Three Parts Dead (12 page)

“The boiler room,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Thousands of pipes, all shapes and sizes, and ladder after ladder. There’s no better place than the Sanctum of Kos to be eleven years old. Though maybe there are better places to be sixteen,” he conceded.

Instead of donning her shoes again, she stuffed her stockings inside them and put them in her purse. The divine flesh was cool beneath her feet. “The Hidden Schools are not a good place to be either eleven or sixteen. Fine place to be twenty-one, though, if twenty-one is something you wanted to be.”

“Nothing fun for kids?”

“Plenty of fun things for kids, but most would kill you if you did them wrong.”

They walked on. Abelard at last surrendered and tapped cigarette ash onto his god’s skin, no doubt repeating to himself that this was a model, not the actual divine corpse.

“Does all this walking serve a purpose?” he asked after a while.

“I’m inspecting the body,” she replied. “God-meat decays like the human variety. Small dark things, neither god nor man, sneak in and chew at it. Spiritual lampreys: ghosts, half-formed concepts that might become the seeds of new deities. We can tell from the damage they inflict on the flesh how long a god has been dead. Other signs indicate the cause of death.”

“What do you see?”

“Some confusing things.”

“For example?”

“For example.” She let out a rush of breath that fell over the quiet corpse-scape like a heavy robe on a cold floor. “We’ve passed pools of ichor—divine blood, divine power. Little ones, consistent with a god who died recently. The maggots have dined, but not much. There are more wounds than there should be, though, and they’re distributed, where they should cluster. Scavengers are drawn to weak points in the body’s defenses. Then there’s the flesh itself. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”

“It’s cold, and hard.”

“Where it should be warm, yes?”

“If He were alive.” Abelard shuddered when he said the last word.

Poor kid. “The heat of gods fades slowly. He should still feel lukewarm, at least. Also, there’s not enough blood.”

“What?”

“A body with much blood in it doesn’t remain firm for long. The blood—the power—attracts pests that accelerate decay. This has not happened with Kos. Your deity had much of his blood removed before he died. The drain wasn’t sudden, or the skin would be more discolored. His power faded slowly, over time.” She looked up. “Do you know what might have caused this?”

Abelard shook his head, mute.

“Has there been anything strange about Kos’s behavior in the last few months?”

“Not really. He’s been strong as ever.” He faltered, as if wondering whether to continue. She didn’t wait for him to make up his mind.

“Save for what?”

“Save … He has been slow to respond to my prayers for the last few weeks. He always came, but it sometimes took half an hour or longer to attract His attention.” Abelard’s gaze fell to the ground beneath his feet. “On the night He died, I thought he was ignoring me. Perhaps He found me unworthy. Perhaps I was.”

“Did other people have this problem?”

He shifted from foot to foot, unwilling to face her. “The Everburning Lord doesn’t often respond directly to prayer. Even the most faithful may receive little more than a moment of His grace. Once in a while, maybe a couple words from Him.”

“Don’t priests get a direct line?”

“There’s a range of faith in the priesthood, as in the laity, but the Technicians of the Divine Throne, who oversee the patch between the Everburning and the city grid, we meet God whenever we come to our post. Or we should.”

“If you had a problem, others might have as well. Did you mention it to anyone?”

“To Cardinal Gustave, when we spoke this morning.”

“You didn’t report anything before his … before two nights ago? Didn’t ask for help?”

“No.” Abelard exhaled smoke. His eyes were red.

“Why not?”

“Would you run to Lady Kevarian at the first sign of trouble, if this investigation grew difficult?”

She didn’t answer.

“I’m the youngest Technician in the office,” Abelard said. His voice was quiet, and his quietness cut her. “Positions open up once every few years. I barely made it this time around. If I let on I had trouble speaking with our Lord, what do you think would happen? There are scores of people hungry for my place.” His narrow shoulders slumped, as if he was melting beneath the folds of his robe.

“The others might have kept silent as well.”

“I heard them talking. Maybe they hid their problems, as I did, but Cardinal Gustave sounded surprised when I told him. It was just me.”

She reached out and gripped his frail, thin arm. He didn’t pull away.

No wind blew in this space beyond the world. Not even the sound of their heartbeats intruded on the silence. “I thought,” he said at last, “that if I helped you, I might be able to deal with His death. Find some meaning in it.”

“My boss and I aren’t in the meaning business,” Tara replied. “I’m sorry.”

“I know.” Abelard did not look up from the god at his feet. “But what am I supposed to do? My faith was weak before. Without my Lord, what’s left?”

Millions of people live without gods, she wanted to say. They live good lives. They love, and they laugh, and they don’t miss churches and bells and sacrifice. She weighed all the words that leapt to mind, and found them wanting. “I don’t know.”

He nodded.

“I’d still like your help.” Silence. “What would he want you to do?” She pointed to the body at their feet.

Abelard sagged. “He’d want me to help—help Him, help the city, help the world. I want to. Helping is the only way I have left to honor Him. But I don’t know how.”

“That’s what we’re trying to do.”

“We’re like insects here. Less than insects. How can we make a difference?”

“Maybe the problem isn’t as big as you think. Maybe we’re trying to see it from too close. Want to get a better view?”

He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. When he looked up, they were dry. “What do you mean?”

She glanced up. He followed her gaze into the black.

“You can fly?”

“Not outside. It takes too much power for me, even if flight weren’t interdicted in your city. But this is a shared hallucination. We can do anything here, as long as it doesn’t change the truth behind the picture.”

She raised her hand.

There was no sensation of movement, because they were not truly flying. Gravity broke, and they ascended.

As they rose, Kos shrank. At first, the slopes and valleys of his ribs and the swells of his oblique muscles filled Tara’s field of vision. Then she saw his whole chest at once, sculpted and magnificent. The stomach she saw next, and for the first time she detected edges to the universe of him, an endless gulf separating the peninsulas of his arms from the plateau of his mighty chest. His face glowed softly, its features almost but not quite those of a man. They shifted as she watched, now blurred and unfocused, now clear and distant as the tiny upside-down image in a magnifying glass. A single detail remained constant: the corners of his mouth quirked into a knowing smile, the smile of one who had seen the earth as a distant blue marble, one who swam in the liquid flames of the sun.

I’ve seen the world from a distance, too,
Tara thought, full of awe and ambition.
Someday I’ll match you stroke for stroke
.

“Those wounds,” Abelard said, pointing down. “Those are from the creatures you mentioned earlier? The maggots, the ghosts?”

“Yes.” Though they had been large as lakes when Tara and Abelard walked beside them, they were barely visible from this height. Little gouges, as if someone had taken a chisel to Kos’s flesh. “But those…” She indicated large round gaps in the god’s arm and leg and throat and chest, punctures from which no blood issued. “Those aren’t wounds.”

“They look awfully woundlike,” Abelard said.

“A defect of the system. You see there’s no blood around their edges, no sign of forced entry.” He blanched and wavered, but seemed to be handling this part well enough. “They’re patch points. When a god makes deals with other people, deities, or Craftsmen, they borrow his power, his blood, through those holes. Out when it’s paid out, and in when it returns, increased by the terms of the contract.” She frowned. “Here, it’s easier to see this way.”

She turned her hand, and glowing conduits of power coalesced about the gaping patch points. Blood coursed up half of them, tinted red, sluggish and reluctant, drawn by contracts stronger than iron now that it was no longer sent forth in a free rush by the ceaseless pulse of Kos’s divine will. Down the other conduits, blue-tinted blood returned, swift and pure.

“The red tubes send his power out into the world, and the blue tubes bring it back. More blood is going out than returning. You can see, even maintaining the current contracts costs your Church by draining away the little innate power that would defend Kos’s body against the maggots.”

“And you’ll what, fix it so Kos brings in more than He sends out? Restart His heart? Make Him live again?”

She considered lying. Abelard hadn’t asked for any of this. He wanted to be reassured, wanted to hear that yes, within a few weeks the madness would be over and Kos whole.

She considered it.

“The Craft doesn’t work that way,” she said.

He didn’t respond.

“We can make something from this body that will honor Kos’s obligations, but we will have to cut out other parts of him. Alt Coulumb will be warm this winter, and the trains will run on time. Gods and Craftsmen throughout the world will continue to draw on the power of Alt Coulumb’s fire-god, but the entity you call Kos is gone.”

“What will be different?”

She tried to think of something encouraging to tell him, but failed. “It sounds like Kos was a hands-on deity. Knew the people of Alt Coulumb by name. That will change. He used to visit your dreams, in the long nights of your soul. I imagine the faithful felt his radiance throughout the city. No more. Even his voice won’t be the same.”

“But we’ll have heat, and trains.”

“Yes.” Don’t sneer at heat and power and transportation, she wanted to say. Hundreds of thousands in this city would die without them even before the winter, from riots and looting, pestilence and war.

She kept silent.

“There’s no other way?”

“What would you propose?” she asked.

“Surely some of my Lord’s people loved Him more than they needed His gifts. Couldn’t that love call Him back to life?”

“Maybe.” She chose her words carefully. “He could take refuge in their love to escape his obligations. Consciousness is a higher order function, though. A god requires the faith of around a thousand followers before displaying rudimentary intelligence, and that’s if those followers ask nothing in return for their love. If a heavily contracted god, like Kos, tried to do what you describe, he would be barely alive, and in constant, excruciating pain from the contracts that tore at him. If you asked him, he would probably rather die.”

“It sounds horrible.”

“It is.”

He said nothing for a while, and neither did she. There was no sound but their breath.

“He loved this city, you know. Loved His people, and the world.”

“Yes,” Tara said. She didn’t know if this was true, but she didn’t care. Abelard did.

He tapped ash from his cigarette and it floated down the miles below. “How do I help?”

She removed a pad of paper and a quill pen with a silver nib from her purse, and handed them to him. “Start by taking notes.”

*

Somewhere, there was a bright room in a high tower, with windows that opened on a field of mist. Other towers rose from the mist, too, forming a forest in the sky beneath a moon that burnt the world silver.

The sun had set, and night was come. Within the bright room, people were hard at work. A young woman bent over a laboratory bench, making careful incisions in a cadaver. Next to her, a jowly older man scanned tables of densely written figures. At a chalkboard in the corner, two students reviewed an equation from an obscure branch of thaumaturgy. Conversation, when it occurred, was hushed. Each individual diligently pursued their portion of the project at hand. It was a laboratory among laboratories, a perfect, organized system.

As the pretty young vivisectionist inhaled so, too, did the thaumaturgy scholars at the blackboard; when she exhaled, so did the man with his tables. Chalk left white lines on slate as the scalpel parted skin and fat. Sluggish blood flowed. The supervising student at the window sipped his tea and swallowed. A foot came down in one corner of the room and a hand was raised in another. Whispered questions received muted answers. Students relinquished equipment precisely when their successors required it.

The Professor strode through the laboratory, breathing in time with the rest—or they breathed in time with him. His light steps on the worn checkerboard floor were the taps of the primum mobile on a wheel that moved their world. The beats of his heart drove blood in their veins.

He held a clipboard and a pencil. Once in a while, in his ceaseless circuit, he made a note, erased an older mark, modified a sum, or sliced out a sentence. The work of ages lingered on that clipboard, and many were the men and women who would have killed for its contents.

His eyes lingered on the vivisectionist’s legs as he passed her table. They were well curved beneath the hem of her lab coat. Supple. And her work was exact.

Pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of the flesh. Unimportant compared with the keen joy of the mind.

He moved to the window where the supervising student waited. The Professor tilted his head back to regard his own image in the window glass: round, high brow, bushy brown beard, pince-nez glasses perched on a broad nose. Reflected in his orbit was the world of his lab.

He closed his eyes, and saw the ties that bound.

He knew the student next to him was about to say something, and prepared his answer as he waited for the words. “You received a letter, Professor. They want you in Alt Coulumb.”

He listened to the music of his world, to gentle footfalls, to the murmured symphony of conversation and the slick passage of blade and needle through dead human meat, to the splash of fluid in glass bowls and the flow of blood. Always, he listened to the flow of blood. He thought about the vivisectionist’s legs.