Three Parts Dead

19

“Professor,” Tara said coldly as he advanced. “Why are you here?”

“Tara.” He saluted her. His smile was wide and white as a deep wound. “I’d like you to remember this in the future. Me riding in out of the night to save your ass.”

“I’m doing fine.”

“If it hadn’t sounded like Justice was about to confine you to her deepest, darkest dungeons, I would not have stepped in to help.”

Ms. Kevarian said nothing. Perhaps she supported Professor Denovo, though it was outlandish to think so. Or—was her step more wooden than usual, her expression more stiff? Tara blinked and looked on the world with a Craftswoman’s eyes, but the hall was too crowded with interlacing weaves to identify the cobweb strands that would have bound Ms. Kevarian’s mind to the Professor’s, had he suborned her. Tara thought back frantically. Had her boss been in step with Denovo as they entered the chamber?

“Well?” the Professor asked. “No ‘Thank you, Professor’? Fortunate for you that I’m a generous man.” He addressed the goddess he had blinded. “I can prove the truth of Tara’s allegations. A senior official within Kos’s Church hired me four months ago to investigate a power failure. In my research, I learned of the god’s desire to aid our stone companions.” The nearest gargoyle lunged for his legs; a blinding flash erupted from the floor, and when Tara blinked the spots from her eyes, the Guardian lay in a fetal position, clutching his smoldering abdomen and surrounded by chips of broken stone. Denovo had not looked away from Justice, nor allowed the attack to interrupt the flow of his speech. Tara felt his voice more than heard it, familiar as a bad habit and every bit as compelling.

“A rift between god and clergy is dangerous at the best of times, and, Lady, these are not the best of times. Knowing my services as a specialist in deific reconstruction might be required, I sought a position as counselor to Kos’s creditors, having a personal inclination to represent their side in such engagements. I first learned of Judge Cabot’s death this afternoon, and was understandably horrified.”

Denovo raised one finger. “Thus far my testimony consists of my word against the Church, but I can prove that Shale,” pointing with his full hand, “did not kill Judge Cabot. In fact, he has nearly completed his mission unawares.”

“He doesn’t have any part of the Concern,” Tara objected. “I would have seen it.”

“Would you indeed, if it had been camouflaged by a paranoid god and a Judge made wise by decades of service?” Denovo raised one eyebrow. “I have a great deal of experience with such things. I can see. As can Lady Kevarian.”

“It’s true,” Tara’s boss said, voice steady and sharp. “I can see it within him.” No sign of stress, but she agreed so readily. Had she and the Professor inhaled at the same time? The hair on the back of Tara’s neck rose. Against either of them, she was outmatched. Against both, she would be a child set against an avalanche.

“Constructs of Craft,” Denovo said, “cannot be taken from a person without his consent. An untrained individual may be tortured, or tricked, into relinquishing one, but Judge Cabot spent too long in the shadows to be fooled, or swayed by torture. Pain was just one more sensation for him.” Revolving on his heels, he took three measured steps and came to rest in front of Shale, immobilized in iron. “Shale does not know what he carries. There was time only for the Judge to pass on his burden, not explain it. Allow me to produce this evidence for the court.”

Shale was tense with terror. He shook his head, but could not protest through his iron gag.

“He is,” the Professor noted, “distracted and fearful, thus uncooperative. But if he does not know how to help himself, I will have to take on the burden of assisting him.”

Denovo extended one hand, fingers splayed, and closed his eyes.

Every light in the grand hall flickered and grew dim. Denovo shook with tension. A silver mist rose from the slick stone of Shale’s body and hung around him like a halo. The gargoyle began to scream.

Tara closed her eyes, too. The Professor was a spider of thorn and wire, limbs innumerable and barbed. His claws struck into the tangle of Shale’s soul and began to pry.

He pierced knots of empathy and love and compassion, and seized something beneath them, a core of absence in Shale’s heart, a tightly wound ball of invisible threads. Opening her eyes, Tara saw the mist tinged with reddish gold. Denovo’s face was a sweat-slick mask, his lips peeled to bare white teeth. He was not enjoying his work. However Kos and the dead Judge had protected the key to their Concern, Denovo was straining even to see, let alone to extract, it.

He stood vulnerable before her. Her fingers flexed, preparing to summon her knife. She could strike him down, and be slain by Blacksuits. Who would subsequently consider her case a fabric of lies, and find the gargoyles guilty. The Church would never benefit from her discoveries. Abelard would lose his god. But she would have her revenge.

Was that enough?

She forced her fingers to relax.

Besides, Blacksuits were fast. She might not be able to kill him in time.

Torn free of Shale’s body, the mist rose and coalesced into a rotating sphere made from interlocking rings of fire and ruby-orange light. The cold hall felt suddenly warm, its immensity confining.

Denovo smiled in cold triumph. He looked as she remembered him on the day he threw her from the Hidden Schools. Reflected in his eyes, that fiery sphere was every horror in the world. He reached out to grasp it.

With a silent apology to Abelard, Tara clenched her hand into a fist and gathered her power to strike. She undid her bonds with a charm and a whispered word. Iron slipped from her, and unburdened, she raised her knife.

Then the skylight shattered, and shards of glass and fire rained down.

*

Roiling flame scored the rough marble floor, and a column of coherent fire engulfed Alexander Denovo. Crying out, the bound gargoyles rolled back from the blast, their iron restraints clattering on stone. Tara threw up her arm and hardened the air above her into a dome to block falling shards. Ms. Kevarian did not duck, did not call upon her power, did not betray any sign of shock. Which settled the question for Tara: Denovo must have gotten to her somehow.

Bastard.

A wave of fire scattered Blacksuits and prisoners both. Raz fell, screaming, and rolled to extinguish the flames caught on his jacket.

The sphere of ruby-orange light revolved in midair, unperturbed by the chaos.

A robed figure descended through the broken skylight.

A deep bass rumble shook the hall, and the pillar of fire about Denovo broke like morning mist to reveal him, scorched but shimmering with protective Craft. His right hand rose to the glyph above his heart, and a knife of lightning flashed in his grip, ascending through the mystic and deadly curve of Kethek Loes, blade bearing shadow and swift death.

Before he could complete the motion, flame struck again, surgically precise. Denovo’s shield muted the heat of the blow, but its impact tossed him across the hall like a twig in a tornado. He slammed into the floor twenty feet back and skidded.

The figure hovered above the marble and debris, wreathed in fire. Its robe was brilliant crimson, its hood pulled back. The face thus revealed, contorted in the throes of righteous anger, belonged to Cardinal Gustave.

*

Abelard took cover beneath his robe when the skylight caved in. The clustered stone bodies of the Guardians shielded him from the fire. Heat seared his face, scalded his nostrils. His clothes were burning. His cigarette, at least, remained undamaged, and with hasty handwork he preserved it as he rolled over broken glass to extinguish the smoldering rest of him.

Recovering, he glanced about himself, and took stock. Denovo stood pinioned by a spear of flame, unharmed but immobile, forearms crossed before his face. The arrayed Blacksuits did not move; the Guardians struggled in futility against their chains to rise, to fight. Captain Pelham flailed, but could not extinguish the flames devouring his flesh and his clothing. Tara stood near Denovo, alert and ready to ward off attack. Abelard’s gaze rose to the figure in midair.

“Father!” he cried, but his voice did not carry.

Professor Denovo’s, on the other hand, overruled all other sound. “Cardinal,” he said, sly and stable, betraying no sign of strain. “Pleasure as always. Have you joined us for some evening conversation? A spot of theological discourse perhaps?”

Rage filled Gustave’s face and form. “You have poisoned this assembly with your lies.”

“What lies? You must have heard Tara as you lurked up there: Judge Cabot was killed by a cleric of Kos, with the god’s own stolen power. I wonder if you can help us compile a list of suspects. We’re looking for someone who can fly and call upon the fire of a dead god. About your height and build, I’d say.”

“Traitor!” Gustave cried. A second line of flame struck Denovo with the force of divine judgment. Smoke rose from the Professor’s jacket. His defenses trembled, but held. “I name you traitor, Alexander Denovo. You gave me this blasphemous power to ward against a greater blasphemy. I will use your own gift to destroy you.”

“You’re not improving your predicament, my Lord Cardinal,” Denovo replied. “What do you hope to gain by attacking a man in the presence of Justice herself?”

Gustave’s lips twisted in a sneer. “Justice cannot move while I press the attack. My every strike against you drains her. My God will be avenged.”

Abelard smelled smoke. Was his robe still burning? Glancing over his shoulder, he jumped to see Ms. Kevarian five feet behind him, apparently unperturbed, though her skin and suit had been torn by falling glass, and her black jacket was on fire. She betrayed no sign of pain.

Her lips moved. He could not hear her words. Abelard looked from her to the Cardinal and back. Flares of color surrounded the man as if he were a saint in stained glass, lit from behind by a setting sun.

Abelard encircled Ms. Kevarian in his cloak and bore her to the ground. She lay unresisting amid the debris as he smothered the flames under heavy folds of cloth. Blinking, she seemed to recognize him. When he laid the back of his hand on her forehead, he found it cold and damp, like a stone wall after a long night—feverish compared to the ice of her earlier touch.

“Lady Kevarian,” he shouted over the clash. “Are you okay?”

Her body was stiff, almost lifeless, but her mouth moved. The same movements, over and over again. A single word.

“Lady?” He bent forward. “I can’t hear you.” He lowered his ear to her lips, and understood.

“Dagger,” she repeated, over and over.

He turned, not to Professor Denovo, nor to Cardinal Gustave, nor to the Guardians nor Tara, but to Cat, wrapped, trapped, in her Blacksuit. She held the crystal knife Abelard had discovered in the Sanctum’s boiler room.

The drop of blood within its transparent blade glowed more brilliantly with every blast that issued from Cardinal Gustave.

Abelard had forced himself to accept the thought of a priest as traitor, but the Cardinal? There had to be some reason, some explanation.

Abelard shot a worried glance at Ms. Kevarian. Dread command glinted in her eye.

Striking against Gustave was tantamount to heresy. Could stopping a murderer be heretical?

You may have to choose between the city you believe you inhabit, and Alt Coulumb as it exists in truth.

With an urgency born of fear, he left Ms. Kevarian and sprinted toward Cat. Behind him, the embers of the Craftswoman’s jacket burgeoned again into flame.

*

Tara heard Raz Pelham scream, and with a wave of her hand she quenched the fire that consumed him. He slumped, unconscious, but mostly intact. As her mind extinguished the flames, she felt within them inhuman power melded to malevolent human will.

This fire was not born of mortal Craft. Subtle, divine workings gave form and strength to Gustave’s rage: millions of strands of spider silk vibrating like bowed violin strings, their friction creating insatiable flames.

You gave me this power, Cardinal Gustave had said. Of course. Who else would Gustave have asked to build the Craft circle, other than the man he trusted to maintain Justice? What other Craftsman would have done such a thing, in violation of all professional ethics?

“Help me, Tara!” Sweat slicked Denovo’s pale skin and wet the curls of his beard. His arms shook as he blunted Gustave’s attack with power stolen from students and teachers and distant gods. When Tara saw him with closed eyes, he glowed like a neon prayer wheel. She could not have resisted the Cardinal’s fury for more than a few seconds. For all Denovo’s power, he could barely manage it. “He murdered Judge Cabot.”

Yes, Tara thought. With tools you gave him. This would be a neat revenge, and all she had to do was watch.

“I do not murder.” Gustave’s voice was low and dangerous, a hiss of snow in a mountain pass, the omen of an avalanche. “I am an agent of my Lord’s wrath.”

Looking at Gustave was like staring into the heart of the sun. One instant he possessed all colors, the next none, fading to a bruised gray in Tara’s vision.

She could sit back and observe the battle, but Gustave had not yet admitted to the Judge’s murder. Justice was present, though she could not intervene. His confession would save the gargoyles, if any of them survived. “Cardinal,” she shouted, “did you kill Judge Cabot?”

“I killed him. I would kill all who dare plot against Lord Kos.”

Yes. Keep him talking. The more he said, the safer the gargoyles would be. “He wasn’t plotting. He served your god!”

“Gods go mad, as do men. My Lord was sick at heart. When He recovered, He would have known my deeds for true faith. I prevented His desecration.”

“Like you’re doing now? Seizing his power this way—you’ve damaged his corpse more than Seril could have at Her greediest.”

“Tara,” Denovo cried. “Help me. We can defeat him together.”

She ignored him. “Stop, Cardinal. Don’t hurt Kos any more than you have already. He wanted peace between the city and the Guardians.”

“They are vermin!” The word echoed like clashing thunder, but beneath a god’s wrath she heard the weak and railing anger of a very old man. “Flying rats, lurking in the forgotten heights of our city. Should I let them sully my Lord with their claws?”

“You plotted Cabot’s murder for months, ever since you learned what Kos asked him to do. Installing that Craft circle, learning the soul-binding technique. Did you ever ask your god for an explanation, in all that time?”

Tears glimmered in bright wet lines on Gustave’s face. “Why would my Lord give so much to a pack of monsters?”

“He would have told you. You should have trusted him.”

“He would have pitied me for not understanding! My Lord, my Master, my Friend would have pitied me for being unable to love these.” He spat that word down on the Guardians.

“If you really feel that way,” Tara shouted back, “maybe you never loved him in the first place.”

Her heart froze as that sentence left her lips, and she realized it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. Gustave’s ferocity turned upon her. She braced her legs and raised her arms. Fire struck her from on high, and she almost fell.

Almost.

*

Cat was lost. The cosmic high of union with Justice had ebbed, drawing her with it into depths where the world spun in contrary directions and no air reached her lungs when she breathed. Justice’s song twisted her through itself, and she was a note tossed on its immensity like flotsam on a tidal wave. She lay beneath the surface, a drowned woman, and through the shifting black water she saw distorted Abelard approach, backlit by rosy flame.

“Cat!”

His voice fell on ears that did not belong to her, and though she tried to reply, a wall of stone closed up her mouth. Her body was not her own, lent away and the lessee absent.

His face was caught in the writhing shadows of the firefight.

“Cat! The Cardinal’s gone mad!”

She had heard, but memory was such a fragile thing, ephemeral and unreliable as breath.

“That dagger in your hand.” His mouth wide, a gaping pit, yet his eyes were wider. “He draws power through it, from Kos.”

What did he expect her to do? A Blacksuit’s will belonged to Justice, and Justice was silent.

Which, she realized dreamily, was unusual.

Her attention drifted down, and she saw the dagger clutched in fingers that once belonged to her. Abelard wrapped his arm in his robe and struck the crystal blade, but it held and he fell back, a sharp red cut on his forearm where the dagger had sliced through his coarse robe.

“Are you going to let the Cardinal kill Tara? The Guardians? You think he’ll let them live with what they’ve seen, what they know?” He gripped her shoulders, but she did not feel the pressure of his hands. “Help us, Cat.”

*

Fire crisped and consumed Tara’s world, endless, hungry, insensate. She had never fought a god before. If Kos Everburning raised himself against her, she would have perished in an instant. Flush with divine power, Cardinal Gustave still lacked a god’s mastery of the energies he invoked. Even so, Tara buckled beneath the ferocity of his flames.

“Tara!” Denovo’s voice was no longer smooth or collected. She heard fear at its edges. “We can throw him back if we work together.” His mind skittered against the doors of her perception, cool, a refuge from the heat—an invitation to rejoin the link he shared with his lab, to give herself once more to him. “Please. Let me in.”

Without his help, she was going to die. With his help, she would probably die anyway.

But why did Denovo need her? He fought in the God Wars. He knew better than to match deities stroke for stroke. You dodged their power, twisted it against itself, stretched your divine Opponents thin. Cardinal Gustave should have been vulnerable to such tactics, but Denovo seemed desperate for her help, and her surrender.

Was that truly fear she heard in his voice, or the excitement of a con man who feels he has caught his mark?

Tara stood firm against the Cardinal’s assault. As dead Kos’s power pressed against her, she shifted.

Mind, soul, spirit, twisted out of reach. The fire sought her, found her not, and thrashed about, desperate for something to destroy.

As if releasing a bird from her hand, she offered it the seductive tendrils of Denovo’s mind.

Blind, hungry, and mad, the fire accepted.

*

Elayne Kevarian followed the beacon of Alexander Denovo’s pain through thick fog back into her body. Opening her eyes, she found herself prone on the unfinished marble floor of the Great Hall of Justice, beneath the gaze of a blind statue and surrounded by a thousand Blacksuits. She was wounded—deep gashes from fallen glass, myriad scrapes and bruises. And she was on fire.

Perfect.

She breathed in, and became cold. The flames caught on her suit flickered, flared, died. Ms. Kevarian felt their death, and their power flowed into her skin like warm sunlight on a summer morning.

A sword-slash smile played on her lips.

*

The Cardinal’s features twisted in confusion as the fire he threw against Tara struck Denovo instead. The Craftsman’s defenses did not break under this doubled assault. If anything, Denovo seemed less pressed than before. His shoulders squared, his arms steadied, and the stress cracks in his shield disappeared. Though Gustave was nearly blinded by God’s brilliant flame, he saw Denovo shake his head.

“Tara,” Denovo said, “you should have joined with me. It would have been more pleasant for us both.”

Denovo shifted his defenses to his left arm, and reached out with his right, fingers clawed as if to grasp Gustave’s throat. The claw tightened, and though Gustave was ignorant of all but the most fundamental tricks of Denovo’s heathen Craft, he recognized breaking power in that gesture. He twitched in an involuntary spasm of fear.

But he felt nothing.

*

Tara saw victory on Denovo’s face as he closed his hand. That gesture was a trigger, invoking a contract with a shred of nightmare, a rat in the walls of reality—the shadow creature in Gustave’s Craft circle. Denovo must have planted the shadow when he made the circle, as insurance against the Cardinal’s betrayal. He commanded it now to destroy the dagger through which Gustave drew his power. But Abelard had released the shadow creature hours ago, and Cat held the dagger.

When Denovo closed his hand, he expected the flame to die, and the old man to fall. Instead, Gustave redoubled his assault, and Denovo fell to his knees, betrayed by his own frustrated anticipation of success. Veins in his forehead bulged as he fought to regain control. Tara would have crowed in triumph, but a dozen new lances of flame descended on her from all directions as the Cardinal screamed, “Heretics! Blasphemers!”

*

“Help us.”

It was the plea of a drowning man.

Cat knew what those sounded like. She had spent her entire life drowning.

Abelard needed her.

The world was a weight on her shoulders, so she let it bow her to the ground. Kneeling, she turned her wrist, as if it were the wrist of a marionette. Her arm was heavy. She aimed the point of the crystal dagger at the stone floor.

Her arm fell, and she leaned into it, exercising every scrap of her control over the Blacksuit. The dagger’s point struck stone.

The crystal blade held. She sagged in despair.

It snapped.

*

There are as many different kinds of silence as of darkness. Some are so fragile a single breath will shatter them, but others are not so weak. The strongest silences deafen.

The flames of Kos died, and Cardinal Gustave fell screaming. He landed with a sound like a bundle of snapped twigs and lay gasping on the floor, red robes billowed out around him.

A small noise escaped Abelard, as though a mouse was being strangled in his throat. It was not a lament or a protest. It was too confused to be any of these things.

The nerves of limbs and stomach and heart moved him forward, though his brain remained transfixed by the sight of the Cardinal’s twisted body. The ground shook as he approached the pool of red cloth and blood in which the old man lay.

Behind him, the world moved on. He heard raised voices—Tara’s, the Professor’s, sounds with no more meaning than the glass that broke like new spring ice beneath his boots. Even the heavy acid taste of smoke in his mouth felt distant. The gold-thread hem of the Cardinal’s robe surrounded him like a mystic circle. Abelard crossed it, and fell to his knees.

The Cardinal still breathed. It was worse, almost, this way. Thin parched lips peeled back to reveal rows of bright teeth set in gums more scarlet than his robe. Air rattled in the cave of the old man’s mouth, fast and shallow. His eyes were open. They sought Abelard’s automatically, and the mouse in Abelard’s throat cried out again.

Fifteen years ago, Abelard arrived at the Temple of Kos, eager to learn. Of all the priests and priestesses who taught him to glorify the Lord, this man had been, not the kindest, but the most worthy of admiration.

Fire, the Church taught, was life, energy’s ever-changing dance upon a stage of decaying matter. Every priest and priestess, every citizen, had one duty before all else to their Lord: to recognize the glory of that transformation.

Abelard looked into the Cardinal’s dying eyes, and saw within them no fire but that which consumes.

He inhaled. The tip of his cigarette flared orange.

Dying, Cardinal Gustave smiled.

*

Tara’s senses were numb with exaltation at her survival, but there was no time to rejoice. Alexander Denovo staggered toward her, toward the bound gargoyles, toward the orange sphere that hovered above Shale’s slumped form.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said, and blocked his path. Her legs threatened to collapse beneath her, but she steadied herself by main force of will.

“Do you indeed.” Wisps of smoke rose from the brown curls of his hair, and scorch marks covered his clothes.

“You made that Craft circle. You gave Gustave power.”

“He asked me for a weapon against heretics.”

“And you gave him one.”

“I sold him one, at a hefty price.” Denovo shrugged. “You would have done the same. If you wouldn’t, perhaps you should re-evaluate your line of work. The Craft isn’t a charitable pursuit.”

“If all you did was give him a weapon, then why did he try to kill you?”

“Because I was about to expose him. Honestly, Tara, what is the point of this?”

“Cardinal Gustave didn’t attack because he was afraid for himself. He attacked because you were about to acquire something you should not have.”

Denovo chuckled. “Gustave was mad. A murderer. He confessed as much.”

“He confessed to killing Judge Cabot. He thought you were guilty of a greater crime.”

He tried to skirt around her, but she stepped in front of him again.

“Four months ago, Gustave asked you to help him learn why Justice was losing power. You traced the dreams Kos sent into the forest, to Seril’s children. You discovered that Kos was working with Cabot, and to what end.”

Denovo shrugged, every bit the tired scholar.

“Was it you or the Cardinal, I wonder, who proposed killing the Judge?”

“I don’t have to listen to this.”

“For someone with your skills, persuading the Cardinal was easy. Cabot was a heretic, consorting with rebels and traitors. He deserved to die. You gave Gustave the means. You taught him how to bind Cabot’s soul. You even told him which contracts to deface in the Third Court of Craft, and how to do it without being detected.”

“Conjecture and foolishness.”

“Cabot suspected you were onto him. That’s why he installed security wards that could detect Craft. This isn’t the West. The community of Craftsmen here is small and insular. The Judge had no enemies there. Hell, the locks on his apartment building wouldn’t keep out a novice.”

Denovo drew a step closer. Tara took a step back.

“You left Alt Coulumb several months ago, secretly as you had come, but you intended to return. You knew from court records when Cabot would pass the Concern to Seril. You had months to plan your attack.”

“Here we go,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “Accuse me.”

“You organized the assault on the Iskari treasure fleet. You were the Craftsman who negotiated the Iskari defense contract, and you knew that it was the best weapon for your purposes. Your mercenaries attacked, and the Iskari drew on Kos’s power to defend themselves, not knowing that Kos was already drained by his secret dealings. Kos couldn’t stand the strain, and died. At your hand.”

No flush of outrage came to Alexander Denovo’s face. “Why, in this fantasy of yours, did I need Gustave to kill Cabot?”

“You wanted that Concern,” she replied, cocking her head back in the direction of the rotating sphere. “Kos had more power than all your minions put together. You could feast for years on his corpse. But you couldn’t get the Concern from Cabot by force, and if he died without passing it on, it would dissipate, no use to you or anyone.

“You could, however, force Cabot to give the Concern to someone weaker. You taught Gustave a way to kill the Judge without being detected, which also left his victim alive long enough to pass the Concern to someone else. You expected Cabot would give it to his butler, but the butler didn’t find him first. Shale did, and he escaped. You must have been furious when you learned that bad timing had wrecked your plan. But the situation could still be salvaged. Shale, you reasoned, did not know what he carried. Cabot, by the time Shale found him, had no tongue, no throat, and was barely sane; he could not have explained the situation to a Guardian ignorant of Craft. Nor would Shale’s people flee Alt Coulumb after Cabot’s murder: they had staked too much on their deal with Kos to be so easily stymied. The Blacksuits would find Shale and his Flight eventually, and you would trick Justice into letting you claim the Concern, as you almost did a few minutes ago.”

“What proof do you have?” Denovo said archly. “If you lack documentary evidence, at least call witnesses like a civilized person. Say, those mercenaries you claim I hired.”

“You took their memories after the job was complete.”

“Impossible.”

“Not for the greatest Craftsman mentalist in the history of the Hidden Schools. You tried to wipe Captain Pelham’s mind last night. You were hasty, obvious; you must have been terrified when you realized Ms. Kevarian had hired him to escort us to Alt Coulumb. You had to destroy him before he let something slip that would implicate you.”

“I’ve been in the Skeld Archipelago all week. I only arrived this morning, on the ferry. Unless you think I could accomplish such delicate work from halfway around the world.”

“You were in Alt Coulumb last night, not Skeld.”

“A ferrymaster, and a hundred twenty passengers, will corroborate my story. Every one saw me arrive this morning.”

“Where were you before the ferry?”

“My hotel in Skeld. Really, Tara, I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make.”

“You weren’t in Skeld yesterday evening. You were in Alt Coulumb. This morning you flew out and circled back around.”

“The city is a no-fly zone.”

“You could get around that.”

“Circumvent a divine interdict? Perhaps you can tell me how to manage such a miracle.”

“Simple. All you need is something built to be stronger than gods.” Tara took another step back. She was not afraid, but if she was right—and she was right—she wanted space between herself and the Professor.

She was new to Alt Coulumb, but in the last two days she had stood upon its rooftops and crouched in its basements, visited its sick and swam in its oceans. She had walked the mind of its god and traced the paths of his wounds. In two days, she had not once seen the city’s sky bare of clouds, yet never had its air seemed humid, nor had the clouds threatened to break into storm. Alt Coulumb was usually clear in the autumn, Cat had said, because of the trade winds.

Weather was difficult to control, subject to the earth’s shifting in its orbit and to the whims of the moon. Craftsmen and Craftswomen tampered with rain and cloud only in extremity. But more than a hundred years ago, the builders of the first sky-cities had learned that floating buildings were difficult to defend, and easy to conceal.

The skin beneath the cleft of Tara’s collarbone bore a tiny blue circle, the first glyph she had ever received: the Glyph of Acceptance that marked her as a student of the Hidden Schools, entitled to take refuge there in times of need. That privilege had not been revoked at her graduation. Even a prodigal daughter might one day return home.

Tara pressed the tattoo, and it glowed. A tiny gap appeared in the cloud cover beyond the broken skylight, dilating rapidly as a cat’s pupil in darkness. An electric chill passed through her.

Starlight shone through the gap in the clouds. Far above, trapped between earth and heaven, hung the crystal towers and gothic arches and double-helix staircases of the Hidden Schools. Walkways of silver ribbon stretched from building to building, and scholars paced on the balconies. Atop one crenellated dormitory, a corpse-fire glowed, students no doubt clustered about it, drinking and telling stories and maybe making love.

No shimmering staircase of starlight descended from Elder Hall, no rainbow bridge to bear her home. The schools’ Craft of Ingress fought Kos’s interdict as machines fight, deadlocked in absolute certainty. The schools themselves were mightier than the interdict, but the Craft of Ingress had been designed to admit eager young scholars, not extract Craftswomen from the heart of a god’s own territory.

Fortunately, Tara did not want to leave Alt Coulumb. The parting of the clouds was enough for her purposes. She inhaled shadow and starfire. Night adhered to her skin and flowed into her mind.

“You brought the schools here,” she said, “and used their camouflage to obscure the stars and moon, weakening the Guardians and Craftswomen set against you. It was the schools’ broader no-fly zone, not Alt Coulumb’s, which interrupted Ms. Kevarian’s flight yesterday and almost killed us both.

“The schools gave you an excellent alibi. It may be impossible to wipe a man’s mind from a hundred miles away, but a thousand feet of altitude is no obstacle for a master like you. The Hidden Schools are broader than that from end to end, and you wove your commands through my classmates’ minds and mine with no trouble.”

Denovo’s stern expression yielded to a childlike smile. “Tara.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “You amaze me.”

“You killed Kos Everburning, Professor.”

“What do you expect to accomplish with this posturing? If you want a fight, strike me and get it over with.”

“Justice is watching,” she said.

“Justice is blind. I blinded her myself, twenty years before you were born.” He removed one hand from his pocket and examined the blunt tips of his fingers. “If you hope these automata will descend on me like a parliament of rooks on a bad storyteller”—he gestured to the motionless Blacksuits—“you’ve forgotten the first law of design. Never make anything that can be used to hurt you. They’ll remain where they stand until I finish my business.”

For the first time since Cardinal Gustave burst in the skylight, Tara truly looked at the Blacksuits. They did not twitch from their immobile rows. “You’ve done horrible things.”

“Not as horrible as you, or your boss.” He shook his head, tone still conversational. “You deserted our side long ago, as did a great many Craftsmen. You settled for a pleasant illusion, the facile lie that we could have peace with gods. You gave up on the dream.”

“You’re one of the most powerful Craftsmen in the world. What more do you want?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not a god yet.”

Tara blinked. “What?”

“You said I wanted Kos’s power. Clever but wrong. Power I have. It’s godhood I want. Immortality and might, free of sickness and decay.”

“Impossible.”

“Hardly. It’s a logical extension of the first principles of Craft. I struck on the idea while at school. Gods draw strength from faithful masses. Couldn’t a Craftsman do the same? It took years to work out the ramifications of that insight. I took my first tender steps with Elayne four decades ago, winning her trust to tap her power for myself. She noticed, and defeated me, but I elaborated on my theory by creating the Blacksuits, believers tied to their god by sick need rather than mutual love.”

He smiled nostalgically. “I built my lab and consumed the strength of my dear students and colleagues. I became the most powerful Craftsman on this continent. What then? Rot into a skeleton? Flee death from one decaying body to the next? Or take arms against a god, slay him, and become him? I can climb through that Concern into Kos’s body and take his place at the center of Alt Coulumb’s unassailable faith. I will make this such a city as has never been seen, a fiery flood sweeping across the globe. I could hardly believe when the opportunity fell within my grasp.”

“A shame that it’s slipping away.” Tara’s knife flickered into being in her hand, a twist of moonlight curved like a fang.

Denovo’s grin didn’t fade. He started to shake his head, but then he moved, fast as an uncoiling spring. The distance between them evaporated. Dark energy roiled around his fist.

The colors of the world inverted and Tara was not flying but falling, her protective shadows broken and struggling vainly to reform. There was a fist-sized hole in her blouse that had not existed a moment ago, and she was bleeding.

The floor struck her shoulders—or was it the other way around?—and a brown wave rolled in from the corners of her vision to engulf her.

*

Denovo rubbed his palms together like a baker flouring his hands, and surveyed the ruined hall. A pack of gargoyles lay chained upon the floor. Tara, his dangerously persistent student, landed fifteen feet away, unconscious, blood leaking from the wound he had left in her gut. Elayne was spread-eagled on the ground nearby, twitching but immobile. She fought his control of her motor neurons, but had only succeeded in turning a pathetic, rough circle on the floor. The skinny priest knelt by his dead master.

The Concern hovered over the inert body of the Stone Man who had so nearly completed his mission. Who would have succeeded, had he known what he carried.

Denovo straightened the cuffs of his tweed jacket, brushed a few specks of glass and dust off the lapels, and advanced on the sphere of Craft that was the key to his divinity.

As he walked, he shot a jaunty salute at the statue of Justice. “Sorry you can’t see this, old girl. It’s beautiful.” A bound Stone Woman threw herself in his path; he kicked her out of his way with a broad sweep of Craft, and stepped beneath the sphere. It glowed ten feet overhead, out of reach.

The corners of his mouth cricked up into a smirk that did not reach his eyes. Inhaling, he constructed in his mind a framework of pulleys and wheels to lift him up. Exhaling, he called upon his students and colleagues in the Hidden Schools to convince Kos’s troublesome interdict that rising a handful of feet above the earth’s surface did not constitute flight.

On his second indrawn breath he rose a few inches, and on his exhale nearly a foot. His smile broadened. He reached out to grasp the revolving sphere, and felt for the first time in his life unmixed gratitude toward the universe.

Then one hundred forty pounds of bony, high-velocity Novice Technician hit him in the small of the back.

*

The dark waters about Cat parted when the Cardinal fell, but closed in again as love of Justice filled her mind, and with it, love of Denovo, Justice’s creator, who hovered above the earth, reaching for a pearl of orange light. Cat loved this man though he mocked Justice to Her face. Though he had killed a god. She loved him, and knew not why. She hated him for very good reasons.

She had seen Abelard turn from the Cardinal’s body and watch Tara confront Denovo. Abelard remained crouched, seemingly in mourning, waiting for the right moment. As Denovo rose toward his unearthly prize, the priest began to run.

He launched himself from the earth and struck the Craftsman from behind. They fell together, locked in combat. Abelard scrambled for a choke hold as they hit the ground, legs wrapped tight around the smaller man’s torso, but Denovo was built broad and dense like a wrestler, and twisted out of his adversary’s lock.

Cat struggled to break the bonds of love. Chemical passions warred in her breast. An addiction, like any other. Once more she pressed Raz Pelham’s fangs to her wrist.

Denovo broke Abelard’s hold. Lightning crackled about his clawed hand as he brought it down on the young priest’s chest.

For an instant, Denovo was a figure of deepest black with shock-white hair, standing before an audience of alabaster statues. When light and time righted themselves, Abelard lay still on the rough marble, the stub of his cigarette smoking where it protruded from his lips. Denovo rose to his feet.

Abelard’s chest did not move. Through the Blacksuit Cat could see further into the red and violet ranges than most humans, and she saw him grow cold.

Cat forgot love, forgot duty, forgot everything in the shock of that sight: Abelard, still as if sleeping. A taut piano string snapped within her chest. This pain was hers, and this grief. She was herself, Catherine Elle beneath the Blacksuit.

She remembered two things. First, she owned her body. Second, the Stone Men, chained on the floor, were innocent of the crime for which they had been charged. They should be freed.

*

Tara lay in a lake of silver, eyes half-closed, half-open in the dawn moment between sleep and waking. She felt arms around her, cool and comforting. She stared into deep green, endless eyes that were also her own. She remembered pain. She remembered Seril’s voice. “Permit me—”

Permit what?

Permit me to come inside.

Returning to her body, she had felt as if her soul were too large to fit her skin.

Seril’s were the eyes she opened in the Temple of Justice, and Seril’s was the heart that beat within her chest.

She felt her stomach, and found blood there but no pain. A web of moonlight closed her wound. She was not alone inside her mind. Seril overlaid her, silver and ancient and beautiful.

She heard eleven manacles spring open, and a chorus of vengeful roars from throats of stone. Flame crackled and lightning snapped and nameless powers clashed like deep brass cymbals.

She stood. The stars and moon shone through a hole in the clouds above. She felt every grain in the stone beneath her feet.

Her Guardians were free, and dancing.

Their dance did not go well. Three sprawled upon the ground, wings broken and silver flesh splintered, one dead and two dying. Aev, high priestess, great lady, wheeled in the air to strike with both claws against the translucent dome that shielded Denovo. Three others pressed the assault with her. A pair lay writhing in pain, trapped in nets of fine red threads that burned body and soul. Two more struggled to restrain a third, her eyes glazed and her movements puppetlike. David, too, battered against Denovo’s shield, but the Professor reserved his high and vengeful Craft for Guardians alone.

She saw every strike, every riposte, every counter, though faster than human eye could follow. Denovo moved like an orchestra conductor behind the electric mist of his shield.

She advanced upon the battle without walking; her feet hovered a few inches above the ground. Moonlight gave the Guardians’ arms strength and their wings speed and their claws power to pierce and rend and tear. Lightning struck Guardians Jain and Rael, and they collapsed, but Her light pulled them from the brink of death; boar-tusked Gar fell into a pit of infinite depth, but Her love became a long thin silver cord to draw him back. Moonlight closed about Ashe’s mind, and freed her from Denovo’s control.

Denovo turned his attention to Tara. Though his face was fixed in an expression of intense effort, his smile did not falter.

“You know,” he said through the roar and clash, “I nearly missed fighting in the God Wars. I was one of the youngest to join the battle.”

He spun Craft toward the orange sphere above, but She arrested it with moonlight. Thorns of shadow caught Aev, but She dulled their piercing tips. Denovo’s Craft lashed out at Tara as a bolt of flame, and She turned it aside.

Her thoughts came slowly now, and with effort.

“You’re not the first goddess I’ve fought,” he said, calm and cold. “You cannot abandon your faithful. I strike at what you love, and you protect it. When you’re stretched to the limit of your power, I squeeze. Just … a … bit.”

His eyes narrowed, and the thorns about Aev’s body were sharper, the hole into which Gar fell deeper, darker, hungrier, the spear of flame pointed at Tara’s heart more swift and sure.

With a sound like a ringing bell, the light of the world popped free from its perch in Tara’s skull and hung revealed before her, a beautiful woman of frostlight and stone bound to those she could not abandon by cords of her own making.

Tara’s wound reopened, and blood seeped through cracks in the cauterized flesh. Her mind was hollow, her own again, and the world not Seril’s but hers. The Guardians’ names she forgot, but she saw Cat curled in a fetal ball amid discarded iron restraints, trapped in a net of red wire. She had freed the Guardians. Good.

Ms. Kevarian lay on the ground, and next to her, Abelard. Unmoving.

“That’s the trouble with ties,” Denovo said. “They bind both ways.”

Denovo reached out with a rope of flame to draw the sphere toward him.

Tara screamed, wove starfire into her own rope, and lassoed the sphere. Denovo was a supernova of Craft. He pulled and she pulled and Seril pulled and the gargoyles redoubled their attack, and still the sphere approached his outstretched hand. He grinned.

Tara blinked, and the darkness endured.

*

Tara reclined in a leather armchair beneath a glittering chandelier. Ms. Kevarian stood across from her, dressed in a businesswoman’s black and in full control of herself.

Alexander Denovo sat in another chair to Tara’s left, mouth slack with shock.

“What the hell?”

“We are between instants,” Ms. Kevarian explained.

“How did you bring me here?”

“Ties bind both ways,” she observed. “I thought I would give you an opportunity to surrender.”

Denovo laughed outright. “Surrender? Apotheosis is within my grasp.”

“Don’t the odds trouble you?”

“I can hold out for the moments I require to assimilate Kos’s power.” He manifested a pipe out of dreamstuff and began to smoke it. “Then the opposition will fall.”

“I can’t guarantee your safety if you don’t surrender now.”

“When I am a god, Elayne, I will break you, body and soul.”

Her eyes and her voice were made of diamond. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“Boss—” But the moment slipped, and Tara fell between earth and heaven.

*

Alexander Denovo whirled within his protective dome, and through electric distortion saw Elayne Kevarian, standing. He ordered her to sit, to surrender, to die, but his commands rolled off the ice of her mind. The young priest’s body lay prone at her feet. A curving design, wet, red, and intricate, glimmered on the floor around them.

Breath caught in his throat.

Elayne Kevarian had lain prone under his control, twitching, pathetic, circling in place, bloody fingers grasping at pale stone. She had completed the circle. Drawn it in her own blood, worked it with sigils crude in their calligraphy but elegant in their architecture.

She stood within a resurrection circle, over a dead priest whose lips still clutched a smoldering cigarette. But this circle was not drawn for a man. It was drawn for a god.

Denovo called on all his Craft, releasing the gargoyles and their goddess and Tara, everything save for his hold on the fiery sphere. He threw doom and lightning against Elayne and rent the earth beneath her feet and cast her into the outer hells, or tried. Shadow seeped from her, devouring starlight and torchlight and his Craft alike. The blood circle blazed the myriad colors of pure white light.

Within the shadow, within the circle, the flame of a cigarette tip flared.

*

Abelard fell. It was a familiar sensation.

He fell farther, faster, and this time the fire did not merely linger at the edge of his vision and the borders of his mind. It burst upon him in a flood. It charred his soul and burnt his body to a cinder. It danced upon him the dance that destroyed and renewed. This fire was the heartbeat of the world. The fire was love. The fire was life.

The fire was his God.

A faint remnant of his logical mind remembered that for some reason, though he had smoked constantly since his Lord’s death, in three days he had not once used a lighter or a match. Always he passed flame from one cigarette to the next.

He surrendered to God. Every breath of smoke lingering in his lungs, every trace of fire that calmed him in his hours of need, he gave them forth freely.

He was the size of a city, the size of the world, the size of the universe, smaller than the smallest atom. He was ash, and he burned eternal in a million suns.

Brilliant and new as a phoenix, Kos the Everburning rose from the ember at the tip of Abelard’s cigarette.

*

There is a space beyond or beneath the world, where all that is not, which creates all that is, collects and congregates. Shadow dances and wars with light there. Life and mind play their eternal game of flight and pursuit.

That place looks like nothing the human mind can grasp, so think of it as a bar: polished wood, brass fixtures, dim lights, beer.

A woman sat alone, beautiful and lost and full of rage so old it had become a dull ache deadening every newborn sensation. She cradled a half-empty pint glass.

A man entered the bar from a door that had not been there before. He stood waiting for a thousand years as they measured time, but she did not acknowledge him.

He looked more lost than she, and more recently wounded. He opened his mouth to speak, but had no words in whatever tongue they used. He reached for her. Placed his hand on her shoulder.

For another millennium she did not respond to his touch.

She stared into the dregs of her glass. Her arm floated slowly upward, against the weight of history.

She closed her hand around his.

*

Tara heard Denovo scream, an ugly sound full of desire and thwarted ambition. Shadow rolled from Ms. Kevarian’s circle to obscure the world. The air grew warm.

Fire broke reality.

She closed her eyes on reflex, and was nearly blinded in her second sight as webs of god-flame spun through Alt Coulumb with a speed beyond speed. The numberless threads that kept Kos’s city running had hung slack; now they snapped taut as a spring-loaded trap. Across town, fire erupted on the altars of Kos’s Sanctum. A beacon of holy light shone atop the Sanctum tower; a cry issued from the crowd below, wordless and exultant as the shadows vanished from their faces. Their candle flames leapt for joy.

Here in Justice’s Hall, the Concern bloomed and fell like the folds of a bridal veil upon the silver shade that was Seril Green-Eyed. Denovo’s defenses shriveled and snapped.

It was possible, Tara had said to Abelard, for a god to hide himself from obligations within the faith of his disciples, letting all but his consciousness die. It hurt more than death, and only the strongest deities could endure the pain for long. But it was possible. If you were powerful and your need was great—if, for example, this were the only way to save your long-lost love and avenge a grave crime, and if you knew that the fatal draw on your power would soon pass, leaving your body unharmed and ripe for rehabitation—you just might manage it.

Kos was awake once more, strong, and angry.

Seril vanished. Tara heard a great grinding of stone and looked up. The statue of Justice opened the pits of its eyes, and they blazed green.

Denovo hunched into a fighting crouch, knife out, nostrils flaring. The Guardians lurched out of striking range, but David was not so fast, and Denovo’s knife slashed, sharp as thought.

Tara was faster. She reached David in a step, thrust him out of the way, and intercepted Denovo’s knife with her own. The two blades met in arcs of light. Denovo’s broke.

The Blacksuits moved.

Fifty fell upon Denovo, but Cat beat them all, grasping his neck as her colleagues wrapped arms of iron about his limbs and body. Craft struck him, too: the Craft of Elayne Kevarian.

His eyes rolled white, and he fell limp.

Tara stepped back.

Breath came heavy in her throat.

She turned from the unconscious professor to her boss. Ms. Kevarian was covered in cuts and bruises, fingers bloody and clothing charred.

At her feet sat Novice Technician Abelard, rubbing his forehead. An extinguished cigarette dangled from his lips.