“You want to set up a deal, sprinkle on some glitter, and present me with a pretty ribbon to your supervisors: a nice, rich blue sky opportunity. Play it right and you’ll get a big bonus out of that, a new office. A few underlings of your own. Not bad for a local woman in an Iskari bank.”
Fontaine’s smile gained a nervous edge. “I must say, I find your forthrightness bracing.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow. I don’t have time for bullshit. Am I right?”
“Would it be a problem if you were?”
“Not at all. I just want to know where we stand.” In short: screwed, though not necessarily in a bad way. Fontaine wanted a foreign princess to ride in on a magic horse bringing riches beyond the dreams of avarice. Kai needed IFI’s stability and reputation to make a case before the High Priests back home. Look, even IFI thinks these dreamcrafters are a solid investment! Ouroboral. Hells. But she could still make this work. She would make this work. “I have two questions. I’d like direct answers to both.”
Fontaine took a slim silver box from her inside jacket pocket, opened it, and pondered a selection of pills inside. “Go ahead.”
“Do you think we can make a good deal here?”
Fontaine chose a translucent green pill, and held it to the light. “We can make fortunes.” She tasted that word like expensive liquor. Then she dry-swallowed the pill.
“Second question. Are you high right now?”
“Ms. Pohala, I’m a dreamcraft banker. I’m high constantly.” She offered the pill case. “Would you like some?” Before Kai could say no, she rolled on. “Oh! That reminds me. A letter came for you this morning. Internal post, quite urgent. Did you tell anyone else about your trip?”
“No. But the drugs—”
“Here you go.”
“I said I don’t—” But Fontaine wasn’t offering the pills. She offered an envelope bearing Kai’s name in a hand she recognized, sealed, on the back, with her sister’s wolfsbane ring.
Godsdammit. Ley.
“I only ask because, if you’ve mentioned your trip to anyone at IFI, that might prompt a territorial squabble over your business, which I”—Fontaine shuddered with, Kai thought, mostly chemical ecstasy—“would not relish.”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Fantastic. Excellent. Wonderful. Now, Kai, can I call you Kai? Are you certain about the drugs? If you want to invest in dreamcraft, you should cultivate familiarity with the platform.”
Chapter Four
MY DEAREST SISTER—
Kai spent the rest of the day trying to put the letter from her mind. There wasn’t much of it, but what there was, stuck. During pitch meetings she toyed with the envelope, ran her finger down the thick creamy paper. Between meetings she excused herself, reread her sister’s words in a bathroom stall, and let the rage flow through her again. Coffee shocked the system awake, but nothing concentrated like fury.
And she needed concentration. Fontaine, true to her word, had filled her day with meetings, two representatives from each Concern, mostly thin kids in flannels who couldn’t have looked less professional if they’d tried. Perhaps they had tried: they adhered to a fashion lockstep strict as any uniform code. One young woman kept picking at her pants leg; Kai wondered if she ever wore trousers when she wasn’t trying to look like . . . whatever these people wanted to seem.
They had practiced their pitches, though. Oh, yes.
“Two things are happening at once. Global investment is increasingly important for individuals and Concerns looking to maximize returns in a competitive market. But the vehicles for that investment are more complicated than ever. Without expert support, people just don’t know what’s out there—and most people can’t afford a real expert.” Kai’s clients could, but she didn’t interrupt this young man, though he needed an appointment with a razor so badly that Kai considered offering him the one she used on her legs. Besides, he wasn’t wrong. He was, however, seeing things: ghosts beside her head, to judge from his darting eyes. He tapped the desk, and the glowworms on the wall behind him wriggled and reassembled to form a bubbly logo. His partner took over: “Theolog wraps our dreamers into low-involvement Concerns, and connects those Concerns with qualified investment managers. We guide dreamers through scenarios designed to judge their risk tolerance, moral positioning, and time horizon, on a preconscious level. We know more about our participants than they know about themselves.”
Heard you might be in town. Sorry for reaching out this way. Been a while since we caught up.
How in the hells had she heard? And, “caught up”; Ley hadn’t been home in years, no dreams even, just occasional postcards, the last of which showed up just after Kai got out of the hospital last year, and which didn’t mention her injuries at all. Sorry for reaching out, not even “I’m sorry,” just the desultory not-quite apology. Gods.
“Two things,” said a woman with thick braids and a rich Gleblander accent, who shopped for her flannels in the same store as the guy from Theolog, “are happening at once. We live in an age of global diaspora. During the God Wars, international migration was largely driven by fear and pro- or anti-religious sentiment: people scattered to places they thought were safe. Now things have stabilized—” Kai tried not to let disbelief show, stabilized, really, the last six years, serpents over Dresediel Lex and an outbreak in Alt Coulumb, bond crises, stable? Hells, just a hundred miles south past the Wastes, the Northern Gleb was a hothouse of warring Gods and Craftsmen using one another as catspaws: stable was a sick joke. For the five decades immediately after the wars, maybe—three generations had been too dead, tired, or scared to rock the boat. But now, no, never mind, listen to the nice woman who wants you to make her rich. “—Migration has been driven by employment opportunities and the loss of farm jobs due to agricultural automation. At the same time, even in Camlaan and the Iskari Demesne, fewer people describe themselves as more than moderately religious than at any point for which we have data.” Which interval was the last century and a half or so, hardly a reliable indicator of broad historical trends given what had happened in those hundred fifty years, might as well try to describe rivers by looking at waterfalls—no, focus. “As people move more, they’re tied less than ever by gods, and as divine states become increasingly territorial, traveling coreligionists are less likely to find priests to carry messages. The nightmare telegraph is too harrowing for most to use without assistance, and current telegraph office deployment is borderline inhumane, so: How will this mobile population stay in contact?” She tapped the table, the glowworms assembled into another bubbly logo, and her partner, an Iskari woman who looked too young for the streaks of gray in her hair, stepped forward. “Enter Auditor.”
You’re only here for a day, it seems, dear sister. And I need to see you.
How did she know Kai’s schedule? How had she snuck the letter into IFI’s internal post? Fontaine had whisked Kai into the smoked glass heart of the oddly corkscrew banking tower, bypassing most security, but even so she, Fontaine, had to vouch for Kai to three different guards, pass her through three security circles; Kai’d given blood and spoken her name into a glass box, walked between two crackling ebon stanchions the blank-faced Iskari security guards called a “scanner,” and, at the last, passed through a mirror of cascading water that showed, Fontaine claimed, only truth. (Kai tensed when they approached the mirror, wondering what truth, how overzealous fairy-tale Iskari security would react to her, but the mirror reflected her accurately—a Kavekanese woman overcaffeinated, exhausted, and past done with the poking and prodding.)
And that “I need to see you,” perfunctory, a queen’s dictate, as if of course Kai would have no other pressing demands during her overnight business trip. No, that wasn’t right. Ley wasn’t thoughtless—anything but. She just thought other people should share her priorities.
A man with nose-pinching glasses, who should have known better than to wear that brimmed hat with that untucked short-sleeved button down: “Two things are happ
ening at once.” Gods, had they all read the same book? “Around the world, factory-finished goods have displaced, or are displacing, artisan handcrafts. People joke about this being a developed-society issue, but in fact we’re seeing it everywhere, as manufacturers race to capture markets.” Betting that, as the global thaumaturgical framework remained stable, those parts of the world still reeling from the God Wars, or the resource conflicts, proxy battles, and zombie plagues that rippled from the wars themselves, would recover to join Dresediel Lex and Agdel and Alt Coulumb and Iskar and the Shining Empire and Camlaan in the light of modernity. Betting the system could support a world where everyone was on top. Which wasn’t nearly so maniacally optimistic a wager as it might seem, though the odds were still long. If development, whatever that meant, indeed progressed forever into an impossible bright future, the bet paid off. If it didn’t, if the world collapsed in fire and demons tore our guts out, who gave a shit whether share price declined this quarter? “At the same time, around the world, Deathless Kings, High Priests, let’s call them the thaumaturgical class, are growing used to power and the resources that accompany it. They form a distinct, large pool of exacting consumers of durable bespoke luxury goods. A person who’s functionally immortal expects her crockery to last as long as she does. Highly skilled artisans with enormous experience, literally the best in the world at what they do, struggle to feed themselves even though people across the globe would willingly spend whole souls on their products.” His partner, tall, thin, gaunt-cheeked, tapped the tabletop glyph, and the glowworms did their dance. “Use determines what people with soulstuff to burn want, in their heart of hearts; it passes that inspiration to a growing community of artisans who have the skills, but lack market access.”
Meet me at Sauga’s, tonight at eight thirty. You’ll like the place. Whatever squid you’re working with can tell you how to get there. Come alone.
No clue what kind of “place” Sauga’s might be. Dive bar? Sex club? When Kai last visited Ley, back when her sister was studying in Southern Iskar, she’d brought her to a fish market straight from the airport, saying it’s a nice place to talk.
Kai found Fontaine in the hall between meetings, arguing in Talbeg with someone who, so far as Kai could see, wasn’t there. “Are all these people on drugs?”
“Okay,” Fontaine said to the air. “Good. We’ll pick this up after CoB. Thank you.” She blinked, and color returned to the whites of her eyes. “Come on, I’m starving.” Over a plate of fries in the palatial cafeteria, all beechwood and mother-of-pearl inlay, Fontaine explained: “Art works through dreams and desires. Most people expose themselves, take a nap, have a nightmare or three, and wake up. The drugs are only important for people who need constant contact. There are downsides, of course.”
Kai stole a fry.
“The drugs saturate your normal dreams. You don’t sleep well. It’s, let’s say, inimical to the kind of high concentration required for Craftwork. Or art, awkwardly. But the value’s there.” She reached for more fries; halfway to the plate, her hand stopped, and her face flushed green. “Gods. Ah. Excuse me, please.” When she returned ten minutes later, Kai had eaten most of the fries. They had worked through lunch. “Sorry.”
“Nausea?”
“Hallucinations.” Fontaine straightened her jacket. “Controlled intoxication blurs the line between sleeping and waking.” She tipped the fries into the garbage before Kai could eat more. “It’s worth the compromises.”
“And your . . .” She pointed to Fontaine’s arm. “Partner doesn’t mind?”
“The Good Lords understand the balance of sobriety and opportunity,” she said. “Though they get loopy with exposure. I confess regularly to compensate. Meanwhile, there’s a whole world at my fingertips.”
“A world of two things happening at once. My priesthood invests in girders, Ms. Fontaine. This feels like filigree. It’s all so small.”
“Most things people need really are. People don’t want to save, I don’t know, everything, or break it. They want to stay in touch with their families. They want to sell things they’ve made with their hands, or buy things someone else has made with theirs. They want work. They want to get along. They want minor conveniences, or a few minutes’ escape. People get rich off those desires. Where’s the harm?”
And anyway, Kai asked herself, wasn’t small the point? Get away from the big resource bets, from necromantic earths, from “exploratory missions” one step short of wholesale slaughter, from revenant labor firms that could always, always prove, with flawless paperwork, their debt-zombies were ethically sourced, with repayment schemes that met Craftwork standards. Leave all that behind, bet small, and find something to change the world slightly—maybe for the better.
“To make it happen,” said the unshaven man in the flannel shirt, “we’re asking for two million thaums.”
“To make it happen,” said the woman with the braids, “we’re asking for two point seven million thaums.”
“To make it happen,” said the man with the unfortunate hat, “we’re asking for three point one million thaums.”
The conference room windows faced inward: rooftop mirrors reflected sunlight down the skyscraper’s hollow core, and crystal prisms split that sun to light the IFI offices from within. Kai couldn’t see sunset, but the conference room blushed rose. Glowworms glowed on the wall. Fontaine rocked in her chair, humming, while Kai made notes, summarizing goals, growth potential, commitment, and poor fashion choices. Her watch, on the table, read: seven.
I need you.
—Ley
Two things are happening at once.
“Fontaine. Fontaine. Fontaine.” The name worked on her third try.
“Hmmm?” She knuckled sleep from the corners of her eyes. “Sorry. Just catching up on my prophecies.”
“I have to take a meeting after work. Late notice, personal thing. Place called Sauga’s. Think I can get there without slipping into some kind of apocalypse?”
Fontaine tried, and failed, to keep herself from laughing.
Chapter Five
ZEDDIG FELL INTO THE dead city.
She landed with a crouch in the wrecked library. Frost iced her ruby lenses. She flipped a switch on her goggles and the frost receded, and she could see again. Beneath and before her, past the enormous jagged gap in the wall, spread streets splashed with ice crystal blood, where metal spiders the size of houses had frozen while grappling with winged statues of glorious flame. Enormous crystal worms stitched and knotted in the sky, tearing one another with their teeth. Books lay splayed on the checkerboard floor, revealing Talbeg script and stark blackletter. Knife-wind flipped the pages. Ash drifted past her, drawn north toward the Wound.
She checked her watch. A Craftwork circle burned around the watch’s outer edge, sealed with the same wards as her suit. Blue, now. The light would fade, then blush red; when it died altogether she’d have ten seconds before her suit wards failed, before the death that had claimed her city claimed her, too.
A voice that did not belong whispered in her ear. “Ms. Hala, we have visitors.”
She cursed. “Wreckers?”
“Baseline humans, judging from heartbeat and tread. Local security, I should think. Armed, poorly.” Gal’s elegant accent hid contempt well.
“Raymet said we had a half hour after shift change.”
“She may have been mistaken. Perhaps this is an unscheduled patrol.” Gal’s voice grew contemplative. “There’s only three of them. If you wish—”
“No,” she interrupted. The last thing they needed was for Gal to leave a trail of bodies. Probably just guards looking for a place to smoke. “How long do I have?”
“They’re climbing the stairs.”
“Lock the door. Make noise.”
“That seems contrary to our plan.”
Gods. “Throw some furniture around. Move a desk in rhythm. Groan once in a while. Stall. I have a table at Sauga’s tonight—if I miss my rez because I’m in jail, they�
��ll never let me live it down.” Not to mention that she’d be chained to a wall in the Rectification Authority tower, with open windows so the birds could get at her after the Wreckers finished.
Her watch circle had paled from midnight blue to the color of the sky at noon. Minutes left at best. This was as close a delve as she’d ever taken to the Wound; she had drowned in preparations. She stood on the third floor of the Circuit Library of Mercy and Light University, Seaside Two Seven, Alikand, and through that door, past the ice-covered skeletons of two men (she thought) who had spent their last living moments making love, lay the treasure she’d come to save.
The door splintered beneath her boot.
The reading room beyond was breathtaking, even ruined: black-and-white geometric lattices climbed the walls, patterns and patterns entwined, a High Scholastic masterpiece. Steady, strong hands in workshops long since burned had shaped these broken chairs and planed these tables. Gold fixtures glinted in the never-light that drifted through the shattered roof. You couldn’t buy this craftsmanship for love or money, since the wars.
An angel lay on the floor, dying.
Zeddig did not look at the angel. You never looked at them. Some beauty was too bright to bear, even as it failed. But she had trained herself to see without looking: as she tiptoed past tendrils of gossamer wings, as she climbed over the mound of a fallen wrist without touching the glittering ebon skin, her own breath loud within her mask, she observed the half-flayed chest, the crystal ribs glittering within, the almost-heart made of light that still beat, slowly, the thin trails of rainbow blood. Its eyes were slits, neither closed nor open, like a woman’s in intense pain, no iris visible, milky white from lid to lid. The angel’s glory caught Zeddig, nested in her soul, and she knew she would scream it out tonight, and writhe, and curse in dreams. She would sleep with a leather strip between her teeth, to keep from biting off her tongue.
The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence Page 3