He didn’t flinch as she cut between his scars. The skin resisted more than it should have, but at last blood flowed. She caught it with Craft, a red globe in air, drew a drop from her own arm, mixed the two, made her blade long and curved like a calligrapher’s brush, and, kneeling, painted the circles closed. Blood smoked and sank into stone. Beneath the daylit world, large gears ground, counterweights fell. Circle, curved runes, spiderweb lines, all shone for a glorious, terrifying instant.
Elayne didn’t blink, but someone did, somewhere, and the light died. She crossed the circle, and did not stumble. After decades of slipping from world to world, one found one’s sea legs quickly.
The rest of her business was mundane by comparison, concerned with format and food, security and the spacing of bathroom breaks. They ate after, Temoc and Elayne and Chel, a rough hearty lunch of roast pork and rice delivered by red-arms with the Kemals’ complements. Temoc did not mention Mina or Caleb. Elayne didn’t, either. They were present nonetheless, uninvoked, in the silence.
For all Temoc’s scars and strength, she thought, he needed a ward of his own around Chakal Square, or around his heart, or around that courtyard with the cactus flowers and the screen windows and the boy who played solitaire in the dust.
* * *
After lunch, Temoc and Chel escorted her to the square’s edge. They were near the border when the fight broke out.
First she heard the scream, followed by curses in Low Quechal, and fists striking flesh. Temoc moved, fast. Chel ran after him and Elayne followed, arriving almost too late to see.
A crowd pried two pairs of Quechal men apart. A boy lay between them, clutching his leg. Temoc’s arrival shocked everyone but the brawlers, too set on their fight to notice. One took advantage of his captors’ shock to fight free. His arm came around to strike—
And stopped.
Temoc had grabbed the man’s wrist. The assailant’s arm wrenched at an odd angle, and he cried out. Temoc caught him before he fell.
“What happened here?” Temoc said.
One of the men on the right shouted in Low Quechal, and pointed to the boy on the ground. Temoc replied, earnest, slow, calm.
Neither noticed the Wardens crossing the street, or the red-arms who blocked the Wardens’ path, shoulders square, jaws jutting. Chel shouted, “Stand down!” but the red-arms didn’t listen. A Warden drew her club.
Elayne moved without moving.
Shadow boiled from the ground. Solid winds thrust red-arms and Wardens apart.
Elayne tossed one of the red-arms six feet into the air and passed beneath him into the road. She blazed, grown large in glyphlight. The Wardens recoiled from her, and raised their weapons with the uncertainty of foxes before a bear.
She let her shadows fade. Frost on stone sublimated to steam. Sunlight slunk back like a kicked dog. “There is no trouble here.” She floated them a business card. “I work for the King in Red. A boy was hurt in an accident. Send for a doctor.”
Their blank eyes reflected her. A Warden wearing officer’s bars recovered his composure first. “We need to see for ourselves.”
“Follow me, then,” she said. “You alone. The situation is tense.”
The officer waved his fellows back, and followed Elayne. A scarred giant with a red armband blocked their way. Elayne was about to make the giant move, before Chel grabbed his arm. “Zip. Don’t.”
He stepped aside.
A rumble of distant thunder followed the Warden through the crowd. Temoc turned to meet him. “There is no crime here.”
“I’ll judge that.”
“The boy fell,” he said. “This man shoved him by accident, and broke his leg. These two are his parents. A fight ensued. That is all.”
The Warden stepped past Temoc to address the men. “Is this true?”
Veins stood out on Temoc’s neck, but he kept quiet. Elayne marveled to see such control so near to breaking.
But it held.
Wardens wheeled a stretcher through the crowd. Elayne did not like how fast the stretcher came—it implied the Wardens expected trouble. No one wanted to press charges with Temoc watching. The boy and his fathers went with the Wardens, and Temoc turned to the remaining brawlers with a gaze that drained color from their faces.
But Elayne saw the fear under Temoc’s rage. This might have been the breaking point. A brawl between red-arms and Wardens would spread, and the whole square catch fire.
She took that fear with her when she left. And she took, too, a broadsheet she found near the fight, which bore an etching of Chakal Square beneath a blocky one-word headline: “Rise.”
14
In the heart of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao’s office pyramid, a golem sat in a steel chair behind a steel desk in a cork-walled room and sipped a mug of steaming coffee through a straw. False stars shone around him: light from the ghostlamp on his desk glittered off tacks pinning alchemical prints to the walls. Yarn and wire tied pins to pins, pictures to pictures: a bridge in Shikaw to a Southern Gleb tribesman bleeding out from a lion attack, the claw marks in the tribesman’s back to a teenage girl in a floral print dress with white lace at collar and cuffs, her right eye to a reproduction of a Schwarzwald painting a century and a half old, some ancient family standing before a castle in the depths of a wood—three bearded elders, a small round woman carved from ivory, a young man in a billowing shirt with a smile bent as an old druid’s sickle. And another twenty lines spread from that man, from the curve of his smile, some weaving back to Shikaw and the bridge, and others off to still more distant lands and interlocking wheels of yarn. Thousands of pictures, and these were only the top layer: more beneath, long faded, the string in some cases thrice rotted and replaced by wire.
In that cork-lined room, silent and swift, the golem worked. Four-armed, with its upper limbs it lifted newspapers in many languages from the stack beside the desk, and with its thick manipulators turned the pages. Lower arms, scissor-fingered, sliced scraps from their context: pictures, lines of text, a three-word excerpt from a breath mint ad. Lenses realigned to read. Every few minutes the golem paused for coffee, or for a drag from the cigarette that smoldered in the ashtray. Thin smoke rose from its tip to coil against the ceiling, a dragon pondering the paper hoard. Already the evening’s work had yielded a four-inch stack of clippings. Shifting gears, pumping pistons, unwinding and winding of clockwork and spring, opening and closing switches, all merged into the babble of a mechanical brook through a metal forest. And underneath it all, always, lay the sound of scissors parting paper.
“Zack,” Elayne said from the door, once she’d waited long enough. “I have something for you.”
The cutting, and all other visible movement, stopped. The metal brook trickled on.
She walked to his desk. Dead eyes stared up from the top clipping. A woman, her throat slit. Elayne could not read the caption of old-style Shining Empire glyphs. “You can’t add this many every night. You’d have filled the entire room with paper by now.”
A clock wound as the shield of Zack’s head turned right and tilted back to face her. Lenses realigned for focus, and as they shifted she glimpsed the furnace inside him. “I edit.” A cello’s voice, the music of strings made words by processes she did not understand. She was only a passing student of golemetrics, which required more dealing with demons than she liked. Not that Elayne had anything against demons per se—but her conversations with them often reminded her of a vicious joke in which she herself might well be the punchline. Perhaps the demons felt the same.
Zack hefted the clippings in one manipulator arm. “First cut, most relevant of the day’s news. So I believe now. Initial processing complete, I compare. Lotus Gang execution, or Grimwald incursions into Shining Empire territory? Method suggests Khelids, Dhistran death cult from eighteenth century, though current scholarship indicates Khelids were in fact a cover for Camlaander occupationist priests’ attempts to reconsecrate Dhistran territory to Undying Queen and Eternal Monarchy.”
“Hence: editing. Does new content fit with emergent patterns?”
“Accept facts that fit the theory, throw out those that don’t?”
A narrowing of aperture, for him, was a narrowing of the eyes. “A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.” That last word a vibrating chord. “Did you come to mock my methods, Elayne?”
“I came to ask your help.”
“You have strange protocols for asking.”
“You’ll like this.” She unfolded the broadsheet and held it before his lenses.
Clicks and realignments, scrape of a needle on a spinning wheel. “Simple propaganda leaflet. This political affair holds no interest for me.”
“An army gathering in the Skittersill holds no interest?”
“I have no defined life span,” he said. “Nor will you, once you shed that skin shell. We are both difficult to kill. The greatest dangers to us are dangers to our world system. Therefore we may divide all threats into two kinds: global-existential, and trivial. Trivial threats deserve no time or thought. This protest does not threaten the fundamental coherence of reality. It is of no importance.”
“What if it causes a demon outbreak?”
“It will not. Too many central decision-makers have nothing to gain from widespread destruction. Even if it did, such events can be contained—we might lose Dresediel Lex, but not the planet.”
“Accidents happen.”
“Accidents, by their nature, are stubbornly resistant to prevention. The same is not true of conscious threat. This demonstration may inconvenience our clients, but it is not relevant to my extracurricular work.”
“What if I told you someone had been printing and distributing these leaflets throughout the Skittersill, for free, since before details of our work on the old wards became public? That no one knows who prints them, or what their angle might be?”
Zack took the paper—a scythe-arc through the air, and it was gone. Her fingertips stung with the speed of its departure. The golem pressed the broadsheet flat and scanned its front page with lenses and knife-tipped fingers. The shield-face opened, revealing a forest of wires, lenses, and hydraulics. Eyepieces telescoped out for greater magnification, and secondary lenses rotated into place. “No further leads?”
“None.”
A toneless hum was her only acknowledgment. No nods, of course, while Zack was so close to the paper. Without moving his head—it gimbaled gyroscopically—he took a binder from a low shelf beside the desk, fanned its pages by touch, and found a section that seemed to satisfy. Only then did he retract his eyes and close his face. “Here.” He offered her the binder.
“Garabaldi Brothers Printing and Engraving.”
“The shop that composed this item. A family outfit in the Vale. Do you have other samples?”
“No.”
“Unfortunate. Unlikely the object of your inquiry would use a single printer. Combination of sources preserves supply, anonymity. Though anonymity requires effort. How much effort do you believe this person is likely to spare?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “What do I owe you?”
He offered her the broadsheet back. “Tell me what pattern emerges. May bear on my work.”
“I will,” she said. “Zack.”
“Yes.”
“What do you do, when you find an out-of-context problem?”
He tilted his head to one side. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On the threat’s form,” he said. “Threat is another word for change. Status quo ante is not preferable to all change. Consider the Iskari boy stopping the leaking dam with his finger—romantic image, but futile. If one is to play any other role, one must be open to drastic change. The world some large-scale changes would bring about may be preferable to the one we currently inhabit.”
“Have you ever found such a preferable threat?”
He gestured to the walls, to the net of possibilities. “If I had, would I be working here?”
“Thank you,” she said, and left, though he hadn’t answered her question.
Behind, the golem bent once more to his work. The metal river ran through the metal forest, and a smoke dragon coiled against the ceiling.
15
Temoc worked out in the courtyard before dawn: weighted one-legged squats, handclap pull-ups and pushups, a back bridge held for a slow count of one hundred. When he was done he knelt facing east and drew his knife. He checked the black glass blade as he did every morning and found it sharp. The cutting edge was thin enough for light to shine through.
“You’re up early.”
Mina wore a white terrycloth robe, and her feet were bare.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he replied. “How long have you been watching?”
“Long enough to get a good view,” she said with a smile he remembered from nights beneath a desert sky. “Meeting’s today?”
He nodded. “The King in Red. Tan Batac. Both in our camp, to talk. It might even work.”
“You’re wearing your deep-thoughts face.”
“You always think that.”
She walked to him, took his arm in her hand, and squeezed. “Tell me.”
“Caleb.” He had not known what he would say until he spoke his son’s name. “When I was his age.”
Mina smelled of sleep, and her robe smelled of laundry. “When you were his age, the world was a different place.”
“When I was his age, I earned my scars. They’ve kept me safe.”
“Not against this.” She dragged her fingernails across his skin, leaving white tracks that faded fast. He felt exposed with her so close. Vulnerable, bounded. He liked the feeling, though every old warrior’s instinct rebelled against it. “You’re scared, so you run scenarios. I understand.” She slid her hands over his chest. The creases at the corners of her eyes deepened. She read him as if he were a strange text in a familiar script. “It’s okay.”
He stepped back. “If this meeting goes wrong, I become a target. So do you.”
“I can handle myself.”
“Caleb has no scars to help him.”
“That was the idea. He can be the sweet kid neither of us were.”
“But if I fail—”
“You won’t.” She kissed his cheek.
“You were worried, before.”
“I still am,” she said. “You mind if I head-shrink you a bit?”
“No.”
“You’ve grown up good enough to want to help people, and strong enough to do it. That has nothing to do with the scars your father gave you, and everything to do with the man who wears them. But you don’t know that. You’re scared of what happens to us if something happens to you—and since goodness and strength and scars are tangled in your head, you worry you haven’t done right by Caleb because you haven’t scarred him. But our son will be good and strong without the shit your father did to you, or the shit my parents did to me. My husband is about to make peace with the King in Red. I’m proud of you.”
“I love you,” he said.
“Damn straight.” They kissed again. He lifted her, and she laughed. Her kiss lingered on his lips, her weight in his arm. Later, when he stood in Chakal Square before his congregation, blade raised, sacrifice bound on the altar, she remained. But chant swelled to climax, the blade came down, pommel striking sternum like a hand on a drum, and in that sweep and the exultant rush that followed, he lost her.
16
The morning of the conference, Bloodletter’s Street was cordoned off for blocks. Wardens moved yellow wooden barricades to admit the King in Red’s carriage; dismounting, Elayne found herself in a field command post that looked much like those she remembered from the Wars. Stretchers against one wall, first-aid station nearby. Wardens marched or ran about
. None were armed that she could see, beyond their truncheons. Small relief. If weapons were called for, she doubted they’d be long coming.
Couatl circled sharklike overhead. An adjutant ran off to summon the Wardens’ captain, who approached, blank-faced with reflective silver like the rest, unidentifiable save for height and shape and the number stamped on his crimson skull badge. The King in Red drew the captain aside, and they conversed in hushed tones.
Beside her, Tan Batac shrank into himself: hands in pockets, shoulders hunched, head turtled down.
“Nervous?” Elayne said.
“Big day.”
“You’ll be fine. These people want to talk.”
“These people want my head on a pike, and the rest arranged somewhere near as a warning to passersby.”
She chuckled.
“Listen to them.” Chakal Square was chanting. From this distance, the words melded to a meaningless ocean rhythm. “We brought these people everything. There are fortunes in the Skittersill because of me, because of my family.” He struck his chest, hard. A hollow sound. His hand darted back into his pocket as if startled by the noise. “We try to make this place a palace, and what do we get?”
“These people are angry because they think you’ve ignored them. Their anger will recede as you work together.”
“They’ll come for me. Just you wait.”
Kopil returned with the Warden chief and two deputies in tow. “Is Tan still brooding on his imminent demise?”
“That isn’t funny.”
The skeleton grinned, of course. “Let’s hope this peace conference goes better than the last one, eh?”
The last one: the God Wars. The failed summit before the final assault on Dresediel Lex. Liberation forces approached the meeting scarred by years of war; Elayne herself had been seventeen and suffering nightmare visions of thorn-beings hunting her through deep jungle. They bore their losses with them to meet with gold-draped priest-kings of Dresediel Lex who deigned to grant them audience. The conference failed in the first minute, but days passed before anyone realized. “Let’s hope,” Elayne said.
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