Three Parts Dead

18

As night deepened, the Business District died. Its workers bled out in a dual current, west to the residential neighborhoods and east to the Pleasure Quarters. Their beds received them, or else the welcoming embrace of pub doors and back-alley dancers; they rested their heads on pillows or the flesh of lovers or the slick countertops of mostly clean, almost well-lighted diners that never closed, even when the night-shift waitress drowsed off at two in the morning and left the patrons to serve themselves from the pot of bitter, bad coffee warming on the slow burner.

Those who sought solace in the city that night found it wanting. Uncertainty took root and flourished even in minds and hearts ignorant of Kos’s death. When tired people sought their lovers or clients, their usual hungry and desperate companions, they found them unable to reassure, cherish, or comfort. They whispered broken sentences to one another, or fought and slept angrily apart, or drank and laughed in the dark, or wandered to the Holy Precinct and joined the candlelit crowd.

A few stragglers remained in their skyscraper offices near the Temple of Justice, sludging toward an illusory finish line. Work weighed them down and tied them to their desks. None rose to look out their windows, so none saw the line of black wagons pull up to the curb beneath the blind, accusatory gaze of the statue of Justice with her sword and scales.

They labored on in ignorance, while around them the world began to change.

Some Blacksuits jogged beside the wagons as they rolled through the vacant streets, while others rode atop them, guarding against escape or rescue. Arriving at their destination, Justice’s servants cordoned off the street, creating a gauntlet that led up the broad white steps and into the Temple’s inner chambers.

A Blacksuit detachment escorted the prisoners from the wagons. Most of the gargoyles went limp from protest, forcing Justice’s servants to carry their thousand pounds of weight. Tara and Abelard gave their captors no trouble, and were allowed to walk under their own power.

Tara looked at the imposing white marble Temple, fronted with columns and statuary, but did not see it. Her mind raced, reviewing all Abelard had told her on the ride over, about Denovo’s desire to work on this case and his consultation with Cardinal Gustave; about the shadow creature, about the circle of Craft inside the Sanctum, about a crystal dagger with a drop of blood at its heart—the same dagger Cat had taken from him. As Tara weighed these facts against the gargoyles’ story, she felt like a mosaic artist with a box of colored tiles and no plan.

“You can get us out of this, right?” Abelard said around his cigarette.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s encouraging.”

She shook her head. “I can show the gargoyles are innocent, but that tips my hand to Professor Denovo. He’ll have time to prepare a response, and that will hurt the Church’s case.”

“Will a strong case do us any good if we’re in prison?”

“Ms. Kevarian can bail us out.”

“If Justice lets her.”

“I know.” She forced the words out through her clenched teeth. “I’m trying to think.”

They crested the stairs and passed around Justice’s statue, Abelard to the right and Tara to the left. Together, they continued down the gauntlet of Blacksuits through the open Temple doors into shadow.

The main corridor was long and straight. Lanterns hung unlit from iron mounts on polished marble walls. Every few feet stood iron tripods upon which iron braziers rested, their incense fires ebbed to embers. Thin strings of fragrant smoke rose from the piles of ash. The hall ended in a large wooden door, open to reveal a broad chamber and a gigantic statue within. Tara did not deviate from her path or slow, and soon she and Abelard entered the Inner Sanctum of Justice.

She closed her eyes and saw.

Justice was a goddess remade in the image of man. Craft wound through her Sanctum, a great silver web of mind connecting thousands of Blacksuits across Alt Coulumb, but the web was not Justice. She swelled within it unseen, a colossal distortion at the heart of coarse human Craft. Tara saw her in outline, a face pressed against, or trapped beneath, a shroud of silk. She was immense, she was beautiful, and she had no eyes.

Tara opened her own eyes and looked upon the chamber as Abelard did. A glass dome arched forty feet above the unfinished marble floor. At the hall’s far end stood a polished obsidian statue whose head nearly touched that glass; Justice, robed as outside the Temple gates, with her blindfold removed. Her empty eye sockets were pits of broken, glittering stone.

Tiered steps were carved into the chamber’s sloping walls, and on each tier a row of Blacksuits stood single file, heads thrown back to contemplate the statue of their maimed Lady. The enormity of the scene pressed against Tara’s skin, against her soul. Great and terrible work had been accomplished here. She imagined Professor Denovo climbing that statue, chisel in hand, to pry the goddess’s eyes from her face. Her stomach turned, and she tried not to vomit.

When the Guardians saw the statue, they surged against their bonds, raging. Blacksuits struck them and forced them to their knees. Aev fell last.

The doors swung shut behind Tara.

The statue spoke.

*

“I will destroy you,” Elayne Kevarian said.

“Not in the near future, obviously,” Alexander replied, crossing and uncrossing his legs. “You know they don’t let you smoke indoors at the schools these days? I had to quit. Wish I had a cigarette now.”

“You’ve been trying to kill us all along.”

“Have not.”

“Liar.” His grip on her mind blocked the course of her fiercest emotions, and denied her the mental clarity required to work Craft, but she could speak, if she remained civil. He had not made a move against her body after that first kiss, intended as a mere demonstration of his control. This did not make her comfortable with the situation. “You wanted me out of the way.”

“Hardly.”

He peeked out of the coach’s curtains, and Elayne seized on his momentary distraction to test the limits of his control. What she found did not please her. Denovo’s technique had grown subtle down the decades. She could adjust her posture, even gesture in conversation, but dramatic movements were denied her. Standing up, striking him, throwing herself from the carriage, all felt pointless, tiring. Why fight? Her heartbeat quickened.

“Elayne, if I wanted to kill you, you would be dead already.”

She inclined her head, neither agreeing with nor denying his assertion.

“I have not moved against you or your assistant. You simply had the misfortune to wander into my experiment.”

“Your experiment.” She found she could still express scorn. “What is its object, pray tell?”

“What else?” Denovo asked rhetorically. “Immortality, and the benefits customarily thought to accrue to it. Feel this.” Leaning forward, he cupped her cheek in his hand. His fingers were deathly cold, as was proper for a Craftsman of his age. She knew her face felt the same, two statues of ice touching. With a shake of his head he released her and drew back. “Was this what Gerhardt wanted, do you think, when he published Das Thaumas? To stretch into eternity, until life becomes nothing but the search for more life? Or did he dream of something greater?”

Elayne, who had never found such questions worthy of meditation, did not reply.

Their carriage drew to a halt amid a jangle of tack and bit and a creaking of wheels. Denovo opened the carriage door, and Elayne saw the marble columns and blind statuary of the Temple of Justice. Leaping to the pavement, he offered her a hand, which she accepted.

“Shall we?”

*

The accused stand before us, said a voice several octaves too deep and too high at once to be human. Reverberating from the skin of the eyeless statue and the flesh of the rapt Blacksuits alike, it nearly bore Tara to the ground. The gargoyles, whose hearing was more acute than her own, quaked where they knelt.

The accused stand before us, charged with abetting the murder of a Judge of Alt Coulumb.

The air about struggling Shale glowed with corpse-light, casting him in sickly green.

This one is charged with murder. Above the prisoners, shining motes of dust danced and rearranged themselves into a picture, three-dimensional and vivid: Judge Cabot’s rooftop garden picked out in neon, rotating in empty space. The Judge lay as Tara had found him, dismembered in a pool of his own blood. David let out a choked sound, sobbing or retching. Shale reared over Cabot’s body, blood slick on his stone hands and talons and chest. Tara saw pain in his snarl, but to someone burdened with years of hate, the gargoyle’s expression would look like a roar of bestial triumph.

How do the defendants plead?

This was all wrong. There should be a chance for the accused to present evidence and consider the evidence presented against them before entering a plea. This was no trial. They were at the mercy of an arrogant, crippled goddess.

The bonds about Aev’s mouth slackened. She rose to her feet. The sound of her weight settling on the stone floor echoed through the hall. She looked up at the holes where the statue’s eyes should have been, and spat gravel and dust at its feet. The bonds tightened about her again, but she did not kneel.

The gargoyles would be executed, or worse, for murdering Cabot. Tara remembered Ms. Kevarian’s words as they flew away from Edgemont: “We stay one step ahead of the mob.” Justice might claim she was blind, but she saw through her Blacksuits. She was the mob, given a single voice.

But she believed she was fair. Tara could use that belief to save the gargoyles, and Abelard, and herself.

All she had to do in return was give up her advantage over Denovo. She had no illusions about her chances of defeating him if they were on an even footing. Denovo was the stronger and cannier Craftsman, even without his lab.

What was more important? Assuring her own victory, or protecting these people, whose city had betrayed them and cast them out? Whose own countrymen thought them monsters?

As the defendants have refused to enter a plea, they are subject to confinement—

“No.”

It was a single word, but Tara put all her Craft into it. Justice fell silent. A vast mind settled its attention on her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Abelard hissed.

“Making things up as I go along,” she replied in a harsh whisper. She stepped forward, summoning her composure and her technique and her reserves of voice. “Lady,” she said to Justice, “I enter myself as counselor for the accused, and register a plea of not guilty.”

*

Crimson robes flapped about Cardinal Gustave like a vulture’s wings as he flew toward the Temple of Justice. The sky pressed against him, trying to force him back to earth. He thought of Lady Kevarian’s assurances, and of the demon Denovo, encouraging, pricking, convincing with his teeth bared in mockery of a smile.

The lights of a passing train lit the Cardinal from below. An idle Crier paced the business district, singing listlessly to empty streets. The city had deserted him.

As it had deserted the Church.

Rounding a skyscraper, Cardinal Gustave saw the Doric and gleaming Temple of Justice. Beneath the glass dome of its inner Sanctum, tiny figures moved at the blind goddess’s feet. Even from this height, Gustave could identify Abelard among them, and Lady Kevarian’s apprentice.

He descended, watching.

*

Tara advanced between bowed figures and Abelard followed. As she neared the statue of Justice, a Blacksuit barred her path. Tara recognized Cat, and the crystal dagger in her grip.

Justice spoke again. What do you intend to prove, Counselor?

“Lady, the accused did not murder Alphonse Cabot. The Judge was assassinated by a third party, who wished to prevent him from serving the god who until three days ago watched over this city and its people. Nor was Judge Cabot the sole victim of assassination in Alt Coulumb this week. There has been one other.

“Kos Everburning.”

*

Cat watched, astonished, from within her Blacksuit as Tara spoke. A silent war waged through Justice’s mind over whether to recognize the Craftswoman’s right to argue her case. Some parts of Justice were intrigued; others felt this was not Tara’s city, nor her affair. Strike her down, they said, and proceed with the trial.

Tara indicated with one hand Raz Pelham’s body on the floor nearby.

“Three days ago, a trap was sprung against the nation of Iskar. A mercenary armada attacked the Iskari treasure fleet. Iskar used Kos’s power to defend itself, and Kos died as he honored his obligation to them. But the defense contract was clear and carefully wrought: Iskar could not have drawn enough power through it to kill Kos, unless he was far weaker than his Church knew.”

*

How did you learn of these attacks?

“I have eyewitness testimony,” Tara said. No backing out now. “If Raz Pelham will rise?”

Raz did not twitch. His wounds had long since healed, bones fused, skin and flesh knit together, but he remained still, no doubt hoping to preserve the element of surprise. Calling him as a witness played one of Tara’s few hole cards, but if Justice didn’t believe her argument, the gargoyles wouldn’t survive long enough to benefit from any other scheme.

“Raz,” she said, softly. “Please get up.”

A Blacksuit approached the Captain’s body, but Raz stood on his own, brushing grime off the front of his shirt. Shadows flowed on the face of the Justice statue as it fixed him with its broken stare.

Identify yourself.

“Captain Rasophilius Pelham,” Raz said, “of the Kell’s Bounty.”

A pirate.

“An entrepreneur and occasional mercenary. I was hired to attack the Iskari treasure fleet. I vouch that everything Tara has said is true.”

Who hired you?

“I can’t give you that information.”

You must.

He raised his chin and bared his teeth. “With all due respect”—though his tone did not imply much—“I am willing to identify my employer, but unable to do so. My employer destroyed my memories of his—or her”—with a nod to Tara—“identity after I fulfilled my contract.”

Half of Justice objected in a voice that issued from the Blacksuits to the hall’s right. Tara Abernathy strays from the question before Us. Are the accused guilty of murder? A second later, other Blacksuits echoed and emphasized the theme. How is an attack on Iskar connected to the death of a Judge in Alt Coulumb?

Tara’s throat was dry, her chest tight, her muscles sore, but she’d be damned if she let herself look weak. “The Judge’s death fits into a larger story in which the accused appear as victims, not aggressors.”

Reach the point. Kos died when He should not have. The battles in Iskar were a factor in Kos’s demise, but could not have been so had He been at full power. We accept this for the comment.

Tara waited as the eyes of Blacksuits and chained gargoyles turned to her. She heard tobacco burning at the tip of Abelard’s cigarette. Steepling her fingers, she began to pace.

“Kos was not at full strength that evening because for the last several months he had worked in secret with Judge Cabot to transfer much of his own power out of the Church’s control without its knowledge. Proof of this is on file at the Third Court of Craft.

“Kos contacted Judge Cabot because he learned, through the prayers of the Judge’s son”—she pointed to David, who blanched at being singled out—“that Seril Green-Eyed, Seril Undying, survived the God Wars. Broken, nearly powerless, but alive, preserved by the fervent belief of these few Guardians and others like them. From David, Kos learned that some of his own priests had kept Seril’s survival from him.”

*

Abelard could no longer restrain himself. “That can’t be true.”

Tara had anticipated his interruption, and turned on him with a rejoinder. “You said the Priests of Kos mistrusted Seril and Her Guardians. Is it difficult to imagine some welcomed Her death? Welcomed it enough to prevent Kos from knowing that a part of Her survived?”

The world lurched from side to side. He realized he was shaking his head. “How could they do something like that, even if they wanted to? Men can’t blind gods.”

He said it without thinking, and should have anticipated her slight, pleased smile. “Gods are not almighty. The Craft can circumscribe their powers. The white gravel paths of the Holy Precinct trace a binding circle strong enough to prevent a weakened Seril from contacting Kos. It worked, too, until David Cabot found Seril, and brought news of Her survival back to the City.”

“It’s true,” David said to the watching Blacksuits and to Abelard. “I prayed when I returned to Alt Coulumb. Lord Kos visited my dreams at night, and saw my soul. I led Him to the Guardians, and He began to visit their dreams as well.”

Abelard’s chest clenched around the smoke in his lungs. He sucked air through his cigarette. Which was more improbable: that Tara was lying, or that she was telling the truth? There were traitors within the Church. To bind Kos, to blind Him even in part, was hubris beyond hubris. But someone had blinded Justice, once.

Tara nodded. “How long ago was this, David?”

“Four months. A little more.”

“And after Kos learned Seril was still alive, he sought out your father, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

David’s brow furrowed. “Seril was weak. Lord Kos wanted to help Her by giving Her some of His own power, but He couldn’t do it Himself, because the Church would know. He worked with my father to set something up. I don’t know the details.”

“Wouldn’t Kos’s Church have noticed their god plotting behind their back?”

“They worked late at night, when nobody would notice.”

“By late at night, you mean…”

“After midnight, and before dawn.”

“Abelard.” He recoiled a step as Tara turned back to him. “You told me you had problems contacting Kos during your watch, between one and four in the morning. How long ago did those problems begin?”

“Four months ago,” he replied when he found his voice.

“Four months ago,” she repeated. “Four months ago, the Blacksuits also started to experience a drain on their power, also between one and four in the morning. Isn’t that the case?”

The chamber’s silence weighed on Abelard. He struggled to breathe, and to answer her question. “That’s what Cardinal Gustave told Lady Kevarian, and she told me.”

“Justice is powered by excess heat from Alt Coulumb’s generators, right?”

“Yes.”

“So anything that made the generators run cooler could have caused the outage.”

“That’s right.”

“And if Kos directed the bulk of his power outside the temple, to attend to matters he didn’t want you, or any of his priests, to know about—that would make the generators run cooler, wouldn’t it?”

Fire glared briefly at the tip of his cigarette, in his mouth, in his throat, in his stomach. His clothes felt too tight. His body felt too tight. “Yes. It’s possible.”

She broke eye contact with him and turned to the statue. Black curls swayed about her shoulders. “Four months ago Kos learned Seril was not dead. Four months ago Judge Cabot purchased a pair of Concerns and gave them secretly to Kos, who combined them into a single receptacle for his soulstuff. Kos moved a great deal of his power to this Concern in the small hours of the morning, when nobody but Abelard was watching. He intended to pass control of the Concern to Seril, restoring to his old lover a fraction of Her former glory. As he worked, his fire burned less fiercely in Alt Coulumb’s generators, and Justice grew weak.

“You can find traces of all this at the Third Court of Craft. Cabot sealed most of the files connected with Kos, but everything’s still there—except for Seril’s name on the final contract of transfer. That name was erased from the sealed records by someone who could burn writing off a piece of paper without damaging the surrounding page. This person did not, however, erase the transfer’s date. It was scheduled for yesterday morning.

“Craft is more than words in a ledger, though. A schedule does not guarantee a transfer: a piece of the Concern had to pass from one party to the other. A key. Yesterday Shale was sent to receive this piece from Judge Cabot, and bring it to his Flight, and his Goddess.”

She swung on Cat, the statue of ebony. “Tell me. What do you think happened yesterday morning in Judge Cabot’s garden?”

*

Cat would have taken a step back had her feet not been rooted to the floor. Ordinarily, with the suit on, she felt neither fear nor remorse. She was an instrument of the Lady she served, and a pleasant haze of inevitability cushioned her every action. But Tara’s eyes—

No, not her eyes. Or, not just her eyes. Tara’s pupils, sharp and cold and black as space, were the twin points of a blade that was her entire self, a blade that pierced the Blacksuit and skewered Cat where she stood. For the first time in Cat’s memory, she wanted to speak to someone while suited, not in her official capacity, but as a human being.

She wanted to say, “I’m sorry.”

Tara didn’t give her the chance.

“Describe the condition of Al Cabot’s body.”

The statue of Justice responded in a smooth chorus. Cabot’s body was—

“Not you.”

Gods are not used to being interrupted. Resurrected divine constructs have less experience overall, and as such are even less used to it.

Pardon me?

“You contain many elements, correct, Lady? Your mind works in many directions at once. One segment of you may conduct investigations, another direct patrols, and a third pass judgment.”

Cat swallowed, and felt Justice as a pressure around her throat.

“I want to talk with the part of you that visited Cabot’s penthouse.”

I will speak for it, Cat said without meaning to.

Her flesh chilled. That had been her voice—Justice, talking through her, rather than with her. Never before had she felt so overshadowed, a passenger in her own mind.

“What summoned you to Judge Cabot’s apartment?”

Several months ago, he requested security wards that would record an image at the instant of his death.

“Why did he have these wards installed?”

He believed his business dealings might place him in danger. He was too concerned for his own privacy to request a bodyguard, but he felt this system would protect him against violent death.

“He wasn’t worried about poison? Or death by Craft?”

Cat’s head tilted of its own volition. As a Craftswoman, I expect you know how hard it is to poison someone who has spent his life as deep in darkness as the Judge. His wards would capture the impressions of any Craft used against him.

So complete was Tara’s poise that the bonds clamping her arms to her sides seemed mere adornments. “Tell me about the Judge’s body.”

A flood of images poured through Cat’s mind, too fast for her to comprehend, oceans of blood interrupted by islands of flesh and shoals of broken bone. His body was opened along the spine and his vertebrae removed, thirteen of them then arranged around the corpse in a circle. His arms and legs were splayed, and his eyes plucked out. Craft kept Cabot’s soul bound to his physical form until released by some trigger. Out of the corner of her eye, Cat saw the young human prisoner—the man who claimed to be David Cabot—shake and sweat as if in the throes of a deep fever.

“Do you think one of these Guardians could have done that?”

You claim their mad goddess survives. Who knows what she might be capable of?

Snarls rose from the assembled gargoyles, and Cat felt eleven pairs of furious emerald eyes fix on her.

“Seril Undying,” Tara said carefully, “is an echo of Her former self. But even if She had the strength to accomplish this, She would not have needed the aid of blood and bone. As I told your Blacksuits, Lady, the technique used on Cabot resembles Craft doctors use to preserve a patient until her body recovers. Only a rank amateur would need so powerful a focus as the patient’s spine to produce this effect.

“But there are amateurs in the world. Stranger than the use of the spine was the corpse’s pristine condition. Human Craft takes power from the world around it. Touch it to dead flesh and that flesh decays. Yet Cabot’s body was unspoiled. The power used to bind his soul did not come from a mortal Craftsman or Craftswoman.”

You accuse a God? A priest?

“A god wouldn’t need the spine any more than I do. A priest working miracles with Applied Theology would not need it either. He would tell his god what needed to be done, and the god would do the difficult bits for him. Without a god, an Applied Theologian lacks the control to bind a soul, or to burn a name off a contract without harming the rest of the book. But there are ways to steal divine power, siphon it, and use it to fuel your own Craft. Today Abelard found a circle built for this purpose within the Sanctum of Kos, in an area only the clergy could access.” She glanced over her shoulder at Abelard, who nodded by way of confirmation.

“This circle works by draining heat from the generators’ exhaust before Justice consumes it. When used, the circle weakens the Blacksuits, the same way they were weakened when Kos made Alt Coulumb’s generators run cool. If I’m right, Justice had several brown-outs yesterday, one of which began about an hour before Cabot died.”

Justice did not reply. Cat wanted to assent, but she was trapped within herself.

“The Judge was … dismantled … before Shale”—Tara pointed to the slender Stone Man—“set foot on his rooftop. Killed by a priest with a god’s power but a student’s skill—the same priest who used Kos’s fire, finely controlled, to erase Seril’s name from the records in the Third Court of Craft. He feared that if Seril gained access to Kos’s body, She would destroy what was left of him, and do to his clergy what his clergy did to Hers.

“Shale found Judge Cabot lying in a pool of blood, and unwittingly broke the Craft that kept him alive, as the murderer expected. Cabot died, triggering his security wards. Shale had opportunity, but neither motive nor method. Our priest had all three.”

*

Abelard clutched at Tara’s arm. “Do you actually think a priest did this?”

“I do.”

“We couldn’t, I mean, nobody would have…” Both sentences withered to ash in his lungs. “Who?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “But I have a suspicion.”

Suspicion, Justice boomed, is insufficient.

The waiting Blacksuits leaned forward, birds of prey prepared to launch themselves at the accused. Justice looked on, merciless.

Time ran down like an unwound clock, and was shattered by a deep, familiar voice. “I have evidence to introduce in Ms. Abernathy’s support.”

Many heads turned in the Temple of Justice, but none so fast as Tara’s. The ground beneath her feet shook, and rage sped her beating heart.

Through the doors of the grand hall, thumbs thrust into his belt loops, black eyes blazing and chin held high, strode Alexander Denovo. Elayne Kevarian followed him.