Kai stammered thanks, and let Bescond walk her to the cab.
“I know how you feel,” Bescond said. “It’s a sad affair. But I’m trying to help, to the extent possible.”
“I know,” Kai said, “thank you,” and closed the door.
On the ride back to her hotel, she pondered Zeddig’s skyward gaze, and the word she’d whispered: “spear.”
Chapter Seventy-one
“IT’S COMPLICATED,” IZZA TRIED TO EXPLAIN, panting, as they ran from High Sisters through the shipyard, dodging spotlights and guards.
“I figured that out,” Isaak said, as he choked out a guard who had made the simple mistake of diligence on his rounds. “Around the moment my friend turned out to be a prophet.”
They could make better time over the rooftops, and they’d only have a minute, at most, before the guard woke and sounded the alarm, so she climbed a fire escape, Isaak clanging behind her. For the next minute of roofs, gantries, jumps, and sudden drops, they were running too fast to talk.
Sprawled on another roof, they caught their breath as watchmen and undead dogs ran past below. The fallen guard must have recovered enough to sound the alarm. Izza prayed thanks for that—Isaak was good, but knocking someone out without killing them always involved a bit of luck. She mopped sweat from her brow with her jumpsuit sleeve. Once they made it to the city, she’d have to steal some clothes. “The Iskari want to break the city. Tomorrow, they’ll launch something that will force everyone into Agdel Lex. No more in-betweeners, no more Alikand. Just the Iskari city, and the dead one. My friend’s trying to fight it, but even if she wins, it won’t be clean. The Wastes will rush in, and eat people. We can help—the Lady can help. We just need to get to the Temple of All Gods. The priests there should be working on a defense.”
“How do you know all this?”
She tapped her heart. “The Lady passed along the details. And—” She should stop, but she owed him truth. “Kai told me.”
“Kai?”
“The woman from the train. Ley’s sister.”
Isaak’s eyes flashed gold in the shipyard lights. “You knew her.”
“I—” Gods. They didn’t have time for this. There wouldn’t ever be time for this. Best to do it quick. “I came because of her. She was in trouble with the Wreckers. So was her sister. I wanted to help them.”
“And you knew the underground. You knew me.”
His lips curled open, and his teeth were very sharp. There was a wall behind his eyes.
“Yes,” she said. “I didn’t think it would go this far. I hoped—”
“You sold us out.”
“That wasn’t the plan.” She was talking faster than her mind could keep up. “I just wanted to get her on the train, so she could talk to Ley.”
“Lady.” He looked sick. Disappointed.
“Vogel’s the one who sold us out to the Wreckers. Not Kai.”
“Whose word do we have for that? Hers?” Her silence was all the answer she could give. “Gods, Izza.”
“Freeze!”
Izza swore. The last few days had worn on them both. No personal conversations on the job, that was way down around rule zero. Personal talk left you arguing while guards crept up behind.
“Stand slowly. Hands up.” One man’s voice. Three more behind them, judging from the footsteps.
They stood slowly. Hands up.
Two pairs of feet approached.
“Trust me,” Izza said. “You have no idea what Kai’s been through—for me, and for the Lady. Torture doesn’t begin to cover it. She’s on our side. She prays like you do. Like we do.”
“Shut up!” The guard’s voice, not Isaak’s.
Isaak was still, and angry. And when the guards drew close, he moved.
A crossbow plucked an ugly note. Izza dropped, kicked the legs out from under the guard behind her, and tossed him down onto the fire escape. By the time she turned around, most of the screaming and snapping had stopped, and Isaak stood in the center of the roof. Blood dripped from his fists. The guards were still breathing, shallowly.
Reinforcements came soon, and there wasn’t time to talk. There was more hitting, and running after the hitting, and a brief enthusiastic fence climb—Izza called on the Lady to snip the barbed wire atop the fence, while Isaak just vaulted over and down, trusting the scales on his palms—and they escaped into the shadows of Agdel Lex and Alikand, and betrayal and secrets and gods and years fell away and they were just kids running side by side through the night.
Until Izza glanced back over her shoulder and found she was running alone.
She skidded to a stop between a trash can and a wall. The alley stood empty, and smelled of garbage. He must have climbed the wall, or cut down a side street.
“Isaak!” she called.
No answer.
She called again. Still nothing. “I know you’re angry.” He could hear her. His hearing had always been excellent. “I’m sorry. I should have told you sooner.” Silence, but a different silence. Or else the difference was only wishful thinking. “I wanted to help her. And I wanted to stay your friend.”
Fuck.
“I’m going to the Temple,” she said. “Find me. I need your help. I need all the help I can get.”
Tin cans shifted behind her. She turned, fast, heart swollen.
A scarred ugly cat crouched in the shadows, judging her.
Fine, she thought. That makes two of us.
She ran.
She did not cry. Crying slowed you down. You needed breath to cry, and time. You needed room in your heart to feel. So she ran and hurt, and stole clothes, and snuck upslope, and came back to herself limping, exhausted, sweat-soaked and in pain, at the door of the Temple of All Gods.
She knocked. More or less. To knock on a thing was to strike it, and she definitely struck the door as she collapsed.
She started to cry, then, a bit. A bit more.
The door opened. She staggered into a thin-boned man in a scratchy robe. “I suppose,” Doctor Hasim said, “some experiences are habit-forming.”
She needed to laugh and blow her nose and weep, and instead of doing any of those things, she punched him, and let him bring her inside.
Chapter Seventy-two
DAWN THREATENED.
Across the city, people woke or slept, or slumped home from graveyard shifts, or lived, or died in hospital beds or in stupid accidents, or sent rats to tell their bosses they were sick before they snuck back to lovers’ beds, or counted the night’s take twice, three times, in case their dealers had stiffed them, or fried breakfast, or jogged along the coast, or worked their businesses, or failed at same. They lived their stories as if no one else’s would ever intervene.
Tara Abernathy worked the garden before her shower. Doctor Hasim and Umar circled the grounds to check the wards they had built against a day they’d hoped would never come. They prayed, which was not unusual. She prayed, which was.
Tara thought about why she had come to Agdel Lex, and what she had done here, and what she might have done instead, and what she could do now. Then she showered, armored herself in suit and boots and sorcery, and a touch of lip gloss because why not, and set out for the wall.
In Hala’s Fell, Aman heard a knock on the front door. She navigated the halls by memory and smell, by darkness and light and the touch of her cane. The Iskari city, Agdel Lex, crept in everywhere, like sand blown from the desert the Iskari thought all deserts were: it covered even her own home, smudged it to her gaze. She guided herself by the light of old familiar things: by this rug, woven a century and a half ago by a woman whose family died in the wars, which Aman’s grandmother bought in a market where an Iskari office building now stood. By that shallow bowl on a table by the door, with water for guests to wet their hands, which she refilled each morning if she could reach it before her daughters and sons. By the pattern of tiles around the door, which Zeddig had seen in a delve to the shattered palace that was once their family home, and taken the
time, though beset by monsters, to sketch. When Aman became Archivist, long ago, she had pledged to live in her city. She saw by its light.
She opened the door.
The women waiting on the stoop shone brighter than all the suns Aman had left behind. Ko’Adal, frail and bowed but fierce. Zel’Hojah, half her face burned, the other half a mass of wrinkles, perpetually smiling, first to laugh at jokes others did not intend, appalling punster, linguist, mother of eight. Lai’Basbeg, stern and tall, who outlived six husbands, ran a butcher shop for twenty years, and in retirement made wooden puzzles for children. Jol’Haskei, willowy and gorgeous and white-haired, and broad-faced Tosg’Homain, her hair still deep black as nights never were in the Iskari city—whose marriage, and more to the point, the joining of whose libraries, had caused such furor four decades before. She had known them all her life. They were old, and beautiful. They were Archivists.
She invited them inside. The dawn was cool, and none of them were so young as they once were. Hojah observed that this was true of everyone. They all knew this joke, but they laughed, because it felt good to laugh. The morning had left them cool and damp, but tea warmed. The children, grandnieces, grandnephews who had brought them ate and drank in the kitchen as they sat in the courtyard, and when the tea was done they all climbed the winding stair to Aman’s roof.
Across town in the Bite, Fontaine shivered in her kitchen, knees pulled up to her chest beneath her nightgown. Coffee steamed on the table, and three pills lay on the napkin, side by side by side, next to a glass of cool water. She had slept little that night. She did not know what would happen today. She knew enough to scare her. That was fine. She had drugs for the fear. She had drugs for all occasions.
The kitchen smelled of coffee and stale water. The faucet dripped. Should get the landlord to look at that. She wanted to call her dad, her mom, her college roommates. She wanted to write a letter right now, run down to the post office in hope her note could make the morning mail to anywhere else. Nothing grand: no warning, no confession. Just reaching out to mark a world that did not much care for that sort of thing. Fontaine had made her life in stories and fortunes, and those bore as little trace of those through whom they passed as did the surf.
She wanted her drugs.
The pills lay red and green and white against the brown paper, printed with glyphs that meant something, she supposed, to somebody.
She gathered the pills in the napkin, in her fist, and threw them down the sink, to the monster that lived in the pipes and ate her garbage. She ran the water as it chewed. Footsteps behind her. Her husband’s arm settled around her waist. He bent to press his cheek against her cheek. She reached up and back, and clutched the tight coils of his hair.
“Long night?”
“Yes,” she said, and “I love you.”
The sky blued, and the Shield Sea with it, and Kai, on the pier, wished she’d packed a thicker coat. She turned her collar up against the breeze, and reviewed herself: her linen suit, her little black prayer book in the inside pocket, her purse heavy with religious paraphernalia. No glyphs. No weapons. No deep magic from before the dawn of time. The Altus Spire stood, a bare splinter on the horizon, half in sea and half in sky.
She heard Eberhardt Jax’s lighter, and smelled his tobacco, before he joined her on the pier. Jax wore boating shoes and checked trousers and an ascot, and a blue blazer draped over his shoulders, and must have used a razor to part his hair. He smelled of sandalwood and pomade. She liked those smells, even as the tobacco eroded them. “I’m sorry,” he said, drawing the cigarette from between his teeth. “Bad habit, but it calms the nerves. Big day.” His eyes flicked left. They were very blue. “You want me to put it out. You think I should put it out?” He shrugged, dropped the cigarette, crushed it with the toe of his boater. “I should have quit years ago. But we only have so much willpower, and every decision we make, we spend some. I conserve mine, to spend it in the right places, at the right times.”
“Where’s your boat?”
“Oh,” he said. “That.” He raised his right hand, and made a gesture almost like a conductor beating six-four time. A ring on his index finger trailed ruby light, and one on his ring finger trailed sapphire.
Space lurched at the end of the pier, and there was a ship where none had been before: a tall white yacht built like a teardrop, contoured for speed, save for the bristling nightmare antennae on the cabin roof. Kai blinked. “I expected something more practical.”
“If you have nice things, why not use them?”
“I thought the whole point of owning a Iokapi 2300 was to show it off. Hard to do if it’s invisible.”
“You know boats?”
“My mother runs a small repair Concern. I don’t think she’s ever worked on something this fancy, though.”
A sailor with a metal arm lowered the gangplank.
“I find observation tiring,” Jax said. “It is good to be seen. But sometimes it is more comfortable to go without.” He stepped onto the ramp and extended his hand with self-conscious goofy gallantry she played into by accepting. “Take us home,” he told the sailor when they stood aboard; she raised the gangplank, shouted an order, and took the wheel.
Jax, one hand pocketed, strode to the bow. The way he stood, moved, spoke was all assumption: he expected the world would bend to his wishes, because it so often did. But Kai knew tyrants, and he lacked their scorn. Eberhardt Jax was a machine more than a man, a system of ideas, a rumor and a fortune and a set of contracts dedicated to building that fortune. Eberhardt Jax, the meat, the person who once was born and might one day die, was incidental to that machine. He guided it, built some parts and directed others, but the machine did not need the man. Many of Kai’s pilgrims, no matter how great their wealth, no matter how vast their power, never grasped this truth. Jax cultivated carelessness, and let his machine carry him.
She joined him at the bow. The boat gained speed. He clutched the rail and grinned. A gust tore his blazer from his shoulders. Kai caught the blazer one-handed before it went over the side, and passed it back. He grinned his thanks.
The Altus Spire grew on the horizon. The yacht sailed smooth for all its speed, so the spire seemed to grow from the waves, an architectural obscenity—but as they neared, its scale crossed from grotesque back to glorious. Crystal and glass and steel facets broke sky and surf into a thousand seamed reflections, some inhumanly perfect as a demon’s painting, some mere washes of color. The spire did not belong here, would not belong anywhere, did not care. It was not built for this world.
Somewhere within, Kai’s sister hid.
The sun cracked the horizon, and the spire took flame.
Kai gripped the rail, and told herself she was ready.
Chapter Seventy-three
TARA CLIMBED THE WALL.
Stone pulsed underfoot. Hollow tunnels ran beneath the wall’s rock shell, strung with nerve and muscle and vein, extensions of the squiddy Wrecker Tower. Below and to the north, four-story apartments grew in the shadow of the wall, and laundry waved on rooftops. Old men and women walked in public parks, or danced to the bands of dawn, lifted weights in public gyms, played shuttlecock by the Express tracks. Long ago, when the Iskari made Agdel Lex, they’d judged this wall a good limit for their city. Someday, they imagined, the godlings beyond would kill each other, and the plains could be settled again. Until then, they would station Wreckers on the wall, to guard against the monsters of the Wastes.
Someday had not happened yet.
But today the Iskari would force the issue—unfurl their web in the sky, make the Wastes flower again, and save the world. With a minor, forgiveable human cost.
The long climb winded her. She waited atop the wall. To her left, far away, stood a Wrecker, and to her right another. The Wastes were a smudge of roiling gray, save where the Express tracks printed a clear line through chaos. Or printed a clear line of chaos through . . . something else.
Tara gripped the rampart, and felt nervous. A cit
y behind her, a city that wasn’t hers, a city she’d done more to hurt than help, while trying to solve another problem altogether. She had not pondered second-order effects, let alone third. She wondered what her old teacher Ms. Kevarian would think. Had she ever found herself in a mess like this, a catastrophe she’d helped shape, beyond her power to control?
Probably.
Tara wished she knew what Ms. Kevarian had done.
Then she cracked her knuckles.
* * *
Take an anthill, marble its tunnels, polish them glistening white, limn each surface in silver, and you’d come near the Altus Spire. Ants included. Scientists and techs quick-marched through the halls, intent, carrying clipboards, arguing, men and women and golems with a mission. At every corner Kai turned, she saw a clock counting down. Loudspeakers announced: launch in one hour. Fifty minutes. She tapped down the halls, keeping pace with Jax, because he was her host, and because the crowd parted when he neared.
Questions dogged them down the white corridors; Jax brushed most of them off with one raised hand. His assistant paced at his right, Kai at his left, which frustrated Kai, who was nobody’s assistant.
“Sir, the Imperial Mark—”
“It’s a blip, not a proper correction. Hold through. Draft a quote for the Times.”
“Dhisthra’s high council—”
“Next week.”
“Seventy—”
“Ask for another ten percent. If they don’t, dump our stake.”
“Grimwald—”
“Next week, if they have room. Anything else?”
The assistant displayed his clipboard. They’d barely cleared the first page, and Kai counted ten more.
“Karl. Please. Deal with it? We have history to make.”
The elevator doors closed, leaving Karl on the other side.
Jax did not press a button. He turned a key, and the elevator thrummed up in silence, smooth, and so fast blood gathered in Kai’s feet. They did not talk for most of the elevator’s rise. “History,” he said, wistfully.
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