“You’re trying to protect me,” Kai said. “You want me to get out before this sticks to my fingers.”
Tara did not reply.
“You wouldn’t, in my place.”
She stitched the incision above the breastbone closed. When she tied off the thread, it melted into skin. Tara removed her gloves, baring clean brown hands. She glanced at her watch. “It’s time for you to leave.”
“You’re an only child.”
Her eyes were dark and level. “What makes you say that?”
“My sister almost gave up everything to keep that knife from you. I have to know why.”
“Turn that wheel to your left.”
The iron wheel moved grudgingly at first, then faster. Kai heard a hiss and a knocking of pipes. A circle of floor beneath them began to rise.
The transparent membrane skylight unfolded like flower petals, and they passed through. Night plummeted above. Below, beyond, lay regimented Agdel Lex, its boulevard grids stretching from ridge to ridge, ghostlights aglitter, a geometer’s city singing the lifeless music of the spheres.
The moon hung overhead.
Tara raised one hand, and the sphere-music stilled. Glyphs burned on her skin; a black curtain spread from the tower, carving the land from heaven. The Iskari city vanished.
And the stars returned.
They came tentatively at first, easing into the dark like swimmers into a pool at dawn. There had been stars before, but not so many millions as now, and everywhere she looked, in that blooming blackness, more. A galactic streak silvered the center of the sky.
Tara Abernathy was smiling.
The Craftswoman raised both hands, and spoke a word that fell upon them like a weight, a word that was bell peal and hammer blow, and the stars went out. All the light there was, gathered into the blade that hung above the corpse, into the drop of blood at its heart.
The blade opened, and the drop fell, so large it contained oceans. It struck the body’s breast, splashed, and sank into the skin.
Blackness reigned, and silence.
A two-stroke rhythm sounded, and again.
Breath rasped through a dry throat.
Eyes of cold blue fire opened.
The stars came back, or else their faded remnants, and the city snapped to being below, its right angles and straight lines intact.
Alethea Vane lay on the slab. Her chest rose and fell. Her eyes, only blue now, not burning, stared up into the dark.
For a second, Kai thought Abernathy must have done it wrong. Vane was supposed to move, to swear, to speak. Kai had seen people woken from near-death before, and there was generally a lot of ugliness, flailing like a landed fish, cursing and spitting and crying. Vane’s soul must not have meshed with the body right. Perhaps she was trapped within that skull even now, screaming without a mouth to scream.
Then Vane sat up, swung her legs over the side, stood, and said, “What took you so long?”
Chapter Fifty-five
THE QUAKE KNOCKED RAYMET out of a pleasantly intricate whips - and - chains - and - suspension sort of dream onto her cell floor in the Wrecker tower across the hall from Gal. Collapsed, cursing in Talbeg on the disturbingly warm chitin, she remembered that everything was quite fucked indeed. And not in the good way.
At least she wasn’t alone.
Gal didn’t seem concerned. She knelt behind bars in her own cell, radiant as ever, hands limp on her thighs, back straight, infuriatingly composed, serene, even, while this enormous stupid squid building trembled, as though debating whether to obey physics for once and collapse. Raymet rolled under her bunk for shelter, though that wouldn’t help. At least the cell didn’t have anything loose that might tumble down and kill her. No, if she died in a squidquake, it would be from a falling ceiling, from walls deciding they didn’t want to be walls anymore and mashing her to pulp.
“No need to fear,” Gal said. “It’s not a real quake. Just Craftwork tremors—a resurrection, probably. Not nearly strong enough to hurt our host.”
She stared at the underside of her bunk. Someone had scrawled a few lines of Imperial verse here, something about willows, as if willows grew anywhere near Agdel Lex. “Anything we can use?”
“I don’t understand.”
The tremor stilled. She rolled back to her feet and tested the cage bars—some kind of bone or horn. “To get out of here.” The bars did not budge. She planted her feet and pulled until her shoulders hurt and her grip gave and she fell back to the floor, but the bars stood strong as any metal. “Escape while they’re distracted. You don’t have a lock pick or something, do you? If I can get this door open . . .”
“Why should we escape?”
There had to be loose metal somewhere. Raymet checked the bed—no springs. Checked corners, shelves, with as little luck. “What do you mean, why?”
“I have been taken in battle. Attempted escape would be dishonorable.”
“What?”
Gal hadn’t moved, but her eyes were open now. If she had been, in fact, a statue, one small enough to heft, Raymet would have thrown her across the room.
“This is a hell of a time to care about the law.”
“This is the first time I have been taken in battle. They will contact my Queen for ransom, I expect, but she will disavow all knowledge of my activities, as is our custom. But, having been legitimately detained, I will not disgrace my order by attempting escape.”
“The Wreckers will kill you. Or break you.”
“They will not succeed at the second task,” Gal said. If they succeed at the first, they will have honored my vow.”
Raymet swore in Talbeg. She paced the cell. She kicked each wall twice, the first time because she wanted to, the second time because she still did. She glared across the aisle. “You get why we’re in cells near one another, right? They want to play us against one another. They’ll drag us out, one by one, and when they bring us back, we’ll neither one know what the other said. Whether we broke.”
“Reasonable strategy.”
“That’s a godsdamn strange perspective for someone about to be tortured.”
“It is not the proper way to treat a prisoner of war,” she said, “but, as I will be disavowed by the Queen, they have no reason to regard me as such.”
“It’s a fucked-up way to treat anyone,” Raymet said. “Prisoner of war or not.”
“Of course.”
“So we should get out of here.”
Gal said nothing.
“You won’t even try?”
Still nothing.
“I came back for you, Gal.”
“Why?”
Raymet, pacing, froze. Whirled on the woman in the cell across from her. Inhaled molten lead, and breathed out plasma. Gal knelt there, you could have gilded her and stuck her on a Camlaander cathedral just as is, the holy fool in her natural habitat. Pure curiosity on that perfect face, head cocked at angle. Like she’d sprung full-blown, navel-less, from some tyrant god’s brow, innocent of everything.
The way she looked at life made tangles seem simple. In Raymet’s head the world was four cats drowning in a sack, options and might-have-beens tearing each other bloody, ancient fears and unspoken needs and just-this-once ethical exceptions, and don’t forget the lusts, all yowling in panic as black water seeped in. Against that, contrast Gal, who kept her code, who did what she could and never seemed to blame herself when what she could wasn’t good enough, who sat there as ready to meet torture and pain as she was to meet the dawn.
None of this was new. Gal lived this way even in the weeks when she never drew her sword. Raymet remembered her, holding her head over the toilet as she vomited out poison. Remembered Gal’s touch in fever dreams. Gal’s hand extended as she climbed the ladder. Gal’s weight beside her as she panted, scared, crushed by the horizon and the mass of open sky. Gal, fighting monsters in the dead city. Gal, who could shatter steel with a punch, and lived so gently. Gal, who needed nothing, while Raymet needed so much.
The question hung between them.
Raymet couldn’t bear to look anymore. She turned to face the wall, lay on her bunk, pulled the hairshirt blanket over her, and cursed herself to sleep.
Chapter Fifty-six
NAKEDNESS IS A STATE of mind, and states of mind differ from culture to culture, religion to religion—even from sibling to sibling. Hidden Schools sociologists survey this sort of thing, as they survey every sort of thing, and trace patterns of nudity across cities and classes. Some peoples have a kink of bare skin, though if we asked people from those groups they wouldn’t likely accept the word “kink” in this context. “Complex” might raise fewer hackles: a nub of interrelated concepts, tying, say, nudity to vulnerability, and vulnerability to any number of other concerns depending on local constructs of power, gender, sexuality, and, more than most tend to admit, property and inheritance. Another person, in another place, might see nakedness as power: the greatest heroes stride into battle bare, and gods are depicted always in radiant nude.
The person stands unclothed, however we react. “Reality” does not change, but then, what’s reality? Clearly not the information our limited senses report, subject to hallucination and mistake. One idea, with which philosophers would argue: we can regard something as real if perception of it does not vary—if, say, at least two independent observers perceive a phenomenon and agree on what they perceive. But to agree we must communicate. So, if our two observers differ about what nakedness means, how can they say whether someone is, really, naked?
Though Alethea Vane stood bare-skinned in starlight atop the Rectification Authority Tower, so pale her skin flushed blue, Kai could not call her naked. Vane glanced from Tara to Kai, waiting for an answer to her hanging question—what took you so long?—and, finding none, reviewed her limbs and scars, old and new, without concern, a general gauging battle-readiness without trace of sentimentality. Naked or not, she seemed more comfortable in her skin than anyone Kai had ever known.
“Good,” Vane said, then struck her chest, bent over coughing, and spit over the platform edge onto the tower. “Good,” her pitch higher now. “Fine.” She sang a high pealing note that swept down to low registers. She touched her toes and bent her back. Kai expected pops and cracks, and heard none. “Thank you, Ms. Abernathy. Competently done, even absent a living will. I’m pleased to detect a heartbeat.” The platform sank back into the tower. Membranes folded to close out the chill night air.
“You should be fully functional,” Tara said. “We reached the body in time.” Her tone of voice left some doubt as to whether this was a happy chance or a regrettable oversight. “Welcome back.”
“I always wondered why more Craftswomen didn’t shed their bodies altogether.” Vane raised her hands and stood on tiptoe, as if being pulled up by an invisible rope. Muscles in her back lengthened. Stars and shadows and reddish tower light created an interesting topology on her skin. “Now I know. Damned impossible to get anything done without one. You have no idea the repetitive nonsense conversations I’ve sat through, the moralizing! I didn’t even have a sense of time—had to borrow that from my interlocutors. Most would be driven mad. I have to say, I’m impressed with our Ley. I never thought she’d have it in her—but, hm.” She turned back to Kai and examined her, utterly still, with raptor focus.
“The sister,” she said.
Kai didn’t see her move. Perhaps it was the stillness of that gaze, perhaps the evenness of the voice, perhaps the speed of the motion, but one second Kai was standing and the next she lay on her back on the dais, head ringing from impact, Vane’s weight settling against her belly, forcing her breath shallow, Vane’s hand on her throat, not squeezing, not crushing, just there, mastering her. Vane’s teeth flashed white: Kai thought vampire for a panicked instant, as she brought her hands up to fight, tensed her legs to buck—
Black lightning split the red tower, and Vane flew back, spread-eagled in the air, still not precisely naked.
“Come on,” Vane said. “I was mostly dead. Don’t I get at least a taste of vengeance?”
“Kai,” Tara replied, “is not liable for her sister’s actions.”
“Liability is beside the point, Ms. Abernathy. I want to hurt Ley, and her sister’s available.”
Kai sat up, feeling her neck, numb with disbelief. There had been no fangs in that mouth, and the woman hadn’t moved with inhuman speed: she’d just decided she wanted to do the thing, then did it without hesitation. “Fuck you.”
“Hardly.”
“I saved your life,” Kai said. “Ley would be happy if you hurt me.”
“Would she?” Vane relaxed into the sorcerous bonds that held her, pleading, physically, no contest. “Kai, isn’t it? You’ve never slept with your sister, I imagine.”
“What?”
“You have no idea what sort of tight-wound spring you helped create there. She ran around the world to escape your shadow, because she couldn’t make something worth you. Half her stories start with, one time, my sister. It makes a certain kind of funhouse mirror sense that you wouldn’t know this. But never doubt: I could hurt her through you.”
“Kai,” Tara said, “helped steal you back. You’re alive because of her. She’s under Iskari protection, and mine.”
Vane’s blinked. “Really?”
“Without me,” Kai said, feeling her throat, “you’d still be stuck inside that knife.”
“Well.” Drawn out like a cat’s whine. She grinned. “That must have hurt her delightfully—you, too. Please let me down, Ms. Abernathy. I won’t hurt Ms. Pohala any more than she’s hurt herself. Swear to whatever you hold sacred. Choose a goddess or three, if it won’t offend your sensibilities. But much as I’d like to hang around, I have work.”
At Tara’s glance, Kai nodded permission; the Craftswoman snapped her fingers. Vane landed bent-legged on the floor, stood, brushed off her arms as if the sorcerous manacles had left dust, then marched to the dais and snatched the dagger free of its wire mounts. She tossed the knife in the air, watched it spin, satisfied, and caught the handle as it fell past her, without apparent concern for the blade. “Good. I must say, in spite of the violence done my person, I appreciate dear sweet Ley’s giving our project the ultimate test run.”
Kai glanced at Tara, and back to Vane. “What do you mean? What is that thing?”
Surprise wrinkled Vane’s forehead. “I would have thought she’d have told you, during her last-ditch play to buy the Concern out from under me.”
“She didn’t mention knives.”
“It’s not just a knife,” she said. “It’s a work of art.” She marched past Kai and Abernathy to the door. A lab coat hung on a hook beside the door; she swept it on like a cloak, buttoned it up the front, and paused. “Are you coming?”
Chapter Fifty-seven
LEY COLLAPSED AFTER MIDNIGHT, so Zeddig dragged her the rest of the way: rigged a harness from cord and coat, and pulled her, sweating and shivering, across the frozen sand beside the train tracks.
As they neared the wall, the Wastes chilled. Barbed-wire winds cut Zeddig’s cheeks. Her breath froze in tangles. In Agdel Lex, the tower loomed, imposing a dry reality, which at least would not try to kill them. But in Agdel Lex sentries waited on the wall, standing watch against invasion from the Wastes.
Whole, and alone, Zeddig could have gone around, risked the extra miles and a swim in the monster-swarmed Shield Sea. She could not take that route with Ley. And they didn’t have time to circle and catch the Apophis Local, either—the wards wouldn’t last the trip.
As they neared the wall, as its thousand-foot-high translucence loomed with Agdel Lex beyond, she stopped, knelt, and shook Ley’s shoulder. “Wake up.” Hung
ry ghosts and half gods gathered close; their hands played at Zeddig’s coat, their teeth tested her boots. Ley groaned. “I need you.”
Long lashes fluttered, and the eyes beneath, black, wet, beautiful, stared out. “What—” She couldn’t finish the sentence.
“I need you to listen.”
“You have—” She grunted. “A captive audience.”
“I need more than that. I need you to pay attention.”
“What do you mean?”
She’d spent the night thinking this through: pondering the knife, and the wall, and the rules of art and delving, but putting it all into words now left her feeling numb, imprecise. “The knife binds us together, you said. Without it, we fall apart, the ward fails, the Wastes roll in. If I tell you another story, if something else pulls us together, maybe the ward will last longer—long enough for us to slip into Alikand.”
Speaking that name out loud, the name of her secret winding city without walls, the hidden streets where Wreckers could not go, was harder than she expected, even here.
Ley’s eyes closed again, and Zeddig, afraid she’d gone back to sleep, reached for her again. “I’m still here,” Ley said. “I’m thinking.”
Cold wind blew.
“It might work,” Ley said. As if she were pondering a chess move of unorthodox strategy. “But it won’t last long.”
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