Tara gloried in the work. As her knife sang through dead flesh, she felt years of torment and the waking dream of Edgemont fade away. This was real, the acid-sharp scent of welded nerves, the soulstuff flowing through her hands, the corpses’ spasms as she worked her Craft upon them. Forgetting this, she had forgotten a piece of herself. She was complete again.
Which she couldn’t exactly explain to the torch-bearing mob.
Her cry when the Raiders’ curse struck must have tipped them off, or else the darkness that spread across the village as she twisted starfire and moonlight through the warp and weft of her mind to bring a mockery of life to the dead. Maybe it had been the thunder of reanimation, as of a tombstone falling from a gruesome height.
Also, she had cackled as the corpses woke beneath her: a full-throated belly laugh, a laugh to make the earth shake. Good form required a guffaw at death’s expense, though Professor Denovo always recommended his students practice discretion, perhaps for cases like this one.
“Raiders!” cried the front-most Edgemonter, a middle-aged wheat farmer with a round potbelly and the improbably heroic name of Roland DuChamp. Tara had settled his grandfather’s will for him a month before. He was mad now with the fury of a man confronting something he cannot understand. “Back for blood!”
It didn’t help that shadows still clung to Tara, shielding her from their sight. What the Edgemonters saw across the graveyard was monster more than woman, wreathed in starfire and night-made-flesh, save where her school glyphs glowed through in purest silver.
The townsfolk raised their weapons and advanced uneasily.
Tara put away her knife and extended her hands, trying to look friendly, or at least less threatening. She didn’t banish the shadows, though. Her return had been awkward enough for Mother and Father without bringing a torch-wielding mob down upon them. “I’m not here to hurt anyone.”
The corpses, of course, chose that moment to sit up, growl with unearthly voices, and clumsily brandish weapons in their skeletal hands.
The mob screamed. The corpses groaned. And streaking through the darkness came the five remaining watchmen of Edgemont, the power of their office drawn about them. Halos of white light surrounded the watch, granting them spectral armor and the strength of ten men. Tara backed away farther, glancing about for an avenue of escape.
The eldest watchman, Thom Baker, raised his spear and called out, “Stand, Raider!”
Three of his comrades fell upon her revenants and wrestled them down. Tara had done her work well; recognizing their friends, the corpses put up little resistance. The odds stood at two to one against her, and, as her father knew, she was no warrior.
At this stage, dropping her cloak of darkness and trying to explain might not have done any good. They had caught her raising the dead. Perhaps she was not Tara Abernathy after all, but something wearing Tara’s skin. They would cut off her head and move on to her family, make sure of the lot of them in one stroke. Justice would be swift, in the name of the Gods, fallen though most of them might be.
Tara was in trouble. The members of this mob were in no mood to discuss the valuable contribution her Craft could make to their lives. In their murmurs of anger and fear, she heard her doom.
A wind blew from the north, bearing cold and death.
Lightning split the clear night sky. Storm clouds boiled up from nothing, and torch-fires flickered and quailed. The glow from the watchmen’s armor dimmed, and Tara saw their true forms beneath: Thom Baker’s double chin and two-day stubble, Ned Thorpe’s freckles.
Thunder rolled and a woman appeared, hovering three feet above the ground, long white scarf flaring in the fierce breeze. She wore a dark, severe suit, with narrow white vertical stripes as if drawn by a fine brush. Her skin was pale, her hair iron gray, her eyes open black pits.
Her smile, on the other hand, was inviting. Even welcoming.
“You are about to attack my assistant,” she said in a voice that was soft, but carried, “who is helping your community for no fee but the satisfaction of working for the public good.”
Thom Baker tried to say something, but she interrupted him with a look.
“We are required elsewhere. Keep the zombies. You may need them.”
This time, Thom managed to form words: “Who are you?”
“Ah,” the floating woman said. She held out a hand. Between her first two fingers she clutched a small white rectangle of paper, a business card identical to the one in Tara’s pocket. Thom accepted the card gingerly as if it were coated in poison, and examined it with confusion. He had never seen paper before that was not in a schoolbook or a ledger.
“My name,” the woman continued, “is Elayne Kevarian. I am a partner in the firm of Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao.” Tara heard the Edgemonters’ feet shuffle in the silence that ensued. The corpses moaned again. “Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble with your new allies.”
“Allies?” Thom looked down at the revenants. “What are we supposed to do with them?”
“Keep them away from water,” she said. “They melt.”
Another gust of wind came, and Tara felt herself borne up on wings of night—up, and away.
They were ten miles outside of Edgemont when Ms. Kevarian addressed Tara for the first time that evening. “That was a nasty bit of incompetence, Ms. Abernathy. If we are to work together, I trust you will be more circumspect in the future.”
“You’re offering me a job.”
“Of course,” Ms. Kevarian said with a bemused smile. “Would you rather I return you to your fellow man?”
She looked back at the vanishing village lights, and shook her head. “Whatever you’re asking me to do, it has to be better than that.”
“You may be surprised.” They rose into clouds and thunder. “Our work keeps us a single step ahead of the mob. That’s all. If you let your ego rule your reason, you’ll find the villagers with pitchforks waiting, no matter how far you’ve traveled, no matter what you’ve done on their behalf.”
A determined smile spread across Tara’s face, despite the rebuke. Let Edgemont shake its torches; let the Hidden Schools rail and Professor Denovo fume. Tara Abernathy would live, and practice the Craft, in spite of them. “Yes, ma’am.”
*
It’s hard to read a codex in a storm, ten thousand feet in the air. The rain wasn’t a problem; Tara sheltered herself and her books beneath a large umbrella. But the umbrella did not stop the wind, and when one is flying through the sky on a platform of solid nothingness, there is quite a lot of wind.
“In conflicts of deothaumaturgical interest, equity proceeds according to a paradigm originally formalized in the seventeenth century by—”
Just as the sentence was about to mean something, a particularly vicious gust tore the page from her fingers and flipped it, revealing a line of black spindly letters beneath, which read, “Chapter Seven: Personal Default.”
She closed the book with a sigh and placed it on top of the stack. Near the bottom of the pile lay basic texts, tersely titled treatises the contents of which she had committed to memory years ago: Contracts, Remedies, Corpse. Atop them teetered more comprehensive works Ms. Kevarian had had borrowed from the library during their midnight pit stop in Chikal. Tara had planned to scan these during the flight, but they were too dense, relying on obscure tricks and arcane turns of theory she haltingly grasped back in school, but hadn’t reviewed since.
She glanced up at Elayne Kevarian—Boss, she reminded herself, with the capital letter—and thought better of asking for her help. Ms. Kevarian was busy driving. She hovered fifteen feet in front of Tara, head cocked back, arms outstretched, and gripped bolts of lightning as if they were the reins of the clouds. Gale winds blew her hair about like billowing smoke, and raindrops burst into steam before they could wet the wool of her gray pinstriped suit.
Below them fell the rain, and below that stretched miles and miles of farmland. In the four decades since the God Wars ended
, those farms and the villages dotted among them had recovered, prospered, and kept to themselves. Down there lived people who had never flown in their lives, never left their hometown, never seen another nation, let alone another continent. Tara had been one of them, once. No longer.
At that she felt a pang of guilt, and took from her shoulder bag a piece of parchment, a small writing board, and a quill pen.
She began the letter:
Dear Mother and Father,
I received an urgent job offer last night. I am excited by the opportunity, though I am sorry to leave home so soon. I intended to stay longer.
It was wonderful to see you both. The garden is coming along well, and the new schoolhouse looks like it will be even bigger and better than the last one.
Say good-bye and hello to Edgemont, and if you don’t mind, please bake some cookies for the chaplain and say they’re from me.…
*
It was too nice a morning for Al Cabot to die. The storm had passed in the night, leaving shredded clouds to catch red fire as the sun swelled on the horizon. Another bank of thunderheads approached on the western wind, but for the moment the sky was clear. Al stepped out into his rooftop garden, teacup in hand, and took a moment to breathe. According to his doctor he needed to take more of these, or he wouldn’t be around to breathe at all for much longer.
Al was a man grown nervously fat during a career of sitting behind a desk and shuffling from one poorly lit room to the next. He never had the time to sweat and acquire the hard-glazed muscles of a common road worker. He told his few friends that he had received the raw end of the deal, but nobody ever asked the road workers.
He savored the morning light, and with it a sip of nightshade tea—toxic to normal humans, but he was hardly normal anymore. Al was no Craftsman, but his occupation left its mark, like the coal miner’s dusty cough or the farmer’s crop-bent back. For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some of it crept into his bones.
It was almost over, though. His debts were nearly paid. Today he felt forty again, young and unburdened. His cares had passed with the storm, and once this last bit of business was complete he could stride into the dawn of his coming retirement.
His butler had left the morning’s pertinent mail on the table by the azaleas. Perusing the shallow stack, Al found a few professional notes and a letter from his son, David, who had left years ago to rebuild the world. Whole continents had been shattered in the God Wars, David proclaimed when he set off on his quest. So many nations and cities are less fortunate than we of Alt Coulumb, and we owe them aid.
Al had not approved. Words were said that could not easily be unsaid after one’s son shipped off to the Old World. Al tried to track him, making long and involved sacrifices to Kos and calling upon favors from priests and even from the Deathless Kings who frequented his chambers. All his efforts failed. Six months ago, however, David had returned on his own to propose a complex business deal, lucrative and good-hearted but of questionable legality. He remained an idealistic fool, and Al a standard-bearer of the old guard, but years of separation had taught them to avoid most of their habitual arguments. They were father and son, and they talked now. That was enough.
Al tapped the envelope, considered opening it, set it down. Wait. Start the day properly. He took a deep draught of tea, bitter and smoky and strangely sweet.
The azalea bush behind him rustled.
When the butler found his body forty-five minutes later, the strong, ruddy tea had spilled from his broken mug to mix with his blood. Al Cabot’s body had contained a great deal of blood indeed, most now spread in a drying, viscous puddle around the shredded remnants of his flesh. The spilled tea barely diluted it at all.
2
Shale recovered his senses soon after sunrise and discovered to his dismay that he was fleeing down a back alley, covered in blood. The sticky red fluid was everywhere—soaked into his clothes, drying in his hair. It dripped from his brow, rolled down his cheek into his mouth. Worst of all, it tasted good.
The blood wasn’t his most immediate problem. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw four black shadows with human shape, rough-featured as cave paintings, chasing him.
Blacksuits. Agents of Justice. The perfect police: you, a citizen, surrender your autonomy for one shift a day in exchange for a salary. Don a suit, and your mind is welded into the intricate network of Justice, seeking everywhere for criminals and enemies of the city. Justice patrols the streets and guards the populace. Justice is blind, but Justice sees all.
Justice was chasing him, implacable and tireless. It was only a matter of time before he faltered.
Goddess above, he was covered in blood. The last thing he remembered was climbing the façade of a tall building past immobile graven images of gargoyles toward a rooftop garden, to meet with Judge Cabot, the great fat man.
Another memory dawned out of rage-tinted mists: Cabot’s face, contorted in pain, screaming. Bleeding. Fire rolled in to consume Shale, consciousness fled him, and he had opened his eyes here.
If the Blacksuits were after him—omniscient Justice wondering no doubt how this apparently normal human could outlast her agents at a full sprint, ducking down side alleys and weaving between obstacles, there leaping a trash can, here climbing a chain-link fence in two massive pulls—if the Blacksuits were after him.… Was it possible he had lost his mind? Surely. Possible. If he had been betrayed.
Had he killed Cabot?
His mind recoiled from this prospect, but he couldn’t deny that a tiny part of him quickened in excitement at the thought of death. A tiny, desperate, hungry part.
Shit.
His people, his Flight, would know what to do, but they were hidden, and if he sought them, the Blacksuits would follow.
He needed a place of refuge, the last place they would look.
First, he had to evade pursuit. With stars set and the moon hidden in Hell, it was hard to change, but he had no other options. His heart beat faster, his nostrils flared. He stumbled forward, tripped, nearly face-planted onto the cobblestones. Smells and sounds rushed in to overwhelm him, muck and alley filth and the savory odor of fresh-fried dough from a street-side breakfast stand, the clatter of carriage wheels and the jingle of harness and the pounding of the Blacksuits’ feet. Sweet, transcendent power pulped his mind and turned his muscles into mush.
And transformed that mush to living rock.
The bones of his shoulders broke, warped, and became whole again. Wings of stone burst from his smooth granite back and fanned to taste the air. His jawbone swelled to anchor sharp and curved teeth. Frail, fleshy human hands and feet split and opened like tree buds in spring, his great talons flowering from within.
The world slowed.
He bounded forth faster than Blacksuits could follow, now on two legs, now on four, leaping from wall to wall, talons leaving deep grooves in stone. He did not have much strength left, but sweet Mother, he could run. He could fly.
He was bound once more for Al Cabot’s penthouse.
Behind him, the four Blacksuits stopped, their unearthly fluid motion transformed in an instant to the dead stillness of statues. They turned smooth, eyeless faces to one another, and if they conferred in some way that human beings could not hear, they gave no outward sign.
*
“Boss,” Tara asked when she woke and saw beneath her a rolling field of blue and green, “why are we over the ocean?”
Ms. Kevarian sat cross-legged in midair, the backs of her hands resting on her thighs, a meditating monk in a pinstriped suit. A corona of starfire clung to her skin, woven by her will into the platform that held them both aloft. Gone were the lightning and gale-force winds she had used to blow them across a continent. The air was clear and crisp, the sky the light purple of imminent dawn. Clouds loomed on the horizon.
“Why do you think?” Ms. Kevarian replied.
Tara opened her mouth to answer, closed it again, then said, “This is a test.”
“
Of course it’s a test. Reasonable people do not answer questions with further questions. I know from your performance at the Hidden Schools that I want to work with you, but I have not seen your logical abilities firsthand. I do not know whether to treat you as an assistant, or an associate. Show me.”
A seagull flew beneath them as Tara thought. It looked up, squawked in astonishment, and plunged into a dive toward the water.
“There’s only one answer that makes sense,” Tara said at last, “but a piece of the evidence doesn’t fit.”
Ms. Kevarian nodded. “Continue.”
“We’re not going to another continent. Or to an island. Judging from the books you had me borrow, we’ve been retained for a more extensive case than you’d get on some Skeld Archipelago god-haven. Definitely on our side of the ocean—the New World, liberated territory. We were traveling east, and now we’re traveling west, so we couldn’t simply land at our destination. We had to fly past and wheel back around. We must be bound to a place where flying is restricted. In other words, a city still ruled by gods. But…”
“Yes?”
“If we’re going to Alt Coulumb, why can’t I sense it from here?”
Ms. Kevarian waited, and watched the western horizon with black, unblinking eyes. Below, amid the swells and breakers, Tara saw huge ships, tiny as toys from this height. Some sported sails bowed out by captive winds, others spouted thick gouts of smoke. Red-and-black ironwood hulls glowed with wards wrought by diligent Craftsmen. These were no mere bedraggled merchant vessels laden with cut-rate goods. On this coast of the New World, only Alt Coulumb could attract such a fleet. Two-thirds of all cargo from the Old World across the eastern ocean passed through that city’s mighty port, from Iskar and Camlaan and the sweltering Gleb, from the regimented realm of King Clock and the icy wastes that bowed to Dread Koschei. Caravans and traders by the thousands bought the ships’ wares in their turn, wholesale, and bore them west, up river and over road, to the free cities of Northern Kath.
“Everything else makes sense.” Tara squinted at the ribbon of land visible beyond the ocean and beneath the high, threatening clouds, but could not see details from this distance. A few sharp peaks that might be the tips of skyscrapers, that was all. “The defenses to the Alt’s west, south, and north are strong enough to keep us out. They’re a trading and shipping power, though, so their ports have to be open. But if that’s the home of Kos Everburning, the last divine city in the New World, I should be able to feel something, and I’m drawing a blank. No soulstuff, no starshine, no faith, no aura. As if the whole place were dead.”
Three Parts Dead Page 2