She was about to set this crowd on fire.
She turned her back on the audience. The choir stood in mixed formation. Cross, the deepest bass, had vomited for several minutes in the bathroom before warm-ups. Thank gods and demons alike for mouthwash and toothbrushes. But a choir was a corps. They had discipline. Even faced with such a crowd, they held together.
She raised her hands, and they sang.
* * *
Seril Moon-mother did not die in the wars.
Abelard listened.
He knew this story. He’d lived the tale’s unraveling. But knowing did not prepare him to listen while the Crier’s Guild recounted his life in counterpoint and fugue. In the goddess’s own words, no less. And Aev’s.
We returned to see our Lady carved into a mockery of self.
I was diminished, a lost voice among the trees.
Seril’s voice twined soprano and bass; Aev, alto and tenor.
The music was masterful, but mastery could go only so far.
The crowd rumbled. “Bullshit” was the word the man before him whispered.
The first cry of “Blasphemy!” came from back on Prospect, but others took it up fast. The crowd chanted against the choir.
They should have done this earlier. They should have trusted the people earlier. There was no time to convince them now.
They needed a miracle.
“Pray with me,” he told Sister Hildegard.
* * *
Onstage, her back to the audience, Gabby heard the anger. Her shoulders tensed, and the beat her hands carved in the air slipped. The singers looked scared.
Should she stop? They’d almost reached the restatement of the theme; the piece’s harmonics weren’t yet resolved, the story half-done—she had to explain Seril’s return. Failure to finish might make the situation worse.
Curses filled a brief fermata; she invited the choir to sing louder, wrecking the dynamic effect. Soon they’d throw things at the stage. She hoped for rotten fruit. It was soft.
Stop, a wise voice inside her urged. Or change the story. Give these people what they want to hear.
Fuck what they wanted to hear.
This was news.
* * *
Faith on the corner of Providence and Flame was a tangled net, a self-propagating snarl at Kos Everburning’s core. Lord Kos was born from His people, and grew with them. He changed them, and they changed Him, through time.
So if the crowd was confused, and angry, so too was the God—and hurt, and scared. A small core within Him revolted against Himself.
Abelard prayed through chaos and uncertainty. The many voices clashed and cackled, senseless.
—Cannot believe what she’s selling—
—they think they are, that’s not how God—
—can’t be, impossible—
—tear them off that stage and show them fire—
They need to hear this song, Abelard prayed, and felt Hildegard and other priests throughout the crowd join him. They must know its truth.
—wish that I could hear the part—
—we should just rush the fucking stage—
—how can I get out of here—
—just have to do—
And the fire sang.
* * *
When the crowd hushed, Gabby heard new voices.
The guild recruited evensingers from the best choirs in the New World. They could memorize a piece faster than a scribe could copy it. Even Gabby, who knew how to listen, could not identify an individual breath in two hours of performance. They shaped notes to perfection, matched sound to sound with crystal purity.
No human choir could match them.
The new voices were not human. Nor were they, exactly, new.
Streetlight gas lamp flames unfolded above the crowd, and within each stood Gabby’s choristers—their voices grown within the fire.
Some in the crowd looked at the lamps. Others stared farther up.
Into the clouds.
Which the sunset stained red, and which shaped themselves as she watched—oh God—into her, and her choir, miles tall, singing with flame-touched tongues.
Singing her story. Seril’s story.
Some in the crowd fell to their knees. Gnarled fingers framed the sign of the Lord.
Gabby wanted to kneel as well. But when her beat faltered, so did the song in the sky.
An unfamiliar warmth filled her.
She was not the target of this miracle. She was its vessel.
Gabby set aside shock and glory, and focused instead on sound, speed, rhythm. The amplified voices screwed with her blend. Cacophony loomed, discord overlapping chord, dynamics squelched as delays crushed rests. And the mix had to slip a little: amplification goosed the tenors and shrilled the soprano line.
Yes, she prayed, like that, but softer on the high end, and if you can do something about the delay—
She coaxed the singers with her fingertips, shaped their sound, invoked the basses, and ushered sky-borne echoes back into the blend.
Skein voices spun into song.
(Which should have been impossible. Sound had a finite speed, like light. The words her choir sang on earth ought to take a fraction of a second to reach the sky, and seconds more to return. But gods were outside time. And that thought, in turn, had implications she resolutely ignored for fear of going mad.)
She directed her choir, and her gods. Alex in the alto section wept, but her voice kept steady.
They sang truth, and the city listened.
49
The Godmountain had many names. Failfire, some Badlands tribes called it, and told its story. At time’s dawn, a tide of flame burned the green world to ash from sea to sea, burned the ash to bare stone, and would have burned the stone itself had not the Lady of the Plains challenged it. Proud, the fire came, and when it came the Lady wrapped it three times round: first in a cage of her hair, second in a lake of her blood, and third in a mountain of her bone. The fire, more fierce than clever, scorched her hair, and simmered her blood, and blackened her bone—but the hair, scorched, melted to wire, and the blood, simmered, thickened to lava, and the bone, blackened, fused to stone, and the more the fire burned, the worse it trapped itself.
Still, the Lady of the Plains knew one day the fire would burn free. So she wrapped it in a fourth and final maze made from her own mind: mirrors reflecting mirrors within, so the fire could burn and burn but only burn itself. Beneath Failfire, the Lady plays time’s game, deceiving, outracing a pursuing flame. Some holy men and women enter the Godmountain’s caves to chant old chants and eat certain mushrooms and hear her laughter and her cries.
Homesick, Drakspine fisherfolk called the mountain, for soil taken from its slopes pulls always toward the spot from which it came. The fisherfolk made necklaces from its stone in ancient days when their boats roamed the Kathic coast and crossed the ocean Old Worlders call the Pax, to Xivai and the archipelagic West. (Their descendants, who live in Kovak, claim their fathers and mothers even reached the Shining Empire, that those wandering weathered explorers were the Ocean Sages of Imperial legend—but tell that to an anthropologist and they’ll offer you a good deal on mousefeathers or the Camlaander Channel.) But this much is true: Homesick stone does always point toward home, and each piece of the mountain let off its chain will swim oceans and worm across earth until it returns to the face from which it was hewn.
Site A-313, the Kovak Central Mining Concern called it. “Which,” Tara said, turning a page and squinting to read by lantern light, “tells you everything you need to know about the Kovak Central Mining Concern.” Site A-313, rich in copper and rare elements essential for high-energy Craftwork, rail-convenient to Kovak, Regis, and Dresediel Lex, ripe for exploitation. “You need these elements for industrial-scale necromancy, and there aren’t many places in Northern Kath you can get them without pissing locals off, since the mining process leaks.”
“Leaks?”
She compared her travel guide’s map to
the flyspeck printing on the sheet the Two Serpents Group offices gave her. “Mining runoff enters the groundwater, people who drink it have higher mortality rates, and one or two sigmas greater than average chance of doing the wandering brain-chomping undead thing after death. No big deal.”
“It sounds like a big deal.” Outside the carriage window, over the tops of trees, the mountain grew. Its vicious black stone peak jutted toward the stars.
“Long as the Concern uses proper containment, there’s no outbreak. Problem is, containment isn’t working.”
“So there’s a zombie horde out there?”
“I mean,” she said, and trailed off.
Shale looked at her from across the carriage.
“Horde is pejorative. So’s zombie, for that matter, if you’re not referring to the Archipelagese religious practice.”
He did not speak then, either.
“Fine. Yes.”
“That explains why we had such a hard time getting a taxi to the camp.”
“Basically.” They’d had to pay the horse double, with a promised tip that would gouge away most of her expense account.
“And you wonder why the God Wars happened.”
“That’s not fair. The containment system should have worked. This is an isolated event—one site with one problem. Without the resources we pull out of the ground here, no one could do large-scale revenant agriculture. Price of food goes up, people starve. Do you want children to starve?”
“It’s just one problem at one site.”
“Yes.”
“So’s a stab wound.”
“I’m not having this conversation with you anymore.”
A high-pitched howl split the night, and others joined it. “Let me guess. Undead wolves?”
“Shambling wildlife,” Tara said, “isn’t the real problem with a leak.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“Yes, fine, undead wolves. But the issue, believe it or not, is weeds.”
“Weeds.”
“The seepage spread south into the water supply for industrial farms in Centervale. Have you ever farmed?”
“Not as such.”
“Trust me, it’s hard enough when you kill weeds and they stay dead. Imagine what happens when they come back.” She pointed to the newspaper headlines reproduced on the back of the Two Serpents brochure. “Northern farms were the first hit. Crop strangled under rotting vegetable matter. The unblight spreads slowly, but it does spread, and it started soon after KCMC began their core extraction op. KCMC stopped digging two weeks ago and called in the Two Serpents Group, who have sent their executive staff to address the problem.”
“Is that normal?”
“Small organization. Not much redundancy. Like playing small-stack poker—you fold or go all in when the odds are right. On the plus side, that means all their execs are in the same place. We go in, convince them to give up their sky rights, cab back to the airport, and make Alt Coulumb by dawn. A whole day to spare, even with this detour.” They crested a low ridge. The many-named mountain’s stone rose in sheer barren cliffs. Eyewateringly brilliant ghostlights blasted through the trees. “That’s them.” The howls rose again, prolonged, gurgling, and punctuated by bowstrings’ twang. The carriage horse reared and shied.
They emerged from the tree line into a broad field of clear-cut earth that swarmed with—well, “wildlife” was no longer an accurate term.
There were wolves after all—or anyway the rotting half skeletons of wolves caught in death spasms of hunger, fear, and rage. Mound-shouldered bears stalked the clearing, hides hedgehogged with arrows that seemed to have inflicted at best cosmetic damage. Weasels and stoats and mice swarmed the barricade at the field’s edge. The smaller creatures could not pass in the silvered razorwire with which some perspicacious soul had draped the barrier, but the wire wouldn’t stop bears.
A blink told her the creatures weren’t bound to any Craftswoman, and that the camp’s territorial ward remained intact, if dormant. The blind and ravenous fought the blind and desperate.
“Those wolves are looking our way,” Shale said.
“Not a problem.”
“They’re running now.”
“On it.” She opened the carriage door. Cool night air rolled in. Pine and putrescine fumes burned her throat. She tossed the travel guide to Shale. “Hold this.” She clutched the door with one hand and the empty driver’s bench with the other and pulled herself up, ignoring the approaching wolves and the pain in her side.
The horse reared as she reached the driver’s seat. She offered it more soul, and it mastered itself again. Hooves dug into dirt and pushed. Bowstrings thrummed to her left, wolves fell, bears shambled—but one wolf dodged the arrows and sprinted toward the barricade. Meanwhile, a rodent tide scurried toward Tara, smelling meat.
No problem.
The mining camp’s spotlights were an issue, so she killed them. No time for elegance: glass shattered in a puff of expanding gas and freed spirits. Night reclaimed the mountain, and stars bathed the field in glory.
She gobbled stellar light, funneling power and pattern through glyphs that woke on her skin. She seized the mining camp’s ward. She had been sent by the King in Red (technically correct), and the King in Red was a Kovak Central Mining investor, along with Alphan Securities, Grimwald Holdings, and a half-dozen other firms. On the King in Red’s behalf she could invoke the wards and extend their protection to the private access road leading to the camp. The rat-revenants were in essence tiny, unprofitable Concerns, simple consumption-action loops trespassing on KCMC territory.
Shadow charged with blue fire rolled out from her carriage. The fire caught at the access road’s edges, and undead rodents screamed. Their tide broke into a burning wave as warded soil repelled them. Across the field, the wolf leapt—only to slam against an invisible barrier and fall. A streak of blood and grime sizzled in midair. The wolf twitched to rest.
After days of boardroom wrangling and terse, tense arguments with recalcitrant deities, Tara had to admit she enjoyed entering a besieged camp to cheers and applause. From the carriage driver’s seat she surveyed the people she had saved: miners and aid workers in vests embroidered with the Two Serpents logo. She bowed, though she felt their celebration premature, since the creatures outside were not so much gone as temporarily repulsed. She didn’t say as much.
A Quechal woman in slacks and sweat-stained blouse approached her from the barricade. “Thanks for the help. Took you long enough to get here.”
“Glad to provide,” Tara said, “but I think you may have me confused with someone else.” She produced a business card. “Tara Abernathy, Church of Kos and Seril. I didn’t come because you called for me. I’m here to speak with Mr. Altemoc.” Judging from the Quechal woman’s flinch, she’d mispronounced the name.
“Weird,” the woman said. “I sent a nightmare SOS yesterday; the King in Red’s offices responded this afternoon with your name and description.”
Far away, beyond the undead howls, Tara thought she heard a skeleton laugh. Why spend your own resources when another will volunteer for cat’s-paw? “Here I am, either way. Can I speak with Mr. Altemoc?”
Her interlocutor drew breath through her teeth. “He’s indisposed at the moment.”
“Where?”
The woman pointed, and Tara looked—past her, past tents and supply depots, to a gaping hole in the mountainside. The shadows within were the shadows of an open mouth.
“Wonderful,” Tara said.
50
“I never thought I could have so little fun after dark with ropes, knots, and a partner,” Cat said as they sailed into the bay.
Raz adjusted his grip on the lines. “You don’t like this? Sea spray in your face, good moon overhead?” The wind changed. “Duck, please.”
She did; the boom swung quarterstaff-swift overhead. Wind bellied the sail and swept them east. “I’m barely happy on a ship that doesn’t try to kill me whenever the breeze
changes.”
“A small boat’s more personal,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Bounty. You can’t haul cargo in a dinghy like this, or fight, and a tall ship has its own soul. But sailing a small boat’s like juggling knives. Your every action’s magnified, and so are its consequences.”
“Did you just say, in this thing’s defense, that it reminds you of knife juggling?”
Moonlight glinted off his teeth.
Cat leaned back. “What’s this big secret, anyway? Or do you plan to kidnap me and save me from the battle?”
“Why not both?”
“My duty’s back on shore. And I’m pretty sure I can beat you up.”
“Who would sail you home?”
“I’d fly. Or use your breastbone for a paddle.”
“I’ll scratch kidnapping off the agenda.” The sail’s lower edge flapped like a flag in a breeze. He let out line, and it filled again.
She turned back to the glow ashore. City towers shrank to needles of light.
“Looks beautiful, doesn’t it?”
“A bit,” she said. She trailed one hand in the waves. The V’s that trailed her fingers caught moonlight. She thought about time and water.
“We’ll soon pass the continental shelf.”
“I shouldn’t be out here,” she said.
“That makes two of us.”
She flicked salt water toward his face. “I should be on patrol. That song at sunset—Justice needs everyone on the streets.”
“Fair.”
“You said two of us, though. Why shouldn’t you be here? Isn’t the ocean your thing?”
The sounding weight made a small splash. They watched each other as the line unspooled. She touched the back of his hand. It felt as cool as the water.
The reel clicked.
“I’m about to tell you something we don’t talk about much,” he said. “Did you ever study history?”
“What, you mean in high school?”
“Do you remember what happened to High Telomere, to the Empire?”
Those schoolbook words sounded silly out here at night. She stifled a laugh with her knuckle against her lips.
He was not laughing.
“Cult, or something,” she said at last. History was a stuffy schoolroom a decade gone—more than that, gods—with big Mrs. Askel pacing through pillars of sunlit dust. “Took over the Empire. Expanded. Fought Schwarzwald tribes. They allied, invaded back, broke Telomere to pieces.”
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