Three Parts Dead

5

Fifteen minutes, give or take, was all Tara could allow herself before Abelard arrived in answer to the bell. Not much time, but there was no sense wasting this opportunity.

If she failed the Church, her career was over. No one would take a chance on her if Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao fired her once this probation ended. She would eke out some sort of living in obscurity, or else … back to the mob. The thought chilled her.

But there were many ways to fail a client. If Cabot’s murder was related to the case somehow, she would be neglecting her duties not to investigate.

Thus bolstered by flimsy logic, Tara brought her mug of tea to the vanity table. The wig stand stared at her with empty wooden eyes. Rooting in her purse, she produced the black leather book, a black marker, a tiny silver mallet, and a small black velvet bag with a sapphire clasp, the contents of which jangled as she set it down.

Face-stealing had been perfect for her purposes at Cabot’s penthouse, but was far from ideal on this end. The face required a mount. This wig stand was the right shape, at least, but poorly prepared, and she could only do so much with the marker, scribing elaborate designs on the smooth undifferentiated features, to improve upon it. Fortunately, she had brought her own silver nails.

She unfolded the face from the book, removed the first nail from the velvet bag, and drove it through the gargoyle’s forehead into the wig stand with the mallet. She fastened the remaining eight nails at the temples, ears, the base of the jaw, the chin, and the bridge of the nose, whispering as she did so a simple binding formula.

Don’t look at him as you do this, she told herself. Don’t even think of him as a him. That makes it easier.

At least it was easier until she drove in the final nail and the deep green eyes opened. Before she could speak, he bared his teeth and said, in a voice void of all emotion, “Who the hell are you? What did you do to me? I’ll kill you.”

His brow wrinkled in confusion, a strange effect when compounded with the creases and furrows produced by Tara’s hasty nail work. Tara knew what to expect, but watching still churned her stomach.

“I’m going to tear your throat out with my teeth.” This said with all the inflection of a bored lector at Sunday chapel. “I’ll drink your blood and splinter your bones.” Comprehension dawned, slower than the sun. “Why do I sound like this?”

“Disinterested? Surprisingly calm given your situation?”

“I should be furious. You tried to kill me.”

“I didn’t try to kill you. I got you off that roof without hurting anyone. Or,” she amended, “without hurting anyone in the long term. This is hardly a permanent arrangement.”

“Why aren’t I angry?” His nostrils flared. His eyes flicked left, right. “Why can’t I move?”

“Two related questions with a related answer.” She turned the wig stand to face the vanity table’s mirror.

His eyes widened, and his mouth fell open. No sound came out.

“You can’t move because you don’t have a body. You’re not feeling anything because, well, you’d be surprised how much of what we call emotion is really chemistry. A few extra grams of this or that hormone in your blood, and you’re angry, or sad, or in love. You have no blood at present, though, or whatever it is a gargoyle has for blood. Lava, maybe? Your personality exists in a self-sustaining matrix I Crafted for it. Your face is the locus, and your own body’s chemical energy powers the whole thing from a distance. A nice piece of work, if I do say so myself.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“No, no, no!” She shook her head. “That’s not how we get anywhere. You start by telling me your name.”

“I can’t feel pain. You can’t torture me.”

Neither statement was precisely true, but it would not be politic to tell him that. “I’m not trying to hurt you. All I want to know is what happened to Judge Cabot.”

“You want a confession.”

“I don’t!” She raised her right hand to the mirror so he could see it. “Honest. I think you’re innocent.”

“Why stab me in the stomach and steal my face?”

“I said I think you’re innocent. The Blacksuits don’t. You said they were chasing you down, and if you thought a gargoyle could get a fair trial in this city, I doubt you’d have run from them.”

The face said nothing.

“Am I right?”

“Stone Men don’t deserve a fair trial,” he said at last, his tone dry and grating. “We tear the city apart. We thirst for blood—or haven’t you heard? You couldn’t assemble a jury to acquit me, whatever evidence you showed them. Not that Justice would bother with a jury.”

“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. We’ve started off on the wrong…” She checked herself. He didn’t have feet at the moment, and it would be rude to remind him of that. “I’m Tara. I’m trying to help you.”

His eyes locked with hers in the mirror, and she took an involuntary breath. They were more than green: the color of emeralds, the color of the sea. “Shale,” he said.

“That’s it? Shale?”

“Why do you people always think we need more names than everyone else?”

“I’ve never met a gargoyle personally.…”

“So you assume we go around painting ourselves with pitch and swooping from rooftops to devour innocents, and call ourselves things like Shale Swiftwing, Beloved of the Goddess, Scout-in-Shadows.”

“You were a lot less sarcastic when we first met.”

“When I was hiding from the Blacksuits?”

“And threatening to kill me.”

“Well, I had a body then.”

The tea was well steeped, and Abelard was no doubt ascending the last flight of stairs to the guest level. She might not have enough time alone to try this again for days, and she’d learned nothing useful so far. Expulsion from the firm weighed on her left shoulder, and death by a murderer’s hand on her right. She drummed her fingers on the vanity table and tried to clear her head. “Is that your actual name?”

“What?”

“You know, Swiftwing and all the rest?”

He rolled his eyes.

“If I am to help you, I need to know who you are. Where you come from. What you were doing in Cabot’s penthouse.”

He pursed his lips, but finally allowed, “Swiftwing I made up. The rest are honorifics.”

“What were you doing in the penthouse?”

“I don’t know.”

She clenched her fist in frustration. “Oh, come on!”

“Do you think it makes me happy, being kept in the dark? Cabot was supposed to give me a package. That’s all I know.”

“Shale, you’re cute, but you’re frustrating.”

“You think I’m cute now, you should see me when I have a real body.”

“How could you possibly not know what you were doing there?”

“I was told the Judge would give me something to bring back to my Flight.”

“Who told you?”

“Aev. Our leader.”

“She didn’t say what the package was? Why she needed to speak with a Judge? Anything like that?”

“I don’t know.”

If she pressed him, he might stop talking entirely, and she needed more information. Move on. “You were supposed to return to your, ah, Flight, after you retrieved this package. Where are they?”

At first she thought he was being reticent, but she realized, from the twitches in his cheeks, that he was trying to shake his head. “I know where my Flight rested yesterday, but they’re long gone by now. We know this city better than anyone. We were born of its stone, and it bears our mark. On the rare occasions when we return, we keep moving from hiding spot to hiding spot so the Blacksuits can’t find us.”

Dammit. “How were you planning to bring them the package?”

“Wasn’t.” His voice was fading. A limitation of face-stealing: the consciousness tired easily when free of the body. “They’ll find me, or I’ll find them. By smell.”

A knock on the door. Tara swore under her breath.

“Ms. Abernathy?”

Factors in this case multiplied too swiftly for her taste. Gargoyles. Abelard. Blacksuits. Foolishness.

“Ms. Abernathy, you rang.” Abelard started to turn the doorknob.

“Wait! Hold on a second. I’m not decent.”

The door paused, already open a crack. “But you rang.”

“Hold on!”

“Trying to keep me a secret?” Shale sneered.

“Shut up,” she whispered.

“What if I call for help?”

“Ms. Abernathy, is there someone else there?”

“Talking to myself,” she said as she raised the hammer.

Fortunately, the setup took less time to dismantle than to assemble. A few pulls with the prying end of the hammer, a slow peel from the wig stand, and Shale’s face was safely back in the book by the time Abelard opened her bedroom door. The young priest stood on the threshold peering into the room as if afraid something within might leap out to dismember him. A fresh cigarette drooped from his lips, and he appeared, if possible, more disheveled than a half hour before.

“Ms. Abernathy?”

“Sorry,” she said, slinging her purse back over her shoulder. “Female troubles. Shall we go?”

*

The Sanctum had been built in the optimistic era before the God Wars reached the New World, when the Church of Kos saw the future as an endless sequence of bright vistas, one opening upon the next. Mad with expansionist dreams, the Church planned its new Sanctum with enough empty space to accommodate a century of growth. Then the war came, and the bright vistas crumbled. To this day, great tracts of the Sanctum remained unoccupied and unknown to the world. Which was to the best, really, because sometimes the Church required spaces that were large, unoccupied, and unknown.

This was the explanation Abelard gave Tara when, after climbing another winding stair three stories up from the guest chambers, they arrived at an otherwise unassuming door, which opened, once Abelard found the proper key, into the largest room she had ever seen. The Hidden Schools’ main quadrangle would have fit inside, easily, along with the east wing of Elder Hall.

The entire room was filled with paper.

Loose sheets of foolscap lay piled by the ream in boxes around the chamber’s edge. Near the center, the boxes gave way to thick piles of scrolls, some in racks, some loose. The dry, comforting aroma of scribe’s ink and parchment filled the dead air.

“It’s a lot of paper,” Abelard admitted. “Lots of scribes, and lots of Craft supporting the scribes. Every deal the Church of Kos ever made, every contract with deity or Deathless King. The founding covenant of Alt Coulumb is here somewhere. Not the original, of course.”

Tara couldn’t resist a low whistle at the sheer quantity of information. She’d seen larger libraries in the Hidden Schools and in the fortresses of Deathless Kings, but most of those held the same sets of dusky tomes. This archive was unique in the world. A bare handful of people knew even a fraction of what was written here, and her job was to learn it all. Her mouth went dry from desire and a little fear.

Abelard preceded her down a narrow alley between piles of paperwork. “It’s crazy that we keep all this stuff, but the Church’s Craftsmen insist. They don’t know anything about engines or steam or fire but to hear them talk you’d think they knew the Church better than Kos’s own priests.”

“It’s beautiful.” The words slipped from her mouth, but once they were out she couldn’t find fault with them. Abelard fixed her with a confused expression.

“Beautiful?”

“There’s so much. You really kept everything.” Spreading her arms wide, she walked down the alley, running her fingers over dusty boxes and the polished wood rollers of professional-grade scrolls. Secrets pulsed within, eager to escape.

“Impressive, sure. I don’t know about beautiful.” Abelard followed her. “You want to see beautiful, I’ll take you down to the furnaces sometime. Not an ounce of steel wasted. Kos’s glory runs through every pipe, shines from each bearing and gauge. They are the heart of the city, and the center of the Church.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said, unable to think of anything nice to say about a furnace however efficient it might be. “But furnaces aren’t relevant to this case. Everything we need to know about Kos is here.”

“These are just glorified receipts. Lists of goods bought and sold.” From his mouth those words sounded small and petty. “Shouldn’t you try to understand who He was before you look at His accounts?”

Tara let the archive’s silence swallow his words, and wished that the Hidden Schools had taught her how to work with clients. Her textbooks mentioned the subject in a sidebar, if at all, before they moved on to important technical concerns like the Rule Against Perpetuities or the seven orthodox uses of the spleen. “These papers,” she said at last, “will show us how Kos died, and what we need to do to bring him back. That’s my main concern. Faith and glory are more your line of work.”

Abelard did not reply, and Tara walked on, knowing she hadn’t said the right thing, and mystified as to what the right thing would have been. She almost sagged with relief when Abelard spoke again, however tentatively. “Your boss, Lady Kevarian, said that the, ah, problem, happened because of an imbalance.”

Had Tara been a god-worshiper, she would have given thanks for a chance to return their conversation to technical matters. “She’s making an educated guess based on what your Cardinal told her, but it’s too general to be much use.”

“What do you think happened?” Abelard gazed up at the vaulted ceiling.

“Me?” She shrugged. “I don’t know more than Ms. Kevarian does. Some kind of imbalance almost has to happen for a god as big as Kos to die. If he expends much more energy than he reaps from his believers’ faith and supplication, poof. We’re here to learn specifics: what drew Kos’s power away, and why.”

“That’s how you kill gods?” Abelard’s voice had gone hollow, but she didn’t notice.

“Sort of. That’s how gods kill themselves. If you want to kill one, you need to make it expend itself trying to destroy you, or trick it somehow.…” She trailed off, hearing his silence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I know this is a sensitive subject.”

“It’s fine.” Tara knew from his tone of voice that “it” was not fine, but Abelard didn’t press the issue. They walked on between walls of dead words. “You seem very … confident around all this stuff for someone so young.”

She pondered that as she scanned the labeled stacks of scrolls. Old World contracts, A through Adelmo. Good. The in-house Craftsmen followed standard filing practices. “I studied hard at school. If I ever take you up on your invitation to the furnaces, I’ll probably feel the same way when you talk about them.”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot less death and war in furnaces.”

“Ironically, right?” No response. “I mean, because of all the fire, and the flame, and the pressure.” She stopped trying. They were close.

“How many times,” he asked, “have you raised a god from the dead?”

“Ms. Kevarian has been a partner with Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao for thirty years. She’s handled a dozen cases this large, and at least a hundred smaller ones.”

“Not her. You.”

She let out a breath, closed her eyes, and yearned for the day when she could answer this question without feeling inadequate. “This is my first.”

The hall dead-ended in a circular clearing, from which seven more paths branched out into the stacks. By twisting and turning through the maze of those paths, one could reach any scroll in the archives. A shallow bowl of cold iron rested on the stone floor, precisely in the clearing’s center. “We’re here.”

Abelard drew up short. He looked from shelved scrolls, to Tara, to the bowl, and back to the shelves. Tara waited, and wished she could peek inside his mind without damaging it.

At last, his thoughts resolved into language. He cleared his throat, the ugly human sound echoing amid the books. “I was hoping for, you know, a…” He glanced back at the bowl, and made some vague gestures with his hands. “A desk. Or a chair, at least.”

Tara blinked. “Whatever for?”

“Reading?”

“That’s why we have the bowl.”

“So we put the books … in … the bowl?”

Comprehension dawned. She tried to keep a straight face, because Abelard didn’t deserve further ridicule, but in the end she had to physically stifle a laugh.

“This is some Craft thing, isn’t it?”

“You thought we were going to read this entire room? Tonight?” She walked over to the bowl and tapped it with the toe of her boot. It rang a deeper note than its size and thickness suggested. “Seriously?”

“I didn’t know,” Abelard said, defensive, “that there was another option.”

“Look.” She extended one hand and a scroll floated from the nearest shelf to her palm. Unrolling it, she revealed a carefully drawn list of abbreviated names, dates, figures, and arcane symbols, divided in neat rows and columns and simplified to the third normal form. “Your Craftsmen and Craftswomen told you to format your records this way, right?”

He nodded.

“They also set up the archive? Told your scribes and monks where to store everything, and in what order?”

Another nod.

“Why do you think that was?”

“I don’t know. Someone had to do it.”

Come on, Tara thought. New kid, monastery kid, churchgoer, and engineer. You’ve lived in the dark so long you’ve forgotten that everything has a reason. She beckoned him toward the center of the clearing. “I’m going to show you a trick.”

He hesitated, suddenly aware that he was alone with a woman he barely trusted, a woman who, had they met only a few decades before, would have tried to kill him and destroy the god he served. Tara hated propaganda for this reason. Stories always outlasted their usefulness.

“Give me your arm,” she said.

He shot a terrified glance at the iron bowl. “Hell no.”

“It’s absolutely safe.” Yokel. “Look, I’ll go first, but you need to promise me that after I show you, you’ll do as I tell you immediately.”

“Okay,” he said, uncomprehending.

“Great.” Tara reached beneath her jacket, to the neckline of her blouse, and opened her heart. The shadows about them deepened; her nerves tingled, half as though she were holding something and half as though her palm had gone to sleep. Cold blue light sparked between her fingers. Because she was doing this slowly for his benefit, she felt the aftershock of her knife’s detachment, a tremor in her soul like a caress from everyone who had ever wronged her.

Her expression must have betrayed some hint of pain or grief, but if it had, Abelard was too busy recoiling with fear to notice. The hairs on his arm stood at unquestioning attention.

“Never seen a knife before?” She held the blade before her face. It crackled.

It took him a few tries to find his voice. “I’ve never seen Craft so close.”

“You’ve seen Applied Theology, miracle work, right? This is the same principle, only instead of telling a god what I want, receiving power from him, vaguely directing it and letting him do all the hard parts, I do everything myself.”

“How is that the same? A god is supposed to have that power. You—”

“I’m a Craftswoman.” She knelt by the iron bowl and held out her left arm. “Come closer.” He did. “This will look like it hurts, but it doesn’t really.” Slowly, again for his benefit, she lowered the tip of the knife to her forearm. She chose a nice small capillary flowing near the skin and pricked herself with the blade of moonlight and lightning, cleanly as an old woman ripping open a seam in a worn-out dress.

A scarlet drop of blood swelled from the wound and fell to splash in the iron bowl. She shivered from the pate of her skull to the soles of her feet, as if she had plunged into a lake of metal.

Did Abelard feel the change as her blood sank into the iron, the turning and falling like tumblers in a lock, the sudden tension in the air? Could this boy who spent his life following gods tell when dormant Craft swung into action around him? Or had the color drained from his face merely at the sight of her blood?

When she reached for him, he pulled back.

“You promised,” she said. “It’s only a drop.”

“Your blood is still on that knife!” he shouted over the rush of wind that rose about them without ruffling the slightest leaf of paper. “You’re going to make me sick!”

Of all the things for him to know … “We make the knife out of lightning for a reason.” A sharp tug of building Craft almost pulled Tara from her body, but she resisted with dogged force of will. If Abelard were to help in his god’s resurrection, he needed to see. “You think we’d use the Craft where a pocketknife would manage if we weren’t worried about infection? Give me your damn arm!”

Thin blue lines had spread from her drop of blood up the sides of the iron bowl, and out, like cracks across thin ice. The cracks widened, and through them, Tara saw a fractal mosaic of spheres, big and small. Each held a design in its center: circles, toroids, slits, stars and spirals, and stranger patterns. Eyes, thousands of them, watched her through the cracks.

“Abelard!”

He lurched forward, arm out, as the archives trembled. His cigarette tumbled from his lips toward one of the hungry, ever-widening cracks, but he caught it before it fell through. Tara’s knife flashed, numberless eyes surged against the membrane of the world, and—

Silence.

All she saw was silence. All she heard was a faint, dead scent like fallen leaves in autumn. She tasted night, smelled smooth black marble, and felt ice melting on her tongue.

She had done this sort of thing before, and knew to wait as her senses twisted round again to normal. Abelard was not so fortunate. She would have warned him, she thought as she walked to where he lay collapsed in the dark, if he hadn’t been such a pansy about the blood.

He shook. Tara felt empty and a little ashamed.

“Hey.” She knelt beside him and squeezed his arm. He didn’t look up, and kept shaking. “It’s easier when you realize you can’t throw up, and stop trying.” A bedraggled sound, like the whimper of a drowning dog, rose from the vicinity of his mouth. She assumed it was a question. “You don’t really have a stomach here, is why. It’s not a biological kind of place.”

His shivers stilled. Her hand lingered awkwardly on his shoulder.

The new world lightened around them. Finally, he stirred and sat up, blinking, eyes raw and unfocused. He raised the cigarette to his mouth with a trembling hand.

“It felt…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be ashamed of. It happens.” She stood slowly so as not to startle him, and extended her hand. He regarded her palm as if it might be a trap, but finally let her pull him to his feet. He swayed like a tree about to topple, yet he did not fall.

In the dim light, he looked past her and saw what lay before him, beneath him, all around him. They were standing on an immense body.

The god’s flesh was black and deep as night. The curvature of his limbs was the subtle and paradoxical curvature of deep space. He swelled in the dark, a pregnancy of form in nothingness.

The body had the usual four limbs, two eyes the size of small moons, a mouth that could swallow a fleet of ships—features that for all their immensity were beautiful, and because of their immensity were terrifying. It was a great and hoary thing ancient of days, a clutch of power that would shatter any mind that tried to grasp it all at once. It was more than man evolved to comprehend, and Tara’s job was to comprehend it.

She bared her teeth in a hungry smile.

“I know Him,” Abelard said, quietly.

“Yes.”

Kos Everburning, Lord of Flame.

His chest was not moving.