Three Parts Dead (11 page)

“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.

Elayne Kevarian meditated on the rooftop of the Sanctum of Kos as the sun declined behind its mask of thick clouds. Before her and beneath her, Alt Coulumb hungered for the coming night.

She was levitating two inches above the ground, and would have reprimanded herself had she noticed. Levitation was a reflex of immature Craftsmen. Students floated in air to feel in tune with the universe, but like any other unnatural posture, hovering caused more tension than it relieved—especially in this city, where Kos’s interdict prevented any flight higher than a fist’s breadth above the ground.

Thoughts wandered through the corridors of her mind like phantoms in an old house. Judge Cabot, her best contact in Alt Coulumb, was dead. Murdered with crude Craft designed to throw suspicion onto a third party. Had the gargoyle—the Guardian?—been purposefully framed, or did the killer simply set a trap for whoever might stumble by?

This case lay at the bottom of it all, like a fat and voracious catfish in a muddy river: the Church of Kos, the greatest divine institution left in the West, hub of thaumaturgic trade on this continent, wilting with its divine patron. Elayne didn’t believe incompetence was at fault. Cardinal Gustave made the right noises, and the documents seemed in order. Nor did it seem likely that Kos died of natural causes. Perhaps one of the Church’s far-ranging plans had gone awry. Or else … Treachery.

She tasted that word in her mind, exhaled it with her breath.

If it had been treachery, then the traitors were every bit as aware as the Church that Kos had failed, had fallen. Somewhere, they marshaled their forces.

Tara was a good kid. Smart. She would wrestle something like truth from the archives—truth, that strange monster often pursued but rarely captured. Meanwhile, Elayne watched, laid deep strategy, and prepared.

Soon her opposing number would arrive, a Craftsman chosen to represent the powers to whom Kos was bound by contract and debt. The creditors would select someone respected for age and strength, who had stood trial in dark matters and emerged strong and sure. Someone familiar with Alt Coulumb.

A handful of Craftsmen and Craftswomen in the world fit that description. She knew most of them.

Winds circled within clouds of slate, and the sun was setting. She and Tara had brought the storm with them to the city. Tomorrow, there would be work to do.

*

Abelard paled, and Tara feared he might collapse again. “God?”

She bit her lower lip and tried to think how to explain. “It’s not Kos. Not precisely. What you think of as your god is a manifold of power and information and relationships, deals and bargains and compromises congealed over millennia. For the last century at least, your scribes recorded the Church’s contracts and compromises in this archive. Our blood in the iron bowl triggered dormant Craft that combined information from those thousands upon thousands of scrolls into a three-dimensional image we can navigate, manipulate, and come to understand.” With a gesture she indicated the landscape of the divine corpse.

“He looks dead.”

“He is dead. How did you expect him to look?” She started walking. Abelard followed her, footsteps tender on the god’s marble flesh. “You’re familiar with what’s called a convenient fiction?”

Abelard answered with the flat tone of rote recitation. Good. Retreating to familiar concepts might help him cope. “A convenient fiction is a model used to approximate the behavior of a system. Like engines. Often, a mechanic doesn’t need to worry about compression chambers and heat exchange. He only needs to know that the engine transforms fuel into mechanical force. That description of an engine as a box that turns fuel to movement is a convenient fiction.”

“I’ve never heard that example before,” Tara admitted.

“What example do you use?”

“Reality.”

They skirted the enormous pit of Kos’s navel, broken and lifeless like the landscape of a distant planet.

“You’re saying that this,” Abelard said tentatively, “is not my Lord’s body at all, but a convenient fiction. You think of him as a giant corpse because … because it helps you evaluate him in the context of your black arts.”

“More or less,” she replied. “I’m sure the blueprints and daily logs of your furnaces tell you all sorts of things about your god. This is like a giant blueprint for another facet of him. It’s easier for me to understand than furnaces.” She saw a discoloration in the distance to her left: ichor welling up from within Kos’s body to form a river on his vastness.

When they reached the slick shelf of the god’s ribs, Abelard scampered up like a monkey, moving with a deceptive, jerky grace in his long brown and orange robes. Tara removed her heels and threw them overhand up the slope, pulled off her stockings, and attacked the ledge with fingers and toes. When she reached the top, she was slick with sweat and breathing hard. She couldn’t quite climb the last swell of protruding bone and muscle, and Abelard helped her up, nearly falling himself in the process.

“Where did you learn to climb?” she asked after she recovered her breath and patted her hair back into place.