deathless King nations. He’s big, he’s old, and though he’s mostly polite he’d rip your heart from your chest and devour it if he thought you were trifling with him. Hasn’t done that in a while, though. Partly because he no longer has an esophagus.” She looked Abelard over, considering. “Perhaps you should remain in the lobby until I introduce you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The doors dinged, and opened.

*

“Why don’t I get to do anything fun?” Cat whispered as she paced the reading room of the Third Court of Craft, regarding the long shelves of books and magazines with evident suspicion.

This was Tara’s idea of how a library should look, not the dusty cave of the Church Archives: a spacious chamber at the pinnacle of the Court of Craft, where the four, or was it five, sides of the pyramid came to a point of transparent crystal that would have skewered any pigeon stupid enough to perch upon it. The crystal caught and funneled starlight into the depths of the building. Normally, no doubt, the sky shone blue as sapphire and deeper through that roof, but today the clouds above were the color of milk.

There were no giant heaps of scrolls here, no quaint tome piles or densely packed shelves. The Court of Craft’s storage facilities were below, tight well-dusted stacks where only Court servants tread. The main reading room was spacious and quiet. Green carpet and wooden tables devoured any sound that dared trespass on their solemnity.

A young man with short, spiked hair and a stud of jet in each ear attended the reference desk, while an older woman, solid and unshakable as a butte, trundled around the room, checking that periodicals remained in their proper places and casting severe glances at the few patrons who dared speak above a whisper. Cat had already received three of those withering looks, and seemed to be angling for a fourth.

When Tara had requested books from the collection, the young man at the reference desk scrawled the titles on a slip of palimpsest with a quill pen and inserted the slip into a pneumatic slot. Minutes later, a wooden wall panel swung open soundlessly and a book-laden cart rolled out of the darkness, bearing her order. A small glass and silver tank welded to the cart’s underside played host to the guiding rat brain. By a trick of Craft, the brain thought it was still a rat, seeking always a trace of food that happened to be one room over, one level up, just around the next turn of the shelf. When Tara claimed her books, the rat brain received its illusory reward and wheeled off in search of the next morsel.

“I’m having fun,” Tara replied in a whisper.

“I mean,” Cat said, “Abelard said that yesterday you walked on a dead god. Why am I watching you shuffle through books? When do I get to take a vision quest?”

“No vision quests here. The Church Archives and the court have different storage philosophies.”

Cat stopped and looked at her as though she had grown an extra head. “What?”

“Every piece of information stored in the Church Archives was about Kos. The Church made careful note of how everything related to him. They described contracts, for example, as drawing from a particular vessel of his power, which in turn drew from a major chakra, which in turn … you get the idea. If I wanted to describe you in the same way, I would say that you have an iris that is a part of your eye that is a part of your face, which is a part of your head and so on. That kind of system is hard for people to interpret, but easy for the Craft.”

Cat looked frustrated, but willing to follow along. “What about this library?”

“These books are all works of Craft, but the Craft is a less unified subject than Kos. This library contains millions of deals between hundreds of thousands of people, gods, and Deathless Kings. I could try to interpret them all with Craft, but the complexity of that vision would split my mind like an overripe fruit, and horrible things would crawl into it from Outside. Nobody wants that. When the subject is too complicated to represent hierarchically, we use normal paper libraries, and read with our own eyes.” She laid one hand on a book spine. “I like this way better.” Cracking the book open, she inhaled the bouquet of its pages. “I can smell the paper.”

“You’re insane,” Cat said.

“Knowledge,” Tara replied, turning a page as quietly as she could manage, “is power. I need all the power I can get.”

“You sound less confident than you did this morning.”

“I’m confident, but I also have, let’s say, renewed faith in my adversary’s strength. I need to be more than right, if I’m going to help the Church. I need to be right, and smart about it.”

“So, what kind of power can all this knowledge give you?”

The green leather-bound ledger before her, which was thicker than the holy writ of most religions, contained all of Kos’s registered deals and contracts for the last few months. A notebook lay open beside the ledger—a normal notebook, not the black book of shadows in which she had caught Shale’s soul. With her quill pen, she wrote a list of contracts that might have been responsible for Kos’s weakness. Progress was slow. The archivist’s handwriting was cramped and angular, and most of the ledger written in code. A prolonged search had revealed a table of abbreviations hidden within an illuminated invocation of the eternally transient flame on the flyleaf. With this she could interpret most of the entries, but not all.

She crooked a finger, and Cat bent close. Tara underlined an entry with the feathered end of her quill. “That’s the date of the contract. This line is the first part of the title.”

“What about the number? It’s not even a real number. There are letters in it and everything.”

“Filing reference. The full contract is somewhere in this building. If we tell the reference librarian that number, he can find it for us.”

“Why not use the contract’s name?”

Tara resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It was a valid question from a woman who had never spent an afternoon in a library before. “You see these three entries?”

“They’re all the same.” Cat spelled the abbreviations out. “C-F-S-R Alt C.-KE to R.I.N.”

“Contract for Services Rendered, Alt Coulumb Kos Everburning to Royal Iskari Navy,” she translated. “Since the common names are all the same, each contract needs a unique reference so we can tell which one we’re talking about.”

“What about those names, there to the right?”

“These are the Craftsmen who sealed the contract, and this is the name of the hiring party, on each side.”

“So COK is the Church of Kos, and Roskar Blackheart was working for them. R.I.N. is Royal Iskari Navy, represented by…” Her forehead wrinkled. “Isn’t that the guy you fought this morning?”

“Yes,” Tara said. “Alexander Denovo.”

“Seemed like the two of you had met before.”

Tara tried to return her attention to the ledger, but Cat’s question hovered between her eyes and the page. “He was one of the best professors in the Hidden Schools. Taught me much of what I know.”

“You ever sleep with him?”

“What?” That squawk earned Tara an angry glance from the librarian. She did her best to look chastened.

“When you saw him in the court, you went all stiff and shivery. There’s history between you, and it’s not pleasant.”

“We did not sleep together.”

“But you had a falling out.”

“Sort of.” Her tone brooked no further discussion.

Cat gave her an odd look, and changed the subject. “This makes sense, anyway. He was working for the Iskari then, and he’s working for them now.”

“More or less. People take all sides in this business, because there aren’t enough good Craftsmen to go around. Last time Ms. Kevarian worked in Alt Coulumb, she represented the creditors, the people Seril’s church struck bargains with. Now, she’s on Kos’s side.” The nib of Tara’s quill pen scratched a black jagged string of letters in her notebook. “The problem, though, starts in Judge Cabot’s ledger.”

Tara pulled a fat book covered in marbled paper from the pile. “Here’s where he adjudicated Seril’s death, and that’s the formation of Justice.” The earlier pages were dark with age and ink, but whole lines near the ledger’s end were blank save for the word “redacted.” “Now, look.” She pointed to a line near the beginning of the redacted sections.

Cat squinted to decipher the handwriting. “CFA Alt C. New.A. by A. Cabot, J-, A. Cabot, J.- PS, New.A by S. Caplan.”

“Below that, too.”

“CFA Alt C. C.S. by A. Cabot, J-, A. Cabot, J.- PS, C.S. by S. Schwartz.” Cat grimaced. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“CFA is Contract for Acquisition. PS means pro se, ‘for himself.’ It’s an old Telomiri Empire term, don’t ask why we still use it. Judge Cabot purchased these two Concerns, Coulumb Securities and Newland Acquisitions.”

“A Concern is what, exactly?”

By now, Tara knew better than to be surprised at Cat’s ignorance. “It’s a system Craftsmen create to magnify their power. Kind of like a church, where everyone’s combined faith makes things happen, only with Craft, not religion. Craftsmen pool their powers to a particular end, say summoning a demon or razing a forest or ripping ore from the earth. If they manage the Concern well, they get more power out of it—from the demon, from the life essence of the forest, or the sale of the ore—than they put in.”

Cat still seemed lost, but nodded.

“Do the Concerns themselves have ledgers?”

“Yes, but they’re not much help.” The next two volumes off the pile were more folios than full books, maybe a hundred sheets each for all their gold binding and shiny leather. Initially, they looked like less-crowded versions of the Church’s ledger, or Cabot’s, but after three pages the descriptions of contracts signed and acquisitions made, enemies dispatched and victories won, gave way to empty space. The last note in each book was simple. “Acq. A. Cabot, J-, Rec. Red.”

“Records Redacted,” Tara translated. “These two acquisitions are the last works of public Craft Judge Cabot performed before he died, and they took place four months ago. At about the same time”—she turned back to Kos’s ledger—“we see the number of sealed records in Kos’s ledger rise dramatically. And if we count the number of sealed records in Kos’s ledger, and compare it with those in Judge Cabot’s, they’re the same.” Repeated lines marched across the page, “redacted” over and over again in elegant black letters. “I think Kos and the Judge were working together on something big, and secret, before they died. But I need to see their sealed records to learn more.”

“They’re restricted. You can’t read them.”

“I can’t, maybe. You can’t. But what about Justice?”

*

Abelard smoked by the window of the Deathless King’s foyer. Four plush red chairs squatted on the hardwood floor around a low table upon which lay a few old scrolls and a ceramic vase of dandelions. A fat red stripe climbed the white wall opposite the windows and ended at the ceiling for no discernable reason.

Had he expected a torture chamber? A lake of fire topped with a throne of skulls, upon which the ambassador of the Northern Gleb sat in grim judgment over demonic servitors?

Maybe. Certainly he hadn’t expected the waiting room to be this cheerful.

Dandelions, for Kos’s sake. They weren’t even in season.

He exhaled and waited, and wished Tara was here.

In the past, when sleep would not come, and he lay awake in bed unwilling to rise and check the clock because he knew dawn was still hours off, Abelard had comforted himself in prayer, and the contemplation of God. Fire touched his soul, and would not desert him.

For the last three days, he had been alone, with only his cigarette flame for a companion. Tara relieved his isolation, strange though she was, but she was gone and here he sat, smoking in silence again. With a sigh, he began to pray.

A quarter of an hour passed, enough time to chant through the Litany of the Unquenchable Flame, complete with colophon and optional sections. No inner warmth came, no communion. Smoke lingered in his lungs longer than usual. That was something, at least.

What did Lady Kevarian want with him? Hardly the pleasure of his company.

Forced idleness was a torment in itself. His hands itched. He could be helping Tara, fixing boilers, serving his dead Lord. Instead, he watched shadows on the wall, and contemplated dandelions.

Not for the first time did his eyes flick to the frosted glass door of the Ambassador’s office. The door wasn’t thick, and its lower half was silvered. If he drew close, crouched down, and pressed his ear to the glass, his silhouette would be invisible from the other side.

He tipped some ash into the dandelion vase, bent low, and approached the door. He heard Lady Kevarian’s voice, and another, deep and rolling like distant thunder.

He pressed his ear to the cool, silvered glass.

“… place me in a complicated position,” said the thunderstorm. “There’s much to your story I don’t understand.”

“Much I don’t understand as well, Ambassador, but everything I’ve told you is true. I can confirm it.”

The storm rumbled, but said nothing.

“I would not, of course, ask you to accept my word with no evidence.”

“Certainly not.”

Her voice sank to a whisper. Abelard leaned against the door as if to press his ear through it. Then the latch gave way, and the door swung in onto nothingness.

Abelard tumbled into a shadowy pit, like night without stars, the way the universe had looked before man opened his eyes, before the gods breathed life into the void. This darkness was deeper even than the darkness into which Ms. Kevarian had thrust him, had flashed with red. Falling, he felt an unexpected warmth at his back.

He gulped reflexively for air but found none to breathe, and would have perished had the dark not broken and reformed around him. Or had his overtaxed mind simply recast the scene into something it could comprehend?

He flailed to find his balance on the carpet. Cool, soothing air rushed back into starved lungs, and sunlight startled his eyes.

He stood in an office, more richly furnished than Cardinal Gustave’s. Chairs of soft leather with silver studs, oak bookshelves. Ms. Kevarian stood to his left.

At the far end of the room, behind a polished desk of what looked to be pure magesterium wood, sat a towering skeleton. Standing, it would have been over seven feet tall; seated in a broad chair of leather and iron, it was nearly Abelard’s height. A hooked silver tab protruded from the hole where its nose had once been, supporting a pair of half-moon spectacles. Sparks like distant stars glittered in the eyeholes of the blanched skull. Two arms rested on the skeleton’s lap, and two more, smaller and grafted below the first pair, were busily taking notes on a yellow pad of paper with a silver-nibbed pen.

“Lord James Regulum, Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Deathless Kings of the Northern Gleb,” said Lady Kevarian with a slight touch of humor, “may I present Novice Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning.”

“So,” the skeleton said, and from its voice Abelard realized it was not an it, but a he, “you’re the little monk Elayne has brought us.”

“Priest, actually,” Abelard said. “And engineer.” The skeleton—Lord James whatever—did not reply, nor did Ms. Kevarian. Both regarded him with a strange intensity. “Ah. May I ask a question?”

“You have asked one already, Engineer-priest, and you may ask another.”

“You, um. Don’t have any lips. Or lungs. How are you … talking?”

Lord James grinned. He did not need to expend any particular effort to do so. “Good question.”

Before he could say anything else, Abelard fainted.