Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

  Blackness melted and ran like wax. She heard a voice.

  *

  “Quite to the contrary, Professor. I wasn’t surprised to get your letter. Though I admit the curse was a shock.”

  Ms. Kevarian reclined in an ornate armchair the color of fresh blood, and sipped the dregs of a vodka tonic. Her lips were more full and red than in waking life, and her skin, while not precisely flush with youth, possessed a pleasant rosy hue. Her hair, too, was darker. She seemed a woman still innocent of the years of sleepless nights and deep Craft that would sculpt her into Elayne Kevarian. Only her eyes betrayed the illusion. “I thought we were beyond such games.”

  With a practiced slump of her wrist, she held out her drink to be refilled, and Tara plucked it from her. The hand that took the glass did not belong to Tara, though. It was too pale, skin alabaster against the black cotton of what appeared to be a waitress’s uniform shirt, and its nails were painted red. Tara would have dropped the glass in shock had she been in control of her body, but that hand, hers and not hers, carried out its duty automatically.

  She set the glass on the table in front of Ms. Kevarian, removed a tiny bottle of vodka and a tonic spritzer from the tray she carried, set the tray on the table, and mixed the drink. Tara experimented, trying to set aside the vodka bottle or push the glass away, but could not control her movements. Odd. This was her dream, wasn’t it?

  It was fortunate Tara had no control over her dream body, or she would have spilled the drink when Ms. Kevarian’s companion spoke. “You know, we used to enjoy our jokes, you and I.”

  “Jokes?”

  The bearded, barrel-chested man in the sport coat looked no younger in this dream than when Tara had last seen him in the Hidden Schools, leading the faculty to cast her out, flame and starlight shining like a crown about his brow. Professor Denovo.

  She handed the vodka tonic to Ms. Kevarian and straightened, reclaiming her tray. Professor Denovo paid her no mind. She was hired help, beneath notice. He held a tall glass of beer and gestured vaguely with his free hand as he spoke. Tara remembered the cadence of his voice from lecture halls long distant.

  “Please don’t take it poorly, Elayne. We will, regrettably, be working against each other in the coming months, but that hardly requires us to be uncivil.”

  “We will,” Ms. Kevarian corrected, “be working together.”

  “Exactly,” he said with a smile that showed the tips of his upper teeth. “You working for the Church, I for its creditors. It’s in neither of our best interest for Kos’s demise to last longer than necessary.”

  “This won’t be another Seril case, Alex.”

  “Of course not.” He dismissed the idea with a wave of a hand and a contemptuous expression, as if scooting away a student’s distasteful paper. “But you needn’t be so vindictive. We were in the creditors’ employ during the Seril case. Naturally we strove for their advantage.”

  “This is necromancy,” Ms. Kevarian said. “There is no winning, and no losing. Death is our enemy. We’re both trying to overcome her.”

  Denovo laughed like a river. “A remarkably traditional paradigm considering your own work’s influence on the field. I think I will hold a conference on the subject once my schedule clears. Adversarial Relationships in Necromantic Transaction, that sort of thing. There’s been a metric ton of Iskari theory on the subject in recent years, to say nothing about what’s come out of the Shining Empire. Camlaan’s always half a decade behind the times, of course.” He waited for her to comment or interrupt, but when she did neither he returned his attention to his beer.

  “What does your party want out of this?”

  “Oh, you know clients. Never agree on anything. The radicals want the Church destroyed, or transformed as in the Seril case. There’s a conservative faction, content to leave matters largely as they lie. And the Iskari, of course.”

  “Of course.” Ms. Kevarian cradled her glass in both hands, as if it were a slender neck that she was about to wring. “Where do you stand?”

  “With my employers. What about you, my dear?”

  In the ensuing pause, Tara experienced a moment of terrifying frisson. The interlocutors’ dream bodies and the elaborate illusion of time and space fell away, and seated across that table from each other were two forces, irreconcilable and profound and not altogether human, locked in a duel so intricate their conscious minds were barely aware of its complexity. The vision endured for an instant, then broke, and left them old colleagues sharing a drink once more.

  One corner of Elayne Kevarian’s mouth turned up. “On the side of Kos Everburning.”

  “I never took you for a sentimentalist.” He said that word as if it referred to a form of parasite.

  She sipped her drink, and looked up at him. Now she was smiling indeed. Tara thought she preferred Ms. Kevarian’s previous expression. This one chilled.

  *

  Tara opened her eyes in a bare room with pale blue walls and an unfamiliar ceiling. Through the gap between the curtains she saw the raw gray of what might have been twilight, but exhaustion told her was the first hint of dawn. Cloth scratched her bare skin: a hospital gown.

  Ms. Kevarian stood at the foot of the bed, waiting, arms crossed.

  “How long was I out?” Tara croaked.

  “Not long. Abelard contacted me soon after your collapse. We’ve no proper facilities for a Craftswoman’s recovery, but the Infirmary of Justice is the best in the city. I added some of my soulstuff to your own, to bring you around faster. I thought you might not wish me to trouble the firm’s insurance policy by requesting their aid.”

  “Thank you.” Tara recoiled from the thought of asking Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao for help. The firm would not approve of her nearly dying after two days on the job.

  “You were acting in our interest, and I want to ensure you continue to do so. Besides, this is a learning experience. I expect that in the future you will be more careful than to engage an adversary of unknown power without preparation or backup.”

  She nodded, and the world shook around her. “Raz. Did I save him?”

  “Hard to tell. Captain Pelham seems whole, but I haven’t picked his brain in decades. Any damage will be more apparent to you than me.”

  “I’ll…” A dew-slick glass of water rested next to a tin pitcher on the bedside table. She almost dropped the glass twice as she worked it to her mouth. Her throat absorbed the liquid like a dry sponge. “I’ll see him after I get dressed. Where is he?”

  “A few rooms away, angrily maintaining that there’s nothing wrong with him and he’s fit to return to his ship.”

  She poured herself another glass of water. “I’ll move quickly. I imagine he still sleeps most of the day?”

  “Yes. He’s spent years training himself to endure the sun. Pain, burning, exhaustion. Some kind of macho thing, but he still goes to bed every morning. Talk to him, learn whatever you can, and come to the Court of Craft. We have to contest a preliminary motion before the judge at eleven.”

  Her mouth went dry. Standing before a judge after one day on site was borderline insane. They didn’t even know why Kos had died. How were they supposed to hold a preliminary hearing? “If you don’t mind my saying so, boss, I think that’s premature.”

  She nodded. “As do I. Unfortunately, we are not the only parties at play.”

  “I saw…” She broke off. There was no easy way to say this. “I thought I saw you in a dream. Talking with Professor”—Shivers caught at her voice, and she stilled them by force of will. “Professor Denovo.”

  “He’s the lead Craftsman for the creditors,” Ms. Kevarian said with a curt nod.

  “It wasn’t a dream?”

  “It was certainly a dream. It was not, however, your dream. Denovo contacted me last night, proposing a meeting to discuss the case. As he would not arrive in town until this morning, we met beyond the Gates of Horn, through which true dreams flow. It was not a productive meeting, but given your history together I
tacitly included you to prepare you for working with him. Or against him, as he would put it.”

  “You pulled me into a dream without my consent, and kept me there,” she said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  “You are my employee and my apprentice, Ms. Abernathy. You’ll find there is little I cannot do to you, your notions of the possible notwithstanding.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “You came to a choice within your dream. A door, it often looks like, if Dr. Kroen’s research is to be believed. I twisted the dream so your choice led to an end of my choosing. This is not a robust strategy—you’ll be more cautious of dream doors now that you know it, for example—but it works.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Neither of them spoke. Ms. Kevarian doubtless had negotiations to perform, individuals to interview, paperwork to complete, but she remained. Perhaps she smelled a question in the air.

  At last Tara gave it voice. “Boss, last night, in the dream. It seemed like you and Professor Denovo had a history together…”

  “I was his partner,” she said after Tara trailed off. “During the Seril case. We were both young, and he was my supervisor. We had a professional relationship.” She uncrossed her arms and rested her hands on the railing at the foot of Tara’s bed. “I hired you because you’re brilliant, and because of the way you stood up to him. I didn’t expect you would need to face him again so soon.” She paused. “What would you have done, out of curiosity? Had you encountered him without warning?”

  Tara considered. “Killed him. Or tried to.”

  Ms. Kevarian nodded. “Crisis averted. Get your clothes on, and interview Captain Pelham. I expect to see you in court by ten thirty.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and reached for her pants.

  *

  Abelard paced the bare waiting room, lost in smoke and thought, taking little notice of his surroundings: a few plants in cheap earthenware pots, beige tables and beige chairs. A drunk slept on a couch in the corner, covered with a flimsy beige blanket.

  An orderly approached and Abelard palmed his cigarette. She sniffed for the source of the tobacco stench; her eyes met Abelard’s, wide and watery with the pain of the cigarette ember against his skin. He offered her an uneasy smile as she passed, her mouth tight with suspicion and disapproval.

  When she was gone, he returned the cigarette to his lips with a gentle sigh. The first puff came as biting, painful relief.

  “They’ll catch you, you know,” Cat said from her perch on a low table. She was browsing a report on the night’s events, which a Blacksuit had delivered to her in the hours before dawn.

  “Eh.” Abelard shrugged. “I’m only hurting myself, right?”

  She shot him an odd look.

  “What?”

  “Don’t they teach you priests public health?”

  “They didn’t teach us anything public. It would defeat the purpose of being an arcane order.”

  “I thought that just meant you didn’t get Saturdays off.”

  That had been a joke only in part. He heard the anger beneath it. “Cat, I would have sneaked out, but the advancement exams were coming up, and after I became a Technician there was so much to learn.…”

  “Yeah,” she said, distantly. “There was so much to learn for two and a half years?”

  He stopped. “Was it really that long?”

  “I’ve gotten two rounds of bonuses. At least that long.”

  “Kos,” he swore, and the tip of his cigarette flared with the exhalation. “Two years, and I show up on your night off, no reason, with this strange woman.”

  “Who’s nice, don’t get me wrong.”

  “I show up, asking for your help, with no more than a hello.”

  “If I hadn’t thought I would get a fang out of the deal, I probably would have told you to stick it.”

  He rolled his eyes. “And you tell me these are bad for my health.”

  “They are.”

  “So’s getting some … creature to chew on you.” His mouth hung open after he said the words, as if he could breathe them back in. He tried to say something else, anything else, but all that came out was a slow “Ah.”

  “You’re right,” she said. When he did not respond, she raised her eyes from the scroll. There was a flatness to her features. Color had not returned to her face or limbs, hours after she removed the Blacksuit. She shook her head. “Shit, maybe it was better back when Seril was here. Before Justice, the Blacksuits, all of it. I don’t know. When I work, I’m Justice. Then it ends, and all that’s left is this pit.” She lingered on that pause, tasting the sentence in her mouth like stale breath. “You know the feeling now, I guess.”

  “You heard.”

  “Justice told me. She thought I should know why you were working with a Craftswoman.”

  “Do all the Blacksuits know?”

  “No. She wants to keep this secret. People will panic when they hear.”

  “And you won’t?”

  She shook her head. “He was more your god than mine. I’m sorry.”

  “I saw His body,” Abelard said at last. “Laid out against the dark. Tara showed me. But…”

  “What?”

  “There was something missing.” He flicked ash into a potted plant. “I don’t know. It must be worse for you. The parts of Kos I cared about, heat, steam, flame, passion, they don’t die. Since I knew Him, and since I loved Him, I’ll still see Him in everything I love. Seril died long before our time. You never knew her.”

  “Justice.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Her name is Justice now.” Cat rolled up the scroll and held it before her. Had it been a sword, she would have been staring at its tip. “You’re right. It’s not the same thing at all.”

  “Cat…”

  “I said don’t worry about it. You have your own problems. You…” Something choked her off.

  He approached her slowly, as if she were a cornered and wounded animal. She had always been able to retreat beyond her body to places he couldn’t follow, ever since they had ceased being children together and started to grow up. He wished he could follow her into that space behind her skin.

  He hadn’t made a noise, but when he crossed some invisible border around her she raised her head like a startled drinking bird, and fixed him with a bird’s alien eyes. He wanted to say something.

  He certainly didn’t want Tara to interrupt, from behind, with a “hello.”

  He turned, but not nearly as fast as Cat rose to her feet.

  Tara looked fine. Precisely fine, not well nor so shrunken as she had seemed hours before. Pallor lingered beneath her brown skin, but her eyes were bright. She wore dark pants and a dark shirt and flats, and a flower print hospital gown over the ensemble, open down the front.

  “Nice coat,” Abelard said. She cocked an eyebrow at him.

  Cat stepped forward, and snapped to attention. “Ma’am.”

  Cat’s newfound formality gave Tara pause, but she continued: “Thank you both for bringing me in. Cat, especially, for…” Her brow furrowed. “You scared off the gargoyles. You’re a Blacksuit? Or did I dream that?”

  “No, ma’am.” She bowed her head, a sharp, mechanical movement. “Lieutenant Catherine Elle, bound to the service of Justice.” She proffered the scroll. “Yesterday Alt Coulumb saw its first Flight of Stone Men in nearly forty years. We’re working to ensure they will be the last.”

  “You don’t need to be this formal.”

  “I do, ma’am.” Cat tapped the scroll in her left hand. “I’ve been assigned to protect you. We can’t let you go unshielded with Stone Men in the area.”

  Tara stiffened. “Protect me? Against what?”

  “Against the Stone Men, for one. And against whatever danger you may encounter in our city.”

  “I don’t need protection.”

  “I have my orders.”

  “What if I refuse?”

  She
blinked, slowly, considering. “This is Alt Coulumb. Justice’s will is paramount.”

  “Shouldn’t they assign someone else? You have a personal relationship with my assistant.” She indicated Abelard with a nod. “No offense.”

  “I’ve known Abelard since I was a girl. He won’t stand in my way. Also, I think you overestimate the individual prerogative officers of Justice have in their work.”

  “Individual prerogative. You mean free will?”

  “Ah.” Cat frowned at that question. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Interesting.” Tara’s expression remained clouded. “Welcome to the team. We’ll discuss specifics later, but we’re on a tight schedule. Can you lead me to Captain Pelham?”

  *

  Tara’s eyes adjusted slowly to the dark room. The vampire lay spread out on the bed, long, slender, and naked from the waist up, sheets pooled around his hips, a fallen mast surrounded by twisted sails. Scars webbed his torso, earned from blade and fire before his death. One was a long, wicked, narrow burn that had not been caused by natural flame.

  His chest neither rose nor fell.

  “Your line,” she said, “is, Thank you for saving me.”

  He laughed. “As I reckon things, we’re even. One rescue from drowning and one from, well…” His red eyes flicked left, to Abelard and Cat standing against the wall behind her. She had warned them to keep their distance. The stress of last night, combined with her hasty mental surgery, might have damaged Raz’s self-control. A Craftswoman’s blood was unappealing to most vampires, as a shot of rubbing alcohol was unappealing to most alcoholics. Theirs, though …

  “What is the last thing you remember?”

  “I was going to meet a client,” he replied. “Get paid.”

  “At Club Xiltanda?”

  His eyebrows rose. “Xiltanda. Huh.”

  “Is that a surprise?”

  A pause followed, about the length of a breath. Rhetorical habits died hard. “I,” he said, “am cursed by peculiar clients. There are not many owner-operators of my … persuasion. Clients with needs beyond the natural often choose the Kell’s Bounty over larger and better-equipped vessels because they know we’ll serve their needs and ask few questions. Understand?”