Three Parts Dead
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CONTENTS
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.
When the Hidden Schools threw Tara Abernathy out, she fell a thousand feet through wisps of cloud and woke to find herself alive, broken and bleeding, beside the Crack in the World.
By the grace of fortune (or something else), she landed three mere miles from what passed for an oasis in the Badlands, a stand of rough grass and brambles clustered around a brackish spring. She couldn’t walk, but made the crawl by sunrise. Caked with dirt and dried blood, she dragged herself over sand and thorn to the muddy pool at the oasis’s heart. She drank desperately of the water, and to pull herself from death’s brink she also drank the life of that desolate place. Grass withered beneath her clutching fingers. Scrub bushes shrank to desiccated husks. The oasis died around her and she crumpled to the arid earth, wracked with wounds and deep illness.
Dream visions tore at one another in her fever, lent strength and form by her proximity to the Crack. She saw other worlds where the God Wars never happened, where iron ruled and men flew without magic.
When Tara regained consciousness the oasis was dead, its spring dry, grass and brambles ground to dust. She lived. She remembered her name. She remembered her Craft. Her last two months in the Hidden Schools seemed like a twisted hallucination, but they were real. The glyphs tattooed on her arms and between her breasts proved she had studied there, above the clouds, and the glyph below her collarbone meant they really did graduate her before they kicked her out.
She fought them, of course, with shadow and lightning—fought and lost. As her professors held her squirming over empty space, she remembered a soft, unexpected touch—a woman’s hand sliding into her pocket, an alto whisper before gravity took hold. “If you survive this, I’ll find you.” Then the fall.
Squinting against the sun, Tara drew from the pocket of her torn slacks an eggshell-white business card that bore the name “Elayne Kevarian” above the triangular logo of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, one of the world’s most prestigious Craft firms. Professors and students at the Hidden Schools whispered the woman’s name—and the firm’s—in fear and awe.
A job offer? Unlikely, considering the circumstances, and even if so, Tara was not inclined to accept. The world of Craft had not been kind to her of late.
Regardless, her priorities were clear. Food, first. Shelter. Regain strength. Then, perhaps, think about the future.
Good plan.
She collapsed.
Silence settled over the Badlands.
A buzzard descended from the dry blue sky in tightening circles, like a wood chip in a draining pool. It landed beside her body, hopped forward. No heartbeat audible; cooling flesh. Convinced, it bent its head and opened its beak.
Tara’s hand twitched up fast as a cobra and wrung the bird’s neck before it could flee. The other gathering buzzards took the hint and wheeled to safety, but one bird cooked inexpertly over a fire of dry grass and twigs was more than enough to set a half-starved girl on her feet.
Four weeks later she arrived on the outskirts of Edgemont, gaunt and sun-blasted, seeing things that did not precisely exist. Her mother found her collapsed near their cattle fence. A lot of crying followed her discovery, and a lot of shouting, and more crying after the shouting, and then a lot of soup. Edgemont mothers were renowned for their practicality, and Ma Abernathy in particular had iron faith in the restorative powers of chicken broth.
Tara’s father was understanding, considering the circumstances.
“Well, you’re back,” he said, a concerned expression on his broad face. He did not ask where she had been for the last eight years, or what happened there, or how she earned her scars. Tara would have thanked him for that had she known how. There were too many ways he could have said “I told you so.”
That evening the Abernathy family sat around their kitchen table and settled on the story they would tell the other residents of Edgemont: When Tara left home at sixteen, she signed on with a traveling merchant, from whom she learned the fundamentals of Craft. The Hidden Schools never opened themselves to her, and at last, tired of dust and long wandering, she returned home. It was a good enough lie, and explained Tara’s undeniable skill with contracts and bargains without stirring up any of the local fear of true Craftswomen.
Tara put the business card from her mind. The people of Edgemont needed her, though they would have chased her from town if they knew where she learned to use her talents. Ned Thorpe lost half the profit from his lemon crop every year, due to a bad arbitration clause in his reseller’s contract. Ghosts stole dead men’s bequests through loopholes in poorly written wills. Tara offered her services tentatively at first, but soon she had to refuse work. She was a productive citizen. Shopkeeps came to her to draft their pacts, farmers for help investing the scraps of soulstuff they eked out of the dry soil.
Over time she picked up the pieces of her childhood, hot cocoa and pitching horseshoes on the front lawn. It was easier than she expected to reacclimate herself to a country life without much Craft. Indoor plumbing was a luxury again. When summer came, she and her parents sat outside in the breeze or inside with windows shut and shades drawn to ward off heat. When cold wind blew they built fires with wood and flint. No elementals of air were summoned to fan the brow, no fiery dancers cavorted to warm cold halls. At school she had condemned such a life as simple, provincial, boring, but words like “simple,” “provincial,” and “boring” did not seem so pejorative to her now.
Once, she nearly took a lover, after a solstice dance on the village green. Staggering back tipsy and arm-in-arm with a boy she barely remembered from her days in Edgemont’s two-room school, who had grown into a young man tending his family’s sheep, she stopped to rest on a swell of ground and watch the stars in the fleeting summer night. The young man sat next to her and watched with her, but when he touched her face and the small of her back she pulled away, apologized, and left.
The days were long, and safe, but she felt something wither inside her as she lingered there. The world beyond Edgemont, the world of Craft more profound than a farmer’s spring planting and the mending of small cuts and bruises, faded and began to seem unreal. Her memories of the Hidden Schools acquired the cotton haze of dream, and she woke once or twice from nightmares in which she had never left home at all.