Three Parts Dead

PROLOGUE

God wasn’t answering tonight.

“Glory to Thy Flame, Thou Everburning, Ever-transforming Majesty,” Abelard chanted, kneeling, before the glistening brass and chrome altar. He hated this part, after the call, when he waited for the response—when he waited and tried to tell himself everything was fine. If there were a real problem, warning flags would fall from the ceiling, alarms would sound, and higher-ups of the Crimson Order would rush in through the side doors, angry and officious.

If there were a real problem, plain Novice Technician Abelard, so young he still needed to shave the inside of his tonsure, wouldn’t be all alone to deal with it.

Yet this was Abelard’s fifth repetition of the prayer in the last hour. Five times he had bowed his head before the glorious Heart-Fire of the Lord, crackling eternally in its metal cage, five times said the words and opened his soul, brimming with devotion. He felt the flickering warmth in his heart, felt the divine heat that flowed from the altar to power the massed, frightful city of Alt Coulumb beyond the Sanctum walls. But the numinous presence of the Lord of Flame …

Well, it wasn’t there.

It was a painful two thirty in the morning, which was why Abelard was on duty and not some bishop or elder priest. Lord Kos the Everburning had to be praised every moment of every day, of course, but some periods of rapturous worship were considered preferable to others. Abelard was tired, and though he wouldn’t admit it, he was starting to worry.

He rose, turned from the altar, and reached into an inside pocket of his robe for a cigarette.

Savoring his first acrid breath of smoke, he walked to the window that dominated the rear wall of the Inner Sanctum, twenty feet tall and forty feet broad. Alt Coulumb spread out beyond the glass in spiderwebs of spun steel and granite blocks. An elevated train wound between the sharp metal spires of the Business District to the north, trailing steam exhaust into the slate-black sky. Invisible to the east beyond the Pleasure Quarters’ domes and palaces, the ocean rolled against the freight docks, marking the city’s edge with its ceaseless wash. The city of a nation—the city that was a nation.

Ordinary Inner Sanctums did not have windows, but then, Kos Everburning was not an ordinary deity. Most gods preferred to have privacy on earth and watch their people from the distant serenity of the heavens. Kos had survived the God Wars in part because He was not the type to wall Himself off from the world. You got a better angle on humanity from down here, He claimed, than from on high.

What Gods thought near was often distant for man, though, and even as Lord Kos took pleasure in His Sanctum’s proximity to His people, Abelard was comforted by its remove. From this window he could see the beauty of Alt Coulumb’s architecture, while the infinite small uglinesses of its inhabitants, their murders and betrayals, their vices and addictions, were so tiny as to be almost invisible.

He exhaled a plume of smoke and said to the city, “All right. Now let’s see if we can’t get you fired up.”

He turned around.

In the aftermath it seemed to him that everything had gone a little out of order.

First, several doors burst open at once, and a number of bearded men in crimson robes rushed in, toss-haired and bleary-eyed and recently roused from sleep. All were shouting, and a disconcerting plurality of them were staring angrily at Abelard.

Then the alarms went off. All of them.

It is difficult for people who have never tended an Inner Sanctum to comprehend the number of things that can go wrong within one: deific couplings might uncouple or misalign, grace exchangers overheat, prayer wheels spin free of their prayer axles. Every potential problem required a unique alarm to help technicians find and fix whatever needed to be found and fixed with all possible speed. Decades past, some brilliant priest had thought to give each alarm the voice of a different piece of praise music: the keening “Litany of the Burned Dead” for a steam breach, the “Song of Glorious Motion” for extra friction on the hydraulics, and so forth.

The music of a hundred choirs burst from every corner of the Sanctum, and clashed into cacophony.

One of the senior Crimson Priests approached poor Abelard, the butt of whose cigarette still smoldered between his lips.

Abelard saw then what he should have noticed first.

The fire. The Everburning flame, on the altar of the Defiant, caged within its throne.

It was gone.