Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

  “A shame that it’s slipping away.” Tara’s knife flickered into being in her hand, a twist of moonlight curved like a fang.

  Denovo’s grin didn’t fade. He started to shake his head, but then he moved, fast as an uncoiling spring. The distance between them evaporated. Dark energy roiled around his fist.

  The colors of the world inverted and Tara was not flying but falling, her protective shadows broken and struggling vainly to reform. There was a fist-sized hole in her blouse that had not existed a moment ago, and she was bleeding.

  The floor struck her shoulders—or was it the other way around?—and a brown wave rolled in from the corners of her vision to engulf her.

  *

  Denovo rubbed his palms together like a baker flouring his hands, and surveyed the ruined hall. A pack of gargoyles lay chained upon the floor. Tara, his dangerously persistent student, landed fifteen feet away, unconscious, blood leaking from the wound he had left in her gut. Elayne was spread-eagled on the ground nearby, twitching but immobile. She fought his control of her motor neurons, but had only succeeded in turning a pathetic, rough circle on the floor. The skinny priest knelt by his dead master.

  The Concern hovered over the inert body of the Stone Man who had so nearly completed his mission. Who would have succeeded, had he known what he carried.

  Denovo straightened the cuffs of his tweed jacket, brushed a few specks of glass and dust off the lapels, and advanced on the sphere of Craft that was the key to his divinity.

  As he walked, he shot a jaunty salute at the statue of Justice. “Sorry you can’t see this, old girl. It’s beautiful.” A bound Stone Woman threw herself in his path; he kicked her out of his way with a broad sweep of Craft, and stepped beneath the sphere. It glowed ten feet overhead, out of reach.

  The corners of his mouth cricked up into a smirk that did not reach his eyes. Inhaling, he constructed in his mind a framework of pulleys and wheels to lift him up. Exhaling, he called upon his students and colleagues in the Hidden Schools to convince Kos’s troublesome interdict that rising a handful of feet above the earth’s surface did not constitute flight.

  On his second indrawn breath he rose a few inches, and on his exhale nearly a foot. His smile broadened. He reached out to grasp the revolving sphere, and felt for the first time in his life unmixed gratitude toward the universe.

  Then one hundred forty pounds of bony, high-velocity Novice Technician hit him in the small of the back.

  *

  The dark waters about Cat parted when the Cardinal fell, but closed in again as love of Justice filled her mind, and with it, love of Denovo, Justice’s creator, who hovered above the earth, reaching for a pearl of orange light. Cat loved this man though he mocked Justice to Her face. Though he had killed a god. She loved him, and knew not why. She hated him for very good reasons.

  She had seen Abelard turn from the Cardinal’s body and watch Tara confront Denovo. Abelard remained crouched, seemingly in mourning, waiting for the right moment. As Denovo rose toward his unearthly prize, the priest began to run.

  He launched himself from the earth and struck the Craftsman from behind. They fell together, locked in combat. Abelard scrambled for a choke hold as they hit the ground, legs wrapped tight around the smaller man’s torso, but Denovo was built broad and dense like a wrestler, and twisted out of his adversary’s lock.

  Cat struggled to break the bonds of love. Chemical passions warred in her breast. An addiction, like any other. Once more she pressed Raz Pelham’s fangs to her wrist.

  Denovo broke Abelard’s hold. Lightning crackled about his clawed hand as he brought it down on the young priest’s chest.

  For an instant, Denovo was a figure of deepest black with shock-white hair, standing before an audience of alabaster statues. When light and time righted themselves, Abelard lay still on the rough marble, the stub of his cigarette smoking where it protruded from his lips. Denovo rose to his feet.

  Abelard’s chest did not move. Through the Blacksuit Cat could see further into the red and violet ranges than most humans, and she saw him grow cold.

  Cat forgot love, forgot duty, forgot everything in the shock of that sight: Abelard, still as if sleeping. A taut piano string snapped within her chest. This pain was hers, and this grief. She was herself, Catherine Elle beneath the Blacksuit.

  She remembered two things. First, she owned her body. Second, the Stone Men, chained on the floor, were innocent of the crime for which they had been charged. They should be freed.

  *

  Tara lay in a lake of silver, eyes half-closed, half-open in the dawn moment between sleep and waking. She felt arms around her, cool and comforting. She stared into deep green, endless eyes that were also her own. She remembered pain. She remembered Seril’s voice. “Permit me—”

  Permit what?

  Permit me to come inside.

  Returning to her body, she had felt as if her soul were too large to fit her skin.

  Seril’s were the eyes she opened in the Temple of Justice, and Seril’s was the heart that beat within her chest.

  She felt her stomach, and found blood there but no pain. A web of moonlight closed her wound. She was not alone inside her mind. Seril overlaid her, silver and ancient and beautiful.

  She heard eleven manacles spring open, and a chorus of vengeful roars from throats of stone. Flame crackled and lightning snapped and nameless powers clashed like deep brass cymbals.

  She stood. The stars and moon shone through a hole in the clouds above. She felt every grain in the stone beneath her feet.

  Her Guardians were free, and dancing.

  Their dance did not go well. Three sprawled upon the ground, wings broken and silver flesh splintered, one dead and two dying. Aev, high priestess, great lady, wheeled in the air to strike with both claws against the translucent dome that shielded Denovo. Three others pressed the assault with her. A pair lay writhing in pain, trapped in nets of fine red threads that burned body and soul. Two more struggled to restrain a third, her eyes glazed and her movements puppetlike. David, too, battered against Denovo’s shield, but the Professor reserved his high and vengeful Craft for Guardians alone.

  She saw every strike, every riposte, every counter, though faster than human eye could follow. Denovo moved like an orchestra conductor behind the electric mist of his shield.

  She advanced upon the battle without walking; her feet hovered a few inches above the ground. Moonlight gave the Guardians’ arms strength and their wings speed and their claws power to pierce and rend and tear. Lightning struck Guardians Jain and Rael, and they collapsed, but Her light pulled them from the brink of death; boar-tusked Gar fell into a pit of infinite depth, but Her love became a long thin silver cord to draw him back. Moonlight closed about Ashe’s mind, and freed her from Denovo’s control.

  Denovo turned his attention to Tara. Though his face was fixed in an expression of intense effort, his smile did not falter.

  “You know,” he said through the roar and clash, “I nearly missed fighting in the God Wars. I was one of the youngest to join the battle.”

  He spun Craft toward the orange sphere above, but She arrested it with moonlight. Thorns of shadow caught Aev, but She dulled their piercing tips. Denovo’s Craft lashed out at Tara as a bolt of flame, and She turned it aside.

  Her thoughts came slowly now, and with effort.

  “You’re not the first goddess I’ve fought,” he said, calm and cold. “You cannot abandon your faithful. I strike at what you love, and you protect it. When you’re stretched to the limit of your power, I squeeze. Just … a … bit.”

  His eyes narrowed, and the thorns about Aev’s body were sharper, the hole into which Gar fell deeper, darker, hungrier, the spear of flame pointed at Tara’s heart more swift and sure.

  With a sound like a ringing bell, the light of the world popped free from its perch in Tara’s skull and hung revealed before her, a beautiful woman of frostlight and stone bound to those she could not abandon by cords of her
own making.

  Tara’s wound reopened, and blood seeped through cracks in the cauterized flesh. Her mind was hollow, her own again, and the world not Seril’s but hers. The Guardians’ names she forgot, but she saw Cat curled in a fetal ball amid discarded iron restraints, trapped in a net of red wire. She had freed the Guardians. Good.

  Ms. Kevarian lay on the ground, and next to her, Abelard. Unmoving.

  “That’s the trouble with ties,” Denovo said. “They bind both ways.”

  Denovo reached out with a rope of flame to draw the sphere toward him.

  Tara screamed, wove starfire into her own rope, and lassoed the sphere. Denovo was a supernova of Craft. He pulled and she pulled and Seril pulled and the gargoyles redoubled their attack, and still the sphere approached his outstretched hand. He grinned.

  Tara blinked, and the darkness endured.

  *

  Tara reclined in a leather armchair beneath a glittering chandelier. Ms. Kevarian stood across from her, dressed in a businesswoman’s black and in full control of herself.

  Alexander Denovo sat in another chair to Tara’s left, mouth slack with shock.

  “What the hell?”

  “We are between instants,” Ms. Kevarian explained.

  “How did you bring me here?”

  “Ties bind both ways,” she observed. “I thought I would give you an opportunity to surrender.”

  Denovo laughed outright. “Surrender? Apotheosis is within my grasp.”

  “Don’t the odds trouble you?”

  “I can hold out for the moments I require to assimilate Kos’s power.” He manifested a pipe out of dreamstuff and began to smoke it. “Then the opposition will fall.”

  “I can’t guarantee your safety if you don’t surrender now.”

  “When I am a god, Elayne, I will break you, body and soul.”

  Her eyes and her voice were made of diamond. “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “Boss—” But the moment slipped, and Tara fell between earth and heaven.

  *

  Alexander Denovo whirled within his protective dome, and through electric distortion saw Elayne Kevarian, standing. He ordered her to sit, to surrender, to die, but his commands rolled off the ice of her mind. The young priest’s body lay prone at her feet. A curving design, wet, red, and intricate, glimmered on the floor around them.

  Breath caught in his throat.

  Elayne Kevarian had lain prone under his control, twitching, pathetic, circling in place, bloody fingers grasping at pale stone. She had completed the circle. Drawn it in her own blood, worked it with sigils crude in their calligraphy but elegant in their architecture.

  She stood within a resurrection circle, over a dead priest whose lips still clutched a smoldering cigarette. But this circle was not drawn for a man. It was drawn for a god.

  Denovo called on all his Craft, releasing the gargoyles and their goddess and Tara, everything save for his hold on the fiery sphere. He threw doom and lightning against Elayne and rent the earth beneath her feet and cast her into the outer hells, or tried. Shadow seeped from her, devouring starlight and torchlight and his Craft alike. The blood circle blazed the myriad colors of pure white light.

  Within the shadow, within the circle, the flame of a cigarette tip flared.

  *

  Abelard fell. It was a familiar sensation.

  He fell farther, faster, and this time the fire did not merely linger at the edge of his vision and the borders of his mind. It burst upon him in a flood. It charred his soul and burnt his body to a cinder. It danced upon him the dance that destroyed and renewed. This fire was the heartbeat of the world. The fire was love. The fire was life.

  The fire was his God.

  A faint remnant of his logical mind remembered that for some reason, though he had smoked constantly since his Lord’s death, in three days he had not once used a lighter or a match. Always he passed flame from one cigarette to the next.

  He surrendered to God. Every breath of smoke lingering in his lungs, every trace of fire that calmed him in his hours of need, he gave them forth freely.

  He was the size of a city, the size of the world, the size of the universe, smaller than the smallest atom. He was ash, and he burned eternal in a million suns.

  Brilliant and new as a phoenix, Kos the Everburning rose from the ember at the tip of Abelard’s cigarette.

  *

  There is a space beyond or beneath the world, where all that is not, which creates all that is, collects and congregates. Shadow dances and wars with light there. Life and mind play their eternal game of flight and pursuit.

  That place looks like nothing the human mind can grasp, so think of it as a bar: polished wood, brass fixtures, dim lights, beer.

  A woman sat alone, beautiful and lost and full of rage so old it had become a dull ache deadening every newborn sensation. She cradled a half-empty pint glass.

  A man entered the bar from a door that had not been there before. He stood waiting for a thousand years as they measured time, but she did not acknowledge him.

  He looked more lost than she, and more recently wounded. He opened his mouth to speak, but had no words in whatever tongue they used. He reached for her. Placed his hand on her shoulder.

  For another millennium she did not respond to his touch.

  She stared into the dregs of her glass. Her arm floated slowly upward, against the weight of history.

  She closed her hand around his.

  *

  Tara heard Denovo scream, an ugly sound full of desire and thwarted ambition. Shadow rolled from Ms. Kevarian’s circle to obscure the world. The air grew warm.

  Fire broke reality.

  She closed her eyes on reflex, and was nearly blinded in her second sight as webs of god-flame spun through Alt Coulumb with a speed beyond speed. The numberless threads that kept Kos’s city running had hung slack; now they snapped taut as a spring-loaded trap. Across town, fire erupted on the altars of Kos’s Sanctum. A beacon of holy light shone atop the Sanctum tower; a cry issued from the crowd below, wordless and exultant as the shadows vanished from their faces. Their candle flames leapt for joy.

  Here in Justice’s Hall, the Concern bloomed and fell like the folds of a bridal veil upon the silver shade that was Seril Green-Eyed. Denovo’s defenses shriveled and snapped.

  It was possible, Tara had said to Abelard, for a god to hide himself from obligations within the faith of his disciples, letting all but his consciousness die. It hurt more than death, and only the strongest deities could endure the pain for long. But it was possible. If you were powerful and your need was great—if, for example, this were the only way to save your long-lost love and avenge a grave crime, and if you knew that the fatal draw on your power would soon pass, leaving your body unharmed and ripe for rehabitation—you just might manage it.

  Kos was awake once more, strong, and angry.

  Seril vanished. Tara heard a great grinding of stone and looked up. The statue of Justice opened the pits of its eyes, and they blazed green.

  Denovo hunched into a fighting crouch, knife out, nostrils flaring. The Guardians lurched out of striking range, but David was not so fast, and Denovo’s knife slashed, sharp as thought.

  Tara was faster. She reached David in a step, thrust him out of the way, and intercepted Denovo’s knife with her own. The two blades met in arcs of light. Denovo’s broke.

  The Blacksuits moved.

  Fifty fell upon Denovo, but Cat beat them all, grasping his neck as her colleagues wrapped arms of iron about his limbs and body. Craft struck him, too: the Craft of Elayne Kevarian.

  His eyes rolled white, and he fell limp.

  Tara stepped back.

  Breath came heavy in her throat.

  She turned from the unconscious professor to her boss. Ms. Kevarian was covered in cuts and bruises, fingers bloody and clothing charred.

  At her feet sat Novice Technician Abelard, rubbing his forehead. An extinguished cigarette dangled from his lips.r />
  EPILOGUE

  Sunset cast shadows of Alt Coulumb onto the soft waves of the turning tide. Along the docks, ropes creaked and boots tromped over wet planks; women swore and men strained against the weight of their burdens as the merchant fleet prepared to face the deep. Lookouts climbed webs of sheet and sail to nest in the rigging, and harpooners manned their posts warily, barbed and poisoned spears in hand. Serpents waited beyond the coastal shelf, and every sailor had sat vigil at least once for friends dragged screaming into the deep.

  Raz Pelham emerged from his cabin onto the deck of the Kell’s Bounty. The lingering sun burned his tanned skin. He had never felt more ready to sail. Twice he had visited this city at the bidding of Craftsmen, twice been brought to the edge of death and beyond. Affairs had fallen out better this time than forty years ago, but still he yearned for the water. Land lied to the feet, and to the soul. You stand, it whispered, upon unchanging ground. You build upon certainty, and your foundations will never crumble.

  Ms. Kevarian had told him, on her first visit to Alt Coulumb four decades past, that beneath its solid shell the world was an ocean of molten rock and metal. Captain Pelham preferred the sea, which misled but seldom lied. The world flowed, the world changed, and many-mouthed terrors lurked beneath its surface.

  According to the Church and the Crier’s Guild, the city had reclaimed its usual equilibrium in the three weeks since Denovo’s arrest. The College of Cardinals pronounced Kos’s resurrection a miracle passing understanding, and Gustave a martyr to his Lord. This rhetoric did not persuade Alt Coulumb’s people, who sensed the near passage of disaster and moved in its wake like sailors after a bitter storm. They did the work the world asked of them—bargained hard, loaded and unloaded cargo, paid their debts, and drank their wine—but beneath routine and ritual, Raz sensed a growing apprehension.

  More had changed than they imagined. Pieces of the truth would surface in the coming months. Already moonlight shone mingled with fire in their dreams. Waves moved over and through Alt Coulumb, scouring its heart and tearing new channels in its soil.