“Those wounds,” Abelard said, pointing down. “Those are from the creatures you mentioned earlier? The maggots, the ghosts?”
“Yes.” Though they had been large as lakes when Tara and Abelard walked beside them, they were barely visible from this height. Little gouges, as if someone had taken a chisel to Kos’s flesh. “But those…” She indicated large round gaps in the god’s arm and leg and throat and chest, punctures from which no blood issued. “Those aren’t wounds.”
“They look awfully woundlike,” Abelard said.
“A defect of the system. You see there’s no blood around their edges, no sign of forced entry.” He blanched and wavered, but seemed to be handling this part well enough. “They’re patch points. When a god makes deals with other people, deities, or Craftsmen, they borrow his power, his blood, through those holes. Out when it’s paid out, and in when it returns, increased by the terms of the contract.” She frowned. “Here, it’s easier to see this way.”
She turned her hand, and glowing conduits of power coalesced about the gaping patch points. Blood coursed up half of them, tinted red, sluggish and reluctant, drawn by contracts stronger than iron now that it was no longer sent forth in a free rush by the ceaseless pulse of Kos’s divine will. Down the other conduits, blue-tinted blood returned, swift and pure.
“The red tubes send his power out into the world, and the blue tubes bring it back. More blood is going out than returning. You can see, even maintaining the current contracts costs your Church by draining away the little innate power that would defend Kos’s body against the maggots.”
“And you’ll what, fix it so Kos brings in more than He sends out? Restart His heart? Make Him live again?”
She considered lying. Abelard hadn’t asked for any of this. He wanted to be reassured, wanted to hear that yes, within a few weeks the madness would be over and Kos whole.
She considered it.
“The Craft doesn’t work that way,” she said.
He didn’t respond.
“We can make something from this body that will honor Kos’s obligations, but we will have to cut out other parts of him. Alt Coulumb will be warm this winter, and the trains will run on time. Gods and Craftsmen throughout the world will continue to draw on the power of Alt Coulumb’s fire-god, but the entity you call Kos is gone.”
“What will be different?”
She tried to think of something encouraging to tell him, but failed. “It sounds like Kos was a hands-on deity. Knew the people of Alt Coulumb by name. That will change. He used to visit your dreams, in the long nights of your soul. I imagine the faithful felt his radiance throughout the city. No more. Even his voice won’t be the same.”
“But we’ll have heat, and trains.”
“Yes.” Don’t sneer at heat and power and transportation, she wanted to say. Hundreds of thousands in this city would die without them even before the winter, from riots and looting, pestilence and war.
She kept silent.
“There’s no other way?”
“What would you propose?” she asked.
“Surely some of my Lord’s people loved Him more than they needed His gifts. Couldn’t that love call Him back to life?”
“Maybe.” She chose her words carefully. “He could take refuge in their love to escape his obligations. Consciousness is a higher order function, though. A god requires the faith of around a thousand followers before displaying rudimentary intelligence, and that’s if those followers ask nothing in return for their love. If a heavily contracted god, like Kos, tried to do what you describe, he would be barely alive, and in constant, excruciating pain from the contracts that tore at him. If you asked him, he would probably rather die.”
“It sounds horrible.”
“It is.”
He said nothing for a while, and neither did she. There was no sound but their breath.
“He loved this city, you know. Loved His people, and the world.”
“Yes,” Tara said. She didn’t know if this was true, but she didn’t care. Abelard did.
He tapped ash from his cigarette and it floated down the miles below. “How do I help?”
She removed a pad of paper and a quill pen with a silver nib from her purse, and handed them to him. “Start by taking notes.”
*
Somewhere, there was a bright room in a high tower, with windows that opened on a field of mist. Other towers rose from the mist, too, forming a forest in the sky beneath a moon that burnt the world silver.
The sun had set, and night was come. Within the bright room, people were hard at work. A young woman bent over a laboratory bench, making careful incisions in a cadaver. Next to her, a jowly older man scanned tables of densely written figures. At a chalkboard in the corner, two students reviewed an equation from an obscure branch of thaumaturgy. Conversation, when it occurred, was hushed. Each individual diligently pursued their portion of the project at hand. It was a laboratory among laboratories, a perfect, organized system.
As the pretty young vivisectionist inhaled so, too, did the thaumaturgy scholars at the blackboard; when she exhaled, so did the man with his tables. Chalk left white lines on slate as the scalpel parted skin and fat. Sluggish blood flowed. The supervising student at the window sipped his tea and swallowed. A foot came down in one corner of the room and a hand was raised in another. Whispered questions received muted answers. Students relinquished equipment precisely when their successors required it.
The Professor strode through the laboratory, breathing in time with the rest—or they breathed in time with him. His light steps on the worn checkerboard floor were the taps of the primum mobile on a wheel that moved their world. The beats of his heart drove blood in their veins.
He held a clipboard and a pencil. Once in a while, in his ceaseless circuit, he made a note, erased an older mark, modified a sum, or sliced out a sentence. The work of ages lingered on that clipboard, and many were the men and women who would have killed for its contents.
His eyes lingered on the vivisectionist’s legs as he passed her table. They were well curved beneath the hem of her lab coat. Supple. And her work was exact.
Pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of the flesh. Unimportant compared with the keen joy of the mind.
He moved to the window where the supervising student waited. The Professor tilted his head back to regard his own image in the window glass: round, high brow, bushy brown beard, pince-nez glasses perched on a broad nose. Reflected in his orbit was the world of his lab.
He closed his eyes, and saw the ties that bound.
He knew the student next to him was about to say something, and prepared his answer as he waited for the words. “You received a letter, Professor. They want you in Alt Coulumb.”
He listened to the music of his world, to gentle footfalls, to the murmured symphony of conversation and the slick passage of blade and needle through dead human meat, to the splash of fluid in glass bowls and the flow of blood. Always, he listened to the flow of blood. He thought about the vivisectionist’s legs.
He accepted the letter, examined the lead seal, and broke it with a narrowing of his eyes that cut through the dull metal like a hot razor. Removing the folded creamy paper within the envelope, he held it up to the light and read.
“Well,” he said at the proper moment. “Tomorrow morning I descend.”
The clouds beneath them were a field of black, and the moon shone down.
*
Tara approached the last of the blue-tinted conduits, and measured its girth with a piece of knotted string. As the string drew taut, glyphs appeared on the conduit’s surface in silver spiderweb script. “This is the return from the Iskari Defense Ministry’s Naval Division, which amounts to principal plus ten percent guaranteed over rate of inflation, accounted monthly, priority secured, drawn off the stomach chakra.”
“That’s not usual, right?” Abelard had mostly filled Tara’s notepad with sketches and figures. He possessed an excellent draftsman’s
hand, far more exact than Tara’s own. As they worked, he had asked a slow but constant stream of questions, trying to learn enough about their task to help rather than merely assist. The questions kept Tara focused, at least. Document review, even for so momentous a case as this, even with your career on the line, was always a chore. “Most of the patches so far have drawn off the arms, or the legs, not the chakras themselves.”
“It’s not usual. Nor is it especially unusual.” She double-checked the glyphs to ensure she had read them correctly. “Different circumstances call for different contracts. The Is’De’Min is a grotesque, many-tentacled entity ruling over a population of millions, challenged to the south by Deathless Kings, to the north by Camlaan, and to the east by Koschei. This contract is earmarked for use in their own defense. If they rely on Kos for firepower, they have to be able to call upon it at a moment’s notice, no matter what. The contract is dangerous for Kos because the power leaves him at such a fundamental level, but it nets him a high rate of return, absolutely guaranteed.”
“I see. This is a likely culprit, then.” He made a check mark.
“What do you mean by that?”
Abelard hesitated, but at last he answered, in a determined voice without stammer or flinch: “It was probably what killed Him. You said the chakras move up from basic life functions to the most advanced—tailbone, groin, stomach, heart, throat, forehead, crown. This is the farthest south any of the deals have gone. If there was a draw here at the wrong time, it might have taken too much power, and the rest of Him shut down.”
“Couldn’t have happened. It’s too small a contract.”
Abelard regarded the blue conduit and its red mate skeptically. Each was thick around as an old redwood tree.
“Too small to do that kind of damage, I mean,” Tara said. “It looks large to us, but compared with the rest of the body? Have some respect for your god and your Church. They would never let anyone patch in this far down if there was a chance they might kill the system.”
“Kos.”
“Excuse me?”
“At least call Him Kos, please. When you say it like that, ‘your god,’ ‘the system’…”
“Sorry. But my point stands.”
“I thought you said Kos was weak.”
“Weaker than he should have been, yes, but not that weak.”
Abelard made a note. Even the angle of the cigarette in his mouth suggested doubt.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll show you.” She untied her string from the conduit and pulled back, skidding and turning on nothingness until she drew even with Abelard.
“What now?” he asked.
“I’m going to turn back time.”
She began before he could protest or ask for clarification.
It was an illusion, of course, but an impressive one. Every record in the Sanctum’s archive bore a date and a time stamp. Tara could manipulate the Craft that modeled dead Kos to show his body from minutes, hours, weeks ago. When she raised her hand, time flowed backward.
Blood and ichor rushed in reverse down the conduits that pierced Abelard’s god. The festering sores and decayed pits on his skin shrank and closed without scabbing over; horrible hungry things writhed in the darkness, their inverted drones taunting and tearing at the strings of Tara’s mind. The body swelled beneath them, grew supple. Light streamed from the flesh, and especially from the heart, an unconscious, vital flow of grace from the god to his mortal servants. When time wound back to the third day, Tara felt rather than heard a great pounding, like distant explosions echoing over a desert. The backbeat of the universe.
His heartbeat.
It battered her soul, demanding worship. Awe quickened at the base of her spine.
You, she thought to it, are an echo. A spirit grown fat trading on its own majesty. I’ll be damned if I let you see me yield.
She summoned ice to her mind, endless fields of it, cool starlight and the black between the stars that human minds stitched together into meaning and Craft. There is no difference between us, she shouted into the vortex of that heartbeat. I cast you out, and stand unassisted.
Her knees wanted to bend.
She closed her fingers, and the whirl of time ceased. “We’re close to the night of your watch, moving forward at thirty times normal speed.”
Abelard had clapped his hands to his ears. Rapture shone from his face. Useless, but at least he was watching.
“See how smoothly the blood flows? And the light, of course, and the heartbeat.”
“What?” he shouted over the noise.
“The heartbeat!”
“What?”
She was about to try again, when the conduits that tied Kos to the shambling horror of the Iskari Defense Ministry erupted with brilliant light. Enough power flowed through those contracts to collapse the walls of a city, to sink a fleet or tear a dragon limb from limb in flight. The light rendered Kos’s body in harsh monochrome, and faded as fast as it had burst upon the dark.
When it faded, the heartbeat was gone.
“Amazing,” Abelard said, his voice faint and reverent. Then, “It looks like the Iskari contract was a factor to me.”
Tara’s cheeks flushed. She took a deep breath, and another.
“That can’t be it,” she said at last.
“Sudden burst of light, and nothing. What more do you need?”
She rolled time back again, to the peak of the Iskari contract’s brilliance. Her calculations had been perfect. Well, not perfect perhaps, but good enough. The contract was too small to destroy Kos, yet there it shone, glorious, and seconds later, the god died.
“That’s strange.” She rolled back time at one-twentieth speed. The Iskari contract flared, faded, died, alone. “Very strange.”
“An ‘I’m sorry I shot down your idea’ would be nice.”
“No other contract even flickers. And the Iskari didn’t draw any more than their pact allowed.”
Abelard looked from Tara, to his God, and back. “So?”
“I’m sorry I shot down your idea. It looks like you were right—the Iskari pact dealt Kos his dying blow. There was no other significant draw on Kos at that time. But I was right, too; the Iskari didn’t drain enough power to hurt your god if he was as strong as the Church records show. He must have been weaker. Much weaker. To die from the Iskari pact, Kos must have been half the strength your people thought, maybe less.”
Abelard shook his head. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s great for us. The Church didn’t know Kos was weak, so the Iskari pact wasn’t negligent, which means we keep more control over Kos’s resurrection. Now, all we need to do is figure out what happened in Iskar.”
“Aren’t we going to look for the source of His weakness?”
“Of course, but that information isn’t here. The problem’s deeper than your Church. Tomorrow, we’ll dive into raw Craft, and find where Kos’s power went. For now, Iskar is our best lead.”
“We know what they drew, and when. What more do we need?”
“We need to know why. The Iskari made that pact for self-defense, but I haven’t heard any news of war from Iskar or the Old World. If your god died because the Iskari abused their pact, we gain ground on his creditors, and even more control over the case. We might be able to bring some of the old Kos back after all.”
She released her grip on the visualization. The world around her blurred, cracked, inverted. This time, at least, Abelard didn’t scream.
When the cosmos righted itself, they stood flanking the iron bowl in the center of the archives, surrounded by scrolls. A faint odor of iron and salt lingered in the air, the smell of steam from boiled blood. The room was darker than before, but more familiar, too. Abelard clasped the notebook to his chest. His skin was slick with sweat and his eyes were wide from the transition, but he’d get used to this stuff in time. Already he looked more confident than when he had
met her on the Sanctum’s front steps.
She pulled her watch from her jacket pocket and checked its skeleton hands. Eight in the evening. Not bad.
“Where can I find a newspaper in this town?”
Abelard’s expression was blank. “A what?”
7
Shale floated in a pit of night, encircled by cords of lightning. He sought within himself for the fire of rage and found nothing, sought too for the quickened shivering breath of fear and was no more successful. It was as if he had reached down to the fork of his legs and felt there undifferentiated flesh, smooth and polished as a wood floor.
Of course, he had no hands with which to reach down, no legs, nor anything at their fork. The girl had taken all that from him and left him in this prison, where a thousand blankets piled atop his mind and every thought came with slow deliberation or not at all.
Tara claimed she was on his side, and indeed she had pulled him from the jaws of death. The Blacksuits, blasphemers, wasted no love on Seril’s children. She did not seem perturbed by his suffering, though, or eager to return him to his body. She needed his information, and who knew what black arts she could practice on him to force compliance? Could she bend him to betray his Flight?
Shale could not break Tara’s hold over him, but one act of protest remained to him that not even sorcery could bar.
He had no mouth to open, nor throat through which to draw breath; neither lungs to hold that breath nor diaphragm to propel it out. Yet he howled.
A gargoyle’s howl is only in part a sound carried on air like other sounds. A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city.
Shale’s howl shook the darkness beyond his prison.
He let the blankets press him down, and he began to wait.
*
“Let me get this straight,” Abelard said as he chased Tara down the Sanctum’s spiral staircase. “You can buy a sheet of paper that tells you what’s happening on the other side of the world?”
“Yes,” Tara replied, focusing on her steps rather than the conversation. Why weren’t these stairwells better lit?
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