Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

  “Is it always so cloudy here?”

  “No,” Cat said, “though you wouldn’t know it from the last few days. Our autumns are usually clear, because of the trade winds.” Color had returned to her face, and mirth to her voice. Her hands lay still in her lap, and she smiled, if weakly. Tara watched her body fight its way free of the Blacksuit, and knew better than to mention the change.

  “You sail?” she asked instead.

  “No. I just hear sailors talking.”

  They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signaled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic. It was surprising how much people didn’t know once you left the cities of the Deathless Kings. A young man in one of the caravans she joined after first leaving Edgemont had claimed in all earnestness that alcohol made people drunk because demons liked its taste, crept within the bottles, and slept there, invisible and intangible. When you drank the alcohol, you drank the demons. Different demons liked different kinds of booze, which was why a man belligerently drunk on whiskey would sleep after a glass of vodka or laugh after drinking beer.

  The other girls in the caravan had found this theory fascinating, but to Tara its parsimony left something to be desired.

  “What do you need to see here?” Cat asked, drawing ahead of her in the hallway.

  “The kid with no face. The witness in Cabot’s murder.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “We still don’t have any leads on the face, by the way. We’re scouring local Craft suppliers, but the equipment for stealing a face isn’t all that specialized, it turns out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Some poor Craftswoman was having a rough day dealing with Blacksuits in her shop, but better her than Tara. She reviewed the last several hours she had spent with Cat, trying to figure out when the woman could have received a report from the other Blacksuits. “Did you check in while I was arguing in court?”

  “Justice told me when I put the suit on back at the library.” Cat wiggled the fingers of one hand in the vicinity of her temple.

  “All this information comes and goes from your head, without your permission. Gods.” Tara wasn’t given to swearing or to mentioning deities in general, but both seemed appropriate.

  “What’s so weird about that?”

  “How can you let something into your mind? Justice could tie you in knots if she wanted.”

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “You know what I mean.” Her voice grew sharp, and Cat froze in midstride. Tara made to brush past her, but the other woman seized her arm. She tried to shrug Cat off, but her grip was strong. “Let me go.”

  “Is there something you need to get off your chest?”

  Tara pulled again, harder this time, with no more success. “I don’t like it when people mess with my head. I can’t understand how you’d volunteer for the experience.”

  “Justice isn’t a person.” Cat was cold and immobile. “I wouldn’t allow this if she was.”

  “Like you’d have a choice.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You need your fix.”

  Cat’s eyes narrowed. “I have a job to do. I keep this city safe.”

  Tara didn’t reply.

  The sudden surge of anger passed, and Cat’s shoulders sagged. “Gods, look, if you want to talk…”

  “No. Thanks.” She nearly spat the second word.

  Cat let go, and Tara stormed down the hall. On the third step she realized she didn’t know where she was going.

  “Do you know where the witness is?” she called over her shoulder.

  “I do.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m not going to tell you.” Deep within the infirmary, an unseen doctor chose that moment to set a broken bone or pull a tooth. The patient’s scream echoed in the empty hall, and Tara and Cat winced at the same time. Apparently these doctors were more familiar with antiseptic than anesthetic.

  “What do you want?” Tara said.

  “You’ve trusted me less since you learned I was a Blacksuit than when you thought I was a simple junkie. Tell me what I’ve done, what Justice has done to earn your contempt.”

  “It’s not contempt.”

  “The hells it isn’t. Will you be straight with me?”

  Tara considered Cat: her hands on her hips, her firm, generous mouth, the steel behind the green lake of her eyes, the scars at her throat, the emblem of Justice that hung beneath her shirt. She thought about her own fall from the schools, about Shale resting faceless in a white-walled, black-curtained room. She thought, too, of another room in this same building, where Raz Pelham lay sleeping. He could not have returned to his ship. Suntan or no suntan, the walk would have fried him.

  “Fine,” Tara said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  *

  Daily maintenance reports were kept on the Sanctum’s eighth floor, in the windowless Efficiency Office at the heart of the tower. Despite its location, the office was well ventilated; turbines in the massive boiler room beneath sucked air through the chamber to regulate the boilers’ temperature. In winter, the office remained ten degrees warmer than the rest of the building thanks to its proximity to the generators, and in summer ten degrees cooler, thanks to the air flow.

  Ingenious.

  Abelard first visited the Efficiency Office at the age of twelve, on a field trip for introductory theology. He had stared about himself in awe as a Novice Theologian, who seemed so mature to Abelard at the time and had been at most twenty-six, used the second law of thermodynamics as a metaphor for original sin. Upon leaving the office, twelve-year-old Abelard promptly forgot the color of its walls (red), its dimensions (forty feet across and ten high, with a ladder in the center leading down into the boilers), and even its shape (round), not to mention the theologian’s argument. He remembered the ventilation system. It was the first complex machine he understood, and its union of physical law with man’s creative spark filled him with joy and love for God.

  Now Kos was gone, but the system remained.

  He sat at one of the four curved metal desks in the circular room, overshadowed by a pile of papers and plans and schedules. First he browsed through the energy output records and found nothing unexpected. Draw on the generators peaked at evening and midday, bottoming out between midnight and dawn, and again between three in the afternoon and twilight. The logs showed no major repairs, and hardly any tinkering since the coolant system’s upgrade months before. Materials and parts consumption normal. But the service records for the last few days …

  He raised one hand. A few seconds and a rustling of robes later, he heard a woman’s voice. “Yes, Brother?”

  He looked up from the records to see the almond eyes and wizened face of Sister Miriel, who had ruled the Efficiency Office and kept its archives for longer than most Cardinals could remember. Sister Miriel was the reason no young novice had ever successfully pranked the maintenance department. She was disarmingly sweet but viciously clever, and detected each planted gas bomb, every swapped document and mislabeled pot of glue in time to turn the jokes against their plotters.

  “Sister,” he said, “you’ve logged twice as many maintenance shifts as usual in the last three days, but made no repairs.”

  “We’d have made repairs if we found what we needed to repair, wouldn’t we?” she answered ruefully.

  “I’d expect so.”

  “Well, there you are.” She leaned forward, skimming the plans and timesheets. “We’re tracking a bug in the works. Though truth be told, it’s less a bug and more a monkey.”

  “Monkey?” That was a new term on Abelard.

  “Bugs nest in one place and stay there. A monkey roams.”

  He waved at the paperwork. “I don’t see any service outages.”

  “Because you’re thinking of the problem wrong,” she said with the kindness of
a grandmother offering candy. “Our generators are redundant, so you wouldn’t see a drop in output. Look here.”

  “The coolant system is operating under capacity.”

  Sister Miriel’s head bobbed, and Abelard felt as if he were back in school.

  “Which means…” He chewed the words before saying them. “The exhaust isn’t as hot as it should be. Heat must escape before exhaust reaches the coolant system.”

  “Our reasoning exactly, but we found no leak, even though we tore the system apart.”

  “That would have taken weeks, not just three days of double shifts.”

  “It did take weeks.” She pointed to the schedule. “If you look at the older maintenance logs, you’ll see that our crews have been pulling extra hours for months. The problem first showed up in spring, though back then it was predictable—every night, between one and four in the morning. In the last few days the drain became chaotic. Yesterday there was a peak just before dawn, and one or two small surges during the days before that. Nothing for the last twenty-four hours, though. There’s no pattern we can see.”

  Between one and four in the morning, as he knelt before an altar, waiting in vain for God to answer his prayers. “It changed three days ago?”

  “A few before that, actually, but the early morning draw stopped three days ago. We wondered if our current theological”—she paused out of propriety—“troubles were at fault, but the problem isn’t worse, only less predictable. We’ve waited all day for a repeat incident with no luck.”

  Abelard turned to another page of schematics, and tried not to think about the “current theological troubles.” The crowd’s cries echoed in his mind. He could collapse, or keep working. The choice was obvious, but it was not easy.

  “Brother,” Miriel said after a quiet interval. “I hear you are accompanying the Godless ones.”

  “I am.”

  “What are they like?”

  Those two lengths of pipe didn’t match up on the schematic. Were these really maps of the same subsection? “The younger one … she wants to be strong. The older, I don’t know what to say about her.”

  “Will they help us?”

  He was about to quibble over the definitions of help, but that was not what Sister Miriel wanted to hear. “I think so.” He rolled up the blueprints and slid them back into their cases.

  “You’re done with the schematics?”

  “No,” he said, and glanced down the ladder into the humid darkness of the boiler room. “Can I borrow a lantern?”

  *

  “I first realized I had an aptitude for the Craft,” Tara said, “when I was maybe five or six.” Her heels tapped down the hallway in perfect rhythm. “More importantly, I liked it. Liked using it, working it around me. It was almost a religious feeling. I wanted to make a life out of the Craft, so I had to leave Edgemont. Which was fine, because I wanted to do that anyway.”

  She waited for Cat to speak, but she didn’t. Their footsteps were in time. Tara could have been walking alone, had she not been able to see the other woman by her side.

  Good. This was hard enough without interruption.

  “I took a job on the next merchant’s caravan that came through town, and wandered with them for a few years, learning everything I could from their lesser Craftsmen, fighting Raiders, keeping the scorpionkind at bay. One night after the campfire died, I sat naked on the sand, soaking in the starlight I would need for the next day’s Craft, and I looked up and saw the Hidden Schools: towers rising out of midair and plummeting into empty space, castles with parapets on both ends, hovering globes of glass and crystal the size of the Third Court of Craft.

  “I was terrified. I had been calling the schools to me for months, as any young Craftswoman who wants to study there will do, but they never answered before.

  “I’d tell you about the rainbow bridge that descended from the twelve-spired Elder Hall, a building so old it became new again, to offer me entrance; I’d tell you about the challenges I faced as I climbed that rainbow, of might and Craft and cunning; I’d tell you about being welcomed into the Hidden Schools as they cloaked themselves in clouds that were not clouds. But none of these things are important to my story.

  “I had a room, for the first time in years, rather than a wagon bed, and a roommate, which took more getting used to. Her name was Daphne, and her family had been Craftsmen as far back as you could go, and Theologians before that. What I didn’t know about the Craftswoman’s world, she helped me learn. She was one of those people you hate a little on first meeting, until you realize their generous act isn’t an act at all.”

  Tara let the pause drag out. She breathed in, and heard a faint inhalation beside her. Cat turned left. Tara followed.

  “She introduced me to Professor Denovo. He was the most famous teacher on the faculty if not the best-loved, and she brought me to a dinner he threw for his advanced students. Denovo had come from the bottom, like me. His family had been well off, watchmakers, but ignorant of Craft until their son showed himself a prodigy. Before long Daphne and I began to work in his lab. There, I found camaraderie, acceptance, common purpose. You’ve felt the same, I’m sure. Your bond with Justice is probably similar to the bond between Denovo and his students, and no small wonder. It was Denovo that broke Seril’s corpse open and stitched it back together into Justice, forty years ago.

  “Few people realize how blind human beings are to change. At the beginning I spent one hour a day at his lab; a few weeks later, six. The lab became my life, and its rhythms determined mine. I dreamed of work, and it seemed completely natural, as natural as you falling in step with me now. My strength dwindled, bit by bit. After weeks of this, I struggled to light a candle on my own outside the laboratory walls. Conversations with Denovo sparked with wit and life, and the rest of the world went dark by comparison, and I didn’t notice.

  “I didn’t notice when Daphne stopped laughing, though one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time she smiled, and that I couldn’t remember the last time I smiled, either. I examined the two of us, and the others who worked in our lab. My head felt stuffed with cotton, but after days I could trace the web of subtle Craft Denovo had woven through our souls. In the service of his will, we worked as a massive organism. Separate from his purpose we were half ourselves, or less.

  “I confronted him about it. He laughed. ‘We do good work,’ he said. ‘Better than any Craftsmen or Craftswomen in history. Together, we achieve greatness.’

  “‘Not of ourselves,’ I said, ‘or for ourselves. We achieve greatness for you.’

  “‘Someone has to direct our studies,’ he replied. He invited me to go to the leaders of the schools and unmask him. I did.”

  Another turn. Stairs. A nurse wheeled a small cart laden with bloody knives past them.

  “Denovo’s lab, they said, was one of the greatest centers of learning in the world. The lab advanced the knowledge of all Craftsmen everywhere. They questioned my judgment, questioned my priorities, as he sucked his students dry and grew fat on the power he stole from them. I tried to quit, but he didn’t let me. Tried to strike him down, but with his lab behind him, he was too strong. Daphne fell asleep in her room one day after a week of work with no rest, and didn’t wake up. Her parents came to take her home. I never saw her again.

  “Late one night, after the students left, I snuck into Denovo’s lab and burned it. That place was the focus of the web he had spun through us all. As it burned I felt his grip on my soul burn, too. Power returned to me. My Craft was mine again.

  “I didn’t announce what I had done, but I made no secret of it, either. Discovering my rebellion, Denovo had me dragged before the Disciplinary Board. He wanted to kill me, but there was no punishment on the books allowing a student to be put to death. They graduated me instead, because no rule states that when you graduate the school has to put you down somewhere you can survive. I confronted the entire faculty, and laughed as they threw me down over the Crack of the World, no
t far, I suppose, from where Seril died.

  “I survived.”

  Cat stopped at a bare wooden door with a brass number riveted onto it. No sound emerged from beyond, not even breathing. Tara felt the tingle of her own Craft within. This was the place.

  She set a hand upon Cat’s shoulder and squeezed, hard. Her nails dimpled skin through cotton, but Cat didn’t start or draw away. The other signs, when she checked them, were all correct. Slightly dilated pupils, breathing in time with Tara’s own. When she closed her eyes she saw the tiny threads that now connected Cat’s mind to hers.

  In three states is the mind most vulnerable, Professor Denovo had once told her: in love, in sleep, and in rapt attention to a story. Cat hated gargoyles. She would not have understood Tara’s protection of Shale, nor would she believe he was innocent. Even if, by some miracle, Cat did believe, Justice would not, and Cat was too much in her dark Lady’s thrall to resist wearing her Blacksuit for long. As Tara searched the other woman’s dark, uncomprehending eyes, she felt a moment of intense self-loathing for what she had done, and was about to do.

  “Cat?”

  A slow “yes” followed a second later, as if Cat had forgotten how to use her own voice.

  “I’m going to review the witness. Look for evidence Justice may have missed.”

  This time, a more ready answer. “Yes.”

  “I can do this alone. I’ll be safe. I want you to be sure Captain Pelham is safe, too. If he’s hurt, we’ll lose our best lead in the case.”

  “Should I check on him?”

  That was how Denovo’s trick worked, at its subtlest. The target didn’t lose her will, but became malleable, grateful for guidance. “Yes. I think you should make sure he’s well.”

  Cat’s footsteps sounded heavier than usual as she retreated down the long white hallway.

  There was a Hell, and there were demons in it. Tara had visited, on school vacation. Nobody knew much about the demons’ society or motives, and there was considerable argument as to whether they captured dead souls or merely copied them before they went elsewhere. The demons themselves were coy on the subject.