Through the transparent walls, Abelard saw the Sanctum of Kos rising like a black needle over the skyline. In ordinary times God’s radiance would have shone from its tip, but these were not ordinary times. “His name is James?”
“Honestly, Abelard, I spout a string of long and dangerous-sounding words at you, and you ask me about the most familiar one of the group?”
“James doesn’t sound like a Deathless King–type name to me.”
“Nor does Elayne, I imagine. Or Tara.” Somewhere during Lady Kevarian’s long life, she had learned to smile in cold amusement without moving a single muscle on her face.
“You’re not a Deathless King, Lady Kevarian.”
“Oh,” she said. “Am I not?”
“You’re a Craftswoman. Deathless Kings are bony, ancient…” She was looking at him. Her lips had joined in the smile, but her eyes remained untouched. “Skeleton things,” he finished lamely.
“How old do you think I look, Abelard? Be honest.”
“Early fifties?”
“I’m seventy-nine years and three months of age,” she said as if reading a tally. Abelard almost dropped his cigarette. “Let me show you something. Take my hand.”
She held it out, palm up. He touched her and felt a spark—but it wasn’t a spark, not a normal spark of electric charge, anyway—leap from her skin to his, or was it the other way around? His world faded, breath stilled in his lungs, and he thought he heard his heartbeat skip.
Before him stood Lady Kevarian, surrounded by empty space. Her skin opened like a hideous flower along invisible fissures and within he saw not a wet, fragile collection of human organs but the will, implacable and cold as steel, that animated the puppet of her flesh. In terror he recoiled and fell away from her, into the black. Time was long, and the world behind his eyes so dark, save for a flicker of deep red at the edge of his vision.
He couldn’t tell if she released him or he released her, but when he returned to himself he was plastered against the glass wall of the lift, Alt Coulumb and open air to his back and Lady Kevarian before him, in human guise once more. Had the lift’s wall shattered, he wasn’t certain whether he would have chosen to leap toward her to safety, or out into the abyss.
She waved dismissively. “Oh, stop looking at me like that. You’re fine.” She brushed a piece of lint off the sleeve of her jacket. “Don’t baby yourself. It wasn’t that bad.”
Come on,
he told himself.
Say something.
“You’re so cold.”
“The Craft, young Abelard, is the art and science of using power as the gods do. But gods and men are different. Gods draw power from worship and sacrifice, and are shaped by that worship, that sacrifice. Craftsmen draw power from the stars and the earth, and are shaped by them in turn. We can also use human soulstuff for our ends, of course, but the stars are more reliable than men. Over the years a Craftswoman comes to have more in common with sky and stone than with the race to which she was born. Life seeps from her body, replaced with something else.”
“What?”
“Power.” Her teeth were narrow. “We soak in starlight or bury ourselves in the soil or apply preservative unguents to ward against time, but eventually the flesh gives way. We become, as you put it”—she counted the words on her fingers—“bony, ancient, skeleton things.”
Her monologue had given him time to breathe. “And Tara?”
“Is on the path to immortality. A cold and lonely immortality, to be sure, and not one a hedonist would find rewarding, but immortality nevertheless.”
He tried to imagine Tara’s dark skin paling and her flesh fading away, tried to imagine what she would look like as a walking, brilliant skeleton. That was almost worse than Lady Kevarian’s touch had been. Almost. “James?”
“One of the first generation of Craftsmen. His people were colonists of the Northern Gleb for Camlaan, and remained through the Wars to found one of the first true Deathless King nations. He’s big, he’s old, and though he’s mostly polite he’d rip your heart from your chest and devour it if he thought you were trifling with him. Hasn’t done that in a while, though. Partly because he no longer has an esophagus.” She looked Abelard over, considering. “Perhaps you should remain in the lobby until I introduce you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The doors dinged, and opened.
*
“Why don’t I get to do anything fun?” Cat whispered as she paced the reading room of the Third Court of Craft, regarding the long shelves of books and magazines with evident suspicion.
This was Tara’s idea of how a library should look, not the dusty cave of the Church Archives: a spacious chamber at the pinnacle of the Court of Craft, where the four, or was it five, sides of the pyramid came to a point of transparent crystal that would have skewered any pigeon stupid enough to perch upon it. The crystal caught and funneled starlight into the depths of the building. Normally, no doubt, the sky shone blue as sapphire and deeper through that roof, but today the clouds above were the color of milk.
There were no giant heaps of scrolls here, no quaint tome piles or densely packed shelves. The Court of Craft’s storage facilities were below, tight well-dusted stacks where only Court servants tread. The main reading room was spacious and quiet. Green carpet and wooden tables devoured any sound that dared trespass on their solemnity.
A young man with short, spiked hair and a stud of jet in each ear attended the reference desk, while an older woman, solid and unshakable as a butte, trundled around the room, checking that periodicals remained in their proper places and casting severe glances at the few patrons who dared speak above a whisper. Cat had already received three of those withering looks, and seemed to be angling for a fourth.
When Tara had requested books from the collection, the young man at the reference desk scrawled the titles on a slip of palimpsest with a quill pen and inserted the slip into a pneumatic slot. Minutes later, a wooden wall panel swung open soundlessly and a book-laden cart rolled out of the darkness, bearing her order. A small glass and silver tank welded to the cart’s underside played host to the guiding rat brain. By a trick of Craft, the brain thought it was still a rat, seeking always a trace of food that happened to be one room over, one level up, just around the next turn of the shelf. When Tara claimed her books, the rat brain received its illusory reward and wheeled off in search of the next morsel.
“I’m having fun,” Tara replied in a whisper.
“I mean,” Cat said, “Abelard said that yesterday you walked on a dead god. Why am I watching you shuffle through books? When do I get to take a vision quest?”
“No vision quests here. The Church Archives and the court have different storage philosophies.”
Cat stopped and looked at her as though she had grown an extra head. “What?”
“Every piece of information stored in the Church Archives was about Kos. The Church made careful note of how everything related to him. They described contracts, for example, as drawing from a particular vessel of his power, which in turn drew from a major chakra, which in turn … you get the idea. If I wanted to describe you in the same way, I would say that you have an iris that is a part of your eye that is a part of your face, which is a part of your head and so on. That kind of system is hard for people to interpret, but easy for the Craft.”
Cat looked frustrated, but willing to follow along. “What about this library?”
“These books are all works of Craft, but the Craft is a less unified subject than Kos. This library contains millions of deals between hundreds of thousands of people, gods, and Deathless Kings. I could try to interpret them all with Craft, but the complexity of that vision would split my mind like an overripe fruit, and horrible things would crawl into it from Outside. Nobody wants that. When the subject is too complicated to represent hierarchically, we use normal paper libraries, and read with our own eyes.” She laid one hand on a book spine. “I like this way better.” Cracking the book open, she inhaled the bouquet of its pages. “I can smell the paper.”
“You’re insane,” Cat said.
“Knowledge,” Tara replied, turning a page as quietly as she could manage, “is power. I need all the power I can get.”
“You sound less confident than you did this morning.”
“I’m confident, but I also have, let’s say, renewed faith in my adversary’s strength. I need to be more than right, if I’m going to help the Church. I need to be right, and smart about it.”
“So, what kind of power can all this knowledge give you?”
The green leather-bound ledger before her, which was thicker than the holy writ of most religions, contained all of Kos’s registered deals and contracts for the last few months. A notebook lay open beside the ledger—a normal notebook, not the black book of shadows in which she had caught Shale’s soul. With her quill pen, she wrote a list of contracts that might have been responsible for Kos’s weakness. Progress was slow. The archivist’s handwriting was cramped and angular, and most of the ledger written in code. A prolonged search had revealed a table of abbreviations hidden within an illuminated invocation of the eternally transient flame on the flyleaf. With this she could interpret most of the entries, but not all.
She crooked a finger, and Cat bent close. Tara underlined an entry with the feathered end of her quill. “That’s the date of the contract. This line is the first part of the title.”
“What about the number? It’s not even a real number. There are letters in it and everything.”
“Filing reference. The full contract is somewhere in this building. If we tell the reference librarian that number, he can find it for us.”
“Why not use the contract’s name?”
Tara resisted the urge to roll her eyes. It was a valid question from a woman who had never spent an afternoon in a library before. “You see these three entries?”
“They’re all the same.” Cat spelled the abbreviations out. “C-F-S-R Alt C.-KE to R.I.N.”
“Contract for Services Rendered, Alt Coulumb Kos Everburning to Royal Iskari Navy,” she translated. “Since the common names are all the same, each contract needs a unique reference so we can tell which one we’re talking about.”
“What about those names, there to the right?”
“These are the Craftsmen who sealed the contract, and this is the name of the hiring party, on each side.”
“So COK is the Church of Kos, and Roskar Blackheart was working for them. R.I.N. is Royal Iskari Navy, represented by…” Her forehead wrinkled. “Isn’t that the guy you fought this morning?”
“Yes,” Tara said. “Alexander Denovo.”
“Seemed like the two of you had met before.”
Tara tried to return her attention to the ledger, but Cat’s question hovered between her eyes and the page. “He was one of the best professors in the Hidden Schools. Taught me much of what I know.”
“You ever sleep with him?”
“What?” That squawk earned Tara an angry glance from the librarian. She did her best to look chastened.
“When you saw him in the court, you went all stiff and shivery. There’s history between you, and it’s not pleasant.”
“We did not sleep together.”
“But you had a falling out.”
“Sort of.” Her tone brooked no further discussion.
Cat gave her an odd look, and changed the subject. “This makes sense, anyway. He was working for the Iskari then, and he’s working for them now.”
“More or less. People take all sides in this business, because there aren’t enough good Craftsmen to go around. Last time Ms. Kevarian worked in Alt Coulumb, she represented the creditors, the people Seril’s church struck bargains with. Now, she’s on Kos’s side.” The nib of Tara’s quill pen scratched a black jagged string of letters in her notebook. “The problem, though, starts in Judge Cabot’s ledger.”
Tara pulled a fat book covered in marbled paper from the pile. “Here’s where he adjudicated Seril’s death, and that’s the formation of Justice.” The earlier pages were dark with age and ink, but whole lines near the ledger’s end were blank save for the word “redacted.” “Now, look.” She pointed to a line near the beginning of the redacted sections.
Cat squinted to decipher the handwriting. “CFA Alt C. New.A. by A. Cabot, J-, A. Cabot, J.- PS, New.A by S. Caplan.”
“Below that, too.”
“CFA Alt C. C.S. by A. Cabot, J-, A. Cabot, J.- PS, C.S. by S. Schwartz.” Cat grimaced. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“CFA is Contract for Acquisition. PS means
pro se
, ‘for himself.’ It’s an old Telomiri Empire term, don’t ask why we still use it. Judge Cabot purchased these two Concerns, Coulumb Securities and Newland Acquisitions.”
“A Concern is what, exactly?”
By now, Tara knew better than to be surprised at Cat’s ignorance. “It’s a system Craftsmen create to magnify their power. Kind of like a church, where everyone’s combined faith makes things happen, only with Craft, not religion. Craftsmen pool their powers to a particular end, say summoning a demon or razing a forest or ripping ore from the earth. If they manage the Concern well, they get more power out of it—from the demon, from the life essence of the forest, or the sale of the ore—than they put in.”
Cat still seemed lost, but nodded.
“Do the Concerns themselves have ledgers?”
“Yes, but they’re not much help.” The next two volumes off the pile were more folios than full books, maybe a hundred sheets each for all their gold binding and shiny leather. Initially, they looked like less-crowded versions of the Church’s ledger, or Cabot’s, but after three pages the descriptions of contracts signed and acquisitions made, enemies dispatched and victories won, gave way to empty space. The last note in each book was simple. “Acq. A. Cabot, J-, Rec. Red.”
“Records Redacted,” Tara translated. “These two acquisitions are the last works of public Craft Judge Cabot performed before he died, and they took place four months ago. At about the same time”—she turned back to Kos’s ledger—“we see the number of sealed records in Kos’s ledger rise dramatically. And if we count the number of sealed records in Kos’s ledger, and compare it with those in Judge Cabot’s, they’re the same.” Repeated lines marched across the page, “redacted” over and over again in elegant black letters. “I think Kos and the Judge were working together on something big, and secret, before they died. But I need to see their sealed records to learn more.”