Three Parts Dead (40 page)

“I killed him. I would kill all who dare plot against Lord Kos.”

Yes. Keep him talking. The more he said, the safer the gargoyles would be. “He wasn’t plotting. He served your god!”

“Gods go mad, as do men. My Lord was sick at heart. When He recovered, He would have known my deeds for true faith. I prevented His desecration.”

“Like you’re doing now? Seizing his power this way—you’ve damaged his corpse more than Seril could have at Her greediest.”

“Tara,” Denovo cried. “Help me. We can defeat him together.”

She ignored him. “Stop, Cardinal. Don’t hurt Kos any more than you have already. He wanted peace between the city and the Guardians.”

“They are vermin!” The word echoed like clashing thunder, but beneath a god’s wrath she heard the weak and railing anger of a very old man. “Flying rats, lurking in the forgotten heights of our city. Should I let them sully my Lord with their claws?”

“You plotted Cabot’s murder for months, ever since you learned what Kos asked him to do. Installing that Craft circle, learning the soul-binding technique. Did you ever ask your god for an explanation, in all that time?”

Tears glimmered in bright wet lines on Gustave’s face. “Why would my Lord give so much to a pack of monsters?”

“He would have told you. You should have trusted him.”

“He would have pitied me for not understanding! My Lord, my Master, my Friend would have pitied me for being unable to love
these
.” He spat that word down on the Guardians.

“If you really feel that way,” Tara shouted back, “maybe you never loved him in the first place.”

Her heart froze as that sentence left her lips, and she realized it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. Gustave’s ferocity turned upon her. She braced her legs and raised her arms. Fire struck her from on high, and she almost fell.

Almost.

*

Cat was lost. The cosmic high of union with Justice had ebbed, drawing her with it into depths where the world spun in contrary directions and no air reached her lungs when she breathed. Justice’s song twisted her through itself, and she was a note tossed on its immensity like flotsam on a tidal wave. She lay beneath the surface, a drowned woman, and through the shifting black water she saw distorted Abelard approach, backlit by rosy flame.

“Cat!”

His voice fell on ears that did not belong to her, and though she tried to reply, a wall of stone closed up her mouth. Her body was not her own, lent away and the lessee absent.

His face was caught in the writhing shadows of the firefight.

“Cat! The Cardinal’s gone mad!”

She had heard, but memory was such a fragile thing, ephemeral and unreliable as breath.

“That dagger in your hand.” His mouth wide, a gaping pit, yet his eyes were wider. “He draws power through it, from Kos.”

What did he expect her to do? A Blacksuit’s will belonged to Justice, and Justice was silent.

Which, she realized dreamily, was unusual.

Her attention drifted down, and she saw the dagger clutched in fingers that once belonged to her. Abelard wrapped his arm in his robe and struck the crystal blade, but it held and he fell back, a sharp red cut on his forearm where the dagger had sliced through his coarse robe.

“Are you going to let the Cardinal kill Tara? The Guardians? You think he’ll let them live with what they’ve seen, what they know?” He gripped her shoulders, but she did not feel the pressure of his hands. “Help us, Cat.”

*

Fire crisped and consumed Tara’s world, endless, hungry, insensate. She had never fought a god before. If Kos Everburning raised himself against her, she would have perished in an instant. Flush with divine power, Cardinal Gustave still lacked a god’s mastery of the energies he invoked. Even so, Tara buckled beneath the ferocity of his flames.

“Tara!” Denovo’s voice was no longer smooth or collected. She heard fear at its edges. “We can throw him back if we work together.” His mind skittered against the doors of her perception, cool, a refuge from the heat—an invitation to rejoin the link he shared with his lab, to give herself once more to him. “Please. Let me in.”

Without his help, she was going to die. With his help, she would probably die anyway.

But why did Denovo need her? He fought in the God Wars. He knew better than to match deities stroke for stroke. You dodged their power, twisted it against itself, stretched your divine Opponents thin. Cardinal Gustave should have been vulnerable to such tactics, but Denovo seemed desperate for her help, and her surrender.

Was that truly fear she heard in his voice, or the excitement of a con man who feels he has caught his mark?

Tara stood firm against the Cardinal’s assault. As dead Kos’s power pressed against her, she
shifted.

Mind, soul, spirit, twisted out of reach. The fire sought her, found her not, and thrashed about, desperate for something to destroy.

As if releasing a bird from her hand, she offered it the seductive tendrils of Denovo’s mind.

Blind, hungry, and mad, the fire accepted.

*

Elayne Kevarian followed the beacon of Alexander Denovo’s pain through thick fog back into her body. Opening her eyes, she found herself prone on the unfinished marble floor of the Great Hall of Justice, beneath the gaze of a blind statue and surrounded by a thousand Blacksuits. She was wounded—deep gashes from fallen glass, myriad scrapes and bruises. And she was on fire.

Perfect.

She breathed in, and became cold. The flames caught on her suit flickered, flared, died. Ms. Kevarian felt their death, and their power flowed into her skin like warm sunlight on a summer morning.

A sword-slash smile played on her lips.

*

The Cardinal’s features twisted in confusion as the fire he threw against Tara struck Denovo instead. The Craftsman’s defenses did not break under this doubled assault. If anything, Denovo seemed less pressed than before. His shoulders squared, his arms steadied, and the stress cracks in his shield disappeared. Though Gustave was nearly blinded by God’s brilliant flame, he saw Denovo shake his head.

“Tara,” Denovo said, “you should have joined with me. It would have been more pleasant for us both.”

Denovo shifted his defenses to his left arm, and reached out with his right, fingers clawed as if to grasp Gustave’s throat. The claw tightened, and though Gustave was ignorant of all but the most fundamental tricks of Denovo’s heathen Craft, he recognized breaking power in that gesture. He twitched in an involuntary spasm of fear.

But he felt nothing.

*

Tara saw victory on Denovo’s face as he closed his hand. That gesture was a trigger, invoking a contract with a shred of nightmare, a rat in the walls of reality—the shadow creature in Gustave’s Craft circle. Denovo must have planted the shadow when he made the circle, as insurance against the Cardinal’s betrayal. He commanded it now to destroy the dagger through which Gustave drew his power. But Abelard had released the shadow creature hours ago, and Cat held the dagger.

When Denovo closed his hand, he expected the flame to die, and the old man to fall. Instead, Gustave redoubled his assault, and Denovo fell to his knees, betrayed by his own frustrated anticipation of success. Veins in his forehead bulged as he fought to regain control. Tara would have crowed in triumph, but a dozen new lances of flame descended on her from all directions as the Cardinal screamed, “Heretics! Blasphemers!”

*

“Help us.”

It was the plea of a drowning man.

Cat knew what those sounded like. She had spent her entire life drowning.

Abelard needed her.

The world was a weight on her shoulders, so she let it bow her to the ground. Kneeling, she turned her wrist, as if it were the wrist of a marionette. Her arm was heavy. She aimed the point of the crystal dagger at the stone floor.

Her arm fell, and she leaned into it, exercising every scrap of her control over the Blacksuit. The dagger’s point struck stone.

The crystal blade held. She sagged in despair.

It snapped.

*

There are as many different kinds of silence as of darkness. Some are so fragile a single breath will shatter them, but others are not so weak. The strongest silences deafen.

The flames of Kos died, and Cardinal Gustave fell screaming. He landed with a sound like a bundle of snapped twigs and lay gasping on the floor, red robes billowed out around him.

A small noise escaped Abelard, as though a mouse was being strangled in his throat. It was not a lament or a protest. It was too confused to be any of these things.

The nerves of limbs and stomach and heart moved him forward, though his brain remained transfixed by the sight of the Cardinal’s twisted body. The ground shook as he approached the pool of red cloth and blood in which the old man lay.

Behind him, the world moved on. He heard raised voices—Tara’s, the Professor’s, sounds with no more meaning than the glass that broke like new spring ice beneath his boots. Even the heavy acid taste of smoke in his mouth felt distant. The gold-thread hem of the Cardinal’s robe surrounded him like a mystic circle. Abelard crossed it, and fell to his knees.

The Cardinal still breathed. It was worse, almost, this way. Thin parched lips peeled back to reveal rows of bright teeth set in gums more scarlet than his robe. Air rattled in the cave of the old man’s mouth, fast and shallow. His eyes were open. They sought Abelard’s automatically, and the mouse in Abelard’s throat cried out again.

Fifteen years ago, Abelard arrived at the Temple of Kos, eager to learn. Of all the priests and priestesses who taught him to glorify the Lord, this man had been, not the kindest, but the most worthy of admiration.

Fire, the Church taught, was life, energy’s ever-changing dance upon a stage of decaying matter. Every priest and priestess, every citizen, had one duty before all else to their Lord: to recognize the glory of that transformation.

Abelard looked into the Cardinal’s dying eyes, and saw within them no fire but that which consumes.

He inhaled. The tip of his cigarette flared orange.

Dying, Cardinal Gustave smiled.

*

Tara’s senses were numb with exaltation at her survival, but there was no time to rejoice. Alexander Denovo staggered toward her, toward the bound gargoyles, toward the orange sphere that hovered above Shale’s slumped form.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said, and blocked his path. Her legs threatened to collapse beneath her, but she steadied herself by main force of will.

“Do you indeed.” Wisps of smoke rose from the brown curls of his hair, and scorch marks covered his clothes.

“You made that Craft circle. You gave Gustave power.”

“He asked me for a weapon against heretics.”

“And you gave him one.”

“I sold him one, at a hefty price.” Denovo shrugged. “You would have done the same. If you wouldn’t, perhaps you should re-evaluate your line of work. The Craft isn’t a charitable pursuit.”

“If all you did was give him a weapon, then why did he try to kill you?”

“Because I was about to expose him. Honestly, Tara, what is the point of this?”

“Cardinal Gustave didn’t attack because he was afraid for himself. He attacked because you were about to acquire something you should not have.”

Denovo chuckled. “Gustave was mad. A murderer. He confessed as much.”

“He confessed to killing Judge Cabot. He thought you were guilty of a greater crime.”

He tried to skirt around her, but she stepped in front of him again.

“Four months ago, Gustave asked you to help him learn why Justice was losing power. You traced the dreams Kos sent into the forest, to Seril’s children. You discovered that Kos was working with Cabot, and to what end.”

Denovo shrugged, every bit the tired scholar.

“Was it you or the Cardinal, I wonder, who proposed killing the Judge?”

“I don’t have to listen to this.”

“For someone with your skills, persuading the Cardinal was easy. Cabot was a heretic, consorting with rebels and traitors. He deserved to die. You gave Gustave the means. You taught him how to bind Cabot’s soul. You even told him which contracts to deface in the Third Court of Craft, and how to do it without being detected.”

“Conjecture and foolishness.”

“Cabot suspected you were onto him. That’s why he installed security wards that could detect Craft. This isn’t the West. The community of Craftsmen here is small and insular. The Judge had no enemies there. Hell, the locks on his apartment building wouldn’t keep out a novice.”

Denovo drew a step closer. Tara took a step back.

“You left Alt Coulumb several months ago, secretly as you had come, but you intended to return. You knew from court records when Cabot would pass the Concern to Seril. You had months to plan your attack.”

“Here we go,” he said, voice low and dangerous. “Accuse me.”

“You organized the assault on the Iskari treasure fleet. You were the Craftsman who negotiated the Iskari defense contract, and you knew that it was the best weapon for your purposes. Your mercenaries attacked, and the Iskari drew on Kos’s power to defend themselves, not knowing that Kos was already drained by his secret dealings. Kos couldn’t stand the strain, and died. At your hand.”

No flush of outrage came to Alexander Denovo’s face. “Why, in this fantasy of yours, did I need Gustave to kill Cabot?”

“You wanted that Concern,” she replied, cocking her head back in the direction of the rotating sphere. “Kos had more power than all your minions put together. You could feast for years on his corpse. But you couldn’t get the Concern from Cabot by force, and if he died without passing it on, it would dissipate, no use to you or anyone.

“You could, however, force Cabot to give the Concern to someone weaker. You taught Gustave a way to kill the Judge without being detected, which also left his victim alive long enough to pass the Concern to someone else. You expected Cabot would give it to his butler, but the butler didn’t find him first. Shale did, and he escaped. You must have been furious when you learned that bad timing had wrecked your plan. But the situation could still be salvaged. Shale, you reasoned, did not know what he carried. Cabot, by the time Shale found him, had no tongue, no throat, and was barely sane; he could not have explained the situation to a Guardian ignorant of Craft. Nor would Shale’s people flee Alt Coulumb after Cabot’s murder: they had staked too much on their deal with Kos to be so easily stymied. The Blacksuits would find Shale and his Flight eventually, and you would trick Justice into letting you claim the Concern, as you almost did a few minutes ago.”