Abelard did not reply, and she seized the opportunity to change the topic. “What about Cat? Why does she give half her life to Justice?”
“I don’t know.” He flicked cigarette ash out the window. “We grew up on the same street. A simple neighborhood, poor enough that the people there struggled to keep up the illusion they weren’t poor. Cat wanted to serve the city, but in a different way from me. Gears, pulleys, pistons, theology didn’t interest her no matter how I tried. She saw people getting hurt, and other people doing the hurting, and thought she could make a difference through Justice.”
“Does Justice make a difference?”
He shot her an odd look. “You should know. Your boss helped create her.”
“Ms. Kevarian doesn’t really talk about her last visit to Alt Coulumb.” This was why she had gone to the trouble of getting the two of them alone. “I hoped you could give me a history lesson.”
“About what?”
“Seril. Justice. The gargoyles. They fit together, don’t they?”
Abelard’s face looked thinner than yesterday morning, as if something inside him were melting flesh and fat and muscle away. “They fit,” he said.
“Tell me.”
He squirmed, but her silence was unrelenting and at last he surrendered. “Seril was night and moon and rock, everything cold and proud and untouchable. Maybe that was why Kos loved her. She wouldn’t burn.”
“Kos loved her?” Tara hadn’t known that. A pair of gods ruling together, one for day, the other for night, one creating, another ordering. Bonds of love between opposites were powerful, stable yet dynamic. No wonder Alt Coulumb had stood for so long and grown so vast.
“They loved each other,” Abelard acknowledged. “But the God Wars were like the opening of a dam for her. She rushed to the front lines, with her priests and soldiers.”
“The old City Guard. Who became the Blacksuits.”
Abelard shot her a sidelong glance, uncertain what he should say next. As if afraid she was testing him.
A dozen disparate facts fell into place. “The gargoyles.” She couldn’t keep an edge of shock from her voice. Stupid. Why hadn’t she seen it before?
“The Guardians of Seril. The goddess created them. Moonlight and night air sank into stone and the stone came to life.” Abelard looked uncomfortable with the idea. “I wasn’t alive to know them, but my father was, and my grandfather. They say the Guardians roamed the rooftops in small bands, marking territory with their talons, writing poems to Seril that could only be understood when seen from the air. They hunted the night. If a crime occurred, they swooped down, claws out. Criminals feared them because they were implacable. They had no families, no friends, so you couldn’t threaten them. The city was safer in those days. The Blacksuits may be effective, but the Guardians were terrifying.”
“What happened?”
“When Seril went to war, they followed her. A few remained in Alt Coulumb. Not enough to keep the peace. At least, not enough to keep the peace, ah, peaceably.”
“There were deaths,” she said.
“Yeah.” He didn’t look at her. “I mean, there were always deaths, but now there were more. Criminals, mostly.”
“And a few Craftsmen.”
He looked up. “I didn’t think you knew.”
It wasn’t hard to guess. The God Wars had not been a pleasant time for Craftsmen and Craftswomen around the world. One day, you’re a simple thaumaturge, idly meddling in matters man was not meant to comprehend. The next, a collection of beings as old as humanity, with legions of followers, declare war on your “kind,” and neighbors who once thought you a harmless eccentric with a fondness for mystic sigils and foul unguents see you as an affront to Creation.
All the usual things had happened. Riots, pogroms, lynch mobs. Many of the victims had not been Craftsmen at all but mathematicians and philosophers, anatomists and chemists and scholars of ancient languages. Universities around the world were razed. True Craftsmen and Craftswomen protected what and who they could from the riots, sheltering scholars with their might, ripping towers and libraries and great cathedrals from the earth and spiriting them away into the deep sky; in time these stolen buildings congregated and grew into the Hidden Schools and the other great Academies. But there had been too many to save. The great and powerful and angry, like Ambrose Kelethras and Belladonna Albrecht, struggled on the front lines against the gods, while around the world their less militant and more trusting brethren fell to murder and to the madness of crowds.
It was a dangerous era for those who used their minds.
This wasn’t the time to say any of these things, so she shrugged, and said, “It happened.” And, “Seril died on the front lines.”
“She died in battle. The Guardians in Alt Coulumb went mad with fear and fury and grief. They saw rebellion everywhere. Grandpa says the city went to war with itself. Most of the buildings that stand unscarred today were razed in the struggle and rebuilt from the foundations up. Swords can’t cut stone, so we defended ourselves with hammers. Priests called down Kos’s fire against Seril’s children. The old clergymen say God wept.” Abelard would not look at her, and she couldn’t read his voice. “When the rest of the Guardians returned from the war, they attacked the city walls and we thrust them back. It was a bad time.” He broke off. “Have you ever seen a gargoyle enraged?”
“No,” she said, pondering what the cute young man trapped within her purse would do to her if—when—freed from her binding spell. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. In his native shape he had been large and swift, his talons sharp.
“Neither have I,” Abelard admitted. “They attacked the city again and again from the forests and were thrown back each time. It was a long, hard fight. People started to believe Seril’s children were monsters all along. Personally, I think the Cardinals were relieved. They mistrusted Seril and her faithful. She was, they were, too dark, too strong, too in love with the old city to belong in the bright world Alt Coulumb was trying to join. We remade their goddess into Justice, and instead of Guardians we made Blacksuits. When the Blacksuits first joined battle, the Guardians fled to the forest, and weren’t seen again.” They hit a harsh bump in the road. Abelard grabbed the side of the carriage for support. “Until last night.”
“And Cat,” she ventured, “hates the gargoyles because they betrayed the city she tries to protect?”
“Maybe. Sometimes I think she hates them because they had a goddess, and she doesn’t.”
The carriage jolted again, but this time to a stop.
*
“Courthouse” was the wrong name for this building. Courthouse suggested nobility, distance, a polite remove from the world. There was nothing noble or distant or polite about Alt Coulumb’s Third Court of Craft. It did not stand at a remove from this world so much as inhabit another one altogether.
It was a soaring pyramid of black, pinnacle lost in low-hanging cloud. Runes covered its face, dense as crosshatching, invisible to the untrained eye though they burned in Tara’s mind. This building warped the world around it, purified it, made it real. The skyline near the pyramid’s edge flexed concave to convex as in a magician’s mirror. Tara’s heart sank. Abelard and Cat, by contrast, seemed nonplussed.
“It doesn’t look strange to you?”
Abelard didn’t say anything. Cat shook her head. “I mean, there’s always been something funny about the Court of Craft, but…”
“How many sides does it have?” Tara asked.
“Four,” Cat replied confidently.
“Five,” Abelard said at the same moment with the same self-assurance. They exchanged a brief, frustrated glance.
“Fair enough.” Tara squared her shoulders and strode forward.
There was no door in the pyramid’s front face, but as they approached the black stone, the runes flowed and rearranged into a familiar pattern. A translation would have begun, “By crossing this barrier you do undertake to bring no harm by Craft or blade to those w
ithin. Definitions of ‘harm’ include, but are not limited to, death, personal injury, injury to the will or to the memory, injury to one’s ability to pursue the interests of one’s client, acts of God, and all other forms of harm. ‘Craft’ indicates…” and so on, a protracted list of definitions and special cases. The standard contract was full of loopholes and exemptions, but it usually held, a minor miracle for which Tara was glad. There would be blood enough before the Judge today without extracurricular violence.
She walked through the runes and the stone upon which they were printed, and the contract settled against her skin like an old cobweb. Her companions did not follow at first, likely deterred by the prospect of walking into what seemed to them a blank wall. Abelard’s loyalty, or perhaps curiosity, got the better of him and he entered after Tara, brushing at his face as the contract took hold. Cat followed a moment later.
“It looks smaller on the inside,” Abelard observed.
They stood in a long and narrow hallway, well-lit and carpeted in deep red, its walls paneled with rowan wood. There were no doors to the left or right, and Tara knew that if she looked back she would not see an entrance, only the four edges of wall and ceiling and floor proceeding until perspective crushed them to a point. Far ahead stood a door of wood and smoked glass. As they approached, she read spidery letters in black upon it: KOREL ROOM.
“This,” Cat said in a hushed whisper, “doesn’t look like any court I’ve been to before.”
“What,” Abelard shot back, “they don’t usually have disappearing walls and endless hallways?”
“And there’s usually more than one courtroom in a building.”
“There’s more than one courtroom,” Tara said. “The hall only takes us where we need to go.”
“For privacy reasons?” Cat ventured.
“Privacy, and safety.”
“Theirs?”
“Ours. Courts of Craft are dangerous if you don’t belong.”
“We do, though, right?”
Rather than answering the question, Tara opened the door.
The courtroom was over a hundred yards across, circular, and walled in black. Ghostlight shone from jewels set into the domed ebon ceiling. A massive Craft circle had been acid-etched into the floor and the acid grooves filled with silver. Within the circle’s silver arc, at the far end of the room, rose the Judge’s empty dais.
Near the entrance sat an array of benches, upon which slouched their audience: a pudgy trailing-whiskered man in an orange Crier’s jacket, a few elder Craftsmen come out of curiosity, and a student with lines under her eyes, who glanced nervously at the empty benches around her, hoping more people would arrive so she could doze off without anyone noticing.
Tara felt sorry for the girl. There would be no eager masses today. Tomorrow, after rumors of Kos’s death spread, would have provided a better opportunity for a nap. The chamber would be so crowded then that nobody would notice a kid catching some sleep.
Cardinal Gustave sat at a low table to the left of the silver circle, and Ms. Kevarian stood near him, her face a professional mask. She twirled a dry quill pen between her fingers. A squad of Church personnel stood behind the Cardinal, backs pressed against the chamber’s rounded wall. They wore a range of expressions, but most were some degree of terrified.
None of the contract holders with claims against Kos Everburning had come in person, unsurprising considering that they were Deathless Kings and other gods. They would send envoys in the coming weeks to observe negotiations, but for now they merely hung immanent in the air about the desk to the right of the circle, where Alexander Denovo sat alone in his tweed jacket. His attention was bent on a yellowed scroll, and he didn’t seem to notice Tara’s arrival.
She had expected to feel more upon encountering him for the first time since her graduation: a dryness in her mouth, anger curling like a fire in her breast, a sour taste at the back of her throat, the bright purple pulse of fear behind her eyeballs. When she saw him, though, she just felt dead.
Dead. Adrift on currents of air, falling toward the Crack in the World, bloody and bruised, broken, her mind aching. His laughter echoing in her soul.
“Tara?” Abelard’s voice. Focus on it.
“What?”
“You looked funny for a second there.”
“Funny?”
“Scared, almost.”
“Not scared.” She wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but it wasn’t fear. Fear was weakness, and if she had been weak, she would have died a long time ago. “But almost.”
“You know that guy?” He pointed to Denovo, but she slapped his arm down. “What?” he asked, cradling his wrist.
“It’s rude to point.”
She brushed past Abelard toward Ms. Kevarian, who acknowledged her presence with a nod while continuing her conversation with the Cardinal. “Whatever else happens, you must be confident. Don’t break faith for a moment. Any weakness can be used against you in an engagement like this.” The Cardinal nodded, features stern, and Ms. Kevarian turned from him to Tara. “You’ve collected another friend.”
“Cat is a servant of Justice.” She indicated the other woman without turning around. “My watchdog. Says she’s supposed to keep me from getting into trouble.”
“Well.” Something about the way Ms. Kevarian said that word, long and drawn out, made Tara glance back to be certain Cat was still there. “She’ll have her hands full soon.”
“What do you mean?”
She consulted a codex splayed on the table. “Denovo will open by proposing that our defense contracts with Iskar were negligent, made with the knowledge they could lead to Kos’s death.”
“Logical.” There were two or three acceptable first moves in a complex case of Craft like this, but all involved breaking down the walls that preserved the divine client’s dead body against alteration. Tara might have chosen the Iskari contract as the first issue herself, had she been in Denovo’s place. Why was Ms. Kevarian reviewing the basics? “The truth will work as a counterargument, for once. The Iskari pact was too small to kill Kos under any conditions that could have been anticipated when it was drawn. Whatever drained Kos’s power was at fault, not the Church’s deal with Iskar.”
“Good.” She scratched a sharp black line of ink across the cream of the scroll. “Then you shouldn’t have any trouble maintaining that within the circle.”
“You’re not serious.” The stone beneath Tara’s feet felt spongy, unstable, soaked with panic.
“This will be a good learning experiene, and an excellent chance to demonstrate your value to the firm. Do either of these goals seem humorous to you for some reason that escapes me?”
“You don’t…” Tara wanted to steady herself, but the table kept shifting as she tried to rest her hands on it. She focused on her breath. “I assumed I’d have more warning, boss.”
“You do know what they say about assumptions, Ms. Abernathy.”
Before Tara could answer, a peal of thunder broke the hush of the dark stone room, and a wash of blackness obscured the light. When it passed, a man stood on the Judge’s dais. He would have been tall if he had straightened. His back arced forward like the blade of a sickle, and his sallow skin seemed ready to slough off at any moment to reveal the flesh and bone beneath. “I am Judge Cathbad, son of Norbad,” he announced in a voice deep and resonant enough to shake stone. “I call from chaos to order. I stand to witness the verities and falsehoods of Kos Everburning and his creditors. I invite counsel to approach.”
As he completed the formula, a stream of fierce blue fire rushed from his dais along the silver lines set into the floor, caught there, and burned.
Tara looked to Ms. Kevarian for reassurance, but in her eyes found only quiet expectation.
When Tara practiced for this moment at the schools, she had spent days, weeks memorizing every facet of the cases before her. There wasn’t time for that now. Maybe later, after the initial challenges were defeated.
It was this, s
he thought, or back to Edgemont.
She steeled herself and stepped across the line of blue flame.
11
Summers back home began hot and grew hotter. The sunbaked fields into pale dead yellow clay, and steam collected in toiling farmers’ lungs. Every child enduring daily chores yearned to finish her tasks and sprint off, limbs flailing, to the quarry.
It had never been much of a quarry, but for a brief period at the beginning of the last century it supplied rocks for Edgemont’s houses and fences. After idle decades the blasting powder and equipment were gone and only its sharp rock face remained, plummeting twenty feet to a deep pool of cold, murky water that seeped from unknown fissures in the earth. An enterprising priest a generation back had erected a prayer pavilion near the edge of the highest cliff, but this was rarely used in recent years save by the children who leapt from the pulpit over the quarry’s edge, down, down, screaming through sweltering air, to strike the surface of the pool with a loud splash and sink into chill darkness.
Every time Tara made that jump as a girl, she felt a moment of panic as the water closed about her and the cold of it, the cold of the world’s belly, struck her in the chest and seared her muscles and shocked her brain. If you lost yourself and opened your mouth in a desperate bid for air, the cold would reach down your throat, grasp your heart, and stop it with a squeeze.
She felt that same cold when she crossed the line of blue flame in the Third Court of Craft, thousands of miles from Edgemont. Circumstances, however, were different. In Edgemont, she only had to wait for the pool to open its mouth and vomit her out into air and light and heat. Today, she would have to earn her relief.
The world beyond the edges of the circle faded away. The diamonds set in the black canopy above were stars, the canopy itself the endless reach of space. The audience no longer existed. Abelard, Cat, the Cardinal, all were motes of dust insignificant in the emptiness.
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