“We can do this,” Zeddig said.
Raymet rolled her shoulders, and pointed her toes toward the clothes on her floor. “Go to bed, Zeddig.”
She went to the pallet Raymet had laid out in her office, and lay in the dark, watching the ceiling.
Raymet would be fine. They’d known each other since the block school Aman ran to teach local kids history. Raymet learned for control. If she knew the right answers, the other students would listen to her, and maybe they’d stop trying to beat her up after class. Some kids thought the girl with her thick glasses would make a good target. She learned to fight by doing, liked the taste of her own blood and its slickness against her teeth.
That need for control didn’t go away. Raymet went to university not to learn foreign ways because they were better, but because you had to know squid words to control the squids. She delved to control the dead city, and the horror of history.
Zeddig’s eyes burned when she closed them. She rolled, and shifted, and could not sleep. She rose from bed, felt joints pop, and shuffled barefoot from the office to find a drink, guiding herself by memory and dim light from the glow-in-the-dark skulls Raymet pasted above her baseboards.
As she passed Raymet’s room, she heard Ley’s voice upstairs.
“—not any business of yours.”
Was she talking with Raymet? Zeddig felt, and tried to un-feel, a stab of jealousy. But no voice interrupted the silence before Ley spoke again.
“Oh, yes, I’m sure you’d like me to explain my plan in serial villain style. Should I grow a mustache for proper twirling?”
The glow-in-the-dark skulls were not the stairwell’s only source of light: a soft blue-white glow issued from the living room. Zeddig crept upstairs—tested each step with the ball of her foot. She moved as if she were climbing over a fallen angel.
Soundless, she crested the stairs.
She could only see Ley’s arm, propping a glowing knife tip-first on Raymet’s coffee table, a fat triangular blade with a carved handle, almost a Nyongtho design, only uncarved: the knife was a ray-traced outline, and a cloud of blood whirled within. And in that blood, did she see—features? A face, in miniature?
“Sentiment, of course,” Ley said, and Zeddig stopped breathing. “And utility.” She stretched on the couch: the knife wobbled, and its tip dug a groove in the table between a toy centaur and a tank. Cushions shifted. “Oh, come now. Was I ever more than that to you?”
Zeddig watched the face in the blood, and wished she could read the movement of the lips.
“That’s what I thought. Good night, Allie. Sweet dreams—if you can dream in there.”
The knife fell, hit the table, and rung not entirely unlike dropped crystal. The light died.
Zeddig could get a glass of water just as well from the bathroom sink. She crept downstairs.
Deep down, she hoped Gal would say no.
Chapter Seventeen
KAI DOUBLED IN DREAMS.
She wrestled Ley on the apartment balcony, breath shallow in her chest, hand slick with the blood that slicked her sister’s hands, I can help you, let me help you, and at the same time she paced the room, perfectly composed in heels and a checked camelhair skirt, around the body circled in blood, tapping her chin with one bent knuckle. Somewhere, Behemoth yowled.
The body belonged to a woman named Alethea Vane, and Alethea Vane was beautiful.
To Kai’s mind “beautiful” was the most useless adjective ever minted. Most people were beautiful, in one way or another, and line up ten beautiful people and search for common factors and you’d come up blank. In school she’d read aesthetic philosophers who argued some formal unity behind the angle of a gymnast’s bicep and the curve of a dancer’s thigh, some common thread binding the lean long climber’s arms to the soft smile of a reader delighted in repose, but unity, symmetry, crumbled in the mouth like bad cake. Beauty varied too much from person to person, from one island to the next, let alone from continent to continent and era to era, for the word to mean anything at all. In the Harmonious Empire that preceded the Shining by a few dynasties, poets wrote paeans to their lovers’ black teeth.
Move past beauty to useful questions. Who was Allie Vane, to have come here, to have become this body on the floor?
Focus.
Seafoam eyes that matched her suit, those said something. The precise architecture of the face didn’t matter, only fools tried to read personality in the splay of cheekbones, though skin quality said something about nutrition, and sometimes there were scars. Sclera slightly yellowed, overwork and determination in the corners of that full mouth. (Ley’s type? Absolutely.) Soft hands, calluses on the fingertips: a string player. She should have gone through Vane’s purse before the cops arrived.
“You need help,” Izza said behind her.
Kai hadn’t felt her dreamspace ripple when the girl entered. “Is this something we can do to each other now? Just—slide in and out? I thought the nightmare telegraph needs choice. I didn’t open a door to you.”
She heard Izza’s footsteps as the girl orbited the corpse. “This room has a door. I picked the lock.”
Kai looked up.
Once again, beautiful, the useless descriptor. She remembered the first time she and Izza met, a year and a half ago: the girl’s knife pressed to her throat, her eyes shining with rage and sorrow. Back then Izza was a street kid hiding from Penitents in Kavekana alleys, worshipping her secret goddess, who had become Kai’s secret goddess too. Izza had grown. She ate better now, like all her orphan crew. She still kept her hair in tight braids, she still wore battered slacks and a ragged shirt, but she no longer looked so brittle.
“I’m fine.”
Izza looked over her shoulder, toward the balcony. “Who’s the lady with the red right hand?”
“My sister.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I’m just reviewing options,” Kai said. “The Authority won’t let me near the crime scene, but I can use my memories.”
“You’re remembering all this?” Izza shook her head. “Impossible.”
Kai straightened. “This is my job. Pilgrims ask me to build their idols and keep their secrets. We make records, naturally, but what I’m told in confidence stays here.” She tapped her temple. “Along with all the various myths and observances, the sacred mysteries. If I had to carry full rites documentation everywhere I go, I’d only visit airports that offer complimentary forklifts in baggage claim. Priests have good memories, and tools to navigate them.”
“You didn’t remember the soles of this woman’s shoes,” Izza said, kneeling, peering at the bottom of the sole. “They’re fuzzy.”
“Good, I said. Not perfect.” Pacing the room, she reviewed its emptiness. The couch could fold out into a bed. There was no proper bedroom. The kitchen looked seldom used. She hadn’t thought to check the icebox; the presence or absence of milk, and its condition, would have told her so much. She toed grooves in the laminated pale wood floor. “Ley didn’t live here. She must have, once. I have the return address. But this place is too neat. You should have seen her room in Chartegnon. She puts herself together before she goes out, always presents a sharp front, but she lives in a nest. So she was living somewhere else, perhaps even with someone else, and kept this—what? As a retreat?”
“Or she cleaned tonight for a particular reason.” Izza circled the dream shadows of Kai and Ley, fighting on the balcony. She touched that Kai’s shoulder, and the Kai searching for clues in the next room felt the echo of that touch. “Or she’s changed.”
“You didn’t grow up with her.” Even she heard the false certainty in her voice. Once more she crouched, and watched Vane’s face. “Ley came to me for help, but painted it as investment. Whatever was wrong, she thought sixteen million thaums could fix it. When I didn’t help her, this was her only option.” The blood reflected Kai’s face. “So that’s the avenue. Trace Vane, and Ley, and their business. Learn what brought them here.”
T
his time, the hand on her shoulder wasn’t an echo.
The girl stood over her, tall and thin and impossibly steady, a ship’s mast firm against a storm. “You want to find her before the Iskari.”
“I want to help her. She’s in trouble. Obviously. I mean, she doesn’t usually go around stabbing people.”
Izza looked skeptical. “She killed someone.”
“The Craftswoman thinks ‘kill’ is the wrong word. If I find Vane, I can patch up whatever this is, make sure Ley’s safe, and move on.”
“Kai, you barely know this city.”
“So, tell me.”
“This isn’t something I can just tell you. It’s a dangerous place.”
Kai rose, and stepped away from Izza. The girl—woman—just wanted to help, was the damnable thing. “This won’t be like before. I don’t know Agdel Lex like I know home—but I won’t make the same mistakes.” Sometimes, angry or afraid, Kai still smelled the Penitent around her: glass and sun-baked rock and fear-sweat. She buried all that beneath more comfortable nightmares. “I don’t think the Authority’s on my side. Ley came to me for help; I didn’t understand. I was a fool. But I have to fix this. She’s my sister.” She only realized how angry she’d become when the rage broke. She dropped her hands. “Even if I am bad at sistering.”
“She’s your sister,” Izza said. “And I’m your friend.”
Lava, flowing into the sea, cools with an eruption of steam, leaving arches, bridges, structures that endure when the heat’s gone. Lava wasn’t often sentient, and volcanoes didn’t talk much, but Kai wondered, sometimes, if they ever felt embarrassed by the visible aftermath of their eruption.
She turned back. Izza was still there. “You weren’t trying to warn me off.”
“You don’t know this place,” Izza said. “I do.”
“No.” Kai raised her hands. “No. No, and no.”
“I lived here, Kai. Fought here. And you owe me: I got you away from the Iskari.”
“Fontaine said that was Twilling.”
“How do you think he knew to call?”
“Oh,” she said. And: “Thank you. But I don’t want your help.”
“Name one reason I shouldn’t come.”
“Do you have a criminal record in Agdel Lex?”
Izza’s hands plumbed the depths of her pockets, and she developed a sudden interest in the bare wall behind Ley’s couch. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Kai took a moment, palm to brow, to control her breath, and her voice. “Even if you could get through customs—”
“I have papers, we took care of that—”
“—then we’d both be here, in danger—”
“I don’t think that’s fair—”
“—with the congregation abandoned on Kavekana—”
“It’s not like the kids don’t know the ritual, and anyway, the congregation’s not just kids anymore. They can handle things on their own for a week or two, might even be good for them, there’s some weird cult of personality shit going on, which, I mean, it gets me laid, so that’s nice, but—”
“Izza.”
No silence weighs quite like the silence of your own dream. Izza froze mid-pace. Kai reached for her arm, and Izza didn’t pull away.
“I don’t know what’s happening here,” Kai said. “You’re right. I barely speak the language. The dead city, the broken sky—I’ve never seen anything like this. My sister’s in the middle of it all, doing Lady alone knows what, Lady alone knows why. I can’t let her go. Whatever’s caught her, I have to steal her back. I’m not fucking—” Her voice slipped out of control, and in a moment of panic she found her reins. That didn’t bother her. She’d spent years before ordination, before she remade herself into herself, managing her voice. “I’m not naive. I know the risks. Some of them, at least, and the rest I can guess. I can’t drag you into this. You’re too important.”
“And you aren’t?”
“You have other contacts in the priesthood. Twilling—”
“Isn’t you.”
“No.” She smiled, sadly. “And I’ll be back soon. But for now—I have to do this alone.”
“Kai.”
But she’d fought hard enough already. She let the room go; the nightmare petaled beneath her and she fell, screaming, into blue crystal jaws that pierced and ground her, into an oubliette of knives, and far away there was a door with no lock for Izza to pick, a wall too high and smooth for her to scale, and in those depths, alone in pain, Kai slept.
Chapter Eighteen
GAL WAS RAYMET’S LAST hope.
Raymet knew better than to trust her own judgment about this job. She’d grown up poor, educated by charity and libraries and mistreated in Iskari public schools, chasing scholars around the university at age twelve to ask about proper conjugation of the highly irregular old Talbeg verb la’at, which depending on modifiers and attendant grammar might mean to be, to read, to know, to have sex with, or to change. She’d always been an outsider. She used her hunger like fuel. Most of the old High Family kids she came to know in college grew up in certainty. They took fewer risks, because they had more to lose. When you’re playing short stack poker, a gambler Raymet slept with had told her once, you bide your time, and when you see your golden hand, you go all in.
But you choose that moment carefully. Don’t play every big pot, don’t fall for a pair of queens. And care was Raymet’s weakness. Climb her family tree and you’d find generations of hungry men and women, desperate for the big score, overplaying hands on the verge of triumph.
So, with a prize like this before her—the Anaxmander Stacks, wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and academic fame in the bargain—she knew better than to trust her judgment.
But she couldn’t trust Zeddig’s, either. Ley was a good pitchwoman, and she didn’t have to be with Zeddig. Raymet had known them both separately at school, before they knew each other: each indomitable in her own idiom, guarded by layers of detachment and strength. Their relationship had been a sort of experiment—a Quechal standoff, each one’s blade to the other’s throat, waiting to see who would cut first. When Ley betrayed them and left, Raymet felt furious, but relieved. At least that was over with.
So: she couldn’t trust herself, and she couldn’t trust Zeddig.
That left Gal. Raymet’s hope. Her moral compass, sitting cross-legged and radiant in the room she kept, unfurnished save for a mattress on the floor, eyes closed, listening to Ley’s pitch as she might a sermon—Gal, light in her hair, pure as a statue, gorgeous and simple as a blade.
Gal could not be tempted. Gal would know what to do.
Raymet had never visited Camlaan, and she loathed the Camlaander expat community in Agdel Lex, bunch of priggish drunken isolates, most of whom worked in necromantic geology for the big drilling Concerns south of the Wastes. Their homeland was a barbaric mess of stereotype and myth: undead queens, land-bonding, fertility rituals of the bloodier sort, sickles, wicker, and flame, grails and other theological cutlery. Raymet grew up, like everyone, on stories of Camlaan’s Knights, questing, determined, anointed sons and daughters of the realm sent by the Crown’s will to smite monsters foreign and domestic. They had been ginned up in a war by some divine monarch or other two thousand years back, and pledged oaths to succor the innocent and help all those in need, though in practice they had a selective sense of what constituted need, or innocence. Monsters had a convenient tendency to live on land that would be valuable if not for the monsters living there; the innocent had a convenient tendency to be oppressed by wicked kings and queens who ruled territory coveted by Camlaan’s Crown.
Knights these days tilted against the Golden Horde; Knights faced Zurish Champions in Schwarzwald nightclubs; Knights ventured south into what the Thaumaturgist described as “the sectarian madness of the Northern Gleb,” drew shining swords and took up the armor of their faith and slaughtered in the name of truth, freedom, and so on, until their priggish drunken isolate compatriots could safely lease mineral r
ights to that no - longer - quite - so - monster - haunted wilderness.
And so on until empire.
The Knights were a myth wrapped around naked bloody power: a neat clean story to justify destruction. Gross. If you wanted to make people bow before you, to conquer their homes and break them to your will, just do it and have done. Don’t lie to yourself that you mean all this for their own good.
But Gal lived the myth.
She never lied and rarely swore. She cared for her friends. She worked hard without complaint. Strong, immensely strong, she used that strength gently save in battle. She sweat and bled like any woman. Someone else had made her a weapon, but she made herself kind.
Her calm, her patience, reminded Raymet of those High Family kids, holding back, waiting for a sure bet. But that wasn’t Gal at all. Not when she fought.
Raymet had first seen Gal in the Blood Brawls, in one of the foreigner drum - and - bass - and - gladiator - arena clubs she avoided like she used to avoid her thesis advisor. She’d only come with Zeddig, and Zeddig only came because she’d been dating someone—not Ley—who later proved to be evil.
(Zeddig had a problem with exes.)
The Brawl had simple rules: one point for each limb taken, three points to victory, decapitation or bisection an immediate win. According to Zeddig’s soon-to-be-ex, the current champion was a woman without insurance or phylacteric trust, no safety net of any kind. If she died, she died. Yet she’d won eight nights running, and each night staked her winnings on herself and let them ride.
That was Gal.
Everyone knew she’d die eventually, and odds were on tonight, which was why Zeddig’s soon-to-be-ex demanded they attend. A mantis-centaur thing had tagged Gal’s arm in her last fight with a serrated blade: Gal’s first major injury. She’d fall tonight, or tomorrow. Odds against were celestial. Raymet wasn’t a bloodsport kind of girl, ask anyone—she’d come to give Zeddig moral support with the evil soon-to-be-ex—but cheers and bar smoke tension woke something in her chest that turned and yawned and bared sharp claws.
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