Who raised one eyebrow, unconcerned. Her glyphwork slept beneath her suit. There was no starlight here, and the Courts of Craft held little claim on the Wastes. Yet Tara seemed at ease. Trusting—
Oh.
Trusting Kai.
Kai pondered her options.
First: leave—let Bescond chase Ley alone, and fail. At first. Ley was smart, but no one stayed smart forever. People slept. They drank. They trusted. They fell. If Ley ran to the corners of the globe, if she hid in some demon dimension, the Iskari would find her sooner or later, and the blade would fall.
So: option two.
A minor betrayal for a good cause.
Kai wanted to lick her lips, but did not. To sell, you projected confidence, and this was a kind of sale. “Lieutenant. You want Ley’s knife.”
“Yes.”
“You want it more than you want her.”
Bescond waited.
“I want to help Ley. I want you off her back.”
“Why should I care?” Bescond asked.
Don’t let your voice shake. Don’t show weakness. You have to convince her you’re an equal, dealing from a position of strength—not a woman alone in a desert, flanked by enemies.
“Because,” Kai said, “I can lead you to her.”
Chapter Forty-six
“GODS,” ZEDDIG SAID AS Ley led them through the Wastes, “are stories people tell. The Hidden Schools claim gods evolved with us. We order the world in our minds, and our stories gather strength and power. Through them we become more than meat, and through us they become more than wind. Faiths are eyes through which we know the world. Gods and goddesses sing ourselves back to us through time.”
They walked over bodies, and waded through slush rivers of rainbow blood. Ley, in the lead, consulted her maps and devices. The landscape twitched and rolled as she prodded it. They climbed the cleft between fingers of a giant hand, pitons gouging frozen flesh, and when they reached the summit the Altus tower had vanished; Ley knelt on a goddess’s onyx brow, removed a stopper from a glass tube on her bandolier, and let one measured drop fall. The goddess’s skin flushed and softened, the landscape quaked, and the tower emerged again from the sky, like clear glass immersed in water rendered visible by a shift in light. Ley stood. An eye the size of a hill blinked, and its tremor knocked Izza to the thawing skin; she regained her balance as the goddess froze again, her lashes icicles piercing skyward.
Isaak was praying. Zeddig glared at him. “Stop, please. We have enough trouble without drawing their attention.”
Claw by claw, Isaak released the blue stone. Raymet, crouched, stared through the icicle lashes into the depths of the eye. Gal set a hand on her shoulder; she reached up, about to push the hand away, but stopped.
Ley marched on, and they followed her.
* * *
Wreckers leapt from the train to land soundlessly in desert frost. They fanned out into a semicircle bordering train tracks. Tentacles lashed out from their robes, binding each to each, and within their perimeter and for some distance beyond, the ground stilled and settled and was only sand.
“Watch the sand,” Bescond said. “It’s safer. The things out there—” She shuddered. “Horrifying. And hungry. They’d like you.”
“I’m used to gods,” Kai said.
“That’s exactly what I mean, Ms. Pohala. You’re used to believing in many things at once. That’s a bad habit. It makes room. If these things get inside you, they’ll tear you to pieces. Watch the sand.”
Kai glanced to Tara, but the Craftswoman hid any shock or awe or disgust behind a cool Craftswoman’s façade. They must teach the art of that in the Hidden Schools—to see the world not as a wonder or a horror or even a place, but as a threat to manage and a resource to exploit. Glyphs burned beneath Tara’s clothes. “We should get going.”
“By all means.” Bescond gestured. Long ropelike arms emerged from the robes of the Wreckers still aboard the train, wound together like vines, forming a ladder down to the sand.
Bescond stepped onto the ladder without checking to see if it would hold her. Her boots squelched on gray skin, and she gripped a tentacle railing with one gloved hand. She grinned. Showing off, Kai thought: demonstrating comfort with the impossible, challenging them to keep up. Bescond’s afraid of Tara, afraid of the Wastes, maybe even afraid of me, but she can’t let us know. Remember that. We can use it, maybe. Somehow.
“Come, Ms. Pohala. You claim you can lead us to your sister? Well, time’s wasting.”
I’m not betraying my friend, she told herself. I’m saving my sister. Izza knows the plan.
Kai took a breath, grabbed the wet length of—call it rope, that made it easier. She descended to the Wastes, and tried not to think about gods.
* * *
“In old Alikand,” Zeddig said, “things worked differently. You’ve heard stories.”
“The Angel’s City.” One epithet among many from childhood fireside tales.
“Two thousand years back, we had gods like any people. But we fought the Telomeri and their blood prophets, and they broke us. They shattered our palaces, burned our city, ate our gods. We scattered into the desert. We could not rebuild. What were we, without gods? When we prayed, the Telomeri smelled us, found us, killed us. They haunted our nights, and by day their soldiers came. So we wrote the names and stories down, and copied those books, and copied them again. A people, broken, will rebuild. Though a church is broken, faith remains. Souls hunger for order and direction. Reading stories, we found our gods again. But something strange happened.”
They skidded down the inside of a thigh, passed beneath an arch of teeth, climbed an esophageal cave, and emerged from the eye socket of a bird that, wings spread, would have been larger than most buildings Izza’d seen. Flowers of ice grew from dunes and opened snapdragon mouths. Grass razors snapped against their boots. The wind bore voices. Izza ignored them. She felt the bond between herself, and Zeddig, and Gal, and Ley, and Raymet, and Isaak—that silver wheel turning in her mind, Ley’s knife gathering and guarding them against the Wastes. She thought of her Lady, so far away. Was anything less like Kavekana than this emptiness?
She shivered.
Zeddig spoke as she walked, with a natural storyteller’s ease, and Izza listened, because to listen was easier than to walk alone in the quiet of her own mind, with no company but fear and those mad half-heard voices that filled her soul when she thought of the Blue Lady.
“We found our gods again, but each of us found them differently. Texts speak different truths to every woman, and contemplation refines those truths, frames the reader into something less than god and more than human: beings sprung from the same family as gods, but tinted with individual faith. If gods were light, these were the rainbows a prism cast. Godlings. Angels. A scholar, contemplating tales, becomes one—for a moment. If you gathered faith from family and friends, you could spread your wings longer. We framed ourselves within the tales we read, and became beings more and less than human. We were heroes. We fought. We won.”
Raymet snorted.
Zeddig glared at her, eyes glittering in the gap between her wool hat and her scarf. “I’m telling the truth.”
Raymet waved her down. “No, it’s cool. You’re telling the rah-rah version, is all. And you’re leaving the Iskari out.”
* * *
“We,” Bescond said, “should have let this place collapse.”
Within the circle of the Wreckers’ arms, desert sun burned the frost on the sand to steam. Within the Wrecker’s arms, they walked, sweating, over salt flats, and climbed dunes. Within the Wrecker’s arms, Tara glistened, and Kai carried her jacket over her shoulder, and Bescond’s face turned a cancerous blotchy pink. They walked, and from time to time Kai corrected their course, tracing her bond with Izza across the Wastes.
Bescond continued: “We’ve had a close, long-lasting relationship. Our great - great - grand - et - ceteras, back in the mists of time, fought the Telomeri together—their
empire pushed the old Iskari north to the Blightsea, killed our tribes one by one, flayed chieftains and hung them on trees for fuck’s sake, until, on the most godsforsaken jut of barren nowhere, we called to the sea, and the star kraken heard us.” She touched her chest, and no matter how used Kai had become to the sight of something wriggling beneath a believer’s shirt, she still flinched.
A great hand burst out of the ice before them. Wreckers leaped onto the hand, lassoing fingers thick as columns and breaking them apart. A cage of bones caught the Wreckers, but they shattered it. They moved quickly, and knew their business.
“What happened next was awesome, in the old-fashioned sense. We still remember it, some of us—my older sister has the family Lord, but mine’s only a tenth century bud, give or take, so I can’t dream that far back. But it’s a hell of a story: huge hairy blood-mad tribesmen swarming south, strangling the Telomeri in their own muck. We pushed them south, and south, allied with the real red - in - tooth - and - claw motherfuckers from Schwarzwald, the first Knights of Camlaan, and imagine our surprise when we found Alikand pushing the Telomeri north in turn, with their weird semi-divine militia. It wasn’t a proper religion—I suppose you’re the expert in this sort of thing, but I don’t think theirs counts. Tribal shamanism, a regression to a pre-pantheon era they dressed up as something new. But, fuck, they helped us beat the bloodsuckers, and said in no uncertain terms that we should get out and let them mind their own business. Which we did. Until, centuries later, it all went to shit. You can’t win for losing.”
* * *
“Let’s skip forward,” Zeddig said, as they rappelled down a shoulder blade, “to Maestre Gerhardt.”
“Oh,” Raymet cut in from overhead, “so that’s the plan. We gloss over, what, four different dynasties’ attempts to reform the pantheon, two conquests, three empires, the rise of the Scholastic Senate and the Fifty Families.”
“I’m trying to explain the Wastes.”
“I get it. Just tell the girl what she needs to know. Which is why you started two fucking millennia back.” Raymet let out her line, and skidded down past Zeddig to draw level with Izza. “Don’t let Zeddig’s ancien régime shit fool you. She and her family made out well in this story: if you had resources to gather a library, and train people who did nothing but study and pray and build souls all day, you had power, and used that power to get more. Interest compounds, when it has stable centuries to compound in. So, a hundred fifty years back, fifty families controlled the senate and university, and governed the rest of us on a don’t-upset-the-rabble basis. You wanted power, you learned to kneel, minored in groveling, and if they let you in the front door, you were a good girl, because if you licked the right boots one of your grandkids would have someone grovel to them someday.”
“Or,” Zeddig said, “you stole books, and used them without basic safety precautions.”
“See what I mean, kid? Three or four of your ancestors turn into giant city-smashing lizards, and the High Families never let you hear the end of it.”
They landed. Gal coiled the ropes into her pack; she’d carried the gear without slowing a step. Ley took a needle from her belt and tossed it into the air. It hovered, glowed, and twirled; a ray of light emerged, pointing straight ahead. They followed.
After a while, Izza asked: “How does Gerhardt fit?”
* * *
A dragon reared before them, icicle teeth gleaming from its maw. Spread wings birthed eddies of dust and snow. Its roar buckled Kai’s knees, but the Wreckers flowed forward and the dragon fell, melting, steaming, back to sand.
“Gerhardt spoiled everything,” Bescond said. “Ruined our relationship with Agdel Lex, destabilized two continents, even before the wars began in earnest.”
“Gerhardt,” Tara explained, “came to study angels. He developed his theories of power transfer in the Schwarzwald, but no pantheon would let him experiment. Alikand had been a port of call for scholars and merchants for centuries. Everyone came here: it was stable, beautiful, peaceful, and cultured, with expat communities and immigrants hailing from Dresediel Lex to the Shining Empire. Gerhardt and his followers fit right in. They taught philosophy and mathematics and applied theology, compared notes on their explorations of the hells, made and squandered fortunes in research. And they learned about angels.”
Bescond shook her head. “You’re making it out like what happened here was some grand unforeseeable tragedy. Gerhardt came to overthrow the city. We have his records in his own hand. He and his disciples stole knowledge from the High Families, traded that knowledge for power, and when they were ready, began to perform miracles. They drained the earth, made buildings fly, raised the dead. But everything they did had a cost: it burned the land and sky and human souls. So the High Families brought out their angels, and did what you’d expect—”
“They killed him,” Kai said. “I know this part.”
* * *
The light guided them up a long, steep shin. Gal passed out crampons, and helped them strap the spikes to their boots. “Don’t trip,” she said, “or you’ll slice your tendon and fall and die.”
“Thanks,” Izza said, without meaning it. Gal roped them together. Far up the cracked ledge, the tower waited. She felt seen. Of course: they were always watched here. “So,” she said, to Zeddig. “You were getting to the gods.”
“There was a fight. No one knows how it started.”
“Some of us have theories,” Raymet said, but stopped when Zeddig glared at her. “But no one really knows.”
“There was a fight, soon after the Taifa resurrection. The High Families got involved. Gerhardt fought back, and the more he fought, the more he drained the land, the more he broke the sky, the more he tore from his victims’ souls. The High Families sent flights of angels against Gerhardt’s followers, but the angels shattered, wave after wave. Some foreign gods joined the fray. Domyel of the Zur was the first to fall, and then it got worse. Gerhardt’s disciples scattered, fled to whatever universities and seminaries would harbor them, but their master stayed—and that was the beginning of the God Wars. Gerhardt slew gods and angels alike, but they don’t die easily. Drained of power, torn from their faithful, they hid in dumb matter. Desperate, they fused sand to glass and stranger forms, built labyrinths to hide within. Matter is not so comfortable as a mind, to a god. But they tried to take the story matter tells itself—I am a stone, I am sand, I am a river—and shelter there. So, in his rage, Gerhardt broke even those simpler stories. And here we are.”
* * *
“Gods,” Kai said, “in the sand.”
“Former gods,” Tara corrected. “And angels. The last gasp of a drowning man, reaching for a rope.”
Kai remembered her father, and sandcastles.
“These are . . . the nightmares of dying beings, feasting on one another, growing inside one another to burst from each others’ chests. They war against themselves, in this world Gerhardt wrecked. In his hunger, Gerhardt scraped away the . . . there’s a Waldan term for this, which in Kathic means thingness. He drained that from the Wastes—and when he began to die, he lost control.” Tara shrugged. “The God Wars left bigger scars on the world, but nothing this weird. Every few years the Hidden Schools petition to send an expedition here, to cut these things up and find out how they work, but the Iskari have never been keen on the idea.”
Bescond glanced back over her shoulder. “We’ve learned better than to let Craftsmen screw with Agdel Lex.” She stopped walking. “Now,” she said. “Kai. Which way?”
Kai listened, deeply, quietly. She did not look. She pointed, and they climbed.
* * *
One minute the spire towered atop the hill, and each step toward it bore them further back, as if they walked against a fierce current. Then, in a blink, Ley stood before a gate in a chain-link fence, and behind that fence lay a frost-crusted parking lot, a desiccated lawn, and a sixty-story glass needle that a sign identified as “Altus Industries, Beta Complex.”
; Ley slit the chain and padlock with her knife. Blinding sparks burst from severed links as she broke some Craft more durable than steel. She rolled the gate open.
“Frustrating,” Ley said, “is how I’d sum up the whole story. Heroism, grim last stands against adversity, and what’s left? A wasteland of orphan myths begging to serve anyone who will feed them—millions of voices that barely remember flesh, promising freedom and power and all sorts of things they think matter, if only you let them make you into something you aren’t. Myth taints even warded ground. So, out here, every time you cross a threshold, you get caught in some damn story.”
She demonstrated.
A frozen wind tore through the yard. Asphalt cracked and dirt flowed into a form. Dried grass twisted into hair. An abandoned rusted bench became teeth in a lion’s mouth. Boulders of ice were eyeballs glaring down, and frost wings spread and scattered light.
“Kneel,” the sphinx said in a voice so low Izza heard it in her stomach, “answer my riddles, and keep your lives.”
“No thanks,” Ley said, and reached for her belt.
The sphinx struck too fast for any of them to react. In one bite, she was gone.
Then the sphinx coughed, staggered, clutched its throat, and exploded into dust.
Ley landed on her feet.
She grinned to Zeddig. “I told you dragonheart was worth the trouble.” She brushed ice off her jacket. “Come on. We have a lot of stairs to climb.”
Chapter Forty-seven
SHE’S USING YOU.
Zeddig heard the knife’s voice as she crossed the Wastes, beneath the tale she told to block it out, beneath the glacial creak and crumble of the shifting gods upon whose skin they walked, beneath the wind and the whispers that wind bore as near-dead beings begged her to believe.
She’s using you.
Ley forged a path through the changing land, deployed her tricks and tools to find the Altus tower. She had never looked sexier than standing wind-bitten and defiant, consulting her map, one foot propped on snowbank, small gods’ faces forming in the steam of her breath.
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