“Last time you and I were in Alt Coulumb. Forty years back, maybe?”
“Yes,” the Cardinal replied, his words heavy with rage. “I was Technician Gustave when you first came to this city. Wiser and more innocent than the years have left me.” He stood and extended his hand, rigid as a mannequin.
Alexander was much better than the old priest at faking politeness. He gave Gustave a polo player’s handshake, and when their palms touched, his smile widened. “I remember! You helped us in the Seril case. It’s been far too long. How have you been?”
A flicker of pain crossed the Cardinal’s features when Alexander mentioned Seril. His fingers tightened on his staff, as if its haft were Denovo’s throat. “I am as you see me.”
“Well.” Alexander slapped the Cardinal’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Elayne and I are the best there is at this kind of thing. We’ll have Kos up and smiting the unbelievers in a flash. Just like last time.”
“No,” the Cardinal said. “Not like last time.”
Ms. Kevarian hoisted her bag to her shoulder. “Might you excuse us, Cardinal?” The old man nodded. She shot Alexander a significant look. “Professor, accompany me to the street?”
He fell into step with her automatically. Her legs were long, but he had a broad stride. She reached the door out of the courtroom first, held it open for him, and closed it behind them. They walked alone down the long hall to the exit.
“What is it, Elayne?”
“What did you plan to accomplish back there?”
“I think the Church knowingly pledged too much to the Iskari, and as such does not deserve the first and third degrees of protection. I’m acting in my clients’ best interest.”
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
“What, then?”
“You think Gustave doesn’t see right through you? The man spends his days in a confessional. He knows you don’t want to bring back the Kos he knew. You’re rubbing salt in his wound.”
“The Kos he knew, the Kos I knew, what does it matter?” He was keeping his contempt in check at least. “We’re going to make something that works. It’ll do everything old Kos did, but better. This is an opportunity.”
“Let him grieve for his god. He has little enough trust in this process without your snide comments setting him off.”
“A man can’t say what he feels anymore?”
“You never say what you feel,” she observed. “You say what you calculate will have the desired effect.”
“As if you cared about all these gods and their worshipers. Hell, I remember when we were starting out, you were more bloodthirsty than I’d ever been.”
“Forty years ago. I’ve seen a lot in that time, and become much better at serving my clients.”
“As have I,” Alexander said with a grin. “Though I always have been more certain of who my ultimate client was.”
“Yourself?”
“None other.” He bowed, sweeping one arm out behind him. “Come with me to dinner tonight.”
“So forward.”
“That’s not a no.”
“You’re here to no good purpose. You took this case because you thought you could turn it to your advantage, and if you can betray a few people at the same time, so much the better.”
“That,” he said, “is not a no either.”
She quickened her pace.
“I’ll be at the Xiltanda at seven,” he called after her. “Fifth floor, in the dark. You’ll come?”
The hallway ended in a blank wall of gray mist. She strode through it without farewell or backward glance.
“Great!” he called after her as she escaped into the day.
*
After the darkness of the Court of Craft and of astral space, Alt Coulumb’s panoply was overwhelming: towers of chrome and silver against the empty white sky, a street full of deadlocked carriages, a boy in an orange jacket singing the noon news on the corner. Tara found no joy in the light and noise. She felt Denovo’s smile like a splinter in her mind. Your family, he had said. What was the name of that little town?
Damn him.
“I don’t understand,” Abelard said. “Why did you give him the archives?”
She needed a drink and a square meal, not questions. Cat, small mercies, stood apart, scanning the street, the sky, the sidewalk for signs of danger. One conversationalist was bad enough.
She fought to produce an answer despite the throbbing pain in her skull. “I needed the archives to distract him long enough for me to win.” And soon he would use those archives against her. Tara’s victory had been well earned, even Ms. Kevarian said that, but it would not last.
“Why was he winning in the first place?”
“He’s the best Craftsman I’ve ever known. But that’s not why.” A man sold water in glass bottles from a stand near the court gates. She threw him a small coin. He tossed her back a bottle, which she caught with a tendril of Craft, opened, and drank. Cold clear water chilled her throat and calmed her heart, but the headache did not recede. “He cheats.” She took another swig. Had he done something to her, in the circle? No, not likely. The court wards would have kept her safe from his tricks.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she shot back. “Sorry. Shaken, that’s all.”
“I understand,” he said, and placed a hand on her arm. He didn’t understand. Denovo had every advantage. Tara would lose this case if she didn’t find a way to assure her victory. She would lose, and be lost to history, shut off from the world of Craft and consequence.
Breath came short to her lungs, and deep thoughts spiraled within her, but she was not afraid. When you were afraid, you ran from the object of your fear, and Tara did not intend to run.
Ms. Kevarian emerged from the court, saving Tara from further introspection. Her heels sounded staccato on the stone sidewalk. “Tara. Thank you for waiting. I needed to attend to affairs inside.”
Cat, sensing business, drew back farther to preserve their privacy.
“No problem.” Was it Tara’s imagination, or did Ms. Kevarian look flustered? “Boss, if you don’t need me for something else, I’d like to spend the rest of the day in the court library.” She pointed to the pinnacle of the black pyramid behind them. “Denovo has the Church archive data. He’ll decode it soon, and learn that Kos was low on power. I want to find out where that power went before he starts asking. Abelard and I should be able to make a good start before sundown.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You will scour the library next—that’s the correct move. However, I need Abelard for my own work.”
“I’m right here,” Abelard observed.
Ms. Kevarian turned to him. “You will accompany me this afternoon to visit the local representatives of several Deathless Kings. They have a stake in Kos’s resurrection, and we need to be on good terms with them if your Church is to survive unchanged.”
“How can I help?”
“For the most part, by standing in their offices looking like a good young cleric.”
He frowned, but did not reply.
“We need to stay ahead of Denovo,” Tara said. “Abelard knows the Church inside and out. He’s invaluable to my work.”
“Your little bodyguard,” Ms. Kevarian said, pointing at Cat, “should be able to navigate the bureaucracy at least as well. She’s an officer of Justice, after all.”
“Abelard would be better, and you know it.”
“Yesterday you chafed when I asked him to assist you, and today you don’t want to be separated from him. I need his—and your—help. Though our task may sound frivolous, trust me, it is every bit as important as your research.”
Abelard lit a fresh cigarette with the tip of the previous one. “Do I get a choice?”
“No,” Ms. Kevarian said before Tara could respond.
He gave Tara a reluctant look. She tried to return it. For a god-worshipper, he was a decent human being. More decent than most.
“Will the Deathless Kings mind if I smoke?” Abelard asked.
“Not in this instance.”
He shrugged. “Fair enough.”
A group of suited men strode out of the court, lesser toadies and plump advisors huddled around an elder Craftsman: a robed skeleton with diamond eyes who sipped coffee from an oversized black mug. Ms. Kevarian drew close to Tara, and her voice dropped to an urgent whisper. “Beware of Alexander Denovo. I’ve known the man for half a century. I haven’t trusted him so far, and I don’t know any reason to start now.”
As Tara listened, her tumbling emotions fell into place. She recognized the rapid rhythm of her heart, and the rhythm’s name was wrath: wrath at Denovo’s smile, at his bumpkin’s charade, at his cheerful threats and the lives he chose to break. Her fear of the firm, of failure, crumbled before the sweet, consuming flame of rage. “I will do more than beware him,” she said. “I’m going to beat him.”
“Good.” Ms. Kevarian’s words were sharp and quiet, like footsteps in a distant passage. “But remember, your first duty is to our client, not revenge.”
“If I have to raise a god from the dead to defeat Alexander Denovo,” she replied, “I will raise a hundred. I’ll bring Kos back ten times greater than he was.”
“Well said.” Ms. Kevarian withdrew, and raised her voice. “You can return, Catherine. We’re done talking shop.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Good luck to both of you. Be careful.”
*
“Be careful, she says.” Cat sounded as if she wanted to spit.
Tara’s legs ached. Upon re-entering the Court of Craft, they had found the hallway replaced by a long, narrow flight of stairs. Tara welcomed the first hundred steps as a meditative exercise, a chance to master her emotions and prepare for the long afternoon ahead. Anger was a useful tool, but it would not help her track down inconsistencies in cryptic scrolls. The next few hundred steps served no purpose but to embarrass her. After half an hour’s ceaseless climb, she was slick with sweat, while Cat’s breath remained even and assured. Tara’s ordeal in the circle, and the previous night’s adventure, weighed on her bones like meat on a hanger. She hadn’t expected a career in the Craft to involve being beaten up so much.
Tara did not answer Cat, but the other woman continued regardless. “Be careful. As if something’s going to jump us in a library.”
“You might be surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know how people say a book is really gripping?”
“Don’t tell me…” Cat trailed off.
“Libraries can be dangerous.” They reached one of the brief landings that interrupted the stairs every thirty steps or so, a few square feet of flat floor hosting a teak table and a fern—either a flimsy attempt to relieve their tedium or a cunning mockery of the same. Flipping over a frond, Tara found its underside purple. “You’d still probably rather be on the prowl. Hunting down miscreants.”
Cat laughed bitterly. “Not until you’re gone. I have my orders.”
“From whom?”
“Justice.”
That word, that name, made Tara shiver despite the heat of her exertion. “Directly? You don’t have a superior officer?”
“Justice is always in charge. It’s easier that way.”
“Easier how?”
“Power corrupts people. Justice isn’t people.”
Tara let that sentence pass without comment, and cataloged in her mind the retorts she wanted to give.
Of the pair of them, Cat was the least comfortable with silence, and soon she spoke again: “I want to be where the action is, but I’m more likely to run into Stone Men with you than on the street. They came hunting for you last night, and you survived. Stands to reason they’ll try again. Maybe they’ll send the one that killed Cabot next time.”
“You still think a gargoyle was responsible for that?” Tara asked, feeling as though she were carrying an entire gargoyle in her handbag, rather than only his face.
“Justice does.”
“And you don’t ask questions once Justice has done the thinking?”
“Questions are way above my pay grade.”
“What if I asked for your personal opinion?”
“When Cabot died, his security wards took an engram of the scene.” She saw Tara’s confusion, and made a vague gesture in the air. “Mental picture thing. Like a painting in your head. If you need to know something, Justice flashes an engram into your mind when you put on the Blacksuit. Better than getting news from a Crier. The engram’s never off pitch.”
“At least the Crier stays out of your head.”
“I guess. Cabot’s engram shows a Stone Man standing over his body, talons red with blood.”
“Couldn’t a Craftsman or Craftswoman have killed him, and faked that picture?”
“You know more about that sort of thing than I do, but Justice doesn’t think so. Cabot’s wards would have alerted us if someone used Craft to break them, or to hurt him for that matter.”
“The wards didn’t tell you about the bone circle,” Tara said, though she was being unfair. She could think of a handful of answers to that objection herself, and was not surprised when Cat gave one of them.
“The circle was a standard piece of medical Craft. Cabot died because his spine was removed in the first place, along with his brain and eyes and everything. The circle just kept him alive a little longer. Besides, why would a Craftsman want Cabot dead? There aren’t many students of the Craft in Alt Coulumb, and Cabot was well liked by those that knew him.”
They climbed the rest of the way without speaking. Tara considered the other woman’s words, and indexed them for the future.
Cat reached the door at the top of the stairway first. It was made of thick, heavy wood, finished with a lattice of ash and rowan designed to ward off harmful Craft.
“Cat?”
“Hm?” Her hand hesitated on the doorknob.
“Why do you think the Guardians attacked Cabot? What was their motive?”
“They don’t need a motive for murder. Bloodthirsty creatures. They live for death and destruction. You really should stop calling them Guardians, by the way. People will think you’re on their side.”
“Gargoyles, then. Justice doesn’t think they killed him because of the case?”
“What case?”
“This case. Wasn’t Cabot slated to judge Kos before he died?”
Cat looked taken aback. “I don’t think so.”
*
“Young man,” Lady Kevarian said as the glass lift passed the thirtieth floor and continued its ascent, “you’re about to meet the senior representative of the Deathless Kings of the Northern Gleb in Alt Coulumb. His name is James, and you are to be on your best behavior.”