Drums built. The crowd roared.
A shining woman stepped onto the sand.
Gal seemed alien under spotlights. Even angels didn’t look so sure, though perhaps Raymet only thought that because she tended to see them dying. She stared at the surreal gold of her, the cornsilk hair and cornflower eyes, the bare strong limbs, one marred by a cotton bandage. Not all the first editions in the world could have made her look away.
Chains lifted the gate, and something skinless shambled through: a gorilla skull nestled in a tangle of muscle Raymet’s brain interpreted as a chest, despite its lack of ribs, and the skull had gems for eyes, and when it opened its jaw to roar, no sound emerged. The rest of the thing was wriggling flesh and metal rods bunched into limbs. Blood circled by hydraulic pump. When the creature walked, it splashed.
Nobody knew what the skinless thing was; it fought under the ring handle “Oscar.” It began with four limbs, but those limbs peeled from one another as needed, and were flexible as whips. The fight, to judge from the crowd’s hush, should have been one-sided.
It wasn’t.
Gal fought defensively. She circled, sought openings. She danced around Oscar’s brutal gouging blows, supple and smooth, as if her bandage was a joke, as if she had come for some purpose more noble than a fight. She drew her blade, but only parried. Oscar pressed its advantage. Gal bled, and bled again. The crowd roared. She smiled at their fury, and, Raymet thought, at the prospect of her own demise.
Raymet’s hands tightened on the rail.
That thing in Raymet’s chest dug its brilliant claws into the meat between her lungs. That shining woman could not die here. Not like this. Whatever drove her wasn’t worth it. Nothing could be. Yet Raymet stood watching, powerless as she’d ever been, once more a broke kid on the street. What could she do? Cry out? Force them to stop the fight? How?
She saw it then: jump into the pit. Ruin the odds, at least, spoil the match. Distract the monster. And, quite likely, die. Raymet could handle herself in a street fight, but Oscar looked like it ate streets.
It was a bad gamble. She might just trip the other woman up—spoil her rhythm, die trying. She held cards unsuited, no connectors, a sucker’s hand.
Gal slowed. Her bandage was a mess of blood. Her teeth were perfect.
She had to do it.
Raymet gathered herself to jump, and glanced, at the last instant, to Zeddig, for reassurance or out of hope Zeddig might stop her.
But Zeddig wasn’t there. Because, of course, she had already jumped into the pit.
(That was when Zeddig’s soon-to-be became her ex.)
Raymet watched, horrified, sick, and ashamed she hadn’t jumped first. Why hadn’t she? She almost followed—but it all happened so fast. Oscar swept Gal’s legs out from under her and writhed toward Zeddig. Its torso inverted so the jewel-eyed skull faced out from where the spine should be, and it pinned Zeddig with a glare; a meat-limb whipped out to snare her throat, and missed, but another caught her arm—
And then Gal stood between them, wreathed in light.
She had not seemed slow before, but she moved faster now.
The fight ended soon.
There was blood everywhere.
After the promoter screamed at them and had them thrown out of the club by bouncers who were very polite, for obvious reasons, Raymet caught Zeddig in the alley, furious in her shame, what the hell were you doing, you almost got yourself killed, but she stopped when she saw Gal standing in shadow by Zeddig’s side. The woman so ready to die back in the ring seemed resigned to life instead. Not excited, relieved, triumphant. Just—tired. What will you do? Zeddig asked. And Gal said, I’ll find another way. Zeddig didn’t know how to answer that. But Raymet, her mouth dry, cursing herself on the inside for a fool, said: Are you looking for dangerous work?
And that was how it started.
They needed muscle for delves. The dead city was dangerous. Gal knew little about Agdel Lex—the Knights were not historically trained, their masters thought context unhelpful on their missions—and she couldn’t read modern Talbeg, let alone Old High, or Telomeri, any of the languages necessary for their work. Hells, she could barely read Kathic. But then, neither Zeddig nor Raymet could wrestle angels.
So they worked together, fought together, caroused when they won, and endured failure. Time and again, Gal saved them, and each time Raymet remembered that shame, of not running fast enough to Gal’s defense. If she ever mentioned it, Gal would have waved the whole thing off—even if Raymet was a fighter, that was not her fight—which made things worse.
And now, as they gathered in her cell, and Raymet hoped she’d save them once more.
They called Gal’s one-room flat above Madhin’s Tea Shop a cell not because Gal was confined there, but because it looked like a monk’s chamber: in six years the Camlaander had never furnished the place beyond a cheap straw mattress with sheets so poor she must have imported them—no cotton vendor in Agdel Lex would sell a weave that rough. Raymet didn’t know how Gal spent her take of their missions: most people stored their souls in homes and things, soulstuff sloughing into tapestries and furniture, art and books and cookware, or deposited what they could into a bank to earn interest. Gal probably believed banking and interest were sins. But people couldn’t hold more than a few thousand thaums without going strange.
Then again, with Gal, how would you tell?
Ley made her pitch.
Gal listened. Golden light haloed her short hair. The room’s one arrowslit window cast light on the bed, not Gal, so the light must have come from inside her. Raymet watched her, and remembered the ring of sand, and the smile. They’d known each other for years, and she still felt those bright claws sink into the meat between her lungs. “That’s the deal,” Ley said. “You get me into the Altus facility. I get you into the Stacks. No questions asked, none answered.”
You see the golden hand, you go all in. Don’t pass this up.
But it was still a bad job.
So Raymet watched Gal like she would watch a lighthouse, hoping for guidance through the storm.
Gal’s eyes were blue, and light, and there was light inside them.
“Yes,” she said. “But I want to see your tools at work.”
Chapter Nineteen
KAI FOUND FONTAINE IN her office the next morning, cocked back in her desk chair, feet propped on a filing cabinet, chin raised, right eyelid pried open by her left thumb and forefinger while her right pinched a tiny neon lizard over the wet dome of her cornea. The lizard hissed and squirmed, but Fontaine did not let herself blink.
“I can come back later,” Kai said.
“Not at all, Ms. Pohala, come in, come in.” Fontaine adjusted the lizard. “Amodosia are a pain in the posterior, to be honest, hard to make the glands express at this size. The price we pay to stay current. Nothing goes to the optic nerve quite like these babies, even if you have to—ow.” A flailing rear claw drew a line of blood from her thumb. “Come in, please.”
Kai sidled in, quietly. She’d never been comfortable with drugs. Kavekanese artists who took them tended to be desperate, poets and painters who’d so worn out their capacity for dream that they could see visions no other way. But if Fontaine spent her life in meetings like the kind Kai had yesterday, no wonder she’d grown callous to nightmares. “I signed your paper.”
“Wonderful!” Fontaine found the spot she sought in the hissing lizard’s jaw, and pushed her thumbnail into the scales. The lizard gagged; a drop of oily rainbowed liquid fell from its mouth into Fontaine’s eye. She snapped her eyes shut, then, and doubled over, shuddering. She made a sound like she’d been caught in the fist of some other enormous being, held pendant over its eye, and squeezed. “There” was her first word after, drawn like a dispatch from the grave. Her second “There” was shorter, chipped, chirpy. Fontaine hopped to her feet, head raised as if ready to be crowned. She grinned rapture, and, without looking, tossed the lizard into a glass terrarium that stood, top open
, near her desk. Then she closed the top.
When she opened her eyes, the paper-thin ring of iris visible around her left pupil remained the usual brown, but the ring around her right was the blue of ice in gin.
“Brilliant! I’m so glad we can work together.” Fontaine snatched the contract and unfolded it, crumpling the paper in her fingers. “We can build a profitable relationship without a doubt, Ms. Pohala, and since you’re extending your stay, along with your investment horizon, let’s expand the range and depth of our interviews to compensate, as I really don’t think you”—she opened her desk drawer and dropped the paper inside—“appreciated the depth and growth potential of the Concerns we saw yesterday—and our broader time frame lets us focus on a fuller”—she laughed at a joke Kai hadn’t understood, and locked the drawer—“range of associations, thematic and structural relationships we glossed over given yesterday’s focus on short-term growth potential, why, depending on your interest there are a number of incubators and co-op programs we could—”
“I’d like to discuss Alethea Vane,” Kai said, and sat.
The next time Fontaine blinked, her right eye was a deeper blue, about the color mainland poets said robins’ eggs were. There weren’t robins on Kavekana—traders tried to introduce them, once, but the trees kept eating them. “Ms. Vane.”
“And Ley Pohala, if you recognize that name.”
“I think,” Fontaine said, lowering herself to her chair, “Dreamspinner is well past your investment horizon.” Another blink. Desert sky. “Pohala? Any relation?”
“My sister.” Interesting. So: the murder hadn’t made the news. Or Fontaine didn’t read the news—did she even have to read? Perhaps drugs just dropped news into her brain. Someone in Zur was probably dreaming to her about oil prices as they spoke.
“You’re related? No sense talking about Dreamspinner then, conflict of interest issues there—we could build a structure that wouldn’t attract Court attention, but it doesn’t matter since they’re not on the funding market—”
Interesting. Then why was Ley hunting for funding last night? “I don’t want to invest in them,” Kai said. “I want to learn about their industry. I want an unvarnished opinion of their stability, current positioning, and growth prospects.”
“Unvarnished, you say.” Fontaine chuckled. “Sorry.” She laughed some more, realized she was laughing, and tried to stop the laugh with her fist, without success. Kai waited. “Okay,” she said after a while. “This is good. We’re good. Good is a funny word in Kathic, isn’t it?” They were speaking Iskari, which Kai didn’t mention. “I have just the person, think I can set up a meeting this afternoon, and meanwhile—” She stretched toward a filing cabinet in the room’s far corner; Kai was about to get up and open it for her, but a long thin tendril wriggled out from beneath Fontaine’s cuff, arrowed across the room, tugged open the drawer, slithered into the files, pinched a particularly thick folder, and drew it out—tried to lift it, but settled for dropping the folder to the floor and dragging it toward Fontaine’s chair, where the woman bent to pick it up. Kai didn’t blame the tentacle. She’d read theological regulations thinner than that file. “So you want to learn about infrastructure and defense.”
“Do you need to make an appointment? With the person you want me to talk to? I could find an admin—”
“No, hardly, I mean, I’ve already done it, you see.” She tapped her still-blue eye. “Now!” Fontaine opened the folder, and grinned at the contents. “Infrastructure! Or, would you like a snack first?”
* * *
After two and a half hours, punctuated by a trip to the canteen for a plate of fries smothered in chili sauce, and a second trip forty-five minutes later to one of Fontaine’s colleagues’ desks to ransack her secret cookie stash (vividly colored cardboard boxes, “she gets them from some weird foreign paramilitary evangelist front, can’t find ’em anywhere in Agdel Lex but the necro-G people sponsor a troop and she does their financing, which is why she’s away right now, conference in Dhisthra, so”), Kai understood more than she ever expected to know about Iskari defense contracting and military appropriations. She was overjoyed when Fontaine’s admin knocked to interrupt, and said, in Talbeg, “There’s a woman here for Ms. Pohala.”
Which Fontaine translated for Kai, who still hadn’t let on that she spoke Talbeg, even if she didn’t quite have a handle on the local dialect yet. “So popular!”
Kai excused herself and followed the admin. He left her at the conference room, where Ms. Abernathy waited.
The Craftswoman stood against the city, looking down. From the twenty-third floor of the IFI building, Agdel Lex looked like a mosaic of crystal and plaster, roads the gaps between colored tiles. The sun beat down from a desert blue sky, and glistened off the faintly pulsing walls of the Authority tower nearby.
“You’re never supposed to stand with your back to a door,” Kai said, approaching.
Abernathy didn’t look back. “That’s from Hebenon, isn’t it?”
“I forget. I never read the book; my ex was a fan, and he used to say that all the time.”
“Do you think I should be worried about assassination?”
Kai sat on the table, and crossed her legs. “You tell me.”
“The funny thing about never sitting with your back to the door is that it leaves you with your back to the window.” She turned to face Kai, and leaned against the window glass. Kai’s heart and stomach swapped places; the glass was so clear as to seem nonexistent. Deep in Kai’s brain a vestigial monkey insisted Abernathy was about to fall. “Do you expect greater danger from within, or without?”
“You’re being cryptic, Ms. Abernathy.” Then again, Kai did not know who else might be listening.
“We’re on the same side here.” Abernathy snapped her fingers. Shadow rolled from the glyphs cut into her skin. The world grayed, quaked, stabilized. She’d inked, Kai saw now, thin Craft circles on the conference room’s walls, ceiling, and floor, each design bridged by an arc of moonlight. “Or at least, on similar sides. We can speak freely. The squids may notice they can’t listen in, but if they break the ward, I’ll know.”
“Nice trick.” Kai tapped her nails on the table. “In what sense are we on the same side?”
“You want your sister safe. You want to know what’s going on here. So do I.”
“You’ll forgive my skepticism, Ms. Abernathy.”
“Call me Tara.”
Kai waited, and so did the Craftswoman. “Tara,” she said, in the end. “You’re working with Bescond, but you don’t trust her. You’re not from around here, and you’re not certain you can rein Bescond in if she does—whatever she wanted to do to me last night before Fontaine showed up.”
The Craftswoman’s hand tensed on her jacket sleeve. Watching her, Kai remembered the overwound watch and the straining mainspring, and thought about traveler’s tales of still mountain mornings after heavy snow, when a song could break white cliffs to avalanche. “I can’t say much.”
“Likewise.”
“Alt Coulumb is collaborating with the Iskari Demesne. We”—she smiled in self-mockery when she said that word, and Kai felt a stab of affection for her for that—“have our differences, but we’ve been allies. We reached out to the Iskari for help with an important project; they were working on something similar, and offered to bring us on board if we helped them with financing. I just came to town a couple weeks back to observe the final stages. But the project can’t move forward without the woman your sister, let’s say, stole. This”—she pointed over her shoulder with her thumb at the cracked city and the throbbing tower—“is new to me. I want Vane back, alive, soon. I don’t care whether your sister’s brought to justice. Bescond’s a loyal officer with a limited vision, and she wants Ley caught. But we might be able to work together—you and I, I mean.”
“You just told me you don’t care what happens to my sister.”
“I told you,” Abernathy said, “I don’t care whether she’s
brought to justice.” That word, too, seemed to amuse her. “I don’t know your sister well, though, having met Vane, I sympathize with a desire to stab her. You want your sister safe. I want Vane. I think we can cooperate.”
“Can I trust you? You didn’t speak up for me last night.”
“If I put Bescond on the spot, she would have doubled down. I would have freed you somehow. But you don’t have proof of that, so for now, I can only say: I’m sorry.”
“And you can’t tell me why you’re here,” she said. “Maybe we’re not necessarily on opposite sides, but we’re not on the same side, either. I need to find my sister and get her out of this mess. Your project, her Concern, this city—none of that matters to me. The way I see it, my best play is to thank you for your time and walk out that door.” She stood. “Are we done?”
Abernathy pushed herself off the window, and Kai’s stomach lurched again. The Craftswoman moved, and stood, like a woman who was not afraid to fall. She held a business card she hadn’t held before. Had she produced it with Craftwork, or sleight of hand?
Sometimes Kai wondered about the difference between the two.
Kai drew back. “No way. I’ve worked with Craftswomen before. I take that, and you can listen in on my conversations, or track me, or gods know what.”
Tara laughed. “Not my plan.” The card disappeared anyway. “But I’d rather not make you nervous. If you change your mind, find me. I room at the Temple of All Gods, Eastridge, near the Cleft. Cascade Street. I’m there most nights after ten, and mornings before seven. The longer you wait, the less I can help.”
“I’ll take that risk,” Kai said, and left.
Chapter Twenty
ZEDDIG LED THEM THROUGH the slough tunnels into Gavreaux Junction, dodging scavenger lice, and they waited in the high ductwork for their chance. The eleven-thirty freight from Garde du Leon arrived on time—vents opened and supercooled toxic slush flooded in. The blue-green liquid gurgled below, extruding pseudopods that lashed tunnel walls but found no grip on the laminated stone. Clinging to hydraulic tubes twenty feet above the rushing current, Zeddig and Ley and Gal and Raymet breathed through masks.
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