Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

  We are Justice. We have rules.

  This wasn’t working. Change tactic. They like rules, do they? “What are your rules, then?”

  The just heart is lighter than a feather. They raised their faces heavenward again. We weigh hearts.

  “Ah.”

  The Blacksuits seemed comfortable with silence. The repeated cries from the Judge’s apartment did not appear to perturb them, either.

  “There are other rules, right?”

  The Book of Regulations is twenty pages long.

  “Not so bad.”

  Appendix A is three thousand one hundred twelve. Pause. We will not repeat them aloud. Copies are on public display at the Temple of Justice as a service to the City.

  She tried to press past them as they spoke, but they moved, more like flowing lava than people, to block her way.

  We are not permitted to let you pass. Our examination of the scene is incomplete.

  Tara was about to give up and storm off, cursing cities and law enforcement and Elayne Kevarian for good measure. She turned around and raised her foot. Had she set it down, the momentum of that step would have carried her to the street and on with the rest of her life.

  She turned back to the sentinels.

  “You’re examining the body?”

  Yes.

  “You know how to do that?”

  We are waiting for experts.

  “I’m an expert.”

  They said nothing.

  “I’m a Craftswoman. A graduate of the Hidden Schools. I’m as competent to judge the state of a corpse as anyone in the City.”

  You are not approved by the Council of Justice, nor certified as an examiner.

  “The examiner isn’t here, though, is she? I am. Every minute you spend waiting in the foyer, you lose valuable information. Evidence decays faster than the corpse, and your killer is racing to cover her tracks.”

  The information of which you speak will be gathered by the proper authorities.

  Tara smirked. “What proper authorities?” She extended one arm, palm up, and pulled back her sleeve with the other hand. At first, there was no way to tell if the Blacksuits were looking, their pupils invisible beneath their ebon shells, but they turned toward her when the sunlight began to die. Tara’s forearm had been brown and unmarked when she pulled up her sleeve, but as shadows deepened and the world went gray, traces of silver light appeared on her skin.

  Her glyphs resembled spiderwebs laid by machine. Precise lines wove around her arm, spirals devouring spirals, hermetic diagrams inscribed with the script of half a dozen languages, most of them dead. A repeated symbol interrupted this pattern along the course of her radial artery: circle, nested within triangle, within circle, the mark of the Hidden Schools. The glyphs’ light was strong enough to cast shadows.

  The Blacksuits retreated a fraction of a step.

  “I’ve come a long way,” Tara said. “I can help. Now, please, let me inside.”

  *

  She nearly threw up when she saw the body, but she wasn’t about to give her Blacksuit escort the satisfaction. Blasted thing would probably lock her up for vomiting all over a crime scene.

  Judge Cabot had been what an older century would have called a portly man, the kind who hit his second chin at the age of twenty-nine and decided there was no point going back. His figure was—had been—toroidal, narrow shoulders broadening to a wide chest and a wider belly before tapering to inverse—cone thighs, thin, strong calves, and eight-inch feet. Birthmarks dotted his shoulders and arms, and he had a nasty scar on his right hip from some accident or botched attempt at medicine. His body was pallid, and not particularly hairy.

  Tara saw all this because Judge Cabot’s robe and dressing gown had been torn away, along with much of his flesh. He lay in pieces on the garden floor, in a pool of his own blood. The part of her that was her father’s daughter quailed and hid in a far corner of her mind. What remained was a consummate professional. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  “What do you see?” she asked the Blacksuit.

  It is immaterial. We are interested in your observations.

  The initial trio of Blacksuits had divided, one to watch the foyer, and two to escort her. The second split off, presumably to help interrogate the butler, as they crossed the oak-paneled sitting room. The third brought Tara through a glass door into a rooftop garden of fluorescent flowers and miniature date palms. Elaborate Craft focused sunlight and trapped humidity to transform the roof into a private rainforest. The effect was not perfect—the air had the proper sticky weight, but there weren’t enough flies. In a true jungle, that congealing red puddle would be writhing with vampiric vermin.

  Here there was only the blood. And the limbs. And the face.

  The Blacksuit stood ten feet back, near the door, watching. It was a woman, when it wasn’t working.

  What can you tell us?

  Tara stepped gingerly around the blood pool. At its edge she saw ceramic fragments, and a discoloration in the deep red tide. He had been drinking tea. And now he was dead. No. Focus on the details, not the horror. This was just another cadaver, like any of the others she had studied back at the Hidden Schools.

  Ms. Kevarian had intended Tara’s visit to the Judge as a test, a chance to demonstrate her ability to work alone. It could still fulfill that purpose.

  The smaller shards of clay were covered with dried or drying blood; Cabot’s head rested atop one piece. This much the Blacksuits almost certainly knew: he had been surprised, dropped the cup, and fallen.

  There was no bruising, and no foreign blood or dirt or hair beneath Cabot’s nails, though his fingers were mangled and broken. He hadn’t put up a fight. Whatever happened to him happened fast.

  The body had a sharp, hot silver smell beneath the stench of spoiling meat.

  “How were you contacted?”

  Cabot had special wards to notify Justice in the event of his death, and give us an image of his body. Pause. Also, the butler summoned us.

  “Does your image show who did this?”

  We have suspects.

  Tara laced her fingers together. “Someone pulled Cabot’s spine out of his back, through the skin. Death should have been instantaneous, but whatever did this wanted him alive.” She pointed to the discs of bone arranged in a rough circle around the body, like poker chips strewn on a table. “The corpse has been ritualistically encircled by its spinal vertebrae. Necromancers use a more advanced version of the same technique to bind spirits. Doctors use it, too, to keep the patient alive on the operating table. Bone is a powerful focus, especially if it’s your own. With the Judge’s own spine, even an amateur Craftsman could have kept him alive and sane for … I’d guess a minute. If they only wanted to keep his soul bound to his body, and didn’t care about his sanity, it could have lasted longer. Much longer.” It would have felt longer still to Cabot. The heart kept time in the human body. Without its beat thoughts elongated, stretched, changed. She had stopped her own heart as an experiment back at school, under close observation, keeping her brain alive the entire time. For Cabot, seconds of agony would have felt like hours.

  Stay professional. Keep your breakfast where it should be, and your voice level.

  The Blacksuit cocked her head to one side. Is there any way to call him back?

  Tara continued her slow revolution around the corpse. “The body’s a complicated system. Bringing someone back requires the corpse have enough order to build upon, and there’s hardly any of Cabot left. Even if we had the proper equipment to sift his memories, we’d need the organs that bear the imprints of sense experience. The eyes have burst. The tongue, here, well. The brain, missing out the back of the skull. The spine you see, and the heart is gone entirely.” She looked up at the Blacksuit. “Did you really think it was possible he died of natural causes?”

  These are strange days. We have had to widen the definition of the word “natural” six times in the last decade.

  “Well, whoeve
r did this was a poor student of the Craft, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed the bones—only beginners use such a strong physical focus for something this simple—but she knows enough to keep the dead from talking. Which brings me to another oddity. The body is pristine, or at least no more rotten than it ought to be based on time of death. The Craft used to bind his soul should have accelerated decay.” There was that scent again, the urgent tang of hot silver. She breathed it in, and turned from the body to the thick vegetation. “Do you mind if I look around the garden? The murderer could have hidden the missing organs nearby. Keeping them out of our hands for an hour would spoil them. Our killer needn’t have run through the city in broad daylight with a bleeding heart clenched in her fist.”

  I will remain to guard the corpse.

  Tara walked off between the looming sunflowers. The garden growth was thick, but not thick enough to dampen all sound. With a shout, she could call the Blacksuit to her.

  It was indeed possible that the murderer, whoever, whatever she was, hid Cabot’s heart somewhere nearby. She could also have burned the heart to ash and mixed it with the blood as an additional focus for her ritual. But searching for the heart gave Tara a plausible excuse to investigate without supervision.

  The burnt silver smell haunted the garden. She traced it to a point near the terrace’s corner, between a trellis of ivy and a carefully cultivated orchid. Approaching the edge, Tara reached to her heart and drew her knife.

  The odor’s source was not hidden behind the trellis, and the orchid provided no cover. Elsewhere in the rooftop garden, vines had been strung overhead to blot out the sky, but here she looked up and saw nothing but clouds. No ambush would come from above.

  She leaned over the roof’s edge. Far below ran the street, full of tiny people and tiny carriages. Gargoyles leered at the passersby. At ground level, the carvings were common monsters, sharp-nosed and snaggle-toothed, but as the building rose, their complexity grew. The sharp gouges Tara had seen from below marred the intricate artwork.

  The gargoyles one floor beneath Cabot’s penthouse seemed almost alive. To her right loomed a giant with three eyes and a massive tusked maw, each of his six arms clutching a different weapon. To her left stood a similar statue, and clinging to the ledge beside that another, in a different style. The first two were built from planes and angles, while this last gargoyle’s sculptor had carved the curves of its hunched back and powerful torso with an anatomist’s devotion. It was limbed as a man, save for two folded leathery wings and a long tail. A snarl contorted its gruesome, hook-beaked face. The creature was bent like a drawn bow, ready to fly.

  Statues. The smell was strongest here, burning in her nostrils. Tara tightened her grip on her knife, and pondered.

  This building had been built to a careful pattern, architects and artists weighing each decoration against every other. Nothing was accidental or asymmetrical save for the strange rune carvings, which did not seem part of the original design. Yet to her right there was a single gargoyle, and to her left—

  As she turned to look, something long and sharp pressed against her throat, the point dimpling her skin. She swallowed, involuntarily, and her skin almost gave.

  “Scream,” said a low voice like crushed rock, “and you die.”

  It was amazing, she thought for the second time that day, how imminent death focused the mind.

  She remained still and quiet with the gargoyle’s claw at her throat, to show she would not call for help. When he didn’t say anything further, she whispered, “There’s no need to kill me.”

  “There is if you scream.”

  “What would my death accomplish if I did? As soon as they know you’re here, they’ll be after you, and they move fast.”

  “So do I.”

  She had to admit that. He was fast, and quiet. She hadn’t heard him climb onto the roof and approach her, for all his bulk. “Killing me will convince them you killed Judge Cabot. No evidence will stand against your murder of an innocent while fleeing the scene of the crime. The Blacksuits will track you to the ends of the earth. They’re tireless.” His claw twitched against her throat. “And you’re tired already.”

  “Quiet.”

  “How long have you been hanging off this building? Hiding from them? Hoping they couldn’t smell you the way I can?”

  “Stop.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “I am a Guardian.”

  She heard the capital letter. “I’m not interested in your title,” she said, as conversationally as she could manage. “I asked you to tell me your name. Because if I’m going to help you get out of this alive, we should get to know each other.”

  His breath should have been hot on the back of her neck, but he did not breathe. One cannot breathe with lungs of stone. She fought to control her pounding heart.

  “You need my help,” she said. “You’re obviously innocent.”

  “What?”

  Keep him talking, Tara thought. If you’re wrong, and you’re seldom wrong, then you want him to think you’re on his side. If you’re right, he wants to believe you. Recite the facts. Her throat was dry. Her breath came short. Dammit, be calm. Cool as crystal, as ice. Cool as Ms. Kevarian. “Whoever killed Cabot planned the murder well. Knew how to do it without leaving traces someone like me could follow. The murderer kept Cabot alive, more or less, until you came. You broke that pretty little bone circle, Cabot’s spirit left his body, and bam, his wards went off and the Blacksuits had a nice picture of you looming over his corpse, talons out. It won’t even matter if they were bloody.”

  The pressure against her throat eased.

  Ms. Abernathy?

  The Blacksuits were coming. She had to work fast.

  Tara turned around. The claw did not leave her neck. The gargoyle stood before her, seven and a half feet of silver-gray stone bowed forward until his face was level with her own. Furled wings rose like twin mountains from his back. His open eyes were emerald green and large—at least three times as big as hers, eyes the size of billiard balls. She focused on the eyes because otherwise she would focus on his hooked, toothed beak.

  “Listen. Is there any way you can make yourself less threatening? More human?”

  “They might recognize me. I looked human earlier, when I ran from them.”

  “Did they see you up close?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. I’ll deal with that. Just try to be a little less with the huge and monstrous, please?”

  There came a horrid twisting, and an inrush of air. The creature collapsed into himself, passing through a stomach-churning stage where he was emphatically not gargoyle, but not human either. Strands of muscle showed through the broken stone, which melted into yielding, warm flesh.

  A young man stood before her, strong, good chin, ripped clothes, ripped chest. His eyes remained green as gems.

  Tara’s eyebrows floated upward of their own accord.

  “What?” the gargoyle said.

  “You’re…”

  “A monster?”

  “I was going to go for cute.”

  Ms. Abernathy? Are you well? Again the shout scraped across her soul.

  “Thanks?”

  “Don’t thank me. That makes it harder.”

  He opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but before he could speak, before he could react with all that mind-numbing speed and strength, she drove her knife deep into his stomach. It entered with a sizzling of seared flesh. His mouth opened in a silent gasp.

  As she pulled the knife up and out, his body was already healing. With a swipe of her mind she took that power from him. He started to turn himself to stone, but the glyphs on her left arm sparked silver as she stopped him. The plan relied on him looking human: no swift healing, no claws, no rocky skin. His blood would have stained her clothes, but a wave of heat surrounded her and turned that blood to vapor.

  She’d chosen her target well, and her depth. Missed the intestines and vital organs but nicked a few
arteries going in, not so bad that he’d bleed out in minutes, but bad enough. He went slack, and fell free of her blade.

  She knelt beside him and passed the knife to her left hand. The glyph-rings on her fingers, the spider on her palm, sparked silver as the blade faded into them. Next came the hard part. She framed his face with her fingertips and tightened her grip. Her nails pressed into flesh, and her Craft pressed deeper.

  She twisted her wrist and peeled his face away. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Behind, she left a smooth, unbroken pane of skin.

  Why do this? Why get involved? Save that someone had tried to kill her before breakfast, and someone else apparently succeeded at killing Judge Cabot. Two attacks in one morning, both on people connected with the case. Tara needed to know more, and she had little confidence in these Blacksuits and their Justice.

  Holding the face in her left hand, she reached into her purse with her right and produced a black, leather-bound book, cover scrawled with silver. She stuck the face, carefully folded, between pages 110 and 111. Click went the latch, then back in her shoulder bag.

  She had little power left. Enough to make a pass over the bleeding, faceless body and wipe away the miniscule traces of her Craft. Add to that a light ward against discovery, strong enough to block normal sight, but weak enough that it would never fool a Craftswoman.

  Ms. Abernathy?

  She stood, stepped back from the body, brushed a stray lock of hair into place, and squeezed her fists tight. Her nails bit into her palms, and she screamed.

  *

  The Blacksuits weren’t the individuals Tara would have chosen to comfort a person who had discovered a faceless body. If she had been telling the truth, and indeed stumbled upon a wounded, comatose man while wandering through the garden, their precise questions would have driven her to hysterics. As it was, after she staunched the gargoyle’s bleeding and bound his wound Tara felt compelled to hyperventilate, sit down in Cabot’s parlor, and ask for a strong cup of tea.

  What might have happened to this young man?

  “I almost tripped over him, by all the gods. Couldn’t have seen him if not for the Craft. I mean … Shit. I think … Maybe he was here. Talking to Cabot? Maybe whoever killed Cabot didn’t notice him at first?”