“Yeah,” Izza said, and even she could tell that her own voice sounded flat.
Cat stopped sweeping. “Are you okay?”
Izza should have gone to her when the poet died. When the pain still bled like a wound. Now the scab had formed, and tearing it open again hurt more. “No,” she said.
“What happened?”
“Margot died yesterday.”
From how hard the words were to say, she expected them to hit Cat harder. The other woman closed her eyes and breathed and opened them again. “Shit.” Cat slumped onto a blackened, half-rotten crate. The boards sagged, but supported her. “What happened?”
“The cops did it. The Penitents. They’re all—” She broke off. Better to keep quiet than speak in that quivering quavering tone. Telling Kai had been easier. Izza knew Cat, and knowing her she felt the need to be strong in front of her.
“Tell me.”
“A Penitent came for him. He fought.”
“You saw it.”
“I did.” She paced angrily among rusted wires and broken barrels until she could come up with more to say. She didn’t say, I need you, would not admit that even now. “They killed him. They’ll go on and kill my friends. I can’t leave until they’re safe.”
Cat’s grip tightened on the broom, and she stared down into the scrapes its bristles left in the dust. She growled in that tongue Izza did not know, with words like breaking rock. Then she let the broom fall. It clattered on the floor. She stood. “It won’t be safe,” she said. “Not ever. If they killed Margot, they’ll hunt for anyone connected with him. That’s you. That’s the kids. Hells, that’s me. You should have stayed away.”
“I have a…” Gods, what should she call Kai? “A friend trying to help me find out what happened. To get to the bottom of this. Figure out what made the Penitents go crazy.”
“And then what? You can’t stop the Watch.”
“You could.”
Cat’s laugh was harsh, humorless. “One at a time, maybe. You’ve already seen how well two at a time goes for me.”
“What, then? We run away? Leave the kids in danger?”
“They always were in danger. You know that. They should all leave. But they have to figure that out for themselves.”
“And what about Margot? He was killed. He deserves justice.”
That drew a smile from Cat, but it wasn’t a kind one. “I’m not here as a cop, Izza. I had to leave all that behind.”
“I don’t want a cop.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to help me.”
She’d shouted. She hadn’t meant to. Broken wood and rusted metal, fallen ceiling and shattered stone, should have eaten the echoes of her voice, but she heard them still, or heard her words in the silence their passage left. She heard the crackle of a burning village, heard the scream she’d been screaming for five years.
Cat watched her with green eyes like jade, like water.
Izza stood taut and sharp in the decaying room she’d chosen for her palace.
Cat walked toward her slowly. “You told me you wanted to leave. That you didn’t want to be responsibile for this island, for these children. You don’t have to.”
She was too close. Izza couldn’t move.
“I know that look in your eyes,” Cat said. “You want to make a difference. You think if you push hard enough, you can fix this damn island, and once you’re done with that, why not the whole world? But gods and Deathless Kings are bigger than you, kid, and they’re bigger than me, and when folks like us play their games, we get lost so fast. Ideals twist, and one day you find yourself down a dead end, breaking ten oaths to keep one. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” Izza said.
“Weeks back you said you wanted to save yourself. I can help you do that. I will. But you have to choose. I’d hate to see you choose wrong. There’s a whole world out there. This place isn’t worth you.”
Cat touched Izza’s shoulder, and Izza didn’t run, didn’t break her hand. The touch felt unreal, as if Cat wore her quicksilver skin again. Or as if Izza herself wore a skin. As if she’d been wearing that skin all along, since the day she ran through brambles and desert trees away from a rising pillar of sick oily smoke.
Cat drew her into her arms, strong and warm. Izza moved slowly.
She didn’t cry even then. She ground the sobs to dust between her teeth.
“Stay here,” Cat said. Her body felt stiff against Izza’s. She wasn’t used to these movements—to tenderness and human touch. “With me. If we need to run and hide, we run and hide together. And then, when the time’s right, we’ll leave.”
Izza wanted. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted. But she set her hands against Cat’s ribs, and pushed her away. The woman’s arms parted slowly.
“I should go,” Izza said. “I need to take care of some things. Before we leave.” She did not know if the last part was a lie.
“Okay. Okay.” Neither repetition seemed to satisfy Cat. She stepped back. “If you want. And if.” She didn’t say, if you change your mind, but Izza heard it anyway. “When the time comes, you can meet me back here. As fast as you can—I won’t be able to wait for long.”
“How will I know when the time comes?” Izza asked.
“You’ll know.”
Izza turned away. “Fine.”
“Kid,” Cat said, and she stopped. “I wish I could do more.”
“Me too,” Izza said, and left.
48
Twilling didn’t present half the problem Kai feared. Walking out of the office, numb from incense and the glassy stares of painted kittens in the motivational prints that adorned the man’s walls, she realized she need not have worried. Twilling didn’t know Kai, barely knew Jace, wasn’t privy to inner-mountain gossip. Theology, he’d said, standing by the window—he didn’t have a proper desk, only three lecterns piled with papers where he stood to work—theological rigor was an asset his branch seldom possessed, and if Kai could convert a pilgrim using her skills in that area, this was to be celebrated, and by the way, he was glad to hear Kai patched things up with Ms. Batan, and he always felt it was a mistake to silo verticals, which phrase Kai understood but felt dirty for understanding. In short, he said, spreading hands, we might make a closer out of you yet. Who knows to what heights you might rise? He handed over the paperwork without fuss, once he found the right form and signed his name with a quill pen and a sleeve-flaring flourish.
The hardest part of the conversation had been to keep a straight face when Twilling’s verbiage swerved into the arcane and he began to invent new meanings for the word “leverage.” She rode the lift down from the office, self-satisfied, bobbing her head to the ghostly music of a steel drum.
When the lift reached the lobby, the doors opened and she saw Claude.
He waited straight backed on the edge of a leather couch, his face fixed in that even, distant stare watchmen and other Penitent survivors had, the one that seemed deeper than blind. The blank wall in front of him was painted cream. He wore his uniform shirt and pressed khakis and mirror-shined shoes. He didn’t look at his reflection in the patent leather.
Penitents stood guard outside the lobby’s glass doors. Three suited shamans squeezed past them into the alchemically cooled air.
Claude noticed her before she could decide whether to stay in the lift and hide.
“Kai!”
If he wanted her in an official capacity, the offices upstairs offered no protection; if he wanted her unofficially, she could just brush past. She walked as briskly as her limp allowed, her cane taps loud on the floor.
He cut her off at the doors. She tried to circle around him, but he blocked her path. “What do you want?” Not good, but better than her other options, most a variation on “so are you going to arrest me or what?”
He adopted that smile he thought was comforting. “We need to talk.”
“I have business.” She held the signed contract between th
em like a herald’s rod. “A client meeting. We can talk later.”
“I don’t want to make this official.”
“Did you come here to make it official?”
“You vanished last night.” He stepped closer, and she stepped back. “We have to talk about Margot. The sky’s about to fall. The Iskari legate’s up the ridge, waving his holy symbol around and threatening to rain all hells down on the chief if we don’t get him answers. I’m on the line. I have to tell them something. The chief, if not the ambassador. Why did I go to Margot’s house before there was any report of fire?”
“Why do you ever go on patrol?”
“Yesterday, I went because you asked me to.”
“Not when I asked, though.”
“You wanted me to arrest a private citizen, Kai. A foreigner. It took me a while to set things up.”
“You arrest foreigners all the time.”
“Stowaway creeps caught peddling bennies in the Godsdistrikt. We don’t grab bona fide rent-paying residents. I put myself on the line for you.”
“And someone got killed.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t tell anyone the story, Claude, except for you. I told you, and you promised not to tell anyone else, and somehow Margot ends up dead.”
“You don’t think I…” He trailed off.
“I don’t think you killed him. But you told someone.”
The words struck Claude exactly like a slap—he barely moved. She’d slapped him before, and knew the signs. Shirtfront shifted as he flexed and relaxed his chest. “I didn’t.”
When Claude lied, silence was the best response. She walked past, and he did not try to stop her with anything but words.
“You made some wild accusations. I had to check.”
She kept her voice low. Security guards had already glanced their way. “I showed you proof.”
“You showed me a piece of paper. That isn’t enough. And you haven’t exactly been yourself lately. Irrational. Jumping at shadows.”
Her teeth ground. She forced the anger from her voice—without, it was level like a guillotine blade. “Who did you tell?”
“My team. The watch officer.”
“Who else?” Pulling him in two directions: duty to the watch, keeping silent, and duty to her, to speak. Duty was the cord that bound them. Not love. Maybe it never had been love.
“I sent a runner up the mountain. To ask if they knew anything about Margot.”
“To the mountain. To whom?”
“Jace,” he said.
“Gods.” After all her care to gather evidence, to give Jace solid proof. She closed her eyes and was back in the spider’s web, back on the bed, strapped in, tubes leading from her arms. “I told you not to tell anyone. And you told five people, at least. Who knows how many they told?”
“He trusts you, Kai. The reply came late, but it came. He said he trusted you. That was all I needed.”
“You should have trusted me without him. Instead you needed someone else to tell you it was okay to believe the crazy girl. Every link in the chain could be a leak. The runner. Your partners. The duty officer. Anyone.”
He tried to touch her, and she pulled away.
“No. A man’s dead, and I have to go.”
“I could make you come with me.”
“Do it, then.”
He had stone in him, in his bones and marrow, as much almost as the Penitents outside. Little veins stood out on the backs of his hands.
But he didn’t stop her as she left.
She pushed through the revolving doors out into the sea’s breath and the heat and the Penitents’ shadow. One turned its head to watch her, leaning on her cane. Stone groaned, and the prisoner too. She did not acknowledge their attention. A cab stopped for her, and she got in.
“Just drive,” she told the horse. She closed the door, slid the curtains shut, and sat in red-tinged solitude.
Leaning back into cushions, she wished she could disappear.
Jace knew about Margot. Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe now he’d see it was futile to keep her on the sidelines. Or, more likely, he’d kick her out forever.
Especially if he discovered what she was about to do.
In which case she should hurry.
She cracked the door, leaned out into traffic, and shouted over the rush: “Take me to the Regency.”
49
An hour later, Teo and Kai sat side by side in a cable car climbing Kavekana’ai. Beneath and behind them the shoreline city receded. Perspective congealed metal and brick and streets and blocks into a cracked old scab separating ocean from green slopes. They shared the car with a young woman in a green shirt, who wore a silver name tag that read “Jamie” in round sans-serif letters: an employee in the volcano’s coffee shop. Kai’d greeted her with a nod as they boarded the car, and received no acknowledgment in return.
“Nice, this,” Teo said halfway through the climb, as the car rocked past an interchange pole. “Pilgrimage in style.”
“The priests didn’t like the idea at first.” Kai was relieved for the opening. Plots tangled in the cat’s cradle of her mind and left little slack for small talk. “Used to be the mountain was a special space.”
“Sacred.” Teo nodded. “We used to do that all the time, too. My grandparents’ generation, I mean, before the God Wars. Old Quechal were sticklers for class and strata. There were five or six different sectors of the city, and different castes or clans couldn’t visit one or the other during lunar eclipse months, or intercalary days, or when the wind was wrong. Made for all kinds of hassle.”
Jamie the coffee girl leaned against the window and closed her eyes. Her cheek puddled into the glass.
“It’s not like that,” Kai said.
“What’s it like, then?”
“The whole island’s sacred space. This is where human beings came from, after all.”
“Oh,” Teo said. “Right.”
“Oh right what?”
“I forgot. You’re one of those cultures. ’And so the gods shaped men out of clay.’ That sort of thing.”
“What do you have against creation myths?”
Teo shifted in her seat. “Outside of the fact that they’re wrong?”
“Creation stories are key to mythology. They show us who people think they are. And they’re so interesting. Some Old World cultures say people are made from earth and spit. Orthodox Apophitans claim one of their sun gods, you know. Jacked off onto some sand, and then shaped the sand.” Jamie squinched up her face like she’d smelled something foul, which confirmed Kai’s theory she was pretending to sleep.
“And yet you believe human beings were created here. On this island.”
“What do you believe?”
“The fossil record. Old bones in caves. Evolution. A friend of mine, his mother studies rural cultures. Find a hundred fifty people who scrape a living together in the deep desert cutting cacti open for water and trapping rats for food, and they’ll have a story about how the great cactus god shaped them out of rat dung and hung the sun in the sky to dry them. Or this masturbating sun god. Creation myths are embarrassing.”
“There are gargoyles in Alt Coulumb,” Kai said. “Seril’s children. The goddess made them. Zurish gods made the sentient ice that walks Koschei’s empire—or the ice made the gods. Some dragons claim they made themselves, but you never really know with dragons.”
“Those are exceptions and you know it. You went to college?”
“Of course.”
“A real one, I mean. Not just shaman academy.”
“Shaman academy has as rigorous a mathematics and applied theology course load as any in the Old World,” she said. “But, yes, I did undergrad at Seven Islands.”
“So you know about evolution.”
“I do.”
“And you believe it.”
“I’m no student of the mystic arts, but sure.” Kai shrugg
ed. The cable car rolled on; the cable’s slope increased and the car tilted back and Jamie’s face slid forward on the glass until her temple and cheekbone pressed against the window’s edge.
“And yet,” Teo said, “you claim the human race started here. On this island. Doesn’t the contradiction bother you?”
“I don’t see a contradiction.” Their ascent grew steeper, and the horizon bucked and reared. Always at this stage of the climb Kai felt that deep monkey fear of twisted balance, of the eternal fall. “Yes, we evolved somewhere in the Old World, probably in the Southern Gleb. We spread over earth and sea for a few hundred millennia. An eon or so back, some people landed here after a long voyage, either from Kath or the Gleb, the Hidden Schools are still arguing which. And here, we became human.” Ahead and above, the cave mouth gaped. The car slid onto the cave roof track with the grinding, crunching sound of a metal throat being cleared. “Here’s our stop.”
Jamie the coffee girl threw open the door of the moving gondola, jumped out, and jogged to the security desk at the far wall, where a bored guard waited with feet up and newspaper spread. Kai stepped out and held a hand for Teo, who stumbled anyway. Dresediel Lex was a port city, but Kai’d never realized how landlocked its people could be, how unsteady when the ground betrayed them.
“You believe metaphorically,” Teo said.
“Metaphors are true.” Kai handed the guard her papers, Twilling’s signature showing. The guard returned the contract along with two visitors’ passes, moved two beads on an abacus, and the rock doors behind him rolled open. Kai led Teo inside. Her identity as Kai, a visitor from Twilling’s group, took precedence over her identity as Kai, exiled priest. So far, the wards did not protest her presence. Hopefully that held.
“We don’t need to grope around the edges of truth these days,” the Quechal woman said, behind her. “We know it.”
“Do we really?”
“Yes.”
With green visitor’s badges clipped to their jackets, engrossed in conversation, they presented exactly the right impression: pilgrim and intercessor, come to tour the holiest of holies. Kai guided Teo through a side door in the reception hall, and down a well-lit winding stair. “How much do you know about the Craft?”
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