“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, she thought, or back to Edgemont.
She steeled herself and stepped across the line of blue flame.
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.
She still felt Ms. Kevarian’s eyes upon her, though maybe that was her own imagination.
There were three people left in the universe. Tara. The Judge, grown vast by a trick of the circle’s Craft, twisted and dark, eyes shining in the expanse. And, striding into the circle with no twitch of discomfort, because of course the cold held no threat for him, veteran of a thousand battles, tweed-jacketed, his white shirt bright as a cloudless midnight’s moon, Alexander Denovo. Professor.
“Tara,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”
His voice almost undid her. It was exactly as she remembered from school, casual, familiar, polite. Not arrogant, because arrogance implied one had to establish one’s superiority. Denovo’s voice assumed it.
“Professor,” she said at last. “Good to see you’ve joined us in the real world.”
“Tara.” He linked his thumbs through his belt loops, a picture of a country Craftsman. That was all it was, a picture. Denovo liked to seem simple, to disarm others with the bumpkin’s mask and strike once they were lulled into a false sense of his civility. “I thought you would have realized by now that one world’s as good as another. The schools reach everywhere, and everywhere reaches into them.” Even his grin was casual. She felt her back stiffen. “How’s the family? Still in that little town—Edgewood? Borderhill?”
He didn’t need her to tell him the name. She wanted to snap his neck for mentioning her family. “What have you done to them?”
“Nothing!” He laughed. “I’m simply asking a friendly question to an old student. An old student who repaid my kind tutelage with blood and fire.” His tone was perfectly urbane.
“You aren’t at least surprised to see me alive?”
“You broke the rules, dear Tara, and you were punished, but I was confident you would survive. Have you found the freedom you valued, working for Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao, one of the biggest partnerships in the world? Are you truly your own woman?”
“More than I was in your lab,” she said. “Are you going to make your case, or talk shop all day?”
“Certainly.” Denovo bowed, turned to the Judge, and raised one hand. “Your Honor, Kos Everburning is dead.”
The silver-blue flame roared around him, drowning out gasps from the invisible audience. The Judge knew already, from reading his Court brief that morning, but even his starlit eyes widened.
Tara raised her right hand. “Your Honor, the Church of Kos proclaims likewise. Kos is dead, and we come to grant him life.”
Great wheels of Craft revolved in the walls of the chamber around them. Gears ground against gears, and hidden silver needles automatically scribed sacred names upon circles of protection and of summoning. Abelard had been right. The Court chambers were smaller than the immensity of the black pyramid led one to believe. Most of the extra space was packed with the machines required to support human beings who dared meddle in the affairs of gods.
The Judge threw his head back, and a spiked hook of blue-white light swung out of the darkness to skewer him on his dais. His every muscle went rigid as the Craft pierced his body and mind. He was no longer precisely himself, but an interface between Tara, Denovo, and the Third Court of Craft.
Tara felt the heartbeat of the world weaken and fade as the machines and magic around her suppressed the universe’s background energy, the subtle butterfly-wing flutter every novice Craftsman could sense. It was uncanny, exhilarating. She had a stable place to stand, and from here she could move the world.
“I call upon,” she continued, “the powers of stars and of earth. I call upon the massed divine union, and I call upon the faith of the people of Alt Coulumb. Kos died honestly and through no fault of his own, and will not languish in death, but serve his people still. I invoke the first, third, and seventh protections, to secure his body against predation and decay as we do our work.” In Craft of smaller scale, like her pro bono zombies back in Edgemont, she would have done this part silently, and in a fraction of a second. This case was larger, and far more delicate. She needed to be careful and explicit, lest she tread too far too fast and leave herself undefended.
Denovo spoke next. “The lady calls for the protection of the world, of men, and of gods, to preserve her client. My clients challenge her claim that Kos died honestly and through no fault of his own. I will establish that, in point of fact, the Church of Kos bound itself to contracts that would result in its patron’s demise, specifically defense pacts with the Pantheon of Iskar. We cannot rely upon the current Church bureaucracy to maintain a functioning god.”
“It is noted.” The Judge’s mouth did not open, but his voice resounded from the chamber walls.
Tara took a deep breath. “The Iskari pacts to which Mister Denovo refers were undertaken with full knowledge of their potential consequences. The Church rightly determined they could cause no long-term damage to Kos.”
The flames on her side of the room danced.
The Judge regarded the web of fire on the courtroom floor with unseeing eyes. “Mr. Denovo presents.”
Denovo faced Tara directly. She saw what lurked beneath his pleasant, confident exterior: a network of thorns in the shape of a man, a thing that wore him like a suit. He called upon his Craft.
The space about them was charged with lines of starfire, a tapestry woven around and through itself in infinite variety, time its warp and space its weft. His will, cool and smooth as snakeskin, insinuated itself against hers, and she saw the world as he saw it, or as he wanted her to see it: a network of wire and wheels.
His Craft plunged through the bedrock of reality. The world shuddered, shivered, and began to crack, and they no longer stood within the courtroom, but on empty space, several hundred feet above the mile-sprawled corpse of Kos, pierced with contracts that tied him to gods, to governments, to Deathless Kings, to the bureaucracy of his Church Militant. He lay in the center of a globe of stars unlike any visible from earth. In death he radiated something akin to light, but deeper and more profound.
In the archives, Tara’s vision of the god had struck her full of awe, but that vision only approximated the being that lay below. This was the reality, or as close to reality as her still mostly mortal brain could come without shattering into a million shards of glass.
Across from her stood Alexander Denovo, no longer playing the country Craftsman’s role. His form had grown longer, and thorns peeked through his skin. His pupils were completely white, the white at the center of a forge fire, the white of molten metal. He stretched out his arms over the void, and fire leapt into being beneath him, scouring down like a rain of brilliant talons to rend the god’s body flesh from flesh.
*
The room went black save for the outlines of the mystic circle. Abelard’s eyes adjusted swiftly, accustomed as they were to moving in and out of the ill-lit depths of the Sanctum’s boiler room, so he was nearly blinded when lightning split the darkness without warning. Tara rose in the air wreathed by tongues of fire, and the opposing Craftsman, too, their bodies rigid. In the crackle and flash he thought he saw Tara’s skeleton through her skin.
“What the hell,” Cat said next to him. She was a monochrome statue, lit intermittently by clashing brilliant light from the circle. “What are they doing?”
“I thought you’d been to court before,” Abelard hissed back.
“I’ve been to normal court. Where they have witnesses, and evidence, and, you know, light.”
“There’s light,” he observed.
“Light, I said. Not lightning.”
As he watched the clash and roar, he noticed something else disturbing.
“She’s not breathing.”
“She’s what?”
“Tara. Not breathing.”
Cat held up a hand to shield her eyes. “Hard to see.”
“You can see her skeleton,” he pointed out. “When it sparks. Her chest doesn’t move.”
“You
would
look at her chest.”
“Novice Abelard.” Lady Kevarian had spoken, from her seat to his left. In the dark, the lightning glow suffused her skin.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“This may take a while. You won’t be of any help here. Take your friend and sit with the rest of the audience.”
“Shouldn’t we stay, to support Tara?”
She turned from the action within the circle to him. Her face was smooth, ancient and unforgiving as water-worn rock. He glanced back at Tara, levitating in the circle, and it occurred to him that everything Cardinal Gustave was to him in engineering and theology, Lady Kevarian was to Tara in Craft.
Abelard touched Cat’s shoulder. “We should find a seat.”
Cardinal Gustave watched them go. His eyes followed the dancing ember tip of Abelard’s cigarette, before returning to the tableaux within the circle.
Ms. Kevarian saw it all.
*
As the fire scorched toward its target, Tara pulled her knife from the glyph above her heart. It gleamed, and her physical form dissolved. She became a creature of shadow and starlight, and wrapped her will about Denovo’s fire, stilling, smothering.
She knew his goal from the shape of his Craft. He was trying to force open the conduit forged by the Iskari pact and prove that enough power could flow through it to destroy Kos, even when the god was at full power. He was wrong, but this didn’t mean he would fail. Truth and falsehood were flexible, and Denovo a hardened warrior. He would distort the contract, warp it, force it open in ways the original designers never intended. When he was done, it wouldn’t matter that the Iskari had never drawn more than they explicitly bargained for, or that neither party ever believed their contract vulnerable to such exploitation.