Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

  Her expression must have betrayed some hint of pain or grief, but if it had, Abelard was too busy recoiling with fear to notice. The hairs on his arm stood at unquestioning attention.

  “Never seen a knife before?” She held the blade before her face. It crackled.

  It took him a few tries to find his voice. “I’ve never seen Craft so close.”

  “You’ve seen Applied Theology, miracle work, right? This is the same principle, only instead of telling a god what I want, receiving power from him, vaguely directing it and letting him do all the hard parts, I do everything myself.”

  “How is that the same? A god is supposed to have that power. You—”

  “I’m a Craftswoman.” She knelt by the iron bowl and held out her left arm. “Come closer.” He did. “This will look like it hurts, but it doesn’t really.” Slowly, again for his benefit, she lowered the tip of the knife to her forearm. She chose a nice small capillary flowing near the skin and pricked herself with the blade of moonlight and lightning, cleanly as an old woman ripping open a seam in a worn-out dress.

  A scarlet drop of blood swelled from the wound and fell to splash in the iron bowl. She shivered from the pate of her skull to the soles of her feet, as if she had plunged into a lake of metal.

  Did Abelard feel the change as her blood sank into the iron, the turning and falling like tumblers in a lock, the sudden tension in the air? Could this boy who spent his life following gods tell when dormant Craft swung into action around him? Or had the color drained from his face merely at the sight of her blood?

  When she reached for him, he pulled back.

  “You promised,” she said. “It’s only a drop.”

  “Your blood is still on that knife!” he shouted over the rush of wind that rose about them without ruffling the slightest leaf of paper. “You’re going to make me sick!”

  Of all the things for him to know … “We make the knife out of lightning for a reason.” A sharp tug of building Craft almost pulled Tara from her body, but she resisted with dogged force of will. If Abelard were to help in his god’s resurrection, he needed to see. “You think we’d use the Craft where a pocketknife would manage if we weren’t worried about infection? Give me your damn arm!”

  Thin blue lines had spread from her drop of blood up the sides of the iron bowl, and out, like cracks across thin ice. The cracks widened, and through them, Tara saw a fractal mosaic of spheres, big and small. Each held a design in its center: circles, toroids, slits, stars and spirals, and stranger patterns. Eyes, thousands of them, watched her through the cracks.

  “Abelard!”

  He lurched forward, arm out, as the archives trembled. His cigarette tumbled from his lips toward one of the hungry, ever-widening cracks, but he caught it before it fell through. Tara’s knife flashed, numberless eyes surged against the membrane of the world, and—

  Silence.

  All she saw was silence. All she heard was a faint, dead scent like fallen leaves in autumn. She tasted night, smelled smooth black marble, and felt ice melting on her tongue.

  She had done this sort of thing before, and knew to wait as her senses twisted round again to normal. Abelard was not so fortunate. She would have warned him, she thought as she walked to where he lay collapsed in the dark, if he hadn’t been such a pansy about the blood.

  He shook. Tara felt empty and a little ashamed.

  “Hey.” She knelt beside him and squeezed his arm. He didn’t look up, and kept shaking. “It’s easier when you realize you can’t throw up, and stop trying.” A bedraggled sound, like the whimper of a drowning dog, rose from the vicinity of his mouth. She assumed it was a question. “You don’t really have a stomach here, is why. It’s not a biological kind of place.”

  His shivers stilled. Her hand lingered awkwardly on his shoulder.

  The new world lightened around them. Finally, he stirred and sat up, blinking, eyes raw and unfocused. He raised the cigarette to his mouth with a trembling hand.

  “It felt…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be ashamed of. It happens.” She stood slowly so as not to startle him, and extended her hand. He regarded her palm as if it might be a trap, but finally let her pull him to his feet. He swayed like a tree about to topple, yet he did not fall.

  In the dim light, he looked past her and saw what lay before him, beneath him, all around him. They were standing on an immense body.

  The god’s flesh was black and deep as night. The curvature of his limbs was the subtle and paradoxical curvature of deep space. He swelled in the dark, a pregnancy of form in nothingness.

  The body had the usual four limbs, two eyes the size of small moons, a mouth that could swallow a fleet of ships—features that for all their immensity were beautiful, and because of their immensity were terrifying. It was a great and hoary thing ancient of days, a clutch of power that would shatter any mind that tried to grasp it all at once. It was more than man evolved to comprehend, and Tara’s job was to comprehend it.

  She bared her teeth in a hungry smile.

  “I know Him,” Abelard said, quietly.

  “Yes.”

  Kos Everburning, Lord of Flame.

  His chest was not moving.

  6

  Elayne Kevarian meditated on the rooftop of the Sanctum of Kos as the sun declined behind its mask of thick clouds. Before her and beneath her, Alt Coulumb hungered for the coming night.

  She was levitating two inches above the ground, and would have reprimanded herself had she noticed. Levitation was a reflex of immature Craftsmen. Students floated in air to feel in tune with the universe, but like any other unnatural posture, hovering caused more tension than it relieved—especially in this city, where Kos’s interdict prevented any flight higher than a fist’s breadth above the ground.

  Thoughts wandered through the corridors of her mind like phantoms in an old house. Judge Cabot, her best contact in Alt Coulumb, was dead. Murdered with crude Craft designed to throw suspicion onto a third party. Had the gargoyle—the Guardian?—been purposefully framed, or did the killer simply set a trap for whoever might stumble by?

  This case lay at the bottom of it all, like a fat and voracious catfish in a muddy river: the Church of Kos, the greatest divine institution left in the West, hub of thaumaturgic trade on this continent, wilting with its divine patron. Elayne didn’t believe incompetence was at fault. Cardinal Gustave made the right noises, and the documents seemed in order. Nor did it seem likely that Kos died of natural causes. Perhaps one of the Church’s far-ranging plans had gone awry. Or else … Treachery.

  She tasted that word in her mind, exhaled it with her breath.

  If it had been treachery, then the traitors were every bit as aware as the Church that Kos had failed, had fallen. Somewhere, they marshaled their forces.

  Tara was a good kid. Smart. She would wrestle something like truth from the archives—truth, that strange monster often pursued but rarely captured. Meanwhile, Elayne watched, laid deep strategy, and prepared.

  Soon her opposing number would arrive, a Craftsman chosen to represent the powers to whom Kos was bound by contract and debt. The creditors would select someone respected for age and strength, who had stood trial in dark matters and emerged strong and sure. Someone familiar with Alt Coulumb.

  A handful of Craftsmen and Craftswomen in the world fit that description. She knew most of them.

  Winds circled within clouds of slate, and the sun was setting. She and Tara had brought the storm with them to the city. Tomorrow, there would be work to do.

  *

  Abelard paled, and Tara feared he might collapse again. “God?”

  She bit her lower lip and tried to think how to explain. “It’s not Kos. Not precisely. What you think of as your god is a manifold of power and information and relationships, deals and bargains and compromises congealed over millennia. For the last century at least, your scribes recorded the Church’s contracts and compromises in this archive. Our bl
ood in the iron bowl triggered dormant Craft that combined information from those thousands upon thousands of scrolls into a three-dimensional image we can navigate, manipulate, and come to understand.” With a gesture she indicated the landscape of the divine corpse.

  “He looks dead.”

  “He is dead. How did you expect him to look?” She started walking. Abelard followed her, footsteps tender on the god’s marble flesh. “You’re familiar with what’s called a convenient fiction?”

  Abelard answered with the flat tone of rote recitation. Good. Retreating to familiar concepts might help him cope. “A convenient fiction is a model used to approximate the behavior of a system. Like engines. Often, a mechanic doesn’t need to worry about compression chambers and heat exchange. He only needs to know that the engine transforms fuel into mechanical force. That description of an engine as a box that turns fuel to movement is a convenient fiction.”

  “I’ve never heard that example before,” Tara admitted.

  “What example do you use?”

  “Reality.”

  They skirted the enormous pit of Kos’s navel, broken and lifeless like the landscape of a distant planet.

  “You’re saying that this,” Abelard said tentatively, “is not my Lord’s body at all, but a convenient fiction. You think of him as a giant corpse because … because it helps you evaluate him in the context of your black arts.”

  “More or less,” she replied. “I’m sure the blueprints and daily logs of your furnaces tell you all sorts of things about your god. This is like a giant blueprint for another facet of him. It’s easier for me to understand than furnaces.” She saw a discoloration in the distance to her left: ichor welling up from within Kos’s body to form a river on his vastness.

  When they reached the slick shelf of the god’s ribs, Abelard scampered up like a monkey, moving with a deceptive, jerky grace in his long brown and orange robes. Tara removed her heels and threw them overhand up the slope, pulled off her stockings, and attacked the ledge with fingers and toes. When she reached the top, she was slick with sweat and breathing hard. She couldn’t quite climb the last swell of protruding bone and muscle, and Abelard helped her up, nearly falling himself in the process.

  “Where did you learn to climb?” she asked after she recovered her breath and patted her hair back into place.

  “The boiler room,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Thousands of pipes, all shapes and sizes, and ladder after ladder. There’s no better place than the Sanctum of Kos to be eleven years old. Though maybe there are better places to be sixteen,” he conceded.

  Instead of donning her shoes again, she stuffed her stockings inside them and put them in her purse. The divine flesh was cool beneath her feet. “The Hidden Schools are not a good place to be either eleven or sixteen. Fine place to be twenty-one, though, if twenty-one is something you wanted to be.”

  “Nothing fun for kids?”

  “Plenty of fun things for kids, but most would kill you if you did them wrong.”

  They walked on. Abelard at last surrendered and tapped cigarette ash onto his god’s skin, no doubt repeating to himself that this was a model, not the actual divine corpse.

  “Does all this walking serve a purpose?” he asked after a while.

  “I’m inspecting the body,” she replied. “God-meat decays like the human variety. Small dark things, neither god nor man, sneak in and chew at it. Spiritual lampreys: ghosts, half-formed concepts that might become the seeds of new deities. We can tell from the damage they inflict on the flesh how long a god has been dead. Other signs indicate the cause of death.”

  “What do you see?”

  “Some confusing things.”

  “For example?”

  “For example.” She let out a rush of breath that fell over the quiet corpse-scape like a heavy robe on a cold floor. “We’ve passed pools of ichor—divine blood, divine power. Little ones, consistent with a god who died recently. The maggots have dined, but not much. There are more wounds than there should be, though, and they’re distributed, where they should cluster. Scavengers are drawn to weak points in the body’s defenses. Then there’s the flesh itself. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”

  “It’s cold, and hard.”

  “Where it should be warm, yes?”

  “If He were alive.” Abelard shuddered when he said the last word.

  Poor kid. “The heat of gods fades slowly. He should still feel lukewarm, at least. Also, there’s not enough blood.”

  “What?”

  “A body with much blood in it doesn’t remain firm for long. The blood—the power—attracts pests that accelerate decay. This has not happened with Kos. Your deity had much of his blood removed before he died. The drain wasn’t sudden, or the skin would be more discolored. His power faded slowly, over time.” She looked up. “Do you know what might have caused this?”

  Abelard shook his head, mute.

  “Has there been anything strange about Kos’s behavior in the last few months?”

  “Not really. He’s been strong as ever.” He faltered, as if wondering whether to continue. She didn’t wait for him to make up his mind.

  “Save for what?”

  “Save … He has been slow to respond to my prayers for the last few weeks. He always came, but it sometimes took half an hour or longer to attract His attention.” Abelard’s gaze fell to the ground beneath his feet. “On the night He died, I thought he was ignoring me. Perhaps He found me unworthy. Perhaps I was.”

  “Did other people have this problem?”

  He shifted from foot to foot, unwilling to face her. “The Everburning Lord doesn’t often respond directly to prayer. Even the most faithful may receive little more than a moment of His grace. Once in a while, maybe a couple words from Him.”

  “Don’t priests get a direct line?”

  “There’s a range of faith in the priesthood, as in the laity, but the Technicians of the Divine Throne, who oversee the patch between the Everburning and the city grid, we meet God whenever we come to our post. Or we should.”

  “If you had a problem, others might have as well. Did you mention it to anyone?”

  “To Cardinal Gustave, when we spoke this morning.”

  “You didn’t report anything before his … before two nights ago? Didn’t ask for help?”

  “No.” Abelard exhaled smoke. His eyes were red.

  “Why not?”

  “Would you run to Lady Kevarian at the first sign of trouble, if this investigation grew difficult?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’m the youngest Technician in the office,” Abelard said. His voice was quiet, and his quietness cut her. “Positions open up once every few years. I barely made it this time around. If I let on I had trouble speaking with our Lord, what do you think would happen? There are scores of people hungry for my place.” His narrow shoulders slumped, as if he was melting beneath the folds of his robe.

  “The others might have kept silent as well.”

  “I heard them talking. Maybe they hid their problems, as I did, but Cardinal Gustave sounded surprised when I told him. It was just me.”

  She reached out and gripped his frail, thin arm. He didn’t pull away.

  No wind blew in this space beyond the world. Not even the sound of their heartbeats intruded on the silence. “I thought,” he said at last, “that if I helped you, I might be able to deal with His death. Find some meaning in it.”

  “My boss and I aren’t in the meaning business,” Tara replied. “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.” Abelard did not look up from the god at his feet. “But what am I supposed to do? My faith was weak before. Without my Lord, what’s left?”

  Millions of people live without gods, she wanted to say. They live good lives. They love, and they laugh, and they don’t miss churches and bells and sacrifice. She weighed all the words that leapt to mind, and found them wanting. “I don’t know.”

  He nodded.

  “I’d still li
ke your help.” Silence. “What would he want you to do?” She pointed to the body at their feet.

  Abelard sagged. “He’d want me to help—help Him, help the city, help the world. I want to. Helping is the only way I have left to honor Him. But I don’t know how.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to do.”

  “We’re like insects here. Less than insects. How can we make a difference?”

  “Maybe the problem isn’t as big as you think. Maybe we’re trying to see it from too close. Want to get a better view?”

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. When he looked up, they were dry. “What do you mean?”

  She glanced up. He followed her gaze into the black.

  “You can fly?”

  “Not outside. It takes too much power for me, even if flight weren’t interdicted in your city. But this is a shared hallucination. We can do anything here, as long as it doesn’t change the truth behind the picture.”

  She raised her hand.

  There was no sensation of movement, because they were not truly flying. Gravity broke, and they ascended.

  As they rose, Kos shrank. At first, the slopes and valleys of his ribs and the swells of his oblique muscles filled Tara’s field of vision. Then she saw his whole chest at once, sculpted and magnificent. The stomach she saw next, and for the first time she detected edges to the universe of him, an endless gulf separating the peninsulas of his arms from the plateau of his mighty chest. His face glowed softly, its features almost but not quite those of a man. They shifted as she watched, now blurred and unfocused, now clear and distant as the tiny upside-down image in a magnifying glass. A single detail remained constant: the corners of his mouth quirked into a knowing smile, the smile of one who had seen the earth as a distant blue marble, one who swam in the liquid flames of the sun.

  I’ve seen the world from a distance, too, Tara thought, full of awe and ambition. Someday I’ll match you stroke for stroke.