Three Parts Dead (41 page)

“What proof do you have?” Denovo said archly. “If you lack documentary evidence, at least call witnesses like a civilized person. Say, those mercenaries you
claim
I hired.”

“You took their memories after the job was complete.”

“Impossible.”

“Not for the greatest Craftsman mentalist in the history of the Hidden Schools. You tried to wipe Captain Pelham’s mind last night. You were hasty, obvious; you must have been terrified when you realized Ms. Kevarian had hired him to escort us to Alt Coulumb. You had to destroy him before he let something slip that would implicate you.”

“I’ve been in the Skeld Archipelago all week. I only arrived this morning, on the ferry. Unless you think I could accomplish such delicate work from halfway around the world.”

“You were in Alt Coulumb last night, not Skeld.”

“A ferrymaster, and a hundred twenty passengers, will corroborate my story. Every one saw me arrive this morning.”

“Where were you before the ferry?”

“My hotel in Skeld. Really, Tara, I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make.”

“You weren’t in Skeld yesterday evening. You were in Alt Coulumb. This morning you flew out and circled back around.”

“The city is a no-fly zone.”

“You could get around that.”

“Circumvent a divine interdict? Perhaps you can tell me how to manage such a miracle.”

“Simple. All you need is something built to be stronger than gods.” Tara took another step back. She was not afraid, but if she was right—and she
was
right—she wanted space between herself and the Professor.

She was new to Alt Coulumb, but in the last two days she had stood upon its rooftops and crouched in its basements, visited its sick and swam in its oceans. She had walked the mind of its god and traced the paths of his wounds. In two days, she had not once seen the city’s sky bare of clouds, yet never had its air seemed humid, nor had the clouds threatened to break into storm. Alt Coulumb was usually clear in the autumn, Cat had said, because of the trade winds.

Weather was difficult to control, subject to the earth’s shifting in its orbit and to the whims of the moon. Craftsmen and Craftswomen tampered with rain and cloud only in extremity. But more than a hundred years ago, the builders of the first sky-cities had learned that floating buildings were difficult to defend, and easy to conceal.

The skin beneath the cleft of Tara’s collarbone bore a tiny blue circle, the first glyph she had ever received: the Glyph of Acceptance that marked her as a student of the Hidden Schools, entitled to take refuge there in times of need. That privilege had not been revoked at her graduation. Even a prodigal daughter might one day return home.

Tara pressed the tattoo, and it glowed. A tiny gap appeared in the cloud cover beyond the broken skylight, dilating rapidly as a cat’s pupil in darkness. An electric chill passed through her.

Starlight shone through the gap in the clouds. Far above, trapped between earth and heaven, hung the crystal towers and gothic arches and double-helix staircases of the Hidden Schools. Walkways of silver ribbon stretched from building to building, and scholars paced on the balconies. Atop one crenellated dormitory, a corpse-fire glowed, students no doubt clustered about it, drinking and telling stories and maybe making love.

No shimmering staircase of starlight descended from Elder Hall, no rainbow bridge to bear her home. The schools’ Craft of Ingress fought Kos’s interdict as machines fight, deadlocked in absolute certainty. The schools themselves were mightier than the interdict, but the Craft of Ingress had been designed to admit eager young scholars, not extract Craftswomen from the heart of a god’s own territory.

Fortunately, Tara did not want to leave Alt Coulumb. The parting of the clouds was enough for her purposes. She inhaled shadow and starfire. Night adhered to her skin and flowed into her mind.

“You brought the schools here,” she said, “and used their camouflage to obscure the stars and moon, weakening the Guardians and Craftswomen set against you. It was the schools’ broader no-fly zone, not Alt Coulumb’s, which interrupted Ms. Kevarian’s flight yesterday and almost killed us both.

“The schools gave you an excellent alibi. It may be impossible to wipe a man’s mind from a hundred miles away, but a thousand feet of altitude is no obstacle for a master like you. The Hidden Schools are broader than that from end to end, and you wove your commands through my classmates’ minds and mine with no trouble.”

Denovo’s stern expression yielded to a childlike smile. “Tara.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “You amaze me.”

“You killed Kos Everburning, Professor.”

“What do you expect to accomplish with this posturing? If you want a fight, strike me and get it over with.”

“Justice is watching,” she said.

“Justice is blind. I blinded her myself, twenty years before you were born.” He removed one hand from his pocket and examined the blunt tips of his fingers. “If you hope these automata will descend on me like a parliament of rooks on a bad storyteller”—he gestured to the motionless Blacksuits—“you’ve forgotten the first law of design. Never make anything that can be used to hurt you. They’ll remain where they stand until I finish my business.”

For the first time since Cardinal Gustave burst in the skylight, Tara truly looked at the Blacksuits. They did not twitch from their immobile rows. “You’ve done horrible things.”

“Not as horrible as you, or your boss.” He shook his head, tone still conversational. “You deserted our side long ago, as did a great many Craftsmen. You settled for a pleasant illusion, the facile lie that we could have peace with gods. You gave up on the dream.”

“You’re one of the most powerful Craftsmen in the world. What more do you want?”

“Well, for starters, I’m not a god yet.”

Tara blinked. “What?”

“You said I wanted Kos’s power. Clever but wrong. Power I have. It’s godhood I want. Immortality and might, free of sickness and decay.”

“Impossible.”

“Hardly. It’s a logical extension of the first principles of Craft. I struck on the idea while at school. Gods draw strength from faithful masses. Couldn’t a Craftsman do the same? It took years to work out the ramifications of that insight. I took my first tender steps with Elayne four decades ago, winning her trust to tap her power for myself. She noticed, and defeated me, but I elaborated on my theory by creating the Blacksuits, believers tied to their god by sick need rather than mutual love.”

He smiled nostalgically. “I built my lab and consumed the strength of my dear students and colleagues. I became the most powerful Craftsman on this continent. What then? Rot into a skeleton? Flee death from one decaying body to the next? Or take arms against a god, slay him, and become him? I can climb through that Concern into Kos’s body and take his place at the center of Alt Coulumb’s unassailable faith. I will make this such a city as has never been seen, a fiery flood sweeping across the globe. I could hardly believe when the opportunity fell within my grasp.”

“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.”