So close, Kai thought. She could hear Teo teeter on the brink, changing her mind, ready to work with her. It hurt to say, “I’m sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Privacy. We have to protect our pilgrims.”
“If I can convince my board to work with you,” Teo said, “we might be talking about a big investment here. Could you make an exception?”
Kai shook her head. “There are too many secrets in the pool. I can tell you about idols we’ve built. I can describe common structures of faith and myth. But I can’t show you specifics. Gods and Deathless Kings the world over would kill children for a chance at the knowledge you just asked me to give you. We host idols worth millions of souls, and we take our pilgrims’ privacy very seriously.” She trailed off, remembering Seven Alpha. Not, for once, the idol’s death, not the words, but what came after. The room of glass and edges. Ms. Kevarian’s questions, probing, piercing, endless. “Very seriously,” she repeated.
“I get it,” Teo said. “I can keep secrets. I’ll sign a nondisclosure agreement if you want—you can lock my memories of your idols away except when I’m in the same room as Two Serpents board members.”
“All of whom are major players on the soul-markets themselves. I’m sorry. I can put you in touch with other pilgrims who have volunteered to discuss their experiences. Their successes.” She keeps digging, Mara had said. I don’t even know what she’s looking for. The Grimwalds had signed off on the Shining Empire trade. They knew the risks—might they have known the trade would go south? Did they approve it expecting their idol to fail?
“I’m sorry,” Teo said. “That would help, but I don’t think it will push us over the line. I hope you appreciate my position.”
Kai was barely listening anymore.
I seek the truth. Ms. Kevarian’s own words, in their meeting, in the nightmare.
What truth?
Teo continued: “I don’t mean to be difficult. But if we’re to work together, I have to see.”
“I understand,” Kai said. “I’m sorry you traveled so far, for so little.” She closed the folder, and walked out of the conference room.
She felt Teo’s eyes follow her. She ignored them.
19
“What do you know about poets?” Izza asked that afternoon, as Cat did handstand push-ups on a stretch of bare floor.
The woman’s back and shoulders rippled with muscle; her toes pointed straight at the sky and the sagging roof. Six weeks give or take since her injury, one of those shaking from withdrawal, and already so strong. As if pain hurt her differently from normal people. “Lots of questions today.”
“Just curious.”
“Poets in general or”—Cat growled as she pressed herself back up into handstand posture—“specific?”
“I’ve been thinking about the man who saved me from the watch,” Izza said. “He was a poet. Or he said he was.”
“Saving”—through clenched teeth as she descended into another rep—“isn’t a poetish”—and up again—“thing to do.” She paused for breath this time in her handstand, but her arms did not shake.
“He called himself a bard,” Izza said, remembering the coat proudly worn and the pedigree proudly proclaimed. “What’s that mean?”
“Could mean a lot of things.” Cat bent her legs, set the balls of her feet on the floor, and stood, swooping her arms up and back like wings. She grabbed a jug of water and drank half in three long swigs. “‘Bard’s’ one of those words, like ‘cop,’ that shift depending on who says it. Iskari have this old bardic tradition, dates back to the Devirajic Age, you know, courtly love and all that. Truth and honor and beauty and ladies’ handkerchiefs. Then there are Camlaan bards. Tale-twisting, curse-spreading, cheats at cards and politics and marriage. Back in Alt Coulumb most of the bards have some kind of relationship with the Crier’s Guild, spreading the day’s news, so they end up kind of like spies, or reporters I guess. They hear news, pass it along. You know where this guy’s from?”
“Iskar.”
Cat set down the jug. Water sloshed inside. She sat still. When she spoke again, she sounded more serious. “Do you know his name?”
“Margot, he said. Edmond Margot.”
“An Iskari poet named Edmond Margot.” Her face and voice had closed like doors.
“You know him?”
“I’ve read his work.” She crossed her arms over her knees and frowned. “And he knows about this Blue Lady of yours?”
“He claimed to.”
“Would anyone have told him?”
Izza shook her head. “Nobody I know. The Blue Lady was our story. Secret.”
“Mind if I ask you a question? It’s a little personal.”
“Go ahead.”
“Tell me about the Blue Lady.”
“You heard the stories I told Ivy and the others,” Izza said.
“Stories, yes. I’m more interested in a description.”
Izza wandered around the warehouse, looking for something to kick. She found a suitable rock and with one sweep of her sandal sent it skittering off among broken crates to shock a fat scuttling beetle from its den. “A description.”
“A few details, that’s all. What she’s like.”
“What she was like.”
Cat blinked. “That’s right. You mentioned that she was gone.”
“She died. Happens to gods a lot around here.”
For some reason that seemed to set Cat at ease. “She wasn’t the first.”
“No. But she was nice. And I told her stories, so she was more mine than the rest.”
“Keep going.”
The beetle retreated into the shadow of a piece of broken masonry. Izza knelt, grabbed another stone, and judged the distance. “She was a bird, and a shadow, and a friend.” She tossed the stone in the air and caught it twice, testing weight. “The noise to make a rich man look the other way while you reach for his pocket. The hand that catches you when your grip slips and you’re about to fall. Speed and silence.” She threw the rock as hard as she could. Crack. The beetle’s guts smeared black through the dust. “You wouldn’t have liked her very much, I guess.”
“A goddess of thieves,” Cat said, as if the thought was funny.
“I don’t know about thieves. She was ours.”
Cat nodded. “My goddess back onshore, she was moonlight and order and water and stone. A lantern in dark places.” For the first time, she didn’t sound angry at her old life. Sad, instead, and distant.
“I guess they wouldn’t have got along.”
“No,” she said, though she didn’t sound as if she saw the humor. “There is one thing about bards you should know.”
“What’s that?”
“They attract stories. They’re sensitive to them, pick them up out of the air, out of dreams. If Margot knows about the Blue Lady, it doesn’t mean much more than that he’s good at his job.”
“He doesn’t just know the story,” Izza said. “He believes it. He thought the Blue Lady led him to me, even though she’s dead. That’s why I asked you what happens when gods die.”
Light glistened off the sweat that slicked Cat’s arms and face, outlined contours of muscle. Izza remembered her as a silver statue, breaking Penitents bare-handed.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Cat said. “If I were you, I would keep away from this guy. Dead gods are trouble, and so are men who’re mad for them.”
“He could help the kids after I’m gone. They can take care of themselves mostly, but it’s always nice to have a friend. Besides, I feel like I owe him something. He got me out of jail, and I ran because I was scared.”
“You don’t owe him.”
“What does it matter to you?”
She laughed, hollowly, into the floor, and shook her head. “That’s a good question.”
Izza felt something sharp and small break inside her.
Cat looked up. “I care about you, kid. I won’t say I know what you’
ve been through, but I understand why you want to get away from this life. I want to help you before you hurt yourself, or someone else does the hurting for you. You need to let all this go. The island, your kids, the Blue Lady, the poet. They can take care of themselves.”
“You’re scared,” Izza said.
“Yes.”
“Don’t worry.” Izza did not bother keeping the scorn from her voice. “I’ll make sure no one finds you.”
And she left, before Cat could say anything more.
20
The rest of the day Kai pretended to be productive: reviewing intake forms and trade requests, directing each to the relevant priest. Her thoughts throbbed with conspiracy. When time came to write up her meeting with Teo, she scrawled “theological differences” in the form’s comment box and stuck it amid the others, hoping it would be overlooked. She had more important things to do than a postmortem with Twilling.
At sundown she strolled down Epiphyte, east first, then south, to Makawe’s Rest. The club wouldn’t open for hours; poets slept late on weekdays. The stage stood empty, and the tables with upended chairs looked like pictures she’d seen of Shining Empire tombs. Penitents watched the water, their prisoners asleep. She heard no screams.
Mako stood on the beach between two Penitents, hitting golf balls into the ocean. He’d spread a carpet of fake grass at his feet, stood the clubs in the sand beside him, and placed a tee upright on the carpet. Kai watched him swing three times, and miss. His fourth swing connected, and the ball arced twenty degrees to the swing’s right. Kai squinted, and thought she saw a splash fifty yards out on the still blue bay.
She shouted from up the beach, reluctant to approach. “If Eve catches you doing that, she’ll tan your hide.”
“A man’s still allowed to play golf on this island.”
“You could hurt someone.”
“This time of day? Anyone who works for a living’s back in port, and anyone who doesn’t could use a golf ball to the head once in a while.”
“Wait until they stick you in a Penitent for killing a tourist.”
He groped into his golf bag, found a ball, and knelt to the mat. He placed the ball on the tee, but as he stood, it fell. With an exaggerated sigh he knelt again, replaced it, and rose slowly to his feet. The ball rocked left and right, but stayed. “Nothing they could do to me someone else hasn’t done already.”
She approached, keeping well clear of his arc of fire. She stopped beside the Penitent to his left, sat down, and leaned against its calf. The stone was warm. “I hear it hurts the mind more than the body. These things make you move the way they want, think the way they think. And the way they think isn’t human.”
Mako swung, and missed the ball by a foot. He frowned. “Lots of things force folk to think in ways that aren’t human. Try joining an army someday, if there’s ever a war for you to fight. Hells, I bet you thought at least five inhuman thoughts before work this morning.” Another swing, another miss. The club slipped in the old man’s hands, and Kai flinched. Mako reset his grip. Sunset transformed his face, scarred and cragged and wrinkled, into a landscape of flame. Not for the first time, she wanted to ask what he’d done in the war. Not for the first time, she decided against it. “You shouldn’t be here yet,” he said. “What’s brought you?”
“You expected me?”
“Always do.”
“You’re often disappointed, then.”
He swung. The golf ball tipped off the tee, and rolled to rest in sand.
“It’s by your feet.”
“I know where it is.” He knelt again, and patted about his knees until he found the ball.
“I can’t believe Eve lets you keep those clubs.”
“She doesn’t know I have them.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Doubt what you like.” Back on the tee, and standing. He adjusted his feet.
“A little to the right.”
He grunted, and bent from the waist, wagging the club. “What’s up?”
“I’m in a fix.”
“Must be hard for you.”
“No harder than for a blind man to golf.”
“Great thing about the ocean,” he said, “is that it’s one big hole. Easy to hit.” He draped the club across his shoulders, hooking his wrists over its either end. He twisted his torso sharply left and right, and his back popped like festival fireworks.
“Oh my god.”
“Yes?”
“You should get that checked.”
“Eve sends me to a masseuse every other week. Says it’s the least she can do for all the pain I cause her.”
“I don’t think a massage counts as revenge.”
“You haven’t been with my masseuse.” He laughed, and coughed, and spit. His spit landed with a solid fleshy sound in the sand, startling up a seven-legged sand-colored beetle that reared, bared sickle mandibles in protest, then scurried away. “She’s from those jungles south of the Shining Empire. Girls there are born with chisels for fingers and pistons for arms. Every other Thirdday she avenges each acre of forest I burned in the God Wars.”
“She know you talk about her this way?”
“Hells, I talk about her this way to her face. She only really opens up on the back when she wants to hurt me.”
“You’re a horrible human being.”
“Never have been any good at it.” He thrust his hips forward and bent back. His shirt rode up, revealing stomach roped with scars. “And yet you come to me for advice, so what does that make you?”
“A horrible human being,” Kai said with a sigh.
“What’s the problem?”
She pressed her fingers into the sand, past the warm top layer, into the damp cool beneath. The beetle marched past, and saluted her with its mandibles. She flicked it, and it hissed at her. “You know Jace sent me away from the mountain.”
“You may have mentioned it a few hundred times or so when you were drinking.”
“He wanted to appease some clients who are suing us because their idol died. They don’t have a chance—but they keep prying anyway. I think they’re looking for something.”
“Like what?”
She heaped the sand beside her into a fortress, and carved a moat around its walls. “The idol that died was tied to a lot of others. If the Craftswoman gets those records, she might be able to learn about our other clients—who they are, how they spend their souls. And if that happens, we could all be in trouble.”
“Is that possible?”
“Maybe.”
“So tell your boss.”
“Who will call me obsessed and maybe he’s right. I might be making things up to compensate for being reassigned. Seeing conspiracies everywhere. I don’t want to be the girl who cried kraken.”
He adjusted his grip on the club, and held it out to her. “Are my V’s pointing in the right direction?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Just say yes or no. You have a fifty-fifty shot at being right. Better than most coaches in my experience.”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.” He shifted his hands, and turned back to the artificial green.
She demolished the fortress she’d built, and filled the moat with its sand. “I should trust Jace to deal with this.”
The club rose without tremor or hesitation. The old man’s body was a perfect line. Then the club fell.
A sharp clean crack echoed across the beach and back again. The ball flew out, and up, and straight, until it disappeared into the sunset-singed sky. Mako nodded. “That look as good as it felt?”
“Yes.”
He fished for another ball. “Find what’s wrong with the foundation, then fix it.”
“You think I won’t be able to move forward until I settle this question.”
“I was talking about my swing,” he said, fishing for another ball. “But why not?”
She stood, slapped sand off her skirt, and leveled her fort
ress’s ruins with her shoe. “Guess I better get to work.”
“What’s your plan?” Mako asked.
No one remained to answer him. He shrugged, raised his club, and swung again, missing.
21
That evening Izza crept to the Godsdistrikt, where she panhandled for scraps of soul and watched an itinerant players’ opera. The performers were boat people, island-hoppers of the Archipelago, who lashed watertight barrels of props and costumes to the outriggers of their canoes. They sang while they paddled. Their proud voices rang out over the ocean as they approached on the morning tide.
No performance could match that pure dawn cant. Hearing them across the water, if Izza shut her eyes she could imagine they were not players at all but Makawe home from the wars, bearing treasure in crystal boats. Izza wasn’t Kavekanese of course, but she’d always liked the prophecy of the gods’ return and the paradise to follow.
More, anyway, than she liked this opera. Hard to pin down why. At first she thought she didn’t believe the abandoned bride would really wait three years for her husband to return. Later, watching from a fire escape above the crowd, face pressed between iron rails, she decided that, no, people believed crazier things every day. The problem was the last act, when the bride received a letter announcing that her husband was dead or remarried or something—Izza didn’t know enough Descended Telomeri, especially when sung at high volume with poor intonation, to follow the fine points of the plot—and committed suicide. Izza bought the suicide. The bride’s acceptance of the letter was a stretch. A real person would put more work into self-deception.
But the singers sang beautifully despite the occasional dropped consonant. After the bride plunged her knife into her neck and the orchestra crescendoed its last crescendo, Izza only stole a little from the hat they passed around for donations.
The sun had long since sunk. Godsdistrikt lights burned a million shades of red, and mainlanders milled down narrow streets seeking food, drink, and sex from businesses happy to oblige. Izza bargained for her dinner with a kabob stand owner: an hour’s work passing out glyphed placards to pedestrians, each placard stamped with a crude picture of a meat skewer and a subtle charm to guide its bearer to the owner’s stall. She ate the kabobs she earned for her work on a rooftop near a thronged intersection where smuggler priests promised pieces of cut-rate heaven to passersby.
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