In the kitchen, a cook with an iguana’s face made a mystic gesture over a pan, or maybe added spice; either way, a column of blue fire blossomed. A girl drew a cleaver from a block, tossed it into the air, caught the handle without looking, and laid into a joint. Tuxedoed waiters danced between tables covered in creamy silk. Craft circles surrounded each table, rubbed the neighboring conversations into an incomprehensible stage murmur more welcoming than the eerie silence Craftwork wards often wrought. “What are you doing, Ley?”
“I’m treating my sister, who I haven’t seen in years, to a meal at the best restaurant in the city.” Ley raised her glass, Kai parried with her own, and the result looked almost like a toast. Ley knocked back half her wine in a single pull. She only seemed to take pleasure in the act at its end, granting herself a thin grin. “I’ve come up in the world, since Chartegnon.”
Kai tasted hers, hesitant, patient: peaches without sweetness, a fluttering inside her mouth like a hummingbird trying to escape. She swallowed. “The Chatelenne family are clients of mine. I like their work as much as the next girl, but this is a hundred-thaum bottle. I’m glad you’re doing well, Ley, but, come on. You don’t have to impress me. Somehow you found out I was coming, and somehow you got into the bank to send me that letter. Play poor Marian if you like, but don’t play me.”
Ley’s fingers stroked the stem of her champagne flute. “How are you, sis?”
“Fine, aside from your avoiding the question.”
“You know, I had two letters from Mom in the last year: one to tell me you were in hospital”—without the definite article; she really had been spending too much time in the Old World—“and another, a day later, to tell me you were out.”
Kai set the glass down. “Mom didn’t know I was in, either, until I woke up and told her. By then, I was out of critical. It wasn’t bad—soul loss, deep cuts, broken bones, but treatable. My guidelines for care told them not to tell Mom unless there was a chance I wouldn’t make it.”
“Or me?” Her free hand waved off Kai’s objection. She looked down into the bubbles in her glass. “I was afraid when I heard, but, gods, I can’t believe I’m saying this, those letters were a relief. It was nice to have proof you were human.”
“What do you mean?”
Ley’s eyes, when she opened them, were large and dark as Kai’s own. “You remember that footrace—I was six? You tripped, and split your forehead on a conch shell? And I didn’t notice, I was sprinting along, so happy to be winning for once, and when I turned back I saw you stagger across the line with your face covered in blood.”
“I was fine.” Of course Ley had run ahead, unthinking, eager to win. Kai needed stitches. “I kept the scar when I went into the pool.” She tapped her forehead, near the hair line.
“I’m glad.”
“Why did you break into a bank to send me a letter?”
“Who says I broke in?”
“I asked Fontaine to trace the letter. It appeared this morning, mysteriously.”
Ley waved the implied question off. “I wanted to talk with you. I needed a place that was personal and secure.”
“So secure you didn’t put either of our names on the reservation.”
She shrugged.
“How did you know I was coming?”
“I have friends in the bank, and the arts community. Your visit raised a fuss.”
“Fontaine wanted to keep things secret.”
“It’s a small berg, sis.”
“Doesn’t seem small to me.”
“That depends on your angle.” Ley sculpted the shore behind them with a wave of her hand. Kai followed the gesture: Agdel Lex rose up the cliffs like a wave, ghostlit offices, skyscrapers, sprawling residential blocks, and the Iskari squid tower. The air wavered with reradiated heat. The frozen horrorscape Kai had glimpsed in that first broken moment of arrival was nowhere to be seen from Sauga’s. “There were many cities here even before Gerhardt came, and they’ve multiplied since—the dead city, the Iskari colony with its squiddy bureaucrats, the nameless city where old Alikanders hide, the refugee city, the criminal city, the city of dockworkers and freight. My city’s small, but we do big things.” She turned from Agdel Lex, to face the spire out at sea.
“What is that, anyway?” Kai’s earlier curiosity overwhelmed, for a moment, her certainty that this was just another artful dodge. “Hotel? Military base?”
“Our great success. How did your meetings go?”
That sharp pivot broke the illusion. Kai felt so tired of all this staggering glib self-possession. Maybe this was nothing more than Ley being Ley, uncomfortable, like the rest of their family, around pain, always ready to flee uncertainty by diving into some new project, or unrelated abstract argument about ship rigging or the cost of trade, police organization or the dynamics of faith. Politics, religion, business, these were all easier than human meat, in the Pohala household. There was love—without love, who could bear so many arguments?—but it clothed itself in other words and ways. “What do you want, Ley?” Their waiter approached, but drew back without need for a signal. Good service here.
“Your meetings—what did you think of them?”
“Good Concerns,” she said. “Interesting projects.”
“Interesting?” Ley always could hear the words behind her words.
“They felt small.”
“They are. Dreamcraft and nightmare implementation have limitless potential, but so much of this data-crunching mind-to-mind work just scratches the surface. Amusements. Cheap tricks. Altus, the Concern that built that spire—they want something different. They’ll take the same models, the same spirit, to the stars.”
“Bullshit,” Kai said, and Ley laughed.
“Swearing already? You’ve barely touched your wine.” She finished hers. “They have financing. The technology’s tested. And they have their first big client: an Iskari government launch goes up this week.” Ley frowned, shook her head, pressed on. “For Altus, the Iskari are just a stepping stone. Imagine it: Craftsmen drink starlight for power, and warp the darkness. What if they could walk among the stars themselves? What if they wielded the deepest darkness imaginable?”
Kai ignored the hypothetical. “So—you heard about me through your friends.”
“It’s a tight-knit community, a few thousand at most, all striving for fortune and glory. We come from all over the world, and we scramble, and we live visibly. Every project and verse passes around under a friend-d-a, but everybody’s everybody else’s friend. I heard you were here, tricked my way into IFI, and now, well.” She folded one leg over the other, and looked down into the toe of her shoe as if the reflection might offer her clues as to how she might proceed. “I need help.”
There it was: the meat within the shell. I need help. Kai tried to remember when she’d last heard those words. When this brilliant sharp woman before her broke her ankle falling out of a palm tree, age seven, she’d not asked for help; she’d propped herself on a branch and tried to limp home, choking off her sobs, and when Kai offered Ley her arm, Ley shrugged her off. Kai had shoved herself under Ley’s arm anyway. “Anything.”
“Two things are happening at once.”
Kai felt her frown form. “Really.”
Ley raised one hand. “Let me explain.”
“You brought me here to pitch me.”
“It’s a solid pitch.”
“This was a setup.”
“No.” Ley pinched her nose. “Kai. Come on. I don’t have much time.”
“You don’t have much time? I thought we were here for dinner.”
“There’s a lot going on,” Ley said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Sis, listen to me. This is important. I’m involved in a project.” She drew a small black envelope from her pocket, unfolded it, and unfolded it again, until she held a large black envelope that never appeared to have been folded. A black wax seal glistened on the flap: wolfsbane. She slid it face down across the table to Kai, who di
dn’t pick it up. “It’s a big deal. But the funding’s drawn us in a bad direction, and if you were to buy out their stake, we could pivot away. What we’re trying to do is—”
“What do you need?”
“Sixteen million thaums,” she said. “Tonight.”
Kai tensed, remembered Mom and sandcastles, and said, “No.”
“Kai.”
“Don’t.” She raised one hand. “You’re asking me to spend eight thousand souls—”
“Not spend, invest—in me, in the Concern. There’s limitless growth potential. We’re going to change the world.”
“If you’re such a good investment, why do you need sixteen million thaums tonight? Go to a bank.”
“The bank’s not my sister.”
“And it won’t give you sixteen million thaums sight unseen, either.”
“What do you want from me, Kai?” Even with the sound-dulling ward, Ley’s raised voice drew glances from neighboring tables; an Iskari matron pointedly returned her attention to her foie gras, and a Talbeg gentleman reached for his partner’s hand. “You want me to kneel? To kiss the ring? You’re not even letting me explain. It was hard to write that letter.”
“Not hard enough,” Kai said, primly as she could manage, and stood, and folded her napkin. She left the wine unfinished on the table, and the folder untouched. “I have to go. I can’t sit here anymore.”
Ley caught Kai’s wrist. Kai looked at Lei’s hand. Her sister’s knuckles paled with the force of her grip. She looked open, and raw, and scared.
No one around them was even pretending to eat anymore.
Kai said: “Let me go.”
Ley did. She stepped back, wooden and slow.
Kai smoothed the cuff of her jacket. She closed her eyes for the length of a blessing. When she opened them again, Ley remained. “I’m sorry for embarrassing you in front of your restaurant friends. The next time I see you, I’ll forget we had this conversation.”
She crossed the ward, so she did not hear the word Ley said next. But she could read her sister’s lips just fine.
Chapter Seven
KAI MARCHED UP THE cliffs of Agdel Lex to pray.
She owed a dozen small gods obeisance, in a dozen different languages, and none of those were right. The moon cast one shadow from her, and the ghostlight lamps another, and she minded neither. The road grew steep as it left the harbor. She leaned against a coffee-seller’s stall to switch from sensible heels to the more sensible flats in her purse, and kept climbing, and still couldn’t bear to pray the prayers she needed.
Gods save us from our sisters. Sisters know us before we know to hide our secrets, before we learn to guard the latches that close our soul, to hide the chinks in the diamonds that become our armor as we recline upon our hoard. And sisters remember.
She was not being fair. Whatever Ley wanted, however audacious the request—sixteen million thaums, twice Kai’s investment budget, enough to support a couple hundred families for a year anywhere in the world, a vast fortune mentioned with an offhand ease that suggested she thought it negligible—there must have been a better way to handle that conversation than just charging out.
Kai left the bright tourist districts behind, joining main arteries of commerce and shipping. Streets meant for cart and horse zigzagged upslope. Kai was the only pedestrian she could see. Behind a high fence, enormous conveyor platforms bore corrugated steel containers downslope toward a shipping depot, where golems and night shift stevedores loaded the containers onto carts they dragged to port.
She climbed as they descended, and thought of salmon swimming upstream, and of the fear she’d read in Ley’s grip, in her eyes, the need her sister could not speak.
Kai knew she was wrong to blame sisterhood as a concept, sisters in the abstract. This wasn’t a universal problem. She’d just never been able to shake the sense that Ley knew her better than she knew herself, just like Ley knew everything, drew secrets and held them, captured, with perfect gravity.
The desert dried Kai’s sweat to salt scales. She bought water from an open convenience store. The man behind the counter had a full beard, was reading a book on mathematics when Kai entered, wore a loose white tunic; if he thought Kai out of place he said nothing and accepted her coin—two thaums without the bottle deposit. Kai did not twitch as the soul left her. Izza’d described being so low on soulstuff a thaum for a scrap of bread left you reeling. There was so much Kai didn’t understand. Life was short, and learning took so long.
“Thank you,” she told the man, in what she hoped passed for decent Talbeg. He offered her a betel nut from the open bag on the counter, and she shook her head.
When she reached the top of the hill, she found herself panting and exhausted before an enormous train station. The conveyor behind the fence ran through a toothed gate in a curtain wall studded with guard towers; behind the wall, an engine five stories tall surged to a stop. Beetle-black iron hissed and popped and spouted steam. Guards marched atop the train cars, watchful. One sang a war song in Talbeg Kai couldn’t follow. Demon ice melted and steamed from the train, and tortured metal creaked. One car hadn’t made the journey intact: an enormous claw had torn its side open, and greenish fluid leaked from within. Blood and dried rainbows streaked the steel. Station hands swarmed the train, tossing nets of grounding wire over the hulk, binding it back into this world after its journey through another.
Kai turned back to the ocean and the Altus Spire. Behind her the Iskari tower rose, red and tumescent.
This wasn’t her place. She’d leave tomorrow. But she had duties.
She removed her prayer mat from her purse, spread it on the cobblestones, and knelt back on her calves. Eyes closed, she reviewed the litanies come due, and eyes open, she spoke them. Where sacrifices were required, she offered them, in abbreviated form. Some idols lapped blood, others ate the ash of burnt hair. Others sought only poetry, attention. People who didn’t understand the role of a Kavekanese priest sometimes asked why she’d ever build an idol whose sacrifice inconvenienced her—bloodletting, say, or sexual abstinence. But while faith, in general, had the same dynamics no matter its object, gods and idols were works of art, and begged thematic consistency. A bloodthirsty God would not eat offerings of grass. Though that would be an interesting challenge: to construct a warrior Goddess whose rituals revolved around unlikely combinations and forms of worship. Sex, say, either orgiastic intoxication in the manner of an Ebon Sea cult, or else some peculiar sort of denial. Meditation handbooks from Sheer Peaks monasteries advised the practitioner to envision herself midcopulation with a sensory lushness from which even an Iskari romance might shrink—and then to envision one’s partner undergoing the many stages of death and decomposition, until one lay in congress with a skeleton.
Which proved, to Kai’s mind, that monks were a lot kinkier than most people gave them credit.
Neither the bloodletting nor the incense nor the mental progression through the logics of sex—and certainly not the stink of burnt hair—calmed her, but the idols back home appreciated her attention. She felt their light kind touches: a chill hand across her cheek, a flush in her belly, the smell of lavender, adoration returned, like when Maya’s cats rubbed against her leg when she arrived to feed them. Inside of fifteen minutes, she was in turn the high priestess Ourakos - who - killed, of Yavimal - who - walks - on - water, of Iara - who - summons, of Komoros - healer - of - small - cuts - and - bruises. (She’d tried to convince the Zurish clients who proposed Komoros that she could build something larger, fuller, and more interesting, but they were a family of limited vision.)
She left the Blue Lady for last, because the Blue Lady scared her.
Lady, guide my steps.
Lead me from Smiling Jack and the bag of knives.
Make me smart, and make me fast.
Catch me in Your hand when I fall.
Bind me to my brothers and my sisters.
(Kai stumbled over the last word. Litany: you often forgot what you
were about to say until you said it.)
Unlock the doors that bar.
Help me make others free.
A small prayer, she’d thought at first, when Izza proposed it: a thief’s credo. But when she spoke it every night, she realized how much those words could mean if you let them grow.
The Lady wound through her.
She thought about Ley.
For all her years of experience building small idols, semiconscious almost-gods tailored to fit her clients’ needs, Kai was still growing used to a Goddess who talked back. The Blue Lady didn’t argue, or tease. She picked the locks of your heart. She stole into your mind. If She wanted you to know She was there, She gave you a taste of Her glory. Often, She just slid out, leaving a thought you could ignore if you wished. A memory, an obsession, which might have been your own all along.
Dammit.
Ley wanted to do everything herself. She was smart and brave and she didn’t need other people often. Everything was her responsibility: she could hold it together, tie up her own problems, just get off her case. What would make someone like that ask her sister for sixteen million thaums?
When Kai first read the letter, she’d felt a stab of fear. What could Ley need? Soured by a day of meetings with people begging soulstuff to feed petty projects, Kai had decided without asking: Ley was greedy. Of course she could never be in real trouble.
But maybe she was. Maybe Kai, for all her good intentions, could not hear.
She gathered her ritual apparatus, her fetishes and knife and bowl and lighter, into her purse, stood, shook the prayer mat free of dust, folded it, and returned it to her purse. Golem engines ground behind her; torn metal screamed. A crane lifted the damaged container. Streetlights lit the nameplate on the station wall: Gavreaux Junction.
A smell of ice and broken gods wafted to her from the dead city deep underfoot.
Be careful, Izza had said.
Shit.
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