“The Iskari will notice a job this big,” Ley said.
“Certainly. They’ve baked their fingers into oh so many pies.” He peeled off the nail, dropped it to the floor, and crushed it with his heel. Zeddig didn’t let herself feel nauseous. “But I mentioned greasing palms before: the added cargo will more than cover the added protection money. Don’t worry. Everything will come out fine.” There was a question in his face, if not his voice, as he looked first at Ley, then Zeddig. The boot-stomp rhythm behind them quickened. Men screamed: numbers, bets, a name. Someone enormous roared, and there was a loud crack, and cheers, and the sort of whimper a mountain might have.
“Fine,” Zeddig said. Ley said nothing.
“Excellent. Now, if that’s all?”
Back in the billiards room, the crowd had gathered in a U around a small table near the far wall. They broke, unevenly, as Zeddig approached, big men and living weapons alike chuckling or dismayed. Raymet moved among them, grinning, collecting coins in her hat. Gal sat at the table across from an enormous armor-plated man with cat slit eyes, who wept lava tears. Gal’s hands glowed, faint but noticeable in the dim room, as she smoothed the armor-plated man’s ulna back into place, melding his snapped bone. She’d rolled up her sleeves, and looked radiant with triumph.
“Would you care to try for best two out of three?” she asked.
* * *
“We can’t trust him,” Ley said, later, in a bar, over whiskey Raymet had bought with the proceeds from her turn as bookie for Gal’s arm wrestling match. “He will betray us. We have to be ready.”
“If you have any ideas,” Raymet said, around a chicken wing, “go ahead.”
Gal did not exactly hide her skepticism as she raised her shot of whiskey, but when she drank, her eyes popped open. She sagged back into her chair with a distant, glazed expression.
Raymet grinned. “Good, right?”
“Raymet, is this some sort of solvent?”
“A drop of water opens up the taste a little.”
“He’s not unknowable,” Zeddig said. “He has ideas and goals. He just plays his cards close to his chest. That doesn’t sound like anyone I know.”
Ley smiled a cheerful fuck-you sort of smile.
“We cut and run,” Zeddig said, “once he has the cargo.”
“He has your marker.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“We’re all in this together.” Ley slammed back the whiskey, ignoring Raymet’s wince. “I’ll handle it.”
“You don’t know this guy.”
“And he doesn’t know me. So he won’t know what to expect,” Ley said. “Now. Cigars?”
Chapter Thirty-two
AFTER THREE DAYS IN Agdel Lex, Kai was not surprised when Tara’s address proved more vague than the word “address” might suggest. The cab driver dropped them off on a sidewalk before sunrise, but his directions wrinkled even Izza’s forehead. He buzzed his tongue to his horse and drove away as soon as Kai paid him, before she had time to ask for another pass, slower this time, with compassion for foreigners whose grasp of the language fell short of colloquial. She raised her hand to call him back, but Izza caught her wrist. “I know where we’re going.” Izza’s determined expression did not reassure—she knew where she was doing, what need for determination?—and marched into the alley.
The sun wasn’t yet up, but the district lived. Kids hung laundry from lines. Dough hissed and eggs scrambled in the frying pans of sidewalk chefs. Men and women dressed for business downtown, wearing Iskari cuffs and dark gray suits, they poured themselves earthenware mugs of thick sweet milky tea and leaned against walls near food carts waiting for their breakfast to clear the pan. Kai followed Izza through the streets. Izza turned, glowered, turned again, doubled back. At last, she shrugged. “Can I borrow a few thaums?” Kai passed them to her; she walked up to a coffee seller, and returned with a small cup of dark bitter coffee and directions. “See? No problem.”
Kai memorized turns: a left and a right, followed by a slight right down that side street that looked like a dead end, followed by a hairpin-tight turn, but she suspected that if she retraced her steps she’d find herself somewhere else entirely. Izza’s stops for directions seemed to matter more than the cross streets. So Kai recorded the path that way instead: straight on past the coffee, right at a flaky butter pastry sweetened with honey and sesame seeds, left at a thin pancake folded around a fried cracker and eggs and sprigs of something almost vegetable. “Is it like you remember?”
“Mostly,” Izza said, and “too much.”
“You seem at home.”
“I speak the language,” she said around bites of pancake. “But this isn’t home. It never was. And I left.”
“Because of Gavreaux Junction?”
“That. And—look. The people who grew up here, who’ve been here hundreds of years, all these folk—” She waved vaguely at the kids in the upstairs windows, at the women and men shuffling downhill toward the boulevards. “They keep their secrets, because they have to. They live with that big red Iskari dick on the horizon, so they close up. All these handshakes, the streets with names that change, the shifting map, they’re walls. On the one hand, keeps the Wreckers out. On the other hand, when half the Gleb’s at war, and people run from that and end up here, they don’t know the handshakes. They’re stuck in the Iskari city, which has no place for them, because as far as the Iskari are concerned, refugees bring the war along. The locals and the squids carry on their cold war, and there’s little room left for us.”
“Charity?”
“A few groups help out. Not enough, though, and the Iskari run most of those, so it’s hard to get help if you don’t want a squid in your head.” She shook her head. “It’s crime or the streets, and when the Iskari make it a crime to sleep on the streets, it’s easy to prove people like me are menaces to society.” She finished the pancake and licked her fingers. “Good food here, though.”
“Gods.” Kai made herself walk with the weight of that.
“There were charities,” she said, almost embarrassed. “The temple was one of the less shit, because our people founded it—priests from down south mostly, last faithful of dying gods and goddesses. They ran a soup kitchen by the docks, healing those as needed. I broke my leg in a riot when I was ten, and I made it up here in the middle of the night, with a stick for a crutch. If not for them, I’d still have a limp.” She wadded the wax paper that had held the pancake, and tossed it into a trash bin. “Should be around this next corner. You’ll like the place. It’s not posh like you’re used to, they gave away all the grace they could spare, but they made it comfy. Kept it up. Tended gardens. Nice wall hangings, good wood, good leather. Beats me why Abernathy’s staying with them. Maybe some sort of show of good faith from Alt Coulumb.”
Then they rounded the corner and found the ruin.
They’d been climbing the ridge for a while. Roads cut back and forth to disguise the slope, while houses grew narrower and streets wider. The Temple took up an entire block, squat, whitewashed, glass broken and narrow windows boarded up. Vines loving hands once tended now curtained the wall and widened cracks in plaster that bared abandoned rooms to scourging wind and rain. The front gate leaned, off its hinges, against the arch.
“Looks nice,” Kai said, then realized that was cruel.
Izza didn’t have words.
Kai waited in the sunlight. When she thought Izza was ready, she took her arm and, feeling no resistance, led her through.
They passed beneath the monochrome mosaic tiles that covered the arch, and emerged in a courtyard that once was beautiful. Vines strangled columns. Weeds choked flower beds. There had been—was still—a fountain in the courtyard’s center, a woman, seated, hands cupped above her head. Kai had seen this kind of fountain before: built not to vomit water, but to slick the statue glistening and transform stone to nobler substance. There was no water now, only soft green.
Tara Abernathy knelt in a plot of wee
ded earth, planting. She wore leather gloves, thick denim trousers, a sleeveless shirt, and a thin coating of sweat. The scars of her Craftwork glyphs barely showed. She worked, unhurried, seeds in one hand, spade in the other, folding each into the earth.
Kai hesitated. She did not want to interrupt. She recognized the way Abernathy moved, in the looseness of her shoulders. Whether the woman realized it or not, she was close to peace.
Abernathy sat back on her calves, wiped sweat from her eyes, and reached for a bottle of water wedged into the dirt. When she saw Kai, her movement hitched. She stood, leaving the water, and dusted off her hands. “Ms. Pohala. Good to see you. Sorry for my . . .” She gestured down. Kai saw nothing to apologize for.
“I didn’t see you as the gardening type,” she said.
“I’m not. I hated it growing up, whenever Ma made me help. We had so many fights about weeding and planting, planting and weeding. Have you ever gardened?”
“No.”
Abernathy removed her gloves from the fingertips, like a surgeon. “Start with a prepared plot, and you’re golden. Start with grass, like we did, and you’re in for a heavy summer, weeding and more weeding, and more weeding after. Soil’s wild. It does not care what you want. This is in between, a once-tended plot gone to seed. The owners are putting me up; the least I can do is help them recover. I hated this so much when I was a kid, but now it’s almost restful.”
“Almost” sold the feeling short, Kai could tell, but then, there was probably only so much Abernathy could admit she liked weeding. “This place has owners?”
“It did,” Abernathy said. “Ran into credit trouble a couple years back. We’re helping get them on their feet. I didn’t expect to put in this much elbow grease, but I should spend more time in the gym anyway. Now. Why are you here?”
Kai glanced to her side, to introduce Izza—but the girl was gone. Of course. Sapphire laughter rolled from deep pools in the caverns of her mind. Izza had brought her this far. The rest was up to Kai. “I don’t want to know your secrets. I don’t care about Bescond’s project. I want to keep my sister safe.” And keep an eye on you. Until I come up with a better idea.
“I can work with that.” Abernathy extended her hand.
Kai, uncertain, shook. Abernathy’s hands were strong, and her fingers and thumb callused smooth where they would grip a knife.
Chapter Thirty-three
IZZA WANDERED THE WRECKAGE of the Temple of All Gods.
She had disappeared to let Kai talk with Abernathy in private, and to preserve her anonymity—the less she had to do with the squids and their allies the better. But the ruined temple raised questions. Yes, the world’s glories passed, as the opera said, even such shabby glories as the Temple of All Gods once possessed. But this was too much passing, too fast. So she slid away, stepped softly, and trusted the Lady to guide her feet.
The stairs beside the front door bore her weight. Dust and mold had claimed the second level, the walkway that ringed the courtyard. Izza crept along the balcony, crouched low in case Abernathy should look up, or Kai. She haunted the temple like a proper ghost.
She hadn’t told Kai the whole story.
After Gavreaux Junction, ten years old and stinking of burnt meat, Izza had forced herself, limping on improvised crutch, crawling sometimes, up these alleys, past blind shuttered windows, to this courtyard, under a sky city lights boiled free of stars. Cots lined the temple’s garden rows. Burnt men and women screamed. The crutch broke a block away; she remembered falling, the white of bone through her shin, remembered a calm face and a healing touch.
The Blue Lady’s little church—she still felt weird when she used that word—was growing now, on Kavekana. Street kids told Lady stories to other kids. They came to Izza sometimes, asking which story was right and which wrong, and she, scared by what saying “wrong” would make her, guided the stories that did not fit her goddess into ones that did. She made new rituals and upheld the old. Two years had passed since they last mourned a god. They rescued kids from Penitents. Someday it would end, of course, in fire, or a knife across her throat, or with Craftsmen’s demon chariots in the sky. She didn’t have any illusions about what the world did to people who tried what she was trying. But she might as well build with passion, and enjoy the building while it lasted. What other choice did she have? Shivering in some godsforsaken corner until the world tore itself to shreds anyway? Because doom came. It found you wherever you ran. She knew that as well as anyone.
In the back of her mind she had always hoped that before the fall, before the world ended in fire, she might come back here to the temple, thank its priests, and apologize.
Hard to thank rotted sheets and walls purpling with fungus.
But as she worked around to the courtyard, the building’s condition improved. Someone had swept this wing, polished this bannister. This was more work than Abernathy could do alone and Craftless in the early morning hours before she sidled off to whatever Iskari office she was hot-desking—and she had used little Craft here. Sorcery would have killed the garden.
Izza smelled incense, and crept faster.
In those hungry painful nights, there had been a room atop the stairs in the rear of the courtyard, private to the priests for prayer and whatever little shines they kept for their gods. Half-starved and desperate, Izza had dreamed of that room: tapestries in cloth of gold and silver, candelabras everywhere, lush velvet furniture, statues of gods carved in ivory and dragonbone and lapis. Wealth she longed to steal.
Be honest with yourself, Izza: wealth you tried to steal.
The night after old Hasim healed her leg, she woke from fever dreams around three in the morning. She lay between a stand of squash and a bed of improbably large sunflowers, next to an enormous man who groaned in his sleep and tossed against the gentle bonds that held him down, opening new cracks in the salve-slathered ruin of his skin. She’d tiptoed through the maze of wounded, testing the strength of her regrown leg, marveling at the speed with which her traitor memory papered over the pants-pissing pain of bone splinters worming back through muscle to their proper place, of muscles reweaving and skin becoming skin again. How strange that, after just a few hours, she could revisit those memories without vomiting.
Still she could not trust her healed leg, so she had leaned against the wall to climb to the second floor, and limped to where they kept the treasures.
It didn’t look fancy from outside: just a door no one could enter without a god or goddess at their back. But Izza knew how to steal by then, even from churches. She had learned her tricks against the Iskari, and tried them that night. The door wouldn’t open.
She believed—she tried to believe—in something, the way she’d believed in the pain of her leg. It didn’t matter what. That was the trick of lockpicking: you let the lock teach you. You became what it needed, whatever would get you inside, so you could grab what you needed in turn and run, farther than anyone ever ran before.
On that choked smoky night the lock unlocked at last, and young Izza felt a stab of streetwise triumph—only to fall forward into the robe of the tall man who’d opened the door. She looked up, and up, and saw Doctor Hasim: the same thin face that had soothed her in the screaming depths of healing. Hasim, confused. Disappointed.
She fled, on the new leg he’d given her.
Now, older, a priestess in her own right, she approached the door. The balcony was clean. Someone had swept the stair. Here the sandalwood smell was strongest.
She set a hand to the door, and called on the Lady. Something cool and strong slid from her into the wood, and the door opened.
The room within did not glitter.
She saw no cloth of gold, no statues, no scriptures illuminated in ink of crushed jewels, no sign anything so rich ever occupied this dark spare space. She had conjured the temple’s treasures from dark corners of her own mind. She saw a low table, two men seated, a bowl in the table’s center, water in the bowl, and flame dancing on the surface of the wat
er. The man facing her was enormous and tawny and muscled, hair short, beard dark; when she opened the door his eyes opened too, and she almost fled. But before she could, and before the big man could move, the other raised one hand, and said, “Umar,” and the big man steadied.
She recognized that voice. She recognized the man now standing, slowly, with the table’s aid and consideration for his knees, though he’d grown older in seven years than seemed possible. There was gray in his beard, which he wore short now. “Come in,” he said. “We are not what once we were, but we offer what shelter we can. I am Doctor Hasim. This is Umar. What are you called?” The eyes at least had not changed: dark and keen and kind. He did not remember her. “Would you like to pray with us?”
She held herself on the step. Was that memory she’d carried with her all these years real, or a fever dream? How did you apologize to someone who did not know your fault? “I don’t share your gods.”
“No one does,” Hasim replied, softly. “Such is our calling. But you are welcome nonetheless.”
Chapter Thirty-four
KAI AND ABERNATHY RODE the peristaltic lift to the fortieth floor of the Rectification Authority tower. From within, the lift looked like any machine: metal doors, walls that did their best impression of anything that wasn’t a coffin, illuminated numbers ticking up. Simple, boring, normal. The muscular contractions that replaced cables, winches, and engines were so smooth Kai almost forgot she was being swallowed into the sky.
Abernathy stood beside her, calm, cool, collected, perfect image of a Craftswoman. The Tara Abernathy of the temple courtyard seemed impossible now—how human she had looked in undershirt and gardening gloves with sweat on her skin in the morning light, how made of blood and meat. Kai knew better than anyone that armor and office bound as they empowered: Penitents back home, Blacksuits in Abernathy’s own city, the Wreckers here, and of course the old Camlaander Knights, ecstatic in their servitude. Magic helped make people inhuman, but a shower and a change of clothes could have the same effect. Dressed like this, Abernathy was a being of edge and purpose. All that was soft, she hid.
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