Night had fallen, and Shale moved within her mind, hunting his people. When he found them, Tara would find her answers. Judge Cabot, Kos, and the gargoyles were involved in some deep, secret Craft together, of that Tara had no doubt. Of those three, only the gargoyles survived. Their testimony could prove the Church was not responsible for Kos’s weakness, and help Tara defeat Denovo. Tonight, she would convince the gargoyles to tell her what they knew. Or they would kill her. That was also a distinct possibility.
Tara stood, scaled the basement steps, and walked to the street. Carts and carriages rolled past on their private business. Across the rough cobblestones rose a soaring glass edifice bearing the red tau cross insignia of a Craft firm.
She squared her shoulders and lifted one hand.
A driverless carriage pulled to the curb. The horse eyed her ripped clothes and general disarray with suspicion as she climbed into the coachman’s seat. “Don’t give me that look,” she said. “We’re going to the waterfront. Now giddyup.” The horse didn’t budge. “I’ll tell you where we’re going when we get there,” she said, exasperated. “Can you please move?”
With a toss of its mane, the horse surged forward, and the carriage shuddered into motion behind.
*
The unified chant of “God is dead!” had faded by the time Cardinal Gustave emerged from the small door set into the Sanctum’s looming main gates. It was replaced, after the manner of mob cries, by a host of other slogans, which degenerated in their turn to meaningless roars. A few protesters regained their former ardor when they saw Gustave’s priestly robes, but these were outnumbered by the ones who fell silent when he raised his head and looked upon them with his hard gray eyes.
“Citizens of Alt Coulumb,” the Cardinal began. His voice suggested dark rooms and hidden mysteries.
“Citizens of Alt Coulumb,” he repeated. “I should say, rather, children of Alt Coulumb. What right, you may ask, have I to come before you? My God, they say, is dead, and with Him my authority. I stand before a tower raised to a vanished ideal, and I wear the livery of an absent Lord.”
These things were all true, yet when he said them the crowd beyond the cordon of Blacksuits did not scream their assent. Silence infected them, spread by those who stood near enough to feel firsthand the weight of the Cardinal’s presence.
“Children of Alt Coulumb, ask yourself: what burns even now within your hearts? What fire dances through the pathways of your mind? When you look at me, do you feel the hot flame of righteous wrath that devours brush and brambles and soon gives way to soot and dust? Do you feel the sickly greenwood fire of treason or the slow coal-burn of contempt?”
The crowd was silent, yes, but their silence was dangerous. Cardinal Gustave had placed a shell of words around their anger, and their anger bucked and surged against it.
“Children of Alt Coulumb, that fire is your God!”
Cries rose from the audience, disbelief and half-formed epithets.
“You claim to know the mind of God, you claim to know His nature and His shape, His truth and His power. You claim He is dead when you yourselves are the proof of His glory. What citizens of any other nation would hear such news and come before me, to protest in the shadow of God’s own temple?
“Children of Alt Coulumb, a fire burns within my voice. Within my mind. Within my heart. It is the fire of incense: a fire cultivated and refined through contemplation, strengthened through long practice and given proper fuel.
“That fire is Lord Kos’s breath within me. It burns quietly, and its burning is a pleasure to the wise. Children of Alt Coulumb, that fire is gentle. But
do not mistake me
,” he roared over a tide of angry voices. “Do not mistake me, it still burns!”
Before him he thrust his staff. His brow furrowed, and he drew in a measured breath.
A curtain of flame erupted from the staff’s tip, red and orange and yellow, and rose into the evening sky. It was the color of leaves in autumn, but it was not autumn leaves. It was hot like the sun, but it was not the sun. It was the fire of divinity. It eclipsed the world, rippled over the reflective skin of immobile Blacksuits, and cast the shadows of the mob upon the ground.
The frontmost protesters fell automatically to their knees, from awe and to avoid the searing heat. Some near the back scrambled to escape.
Quickly as it came, the fire dissipated. The Cardinal lowered his staff. Its copper-shod tip settled with a clearly audible tap against the Sanctum’s basalt steps. His body swayed, but within him, a thing that knew no age or weakness stood indomitable.
“Children of Alt Coulumb, your God slumbers within you. In days to come, He will rise once more. Only your faith is weak.”
The crowd remained bowed. Some, at the edges, slunk away.
Cardinal Gustave withdrew into the Sanctum shadows, and closed the door behind him.
*
A Blacksuit guarded the door to the faceless witness’s room, and only let Cat and Captain Pelham pass when she flashed the badge of Justice that hung around her neck. They found the room a mess of broken and burned furniture. Tara’s shoulder bag lay open on the floor, the silver and crystal apparatus it once contained spilled out among splintered wood and shredded fabric.
“What happened here?” the Captain asked.
She had listened to Justice’s mind on the walk over, gripping her badge to hear as if through a layer of cotton the stream of deductions and observations that resounded clear and bright within her skull when she wore the Blacksuit. “A Stone Man burst in, abducted Tara and the witness, and fled.”
“Talon marks on the floor,” Captain Pelham observed. “On the wall, here, and around the bed.”
“The Blacksuits heard a scream, came running, found this.” She paced. “Godsdammit.”
“What? It makes sense, doesn’t it? You saved Tara from the gargoyles last night, and this guy”—he pointed to the broken bed where the faceless man had lain—“witnessed their crime. They came to clean up.”
“Tara invaded my mind to send me away. She must have had a reason.”
“Maybe the gargoyle interrupted her while she was doing whatever it was.”
“How?”
“Through the window.” Captain Pelham pointed to the shattered casement.
“If so, where’s the glass on the inside?” She knelt and swept her hand over the broken tiles, but discovered none. “See how these are bent?” She pointed to the bars. “Someone ripped the whole assembly out of the wall from this side.”
“If you can see that, can’t the other Blacksuits?”
“Not necessarily. They ran through, saw the Stone Man, and pursued. The examiners won’t arrive for another quarter-hour at least.” Her heartbeat quickened. If she found something Justice missed, she could use that to buy off her failure. She needed strong evidence, though. No mere guesswork would satisfy. “There was a Stone Man in this room. He didn’t come in through the window, but he left that way. Could the witness have been a Stone Man all along? Pretending to be faceless?”
“Hard to pretend that, I think. Someone pretty much has to steal your face.”
“Is there a way to break free of Craft that keeps you faceless, then?”
“Search me.” Captain Pelham examined the bent bars, the shards of glass, the splintered windowsill. Dusk washed the outside world in weak shades of gray. “The Craft pays well, but I try to keep my distance. On the first job I took from a Craftswoman, I ended up with a hunger for blood and a bad sunlight allergy.”
“Tara could have been in league with the Stone Men.” Cat clutched her temples with one hand. She was missing something. The world blurred, shifted, solidified. Everything would be fine if she donned her suit. All the pieces would fall into place.
No. Not yet. She needed a real solution.
“If Tara was working with them,” Captain Pelham asked, “why did they try to kill her last night?”
“I don’t know!”
“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you could ask her.”
“What?”
He raised a finger to his lips and pointed out the window and down. She joined him at the sill and saw Tara in the alley below, brushing dirt off her sleeves and straightening her ripped skirt and checking her collar as she walked toward the street. Her clothes were a mess, as if she had just been in a fight.
Silent, they watched Tara reach the curb and summon a driverless carriage. “We need to follow her,” Cat said.
“Follow her?”
Halfway out the window already, she paused, and swore.
“What?”
“She’ll be gone before we can get down if I don’t put on the Blacksuit, but if I do, Justice will know she controlled my mind and take me off the case.”
“I’ll catch you,” Captain Pelham said.
She tried to stop him, but he flowed past her like mist and fell to the cobblestones below; the force of his landing barely bent his knees. He looked up to her in the gathering night and held out his arms.
Captain Pelham was a stranger, an outsider, a vampire. He didn’t like her, and he had a rapport with Tara. If he dropped her, no one would ever know.
But he seemed like a good person, and if she didn’t trust him, Tara would get away.
Cursing herself for a fool, she jumped. Her fall seemed to take longer than his.
He caught her, light as a bag of down.
Being held was nice, and being this close to his teeth was a terrible temptation. So strong. Old, too, and what mattered more,
original
. He had been made a vampire by Craft, firsthand, not by catching the condition from another.
In Cat’s distraction she failed to notice Tara’s carriage pull away from the curb, but Pelham’s attention did not slip. He ran, the world blurring around them, and as her thoughts raced to catch up, he leapt.
Whipping wind, fluttering cloth, the street a surge of colors, and they landed—or rather he landed, with her still in his arms—stiff-legged atop the passenger compartment of an empty driverless carriage four cars behind Tara’s. The horse reared and voiced a whinny of outrage, but when Pelham said, “Follow that cab and we’ll pay you double,” it gave no further complaint.
“You’re insane,” she said.
“At least I’m good at it.”
“You can set me down now.”
“Oh.” He seemed to notice for the first time that he still held her cradled to his chest. “Sorry.” With a flourish, he stood her on her feet. She almost lost her balance and fell into traffic, but caught herself and slid instead into the coachman’s seat. “Occupational hazard. Pirate and all.”
She glowered in response and offered him a hand down.
*
Abelard climbed three, four, five rungs at a time toward the Efficiency Office. Deterred but not destroyed, the shadow creature loped through the darkness after him. With a surge of terror-born strength he burst from the wet, warm air of the boiler room into light.
Scrambling off the ladder, he found himself surrounded by sound and fury. Alarms rang from all corners of the room—coolant alarms mostly, judging from the sonorous,
basso profundo
chorus of the Praise of Sacred Fuel—and Technicians rushed about checking chromed dials and pressure gauges and shouting to one another. Abelard’s warning cries were lost amid the din.
Grasping a nearby table leg, he pulled himself to his feet. A startled hush fell over the room as the maintenance monks noticed his torn garments and the blood seeping from his legs.
“Something’s down there! In the boiler room! Big.” He sucked in breath. “Black, sharp…”
The astonished monks gave no sign they understood his words. They took him for mad, no doubt, another unfortunate cleric broken by the stress of the last few days. Two burly brothers approached, wearing fixed expressions of concern, to escort him out. Abelard pulled back. “Tell Sister Miriel!” Claws clicked on the ladder below. “It’s coming! Get fire!”
Each monk grasped one of his arms and pulled, guiding Abelard toward the nearest door despite his squirming resistance. Others raised their heads from their work and blinked wide uncomprehending eyes, a clutch of tonsured seagulls. The creature would tear them apart before the light killed it. “It’s coming!” Abelard lashed out with a wounded leg and kicked the back of one captor’s knee. The man toppled and let go of Abelard’s arm.
Free, he spun and pointed. “There! Look!”
Some of the monks listened, finally, and they did not return to their work.
A black, viscous thing bubbled up from the boiler room, thousand-eyed, probing with jagged limbs at the world. It thrashed and broke a nearby desk to splinters. Monks scattered. Opening many mouths, the creature let loose a terrifying hiss.
Religious men often think about death, and Abelard had given some thought to his last words. “I told you so” had not been on the list.
The creature roared, and lashed out with a claw of living darkness. Abelard ducked, and it skewered the monk who held his right arm. The man burst like an overripe fruit pricked with a needle. Abelard darted for the door.
He took five steps before he was brought up short. The air about him grew sharp, as before the onset of a thunderstorm.
Ms. Kevarian stood at the door of the Efficiency Office. The cant of her head and slant of her mouth reminded Abelard of a desert lizard he had seen once in a cabinet of curiosities. The scholar who owned the cabinet introduced to his audience a species of scorpion whose sting could kill a grown man in seconds, then placed the scorpion in a glass tank with a flat-headed yellow lizard. The lizard regarded the deadly insect in the same way Ms. Kevarian regarded the shadow swelling and burning in the center of the room.
The scholar had explained, with a carnival barker’s timing, that this lizard’s diet consisted chiefly of scorpions.
Ms. Kevarian’s stillness broke into sudden motion. She cupped the fingers of one hand as if scooping sand off a beach. Behind Abelard, the shadow creature leapt toward this interloper, barbed stingers tense to strike.
Ms. Kevarian raised her hand to the level of her eyes, and with practiced deliberation closed her fingers into a fist.
A rush of wind from nowhere flattened Abelard’s hair and nearly plucked the burning cigarette from his lips. Lightning burst within the chamber walls, but there was no light and no sound of thunder, only a concussive wave. When he opened his eyes, the creature hovered a few feet off the floor, revealed in full grotesquerie and caught in a bubble made from solid air. Angry scrabbling talons glanced off curved transparent walls. Ms. Kevarian’s grip tightened, and the bubble began to shrink. Claws raked ineffectually; limbs buckled and bunched against one another like wet towels pressed against a glass door. Still Ms. Kevarian squeezed and still the invisible sphere tightened. Spider-arms melded into thicker tentacles, and were crushed back into shadow. The creature’s hisses were plaintive in the silence that accompanied Ms. Kevarian’s working of Craft.