“Burned the topless towers,” Raz said, “tore temples stone from stone and sank the stones into the Midgard Sea. You can still find them, if you dive.”
“We’re two thousand miles from the Midgard. I don’t think there were any Telomeri temples here to sink.”
“Do you remember anything else about the cult?” he asked.
“If we’re playing Questions, I think your turn’s over.”
“Humor me.”
Chalk screeched blackboard in memory; the back of her hand stung with a ruler’s impact. She’d drifted off, forehead on crossed arms, pigtails against her ears (didn’t cut her hair short ’til tenth grade, and she dropped out soon after), tired from fighting with Mom the night before. Mrs. Askel wore heavy powder on her face. Miss Elle, recite the next section of the text. “Usual sort of accusations people level against folk they don’t like. Eating flesh. Drinking blood. Raising the dead.” She blinked. “No.”
“The sucker’s deal,” Raz said, “shows up on its own every few centuries. Elayne says it’s baked into our species, though that sounds like what Crafty folk say when they don’t want to admit they don’t know the answer. The point is, you don’t see as many, ah, people like me around, not anywhere near as many as you’d expect given how easily kid leeches lose control.”
“We kill them when they slip up.” Them, not you. She wasn’t sure how she felt about making that distinction.
“You don’t kill everyone,” he replied. “And the Iskari and Schwarzwaldens and the angels of Alikand didn’t kill the Imperials—not all of them. What’s good for the temple’s good for the cultist. You remember back in your apartment, when I mentioned walking into the ocean?”
The night grew brighter as her eyes widened.
“It’s a good life down there, if you don’t need this one. Dark and cool, with like-minded company. And there’s plenty in the sea that bleeds. I stay clear; to them I’m the one that got away. I should have been a fresh father for a new line. The way they tell it, I should join their congregation, settle down, start a colony of my own. Stop rambling. A life for which, as you can imagine, I have little taste.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Age-paled scars hatched skin the color of rosewood. “But you need help, Seril needs allies, and desperation makes strange bedfellows. They want me. If I can use that to help you, I will.”
“I was joking,” she said, “about vampire gods.”
“I wasn’t.” He pointed down into the depths. “Good thing you sink in the Suit. We’d have had to bring weights otherwise.”
* * *
“We can run,” Dr. Hasim said when they were safe behind a locked door. “Or we can stay and help these people fight. We must choose.”
The refugee council gathered in an empty on-call room Hasim had persuaded the orderlies to lend them: Aedi who’d worked with him in the Refuge for a decade; Akhil who collapsed on their doorstep five years back, having wandered half-blind out of the Wastes shrunken as a dried fig; Zola who handled the shrines’ day-to-day management; quiet Mohem to whom the Refuge’s younger guests looked in their troubles.
Mohem, to his surprise, was the first to speak, her voice velvety with rare use: “We are all here, and gods too. Seventy-one awake, and twenty-eight still sleep. Of those, twenty-four dream shallow enough for me to taste. Four are too far gone for me to hear their voices.”
Zola had found herself a clipboard and everyone proper clothes, though the fabrics were coarse and the styles ill-fit and ill-fitting: Hasim wore twill slacks three sizes too large, a belt in which he’d awled an extra hole, and a cotton shirt with ill-considered checks. Zola had not said how, in a building where people died regularly, she acquired the clothes.
She consulted her clipboard. “Our debts appear to have been canceled.” Murmurs around the circle. Akhil looked up from his stitching. “We have a soul apiece, offered by the Goddess Seril. I applied for credit at HBSE and First Camlaander, without success. By freeing us, the Goddess has placed us in thaumaturgical limbo: we are members of Her community, under Her protection—but the broader Craftwork world does not acknowledge Her existence.”
Akhil had been, among other things, a tailor before his town fell, and was adjusting his Zola-found shirt to fit. He pulled his thread taut, pursing a long seam’s lips. “Then there’s the chorus in the sky.”
“What do you make of that?” Hasim said.
Akhil tied off the thread and cut it with a scalpel liberated from a nursing station. “The city is in danger. These aren’t the days, and this was never the land, for a God so leveraged to Craftsmen to address His people directly. He’s afraid.”
Zola turned pages on her clipboard. “The locals love Kos, but few remember Seril as anything but a threat. Their faith is structured for a diad, but they don’t have the praxis.”
Akhil cocked his head to one side. “How do you know what the people think? We’ve scarcely had a chance to leave this building.”
“A hospital—” She frowned, set a hand to her mouth, shook her head. Hasim recognized that expression. The word had pulled at the cuts on her lips. “A hospital tangles many lines. Nurses have one background, doctors another, and everyone falls sick sometime. People talk, especially when they do not think one speaks good Kathic. I have limited my vocabulary in public spaces.”
Mohem rubbed her upper arms. “We could run to the ghost cults in Alt Selene. A train leaves tomorrow.”
Akhil pinched, and pierced, and drew the needle. “Would that not violate the terms of our redemption?”
“There are no terms.” Zola flipped back to the first page. “Seril refused to recognize our indenture. Her soul-gift is simple grace. We owe her nothing.”
“If she falls, the indenture may seize us again.”
“We can be safe under a new guardian before that happens. I know it sounds ungrateful, but this is not our fight. Someone—presumably Grimwald Holdings—attacked us, and we woke here. Seril stands against our enemies, but she will fall. We have”—Zola checked the wall clock—“thirty-two hours to find a better bulwark. Alt Selene’s ghost cults offer generous asylum terms. Alternatively, we could sue for Kosite asylum in the Court of Craft, claiming Seril is subsidiary to Kos, and he inherits her obligations.”
“Which would aid the Craftsmen who attack Her,” Hasim said. “I dislike that idea.”
“We have to protect ourselves, Doctor. And our Partners.”
“And so the choice remains,” he said. “Run or fight.”
Zola leaned back in the chair and caged her long fingers. “I say run.”
“As do I.”
Zola turned in surprise to Akhil, who shrugged as if their agreement were not a momentous occasion.
Mohem pressed her lips into a line as she thought, and when she decided, they unfolded and filled with color again. “The Refuge took me in, back in Agdel Lex. I helped it in return. Seril took us in. I think we should help her. We fight.”
“I agree,” Hasim said. “She needs us as much as any broken deity who ever stumbled to our doorstep. What are we for, if we desert her now? Fight.”
One by one they turned to Aedi. Aedi spoke seldom when she was not praying, and when she spoke she did not use her own words, drawing instead from scriptures the source of which mystified even Hasim. In the Refuge, as each new destitute arrived, Aedi sat reading beside them, working the prayer beads woven into her hair between knuckle and thumb. She was older than Hasim, and wiser. He did not know how great was the gulf between them in either category, but since they first met, he had grown to suspect it was considerable.
Aedi’s braids snaked over her shoulders when she nodded, twisted left and right when she shook her head. They snaked today. “There will be war,” she said, “even in the dry places of the earth.”
51
“Boardrooms,” Shale said as they entered the mountain. Circles of light from their hand torches played over blast-hewn tunnel walls. “We should expect boardrooms and arguments, you said on the flight. You didn�
�t mention mines, or undead beasts.”
Tara led the way, thankful for her borrowed boots, which were large but at least had traction. In the flats she brought, she’d have broken three bones by now. Water dripped from a wall seam to the tunnel floor. “If I expected this, I would have packed for it.”
“If I expected this, I would have—”
“Stayed home? Let me do my job?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so,” she said, and checked her watch, as she had three times since arriving in camp. If it took them more than an hour to find Altemoc, they’d miss the evening flight back to Alt Coulumb. Another flight left the next morning, and after that nothing until sunset. Miss both of those, and she’d not make the court date, with or without the deal. She snapped her watch shut. “Shouldn’t you be happy? This seems like your kind of place.”
“Unfinished stone?” His face twisted in disgust. “I was born in Alt Coulumb. My block was quarried from a moonlit pit and weather-shaped on rooftops. Descending into living Rock—it doesn’t feel right.”
“You’re made of stone.”
“You’re made of meat. Maybe after this we can find a nice tight wet dark meat tunnel for you to squeeze down.”
“Point taken.” Her stomach unclenched slowly.
They reached a three-way fork in the tunnel. Each path led down, and all were smaller than the main concourse they’d followed so far. Tara folded and unfolded the map until she found the relevant square. Altemoc’s route continued straight.
She set one hand on the stone and closed her eyes. Lightning spun spiderwebs around her and down into the bones of the world. “Ms. Batan said her team went for the mine offices while Altemoc led his into the depths. Batan heard the scream, went to find him, but ran into a ‘wall of shadow.’ She pushed at the wall; it tried to pull her in, but she escaped.” She frowned. “Huh.”
“Problem?”
“The Craftwork in these tunnels is weaker than it should be. Something draining it would explain the slurry leaks, the revenants. But I don’t see any trace of shadow walls or the other stuff Ms. Batan describes.” The mountain pressed around them, blacker than black, squeezing tiny lines of human Craft, which quivered like seaweed as a leviathan moved through—“Shit.” She grabbed Shale’s wrist. “Run!”
He did, as the tunnel walls began to glow. Ore veins shone brilliant red, and Tara smelled ozone. Red light chased them down the tunnel, casting crimson shadows. Behind her, a roar issued from no throat. Tara glanced back and saw blinding fire. Her boot struck a jutting rock. Her ankle turned. She stumbled, swore. Shale had pulled ahead of her. She skipped three steps, tried the ankle again—sound, though gods and demons did it hurt.
The roar was nearer. She heard a lightning crack. She could not outrun the coming fire.
She tried, though, dammit, even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and her skin charged with the memory of fire.
A stone hand pulled her into a side tunnel. The thunder ate her squawk of protest. She brought her knife around, brilliant in the shadows, before she recognized Shale in stone form—though not the healthy sculpture she remembered. Moonlight bled from deep wounds, from the missing corner of an ear and a hole in his right wing.
Red lightning carved grotesque shadows from the dark. Tara woke her glyphs, more for reassurance than out of faith they’d save her if whatever-it-was in the tunnel struck them.
Lightning jumped between crystal veins in the tunnel wall. Another bolt followed, and a third, and then they came too fast to count, arc after arc crisscrossing fractal dense. Her brain constructed figures from their dance: bison-headed men and goat-legged somersaulting acrobats, artifacts of spark and flame, the roar their laughter.
She did not know until the lightning passed how bright it had been, or loud. Her ears rang. For a long time all she saw was the red that endures when the eye is overwhelmed.
She returned to herself through the silver of Shale’s wounds.
Light seeped from him. His stone felt cool as ever, but the light, when it dripped onto her fingers, was warm. He pulled back from her touch, bared his teeth, snarled; her ears had not recovered yet, but she felt the sound in her bones.
“Thank you,” she said.
She heard his voice as if through a pillow: “One second.” His stone twisted, inverted, melted to skin again. “There.” His voice was not so loud as before, but her hearing had recovered to match.
“I didn’t know it was that bad,” she said.
His grin would have had a different effect were his teeth still long and curved and sharp. “They don’t hurt as much when I’m like this.”
“You should have stayed home. Taken care of yourself.”
“Aev and the others are resting before the battle. I can work in flesh, for a while.”
“How long?”
“Long enough.”
“No macho jerk answers, please. Be honest with me.”
“This stone, unworked as it is, helps a little. I can handle another day. Which is all we need, one way or another.”
She tried her ankle. “Fuck.”
“Lean on me.”
“I’ll use the wall.” If she couldn’t quite walk, at least she could hop. “Slower than I’d like. Let’s move.”
“Down?” As if he hoped she would give up. Not tonight. Not with gods and goddesses and friends counting on her two thousand miles away. Not with so few hours remaining. Her watch lay heavy in her pocket.
“Down,” she said.
52
Silverclad Cat splashed through the ocean’s skin, plummeting toward a darkness that paled all color: moonlight shafts ended in the shadows below, embedded in the flesh of a beast too large and cold to care.
Cat sank. Bubbles clung to the Suit, and as she kicked they slipped free, tickled up her flanks to form a whirling trail. Justice’s song buzzed beneath her conscious thought. She was far from the community of cops. Seril’s light followed her, warm inside her mind, a caress she couldn’t call a mother’s—not her mother’s, anyway.
She did not have to breathe while wearing the Suit. Blood rushed in her ears, and the water’s pulse twinned her own.
She heard a splash as Raz dove into his element. The speed of his descent slicked back his hair. Naked from the waist up, he joined her as she fell. He swam with beautiful efficiency.
Westward rose the continental shelf, steeper than any cliff could be in air. When Cat was a kid, old Father Clemson at the Quarter parish who owed gambling debts to half his congregation told myths during weekend services. Cat would have beaten up any kid who suspected how much she loved those stories. She had no time for sermons, which were one more way folk told you to sit down and listen, but she liked the strange tales and weird poems, and one line returned to her thoughts as she looked down into the black: something about spirits brooding on the abyss.
She pointed down and shot Raz a questioning glance. He gave her the thumbs-up. Pointed down. Thumbs-up again.
Great.
She brooded on the abyss like a champ.
Water pressed her in an embrace tighter than the Suit’s used to be before Seril came back, and the Suit stiffened to match.
Cat’s heart beat faster. Raz kicked into the deep, somersaulted, and waved up at her with a smile.
Pressure at this depth could warp a body from within. The City Aquarium displayed the corpses of dead things divers dredged from the deeps, spiny and toothed, many-clawed, tentacular. Special care had to be taken, the exhibit’s brass placards read, in recovering such specimens, due to the pressure difference between ocean floor and surface. If she removed her Suit down here, she’d die.
Her eyes adjusted. No human eyes could have, there wasn’t enough light, but human limits did not bind the Suit. Raz’s white pants flashed when he kicked.
They passed few fish at this depth, and no vampires she could see. They’d almost reached the bottom. Sharp grim coral towers jutted from the murk below. White flakes of sea
snow flitted between the peaks. Could Raz have been mistaken? He’d sounded so sure.
The coral towers moved.
Earthquake was her first thought, though there were no quakes in Alt Coulumb. The movement’s scale was too great for anything else. It could not be a living thing—nothing so large could live, on land.
But they weren’t on land anymore.
The towers swelled and reddened as they approached, sharp pitted texture filling out with roseate skin. Blue sparks crackled beneath a translucent surface. High-pitched cries filled the deep. Arms the length of Alt Coulumb’s coastline coiled, wreathed by clouds of dust. Currents tossed her as the thing beneath bloomed, the coral forest transformed into a city-sized mantle. The Suit fed liquid beauty through Cat’s vein, but chemical confidence was little help. As she grasped and failed and grasped again at the sheer inconceivable scale of the thing coming oh gods toward her, its displacement current pulled her down, tossing Raz head over heels—
And what she’d taken for wrinkles on the creature’s skin were blade-sharp ridges—
She caught Raz and pulled him close as the star kraken crashed into them.
Blade-flesh drew sparks as it scraped her Suit; she tumbled into a canyon-sized wrinkle, bounced off a rubbery wall, pushed herself away—Raz tugged her out of the groove before it snapped closed, mouthlike. She kicked off and down again, and realized they were not alone.
Nearly human creatures slipped through the water around her. She’d taken them for snow at first, decayed dead things fallen to the benthic plane. They swam, long limbed and webbed, skin every color she had seen, jaws distended with curved teeth. Darting about the kraken, they pierced its flesh with spears and carved broad wounds with knives. She saw a slick naked girl unhinge her jaw and sink fangs into punctured kraken flesh. Blue blood leaked from the seal her lips made. The girl swallowed convulsively, released the monster, and howled.
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