Three Parts Dead

by Max Gladstone

  “What do you think is lighting this room?”

  No candles or lamps were set into the rough stone walls about them. A broken lantern lay in one corner, but it was not the source of the faint radiance. Unconsciously, Tara had assumed the light was a form of Craft, but when she closed her eyes she saw no mortal thaumaturgy. After a moment of darkness, a swirling vortex appeared at the edge of her vision, interwoven lines and overlaid patterns, an echo of the aura that shrouded Alt Coulumb when seen from the sea.

  When she opened her eyes, the Guardians glowed with moonlight.

  “If you do not believe,” Aev said, voice deep as surf, “we will show you.”

  Light rolled in on Tara like the tide, and on that tide she heard a voice.

  *

  Information from the erstwhile muggers narrowed Cat and Captain Pelham’s options to three warehouses on the same row, two well-defended and the third dilapidated. It was an easy choice.

  “We shouldn’t have let them go,” Cat whispered as they approached the broken door. “They were criminals.”

  “Eh.” Raz waved dismissively.

  “What if they hurt someone else? It will be our fault.”

  “I don’t think those four will take any more purses for a while. Muggers are as superstitious as fishermen, and much less stubborn. Two unfortunate encounters in one night would cause the heartiest to reconsider his choice of career.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “What should we have done, exactly?”

  “Tied them up, and called the Blacksuits.” It would have been so easy to summon them, if only Cat let Justice take over. No. Not yet.

  “With broken arms and legs they still would have wriggled free before the Blacksuits got here. Don’t you think those kids have suffered enough for one night?”

  “Kids? If we hadn’t kicked their asses, they’d probably have killed us.”

  “If we hadn’t been able to kick their asses, we wouldn’t have been in the back streets of the waterfront after dark.” Captain Pelham stepped over the rotted threshold into the warehouse. He laid a finger to his lips, and she clapped her mouth shut. As if she needed to be told when to keep silent.

  Shadows everywhere. Cat and the Captain spread out, communicating with hand signals across the empty space. Five minutes later, they determined the warehouse clear of any watch or rear guard, and met in the center of the room.

  “I haven’t found anything,” Pelham breathed into her ear.

  “Neither have I.” She kicked the bare stone floor in frustration.

  The bare stone floor.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “What?”

  “No tracks in the dust on the floor.”

  “Of course not. There’s no dust on the floor.”

  She didn’t say anything. He pulled back from her. Understanding dawned slowly on his face.

  “Well,” Captain Pelham said, “curse me for a seagoing idiot.”

  “A trapdoor.”

  “Yes.”

  Not one trapdoor, but four, they discovered in short order, one in each corner of the warehouse. Designed to store valuables, equipment or foodstuffs or shipments of magesterium wood that might otherwise walk off the premises in the pockets or lunch pails of warehouse staff, these doors were once marked with yellow paint, but someone had painstakingly removed that paint with a sharp chisel (or talon, Cat thought). Only tiny cracks around their concealed edges remained.

  None of which would have mattered had tracks on the warehouse floor indicated the direction of foot traffic. Whoever was using this warehouse must have scoured the floors for the first time in decades, ridding them of dust and foul refuse, all in vain. That very cleanliness had caused Cat to look further.

  Her hand rose to the level of her neck, but she forced it down. There were many reasons to hide a door, and Justice would not forgive her failure with Tara if all she offered in penance were a paltry smuggler’s cache.

  The first three trapdoors were unoccupied. They heard no sound within them, and no light leaked from the crack between door and doorjamb after Cat worked the dirt packed there free with her pocketknife.

  She and Raz knelt beside the fourth trapdoor and pressed their ears to the stone. Cat heard distant chants, and an oceanic roar. She cleared away some gravel near a hidden hinge, and peered inside.

  She pulled back out of reflex, vision stung by unexpected light. Once more she lowered her head.

  Through the narrow aperture she saw the enemy, giant, chanting. Stone Men. A young human stood near the gathered Flight—a captive, perhaps, or a traitor. Cat glossed over him. She recognized the smallest Stone Man as Cabot’s killer. Through her badge she had gleaned a few hazy images of the creature that broke out of the faceless witness’s window, and the small gargoyle matched those, too. No Stone Man could have entered the hospital undetected. He must have been there already—must have been the witness all along, somehow. It was the only explanation that made sense. But how had he removed his own face?

  Cat’s gaze slid from the killer to the other familiar figure in that basement room. Tara hovered in the center of the Stone Men, lost in a flood of silver radiance, an astonished smile on her lips.

  Hard to fake being faceless, Raz had said. Someone has to steal your face. Tara could have done that, easily, back at Cabot’s penthouse.

  A crystal of ice formed in Cat’s brain, freezing as it spread. Even though Tara had warped her mind and betrayed her to a vampire’s embrace, Cat wanted to like the woman. At least, she wanted to believe Tara was a human being, loyal to her own kind. Tara didn’t trust Justice. Maybe when the murderer changed back to his true form and fled, she decided to track him down herself.

  But why send Cat away, unless she had something to hide? And what could she have to hide, save that she knew the witness was a Stone Man? If she knew, why keep that knowledge from Justice? Why would Tara shelter a killer, unless she was on his side? Unless she had helped him hide from the Blacksuits since the very beginning?

  No wonder she hid from Justice and fled across town. No wonder she regarded Cat with suspicion, grilling Abelard about her behind her back. No wonder she violated Cat’s mind, and forced her to betray herself and her city. She had been working with the Stone Men all along.

  All this was conjecture. Suspicion, hearsay. Cat leaped from conclusion to conclusion. She wanted Tara to be guilty. Her brain pulsed against the limits of her skull. The world was muddy, absurd, unreal. She needed clarity. She needed logic greater than her fragile mind could bear. She needed Justice.

  Her whole body shook at the thought, and sharp tears sliced her eyes. Gods and hells, she needed Justice.

  The Stone Men were below her. This had to be enough to buy back her cold Lady’s love.

  The ice reached the nape of Cat’s neck and crept down to her rapidly cooling heart.

  She waved for Captain Pelham to approach. He knelt next to her and mouthed, “What?”

  Cat pointed to the tiny hole. He bent close, and when his attention was engrossed by the view beyond the peephole, she reached beneath her shirt and gripped the badge on its chain around her neck.

  The Blacksuit overcame her in an instant, sensing her need and shattering her mind’s shell. Captain Pelham glanced over his shoulder.

  No eye could follow the speed of the Blacksuit’s motion.

  The soft crack of breaking bone burst the inflated silence of the warehouse. Below the layers of diamond that enclosed Cat’s mind, she remembered the strength of his arms as he caught her, falling.

  He was Tara’s friend. He would have tried to prevent Cat from fulfilling her duty.

  Anyway, it was not her fault. She was a servant of Justice. Her mind was ice and her body black glass. She did not tremble. She did not feel pain, or guilt.

  She called the other Blacksuits to her.

  17

  A thousand ebon statues scattered across the city turned toward a single spot on the waterfront. At first slowly, then f
aster, like a drummer intoxicated with a new and rapid beat, they began to run.

  *

  Tara rode the surf of a silver ocean in moonlight. Or perhaps she was the surf, floating atop the water and one with it at once. When she lay with a lover and woke slowly the next morning, not knowing of or caring for the world beyond her skin, or time beyond her joyous heart’s slow beat, she felt like this, but now her skin was the endless ocean, and her heart beat in measured rhythm against unknown sands. No thought of gargoyles or Craft or murder could command her. She lay free and glowing on the waters.

  Cool light bathed her. She opened eyes she had not known were closed, looked up, and saw herself, arched in the sky above as she lay curved upon the sea. Up there, she was full and round, glowing with love and serenity. The night was her flesh. Stars clustered in the hollows of her hips and at the base of her neck.

  She felt as a tiger cub must feel looking at her mother, who gives her milk, licks her clean with a rough tongue, and nuzzles her when she tries and fails to walk, her mother who stretches three sinewy meters from nose to tail tip, her mother whose piercing claws and beating engine of a heart no Craftsman would have dared to shape.

  Was that truly her, in the sky? She blinked, and saw Ma Abernathy, smiling. Again, and it seemed to be Ms. Kevarian. Again, and she saw all of them, and none of them, and more, a power her mind desperately sought to fix in a familiar shape though it overflowed them all.

  She was looking at a Goddess. Not a fragmentary divine spirit like the ones she had dissected at school, nor a corpse bereft of life, but a Goddess old as history, Seril Green-Eyed, Seril Undying of Alt Coulumb, Great Lady of Green and Silver.

  Her eyes were open, huge as moons. Reflected in them, Tara saw an endless ocean where Seril lay as fully one with the water as she was with the sky. There was no difference between Seril of the water and Seril of the night.

  Tara was not looking at a Goddess.

  She was one with a Goddess.

  She drew a ragged breath of cool air.

  *

  In the darkness of the Xiltanda, Alexander Denovo laid down his fork. Wood raked across polished tile as he pushed his chair back from the table.

  “What is it?” Ms. Kevarian asked.

  “Your assistant is in trouble.”

  “Indeed?” She felt strangely calm as she ate another forkful of salmon. “How do you know that?”

  “I remain in contact with Justice,” he said at last, and, when she did not react, “You’re not surprised?”

  “On the contrary, I am quite concerned with Ms. Abernathy’s fate. I wonder what you intend to accomplish by rushing out in the middle of dinner.”

  “The Stone Men are inside Alt Coulumb,” he said, as if this were something she did not know.

  “Justice is searching for them.”

  “Tara found them, and Justice discovered her in their company. She’ll be held as an accessory to Cabot’s murder.”

  Ms. Kevarian set down her fork as well.

  “Come with me to the Temple of Justice,” he said. “We’ll sort this out. Get Tara back.”

  She stood, the consternation on her features unseen in the darkness. “Yes,” she echoed, her voice soft. “We must sort this out.”

  As they moved through the dark room to the stairs, she knew, somehow, that Alexander Denovo was smiling.

  *

  Cat, who was also Justice, waited as hundreds of her brothers and sisters descended on the warehouse. The Stone Men’s ceremony continued below, silver waves receding to break again on Tara’s body. Justice’s vast thoughts still debated the facts, but Cat had her own theory: Tara saved the Stone Men’s assassin in exchange for their performance of this ritual, which flooded her precise soul with pleasure. Tara was as much an addict as Cat herself.

  On the floor, the vampire twisted in pain as his regenerative system struggled to repair his spine. His mouth worked, his eyes stared, and little mewling noises escaped his ruined throat. He lacked the motor control to turn them into words.

  She raised her foot over his back. Perhaps he was innocent, but she could not let him warn Tara. He would heal.

  Her foot struck his neck above the flare of the latissimus. Bones splintered.

  The noise was louder than she expected. Below, the chanting ceased. At the same time, she heard a chorus of dull collisions above as more of her brethren landed on the roof. Louder than landings or breaking bone, though, was the rust scream of the door behind her opening.

  Who would be so stupid as to open the closed door into an abandoned warehouse when its mate lay unhinged on the floor beside it?

  She turned and saw Abelard.

  He looked from her, to the vampire on the floor, and back. Few could recognize a man or woman covered by the Blacksuit, but Abelard saw through the layer of her office to the person beneath, and was stunned or foolish enough to call out her name. “Cat!”

  The trapdoor behind her exploded. Fortunately, the Blacksuits chose that exact moment to abandon subtlety and burst in through the roof.

  *

  Lost beyond herself, Tara heard a voice, her mother’s voice almost but deeper. In her left ear it whispered: “Something is wrong.” In her right: “Permit me—”

  The world cracked open, and Seril’s voice dissolved into a mess of sea-foam sound. Tara felt as if she had been torn from her body, then realized she was actually being forced back into it. Her flesh felt tight about her soul, like a dress shrunken in the wash.

  The Guardians would not have interrupted the ceremony. They must have been disturbed.

  Attacked.

  Tara needed to help them. To help Her.

  She realized with a tremor of fear that she was thinking of Seril in capital letters.

  *

  As the rosary guided Abelard to the waterfront, he had noticed that every Blacksuit in the city was going his way. They flitted from shadow to shadow down side streets, or leapt across the rooftops, featherlight footfalls filling the night with a sound like rapid beating wings.

  When his carriage arrived at the broken warehouse, Blacksuits writhing on its roof like maggots upon old meat, he swallowed hard, threw the horse its pay, and ran toward the abandoned loading dock. He expected imminent arrest, but either Justice’s attention was elsewhere or the Blacksuits deemed his arrival part of a larger plan. Great birds of shadow bristling the buildings above, they watched him stumble and fall, panting, through the warehouse’s one standing door, just as Cat broke Captain Pelham’s neck.

  Unthinking, Abelard cried out her name, but his voice was lost amid the crack of shattered stone as gargoyles erupted from the floor.

  Talons out and wings flared, the great beasts leapt for Cat, but Blacksuits rained through the ceiling to repulse them. Battle was joined. Within it Cat darted and struck, locked in combat with a giant tiger-headed gargoyle who wore a torque of glimmering silver.

  Abelard’s tracking rosary pointed straight ahead. Fear quickened in his stomach and caught in his lungs, or perhaps that was cigarette smoke.

  He could hide, watch, and wait for this to pass. The Blacksuits would take care of everything. That was their purpose: to protect and defend. But in the last two days, he had spent too long hiding, watching, and waiting.

  He remembered the dry, wooden snap of Raz Pelham’s breaking, spine and a strange thought rose from the chaos of his mind: who were the Blacksuits protecting, and from what?

  Tara was somewhere inside that maelstrom.

  He ran in after her.

  *

  Pressure and confinement ushered Tara back to consciousness. She found herself in the warehouse basement, cradled in a male Blacksuit’s unyielding arms. Before she could object, he bent his legs and leapt twenty feet into the air.

  She struggled in his iron grip as they reached the apex of their flight. About her and below the Guardians were locked in battle, gray blurs afflicted with parasites of black. Seril’s children were losing. Blacksuits grabbed their wings, locked t
heir arms, and pulled them to the slab floor.

  Tara was weak, denied starlight by this damned cloud cover, but she had tricks at her disposal, especially against enemies like these who seldom fought a Craftswoman. As her captor prepared to land, she twisted her right arm around, and grazed with her palm the sculpted precision of his external obliques. The Blacksuit was divine in origin, thus too tightly woven to easily dismantle, but divine Craft was still Craft. She drank it in.

  She could draw only a miniscule amount of power, but that was enough. The Blacksuit’s enhanced leg muscles went slack. Instead of landing he collapsed, and Tara pitched from his arms, falling unceremoniously on her face.

  As she rose to a crouch a flailing gargoyle shook a Blacksuit off his arm, hurtling the servant of Justice toward her. Dodging, she careened into a downed Guardian who bucked and clawed as six Blacksuits bent a thick, flexible band of iron around his wings. She scrabbled away on hands and feet like a crab, breathing hard. Near the battle’s edge, her fingers touched something soft and cold behind her, wrapped in cloth. A human body.

  Turning, she saw Captain Pelham, splintered bone protruding from the skin of his neck. His mouth worked without sound, but his red eyes recognized her.

  “Shit,” she said, her first word since wakening. Glancing about, ready to duck or dodge, Tara squatted over Raz’s shoulders, worked her left hand beneath his throat, and peeled free the skin wedged between the flagstones. She placed her right hand over his broken spine, then pressed down with her full weight and pulled up at the same time. Raz’s body flopped like a landed fish, but she heard the cheerful pop of bone settling, more or less, into its proper position. Close enough for his own formidable powers to heal the rest.

  A hand fell on her shoulder. Swinging around she saw first the Blacksuit, then the woman within. Cat, wrapped in Justice’s embrace.

  Tara’s second word after awakening was the same as her first.

  You will surrender, the suit said in a voice scarcely like Cat’s own. You are accused of collaboration and conspiracy to commit murder. Around them gargoyles fell, wrestled to the ground by superior numbers. Iron bonds were fitted and locked around wings and arms and legs. Tight clamps held fanged mouths closed. Tara smelled burnt flesh and stone.