Three Parts Dead

2

Shale recovered his senses soon after sunrise and discovered to his dismay that he was fleeing down a back alley, covered in blood. The sticky red fluid was everywhere—soaked into his clothes, drying in his hair. It dripped from his brow, rolled down his cheek into his mouth. Worst of all, it tasted good.

The blood wasn’t his most immediate problem. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw four black shadows with human shape, rough-featured as cave paintings, chasing him.

Blacksuits. Agents of Justice. The perfect police: you, a citizen, surrender your autonomy for one shift a day in exchange for a salary. Don a suit, and your mind is welded into the intricate network of Justice, seeking everywhere for criminals and enemies of the city. Justice patrols the streets and guards the populace. Justice is blind, but Justice sees all.

Justice was chasing him, implacable and tireless. It was only a matter of time before he faltered.

Goddess above, he was covered in blood. The last thing he remembered was climbing the façade of a tall building past immobile graven images of gargoyles toward a rooftop garden, to meet with Judge Cabot, the great fat man.

Another memory dawned out of rage-tinted mists: Cabot’s face, contorted in pain, screaming. Bleeding. Fire rolled in to consume Shale, consciousness fled him, and he had opened his eyes here.

If the Blacksuits were after him—omniscient Justice wondering no doubt how this apparently normal human could outlast her agents at a full sprint, ducking down side alleys and weaving between obstacles, there leaping a trash can, here climbing a chain-link fence in two massive pulls—if the Blacksuits were after him.… Was it possible he had lost his mind? Surely. Possible. If he had been betrayed.

Had he killed Cabot?

His mind recoiled from this prospect, but he couldn’t deny that a tiny part of him quickened in excitement at the thought of death. A tiny, desperate, hungry part.

Shit.

His people, his Flight, would know what to do, but they were hidden, and if he sought them, the Blacksuits would follow.

He needed a place of refuge, the last place they would look.

First, he had to evade pursuit. With stars set and the moon hidden in Hell, it was hard to change, but he had no other options. His heart beat faster, his nostrils flared. He stumbled forward, tripped, nearly face-planted onto the cobblestones. Smells and sounds rushed in to overwhelm him, muck and alley filth and the savory odor of fresh-fried dough from a street-side breakfast stand, the clatter of carriage wheels and the jingle of harness and the pounding of the Blacksuits’ feet. Sweet, transcendent power pulped his mind and turned his muscles into mush.

And transformed that mush to living rock.

The bones of his shoulders broke, warped, and became whole again. Wings of stone burst from his smooth granite back and fanned to taste the air. His jawbone swelled to anchor sharp and curved teeth. Frail, fleshy human hands and feet split and opened like tree buds in spring, his great talons flowering from within.

The world slowed.

He bounded forth faster than Blacksuits could follow, now on two legs, now on four, leaping from wall to wall, talons leaving deep grooves in stone. He did not have much strength left, but sweet Mother, he could run. He could fly.

He was bound once more for Al Cabot’s penthouse.

Behind him, the four Blacksuits stopped, their unearthly fluid motion transformed in an instant to the dead stillness of statues. They turned smooth, eyeless faces to one another, and if they conferred in some way that human beings could not hear, they gave no outward sign.

*

“Boss,” Tara asked when she woke and saw beneath her a rolling field of blue and green, “why are we over the ocean?”

Ms. Kevarian sat cross-legged in midair, the backs of her hands resting on her thighs, a meditating monk in a pinstriped suit. A corona of starfire clung to her skin, woven by her will into the platform that held them both aloft. Gone were the lightning and gale-force winds she had used to blow them across a continent. The air was clear and crisp, the sky the light purple of imminent dawn. Clouds loomed on the horizon.

“Why do you think?” Ms. Kevarian replied.

Tara opened her mouth to answer, closed it again, then said, “This is a test.”

“Of course it’s a test. Reasonable people do not answer questions with further questions. I know from your performance at the Hidden Schools that I want to work with you, but I have not seen your logical abilities firsthand. I do not know whether to treat you as an assistant, or an associate. Show me.”

A seagull flew beneath them as Tara thought. It looked up, squawked in astonishment, and plunged into a dive toward the water.

“There’s only one answer that makes sense,” Tara said at last, “but a piece of the evidence doesn’t fit.”

Ms. Kevarian nodded. “Continue.”

“We’re not going to another continent. Or to an island. Judging from the books you had me borrow, we’ve been retained for a more extensive case than you’d get on some Skeld Archipelago god-haven. Definitely on our side of the ocean—the New World, liberated territory. We were traveling east, and now we’re traveling west, so we couldn’t simply land at our destination. We had to fly past and wheel back around. We must be bound to a place where flying is restricted. In other words, a city still ruled by gods. But…”

“Yes?”

“If we’re going to Alt Coulumb, why can’t I sense it from here?”

Ms. Kevarian waited, and watched the western horizon with black, unblinking eyes. Below, amid the swells and breakers, Tara saw huge ships, tiny as toys from this height. Some sported sails bowed out by captive winds, others spouted thick gouts of smoke. Red-and-black ironwood hulls glowed with wards wrought by diligent Craftsmen. These were no mere bedraggled merchant vessels laden with cut-rate goods. On this coast of the New World, only Alt Coulumb could attract such a fleet. Two-thirds of all cargo from the Old World across the eastern ocean passed through that city’s mighty port, from Iskar and Camlaan and the sweltering Gleb, from the regimented realm of King Clock and the icy wastes that bowed to Dread Koschei. Caravans and traders by the thousands bought the ships’ wares in their turn, wholesale, and bore them west, up river and over road, to the free cities of Northern Kath.

“Everything else makes sense.” Tara squinted at the ribbon of land visible beyond the ocean and beneath the high, threatening clouds, but could not see details from this distance. A few sharp peaks that might be the tips of skyscrapers, that was all. “The defenses to the Alt’s west, south, and north are strong enough to keep us out. They’re a trading and shipping power, though, so their ports have to be open. But if that’s the home of Kos Everburning, the last divine city in the New World, I should be able to feel something, and I’m drawing a blank. No soulstuff, no starshine, no faith, no aura. As if the whole place were dead.”

Ms. Kevarian nodded. Tara held her breath. Was that nod a good sign, or a bad one? “Perhaps you require a change of focus, Ms. Abernathy. Close your eyes, and wait.”

She did. The world was black, stretching without pause save for Elayne Kevarian’s silhouette, a coruscating pattern of lightning whose every facet mirrored its whole. This much Tara expected. Through closed eyes, a Craftswoman could see behind and beneath the world of gross matter. Ms. Kevarian’s pattern was smudged, though, as if emptiness overflowed its edges.

Then the emptiness moved, and Tara realized it was not empty at all, but full of dim and pervasive light: a net of power more intricate than any human Craft Tara had ever seen, layer woven beneath layer upon layer, reaching to the heavens, plunging into the earth, arching over the sea. Within that net she felt the echoed, billowing heat of a distant fire.

“My god.” Tara’s jaw went slack. When she opened her eyes, Ms. Kevarian remained unmoved.

“Quite,” she said. “You’ve never dealt with deities before, have you?”

“Not directly.” She counted her breaths, and stilled her racing heart. “Once or twice at school, in a controlled environment. I know the theory, of course, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” Tara closed her eyes again, and sat amazed by the complexity ahead.

Divine Craft was less obvious than the mortal variety, much as the mechanisms of a living creature were less evident to human sight than those of springs and steel gears. Few Craftswomen could see a god’s work at first glance. Still, Tara had not expected the wards with which Kos shrouded his city to be so subtle, nor so large that she couldn’t find their edge.

The Craft was difficult to master, half art, half science, and an extra half bull-headed determination. Most people could barely light a candle using their own soulstuff, let alone bind and direct the power nascent in the world around them. To bring a single corpse back to a semblance of animation required years of training and rigorous study. That grand construct, with its redoubts and fail-safes, its subtle interdependencies, would have taken a team of human Craftsmen fifty years to plan and shape. It was immense, organic, all-encompassing. Divine.

Looking on Alt Coulumb, Tara experienced for the first time the same emotions which, a century and a half before, had driven a handful of theologians and scholars to take up the Craft and become the first Deathless Kings: the awe at how well divine hands had made a thing, and the insatiable need to improve on that design. The backup filter, for example, which sheltered Alt Coulumb’s harbor from ocean beasts, could use some work. And there was something else, some faint, pervasive problem she couldn’t quite sum up in words.

“Well,” Ms. Kevarian said, “you will soon have firsthand experience with a deity who deserves his title.”

“But why,” Tara asked, “does it look so cold?”

“What do you mean?”

“The wards are all there, sure. But where’s the god inside them? He should shine through the whole system, but the wards are dark as ash. Is that normal?”

Ms. Kevarian opened her mouth to reply.

Before she could speak, however, the solid air upon which they sat lurched, quivered, and became distressingly permeable. Sunlight broke through the morning mist behind them and trapped the moment in liquid amber, sky and sea and distant cloud-covered city, blue waves and ships below.

They fell.

*

Flying isn’t easy, and falling is harder than most people think. Fortunately, Tara had practice at both. The last time she fell, on the occasion of her so-called graduation from the Hidden Schools, she had time to prepare; three days of excruciating confinement preceded her quite literal downfall. On the other hand, her prison cell had weakened her, as did her struggle against her former professors. Perhaps those effects cancelled the advantages of foreknowledge.

Blind, unreasoning terror is the first obstacle to be overcome if one wishes to survive a fall from a great height, but it is by no means the most dangerous. Fear can cloud the mind, but if one is on good terms with fear, as Tara was, it can also aid concentration.

Wind whipped past her face and the ocean accelerated toward her. Tara saw a glint of starshine out of the corner of her eye—Ms. Kevarian, no doubt, saving herself. Was this another test? A potentially fatal one, if so, but Ms. Kevarian did not seem a tender or forgiving person.

Suspicion later, though. Falling now.

The second, and far more insidious, obstacle to surviving such a fall is the pleasant inevitability of death. The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it’s stupid about death. The body knows that any monkey falling thousands of feet to a distant sea would be dead in short order, so it starts to relax. There’s an enlightenment to be attained in these plummeting moments that men and women spend years in monasteries trying to achieve.

But Tara wasn’t a monkey. She wasn’t even precisely a human being anymore, and whatever her body’s opinion on the matter, she would not give up.

Eight hundred feet. Falling faster.

Ms. Kevarian no doubt knew an elegant solution to this problem, something grand and complicated, involving perilous pacts with demonic entities. Tara had no such resources at her disposal. All but the strongest stars had fled the rising sun, and what little of their light remained was weak. She could only rely upon her own mind. She hoped that would be enough.

Ignoring the chemical acceptance inundating her brain, Tara extended her awareness beyond the limits of her skin and made her soul flat and broad as a geometric plane, infinite in reach. She became aware of Ms. Kevarian’s falling body, of a flock of gulls a mile to the south, of flitting wisps of cloud and vapor.

When her senses were broad as the surface of a great lake, she closed them off, made them impenetrable and solid as old wood.

Some people thought matter and spirit were different substances engaged in a delicate dance. The first principle of Craft, which had taken thousands of scholars an embarrassing length of time to comprehend, was that matter and spirit were in truth different aspects of the same substance, and there were tricks for making one act like the other. If a broad piece of cloth, stretched taut by the wind, could slow her fall, so, too, could spirit.

Spirit, of course, is more permeable than matter under normal conditions. If one were foolish enough to rework one’s soul completely into matter, one would become a limp sack of flesh, a drooling idiot who might barely qualify as alive for the moment it took her to forget to breathe. There was a fine line to tread: concentrate, but don’t destroy, your consciousness. Spread your soul wider than any parachute, and slowly, slowly, slowly (but maybe a little faster than that, because now you’re only five hundred feet up) congeal your thoughts and feelings until they can affect physical matter, and a few square miles of empty air start to resist the passage of your body and soul.

Few people have felt their soul billow out behind them like a parachute. During Tara’s previous fall, she was numb from battle and imprisonment, and hadn’t appreciated how much it hurt.

She screamed. Not a normal scream of pain, but a deep and blind cry as reason deserted her. Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara’s bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child’s face.

After the scream came oblivion. She was simultaneously a tiny feather of a body drifting down to a rolling ocean, and a diffuse cloud of soul, one with the sky, one with the wind. A thousand prickling tender touches lit upon her, as if she was caught in a rainstorm and the raindrops were love.

That’s new, she thought, before she hit the water.

*

Abelard sat in the confessional, smoking. He hadn’t been able to stop for two days. If he so much as paused between inhalations, the shakes began. He could barely catch a half hour’s sleep at a time before he woke, trembling and desperate for a drag from the cigarette that lay, ember somehow still glowing, by his bedside.

He should have been tired. Maybe he was, but the shakes were worse than exhaustion. They manifested first in his fingertips and toes, then crept up the limbs, taking root in his forearms and calves before clutching at his groin and chest. He didn’t know what might happen if he let them grip his heart. He didn’t want to find out.

“It’s normal,” the Cardinal’s doctor had told him when he reported his tremors the previous evening. “More intense than I expected, but normal. As an initiate of the Discipline of the Eternal Flame, you smoke between three and five packs of cigarettes a day. God’s grace has protected you from the ill effects of tobacco addiction, but under the current circumstances, His beneficence has been withdrawn.”

The doctor’s advice did not make Abelard feel better. Deep nausea clenched his stomach as he listened, and had not left him since. Even here, in God’s own confessional, he felt empty, deserted. The doctor warned him to quit, or cut back, but Abelard would not listen. He was dedicated to his Lord, no matter what.

The confessional was cramped and spare, walled to his right by a fine grille. His side was well lit, and the confessor’s side dark. He knew his confessor’s identity, though. Not strictly permitted, but this was an unprecedented situation.

“Tell me, my son,” said Senior Technical Cardinal Gustave, “did you notice anything strange before the alarms sounded?” His deep voice resounded in the confines of their confessional. A Church leader for decades, head of the Council of Cardinals, Gustave was accustomed to addressing great halls and inveighing against injustice. Years of leadership and Church politics had rendered him less deft at supporting a single troubled soul. He was trying, but he was tired.

Abelard’s biceps shook, and his thighs. Hold, dammit, he told himself. The Cardinal is watching. The confessing man sits bereft of God’s grace, seeking restitution, and does not deserve the taste of flame. You lasted before until the spasms reached your shoulders and the fork of your legs. You can do it again. “There was nothing out of the ordinary, Father.” His lips were still dry. He licked them once more. The Cardinal remains steadfast. Why can’t you? “Nothing out of the ordinary, on the technical side. All readouts nominal. Steam pressure low, but within tolerance.”

“You reported that the Most Holy was reluctant to answer your prayer?”

The heavy scratch of Cardinal Gustave’s pen sounded like stone tearing. The confessional walls loomed on all sides. “You know how it goes, Father.” Abelard gestured weakly with his cigarette. The ember at its tip danced a trace in the air.

“I know many things, my son,” Gustave said, “but there are outsiders approaching to help us, and they will not be familiar with the particulars of serving our God.”

“Yes, Father.” If only he would turn away for an instant, or blink. “I … Ah … Um.” Gustave’s face was barely visible in the darkness of the confessor’s compartment. Hollow cheeks, high forehead, bushy eyebrows. That mustache grown a decade and a half ago, which never went out of style because it was never in style. He’s here to help, not judge, Abelard told himself. Take comfort in him, because nothing else remains to comfort you. “It sometimes takes a while for me to properly prepare my mind for union with the Everburning Lord. God is great, and I am young, and weak. Sometimes I come before him with my soul unshriven. Sometimes, try as I might, I cannot give my offering with a pure heart.” He cursed himself inwardly. He sounded like a pervert, or an apostate. He hurried on. “Sometimes the Consuming Fire of His Grace is simply … elsewhere. Gods are always present, but They don’t always pay attention. Like in Lehman’s parable about the monk guarding the pantry. He can only watch one set of cabinets at a time, and the rats get in.”

“Thank you,” Cardinal Gustave said when Abelard stopped for breath. “That will be quite sufficient.”

Talking had distracted him for a wonderful moment. His chest began to twitch. He felt so cold.

“Tell me, my son, what methods did you undertake to attract the attention of the Most Fierce?”

This part, at least, did not make him feel ashamed. “I intoned the Prayers for the Coming Flame, polished the conduits on the Throne, and recited the first ten stanzas of the Litany of the Burned Dead.”

Gustave nodded and made more notes. While the Cardinal’s attention was on the paper, Abelard cupped mouth and cigarette with one hand, and sucked in tobacco-stained air. The cigarette flame flared in the confessional darkness, and his quivering muscles stilled. When he looked up, he saw Gustave waiting. The other man’s expression was illegible through the grille. He might have been an exquisitely crafted doll with human features.

This is what we have become, Abelard thought. Seemings without souls, cut off from one another by our fear.

“I’m sorry, Father, I’m so sorry, but the experience, the moment, Lord Kos…” He gestured vaguely at the cigarette.

Gustave bowed his head. “I understand, my son.”

“Are we in trouble, Father?”

“I do not believe so.”

“You said there were outsiders coming.”

“These problems are more common beyond our walls than within our blessed City. There are firms that resolve such matters with speed, efficiency, and discretion.”

“They’ll help us?”

“They’re the best we could find.” Gustave’s eyes were gray, fierce, and confident. Iron towers of faith could have been built on the strength of his gaze. “Professionals. We’re safe in their hands.”

The tips of Abelard’s fingers and toes began, once more, to twitch.

*

Tara floated in a cold womb, wrapped in sunlight. Fragmentary dreams grasped her and loosed her again into unconsciousness. She was six years old, running in the fallow fields of her father’s farm beneath the black angry belly of a thunderstorm. Lightning sparked in the clouds, flashed and crackled, bridging earth and heaven. She raised her hands, frail fingers cupped, and caught it.

Something long, narrow, and heavy collided with her ribs, and she remembered that she needed to breathe. She thrashed in the waves with limbs of twigs and paper, and coughed up a lungful of saltwater. She heard a voice.

“Catch the line, woman!”

Line was what sailors called rope, her bedraggled brain recalled. That was what had struck her in the side, like a lead weight: a wet length of corded hemp, a line to salvation. Her hands sought blindly, grasping it before she sank again. The rope grew taut and pulled her halfway out of the water with a heave that almost tore her arms free of their joints. Her body slammed into a slick, smooth surface.

Her warm pink stupor split like an egg from within and opened upon a brilliant day. The right-hand side of the world was sky and ocean, and the left a wall of dark, wet wood: a keel. Tara followed the rope up the side of the ship with her eyes and saw a man leaning over the deck’s railing to look down at her. He was silhouetted against the clouds.

Someone on the other end of the rope heaved again. Another wash of pain drew Tara’s legs free of the water and left her dangling and dripping against the keel. Black dust and fragments of charcoaled wood stained her clothes and flaked off on her face.

“We’ve caught a young lady, boys,” the silhouette called over his shoulder. “Or a young woman, at any rate.”

She gulped in breath and, recovering her voice, shouted, “Stop the torture! Hold the rope, and I’ll make my own way up.”

“With those skinny arms, and you waterlogged to half again your normal weight? I’ll not believe that.”

“If your last couple pulls are any indication, I’ll make my way up with these skinny arms or without any arms whatsoever.”

“Well said! Hold her steady,” the silhouette advised his invisible assistants.

She hung dripping until certain the other sailors would heed her interlocutor. Satisfied, she planted her feet against the keel, and, with agonizing slowness, began to walk up the side of the ship.

“Keep climbing this slow and we’ll be in port before you reach the deck.”

“I prefer to…” Pull, step. Breathe. Pull, step. “… to take a measured pace!”

“What are you measuring it against?”

Pull. Step. “Not your tongue, certainly.” To her left, she saw a rich and massive ship, and a third past that one. In the distance, she made out the green-black ribbon of the horizon, spiked with pinnacles, towers, minarets. The great city approached. Clouds brooded above it and spilled out over the water.

“What’s your name, sailor?”

“Raz,” the shadow called down. “Raz Pelham, of the Kell’s Bounty, bound from Iskar to Alt Coulumb by way of Ashmere. What’s yours, beauty?”

She laughed harshly. Whatever she looked like, drenched and half-drowned, she doubted it was beautiful. At least bantering with this sailor took her mind off the strain of climbing his ship. “Tara Abernathy, of nowhere in particular.” She spat a flake of charcoaled wood out of her mouth. Free of the water, she saw that burn scars tiger-striped the hull of the Kell’s Bounty, save for a few undamaged spots where new planks marked the site of hasty repairs. “Do you know your ship is falling apart?”

“We’re keenly aware,” he replied. “A few days ago we ran into a spot of trouble in Kraben’s Pillars west of Iskar, but we had little time for repairs before a client hired us for a speedy passenger run to Alt Coulumb. We’ll dry-dock here, with luck.”

“I should have thought a swift ship like this could outrun any trouble.”

“Ah, there’s your error. You assume we were running from the trouble, not toward it.”

She paused to breathe, and rest her aching arms. “Why not refuse the passenger? Seems dangerous to sail while damaged.”

“Does the Kell’s Bounty look like one of those fat-heeled merchantmen yonder, rich enough to accept and refuse commissions on a whim?” He slumped against the railing. “My arms are open to all who pay, though I do wish I were more my own master and less the client’s slave.”

“I know that feeling.”

“What form of clients would a lady like yourself have?” he said with a leer.

She almost laughed, almost lost her grip on the rope, almost tumbled back into the water. She would not allow such a lapse before this man. “No clients, but my new boss is a bit of a witch.”

He didn’t respond. Pull, step. Two feet. One.

Raz reached down to take her outstretched hand. Her eyes adjusted. His skin was brown as old, worked mahogany, and he gripped her forearm with fingers just as smooth. He pulled her up one-handed with no more trouble than he might have taken to raise a bottle of beer. The railing brushed her shins. When he set her down on the gently pitching deck, she saw his body. Muscular, yes, but too thin to hold such preternatural strength.

He smiled, and she saw the tips of fangs peek beneath his upper lip. His eyes were the color of a dried scab, and deep as an ocean trench.

She exhaled. “Thank you for the hand, sailor.”

Raz laughed. “Well done! Not many meet my gaze and stand on the first try. Especially after almost drowning.” He clasped her shoulder and squeezed. “Good to see you’re not all tongue.”

She measured her breath. Her arms shook. “Thank you. You’re a vampire.”

“While you’re on my vessel,” he said, “you might as well call me Captain. For the crew’s sake.”

Still wobbling on her feet, Tara looked about the broad deck. It was busy with sailors: the three who had held the rope steady for her to climb, and twelve more tying off lines and raising sheets and swabbing decks, preparing the Kell’s Bounty for arrival in port.

She would have seen more, but her attention was occupied by a single figure, pale, slender, female, holding a steaming mug of coffee. The fall had not wrinkled Ms. Kevarian’s suit. Behind her, stacked on the deck neatly as if carried aboard by a conscientious porter, rested Tara’s books and their luggage.

“Thank you for rescuing Ms. Abernathy, Captain,” Ms. Kevarian said with a quick nod to Raz.

“Always a pleasure to be of service, Lady K. If you don’t mind me saying, this one has a nice mouth on her.” He winked at Tara, who ignored him. “I have to run below before I get any more of a tan. Captain Davis’ll be up in a flash if you need anything.”

“Won’t you stay and catch some sun?” Ms. Kevarian asked pleasantly.

“Oh, no,” Raz replied, already halfway down the ladder into his cabin. “You know me, crazy lady. I don’t brown. I burn.”

“Perhaps tonight, then.”

“I’m for the Pleasure Quarters soon as the sun sets. It’s been awhile since my last visit to Alt Coulumb, and I fancy a drink. Come find me if you’re interested in sharing one.”

When he had slammed and latched the trapdoor behind him, a cool silence settled between Tara and Ms. Kevarian. The older woman sipped her coffee. The younger stood there, dripping.

“A witch?” Ms. Kevarian said, bemused. “I’d think you’d give me more credit than that, Ms. Abernathy. Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has the time for such pleasantries anymore? Why, I haven’t been on a date since the late eighties.”

“Do I pass the test?” Tara tried to keep her voice level, but adrenaline stuck its cat claws into her heart, and her voice tightened at the wrong moment.

“I beg your pardon,” Ms. Kevarian said.

“You knew we were going to fall, Boss. You had this boat set up to catch us. The whole thing was a test.”

“Hardly.”

“So it’s a coincidence that we crash-land onto a boat captained by your vampire friend?”

A small audience of sailors had gathered. They looked to Ms. Kevarian for her reply, but soon shuddered and looked away. Something about her made the eyes cringe. Maybe it was the way her dark gray suit soaked in the light, maybe it was the way steam from her coffee cup swirled about her like a demon’s wreath of flames. Maybe it was the neon yellow smiley face on the cup’s side.

“Flight near Alt Coulumb is interdicted by divine wards,” Ms. Kevarian said, “but we are more than a thousand feet beyond their edge. I intended for us to land on this ship, and for Raz to bear us into port. I was every bit as surprised as you by our fall.”

Confusion blunted Tara’s anger. “People do business in Alt Coulumb all the time. There must be a shuttle to get them through the wards. Why bother with Captain Pelham?”

“Water taxis receive most incoming flights. We didn’t take one because professionals use them. Mages, vampires, businessmen and businesswomen of all sorts. Someone would recognize me, and guess what I’ve come to do.”

“Why be so secretive about Craftwork? Unless our client is so big that…” She recalled the great dim embers of Alt Coulumb’s wards, and remembered, too, the tingle against her soul as she fell, before she lost consciousness: the love like fire, or the fire like love. That had been the touch of Kos’s power, beautiful but faint—fainter even than the captive Gods she’d studied at school, and those were more ghosts than divine spirits, eviscerated and lonely.

The immensity of what she was about to say choked her off.

Ms. Kevarian drew close. Tara smelled her: coffee, lavender, magic, and something else, strange and unnamable. She whispered into Tara’s ear.

“Kos the Everburning is dead. We’re here to bring him back to life.”