At that she felt a pang of guilt, and took from her shoulder bag a piece of parchment, a small writing board, and a quill pen.
She began the letter:
Dear Mother and Father,
I received an urgent job offer last night. I am excited by the opportunity, though I am sorry to leave home so soon. I intended to stay longer.
It was wonderful to see you both. The garden is coming along well, and the new schoolhouse looks like it will be even bigger and better than the last one.
Say good-bye and hello to Edgemont, and if you don’t mind, please bake some cookies for the chaplain and say they’re from me.…
*
It was too nice a morning for Al Cabot to die. The storm had passed in the night, leaving shredded clouds to catch red fire as the sun swelled on the horizon. Another bank of thunderheads approached on the western wind, but for the moment the sky was clear. Al stepped out into his rooftop garden, teacup in hand, and took a moment to breathe. According to his doctor he needed to take more of these, or he wouldn’t be around to breathe at all for much longer.
Al was a man grown nervously fat during a career of sitting behind a desk and shuffling from one poorly lit room to the next. He never had the time to sweat and acquire the hard-glazed muscles of a common road worker. He told his few friends that he had received the raw end of the deal, but nobody ever asked the road workers.
He savored the morning light, and with it a sip of nightshade tea—toxic to normal humans, but he was hardly normal anymore. Al was no Craftsman, but his occupation left its mark, like the coal miner’s dusty cough or the farmer’s crop-bent back. For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some of it crept into his bones.
It was almost over, though. His debts were nearly paid. Today he felt forty again, young and unburdened. His cares had passed with the storm, and once this last bit of business was complete he could stride into the dawn of his coming retirement.
His butler had left the morning’s pertinent mail on the table by the azaleas. Perusing the shallow stack, Al found a few professional notes and a letter from his son, David, who had left years ago to rebuild the world. Whole continents had been shattered in the God Wars, David proclaimed when he set off on his quest. So many nations and cities are less fortunate than we of Alt Coulumb, and we owe them aid.
Al had not approved. Words were said that could not easily be unsaid after one’s son shipped off to the Old World. Al tried to track him, making long and involved sacrifices to Kos and calling upon favors from priests and even from the Deathless Kings who frequented his chambers. All his efforts failed. Six months ago, however, David had returned on his own to propose a complex business deal, lucrative and good-hearted but of questionable legality. He remained an idealistic fool, and Al a standard-bearer of the old guard, but years of separation had taught them to avoid most of their habitual arguments. They were father and son, and they talked now. That was enough.
Al tapped the envelope, considered opening it, set it down. Wait. Start the day properly. He took a deep draught of tea, bitter and smoky and strangely sweet.
The azalea bush behind him rustled.
When the butler found his body forty-five minutes later, the strong, ruddy tea had spilled from his broken mug to mix with his blood. Al Cabot’s body had contained a great deal of blood indeed, most now spread in a drying, viscous puddle around the shredded remnants of his flesh. The spilled tea barely diluted it at all.
Shale recovered his senses soon after sunrise and discovered to his dismay that he was fleeing down a back alley, covered in blood. The sticky red fluid was everywhere—soaked into his clothes, drying in his hair. It dripped from his brow, rolled down his cheek into his mouth. Worst of all, it tasted good.
The blood wasn’t his most immediate problem. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw four black shadows with human shape, rough-featured as cave paintings, chasing him.
Blacksuits. Agents of Justice. The perfect police: you, a citizen, surrender your autonomy for one shift a day in exchange for a salary. Don a suit, and your mind is welded into the intricate network of Justice, seeking everywhere for criminals and enemies of the city. Justice patrols the streets and guards the populace. Justice is blind, but Justice sees all.
Justice was chasing him, implacable and tireless. It was only a matter of time before he faltered.
Goddess above, he was covered in blood. The last thing he remembered was climbing the façade of a tall building past immobile graven images of gargoyles toward a rooftop garden, to meet with Judge Cabot, the great fat man.
Another memory dawned out of rage-tinted mists: Cabot’s face, contorted in pain, screaming. Bleeding. Fire rolled in to consume Shale, consciousness fled him, and he had opened his eyes here.
If the Blacksuits were after him—omniscient Justice wondering no doubt how this apparently normal human could outlast her agents at a full sprint, ducking down side alleys and weaving between obstacles, there leaping a trash can, here climbing a chain-link fence in two massive pulls—if the Blacksuits were after him.… Was it possible he had lost his mind? Surely. Possible. If he had been betrayed.
Had he killed Cabot?
His mind recoiled from this prospect, but he couldn’t deny that a tiny part of him quickened in excitement at the thought of death. A tiny, desperate, hungry part.
Shit.
His people, his Flight, would know what to do, but they were hidden, and if he sought them, the Blacksuits would follow.
He needed a place of refuge, the last place they would look.
First, he had to evade pursuit. With stars set and the moon hidden in Hell, it was hard to change, but he had no other options. His heart beat faster, his nostrils flared. He stumbled forward, tripped, nearly face-planted onto the cobblestones. Smells and sounds rushed in to overwhelm him, muck and alley filth and the savory odor of fresh-fried dough from a street-side breakfast stand, the clatter of carriage wheels and the jingle of harness and the pounding of the Blacksuits’ feet. Sweet, transcendent power pulped his mind and turned his muscles into mush.
And transformed that mush to living rock.
The bones of his shoulders broke, warped, and became whole again. Wings of stone burst from his smooth granite back and fanned to taste the air. His jawbone swelled to anchor sharp and curved teeth. Frail, fleshy human hands and feet split and opened like tree buds in spring, his great talons flowering from within.
The world slowed.
He bounded forth faster than Blacksuits could follow, now on two legs, now on four, leaping from wall to wall, talons leaving deep grooves in stone. He did not have much strength left, but sweet Mother, he could run. He could fly.
He was bound once more for Al Cabot’s penthouse.
Behind him, the four Blacksuits stopped, their unearthly fluid motion transformed in an instant to the dead stillness of statues. They turned smooth, eyeless faces to one another, and if they conferred in some way that human beings could not hear, they gave no outward sign.
*
“Boss,” Tara asked when she woke and saw beneath her a rolling field of blue and green, “why are we over the ocean?”
Ms. Kevarian sat cross-legged in midair, the backs of her hands resting on her thighs, a meditating monk in a pinstriped suit. A corona of starfire clung to her skin, woven by her will into the platform that held them both aloft. Gone were the lightning and gale-force winds she had used to blow them across a continent. The air was clear and crisp, the sky the light purple of imminent dawn. Clouds loomed on the horizon.
“Why do you think?” Ms. Kevarian replied.
Tara opened her mouth to answer, closed it again, then said, “This is a test.”
“Of course it’s a test. Reasonable people do not answer questions with further questions. I know from your performance at the Hidden Schools that I want to work with you, but I have not seen your logical abilities firsthand. I do not know whether to treat you as an assistant, or an associate. Show me.”
A seagull flew beneath them as Tara thought. It looked up, squawked in astonishment, and plunged into a dive toward the water.
“There’s only one answer that makes sense,” Tara said at last, “but a piece of the evidence doesn’t fit.”
Ms. Kevarian nodded. “Continue.”
“We’re not going to another continent. Or to an island. Judging from the books you had me borrow, we’ve been retained for a more extensive case than you’d get on some Skeld Archipelago god-haven. Definitely on our side of the ocean—the New World, liberated territory. We were traveling east, and now we’re traveling west, so we couldn’t simply land at our destination. We had to fly past and wheel back around. We must be bound to a place where flying is restricted. In other words, a city still ruled by gods. But…”
“Yes?”
“If we’re going to Alt Coulumb, why can’t I sense it from here?”
Ms. Kevarian waited, and watched the western horizon with black, unblinking eyes. Below, amid the swells and breakers, Tara saw huge ships, tiny as toys from this height. Some sported sails bowed out by captive winds, others spouted thick gouts of smoke. Red-and-black ironwood hulls glowed with wards wrought by diligent Craftsmen. These were no mere bedraggled merchant vessels laden with cut-rate goods. On this coast of the New World, only Alt Coulumb could attract such a fleet. Two-thirds of all cargo from the Old World across the eastern ocean passed through that city’s mighty port, from Iskar and Camlaan and the sweltering Gleb, from the regimented realm of King Clock and the icy wastes that bowed to Dread Koschei. Caravans and traders by the thousands bought the ships’ wares in their turn, wholesale, and bore them west, up river and over road, to the free cities of Northern Kath.
“Everything else makes sense.” Tara squinted at the ribbon of land visible beyond the ocean and beneath the high, threatening clouds, but could not see details from this distance. A few sharp peaks that might be the tips of skyscrapers, that was all. “The defenses to the Alt’s west, south, and north are strong enough to keep us out. They’re a trading and shipping power, though, so their ports have to be open. But if that’s the home of Kos Everburning, the last divine city in the New World, I should be able to feel something, and I’m drawing a blank. No soulstuff, no starshine, no faith, no aura. As if the whole place were dead.”
Ms. Kevarian nodded. Tara held her breath. Was that nod a good sign, or a bad one? “Perhaps you require a change of focus, Ms. Abernathy. Close your eyes, and wait.”
She did. The world was black, stretching without pause save for Elayne Kevarian’s silhouette, a coruscating pattern of lightning whose every facet mirrored its whole. This much Tara expected. Through closed eyes, a Craftswoman could see behind and beneath the world of gross matter. Ms. Kevarian’s pattern was smudged, though, as if emptiness overflowed its edges.
Then the emptiness moved, and Tara realized it was not empty at all, but full of dim and pervasive light: a net of power more intricate than any human Craft Tara had ever seen, layer woven beneath layer upon layer, reaching to the heavens, plunging into the earth, arching over the sea. Within that net she felt the echoed, billowing heat of a distant fire.
“My god.” Tara’s jaw went slack. When she opened her eyes, Ms. Kevarian remained unmoved.
“Quite,” she said. “You’ve never dealt with deities before, have you?”
“Not directly.” She counted her breaths, and stilled her racing heart. “Once or twice at school, in a controlled environment. I know the theory, of course, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” Tara closed her eyes again, and sat amazed by the complexity ahead.
Divine Craft was less obvious than the mortal variety, much as the mechanisms of a living creature were less evident to human sight than those of springs and steel gears. Few Craftswomen could see a god’s work at first glance. Still, Tara had not expected the wards with which Kos shrouded his city to be so subtle, nor so large that she couldn’t find their edge.
The Craft was difficult to master, half art, half science, and an extra half bull-headed determination. Most people could barely light a candle using their own soulstuff, let alone bind and direct the power nascent in the world around them. To bring a single corpse back to a semblance of animation required years of training and rigorous study. That grand construct, with its redoubts and fail-safes, its subtle interdependencies, would have taken a team of human Craftsmen fifty years to plan and shape. It was immense, organic, all-encompassing. Divine.
Looking on Alt Coulumb, Tara experienced for the first time the same emotions which, a century and a half before, had driven a handful of theologians and scholars to take up the Craft and become the first Deathless Kings: the awe at how well divine hands had made a thing, and the insatiable need to improve on that design. The backup filter, for example, which sheltered Alt Coulumb’s harbor from ocean beasts, could use some work. And there was something else, some faint, pervasive problem she couldn’t quite sum up in words.
“Well,” Ms. Kevarian said, “you will soon have firsthand experience with a deity who deserves his title.”
“But why,” Tara asked, “does it look so cold?”
“What do you mean?”
“The wards are all there, sure. But where’s the god inside them? He should shine through the whole system, but the wards are dark as ash. Is that normal?”
Ms. Kevarian opened her mouth to reply.
Before she could speak, however, the solid air upon which they sat lurched, quivered, and became distressingly permeable. Sunlight broke through the morning mist behind them and trapped the moment in liquid amber, sky and sea and distant cloud-covered city, blue waves and ships below.
They fell.
*
Flying isn’t easy, and falling is harder than most people think. Fortunately, Tara had practice at both. The last time she fell, on the occasion of her so-called graduation from the Hidden Schools, she had time to prepare; three days of excruciating confinement preceded her quite literal downfall. On the other hand, her prison cell had weakened her, as did her struggle against her former professors. Perhaps those effects cancelled the advantages of foreknowledge.