Tara stumbled forward and fell a few feet from the vampire. The Craft hooked through his soul blazed, and he spasmed in pain as it burned his memories.
“Tara!”
“No,” she shouted, not in answer. “No, dammit!”
“There’s something you should see.”
“They’re taking his mind!”
The hook would burn him clean if she let it, without leaving a scar. The mind was good at healing. Breaches in memory it wallpapered with ignorance or echoes of routine. She had to stop the process, but she was weak without starlight. She reached for her purse and the implements within. Silver forceps for drawing the Craft from Raz’s mind, and black wax for warding him against its return. There, and there. Rosemary, for remembrance, and fennel, for … for something.…
Abelard had stopped talking. She glanced back to call for his help. Another pair of hands could make a difference.
Then she saw the gargoyles, in the dark.
There were six of them, and they were large, spread out in a loose semicircle on the roof to cordon Tara, Abelard, and Cat off from the stairwell and escape. Shale had been small and sleek by comparison. Each of these creatures was at least eight feet tall, wings flaring higher behind them. Deep scars crisscrossed their bodies. Six pairs of emerald eyes gleamed in six broad, contorted faces, some beaked, some fanged, some tusked like elephants. Light from the street below illuminated the hungry interior of six large stone mouths.
Tara had only defeated Shale with surprise on her side, when he was in human form. His brethren were ready for battle. There would be no reasoning with them, or, no tricking them through reason. They understood force, and Tara didn’t have force on her side.
Cat’s eyes were fixed on the tallest gargoyle—immense, female, and blunt-faced like a lion, with long, wicked talons and muscles tight as steel cords. Cat barely breathed. Abelard looked from Tara to the gargoyles and back. An inch of ash shivered at the end of his cigarette. “Tara?” he said, tentatively.
“Abelard, I can’t.” Raz’s brain was being fried from the inside out, and she was almost spent. She could save whatever this unknown Craftsman wished to wipe from the captain’s mind, or else try to protect Abelard and his junkie friend and maybe herself.
If Raz knew something about the case, Ms. Kevarian needed to know it, too.
Tara’s grip shook on the silver forceps.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Cat said to the gargoyle.
Stupid addict,
Tara thought. Hopped up and ready to fight the world. They’d chew through her first, and save Tara to clean their teeth.
But the gargoyle answered. Her voice rumbled like an avalanche.
“We come to reclaim our brother.”
Cat was not fazed. “You violate the law by setting foot within the city.”
“This was our city once.”
Cat turned to Tara, unperturbed by the several tons of killing machine arrayed before her, and said, “Take care of the vampire.” There was authority in her tone and bearing. Tara did not quarrel. Returning her attention to Raz, she gripped the end of that red-hot hook of Craft with her forceps and pulled, evenly and with every fiber of her being. Raz twitched. A soft whine escaped his lips.
Pull harder. If you die here, leave Ms. Kevarian with everything she needs. Otherwise you’ve failed her, which means you left your home and your family to die on a rooftop in a city your kinfolk abandoned generations ago, all for nothing.
The world turned black and white around her as she pulled. Starfire caught and burned in her eyes. The blacks and whites faded to gray and the gray itself began to blur. Breath came heavy in her ears.
She heard a scream.
*
Abelard saw the Guardians, their presence staining the air, and he saw Cat rebuke them like an empress, head back, chin up, the scars at her throat wild and red and raw. Tara collapsed over Raz Pelham’s body, unconscious. His cigarette smoke tasted of sour, copper panic.
Cat glanced from Tara back to the Guardians and said, “It was your city. Now it’s mine.”
She raised a hand to her chest, grasped a small statue that hung from a steel chain around her neck, and began to change.
*
Black ice flowed through Cat’s mind as her hand closed around the badge. It chilled and crushed her fear of these six heretic killing machines, and her fury at their presence. The burning tower of her need stood alone against the rushing cold: the need for a fix, the need for a high, the need to be something better than she was.
Catherine Elle was fallible. Afraid. Angry. Desperate. What remained after the black ice washed over her was strong, clear, hard, slick, patient, hungry. Her mind froze as a shallow, clear pond freezes, trapping fish in midflow. The jumping chaos of her thoughts resolved into stillness, and the stillness came alive with whispers.
These Stone Men were members of a Flight that infiltrated the city days before and had thus far eluded capture. Judge Cabot’s killer was not among this group, but he had been seen in their company.
Idolaters, Cat would have called them. Wild creatures, barely human.
Cat wasn’t here anymore, though. Justice was.
She examined the large Stone Woman with eyes of liquid black. This was the leader of the group, old but still strong. They had not attacked—a good sign.
Your presence is in violation of City law,
Justice said through Cat.
“We want our brother,” the leader snarled. “Stand aside.” The Stone Woman darted left faster than a normal human could have seen. Cat moved faster, and blocked her path.
Justice does not stand aside. But if you leave, I promise to let you go.
“Even if you defeat me, my children will eat your heathen heart. There’s one of you, and six of us.”
Not one,
she said,
but thousands. Fifteen can reach this rooftop before you chew through me.
“You’ll still be dead.”
Doesn’t matter.
The Stone Woman drew herself to her full height, and her wings unfurled. “You’re bluffing.”
Try me.
Wind whispered between them. Cat’s muscles tensed, ready to spring—but the Stone Men were gone. All six, scattered like dry leaves before an autumn breeze. One landed on the roof of a dance hall to the north, wings flared to catch the night wind; three others glided to the peaked gables of a neighboring bordello. Cat couldn’t see the remaining two.
The Suit released her, the oil-slick coating receding reluctantly from her skin. To Cat, it felt like peeling off a scab that was her whole mind. Power left her body, swiftness her thoughts, clarity her soul, and the many voices of Justice died in her ear. Nothing took their place. No, not nothing. The void, an absence strong as any truth.
She sagged to her knees, shaking and cold and in desperate need of a fix. Slender arms encircled her. Abelard. She saw his face as if from the bottom of a pool of water, hazy, naïve, concerned. Her friend.
Poor son of a bitch.
She was lucky, she thought as he held her, that the vampire was unconscious. There was no telling what she would have done for a bite, for a rush to fill the empty space Justice left behind. She would have sold her soul. Maybe she’d done that already. It was hard to remember.
Tara fled down dream corridors from a great and terrible fate. Or was she indeed fleeing
from
a great and terrible fate, and not
toward
one?
Demons and gargoyles hounded her, talons gleaming with her blood. In terror she turned and struck, and soon her knife gleamed with theirs, but there were more of them, endless and brutal, and she ran. A turn in the strobe-lit hallway confronted her with an old wooden door, painted white with a brass knob. A sign was pinned to the wood, a child’s scrawl: gone.
Whatever she fled, or sought, it was beyond that door, nameless and writhing.
She turned the knob and pushed. Shadows scrabbled around the doorjamb, long and slender and hooked like spider’s legs. The howling, clawed things neared behind her. She steeled herself and leapt through.
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?”