Unless Tara stopped him. She swooped down toward Kos’s mountainous corpse and hovered above the gaping pit where the Iskari pact connected to the god. Her goal was to maintain the pact against distortion, as Kos would have done were he still alive, and to do it without being destroyed herself.
Denovo’s quenched flame writhed against her will, within her mind. She had read once of worms that laid eggs beneath human skin, larvae festering into adulthood on a diet of blood and living meat. He would do the same if she let him, consuming her strength and twisting it to his own ends.
She released his fire from her grip, and he struck with it again, in a narrow controlled stream of hungry, probing light. Standing inside the Iskari pact, she could exploit its structure in her defense. Breathing out, she woke the sleeping contract around her, and Denovo’s assault broke on an invisible wall.
So far, so good.
Vines of light descended from the black sky, coiling about the pact. Tara sliced them with her knife, flying in a tight spiral upward, but where she cut, the vines grew back together. She had never seen such Craft before. With her every wasted slash, the vines tightened around the pact wall, weaving through one another into a constricting lattice.
No. She looked again, and saw her mistake. Not constricting. Nor were the vines truly woven through one another. Rather, they twined through tiny holes in the pact, linking it with Denovo’s mind. The two were one. As she watched, the weave started, slowly, to expand.
Tara strangled a scream in her throat. She was within the pact; her will granted it power. Without realizing, she had let Denovo inside her defenses. When he pulled, when he stretched, it was her mind he pulled against, her soul he was stretching.
It hurt. Not as badly as when she had been cast down from the schools, but badly enough. Her eyes grew wide with the pain, her shadow shocked through with crimson light.
*
For the first hour the light show was fun to watch. Once or twice Abelard thought he spied repeated patterns in the lightning’s dance, but the shape of the conflict remained a mystery to him. He didn’t even know who was winning.
“Think Tara’s having fun?” Cat asked, bored.
“Doesn’t look like it,” he replied. Her face was twisted in a mask of agony.
“She never has much fun, that one. You can tell by looking at her.”
“She’s trying to help Lord Kos.” Why was he being defensive? “Even though she doesn’t believe in Him. Give her a little respect.”
A fierce, brilliant spark burst between Tara and the short, bearded man—Denovo.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I … It’s been a long week.” He exhaled smoke and breathed in more smoke. This cigarette was nearly burnt down to the filter. He searched within his robe for his pack. “Kos, and, well.” Anything to change the subject. “How have you been recently?”
She didn’t answer. As he tapped the pack, he thought about this woman next to him, his childhood friend, her nights spent chasing through narrow streets for a fix. He held the tip of his new cigarette to the ember of his old and inhaled, passing flame from one to the other.
“You’ll find your way through,” she said.
He wanted to reply that she didn’t know what it was like, living without a god. That she didn’t know what it was like to feel nothing where there should be warmth, companionship, love. The surviving echoes of Kos in the world, in sunlight and hearth-fire and glory, were a poor sop to the ache of His absence. She did know, of course. That was what being a Blacksuit meant. All the responsibility of a divine servant, and none of the joy.
“Her boss seems relaxed, at least,” Cat observed.
Abelard wouldn’t have used the word “relaxed.” Lady Kevarian looked impassive. Once in a while, she jotted a note on the scroll in front of her. “Her boss has been doing this longer than Tara has.”
“Yeah?”
“She was here when Seril died.”
Cat tightened beside him, and drew into herself. He laid his hand on the back of hers, as Tara hung in the burning darkness. She did not shake him off.
*
Denovo was almost unrecognizable, his features a black mask slit by alabaster eyes. He touched the quivering barrier between them, the meld of her Craft and his own, and it was the touch of a razor against her skin. “Tara.” His voice had not changed. “It’s been a long time.”
Don’t let him distract you, she told herself. Fight through it.
“You’re good at this,” he said. “Your defense is precise, and you have talent. If you hadn’t gotten yourself kicked out of school, we could have made a true Craftswoman out of you. Someone before whom the world would quake in fear.” He wandered lackadaisically around the edge of the expanding pact, here applying pressure, there easing it. His knife glistened sickle-silver in his hand as he sliced apart Tara’s defenses where they threatened his vines. “You have a frustrating tendency to make the wrong choices.”
“Like choosing to fight you?” The words came out strangled with exertion. Somewhere, her physical form was sweating.
“That’s one of them,” he admitted. “But only one.”
The vines woven through her mind began to burn.
She had expected an attack, and deadened her senses against it, but pain wracked her nevertheless. He was fast.
Too
fast. Craft moved at the speed of thought, and there was a limit to how fast human beings could think. Denovo pried at her defenses from all sides, artlessly but without apparent strain. He could not be spinning Craft this swiftly, unless …
“You still have them,” she said. “Your … lab.”
He cocked his head to one side, as if shocked that she found this a revelation. “My dear Tara, did you think your tantrum back at school would have any effect on my plans? You burned my laboratory, but you did not burn my students. Put not your trust in things, but in men. And women,” he amended. “I put my trust in you once, Tara.”
There was no Craft in that statement beyond a simple turn of phrase, but it made her want to vomit.
Now that she knew to look, she saw the seams in the vines of Craft coiled around the Iskari pact. Some bore Denovo’s signature style, smooth and polished and full of flare. Some were rough apprentice work, and others wrought with an unerring, boring precision the flashy Professor could never match. He was drawing on other Craftsmen. In his lab in the Hidden Schools sat a hundred students in dutiful trance, their Craft directed by his mind to his ends.
It worked. That was the most horrible part. Tara couldn’t match Denovo and his hundred students. Nobody could. Any Craft she used against them, one of their number would grasp its intricacies and counter it. Their every strike pierced her like a serpent’s fang, rushing poison through her veins. She wrestled against not one mind, but a multitude.
Her confidence shuddered, and Denovo seized the opportunity to force another opening in her defenses. Some of his light seeped in through the curved walls of the Iskari pact.
She couldn’t fight Denovo’s entire lab. But his tyrannic, directing mind, that she could fight.
Miles away, her dried blood rested at the bottom of the iron bowl in the Church Archives. Blackened into ash, yes, potency all but consumed, it was still a bond between her and those stacks of scrolls. As her attention split, and more of the pact fell to Denovo, Tara called out with starlight, called out with blood, and called up the endless numbers written on the scrolls of Kos’s Sanctum.
Denovo wanted to prove the Iskari contract was negligent, so she gave him the Iskari contract data, without the intricate visualization Craft that had allowed her to comprehend it all without going mad. Endless tables of figures written in rustred ink passed into Denovo’s mind at blinding speed, a sea of paper that would take a team of Craftsmen years to decipher.
Denovo’s shadowy eyes went blank, and his spirit form stiffened as a tidal wave of data rushed from her mind to his. Overflow. Neither he nor his students could comprehend the flood, yet they could not ignore it, in case it contained some trap or stratagem. Denovo’s Craft became rigid for a second, and that was all it took. Tara sliced through the golden vines, and this time they did not heal. She struck with her knife, and struck again, sharpening its edge with each blow. Denovo tried to stop her, but she moved too fast. She was free. She laughed, and flew.
The world broke open around her with a sound like cracking tinder.
*
The laws of physics reasserted themselves in a jumble. She had weight again, and physical extension in three dimensions. Time moved swiftly, then slowed as her mind adjusted to the confines of her body. It was a comfortable feeling, like slipping her feet into a pair of old, well-worn boots that had lain years forgotten in the back of her closet.
In the expanse of prehistory, mind and flesh evolved to complement each other. Craft could transport the soul to wage war on strange planes above the corpses of dead gods, but ultimately there were few places more pleasant than the bag of dancing meat and bones that was a living body. It was warmer here.
Tottering in her flats, eyes stung by the dim court lights, Tara wanted nothing more than an iced tea and maybe an afternoon to sit on a front porch somewhere and watch the sun decline.
The Judge was watching, and she couldn’t let herself fall. Professor Denovo stood next to her, and of course he did not have the decency to look more than discombobulated. His hair was mussed, at least, and there was a hint of tension in his face.
Tara felt stiff, too, in her back and in the backs of her legs. How long had their battle lasted, in real time?
“Sir,” Denovo said with a bow to the Judge. “I ask for a rest to consider the new information Ms. Abernathy has provided. Will you permit us to meet again tomorrow?”
“Indeed.”
When she heard Denovo’s proposal, she felt a weight settle on her stomach. It was reasonable. She had indeed given him the information, after a fashion, and he was obliged to review it.
“We meet again tomorrow,” the Judge said. “Come fire and rain, come ice and the world’s end. The court adjourns.”
As he said the final word, the hooks of Craft decoupled from his flesh, and the flame in the circle died. The Judge crumpled, hands groping for support. Attendants approached to steady the man (and he was a man once more, not the mouthpiece of the machine, as Tara was once more a woman and Denovo was once more … whatever he was), and conduct him gently from the dais. As he walked, he twitched and groaned.
Was that what Judge Cabot had been at the end of his career, a broken thing, too tainted with darkness to live well? Was that what Tara herself would be in twenty years, or forty?
Denovo extended his hand for the customary handshake, but she turned her back on him and staggered away.
“Well done,” Ms. Kevarian said when she met Tara at the circle’s edge.
Tara crossed the line, sinking into the familiar unsteadiness of the normal as if into a hot bath. The feeling, however wonderful, did not improve her mood. “I gave him,” she replied with an angry toss of her head, “exactly what he wanted. I surrendered the Church Archives to win a minor point. I am such an idiot.” She glanced around the courtroom for Abelard and Cat, and saw them shouldering through the milling audience toward her.
Denovo had left the circle, too, and was gathering his papers. Ms. Kevarian leaned in, her voice low. “We would have given him that information sooner or later. Now he has it—unexpectedly, he thinks. He’ll hope you gave him more than you intended, and will analyze it himself rather than request our help, to keep us from knowing how much he has. You won, for now. Feel the victory.”
Tara tried, but the flush of triumph would not come. The floor rested uneasily beneath her feet. “This won’t set him back for long. He’s rebuilt his lab. They’ll reconstruct the visualization Craft from scratch.”
“The lab.” Her expression darkened. “You didn’t expect you had destroyed it for good, did you?”
“Hope springs eternal.” Tara grimaced. “I thought I was thorough enough that it would take him longer to recover.”
Ms. Kevarian looked as though she were about to respond, but Abelard was there, hands outstretched, complimenting Tara and full of questions, and they had no more privacy.
Across the circle, Denovo looked up from his briefcase to Tara. His eyes in the real world were pits of tar. She had drowned in them once.
He wanted her to drown in them again.
She turned to answer Abelard’s questions.
After Tara, Abelard, and Cat left the courtroom, the audience lingered to discuss the proceedings in hushed, frenetic tones. They had not understood much of the battle, due to their unfamiliarity with Craft of such magnitude, but this they knew: Kos was dead.
The student watched the silver circle and said nothing. Her bleary eyes had flown open at the first lightning flash, and down the hours as Tara fought Denovo, she had crept forward until she sat perched on her chair’s edge, vibrating with the energy of a person who had seen something beautiful but lacked the words to describe it.
That one, Ms. Kevarian thought, will make a good Craftswoman some day, if the madmen who run this city don’t warp her into a priest of something or other. Perhaps the girl was safe, though. It was difficult to be a priest in a city whose gods are dead. Cardinal Gustave, silent beside her, his face a stone mask carved with stone wrinkles, would attest to that.
She was about to say something to the Cardinal when Alexander Denovo’s smooth, familiar voice interrupted her. “Fifty years ago, we never expected that someday we would take Alt Coulumb.”
She had seen Denovo approach, skirting the edge of the circle; had felt him on the perimeter of her mind. Until he spoke, she did not acknowledge his presence.
“No one had ever managed it. This city’s gods were tied to every major civilization in the world. Nothing could touch them. Half a century later,” he mused, “they’re both dead.”
“History is full of reversals.” She rolled up one scroll, stacked it atop two others, and placed all three in her bag. “Alexander, I think you’ve met Cardinal Gustave?”