No, Justice said. You need a medic. Now.
Hells with this. Cat was off duty. She let the Suit go.
Pain hit her from nine directions at once. The sky dimmed, and the air chilled-warmed-chilled again, her skin unsure what to feel after so long inside the Suit.
Cat walked to the dark stairs because she could not run and lurched down winding steps shafted with moon- and streetlight through fresh cracks in the walls.
Raz lay in a nest of rubble at the tower’s base. His clothes were torn, and his skin intact. He was very still.
She’d seen him gutted at least twice on the tower, and hamstrung once, healing almost as fast as demons could hurt him.
She limped over concrete and broken rock to sit by his side. “Raz?”
No answer.
A millipede scuttled up his pant leg. She brushed it away. The wound in her side pulled beneath her hand. She needed a hospital. Dust rained down. “Got to get you out of here. Place isn’t safe. This isn’t how you bite it.”
His chest spasmed. “Bad—” Coughing. He raised his hand but could not quite reach his mouth to cover it. “Bad choice of words.”
“Scared me for a second there.”
Another shiver in his chest. They didn’t need to breathe—he didn’t need to breathe—but the voice box still worked the same. “Me, too.”
“We should—” The ruined tower spun a sundial’s revolution over her. “We should get out of here. Building’s breaking down. Can you walk?”
“Don’t think so.” His lips moved so slowly they must have weighed as much as continents, and fangs tipped between them. “Glad you found me.”
“Here, I can—” She reached for the chain around her neck, for Justice.
He grabbed her hand before it could close. “Not her,” he said. “We need to talk.”
“This isn’t the time.”
“It’s never the time.”
“I can’t carry you out alone.” His neck was cool as a marble column. “You took a claw meant for me.”
“It didn’t hurt.”
“Let me say thank you, dammit.” She felt his chest swell and contract against her side. “You’re breathing.”
“Old habits,” he said. “Hindbrain knows you’re hurt, tells you you need air. Instinct. Doesn’t help.”
“Story of my life,” Cat said. “Old instincts that don’t help.” She slid her arm around his shoulders and tried to pull him up. They made it halfway together, then slipped and hit the rock hard. Raz laughed.
“I’ll put on the damn Suit,” she said. If she pressed her back against this big rock, bunched her legs under her, and pushed up with them as she leaned—
Before she could try, Raz caught her arm. She cursed. “Fuck did you do that for?”
Red unblinking eyes fixed hers. His way of moving reminded her of cellar insects, so still when seen, but look away for half a moment and they’re gone.
He was hungry and hurt and so was she.
Points showed between his lips.
She nodded, then said, “Do it,” to make her meaning clear.
He drew close to her. Her veins sang for the sharp pain and the spreading joy. She wanted to become a candle, a bonfire in the dark.
His tongue flicked her cheek, rough and dry, more like a cat’s than a man’s. It lapped blood from the cut on her forehead, the slenderest of tastes. He swallowed, and that swallow rippled through his body. She felt her self drawn into him—no desperate, fiery whirlpool but a tide receding to leave a slant of sparkling saturated sand.
He drew back. She thought she should say something but couldn’t think of words to match the moment. Too many were questions, and could wait. The roof creaked. She grabbed his shoulder. The firmness of her grip surprised her. “Let’s go,” she said.
They lifted each other to their feet and, leaning, limped from the tower.
* * *
By the time Ellen emerged from Peter’s room, Hannah had beaten Jake three times at checkers—their détente involved Jake not minding when Hannah won, and Hannah not minding when Jake marched his toy thunder lizard through the victorious checkers, devouring errant disks in a frenzy of dagger-toothed revenge. Matt hadn’t expected his youngest to get on with the Rafferty girl, but perhaps he wasn’t threatening—or maybe Hannah just liked lizards.
The apartment settled as they all prepared for sleep. Through the wall his bedroom shared with Peter’s, Matt heard Hannah and Ellen talking in low voices like the bubbling of a fountain. Donna held him, and he held her back.
“You’re right,” he said.
She pressed her face into the side of his head and hummed satisfaction. “Call for a mason. Set this occasion down in stone.”
“I say that a lot.”
“Not out loud.”
“The girls need space. Seeing Corbin in the hospital like that—he’s sick, has been the last three years, since June left.”
“Sleep, Matt. There will still be problems in the morning.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said, but kissed her, said he loved her, and heard her say she loved him back. He waited on his back. His wife’s breathing slowed. The ceiling was an unmapped territory.
Soft ghostlight glowed in the crack beneath the bedroom door: Claire, reading, in the living room.
“Claire, go to sleep!”
Ellen’s voice.
The light shut off with a click, and they slept.
36
The next morning’s dawn found Matt and Claire returning from their rounds. Their golem cart plodded up the long low ridge, beyond which Alt Coulumb’s towers peaked. A flash of color cut across the road from tree to tree, and somewhere, something sang a sweet song.
“Beautiful bird,” Claire said.
“The singer or the flier?”
“Both.”
“The singer’s not a bird. It’s a gracklet.”
She turned to Matt. “What?”
“Spider-lizard kind of thing. Mimics birdsong. You can tell because of the hiss before it sings.”
“Do I want to know why it mimics birdsong?”
“Guess.”
“Gross.”
“Circle of life,” he said, and hummed a few bars of a mystery play song. “Gracklets are good for the forest. They keep the bird-mind from eating people.”
“Now you’re just making fun of me.”
“It’s in the history books. The first Old World settlers came to Alt Coulumb after a plague hit the city, around the fall of the Empire in Telomere. Before the plague, locals used rallybirds to talk with people a long way off, because the birds’ minds tie together. In plague years, the birds escaped, bred uncontrolled—and the more there were, smarter they got. Millions of them lived in the forests at the height. They’d eat crops ripe for harvest, pick a man’s flesh from his bones if they wanted.”
“And the gracklet?”
“A trader went to Southern Kath and found that even though the coastal jungle near Ajaia’s land was full of wild rallybirds, they didn’t get so smart. She asked around and learned that gracklet kept the birds in check. Their song breaks up the bird-mind, and then they eat the birds. The trader, she went into the heart of the forest and came back with a chest full of gracklet eggs. Planted them in the Geistwood, and here we are today.”
“Where did you learn all this?”
“I read a book. Besides, it’s part of the language.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well—the larval stage of your gracklet, called a vurm, looks like a centipede yea long.” He held his hands a foot apart. “They make cocoons in the trees. The rallybirds didn’t realize what was going on until it was too late. But the more they lost, the dumber they all became, and grackle can eat a lot of rallybirds. More food makes ’em breed faster.”
“Okay,” she said, warily.
“Why do you think, when we talk about the virtues of industry and clean living, we say, ‘The rallybird gets the vurm’?”
Golem feet trod
down the road with unbroken stride, and wagon wheels rolled.
She hit him in the shoulder, hard.
“Ow.”
She hit him again, then pushed him so he almost toppled over.
“Careful. You’ll spill my coffee.”
“Do you know what a dad joke is?”
“Nothing wrong with a good shaggy-gracklet story.”
“You are a horrible person.” But she had to say it through laughter. He rubbed his shoulder where she’d punched him. “I thought Corbin’s jokes were bad. Do you get them from the same guy? I could tell the Blacksuits and get him locked up, for a nice reasonable time like let’s say forever.”
“Your dad tells jokes?”
“Not as much as he used to.”
He remembered that, dimly—Corbin Rafferty never precisely pleasant, but at least wry, vicious in a way that put all the room but him to chuckling. Recently, though, just mean. “How is he, at home?” Felt dirty to be talking about this after a good laugh, but for once, and maybe because of the laugh, Claire seemed in a mood to talk.
“Drunk a lot. You’ve seen him angry. He gets sad too, when he doesn’t think anyone else sees. Keeping life together is hard for him.”
“Is he—is he hard to you and your sisters?”
“That in the square, that’s as mean as I’ve seen him. He shouts. Shoves. Screams. Breaks things. Sometimes we shout back. Hannah especially. We’re all cats drowning in a bag at home.” Claire flicked the reins, though the golem did not change stride. “After Mom, he tried to keep it together. He drank to take the edge off, I guess. Only Corbin has a lot of edges. You can take off one after another until only a little nub in the middle’s left, and once you’ve gone that far maybe you keep going.”
“So you take care of the girls.”
Her arms clenched, drawing back the reins, and the golem slowed. Matt watched her force herself loose. The tension didn’t leave her shoulders, back, or arms, but she faked relaxation well enough. “I pick up what he drops. I maintain.”
“What that gargoyle did to him won’t last forever. He comes back, he’ll walk the same trail as before. And that’s bad for him, and dangerous for you.”
“I know, Mr. Adorne.”
Which was a door closing.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“If there was a way to force him to rest, I’d take it. The girls need the space. So do I.”
A bump shifted crates in the truck bed. Matt turned to right a few squash which further jostling might have rolled onto his eggs. “I might have an idea,” he said when he settled back beside her.
“What?”
“Rather not say much until I’ve talked to people. Don’t want to promise anything.”
They crested the ridge and descended from the forest to the city below, its road-veined circle quartered by the bite of the bay. “Matt.”
“Yes?”
“The story. Gracklet?”
“They’re real. I made up the bit at the end about the vurms, and there’s a name for rallybird that sounds better in Eld. But gracklet are about as common as mountain lions in the Geistwood, maybe a quarter the size, solitary for the most part. They claim territory like spiders do. Friendly, though. Human soulstuff’s too tight-wound for them to drink, and they’ll only go for you with their fangs if they’re hurt or you threaten their eggs. I saw one once when my dad took me camping. Scales aren’t as bright as they get down south, but still brighter than you tend to find up here in winter country. You see one, you offer a bright feather to Kos and a silver coin to Seril.”
“If this is another setup for a joke, I will hurt you.”
“Honest. Old Coulumbite tradition there. Mom’s side of the family, and her people go back to this soil. It’s a strange world we live in.”
She nodded, though that might have been a bump in the downhill road.
* * *
Tara woke beneath a too-familiar ceiling. Pale yellow metal beams supported white panels overhead; a metronome ticked her heartbeat and a needle pen scraped the sound’s shape onto a palimpsest. She sat up and swore at the pain in her skull, then swore again when she saw the man reading a magazine in the chair across from her bed.
The metronome popped prestissimo as she forced herself to her feet, arm still fabric-cuffed to the heart monitor. Her hospital gown billowed, and stitches pulled in her side. She drew her knife by reflex; the speed of its departure grayed her vision.
Not that there was anything objectionable, on first glance, about the man in the chair, reading a copy of this month’s De Moda. He was lean and strong, a pleasant topology of muscles evident beneath white shirt and charcoal slacks. Good chin. Very green eyes. Emerald, almost.
“What?” Shale said, half-risen. “What’s wrong?”
She caught her breath and guided her nightmares of claws and teeth and chains back to the prisons where they lived in daylight. Her knife faded into the glyphs that ringed her hands and webbed her arm. “Nothing,” she said. “I haven’t seen you looking human in a long time.”
He glanced down at himself, confused. “Did I get it wrong?” The features looked different draped over his skull.
“No. I mean, the wardrobe’s a bit missionary.”
“That’s the point.”
“The last time we talked like this was after I cut off your face and stapled it to a mannequin.”
“I remember,” he said without humor.
“So, we survived.”
“Nobody’s more surprised than I am.”
“I did what I could,” she said. “There were too many.”
“Is this how Craftswomen say thank you?”
“We don’t, as a rule. But, thank you. I remember the ambulance. Before that it’s blurry, except for … the fire. Damn. So he did it.”
“Kos aided us.”
“He shouldn’t have. I need to get to the sanctum. Where in the nine hells are my clothes?”
“Shredded. Unless you want to pass for a cover model on a planetary romance, I think they’re a lost cause. Try these.” He pointed with the rolled-up magazine to a garment bag on the chair beside him, which bore the crossed-keys logo of Adelaide & Stears. “I guessed your size. Hope I wasn’t too far off.”
She snatched the bag and closed the curtains around her bed with a wave. As she untied the back of her gown, she heard him say, “You’re welcome.”
* * *
The nurses had a fit when Tara tried to check out. Fortunately, the hospital knew how to handle fits. Tara ignored the usual arguments: that she should spend the day in bed at least; that her injuries, though superficial, merited observation given the slow infections that could spread from demonglass. Not a risk to her. Probably. Under normal circumstances. Regardless, she couldn’t afford the time.
“That was an unorthodox exit,” Shale said when they were safely a block away from the hospital. “They probably aren’t used to patients who turn into eight-foot-tall shadow monsters and jump out a window.”
She removed her jacket and clipped off stray tags with her work knife. “They’ll be happy to have their bed back. Why shops put so many pins in button-front shirts I’ll never know.” She drew one from her collar, the third she’d missed in her hurry to dress. “Blood for the cotton gods?”
“It’s so you can wear them fresh without ironing. You’ll see it most often with golem-loom shirts, though a few tailors use them, too.”
She donned the jacket and flexed her arms to test its fit. The fabric was the color of churned cream, and lush to the touch. “Fashion’s an odd interest for someone who wears clothes once every never.”
He crossed his legs. “I was made to be a scout, a spy.” His voice sounded strange denuded of its rumbling bass undertones and the susurrus of gravel.
“I remember.” Another pin in her side. That one at least had to be part of some weird ritual, or else a joke. Not that there was much difference between the two, in her experience.
“Infiltration is more than s
peed, and stealth is more than shadows. This flesh mask helps me walk through a city unnoticed, but skin is only part of the problem. People notice clothes that don’t fit. Before the God Wars it wasn’t hard. Clothes changed slowly. I once knew the traditional attire of all walks of life from the old Quechal kingdoms, from Iskar and Telomere and the Ebon Sea and Schwarzwald, Dhisthra and the Gleblands, Zur and Trälheim and the Shining Empire. I could pass for Telomeri street scum, a Zurish horse-lord, a midrank Imperial scholar with a gambling dependency. My knowledge staled slowly, since few were so pampered as to change their attire for a season’s fashion. After the God Wars, though”—he shook his head in wonder and confusion—“golem mills and Craftwork-enhanced manufacture made clothes cheap, and as gods’ holds relaxed, fashion churn spread from fops to the normal world. Though recent Iskari scholarship has challenged that narrative.” He shrugged, which gesture too seemed strange in his human guise—less threatening without wings.
“You read fashion magazines to be a better spy.”
“In Dresediel Lex four years ago, young men wore spats to nightclubs. Spats. Three decades back, young New World urbanites developed an affection for flare-hemmed trousers and suits the color of stained wood. Imagine trying to enter an office wearing such dress today. I would be memorable, and memorable is bad for a spy. And, having made a study of the discipline, it’s fascinating to see the ways you people—mean humans—repeat old themes, coding religious iconography into fabric. Last year a hemstitch developed in the gowns of priestesses of the Vasquan man-gods made a forceful appearance at the Tehan Fashion Show.”
“It’s a good suit,” she said, removing what she hoped was a final pin, and with some reluctance added, “How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing.”
A larger part of her than she was comfortable with wanted to take him at his word. She had enough soulstuff saved at First of Alt Coulumb to cover rent and loans, but doubted her tiny surplus could absorb a shopping trip by a fashion-bug gargoyle. Still—“I can buy my own clothes.”
“Yesterday you fought for our Lady and were hurt in her defense. So were my brothers and sisters. Scree will take a long sleep in stone before she wakes, and Aev bears new scars. We are built for war. We were made to endure such wounds. You’re human.”
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