Three Parts Dead

16

Blacksuits swarmed over the buildings and through the alleys of Alt Coulumb like ants at an abandoned picnic. One crouched at a roof’s edge and glowered into the city with eyes that saw a broader range of light than the eyes of man. Another leapt from flagpole to flagpole, canvassing the Pleasure Quarters. A group of fifty cased the city one block at a time, moving with silent care down side streets.

The sight of them was enough to quell most of the sparks of civil unrest scattered throughout the city, and where mere sight was insufficient, they intervened in person. A middle-aged grocery-store owner struck a reedy young woman trying to steal food, and raised his hand to strike again; a rain of black fell over them, and when it lifted both were gone. A clutch of angry young men near the docks gathered to hear the protestations of a doom prophet, and twenty Blacksuits suddenly stood among the crowd where none had been before, watching and silent. The prophet’s wrath broke as the eyeless stare of Justice settled upon him. Words of fear and hatred faltered on his tattooed lips.

But though the Blacksuits dealt with the criminals and madmen that lay within their path, they did not hunt humans tonight. They hunted men of stone.

A gargoyle had stolen a witness from Justice’s infirmary, or perhaps had been disguised as that witness, or perhaps—Justice’s many minds were divided on this issue, and the debate raged across the brains of a thousand active Blacksuits, dancing through their neurons and arguing about the tables of their cerebra. A Stone Man was on the run, that was certain, and there was no such thing as a lone Stone Man. Dead Seril’s children moved in groups, or not at all.

Justice weighed the hearts of others, and did not spare much thought for her own. Had she examined her emotions, she might have recognized the petulant ire of the chess prodigy thwarted in mid-game. Mortals were meddling in Justice’s sphere, and she was jealous of her sphere. She needed that Stone Man, and his brethren: parade them before the madding crowd, hang murder and blasphemy about their necks, and peace would return. Hate directed was easily controlled.

Blacksuits flocked in Alt Coulumb, a murder of silent crows with human bodies. Though the Stone Man had confused their scouts and their pursuers, for he was fast and could assume many shapes, he was mortal, limited, fallible. He played a smart game, but he would make a mistake, and the murder would descend.

Justice waited, sharpening her sword and polishing her scales.

*

“No Tara here either,” Captain Pelham allowed as they sprinted out of the warehouse, night watchmen in hot pursuit.

Cat almost rolled her eyes, but that would have entailed taking them off the pavement, and in this part of town you never knew when a pothole or a mugger’s tripwire might send you sprawling.

Captain Pelham had ordered their driverless carriage to stay as far back as possible without losing Tara as she wove into the waterfront district, then out, then in again, tracing a labyrinth of which only she knew the paths. Maybe it was a Craft thing, or maybe she was trying to throw off pursuit. On their most recent pass through the waterfront, they turned a corner and saw Tara’s carriage pull away into obscurity, with Tara herself absent.

She must have abandoned the carriage to proceed on foot. Lacking a better option, they resorted to old-fashioned legwork, and had thus far eliminated a little more than half the warehouses in the area. Which meant, as Captain Pelham had reminded her with more good humor than she felt, that a little less than half remained.

It was hard to determine which warehouses were occupied and which abandoned. Near the docks, keeping one’s property in good repair was a counterproductive endeavor. Clean, well-tended buildings hold valuable cargo. Dockside warehouse-keepers realized long ago that a few broken windows and vulgar scrawls of graffiti, fire scars on one wall and water damage on another, made it harder for the casual thieves abundant in this part of town to tell marks from firetraps.

Time ran short. They needed a new tactic.

“Let’s try down this way,” Cat said, pointing to a dark alley that led off the main street. “Shortcut.”

“Sure you aren’t luring me down here so you can force me to suck your blood?” He said the last bit with a heavy Old World accent, and a fanged leer that disappeared when he saw the anger on her face. “I was joking,” he said, lamely, as she strode past him.

“What kind of joke is that?”

“The kind where I make light of your nearly killing yourself.”

“I knew what I was doing.”

“So do most suicides.”

Cat’s mouth tightened. Her hands shook, and she stilled them. Not enough time in the suit today, which left her drawn and irritable. Pelham’s fangs, while glorious, were a poor substitute for Justice. She stalked down the alley, and he followed. “It’s not like this is the first time I’ve been bit.”

“You’re a practiced user, then. Which is so much better.”

“I’m not using you.”

“Of course you are.” He pointed to his mouth. “You need this. You use me, and people like me, to get it.”

Shadows clustered around the trash bins ahead, and a rank stench rose from the open midden to their right. She turned on her heel to face him. “You get something from the deal, too.”

“You think I need your blood? Shit, look, not every vampire is a wrinkled-leather leech like those kids you score off in the Pleasure Quarters. Some of us have good relationships with the people we drink from. Some hunt. Some retrain, or drink off animals. Don’t make assumptions to soothe your grungy little addict’s ego.”

Outrage widened her eyes, and words of rebuttal strangled one another in their rush to escape her throat. Fortunately for them both, the muggers Cat had noticed lurking in the alley before she left the main street chose that moment to attack. The first, a beefy young man with garlic on his breath, grasped Cat’s neck from behind with massive hands, and was quite surprised when she grabbed him by the groin and used his own momentum to throw him into the midden. His three comrades had already jumped forward, blades out, and had no chance to flee.

Ten seconds later, Cat held one mugger in a painful arm lock, while Captain Pelham stood between the remaining two unkempt men, immobilizing both with the pressure of his hands on the back of their necks. Their swiftest comrade lay moaning in the filthy pit.

Cat’s captive twisted in her grip until she cranked his arm, whereupon he let out a high-pitched whine and ceased struggling. She glanced him over: long, elf-locked hair, several days’ stubble, three earrings in his right ear and one in his left. He wore a brown wool shirt that, somewhere in the mists of history, had once been yellow, and a pair of leather breeches more breach than leather.

He had been ill used recently, not just by Cat. Stripes of burned flesh raked across his face and chest, beneath sharp tears in his shirt. No natural fire had caused such damage. This had struck swiftly as a whip, not lingering long enough to catch his clothes aflame. “Hello, boys,” she said. “We’re looking for the young lady who gave you those scars. Dark skin, five-seven, curly black hair, curvy, freckles. Last seen surrounded by a halo of flame?”

“We dinn’ see nuffink,” Cat’s captive gargled through the blood that gushed from his nose and mouth.

“Let’s try again.” Cat applied more torque to the mugger’s arm, and something in his shoulder crinkled like crushed foil. “Tell us where our friend went, and we’ll go away. Otherwise, we’ll stay right here.”

He looked over his shoulder at her. His eyes were wide, and scared.

She smiled. So did Raz.

*

As night deepened, the crowd beneath the Sanctum swelled. The original protesters were so diluted by the new arrivals that they vanished like drops of ink in a pool of clear water. Patient silence replaced the earlier fearful, angry cries. The Sanctum pointed like a confused compass needle into the clouds, and the people of Alt Coulumb stood or sat or knelt beyond the cordon of Blacksuits and watched the black tower’s pinnacle in hope.

Following Ms. Kevarian down the Sanctum’s front steps, Abelard recognized, or thought he recognized, a few faces within the crowd: a Crier they had passed that morning, a candy seller from his excursion into the Pleasure Quarters the previous night, a young woman from the Court of Craft. Even a few Northsiders had come in their suits and ties to watch, and wait. Before, the crowd was unified by anger. Now they stood as individuals, together.

He was mystified by their change, and when he realized this he felt ashamed. He should not have had so little faith in the city, or its people. They were passionate, yes, and powerful, but also wise.

Many in the crowd held candles, and the flickering flames cast their faces in shadow and light.

Ms. Kevarian’s boots crushed the white gravel of the Sanctum’s parking lot.

“There’s a traitor within the Church,” he said. After his rescue Abelard had breathlessly recounted his discoveries in the boiler room, but Ms. Kevarian only listened, and asked brief questions when his story was not clear. When he ran out of breath, she told him about her talk with the Cardinal, but did not comment on his tale. He tried again now to get some reaction from her, stating the problem as directly as he could. “A spy. A saboteur.”

With a raised hand Ms. Kevarian summoned one of the carriages loitering near the Sanctum gates. The horse regarded crowd and Blacksuits alike with suspicion as it approached. “Indeed.”

“They’ve been stealing power from Justice for months.”

“It is a wonder,” Ms. Kevarian replied, her voice dry.

“You expected this?”

As the carriage rolled toward them, she turned to Abelard. “It was a possibility. Your organization is large, and not especially secure. It would surprise me if the system had no leaks.”

“Will that hurt our case?”

“Ordinarily, it might, but there are special circumstances at work.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know enough to say. I need more information.”

“Is that why we’re in such a rush?”

The carriage pulled even with the foot of the stairs. Its rear doors opened, though no hand touched them. “We, dear Abelard, are in a rush for different reasons. You are in a rush because you need to find Ms. Abernathy.” She produced a string of beads from a jacket pocket, the last of which was crudely carved in the shape of a woman. “The tracking rosary will lead you to her. Tell her everything. The secret room, the dagger, the monster, all of it. Relate my conversation with the Cardinal exactly as I told it to you. Be clear, precise, and do not exaggerate.”

“What about you?”

She entered the carriage. “I go to a far worse fate. I have a date, my Novice, with a serpent who fears neither fire nor sword.” She grimaced at Abelard’s perplexed expression. “I have a business dinner. It would be impolitic for you to attend, which is just as well. Your search for Tara is more important. Do not fail to find her.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Take care.” She closed the door and the carriage pulled away.

He stood statue-still, abandoned before the crowd. They watched him. Reflected candle flames shimmered in their expectant eyes.

The tracking rosary dangled from his fingers. “What,” he said to it, “am I supposed to do with you?”

The string twitched, twirled in his grip, and came to rest extended taut in the direction of the waterfront.

Abelard looked about for another carriage.

*

Tara fell through shadow, slashing about with the flaring blade of her knife. By its glow she saw the basement floor moments before she hit. Ribs creaked and her head bounced off stone. The door through which she had fallen closed automatically above her, and she was trapped.

Trapped, and not alone. The click of talons and the rustle of stone wings echoed off nearby walls. The cellar smelled of dank earth and unfinished rock, of new-forged steel and burned silver. Gargoyles, looming figures in the dark, watched her with expectant emerald eyes.

If they wanted her dead, she would be dead. If they wanted to capture her, torture her, they would have moved already, rather than let her recover her balance. She eased into a crouch and stood, testing her bones. No bad breaks. A rib cracked, at most. Good.

What were they waiting for?

With a twirl of her fingers she absorbed the cold lightning of her knife back into her system. A gesture. I come in peace.

She was alone in the black. No lies would avail her. Once again she stood before the tribunal of the Hidden Schools, but this time she wasn’t here for a fight.

“I want to help,” she said.

Soft light bloomed around her, and she saw. This basement room had once been a dry cellar, perhaps thirty feet to a side, roofed by a lattice of pipes and rafters and copper wire. The remnants of decades-old cargo barrels, lay piled in corners. Broken hoops, rusty and sharp as wasps’ stingers, jutted out from long-since rotted slats. A clean bedroll leaned against one wall, surrounded by bits of metal, religious effigies, and personal effects.

Tara stood in the center of the room. Gargoyles surrounded her, each one between eight and nine feet tall. Some were unearthly slender, some thickset, some heaped with muscle and others armored by protruding stomachs of hard rock. Strong stone arms hung from shoulders that could support the world. Hands terminated in hooked talons. Folded wings twitched. Five were male, five female, and all terrifying.

Least human were their faces, no two alike, features hideous and strangely noble, this one long-snouted and fanged like a wolf but with four eyes, that are bird-beaked and crested with a ridge of stone feathers, the next tusked like a boar and bearded like an aging scholar. Intelligence shone in their emerald eyes, sharp as a human’s but bent differently. These creatures rejoiced in the hunt, not in the scavenger’s heaven of boredom, satiety, and sleep.

Shale crouched against the wall, breathing hard. Charcoal blood leaked from a wound on his side. A young human man—or a gargoyle in human form—knelt next to him, keeping pressure on the wound with a dirty towel.

A great gray lady gargoyle stood before Tara, her countenance blunt and broad like a tiger’s. She alone among them wore any form of decoration: a torque of silver that gleamed on her brow.

“What help can you offer us?” Tara remembered her earthquake voice from the Xiltanda’s roof.

“I. Ah.” Tara’s mouth was dry. Ms. Kevarian’s mouth wouldn’t be dry if she were standing here. “I saved your messenger’s life.”

“By kidnapping him.” Tara heard no rancor in the woman’s words. Even, maybe, a touch of amusement. Tara hoped she was right. She remembered Abelard’s story about the battle at the God Wars’ end, and remembered too the scarred stones of Alt Coulumb. Have you ever seen a gargoyle enraged?

She needed this. The gargoyles could prove that the Church of Kos was not responsible for the fire-god’s weakness. With their evidence she would send Denovo running back to his lab. Her weapon was here, if she survived long enough to find it.

“Justice believes your messenger killed Judge Cabot. Your attack on me last night didn’t help your case.”

Some of the gargoyles bared their teeth as she spoke. She heard snarls behind her. The stone woman raised one hand, and silence reclaimed the hidden chamber. Clearly she was their leader. Shale had called her Aev.

“What do you think?” Aev asked.

“Shale didn’t kill the Judge. He lacks even the rudiments of Craft needed to bind Cabot’s soul. I couldn’t have stolen his face otherwise. Besides, why kill Cabot when he was working for you?” Tara met her own gaze reflected in the gargoyle’s gemlike eyes. “Or, working to help you on Kos’s behalf. Months ago, the fire-god asked him for help transferring an immense amount of soulstuff without the Church’s knowledge. Kos loves his Church. Why would he do such a thing? Unless he wished to help the Church’s sworn enemy, a group this city exiled more than four decades ago, but toward which he still feels indebted: the Guardians of Seril.”

No reply.

“I may be the only person in this city who believes you’re innocent, but I need your help to prove it. I need to know why you sent Shale to Judge Cabot’s penthouse yesterday morning.”

Aev cocked her head to one side. Tara prepared to fight, and, most likely, to die.

“The story,” Aev said at last, “is not all mine to tell.”

Tara tried not to look relieved. There would be ample chances tonight to get herself killed. “Whose is it?”

The young human had divided his attention between the conversation and Shale’s wound. Aev indicated him with a sweep of a massive arm. “Its beginning belongs to David Cabot, late-come to our Flight.”

David stood, shoulders slumped and expression apprehensive. His features, now that Tara saw them straight on, were a younger, less fleshy (and less bloodstained) imitation of his father’s. He waved sheepishly. “Hi.”

*

The coach let Ms. Kevarian off at the Xiltanda’s gates. A queue stretched down the block, rank upon rank of pleasant young flesh revealingly clad to excite the club members’ appetites for sex or blood or human spirit. These confections of leather and black lace and pale makeup knew their city’s God was dead, their way of life doomed: Ms. Kevarian saw it in their too-broad smiles and too-loud laughs, in the self-congratulatory way they touched and kissed and pressed their bodies against one another, in the speed with which silver flasks moved from mouth to mouth within small circles of desperate friends. They knew, and they smiled and laughed and tempted and seduced and drank to fortify themselves against the coming storm.

She paid the coach and advanced on the rope line. She had wasted no time changing or applying makeup, but as she walked she called a modicum of Craft to herself. Her colors and outlines sharpened; the black of her suit lost its worn, professional three-dimensionality and assumed a uniform emptiness, as if she had clothed herself in a hole in space.

When she reached the entrance, the bouncers drew back without daring to check her membership. The club recognized her, and welcomed her return.

Entering, she spared an instant to appreciate the marble columns, the glowing sprites imprisoned in their crystal globes, the checkerboard stone pattern of the floor, and the intricate Old World tapestries that hung from the walls. Soft strains of smooth music in swing time floated through the bead curtain, and she followed them to their source.

As she swished toward the spiral staircase, she cut a wake through demons and skeletal Craftsmen, vampires and priests and technomancers and a deep purple, multi-tentacled horror it took her a moment to place as a client from a decade back. Voices familiar and strange enfolded her.

“Lady K! It’s been an—”

“—thought I’d have been informed before you—”

“—this morning at the Court of Craft! I don’t think you—”

“—will pay for your betrayal of the Seventh Circuit of Zataroth!”

“And would you care to join us for bridge someday soon?”

She excused herself from the conversation with a nod. The assassination attempt she thwarted according to club regulations, which politely but firmly requested members not damage the premises in their business dealings. She left her assailant, a vaguely familiar face from a cult she last remembered encountering in the Loan Crisis of the early eighties, a smear on the checkerboard floor. And she accepted the bridge date from the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next several weeks.

Up the staircase she climbed, escaping the party and the smooth jazz at once. Up through the sturm und drang of the dance floor, up through the pained screams of the dungeon level, where Craftsmen relished for a brief half hour the torments they inflicted on others during the workweek, gaining release upon the rack from whatever niggling sense of karmic inequity troubled their souls. Up, and up, and up, each level of private hell segmented neatly from the others. Nobody wanted to feel that his, or her, chosen medium of pleasure and punishment was anything less than a universal absolute.

At last she passed through a shell of darkness but did not emerge on the other side. She climbed through deep space, void of all light. Her suit fit right in.

Ten steps, she remembered, before the stairs drew even with the floor. Her mortal eyes were blind, but as she climbed she saw, with eyes of Craft, the clubgoers hovering in deprivation bubbles, and also the silver web that maintained the absolute darkness that settled around her as she stepped off the stairs onto a smooth tile floor.

She was not blind here, but close. This level had been designed for club members whose personal hell was the death of the senses. Since most clients were Craftsmen or Craftswomen, merely impeding mortal sight was insufficient. The club’s owners spent months designing a system to deaden the eyes of the Craft. It was not perfect, and cost the Xiltanda a great deal, but the effect was chilling. Ms. Kevarian had to hold her eyes closed for a solid minute to detect even the dim outlines of Craft through the artificial darkness.

Footsteps approached from her left, and a rustle of stiff cloth. A woman’s long fingers touched the sleeve of her coat. “Madam, your table has been set, and Professor Denovo is waiting.”

“Thank you,” she replied, and the hostess led Ms. Kevarian forward with a gentle grip about her upper arm. She heard nothing but her own breath and the breath of her guide, their intermingled footsteps and the tiny friction of fabric as they walked.

Twenty steps, twenty-five. The hostess stopped, and so did she. The pressure of fingertips left her upper arm and settled on her wrist, guiding her hand to the ridged back of a plush-cushioned chair. “Thank you,” Ms. Kevarian repeated. With her free hand, she located the chair’s padded velvet arms. It faced a table covered with smooth cotton. She sat, and leaned back into stiff, overstuffed cushions. “I’ll have a vodka tonic.”

“And the gentleman?”

She knew Alexander Denovo would be waiting for her, but somehow it was still a surprise to hear his voice emerge from the subterranean darkness. “Whiskey and water,” he said. “We’ll have dinner after our drinks, please.”

“Of course.” Footsteps retreated from their table.

“I’m impressed,” Ms. Kevarian said. “Those sound like very high heels to wear when you can’t see where you’re going.”

“Practice,” Alexander replied offhand. “Anyway, I think the club lets her see in the dark.”

“Hardly sporting.”

“What in life is?”

“Neither of us, certainly.” After a pause to give him the opportunity of a rejoinder, she continued. “What are you here for, Alexander?”

“What did I ever do, Elayne, to make you hate me?”

She crossed her hands upon her lap, and schooled her voice. “You made me fall in love with you.”

“Weak justification for such wrath.”

“And. You took advantage of my trust to twine your will through my mind, drain my power, and leave me a shrunken wreck.”

“Well,” he said. “Fair enough.”

The ensuing silence was broken by the tap of approaching heels: their hostess, bearing drinks.

*

“My father and I never agreed about much,” David said, looking at the ground, at the ceiling, at anything but Tara. He stood outside the circle’s perimeter, behind Aev’s left shoulder. “He was happy the God Wars ended as they did, felt the gods should have given mortals control of their own affairs long ago. He knew the Craftsmen, and especially the Deathless Kings, were hurting the world, but he thought it was manageable. I thought he was wrong.” He looked for approval in Tara’s countenance, or in her body language, but she had none to spare.

“We fought. A lot. When I was old enough, I left, went to the Old World and tried to help there. It’s amazing the damage Craftsmen can do if they’re not careful. Miles of farmland reduced to desert in a day by a battle between a Deathless King and a pantheon of tribal gods. Of course the Craftsman doesn’t care. He lives off starlight and bare earth. The people are left without water, without homes and the little protection their gods afforded them. ‘Free,’ the Craftsmen say.” As would Tara, but she wasn’t here to argue politics. “I wrote Dad letters, trying to explain, but he never answered, so I came back. There had to be something local I could do, to show him he wasn’t always right. I didn’t expect to meet Aev and her people.” He placed a hand on the stone woman’s arm, and she did not shrug him off.

“We found him,” Aev said, “wandering in the deep forest with little food and less water. He said he believed we had been driven unfairly from the city. He was wrong. We fought Alt Coulumb because it betrayed our Goddess. But while David’s facts were wrong, his heart was right.”

Tara could not restrain herself. “Wait a second. What do you mean, the city betrayed your goddess? The people of Alt Coulumb salvaged as much of her as they could.” No response. “They couldn’t do anything more. Seril died in the war.”

Aev bared her rear teeth, which was the closest Tara had seen her come to a smile. “Did She indeed?”

*

“It’s not as though you didn’t get your revenge,” Denovo said after they sipped their drinks for a quiet interval. “When you discovered what I was doing, you escaped my clutches. Cut me off from Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao. I don’t know what rumors you spread, but for forty years I haven’t been able to get another job at a Craft firm, and I loved private practice.”

“I told the truth,” she replied, between sips. “The firm agreed it was too risky to keep you on staff if you were going to subvert their employees. It’s not like I cast you into a joyless, featureless limbo for all eternity. You parachuted comfortably into academia.”

“Which is different how?” His tone sharpened, but kept its detached amusement. “I admit, the academy is more comfortable than I expected. To my surprise, the Hidden Schools were not so afraid of my … eccentricities as the great firms.”

“Perhaps not so afraid as they should have been.”

“If everyone thought like you, Elayne, no one would have seen the potential in Das Thaumas when it came out a hundred fifty years ago. We’d still be scratching at the edges of the gods’ power with paltry Applied Theology, rather than wielding their might ourselves.”

“If everyone thought like you, Alexander, we would never have realized the God Wars were killing this world in time to stop.”

“There are other worlds.”

“None we’ve been able to find that are suitable for human habitation.”

“You think we’ll still be human when we get there?” he asked with a gentle note of mockery. “Come, Elayne. If you think I’m satisfied with humanity’s current form, you’ve missed the point of my work. I’ve been developing networks capable of distributed action, directed by a single will. You saw what happened at the Court of Craft this morning. Tara’s brilliant, but had it not been for that information dump, I would have broken her mind wide open. There’s no question my way is better.”

“Still, she beat you.”

“She does have a singular facility at that,” he admitted.

“It’s one reason I hired her. Any young woman so resourceful deserves better than to be blacklisted because she avenged her friends against an unethical professor.”

“Unethical? If you asked most of my, ah, students, they’d claim they are quite happy with my methods.”

“Because you don’t allow them to be unhappy.”

“It’s a fulfilling experience, being devoted to a cause.”

“I didn’t feel fulfilled, as I remember.”

“Your experience was a prototype. An early model. I’ve ironed out most of the kinks.”

She took a sip of her vodka tonic, relishing the sharp, burning flavor and the bubbles on her tongue. “I’ve read your papers, Alexander.”

“All of them?”

“Your vision is compelling. But you insist on a proposition I don’t think you can support.”

Ice clinked against the side of his glass. “Indeed?”

“You claim your collective action networks are most efficient when a single node directs the whole.”

“That’s what my experiments suggest.”

“I recommend you re-evaluate your assumptions.”

“You think I’m corrupting my own data?”

“I think you’re only happy with a philosophical framework that allows you to be a god.”

The smell of roast meat washed out of the darkness, and once more she heard footsteps.

“Dinner,” he said, “is apparently served.”

*

“Can’t we go faster?” Abelard asked the horse, who whinnied something that, though Abelard had never learned to interpret Horse, likely translated to, “Perhaps if you got out and pushed.”

The tracking rosary had led him through Alt Coulumb with the constancy of a compass. The closer he drew to the waterfront, the more insistent the beads became, yanking at his arm. He kept a firm grip on them. This was not a good neighborhood in which to dismount in pursuit of an errant necklace.

He had to find Tara. Not because Lady Kevarian required it, but because he needed someone he could trust. The Church itself harbored a traitor, who not only stole from Kos, but set His resurrection at risk.

Two days ago, Abelard would have called such blasphemy impossible. He wasn’t sure what he believed anymore—save in Lord Kos, and He was gone.

As they rattled down uneven cobblestones, urgency and desire warred in Abelard’s heart. The shakes were back, severe as the day after Kos’s death. Cigarettes barely helped; he had stopped in the Pleasure Quarters to refresh his supply. He had not slept straight through a night in three days, but whatever exhaustion he felt was buried under adrenaline and fear.

“Look, I’ll pay double if you pick up the pace.”

He had made this offer once before, and the horse accepted it again, surging into a slow trot down the narrow sea-rank streets of the waterfront.

*

“Seril died in the war,” Tara said automatically. “She fought the King in Red and fell.”

Growls rose around her, stone grinding on stone, but these didn’t move her as much as Aev’s slow shake of the head.

“Her power was spent,” Tara protested. “There wasn’t enough left to sustain her.”

“Sustain? No. Not as She was.”

“Consciousness is one of the first things to go when a goddess loses power.”

“Not,” Aev cut in, “if consciousness is all that is required.”

Tara’s eyes narrowed as dormant wheels in the difference engine of her brain began to rotate. She remembered Abelard saying that Seril created the gargoyles directly. If that was true, an immense amount of her soulstuff was bound inside them. They were obliged to her for their very existence, and she to them for their worship. How much of Seril’s power had been at her own disposal after all, and how much anchored in the bodies of these magnificent monsters? Could the King in Red have killed Seril completely, while her Guardians remained? “You’re saying you kept Seril alive, pared down. An echo of the goddess she used to be.”

“Not an echo. Still that Goddess, only less.” The gargoyles lowered their massive heads in reverence. Wings drooped. “She died by the Crack in the World, but as the King in Red struck the killing blow, our need, the need of Her true faithful, caught at Her. She fled into our hearts.”

Translating from the religious jargon, Tara watched the confrontation play out inside her mind. “A part of her died in battle, but another part, the part bound up with you and your people, survived. The power she invested in the Guardians, and the hooks of your faith in her, pulled her back from the brink, but the process ripped her in half. To her devotees in Alt Coulumb she perished, and to you she lived, or a part of her did. But,” Tara objected, “even if you could support her by faith alone, she would be an invalid as goddesses go. Powerless. She couldn’t help you.”

“We did not require Her help.”

“Why bring her back, then? Why not let her die?”

“Because She loves us.”

Tara paced the confines of the circle, uncomprehending, heedless of the several tons of violent stone that surrounded her. “You kept the rituals, worshiped her, sacrificed to her, to keep her alive. Even though she could do nothing for you, whatsoever, other than love you and be loved by you.”

“Is that strange?” Aev asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It makes you the most stupid, single-minded collection of religious fanatics I’ve ever come across. I mean,” she amended as growls rose about her and green eyes narrowed, “I could not imagine ever doing something like that, but it’s terribly sweet.”

“We did not expect Seril’s half-death to last. When we returned Her to the city, we saw the Church of Kos cooperating with outsiders, godless Craftsmen. We appealed to the Church, but our appeals were rebuffed.”

“Really?” Tara was eager to move the conversation away from the evils of godless Craftsmen. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”

“After Seril’s death, heretics within the Church of Kos claimed their Fiery Lord should reign unopposed by our Lady. They contrived that Kos should not know Seril survived, and they kept us from the city.”

Tara saw, as if from above, the binding circle of white gravel laid into the green grass of the Holy Precinct. It had not, after all, been intended to keep Kos locked within the City—no mortal Craft could do such a thing—but it was more than strong enough to keep a barely living echo of a theologically problematic goddess out. Black hells.

“You fought them.”

“Our brothers in Alt Coulumb lost their minds when the Lady died, for they were far away and could not feel that She lived. They fought like wild things. When we returned, we were barred from our own city, as our enemies desecrated our Lady’s body to create an enslaved mockery of Her. What would you have done?”

Burn the city to the ground. “Abelard said that you fled when the Blacksuits joined the battle.”

“Justice is an echo of the Lady we love. We could not fight her then. Today, we would not be so selective.”

“You ran to the woods.”

“Yes. We hid among the weak, wet, stinking trees.” Aev made no effort to hide her disgust. “Far from our home. We lived there for years, until David came. And Kos.”

*

“Divinity,” Alexander said between bites, “was always the point, wasn’t it? Remember the first sentence of Das Thaumas. ‘Societies characterized by the relationship between the divine and the mortal’—all societies, when Gerhardt was writing—‘appear as an “immense accumulation of power.”’ It’s the energy that matters, not the nature of the participants in that relationship. Gods and men only differ in how they accumulate and apply power.”

Ms. Kevarian had barely touched her salmon steak. “Don’t take Gerhardt out of context. His next sentence was, ‘To improve these societies, we must understand the dynamics of power.’ He was trying to help civilization, human and divine.”

“Sure, and as soon as we began to apply his writings the gods tried to kill us all.”

He couldn’t see her roll her eyes, so she made her derision evident in the tone of her voice. “They were scared. Gerhardt’s first experiments created half the desert we call the Northern Gleb. Twenty years later, Belladonna Albrecht made the Crack in the World.”

“It was a war,” he said with an audible shrug.

“We fought for our freedom. For the human race’s freedom, so we could live with or without gods as we chose. The course of action for which you argue in your papers, not to mention your private life, would make Craftsmen and Craftswomen no better than the tyrant deities we overthrew in that damn war.”

“Language, Elayne.”

“My apologies,” she said after another sip of vodka. “One gets carried away when one feels one’s dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error.”

*

“How did Kos get into this?” Tara asked.

“The Everburning Lord,” David said in the tones of the unquestioning devout, “sees all. This is a lot to sort through, however. Occasionally His attention must be drawn to particular issues.”

“We thought Kos turned against our Lady with his priests,” Aev supplied. “Not so.”

David continued. “I hoped to find the Guardians in the forest and record their stories, document their practices. For posterity. I, ah.” Suddenly nervous, he glanced left and right. “I thought the Seril tradition was about to die out. I didn’t expect to find a live culture, and a live Goddess, too. I returned to the city for supplies, prayed for guidance, and, well, I received an unprecedented answer. God was confused.”

He broke off, and Aev took over the story. “It was soon after that,” she began, “that my dreams of fire started. They spread through the pack. Flame overshadowed our souls, seeking truth within us. The next month, as we danced in the sky at the dark of the moon, we sang to the Goddess about the fire-dreams, and She shivered in anticipation.” The rapture on Aev’s face twisted in Tara’s gut. She had never looked at anything that way.

“Kos learned that Seril was still alive,” Tara said, fitting the pieces together. “But he couldn’t break the binding circle and communicate with her directly without his clergy knowing. He didn’t want to confront his priests; maybe he was afraid of what he would learn if he did, afraid of what his faithful had done, or might have done. He wanted to help Seril in secret. And you”—she turned to David—“suggested he work through your father.”

“I tried to tell Dad myself,” David stammered. “He didn’t understand, at first. But he was a faithful man, and when Kos spoke to him in a dream, he listened.”

“These dreams of fire came in the middle of the night?” Tara asked. “Between one and four in the morning.” She remembered Abelard’s pain when he spoke of his lack of faith. His faith had not been weak. God’s attention was simply elsewhere. He was so caught up in stealing power from himself that he couldn’t bother to comfort a poor, distraught cleric. Typical. “Kos couldn’t risk the clergy tracking you down, so he bought a couple Concerns with Cabot’s aid and combined them into one, a shell that could hold his power and transfer it to Seril.” She raised one finger. “The last step was to give her part control over that Concern, so she could use his power. Which was supposed to happen yesterday morning, I imagine.” David stared at her, stunned. She ignored him. “Shale found the Judge dead, and tried to run.” No sense dancing around the truth. “Neither he nor the Judge’s body contained any Craft that I could see, though. No Concern.”

“The murderer must have taken the Concern,” Aev supplied. “Now, with your help, we will claim the power that rightfully belongs to our Lady.”

Tara chose her next words with care. The gargoyles waited. Their patience made her silence deeper. “Without that Concern, there’s nothing to prove your claim on Kos.”

“We will testify. David will testify. Surely that will be enough.”

“That might help prove Shale’s innocence of the murder, but it won’t give you a claim to Kos’s body.” And if they had no solid claim, then the evidence that Kos was responsible for his own weakness was suspect. Professor Denovo would shred her story and flay her arguments. The Guardians had to have something incontrovertible, some documentation they weren’t telling her about. “You’re interested parties with little corroborating evidence, and no contract in hand. You’d rank below every one of Denovo’s clients on the creditor’s committee.”

Aev bared her teeth. “That man robbed us of our birthright and mutilated our Goddess. We shall not crawl to him in supplication!”

“I’m not suggesting you do. When we take this before a Judge, though, she’ll say your tale could be a big fabrication.”

“You accuse us of lying?”

“No.” She held out her hands against their threatening growls. “I’m saying that we need proof. So far I haven’t even seen evidence that Seril is still alive.”

“What do you think is lighting this room?”

No candles or lamps were set into the rough stone walls about them. A broken lantern lay in one corner, but it was not the source of the faint radiance. Unconsciously, Tara had assumed the light was a form of Craft, but when she closed her eyes she saw no mortal thaumaturgy. After a moment of darkness, a swirling vortex appeared at the edge of her vision, interwoven lines and overlaid patterns, an echo of the aura that shrouded Alt Coulumb when seen from the sea.

When she opened her eyes, the Guardians glowed with moonlight.

“If you do not believe,” Aev said, voice deep as surf, “we will show you.”

Light rolled in on Tara like the tide, and on that tide she heard a voice.

*

Information from the erstwhile muggers narrowed Cat and Captain Pelham’s options to three warehouses on the same row, two well-defended and the third dilapidated. It was an easy choice.

“We shouldn’t have let them go,” Cat whispered as they approached the broken door. “They were criminals.”

“Eh.” Raz waved dismissively.

“What if they hurt someone else? It will be our fault.”

“I don’t think those four will take any more purses for a while. Muggers are as superstitious as fishermen, and much less stubborn. Two unfortunate encounters in one night would cause the heartiest to reconsider his choice of career.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What should we have done, exactly?”

“Tied them up, and called the Blacksuits.” It would have been so easy to summon them, if only Cat let Justice take over. No. Not yet.

“With broken arms and legs they still would have wriggled free before the Blacksuits got here. Don’t you think those kids have suffered enough for one night?”

“Kids? If we hadn’t kicked their asses, they’d probably have killed us.”

“If we hadn’t been able to kick their asses, we wouldn’t have been in the back streets of the waterfront after dark.” Captain Pelham stepped over the rotted threshold into the warehouse. He laid a finger to his lips, and she clapped her mouth shut. As if she needed to be told when to keep silent.

Shadows everywhere. Cat and the Captain spread out, communicating with hand signals across the empty space. Five minutes later, they determined the warehouse clear of any watch or rear guard, and met in the center of the room.

“I haven’t found anything,” Pelham breathed into her ear.

“Neither have I.” She kicked the bare stone floor in frustration.

The bare stone floor.

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

“No tracks in the dust on the floor.”

“Of course not. There’s no dust on the floor.”

She didn’t say anything. He pulled back from her. Understanding dawned slowly on his face.

“Well,” Captain Pelham said, “curse me for a seagoing idiot.”

“A trapdoor.”

“Yes.”

Not one trapdoor, but four, they discovered in short order, one in each corner of the warehouse. Designed to store valuables, equipment or foodstuffs or shipments of magesterium wood that might otherwise walk off the premises in the pockets or lunch pails of warehouse staff, these doors were once marked with yellow paint, but someone had painstakingly removed that paint with a sharp chisel (or talon, Cat thought). Only tiny cracks around their concealed edges remained.

None of which would have mattered had tracks on the warehouse floor indicated the direction of foot traffic. Whoever was using this warehouse must have scoured the floors for the first time in decades, ridding them of dust and foul refuse, all in vain. That very cleanliness had caused Cat to look further.

Her hand rose to the level of her neck, but she forced it down. There were many reasons to hide a door, and Justice would not forgive her failure with Tara if all she offered in penance were a paltry smuggler’s cache.

The first three trapdoors were unoccupied. They heard no sound within them, and no light leaked from the crack between door and doorjamb after Cat worked the dirt packed there free with her pocketknife.

She and Raz knelt beside the fourth trapdoor and pressed their ears to the stone. Cat heard distant chants, and an oceanic roar. She cleared away some gravel near a hidden hinge, and peered inside.

She pulled back out of reflex, vision stung by unexpected light. Once more she lowered her head.

Through the narrow aperture she saw the enemy, giant, chanting. Stone Men. A young human stood near the gathered Flight—a captive, perhaps, or a traitor. Cat glossed over him. She recognized the smallest Stone Man as Cabot’s killer. Through her badge she had gleaned a few hazy images of the creature that broke out of the faceless witness’s window, and the small gargoyle matched those, too. No Stone Man could have entered the hospital undetected. He must have been there already—must have been the witness all along, somehow. It was the only explanation that made sense. But how had he removed his own face?

Cat’s gaze slid from the killer to the other familiar figure in that basement room. Tara hovered in the center of the Stone Men, lost in a flood of silver radiance, an astonished smile on her lips.

Hard to fake being faceless, Raz had said. Someone has to steal your face. Tara could have done that, easily, back at Cabot’s penthouse.

A crystal of ice formed in Cat’s brain, freezing as it spread. Even though Tara had warped her mind and betrayed her to a vampire’s embrace, Cat wanted to like the woman. At least, she wanted to believe Tara was a human being, loyal to her own kind. Tara didn’t trust Justice. Maybe when the murderer changed back to his true form and fled, she decided to track him down herself.

But why send Cat away, unless she had something to hide? And what could she have to hide, save that she knew the witness was a Stone Man? If she knew, why keep that knowledge from Justice? Why would Tara shelter a killer, unless she was on his side? Unless she had helped him hide from the Blacksuits since the very beginning?

No wonder she hid from Justice and fled across town. No wonder she regarded Cat with suspicion, grilling Abelard about her behind her back. No wonder she violated Cat’s mind, and forced her to betray herself and her city. She had been working with the Stone Men all along.

All this was conjecture. Suspicion, hearsay. Cat leaped from conclusion to conclusion. She wanted Tara to be guilty. Her brain pulsed against the limits of her skull. The world was muddy, absurd, unreal. She needed clarity. She needed logic greater than her fragile mind could bear. She needed Justice.

Her whole body shook at the thought, and sharp tears sliced her eyes. Gods and hells, she needed Justice.

The Stone Men were below her. This had to be enough to buy back her cold Lady’s love.

The ice reached the nape of Cat’s neck and crept down to her rapidly cooling heart.

She waved for Captain Pelham to approach. He knelt next to her and mouthed, “What?”

Cat pointed to the tiny hole. He bent close, and when his attention was engrossed by the view beyond the peephole, she reached beneath her shirt and gripped the badge on its chain around her neck.

The Blacksuit overcame her in an instant, sensing her need and shattering her mind’s shell. Captain Pelham glanced over his shoulder.

No eye could follow the speed of the Blacksuit’s motion.

The soft crack of breaking bone burst the inflated silence of the warehouse. Below the layers of diamond that enclosed Cat’s mind, she remembered the strength of his arms as he caught her, falling.

He was Tara’s friend. He would have tried to prevent Cat from fulfilling her duty.

Anyway, it was not her fault. She was a servant of Justice. Her mind was ice and her body black glass. She did not tremble. She did not feel pain, or guilt.

She called the other Blacksuits to her.