The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence

by Max Gladstone

  Izza, I’m in trouble. Ley’s in trouble. I think she’s killed—someone.

  The echoed heart rate jumped, sweat cooled, sheets shifted over someone else’s skin. A hand caught Izza’s arm and she sloughed the whoever off. You’re serious.

  Of course. I just don’t. She’s gone, she ran, and there’s this cat, and there’s a body.

  The blood smoked and hissed on the floorboards, almost gone.

  You have to get out of there, the answer came at last. You don’t know these people. Don’t give them your sister’s name. Don’t give them your name. Just—wipe down the apartment, anything you’ve touched, and go. Someone will find the body.

  I called the cops already.

  A shadow fell between them, reddish and sharp-tinged. Kai felt blood vessels tighten.

  You saw your sister kill this person.

  I did.

  Don’t tell them. They’ll bring you in, and they will not let you go.

  I can’t do that. You didn’t see her, Izza. There was a knife.

  Kai, don’t—

  The blood snapped and hissed and left a stain of ash. She felt the Lady’s chill outside her mind, but she could not bear to be told what to do, not now. She shut out Izza’s answering prayer, refused the grace, and clutched the cat, who wriggled in her arms but settled at last, draped paws over her arm.

  That’s how the cops found Kai when they arrived: sitting with legs folded and Behemoth in her arms, staring into the open blue eyes of the corpse.

  A man took her by the elbow, escorted her to the sofa. (There was a sofa. That was nice.) Set her there. They asked her name, and her sister’s, and she told them both. Cops circled the body with tape. Cops picked through the purse near the body’s feet. (There was a purse near the body’s feet.) Cops spoke her sister’s name. Cops examined the balcony. Cops said another name—Vane, or something like it. She remembered her sister saying “Allie.” Cops discussed weapons, motives, the weather. Cops spoke on the balcony with seven-foot-tall robed beings who landed and perched on the balustrade, tentacular shadows writhing in the darkness beneath their cowls, before they leapt off into the night.

  Comforting.

  A woman swept into the room a few minutes after the cops: Iskari, square and strong, wearing a suit and a ratty overcoat, sunglasses folded in the breast pocket. The cop who’d talked to Kai ran to her, one hand raised, but the woman flashed a badge and brushed past him to the body.

  “Ma’am—”

  “Lieutenant,” she said. “Bescond, Authority. How much time has passed?”

  “Call came at ten thirteen—”

  “Who’s that?”

  Pointing at Kai, or Behemoth.

  “Witness. Pohala’s sister.”

  “When did this happen? Exactly.”

  “Two past ten.”

  “Fuck.” She checked her watch again. “Fuck.” The second time her accent slipped. It had been full Chartegnon before, nasal as a knife’s edge and dripping class. The second fuck broadened, Agdelic. Born here, educated abroad? Or the other way around? “Rectifiers?”

  “Dispatched already. Haven’t heard back yet.”

  Kai stroked Behemoth’s head; the cat nipped her finger, and she pulled her hand back, and wondered if being bitten by a cat who’d just tried to eat a (fresh, admittedly) corpse was more dangerous, infection-wise, than being bitten by a cat who hadn’t.

  The Craftswoman, when she showed up, was less comforting than the cops. Kai heard raised voices in the hall and the beginnings of a struggle, before a burst of moonlight-flashed shadow roiled out into the room. (There was only one room, not counting the closet and bathroom, and few furnishings: sofa, standing lamp, kitchen island, two chairs at the island.) Behemoth yowled and dug claws into Kai’s arm. The shadow failed and a Craftswoman emerged: dark skinned with curly black hair, glyphs shining on her arms, wearing a glower and a charcoal suit.

  “Out of my way.” Her Iskari had a distinct Kathic accent, which shocked Kai at first, before she wondered if that was racist.

  “Abernathy,” Bescond said. “We called you as soon as we could.”

  “I flew halfway across town. Your air traffic control is down in the lobby waiting to arrest me. Get them off my back, and give me space.” She paused, considered. “Please.”

  Bescond did not leave. She gestured to the cops, who went—scuttled, edging around the room to stay as far from Abernathy as possible. From the hallway, Kai heard moans.

  The Craftswoman knelt over the body. She checked the breath with a silver mirror, and took four different pulses; she snapped her fingers and killed the lights, then snapped her fingers again and the corpse glowed from within, as if someone had laced it with the phosphorescent algae that grew in closed harbors. When the lights returned, Abernathy looked even less happy than before.

  “Well?” Bescond asked, but if the Craftswoman heard, she didn’t answer. She drew a piece of silver chalk from her inside pocket, closed her eyes, and let it fall. Glyph rings burned beneath the skin of her outstretched hand, and the chalk swept around her, drawing a swift arcing diagram lined with glyphs. Kai recognized a Craft circle, but she’d never seen one formed so fast. Abernathy’s hand did not shake, but her mouth tightened. The chalk flew back to her hand.

  The cops were gone.

  “Bescond,” Abernathy said. “I need your soul.”

  Bescond stepped back, and touched her breastbone, offended. Something wriggled beneath her shirt, out of sight.

  Abernathy shook her head. “I won’t take much, your partner won’t feel a thing, and we don’t have time to argue.”

  “Take mine.” Kai stood, spilling the cat from her lap. She approached the body, but did not cross the circle. Abernathy reviewed her: not the usual hair-to-ankles sweep, but a single glance focused on the mouth that took in the rest of her, a gaze too broad to avoid. The Craftswoman offered her hand, and Kai took it: Abernathy’s skin was warm, and her palm bore shovel calluses and small, well-healed bloodletting scars.

  The Craftswoman’s glyphs took light. Shadows rolled from her skin, or the world’s colors deepened, or both, as her power unfurled. Thought came labored, like movement underwater. The woman asked before she took: Kai felt the request at her soul’s edge, a need she could ignore.

  She did not.

  “Yes,” she breathed, and that yes pulled a plug in the basin of her soul: she rushed into Abernathy. Color drained from the world, and joy and panic together surged out into the Craftswoman, a few hundred thaums consumed in an instant. Kai saw by castoffs, by the shed skin of atoms; her every touch, every kiss, each lover’s hand on her face, was only like repelling like. The shock of that cold vision knelt her. She did not, at least, collapse.

  “Sorry, Lady,” Abernathy said, but Kai did not think she was talking to her.

  A blade of moon and lightning burned in Abernathy’s grip. It opened, then, into a sharp flower Abernathy placed against the dead woman’s chest; the world tightened. The woman’s—Vane’s?—lungs filled. Muscles spasmed. Her mouth moved. She exhaled, a wet gargling inhuman sound. Abernathy frowned, and chanted a formula in a language Kai didn’t know, and suspected might not, exactly, exist. Vane’s eyes snapped open like a doll’s. Sparks danced in their inhuman blue, but only sparks. No soul remained.

  The corpse fell silent. Light slunk back from its hiding spots in the recessed ceiling ghostlamps.

  Abernathy sat back on her thighs. She watched the corpse for a long minute, then remembered Kai existed. Her smile looked genuine, if distant. “Thank you.”

  Bescond had drawn back behind the kitchen island, and wore her sunglasses.

  Abernathy stood, and offered Kai her hand for a different purpose. Kai appreciated the help; her legs wobbled as she rose, and her knees refused to lock. The Craftswoman released Kai’s hand, and Kai’s fingers tingled as warm air reminded them to feel. Behemoth’s head struck the back of her calf.

  Abernathy glared down at the corpse.

  “T
oo late?” Bescond removed her sunglasses, trying to act cool, though her voice did not cooperate.

  “It shouldn’t be,” Abernathy said. “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said, “even after an hour, even without a trust, even if she’d never done a trace of premortem prep, there should be enough left of Ms. Vane to question. The organs are all in place, and there’s no decay—less than you’d expect over a half hour. Ms. Vane’s just not there. You’re saying her partner did this?”

  “That’s what the witness said.”

  “Witness.” Abernathy revolved. Her head clocked five minutes to one side. She had a hawk’s way of watching.

  Don’t tell them anything, Izza had prayed.

  “I’m her sister,” Kai said, answering a question the Craftswoman hadn’t asked. “Not hers.” Pointing to the woman on the floor. “Kai Pohala.”

  “Tara Abernathy,” the Craftswoman said, then blinked. “You’re Kavekanese.”

  “You noticed.”

  “A priestess.”

  “You deduce that from, what, my shoes, the faint smell of incense?” Loud voices in the back of Kai’s head warned her against fucking with this woman, but so much of the rest of her was screaming that she didn’t listen.

  “I guessed,” Abernathy said. “Small world.”

  “What?”

  “You met a friend of mine, briefly. A little over a year back.”

  “I meet a lot of people.”

  “She had silver wings.”

  Kai remembered fountains of flame, explosions, remembered falling from a gruesome height clasped in arms stronger than steel, beneath wings that warped reflected stars. All that was too much to fit out her mouth at once, so what she said was, “Oh.” And then, as names and memory connected: “You work in Alt Coulumb, don’t you?”

  “You could say that.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Leaving,” she said. “At least, that’s what I planned. Looks like I’ll have to delay my flight.”

  Bescond cleared her throat. “Ms. Pohala. Would you come with us? I have a few questions to ask.”

  “I talked to the cops already.”

  “Different branch,” Bescond said. “They’re metro police; I’m Rectification Authority.”

  Kai turned from Tara. “Do I have a choice?”

  Bescond shrugged.

  “Can I bring the cat?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “EXPLAIN,” ZEDDIG said as they slipped through the night market.

  “Later.”

  They’d lost the Wreckers, drowning the dead city’s taint in living Agdel Lex, in Iskari street names, squiddy temples, tentacular flags, in newsstands that sold guidebooks and tourist maps for three thaums each. Ley and Zeddig were model citizens, weren’t they, two women walking side by side past stalls where Talbeg men and women in garish approximations of traditional dress offered fig cakes for sale. Zeddig even bought a scorpion skewer.

  But cops flooded the roads, badges gleaming at streetcorners, consulting small sketches that looked an awful lot like Ley. Zeddig guided them away from a checkpoint down a side street that seemed to double back on itself, but in fact connected Regency with Probity. Maybe there—but no. More cops waited at Probity and Temperance, tentacles pulsing by their thick necks. Zeddig snatched Ley’s arm and turned her to face the window of a nearby toy shop. Cops searched the street in plate glass reflection, and marionettes grinned grimly.

  “Whose blood is on your hand?” Zeddig asked.

  “You don’t need to worry about her.”

  “That what you’ll say about me after the knife goes in?”

  “Zeddig!” Shocked. But laughing, too, as if Zeddig had made a scandalous joke. “I’d never stab you.” With emphasis on the penultimate word. Which, as reassurances went, didn’t.

  They traced the cordon. Checkpoints bounded the Reine market north and south, east and west. Grumbling lines formed: shoppers smoking with bags of clothing piled at their feet. Street acrobats, faces painted rainbow colors, set up beside the lines and performed patter interspersed with handsprings. They passed an herbalist shaking down two tourists over an exorbitantly priced cup of tea they’d thought was a sample; Ley shouted, “It’s wheatgrass,” and Zeddig tugged her along before anyone could get a clear look at her face.

  Wreckers circled the Reine, their attention forcing streets into their supposedly proper shape.

  “At least tell me what they want you for.”

  “Murder. Obviously.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “Have you ever known me to do anything without reason?”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Do you want me to say more?”

  “No,” she said. “Look. I have friends in the port, people I trust. They won’t have any trouble slipping you past customs. We can get you back to the Archipelago.”

  “I can’t leave,” she said. Those words burned away the fog of her sly levity. “Not now.”

  “Why? What’s happening?”

  Ley didn’t answer. She shoved her hands into her pockets, and walked raw by Zeddig’s side.

  “If we’re going to work together,” Zeddig said, “you’ll have to trust me.”

  The shell closed again, with a cold laugh and an easy shrug, and once more Ley was flawless. “You trust too easily. You tell people, and those people tell people, and pretty soon everyone knows everything. I’ll play this close to my chest.”

  Zeddig stopped, turned, and shoved Ley against a tree.

  “I’d planned to take our reunion slower,” Ley said. “But I can be flexible.”

  Zeddig smelled her, sweat, cinnamon, and smoke. She almost—she almost a lot of things. She didn’t. She’d known Ley too long not to know the game, the slight dig as she withdrew, like a retreating boxer’s jabs. “You’re in trouble. I get that. But you’re scared, and it’s making you dumb. Give me something. Half the city’s looking for a woman who looks like you.”

  “And you found me.”

  “Shut up.” She did, which was a surprise, but then, Ley could say more with a raised eyebrow than most people could with words. “Two years gone, and you show up on my windowsill, wearing a fancy suit over your tattoos, with blood on your hands.”

  “I’m in trouble. I have a job for you. What more do you need?”

  “The truth. Or I walk.”

  Ley’s lips tightened. “I was working on a project. My partner and I had a difference of opinion. I hoped—what I hoped doesn’t matter now. What matters is what I can do for you.” They were too close for her to touch Zeddig’s chest, so she touched her side instead, long fingers curling around Zeddig’s flank, and godsdamn but she remembered that, and what came after. “And what you can do for me.” Those long fingers trailing up to touch her, just below the neck. “You’re not asking the right questions.”

  “You’re not answering.”

  “Ask where I slipped into the dead city.”

  People were watching. Dammit. She needed this finished, fast. “Where.” She ground the word between her teeth.

  “My apartment, in ’Kander’s Cliffs.”

  Three miles away. Zeddig’s grip loosened on her shoulder.

  “And I came back to Agdel Lex a few blocks from your roof. I tried to lose the Wreckers, but the taint was stronger than I expected.”

  “That’s—” She tried to wrap her mind around that notion, and couldn’t. So much time in the dead city’s soul-shearing cold. The best suits anyone could rig lasted ten minutes at the outside. “Where’s your gear?”

  “No gear. No wards.”

  “You delved for an hour, in that suit. You should be dead.”

  “That’s my offer,” she said. “I can keep you in the city longer than either of us ever dreamed. But I don’t have your skills, and I don’t have a crew, and everyone on the scene hates me.”

  “Which is your fault.”

  “I don’t disag
ree. Now. Kiss me.”

  “What?”

  “People are watching,” she said, as if the explanation were written on her face in ten-foot-tall letters. She often used that tone of voice when they were together: scornful, teasing. She knew precisely what effect it had on Zeddig. But there was another edge Zeddig had taken longer to detect, a gentle self-mockery. Look how absurd we are, you for offering me this power, and me for accepting, as if my acceptance didn’t place me in your power, too. “They need a story to tell themselves about us that won’t strain their tiny minds.”

  Oh, but this was a trap Zeddig had never been able to resist, Ley’s self-assurance sheer and cold as stained glass. Was Zeddig a fist, to smash that glass, or a ray of light, to strike and tumble through bewildered into colors? Had Ley come to her to be illuminated? Shattered? Both?

  She kissed her anyway.

  This, too, Zeddig remembered.

  “Come on,” she said, and led Ley to a used bookshop in the Reine’s heart, beside a diamond fountain. The owner had cleared merchandise for Zeddig before, mostly icons and badges of gods dead long before the Telomeri first stretched their claws south across the Shield Sea. In the shop’s basement, behind a—hand to gods—bookcase on hidden hinges (Ley: “Seriously?” But Zeddig didn’t answer), stood a door marked on no Authority map, that led to an even narrower winding stair (Zeddig had to proceed sideways and even that required breath control), which led, in turn, to narrow musty tunnels lined with copper pipes claimed by verdigris. Zeddig draped a cloth over her nose and mouth for spores, offered Ley one in turn, and, in the ghostlight of hand torches, they moved through the wreckage beneath the city. Half-metal insects scuttled away down the tunnel; a trapdoor lasher roped Ley in its legs—newbie delvers called them tentacles, but they were legs, really, long and whiplike like the legs of house centipedes—and tried to drag her up into its ceiling lair, so Zeddig climbed into the pipes, fought through the barbed wire web, and stabbed through the lasher’s ear into the closest thing the critter owned to a brain. Ley hadn’t taken too much poison—“I’m fine,” she said, tried to stand, then slumped against the tunnel wall, but she could still walk if she leaned on Zeddig.