“They’re restricted. You can’t read them.”
“I can’t, maybe. You can’t. But what about Justice?”
*
Abelard smoked by the window of the Deathless King’s foyer. Four plush red chairs squatted on the hardwood floor around a low table upon which lay a few old scrolls and a ceramic vase of dandelions. A fat red stripe climbed the white wall opposite the windows and ended at the ceiling for no discernable reason.
Had he expected a torture chamber? A lake of fire topped with a throne of skulls, upon which the ambassador of the Northern Gleb sat in grim judgment over demonic servitors?
Maybe. Certainly he hadn’t expected the waiting room to be this cheerful.
Dandelions, for Kos’s sake. They weren’t even in season.
He exhaled and waited, and wished Tara was here.
In the past, when sleep would not come, and he lay awake in bed unwilling to rise and check the clock because he knew dawn was still hours off, Abelard had comforted himself in prayer, and the contemplation of God. Fire touched his soul, and would not desert him.
For the last three days, he had been alone, with only his cigarette flame for a companion. Tara relieved his isolation, strange though she was, but she was gone and here he sat, smoking in silence again. With a sigh, he began to pray.
A quarter of an hour passed, enough time to chant through the Litany of the Unquenchable Flame, complete with colophon and optional sections. No inner warmth came, no communion. Smoke lingered in his lungs longer than usual. That was something, at least.
What did Lady Kevarian want with him? Hardly the pleasure of his company.
Forced idleness was a torment in itself. His hands itched. He could be helping Tara, fixing boilers, serving his dead Lord. Instead, he watched shadows on the wall, and contemplated dandelions.
Not for the first time did his eyes flick to the frosted glass door of the Ambassador’s office. The door wasn’t thick, and its lower half was silvered. If he drew close, crouched down, and pressed his ear to the glass, his silhouette would be invisible from the other side.
He tipped some ash into the dandelion vase, bent low, and approached the door. He heard Lady Kevarian’s voice, and another, deep and rolling like distant thunder.
He pressed his ear to the cool, silvered glass.
“… place me in a complicated position,” said the thunderstorm. “There’s much to your story I don’t understand.”
“Much I don’t understand as well, Ambassador, but everything I’ve told you is true. I can confirm it.”
The storm rumbled, but said nothing.
“I would not, of course, ask you to accept my word with no evidence.”
“Certainly not.”
Her voice sank to a whisper. Abelard leaned against the door as if to press his ear through it. Then the latch gave way, and the door swung in onto nothingness.
Abelard tumbled into a shadowy pit, like night without stars, the way the universe had looked before man opened his eyes, before the gods breathed life into the void. This darkness was deeper even than the darkness into which Ms. Kevarian had thrust him, had flashed with red. Falling, he felt an unexpected warmth at his back.
He gulped reflexively for air but found none to breathe, and would have perished had the dark not broken and reformed around him. Or had his overtaxed mind simply recast the scene into something it could comprehend?
He flailed to find his balance on the carpet. Cool, soothing air rushed back into starved lungs, and sunlight startled his eyes.
He stood in an office, more richly furnished than Cardinal Gustave’s. Chairs of soft leather with silver studs, oak bookshelves. Ms. Kevarian stood to his left.
At the far end of the room, behind a polished desk of what looked to be pure magesterium wood, sat a towering skeleton. Standing, it would have been over seven feet tall; seated in a broad chair of leather and iron, it was nearly Abelard’s height. A hooked silver tab protruded from the hole where its nose had once been, supporting a pair of half-moon spectacles. Sparks like distant stars glittered in the eyeholes of the blanched skull. Two arms rested on the skeleton’s lap, and two more, smaller and grafted below the first pair, were busily taking notes on a yellow pad of paper with a silver-nibbed pen.
“Lord James Regulum, Ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Deathless Kings of the Northern Gleb,” said Lady Kevarian with a slight touch of humor, “may I present Novice Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning.”
“So,” the skeleton said, and from its voice Abelard realized it was not an it, but a he, “you’re the little monk Elayne has brought us.”
“Priest, actually,” Abelard said. “And engineer.” The skeleton—Lord James whatever—did not reply, nor did Ms. Kevarian. Both regarded him with a strange intensity. “Ah. May I ask a question?”
“You have asked one already, Engineer-priest, and you may ask another.”
“You, um. Don’t have any lips. Or lungs. How are you … talking?”
Lord James grinned. He did not need to expend any particular effort to do so. “Good question.”
Before he could say anything else, Abelard fainted.
The reference librarian looked up from his paperwork and saw a living statue of a woman sandblasted from black glass. He swallowed, and slid the papers into a drawer.
Good afternoon,
the Blacksuit said with a voice soft as distant surf.
I am looking for a book.
“Ah.” After this initial exhalation, the librarian took the better part of a minute to realize he hadn’t said anything further. “Of course you are.” A moment ago he had been waiting through the pleasant, slow half hour before the end of the afternoon shift, answering patrons’ easy questions to relieve the boredom. Blacksuits never had easy questions. “What do you need?”
Justice requires the following redacted materials,
the Blacksuit said, and slid a scrap of paper across the counter.
The librarian, whose name was Owen, tried to slip the paper out from under the Blacksuit’s fingertips. It ripped a little, but did not move.
These materials are to be provided without notifying any parties that have placed requests or holds upon them.
“I don’t think I’m allowed to…” The protest died on Owen’s tongue.
Speed is a priority. All is in the service of Justice.
The Blacksuit released the paper into Owen’s grip.
“Yes, ma’am.”
*
In three hours, Abelard had met more Craftsmen and dignitaries than he expected, or desired, to see ever again. Lord James the skeleton had been the most striking, but not the most unnerving. “What happened to that last one?” he asked Lady Kevarian when they returned to her waiting carriage.
“Dame Alban has spent the last half-century experimenting with alternatives to the skeletal phase of a Craftswoman’s late life.”
“So she’s turned herself into a statue?”
“Inhabited a statue, more precisely. A brilliant idea: stone has its own soul, and an artist’s skill invests it with more. Not enough to sustain human consciousness indefinitely, but if you have competent artisans and you’re willing to pay, you can have any body you wish, until it crumbles.”
“All of those statues, on the walls and everything…”
“Any one could host her.”
“They weren’t all women.”
“What made you think Dame Alban was?”
“Or human.”
Lady Kevarian shrugged.
“She’s a ghost? Moving from statue to statue?”
“Hardly. One keeps one’s body around, even if one doesn’t spend much time inside it. It is the greatest gift of order and power humans receive from the universe.”
“You still consider yourself human, then.”
“Somewhat.”
He wasn’t sure how to respond to that statement, so he ignored it. “Dame Alban, or Sir Alban, or whatever. Where is her body?”
“You remember the remarkable sculpture we saw upon first entering her chambers?”
“The thinking skeleton?” His eyes widened. “No.”
“Yes.”
“It was lacquered black.”
“And you’re wearing clothes.” Their carriage slowed to navigate around an accident ahead. “Abelard, these people have lived in Alt Coulumb for forty years—longer, in some cases. They’re no more strangers to this city than you and your Blacksuit friend. Before the events of the last few days, did you not feel the slightest interest in them?”
“It all seems … unnatural.”
“Whereas using the love of your god as a heat source for steam power is perfectly normal.”
“Yes,” he said, confused.
“Before this case is over, Abelard, you may have to choose between the city you believe you inhabit, and Alt Coulumb as it exists in truth. What choice will you make?”
Abelard opened his mouth, intending to say,
the Lord will guide me
. He caught himself, and settled instead for, “The right one, I hope.”
“So do I.”
*
A Blacksuit left the library carrying a stack of scrolls, and Catherine Elle returned a few minutes later through the same door, rumpled, trembling like a dry leaf in a high wind, and bearing a parcel in her jacket.
“Are you okay?” Tara asked after they retired to a corner out of the reference librarian’s line of sight. Here, she could peruse the redacted scrolls without risk of discovery or interruption.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“The suit plays hell with clothes.” With a shaking hand she indicated her rumpled linen shirt and loose cotton pants. “Wrinkles them beyond all reason, and if you’re wearing anything with a bit of slink the blackness rips right through it.”
Tara bent close to the first scroll, squinting to read the scribe’s cramped calligraphy. “I wasn’t talking about your clothes. You’re paler than usual, and shivering. Your eyes are bloodshot.”
“Nah. I mean, it’s part of the job.” She gripped her upper arm, which Tara supposed was lean and well-muscled, not that she cared. “The suit gets you kind of high when you use it, and the comedown hurts. That’s all.”
“That,” Tara observed, “doesn’t seem like a good idea.”
“Not a judgment-impairing high. An I can do anything, nothing can hurt me kind of high.” Cat’s fingernails dug into her arm, so deep that Tara was surprised they did not draw blood.
“How does that not impair your judgment?”
Cat let out a dry laugh. “With the suit on, you can do pretty much anything, and nothing can hurt you. Most folks see a sword coming at their face, they duck or flinch. The sword would bounce off the suit. I wouldn’t even feel it. Justice makes sure I know that, so I can do my job.”
“What if you meet something the suit can’t handle?”
“It changes the high, makes me cautious.”
“And there are no ill effects?” Tara studiously avoided looking at Cat’s white-knuckled grip on her own arm, or at the scars on her neck. “No withdrawal?”
“We handle it.” Her tone sharpened to an arrow point.
“I see.” Tara fell silent, and turned her attention from Cat to the parchment. The tension between them subsided into silence. After a while, Tara frowned, and tapped a line of figures with the feather of her pen. “That’s funny.”
“More sealed files?”
“Not quite.” She translated from the abbreviations: “These contracts give another party joint control of Newland Acquisitions and Coulumb Securities, the two Concerns Judge Cabot purchased.”
“Who’s the other party?”
“Kos Everburning. The god himself, not his Church.”
Cat blinked.
“Cabot purchased these two failing Concerns. Then”—she pointed to one of the contract scrolls—“he gave Kos part control of them. Didn’t take any payment. That way, the Church couldn’t detect the deal, since no power left Kos at first.” Back to the ledger with Kos’s redacted records. “Kos combined the two Concerns to make a single, larger one, and filled that one with his power. Lots of power, and the Church didn’t know anything about it. This could be the reason Kos was so much weaker than the Archives show.”
“If he was still in control of this Concern, why did he die?”
“Soulstuff inside a Concern isn’t your own anymore, even if you technically control it. Maybe Kos didn’t have time to reclaim his power before he died.”
“This shell game was a stupid idea, then.”
“It didn’t work out well for him,” Tara admitted.
“So why would Kos want to give so much power to the Judge?”
“I don’t think he did. Cabot withdrew a standard agent’s fee, then tried to transfer his stake in the Concern to someone else.”
“Who?”
“That’s the funny thing. Look here.” Beneath her finger, the last line of the ledger was barely legible after the date. Tara read the abbreviation “ToO” for “Transfer of Ownership,” and Cabot’s name, but beyond that the paper was burned black as if someone had painted over it with a fiery brush. “Here.” Another scroll, the same effect. “And here.” A third. “Cabot’s ledger, Newland’s, Coulumb Security’s, all have that mark. The burn is too controlled for a candle or a match. Someone found these scrolls and destroyed the last line in each one.”
“Kos could have done it, right? With fire? To cover his tracks? It’s not like you people need things written down for them to be real. You just wave your hands and speak some words, and they happen.”
“And when they happen, they happen in a sloppy, inefficient, and slipshod manner that’s open to attack from all fronts,” Tara replied. “For great Craftwork like this, the more precise and explicit your movements, the more secure you are. You want there to be a written contract on file so nobody can lie about it afterward. If the agreement is secret, fine, but it needs to be held somewhere safe and impartial. That’s why the court library exists: if there’s trouble, the court’s might enforces the agreement.” Her brow furrowed. “Destroying the receiving party’s name would wreck the purpose of reporting this deal in the first place. With the name burned off, the Concern is open to attack. But who could do something like this? A priest wouldn’t have been able to burn off the name without Kos knowing. Nor is it a Craftsman’s work: Craft would have decayed or yellowed the paper, but there’s no sign of either.”
“Why use fire, anyway?” Cat asked. “He could have blotted the entries with ink, or stolen the whole thing.”