Three Parts Dead (8 page)

Until, that is, a few days ago.

“Be well,” she said to the cabbie, but his frown deepened. With a flick of the reins and a swipe of the crop he goaded his horse into a sloppy canter and left Tara alone in the shadow of the fire god’s tower.

The Sanctum of Kos was a surprisingly modern building, she thought as she approached the broad, black steps. A few architectural peculiarities marked it as a product of a prior era: unnecessary columns around the base, and structurally superfluous buttresses added no doubt by nervous designers when the Sanctum was first conceived, back when twenty-story buildings had been the precinct of the ambitious, and eighty-story plans the product of fevered imaginations.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

The speaker’s voice cracked and wavered, and he drew in a ragged breath as he paused for the comma. Tara looked down from the staggering heights and saw the same young acolyte who had been waiting on the stairs when she pulled into the lot. He was seated, bent forward over his knees. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. Voluminous robes hung from his thin body, and his upturned eyes were set deep in a pale face.

“It is,” she acknowledged.

“I know what you’re thinking.”

She arched an eyebrow at him.

The young man plucked the cigarette from his mouth and exhaled a long, narrow stream of smoke. “Or, I know what you were thinking.”

“Try me.”

“You were thinking that the columns, the buttresses, are unnecessary. That we added them for show, or out of fear.”

Her eyes widened a tick, and she nodded. “How did you know?”

“You’re sharp enough to get fooled.” His attempt at a laugh crumbled into a hacking cough.

“Are you all right?” She reached for him, but he waved her off hastily. The coughing fit persisted, long and ugly and wet. The fingers of his extended hand curled slowly into a fist, and he struck himself in the chest, hard. The cough stopped with a low rattle and he kept talking as though nothing had happened.

“See how the columns are broader than they should be? Same with the buttresses?”

She nodded, though she didn’t, in fact, see.

“Not structural. A disguise. Building the Sanctum, they thought, no sense having big fat steam pipes coming off the central tower. Too ugly, too vulnerable. Hide ’em. Every other building has columns, so we might as well use these.”

“Good idea.”

“Stupid idea,” the young man said, pointing. “Fancy stonework makes it hard to access the pipe joints there, and there. Whenever anything goes wrong, we need to redo all the masonry, and at night, too, to keep people from seeing.”

“Do you tell this to everyone who stops by?”

He drew in another breath. “Only if they’re wearing a suit.” His ragged smile looked out of place, too broad and sincere for his tonsure and his robes and his slender frame.

“Well, I hope you never get attacked by someone in a suit.”

“Hasn’t happened yet.” He returned the cigarette to his mouth and lurched forward. Tara was afraid he would fall on his face, but he recovered his balance and stood, unsteadily. “You’re Tara Abernathy.” He stuck out a thin hand, which trembled in hers as she shook it. Beneath the smile and the rambling mode of speech, he was afraid. “I’m Novice Technician Abelard. They told me to wait for you. Outside.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“The air out here feels too cold, and I haven’t been … healthy. Lately.”

“You might try quitting.” She nodded at his cigarette.

He let his head loll back to the sky, and his eyes drifted closed, as if he was waiting for rain. None fell, and he opened his eyes again. “I started when I joined the priesthood. A sign of my devotion. I won’t stop now.”

“You’re talking about—”

He shot her a look, but she’d already checked her tongue.

“How many people know about our problem?” she asked instead.

“As few as possible. Technical staff, mostly. The higher-ups. We’ve put it about that the Holy One is contemplating His own perfection, and must not be bothered by mortal concerns.”

“How long will that hold?”

He started up the stairs. “We’ve wasted too much time already.”

The tower’s twenty-foot-tall main doors were opened on feast days alone, Abelard explained as he led Tara to a smaller side entrance. “Takes too much time. You know, to move these monsters you need about fifty monks hauling on each door.” He patted one of his branch-thin arms. “We’re not the heartiest people around.”

“You can’t get Kos to give a push?”

“Of course not. It’d be disrespectful on a feast day. Plus, we wouldn’t get to see the Cardinals fall over when the doors finally budge. I think Kos finds it as funny as the rest of us.” He looked as if he was about to say more, but pain contorted his features, and he fell silent.

The Sanctum’s foyer loomed over them in the shadows. Somehow the single room, with its vaulted ceilings and tall windows, seemed vaster from within than the whole tower appeared from without. Flames of stained glass rose on all sides, and a hundred yards away the golden fires of the nave flickered in the half-light. A pair of initiates in bright red robes swept the otherwise empty hall.

“Nobody comes here during the workday.” Abelard indicated the whole room by swinging one forefinger in a quick circle through the air. The hem of his robe flared out around his bony ankles. “Bread and circuses, strictly.”

“Expensive bread.”

“You have no idea.”

A sharp left brought them up against a metal lattice worked to resemble a thick growth of ivy. Abelard placed his hand upon the lattice, and the vines parted with a slow clank of gears. He ducked his head low to pass through. Tara just walked.

More abrupt turns, more shadowy doors, and a rap on a carefully chosen brick in what appeared to be a solid wall, which swung open on a hidden hinge to reveal a long winding stair. As they climbed, occasional shafts of light broke the darkness, concealed peepholes peering into meeting rooms and conference chambers: here a break room where tired priests stood waiting for a tea kettle to boil, there a chamber at least the size of the Sanctum’s front worship hall and crowded with pipes, cams, pistons, and gears upon gears, here a tiny room half-glimpsed, where Craft circles glowing blue surrounded a modest wooden altar. She saw these things in eye blinks, shadows on a cave wall as they climbed.

“You said you were a novice Technician. Which means you, what, clean the steam pipes?”

His barking laugh echoed through the stairwell. “We have cleaners for that. Repairmen and machinists. A Technician oversees the Divine Throne, the heart of the city. We design, improve, optimize the devices that keep this place running. Not me, yet, though. I was only promoted to Technician a few months back.”

“You’re low on the totem pole?”

“As low as a Technician gets. The king of the backed-up burners, that’s me, archdeacon of scut work. I’m learning, though. Or, I was learning.” He paused, searching the featureless wall for something, and in that pause Tara caught up with him.

“Did they bring you in on this for training? So you’ll know what to do if there’s ever a problem like this in the future, when you’re in charge?”

Abelard faced her. His eyes were dead as a charred forest. “I was the one watching the Throne when God died.”

He pressed a hidden catch, and the wall opened smoothly on hidden gears.

After her steady climb through darkness, the well-lit office was blinding. Pale wood panels everywhere, a couple leather chairs, and a large desk of polished oak. A glass bookcase stood against one wall, though few of its shelves contained actual books or codices, the lion’s share of space reserved instead for sacred icons, trophies, ceremonial plaques. An aerial picture of Alt Coulumb hung beside it, for comparison, Tara supposed, with the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

The city stretched there, a teeming metropolis beneath slate-gray skies, beating heart of commerce, bridge between the god-benighted Old World and the Deathless Kingdoms of the West. Millions breathed, worked, prayed, copulated in those palaces, parks, and tenements, sure in the knowledge that Kos Everburning watched over them. If their faith was strong, they could feel the constant presence of his love, sustaining and aiding them in a thousand ways, breaking fevers and checking accidents and powering their city.

Millions of people, unaware that Kos’s ever-beating heart had been still for days.

Ms. Kevarian stood by the window, engaged in low, earnest conversation with a senior priest Tara assumed to be their client. He sat behind the oak desk, clad in deep red robes and his own authority. Physically, he was unremarkable, silver-haired and thin with age, but his posture suggested that he often spoke while others listened. Never before had Tara seen someone with such presence who was not a Craftsman.

But Kos’s death must have strained him beyond endurance. His shoulders bent as if they bore a heavy weight, and his face looked drawn and robbed of sleep. Accustomed to power, he was scrambling for purchase on events beyond his control.

Abelard announced her. “Technical Cardinal Gustave, Lady Kevarian, this is Tara Abernathy.” He closed his eyes, opened them again, shifted his feet. “I, uh, assume. She never showed me any identification.”

Ms. Kevarian’s expression darkened, but before she said anything Cardinal Gustave extended a firm, reassuring hand. He had a preacher’s deep voice, quiet at the moment, though Tara did not doubt it could fill a cathedral. “Novice Abelard must have recognized Ms. Abernathy from your description. He’s usually prudent, but the current … situation has shaken him, as it has shaken us all.”

“I’m sorry.” Abelard bowed his head, and with shaking fingers raised his cigarette to his lips. Finding it nearly exhausted, he dug frantically into the pockets of his robe for a fresh pack. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. It won’t happen again.”

“See that it does not,” Ms. Kevarian said. “If we are to succeed in this case, we must control the flow of information. The future of your faith depends on your ability to keep secrets.”

Abelard froze, and Tara felt a spark of pity for him. He was terrified to the brink of endurance by his god’s death, and neither Ms. Kevarian nor his own boss were being much help.

So she lied. “He checked my name. I should have remembered to show him some ID. Security only works if both sides are on board, after all.”

Gratitude beamed from Abelard’s face as he produced a new cigarette and lit it from the embers of the old. Ms. Kevarian’s gaze flicked from Abelard, to the cigarette, and back. She watched and weighed him for a silent moment before continuing the introductions. “Tara, meet His Excellency Cardinal Gustave. He contacted Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao via nightmare courier two days ago.”

“A pleasure, Your Excellency,” Tara said with a slight bow. “Happy to serve.”

“You may,” Cardinal Gustave said, “address me as Cardinal, or Father. Anything more presumes that, at the end of this process, I will still have a Church to lead.” He laughed without a trace of humor. “Have Lady Kevarian and Novice Abelard told you the basics?”

“The basics.” Judge Cabot is dead, she wanted to shout at Ms. Kevarian across the room. Someone’s trying to kill us. Business can wait.

But of course it couldn’t.

Cardinal Gustave stood in a creaking of leather. He was a battered edifice, deep lines on his face and dark circles under his eyes. She recognized the look; the events of the few days had worn joy and certainty from him, like a flood scouring away topsoil to reveal the bedrock beneath. “What do you know, Ms. Abernathy,” he said, “about the death of gods?”

*

Tara knew quite a lot, actually. Her grasp of the underlying theory was probably more profound than Cardinal Gustave’s, but she did not interrupt the lecture that followed. The Cardinal looked to have frayed without the fire of his Lord to shelter him. He was desperate, and lecturing Lady Kevarian’s junior associate (and whence that title “Lady” anyway?) was a chance to establish his knowledge and authority.

“Gods, like humans,” he said, “are order imposed on chaos. With humans, the imposition is easy to see. Millions of cells, long twisted chains of atoms, so much bone and blood and
juice
, every piece performing its function. When one of those numberless pumps refuses to beat, when one of those infinitesimal pipes gets blocked, all the pent-up chaos springs forward like a bent sword, and the soul is lost to the physical world unless something catches it first.

“So, too, with gods. Gods live and reproduce much like humans, and, like humans, their higher functions (language, pact-making, careful exercise of power, sentience) developed quite recently on the timescale of eons. In the unrecorded mists of prehistory, when mankind prowled the savannah and the swamps, their gods hunted with them, little more than shadows on a cave wall, the gleam in a hunter’s eye, a mammoth’s death roar, primitive as the men they ruled. As men grew in size, complexity, and might, the gods grew with them.

“Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.”

This was basic stuff. It had formed the theoretical foundation for Maestre Gerhardt’s famous (or infamous, depending on which circles you ran in) treatise
Das Thaumas
, the work that first theorized, a century and a half ago, that human beings could stop begging for miracles, take the power of the gods into their own hands, and shape the course of destiny.

Gerhardt’s work spread like wildfire through academies and lecture halls around the world; in ten years the shuddering and imprecise research of the former masters of Applied Theology, who became the first adepts of the Craft, laid waste to hundreds of miles of verdant countryside and sparked the jealous gods to war. Cardinal Gustave had been born during the century-long conflict that followed, and raised by an order that cleaved to the old ways and the old gods. Tara’s parents were teenagers during the Siege of Skeld and the Battle of Kath near the God Wars’ end, and fled to the edge of the Badlands to escape the convulsions of their dying nation. Ms. Kevarian, who had lived through most of the story, stood by the window, read her scroll as the Cardinal spoke, and kept her thoughts to herself.