Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

But if, in Hell, wicked souls were tortured for their sins, Tara expected she was bound there.

  She opened the door into Shale’s room and stepped inside.

  14

  Abelard swung from the last rung of the ladder to an overhanging pipe and dropped into the red-flushed dark of the boiler room, landing lightly on his feet. Steam and coolant lines tangled about and above him like jungle vines, and beyond them squatted the boilers, huge and round and warm. Humid air condensed into a slick sheen on his skin, mingling with new sweat. The heat was familiar and oppressive as the memories of an unpleasant childhood.

  But the part of his childhood Abelard spent in the shadow of these giant clanking machines had not been unpleasant. Complicated, rather, full of adventure, of hide-and-seek and narrow escapes. The tiny crannies grownup engineers resented as side effects of poor design gleamed to a child’s eyes like silver roads to freedom. Mastering this sweaty, benighted labyrinth, learning every path and obstacle, had been an ordeal of fascination and obsession. Abelard and his friends approached the garden of metal as if they were the first people in the world, consumed by its every facet, creating in the act of discovery.

  The boiler room was not a safe place to play, and children were injured every season in their games. Abelard boasted a half-moon scar on his abdomen where, at thirteen, a falling girder tore through his leather work apron and robes to embed itself in his side. That afternoon he first felt the healing touch of his God, the holy fire that seared his skin, blackening and purifying.

  He bore himself away from the boilers and up, sliding and swinging from pipe to girder to scaffold until the plummeting temperature made the steam that rose from his skin crackle and grow sharp. The Sanctum’s generators were a closed system, though imperfect. Water flowed into the massive boilers, where it became steam that drove the turbines that powered Alt Coulumb’s trains and lights and lifts and the endless smaller mechanisms by which four million people lived in close quarters without strangling on their own filth.

  Superheated steam raced along a series of exhaust pipes to the fourteenth floor, where the coolant system wrapped its icy tendrils about Kos’s hot iron veins. The coolant system was more dangerous by far than the steam pipes. Those would scald and burn, but these would grip one’s flesh with the strength of ice, and not all the hot water in the world could thaw skin so frozen. When the principles behind the generators were explained to him, Abelard had envisioned the coolant system as a ravenous monster, devouring heat and life. His childhood nightmare was not far from the truth.

  He ducked under a pair of dangling chains and approached the thick net of coolant coils, slick and shining with frost. Each coil curled thrice about an exhaust pipe before bearing the heat thus drained back to the coolant system’s core, which waited like a hungry maw in the darkness above. He climbed toward it.

  Once, Sister Miriel liked to tell, there had been no coolant system. Once, Seril granted Her touch of moonlight and ice and cold stone to the pipes, calling Her element back to itself: rushing, cool-flowing water. When Seril died, the Church desperately sought another solution.

  Seril. The dead Goddess had loomed large in Abelard’s life in the last two days. As he climbed through the monstrous tangle of the coolant system, he wondered how life in Alt Coulumb had differed while She lived. What were those nights like, lit by a watchful eye, guarded by creatures powerful, imperfect and passionate, fierce as they were relentless? Had the moon shone brighter on that city? Had its fullness caused the blood to leap for joy? Had Kos, too, been different?

  Such thoughts verged on blasphemy, but climbing this scaffolding, smoldering cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, with no one near and with his God lying dead in starlight beyond the realm of man, Abelard allowed himself to wonder.

  What had Kos been like, when Seril lived? God withheld the full force of his love these days, the old monks said, for fear He might burn the world to a cinder. Abelard had felt Lord Kos’s flame lap gently against his own mortal soul, but had He kept a part of Himself back even then? Could Seril’s presence have let Kos draw even closer to His people? If She still lived, would He have died?

  The narrow cleft Abelard had been climbing opened; he stepped from the scaffold onto a vast plane of black rock, the ceiling of an entire clerical floor below, and found himself swaddled in darkness profound as the abyss. The air was chill as winter night, and there were no lamps. Light was heat, and this room was sacred to the deadly cold.

  The chamber was three stories tall and nearly as broad as the Sanctum itself. Pylons thick and thin bridged the gap from floor to ceiling: staircases, people movers, large lifts for freight or groups of supplicants, all swaddled in layers of insulation to keep warm outside air from polluting the chill emptiness.

  Abelard swept the narrow beam of his bull’s-eye lantern through the black.

  Suspended from the vaulted ceiling and the rough stone walls by thick chains hung the immense, entwined double toroid of the central coolant tank. Black slick metal, it drank the beam of his lantern.

  He wished he had Tara’s sensitivity to the Craft, for the central coolant tank was not a product of mortal engineering. Its inner workings were a mystery to even the most diligent and faithful of Kos’s priests. They knew the black box consumed heat and fed it to Justice by an unseen mechanism, powering Blacksuits throughout the city. That was all. It lay like an open wound in the center of Abelard’s mind, an affront to the laws of the universe.

  He sat down on the stone, and closed his lantern.

  Darkness rushed in, blacker than any night he had ever known, child of cities that he was. The tip of his cigarette burned against cold shadows.

  He closed his eyes and traced in his memory the paths of the four hundred seventy-two threadlike coolant lines that wound over cold stone and through empty air to the central tank. They glowed in his mind’s eye, precise and exact.

  He inhaled, and his breath froze in his chest.

  They glowed not only in his mind’s eye, but in the black beyond his eyelids.

  He opened his eyes, and saw nothing. Closed them, and the coolant pipes glimmered silver and cold in empty space. The silver lines seemed painted on the backs of his eyelids, or rather his eyelids seemed to have become filters that only this light could penetrate.

  To his closed eyes, the coolant tank was a tangle of clockwork outlined in silver. Its innards spun and turned and wound, and in places silver light tangled about invisible, physical gears, pistons, camshafts. Power flowed down the chains that suspended the tank in midair, and proceeded through hidden paths across town to the Temple of Justice.

  He inhaled smoke and exhaled it. The light gleamed more brightly. He opened his eyes, and the silver visions vanished.

  “What is this?” he asked the empty space and the machines.

  They didn’t answer, but something within him whispered, look further.

  He closed his eyes again. Lines of spider silk filled the black, but not all of them were silver. In their midst, one ran a burgeoning red and gold along the floor to disappear into the rock. That line was darker than the others, barely shedding light. Dormant. It was not tied to the coolant system, he reasoned, and thus lacked the coolant system’s pale, hungry hue.

  He opened his eyes and the cover of his lantern, shedding a narrow beam of light along the path of the anomalous pipe, fixed to the stone by iron bolts. It was less corroded than the surrounding coolant lines, but indistinguishable from them in gauge and make. Someone had intended this pipe to blend with the coolant system. Without his newfound vision, Abelard would never have seen the difference. No wonder the maintenance crews discovered nothing.

  Returning to the scaffold, he traced the pipe back down into the boiler room’s sauna heat. His quarry wound about the primary steam exhaust pipe like ivy around the trunk of an ancient dying tree. It fed on the heat, draining it—slowly now, but he suspected it could drain faster, and indeed pull enough heat to steal power from Justice herself. This w
as no doubt the cause of the coolant fluctuations Sister Miriel had observed.

  Back he climbed through the dark, guided sometimes by lantern light, sometimes by the vision that hung before his closed eyes.

  Returning to the coolant system’s chamber, he traced the errant pipe until it plunged into the floor near a stairwell. By comparing the pattern of ventilation ducts and power conduits with the Sanctum’s floor plan, etched in his memory, Abelard identified the rooms below. Offices mostly, a scriptorium, a meeting hall. He knew the Sanctum better than his own body, but he did not know where this pipe led.

  He paused to light another cigarette from the embers of his last. Breathing in, he closed his eyes.

  Three steps to his left, beside the red ribbon of the fake coolant pipe, a red square burned in outline on the floor, a few feet on each side. At one edge of the square, the strange dull light illuminated a depression in the rock, invisible when Abelard examined the same space with his lantern.

  A handle, concealed.

  He placed his fingers into the depression and felt them wrap around a metal D-ring. When he pulled, the entire square of rock shifted up on an invisible hinge. Abelard expected the stone to be heavy, but it rose easily in his grip.

  Below the hidden door, a tunnel dropped into darkness that Abelard’s new second sight could not pierce. A ladder was riveted to the tunnel’s round wall.

  He glanced about, thinking that he should go for help. But access to the boiler room was limited to priests and monks and the occasional, heavily supervised consultant. Building such a complex project as this, with secret doors and tunnels and pipes, required time and power, or numbers, or both. An outsider could not have accomplished it without help from within the Church.

  He thought back to Sister Miriel’s calm assurance, to her bafflement at the coolant problem. Sincere? Or secure, knowing he could not find what she and her comrades had hidden?

  Perhaps Tara had made him paranoid, but Abelard did not feel like trusting anyone.

  He set one foot on the ladder and descended alone.

  *

  Ms. Kevarian did not find Cardinal Gustave in his office, nor in the library. An aide said he had gone to the rooftop to meditate. She sought him there.

  Cresting the stairs she found the Cardinal leaning on his staff near the edge of the roof. Ordinarily from this vantage point Alt Coulumb stretched from horizon to horizon, but today clouds wadded about the Sanctum like thick wool. The world ended in a blank expanse beyond the tower, as if some god had forgotten to draw the rest of the image on the page, or having drawn it, frowned, and reached for the eraser. The noise of the crowd below was barely audible, an undifferentiated mash of sound in the misty depths.

  “Your people are angry,” she said without preamble.

  “Their faith is weak.”

  “They want someone to explain the situation. Assuage their fears.”

  He did not respond. Wind whipped his robes about him, but did not touch her.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Kos’s resurrection.”

  “Talk.”

  “We need a strategy for rebuilding Kos, and the first step is for me to understand what the Church wants. What you want.”

  “I want.” He did not say those words often, she thought. “I want my Lord back. The way He was.”

  “Kos as you knew him is gone, Cardinal. We can resurrect him, but we can’t save everything. I need to know your priorities.”

  “Our priority,” the old man said, “is to defeat Alexander Denovo.”

  Ms. Kevarian joined him at the tower’s edge. She remembered that tension in his voice from his brief talk with Denovo at court. “This isn’t an adversarial process. We win to the extent we get what we want. Denovo loses to the extent he does not get what his clients want.” Wind filled the silence. Through the mist she heard the mechanical rush of a passing train. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

  “I remember when you were not much older than your apprentice is now,” the Cardinal said. “And I was younger.”

  “You were.”

  “It doesn’t seem fair, that all the things of this world pass—that Gods pass—and not you.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I don’t mean you in particular. Your people. Craftsmen. Craftswomen. Lingering on, untouchable.”

  His words died somewhere in the depths of the cloud.

  “Hardly untouchable,” she said.

  “Denovo looks even less aged than you.”

  “He drinks the life of those who come too close to him. Steals their youth. Also,” she said after a pause, “he moisturizes.”

  She intended that as a joke, but the Cardinal did not laugh.

  “Cardinal, I need you to tell me if you’re hiding anything about your relationship with Denovo.”

  No response. Far below, she heard raised voices.

  “When you met him at court, you behaved as if he’d wounded you personally. That by itself means little, but this afternoon I visited several of your creditors, his clients. They told me he angled for this position. He’s working virtually for free, and that’s not his style. He wouldn’t be here unless he thought he had something to gain, but your situation seems strong. Unless he knows something I don’t.”

  Gustave turned away from the abyss, away from her. “You know the Technical Cardinal is responsible for maintaining Justice.”

  “Yes.”

  “For the last several months, Justice has felt a drain on her power in the early morning. The Blacksuits weaken on patrol, and Justice’s thoughts grow sluggish. Our people determined this trouble was Craft-related, but they could not trace its source. We sent word to Denovo, who was the chief architect of Justice. He came, advised me about our problem, and left.”

  “He didn’t mention any of this when you met in the courtroom because…”

  “We both felt it best his consultation remain secret. The Church did not want Justice to appear weak, and Denovo did not want anyone to know his greatest construct required maintenance.”

  A gust of wind billowed Ms. Kevarian’s long coat behind her like a cape. She stuck her hands in her pockets. She heard, and he heard, the distant repeated cry: “God is dead! God is dead!”

  “I think Denovo discovered something when he consulted for you,” Ms. Kevarian said. “Something that made him think Kos was weaker than he seemed. Knowing that, he positioned himself to represent the creditors when Kos died.”

  Cardinal Gustave turned to face her. His expression was carefully blank. “Why? What could he gain from his position as counsel?”

  “My question exactly.”

  Gustave considered this, and Ms. Kevarian, and the clouds around him, with a firm, fixed expression. Saying nothing, he walked to the stair that led back down into the Sanctum’s depths.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Where else? I am going to speak with my people.” His staff tapped out a slow, inevitable rhythm. “I will show them that Kos’s truth endures, despite their weakness.”

  “Applied Theology won’t work,” she said, though he knew this already. “Kos’s body may endure, but his soul is gone. He won’t be able to help you direct his power.”

  “He appointed a little might for his priests’ daily use. That will remain through the dark of the moon, like the generators and trains and all the rest.”

  “Without Kos, you can’t shape and refine his power. If you tried to light a fire you’d end up destroying the fireplace.”

  “That,” he said grimly as he descended into the shadows of the Sanctum tower, “will be enough.”

  Unseen within the gray erasure of the universe below, the crowd screamed on.

  *

  Tara stood in the hospital room, and caught her breath. Snaring Cat’s mind had taken more strength than she expected. This cloud-covered city had so much light but so few stars. She needed to be more efficient to accomplish all she had planned for tonight. An interrogation l
ay before her, combat and pursuit, but at the end she would gain another piece to the many puzzles surrounding Kos’s demise, and, if she was lucky, a weapon to use against Alexander Denovo.

  In the process, she might even prove herself to Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, but that prospect seemed distant and barren to her now. It lacked the pleasant warmth that came when she thought of Denovo falling.

  Shale lay in the bed, or at least his body did. The nurses had stripped him naked and plugged an intravenous drip into his arm. Risky at this low level of medicine, but there was no other way to feed him with his face gone. The folded bedsheets revealed the corded muscles of his chest, unsettling in their perfection, as if he had been built rather than grown. He was thinner, she thought, than yesterday. His freakishly swift metabolism was already cannibalizing fat and muscle. If Shale’s incapacitation lasted much longer, his body would devour itself from the inside.

  She set her shoulder bag on a table across from the bed, beside a vase of flowers. From within she produced her slender black book. Its silver trim glimmered in the dying sunlight. She took other items from the bag as well: a tiny gas burner the size of her clenched fist, a folded piece of black silk, a pen, a vial of ink the color of mercury, her small hammer, a pouch of silver nails, and a tiny silver knife.

  Last chance to turn back, she told herself. Even now you could probably apologize to Cat. Go farther, and you can rely on no one but yourself.

  She undid the latch on the black book. Sandwiched between the tenth and eleventh pages lay Shale’s face. The cool skin twitched as her fingers feathered over its cheek.

  Tara unfolded the face, set it features-down on the black silk, uncapped the ink, sterilized the silver knife with the gas flame, and began to work.

  *

  Cat arrived at the vampire’s door, uncertain how she had come there. Her mind felt mulled, heated and seasoned. Need quickened in her breast.

  She was tired. It had been a long and sober night, and a long day in plainclothes, relieved only by the brief ecstasy of the suit. The world felt empty, its colors garish and sharp without the flood of joy to cushion them.