Three Parts Dead (13 page)

He accepted the letter, examined the lead seal, and broke it with a narrowing of his eyes that cut through the dull metal like a hot razor. Removing the folded creamy paper within the envelope, he held it up to the light and read.

“Well,” he said at the proper moment. “Tomorrow morning I descend.”

The clouds beneath them were a field of black, and the moon shone down.

*

Tara approached the last of the blue-tinted conduits, and measured its girth with a piece of knotted string. As the string drew taut, glyphs appeared on the conduit’s surface in silver spiderweb script. “This is the return from the Iskari Defense Ministry’s Naval Division, which amounts to principal plus ten percent guaranteed over rate of inflation, accounted monthly, priority secured, drawn off the stomach chakra.”

“That’s not usual, right?” Abelard had mostly filled Tara’s notepad with sketches and figures. He possessed an excellent draftsman’s hand, far more exact than Tara’s own. As they worked, he had asked a slow but constant stream of questions, trying to learn enough about their task to help rather than merely assist. The questions kept Tara focused, at least. Document review, even for so momentous a case as this, even with your career on the line, was always a chore. “Most of the patches so far have drawn off the arms, or the legs, not the chakras themselves.”

“It’s not usual. Nor is it especially unusual.” She double-checked the glyphs to ensure she had read them correctly. “Different circumstances call for different contracts. The Is’De’Min is a grotesque, many-tentacled entity ruling over a population of millions, challenged to the south by Deathless Kings, to the north by Camlaan, and to the east by Koschei. This contract is earmarked for use in their own defense. If they rely on Kos for firepower, they have to be able to call upon it at a moment’s notice, no matter what. The contract is dangerous for Kos because the power leaves him at such a fundamental level, but it nets him a high rate of return, absolutely guaranteed.”

“I see. This is a likely culprit, then.” He made a check mark.

“What do you mean by that?”

Abelard hesitated, but at last he answered, in a determined voice without stammer or flinch: “It was probably what killed Him. You said the chakras move up from basic life functions to the most advanced—tailbone, groin, stomach, heart, throat, forehead, crown. This is the farthest south any of the deals have gone. If there was a draw here at the wrong time, it might have taken too much power, and the rest of Him shut down.”

“Couldn’t have happened. It’s too small a contract.”

Abelard regarded the blue conduit and its red mate skeptically. Each was thick around as an old redwood tree.

“Too small to do that kind of damage, I mean,” Tara said. “It looks large to us, but compared with the rest of the body? Have some respect for your god and your Church. They would never let anyone patch in this far down if there was a chance they might kill the system.”

“Kos.”

“Excuse me?”

“At least call Him Kos, please. When you say it like that, ‘your god,’ ‘the system’…”

“Sorry. But my point stands.”

“I thought you said Kos was weak.”

“Weaker than he should have been, yes, but not that weak.”

Abelard made a note. Even the angle of the cigarette in his mouth suggested doubt.

“You don’t believe me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I’ll show you.” She untied her string from the conduit and pulled back, skidding and turning on nothingness until she drew even with Abelard.

“What now?” he asked.

“I’m going to turn back time.”

She began before he could protest or ask for clarification.

It was an illusion, of course, but an impressive one. Every record in the Sanctum’s archive bore a date and a time stamp. Tara could manipulate the Craft that modeled dead Kos to show his body from minutes, hours, weeks ago. When she raised her hand, time flowed backward.

Blood and ichor rushed in reverse down the conduits that pierced Abelard’s god. The festering sores and decayed pits on his skin shrank and closed without scabbing over; horrible hungry things writhed in the darkness, their inverted drones taunting and tearing at the strings of Tara’s mind. The body swelled beneath them, grew supple. Light streamed from the flesh, and especially from the heart, an unconscious, vital flow of grace from the god to his mortal servants. When time wound back to the third day, Tara felt rather than heard a great pounding, like distant explosions echoing over a desert. The backbeat of the universe.

His heartbeat.

It battered her soul, demanding worship. Awe quickened at the base of her spine.

You,
she thought to it,
are an echo. A spirit grown fat trading on its own majesty. I’ll be damned if I let you see me yield.

She summoned ice to her mind, endless fields of it, cool starlight and the black between the stars that human minds stitched together into meaning and Craft.
There is no difference between us,
she shouted into the vortex of that heartbeat.
I cast you out, and stand unassisted.

Her knees wanted to bend.

She closed her fingers, and the whirl of time ceased. “We’re close to the night of your watch, moving forward at thirty times normal speed.”

Abelard had clapped his hands to his ears. Rapture shone from his face. Useless, but at least he was watching.

“See how smoothly the blood flows? And the light, of course, and the heartbeat.”

“What?” he shouted over the noise.

“The heartbeat!”

“What?”

She was about to try again, when the conduits that tied Kos to the shambling horror of the Iskari Defense Ministry erupted with brilliant light. Enough power flowed through those contracts to collapse the walls of a city, to sink a fleet or tear a dragon limb from limb in flight. The light rendered Kos’s body in harsh monochrome, and faded as fast as it had burst upon the dark.

When it faded, the heartbeat was gone.

“Amazing,” Abelard said, his voice faint and reverent. Then, “It looks like the Iskari contract was a factor to me.”

Tara’s cheeks flushed. She took a deep breath, and another.

“That can’t be it,” she said at last.

“Sudden burst of light, and nothing. What more do you need?”

She rolled time back again, to the peak of the Iskari contract’s brilliance. Her calculations had been perfect. Well, not perfect perhaps, but good enough. The contract was too small to destroy Kos, yet there it shone, glorious, and seconds later, the god died.

“That’s strange.” She rolled back time at one-twentieth speed. The Iskari contract flared, faded, died, alone. “Very strange.”

“An ‘I’m sorry I shot down your idea’ would be nice.”

“No other contract even flickers. And the Iskari didn’t draw any more than their pact allowed.”

Abelard looked from Tara, to his God, and back. “So?”

“I’m sorry I shot down your idea. It looks like you were right—the Iskari pact dealt Kos his dying blow. There was no other significant draw on Kos at that time. But I was right, too; the Iskari didn’t drain enough power to hurt your god if he was as strong as the Church records show. He must have been weaker. Much weaker. To die from the Iskari pact, Kos must have been half the strength your people thought, maybe less.”

Abelard shook his head. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know yet, but it’s great for us. The Church didn’t know Kos was weak, so the Iskari pact wasn’t negligent, which means we keep more control over Kos’s resurrection. Now, all we need to do is figure out what happened in Iskar.”

“Aren’t we going to look for the source of His weakness?”

“Of course, but that information isn’t here. The problem’s deeper than your Church. Tomorrow, we’ll dive into raw Craft, and find where Kos’s power went. For now, Iskar is our best lead.”

“We know what they drew, and when. What more do we need?”

“We need to know why. The Iskari made that pact for self-defense, but I haven’t heard any news of war from Iskar or the Old World. If your god died because the Iskari abused their pact, we gain ground on his creditors, and even more control over the case. We might be able to bring some of the old Kos back after all.”

She released her grip on the visualization. The world around her blurred, cracked, inverted. This time, at least, Abelard didn’t scream.

When the cosmos righted itself, they stood flanking the iron bowl in the center of the archives, surrounded by scrolls. A faint odor of iron and salt lingered in the air, the smell of steam from boiled blood. The room was darker than before, but more familiar, too. Abelard clasped the notebook to his chest. His skin was slick with sweat and his eyes were wide from the transition, but he’d get used to this stuff in time. Already he looked more confident than when he had met her on the Sanctum’s front steps.

She pulled her watch from her jacket pocket and checked its skeleton hands. Eight in the evening. Not bad.

“Where can I find a newspaper in this town?”

Abelard’s expression was blank. “A what?”

Shale floated in a pit of night, encircled by cords of lightning. He sought within himself for the fire of rage and found nothing, sought too for the quickened shivering breath of fear and was no more successful. It was as if he had reached down to the fork of his legs and felt there undifferentiated flesh, smooth and polished as a wood floor.

Of course, he had no hands with which to reach down, no legs, nor anything at their fork. The girl had taken all that from him and left him in this prison, where a thousand blankets piled atop his mind and every thought came with slow deliberation or not at all.

Tara claimed she was on his side, and indeed she had pulled him from the jaws of death. The Blacksuits, blasphemers, wasted no love on Seril’s children. She did not seem perturbed by his suffering, though, or eager to return him to his body. She needed his information, and who knew what black arts she could practice on him to force compliance? Could she bend him to betray his Flight?

Shale could not break Tara’s hold over him, but one act of protest remained to him that not even sorcery could bar.

He had no mouth to open, nor throat through which to draw breath; neither lungs to hold that breath nor diaphragm to propel it out. Yet he howled.

A gargoyle’s howl is only in part a sound carried on air like other sounds. A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city.

Shale’s howl shook the darkness beyond his prison.

He let the blankets press him down, and he began to wait.

*

“Let me get this straight,” Abelard said as he chased Tara down the Sanctum’s spiral staircase. “You can buy a sheet of paper that tells you what’s happening on the other side of the world?”

“Yes,” Tara replied, focusing on her steps rather than the conversation. Why weren’t these stairwells better lit?

“How does it know?”

“Every evening, reporters in the Old World write down what happened that day, and tell the Concerns that print the paper.”

“How can they get the information across the ocean so fast?”

“It’s like a semaphore, with Craft instead of a flag, and the message moves through nightmares instead of air.”

“What?”

“Look,” she shouted over the clattering of their feet, “it works. Trust me.”

“Then they print the news on paper, and make so many copies that anyone who wants can read one?”

“Exactly.”

“Where do they get the paper?”

“The same way you get it for your archives, I imagine.”

“The Church makes its own paper,” Abelard said, panting with the speed of their descent, “and it’s very expensive. We couldn’t sell paper for what people could afford to pay.”

“Which is why it’s so expensive.”

“What?”

“If you bought the paper from other Concerns instead of making it yourself, you could have them compete against one another for your business. Each Concern would try to make paper better and cheaper than its competitors, and you’d pay less.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the Concerns try to sell paper cheaper than one another? That hurts them all in the end.”

Exasperated, she dropped that line of discussion. She would have time to explain the problems of a command economy to Abelard after Kos’s return. “How do you get news in this city, if you don’t have newspapers?”

“The Crier’s Guild. Their news about the Old World lags a week or two. Dispatches come on the big, slow ships, because the fast ones are too expensive.”

Tara fell silent. As they clattered down endless winding stairs she thought about ships—about Kos’s contract with the Iskari Defense Ministry’s Naval Division, and about the damage to the
Kell’s Bounty
’s hull, long and narrow wounds as if someone had raked the ship with claws of flame. Two days ago, Raz Pelham said, we had a bit of nasty business south of Iskar. Running toward trouble, not away.

Pelham’s crew had been closemouthed when she pressed them. Unlikely that they’d warm to her now. Pelham himself, on the other hand, had seemed less reticent, and more knowledgeable.

“Abelard.” She paused on the steps and turned back to face him. “Where would a vampire go for a drink in this city?”

He smiled. This worried her.

*

As night sunk its claws into the world, Cardinal Gustave reached a caesura in his paperwork. He handed a stack of documents to his assistant, returned his pen to his desk drawer, stood, and, gathering his crimson robes about him and leaning on his staff, descended to walk the grounds of the Holy Precinct.

Dark thoughts prowled his mind as he searched the empty evening sky. The lights of Alt Coulumb rendered the stars dim and faint, but usually the strongest burned through. Their light invited quiet remembrance of things past, and contemplation of the future. Tonight, though, the heavens were a blank slate.

He wandered, wondering.

His steps took him down the long roads that bisected and trisected the Holy Precinct, along this paved arc section, that curving path. The tip of his staff dug pits in the white gravel as he walked. Occasionally he stopped and stood swaying, and his lips moved without sound. Long fingers gripped the staff as if it were a living thing that might betray him. His face in those moments was made from slabs of rock.