Why not kill him in the same way?
“Not enough time. Oh. Thank you. Tea. Maybe not enough power. We’re dealing with an amateur here—little skill, less soulstuff to work with than a full Craftswoman. Easier this way. Stab him, take his face, run.”
What can we do?
“Not much. Steal the face, steal the mind. The wound will recover, but you won’t get any testimony from him. On the plus side, once stolen, the face is almost impossible to destroy. Neither half can live without the other, but they can’t die, either. Keep his body safe, and you might find the face if you look hard enough.
“Of course I’ll be available to answer questions. I don’t know where we’ll be staying. You can reach my boss or me through the Sanctum of Kos Everburning. I assume you know the—
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Heart pounding, she reached the street, hand in the air and a gargoyle’s face in her shoulder bag. It had been an odd couple of hours, and she had a feeling that, before the week was out, her life would grow stranger still.
But she could deal with strange. She was starting to like the big city.
“Taxi!”
4
At Alt Coulumb’s heart, the press of humanity and architecture yielded to a green circle half a mile in diameter: the Holy Precinct, with the towering Sanctum of Kos at its heart. To the north it bordered the business district, where skeletal mages in flowing robes bargained with creatures from beyond the mortal world in towers of black glass that scraped the sky. To the south lay the university campuses, gentrified, upper-class, and comfortably distant from the machinations of Northtown. East and west spread the no-man’s land between the poles, home to residential zones, slums, dives, and vice.
The most notorious of these regions, the Pleasure Quarters, actually abutted the Holy Precinct, a holdover from centuries past when some saint decreed that the fire in the blood and loins belonged to Kos Everburning as much as the fire of hearth and furnace.
“Problem being,” Tara’s taxi driver said as he swung the goad halfheartedly at the flanks of his slow-moving nag, “that Kos is great and wise”—he pointed to the holy symbol suspended from the buggy’s rearview mirror, a stylized three-tongued flame within a diamond—“but not as practiced as a fertility deity in managing diseases. I love our Lord with all my soul, but the Church did well to give up on sex and focus on the burning. Stick to what you know, I say.”
“So the priests got out of the business, but the brothels remained?”
“Well. I wouldn’t say the priests got out of the business. They’re still, ah, joined to it, at the hip as it were. The Church got out, though, and well done, too. Man goes to pray to leave that kind of stuff behind. Nowadays, if the girls and their boys go wild and roll onto the temple grounds, the priests tromp over, round them up, and cart them off.”
Their buggy rattled along, and the basalt tower grew ever larger before them. Tara watched the buildings that flanked their taxi. The closer they drew to the Holy Precinct, the more grooved scars she saw in the towers’ stone, always several stories above street level. “What about those marks on the buildings? Did the priests take up decorating, too?”
Harness jangled and leather creaked. When the driver spoke again his voice was low and strained. “Ah. Those.”
“I’m sorry. If it’s a sensitive subject, I can…”
“No trouble, miss. They’re war scars, is all.”
“I thought Alt Coulumb wasn’t damaged in the God Wars.”
He snorted. “Weren’t any Craftsmen, but it was damaged all the same.”
Tara was confused, but her driver seemed uneasy with the subject. She chose her next words with care. “Shouldn’t someone have fixed them by now? It’s been fifty years.”
“Can’t be fixed.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Stone Men made ’em, didn’t they?” He spit onto the street. “Can’t cover up their claw marks. The building remembers. Put in new stones and a minute later they’re scarred again.”
Tara’s breath caught, but she tried to keep her tone conversational. “Stone Men. You mean gargoyles?”
He didn’t respond, but it was an affirmative silence.
“Some of the … scars … look like writing.”
“Some are. Marking territory. Blasphemous prayers written by mad beasts. The rest are battle scars.”
“Are the gargoyles still around?”
The man glanced back at her and she saw that his face had closed like a door. “No Stone Men here.” He said those words as if they were a curse. “Not since my father’s time.”
“What happened?”
“They left.”
He turned the cab down a broad road leading into the temple compound. Seen from above, the path they traced over white gravel would follow the outer curves of a massive binding circle, large as the Holy Precinct. Tara wondered if the design served a purpose beyond decoration. Without an army of Craftsmen to manage it, not even a circle this size could contain a god as strong as Kos.
“Why’d they leave? Religious differences?”
He didn’t answer, and Tara didn’t ask for further clarification. Arguing war-era politics with a fanatic in a god-benighted city could be trouble. She wasn’t concerned for her own safety, but arriving on her client’s doorstep in a burning taxi with an injured driver would make a horrible first impression.
They approached the black tower of the Sanctum of Kos, tall and polished, an abstract vision of flame trapped in dark and unscarred stone. The same echoed warmth she had felt while falling washed over her again. Was it always like this here? And if the divine radiance was this strong when Kos was dead, what must it have been like when he was alive?
Their road dead-ended in a broad semicircle of white gravel where a double handful of other vehicles lingered, awaiting their masters: a couple ordinary taxis like Tara’s own, five or six fancier models, and even a few driverless carriages.
A young man in brown and orange robes sat at the base of the steps leading into the Sanctum. He was tonsured, smoking a cigarette, and represented the only non-carriage-related life in the vicinity.
“That’s funny,” her driver said.
“There’s usually a crowd?”
“Place is generally packed with folks, you know, come to pray for this or that or the other thing. Monsters from Northtown come when they’ve got business. If you dream about fire, you visit to pay your respects.” The cabbie frowned. “Fewer than usual today.”
She slid from the cab to the ground, fished a small metal disc out of her purse, and passed it to the driver. A piece of Tara’s soul flowed from her to him through the token. The soulstuff mattered, not the token; metals were just an easy focus. Soon after she paid him, all traces of her would fade from the payment, and only raw power remain, for the driver to trade with others in exchange for food or shelter, goods or services, or pleasure. If he were a Craftsman, and gained enough of this power from others, from the stars, or from the earth, he could use it to resurrect the dead and rain doom upon a nation. If the power remained in Alt Coulumb, on the other hand, some faithful citizen would inevitably sacrifice it to Kos, who kept the city protected and commerce secure and the whole damn system functioning.
Until, that is, a few days ago.
“Be well,” she said to the cabbie, but his frown deepened. With a flick of the reins and a swipe of the crop he goaded his horse into a sloppy canter and left Tara alone in the shadow of the fire god’s tower.
The Sanctum of Kos was a surprisingly modern building, she thought as she approached the broad, black steps. A few architectural peculiarities marked it as a product of a prior era: unnecessary columns around the base, and structurally superfluous buttresses added no doubt by nervous designers when the Sanctum was first conceived, back when twenty-story buildings had been the precinct of the ambitious, and eighty-story plans the product of fevered imaginations.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
Th
e speaker’s voice cracked and wavered, and he drew in a ragged breath as he paused for the comma. Tara looked down from the staggering heights and saw the same young acolyte who had been waiting on the stairs when she pulled into the lot. He was seated, bent forward over his knees. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. Voluminous robes hung from his thin body, and his upturned eyes were set deep in a pale face.
“It is,” she acknowledged.
“I know what you’re thinking.”
She arched an eyebrow at him.
The young man plucked the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled a long, narrow stream of smoke. “Or, I know what you were thinking.”
“Try me.”
“You were thinking that the columns, the buttresses, are unnecessary. That we added them for show, or out of fear.”
Her eyes widened a tick, and she nodded. “How did you know?”
“You’re sharp enough to get fooled.” His attempt at a laugh crumbled into a hacking cough.
“Are you all right?” She reached for him, but he waved her off hastily. The coughing fit persisted, long and ugly and wet. The fingers of his extended hand curled slowly into a fist, and he struck himself in the chest, hard. The cough stopped with a low rattle and he kept talking as though nothing had happened.
“See how the columns are broader than they should be? Same with the buttresses?”
She nodded, though she didn’t, in fact, see.
“Not structural. A disguise. Building the Sanctum, they thought, no sense having big fat steam pipes coming off the central tower. Too ugly, too vulnerable. Hide ’em. Every other building has columns, so we might as well use these.”
“Good idea.”
“Stupid idea,” the young man said, pointing. “Fancy stonework makes it hard to access the pipe joints there, and there. Whenever anything goes wrong, we need to redo all the masonry, and at night, too, to keep people from seeing.”
“Do you tell this to everyone who stops by?”
He drew in another breath. “Only if they’re wearing a suit.” His ragged smile looked out of place, too broad and sincere for his tonsure and his robes and his slender frame.
“Well, I hope you never get attacked by someone in a suit.”
“Hasn’t happened yet.” He returned the cigarette to his mouth and lurched forward. Tara was afraid he would fall on his face, but he recovered his balance and stood, unsteadily. “You’re Tara Abernathy.” He stuck out a thin hand, which trembled in hers as she shook it. Beneath the smile and the rambling mode of speech, he was afraid. “I’m Novice Technician Abelard. They told me to wait for you. Outside.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“The air out here feels too cold, and I haven’t been … healthy. Lately.”
“You might try quitting.” She nodded at his cigarette.
He let his head loll back to the sky, and his eyes drifted closed, as if he was waiting for rain. None fell, and he opened his eyes again. “I started when I joined the priesthood. A sign of my devotion. I won’t stop now.”
“You’re talking about—”
He shot her a look, but she’d already checked her tongue.
“How many people know about our problem?” she asked instead.
“As few as possible. Technical staff, mostly. The higher-ups. We’ve put it about that the Holy One is contemplating His own perfection, and must not be bothered by mortal concerns.”
“How long will that hold?”
He started up the stairs. “We’ve wasted too much time already.”
The tower’s twenty-foot-tall main doors were opened on feast days alone, Abelard explained as he led Tara to a smaller side entrance. “Takes too much time. You know, to move these monsters you need about fifty monks hauling on each door.” He patted one of his branch-thin arms. “We’re not the heartiest people around.”
“You can’t get Kos to give a push?”
“Of course not. It’d be disrespectful on a feast day. Plus, we wouldn’t get to see the Cardinals fall over when the doors finally budge. I think Kos finds it as funny as the rest of us.” He looked as if he was about to say more, but pain contorted his features, and he fell silent.
The Sanctum’s foyer loomed over them in the shadows. Somehow the single room, with its vaulted ceilings and tall windows, seemed vaster from within than the whole tower appeared from without. Flames of stained glass rose on all sides, and a hundred yards away the golden fires of the nave flickered in the half-light. A pair of initiates in bright red robes swept the otherwise empty hall.
“Nobody comes here during the workday.” Abelard indicated the whole room by swinging one forefinger in a quick circle through the air. The hem of his robe flared out around his bony ankles. “Bread and circuses, strictly.”
“Expensive bread.”
“You have no idea.”
A sharp left brought them up against a metal lattice worked to resemble a thick growth of ivy. Abelard placed his hand upon the lattice, and the vines parted with a slow clank of gears. He ducked his head low to pass through. Tara just walked.
More abrupt turns, more shadowy doors, and a rap on a carefully chosen brick in what appeared to be a solid wall, which swung open on a hidden hinge to reveal a long winding stair. As they climbed, occasional shafts of light broke the darkness, concealed peepholes peering into meeting rooms and conference chambers: here a break room where tired priests stood waiting for a tea kettle to boil, there a chamber at least the size of the Sanctum’s front worship hall and crowded with pipes, cams, pistons, and gears upon gears, here a tiny room half-glimpsed, where Craft circles glowing blue surrounded a modest wooden altar. She saw these things in eye blinks, shadows on a cave wall as they climbed.
“You said you were a novice Technician. Which means you, what, clean the steam pipes?”
His barking laugh echoed through the stairwell. “We have cleaners for that. Repairmen and machinists. A Technician oversees the Divine Throne, the heart of the city. We design, improve, optimize the devices that keep this place running. Not me, yet, though. I was only promoted to Technician a few months back.”
“You’re low on the totem pole?”
“As low as a Technician gets. The king of the backed-up burners, that’s me, archdeacon of scut work. I’m learning, though. Or, I was learning.” He paused, searching the featureless wall for something, and in that pause Tara caught up with him.
“Did they bring you in on this for training? So you’ll know what to do if there’s ever a problem like this in the future, when you’re in charge?”
Abelard faced her. His eyes were dead as a charred forest. “I was the one watching the Throne when God died.”
He pressed a hidden catch, and the wall opened smoothly on hidden gears.
After her steady climb through darkness, the well-lit office was blinding. Pale wood panels everywhere, a couple leather chairs, and a large desk of polished oak. A glass bookcase stood against one wall, though few of its shelves contained actual books or codices, the lion’s share of space reserved instead for sacred icons, trophies, ceremonial plaques. An aerial picture of Alt Coulumb hung beside it, for comparison, Tara supposed, with the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The city stretched there, a teeming metropolis beneath slate-gray skies, beating heart of commerce, bridge between the god-benighted Old World and the Deathless Kingdoms of the West. Millions breathed, worked, prayed, copulated in those palaces, parks, and tenements, sure in the knowledge that Kos Everburning watched over them. If their faith was strong, they could feel the constant presence of his love, sustaining and aiding them in a thousand ways, breaking fevers and checking accidents and powering their city.
Millions of people, unaware that Kos’s ever-beating heart had been still for days.
Ms. Kevarian stood by the window, engaged in low, earnest conversation with a senior priest Tara assumed to be their client. He sat behind the oak desk, clad in deep red robes and his own authority. Physically, he
was unremarkable, silver-haired and thin with age, but his posture suggested that he often spoke while others listened. Never before had Tara seen someone with such presence who was not a Craftsman.
But Kos’s death must have strained him beyond endurance. His shoulders bent as if they bore a heavy weight, and his face looked drawn and robbed of sleep. Accustomed to power, he was scrambling for purchase on events beyond his control.
Abelard announced her. “Technical Cardinal Gustave, Lady Kevarian, this is Tara Abernathy.” He closed his eyes, opened them again, shifted his feet. “I, uh, assume. She never showed me any identification.”
Ms. Kevarian’s expression darkened, but before she said anything Cardinal Gustave extended a firm, reassuring hand. He had a preacher’s deep voice, quiet at the moment, though Tara did not doubt it could fill a cathedral. “Novice Abelard must have recognized Ms. Abernathy from your description. He’s usually prudent, but the current … situation has shaken him, as it has shaken us all.”
“I’m sorry.” Abelard bowed his head, and with shaking fingers raised his cigarette to his lips. Finding it nearly exhausted, he dug frantically into the pockets of his robe for a fresh pack. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it does not,” Ms. Kevarian said. “If we are to succeed in this case, we must control the flow of information. The future of your faith depends on your ability to keep secrets.”
Abelard froze, and Tara felt a spark of pity for him. He was terrified to the brink of endurance by his god’s death, and neither Ms. Kevarian nor his own boss were being much help.
So she lied. “He checked my name. I should have remembered to show him some ID. Security only works if both sides are on board, after all.”
Gratitude beamed from Abelard’s face as he produced a new cigarette and lit it from the embers of the old. Ms. Kevarian’s gaze flicked from Abelard, to the cigarette, and back. She watched and weighed him for a silent moment before continuing the introductions. “Tara, meet His Excellency Cardinal Gustave. He contacted Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao via nightmare courier two days ago.”
Three Parts Dead Page 6
