“What did I ever do, Elayne, to make you hate me?”
She crossed her hands upon her lap, and schooled her voice. “You made me fall in love with you.”
“Weak justification for such wrath.”
“And. You took advantage of my trust to twine your will through my mind, drain my power, and leave me a shrunken wreck.”
“Well,” he said. “Fair enough.”
The ensuing silence was broken by the tap of approaching heels: their hostess, bearing drinks.
*
“My father and I never agreed about much,” David said, looking at the ground, at the ceiling, at anything but Tara. He stood outside the circle’s perimeter, behind Aev’s left shoulder. “He was happy the God Wars ended as they did, felt the gods should have given mortals control of their own affairs long ago. He knew the Craftsmen, and especially the Deathless Kings, were hurting the world, but he thought it was manageable. I thought he was wrong.” He looked for approval in Tara’s countenance, or in her body language, but she had none to spare.
“We fought. A lot. When I was old enough, I left, went to the Old World and tried to help there. It’s amazing the damage Craftsmen can do if they’re not careful. Miles of farmland reduced to desert in a day by a battle between a Deathless King and a pantheon of tribal gods. Of course the Craftsman doesn’t care. He lives off starlight and bare earth. The people are left without water, without homes and the little protection their gods afforded them. ‘Free,’ the Craftsmen say.” As would Tara, but she wasn’t here to argue politics. “I wrote Dad letters, trying to explain, but he never answered, so I came back. There had to be something local I could do, to show him he wasn’t always right. I didn’t expect to meet Aev and her people.” He placed a hand on the stone woman’s arm, and she did not shrug him off.
“We found him,” Aev said, “wandering in the deep forest with little food and less water. He said he believed we had been driven unfairly from the city. He was wrong. We fought Alt Coulumb because it betrayed our Goddess. But while David’s facts were wrong, his heart was right.”
Tara could not restrain herself. “Wait a second. What do you mean, the city betrayed your goddess? The people of Alt Coulumb salvaged as much of her as they could.” No response. “They couldn’t do anything more. Seril died in the war.”
Aev bared her rear teeth, which was the closest Tara had seen her come to a smile. “Did She indeed?”
*
“It’s not as though you didn’t get your revenge,” Denovo said after they sipped their drinks for a quiet interval. “When you discovered what I was doing, you escaped my clutches. Cut me off from Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao. I don’t know what rumors you spread, but for forty years I haven’t been able to get another job at a Craft firm, and I loved private practice.”
“I told the truth,” she replied, between sips. “The firm agreed it was too risky to keep you on staff if you were going to subvert their employees. It’s not like I cast you into a joyless, featureless limbo for all eternity. You parachuted comfortably into academia.”
“Which is different how?” His tone sharpened, but kept its detached amusement. “I admit, the academy is more comfortable than I expected. To my surprise, the Hidden Schools were not so afraid of my … eccentricities as the great firms.”
“Perhaps not so afraid as they should have been.”
“If everyone thought like you, Elayne, no one would have seen the potential in
Das Thaumas
when it came out a hundred fifty years ago. We’d still be scratching at the edges of the gods’ power with paltry Applied Theology, rather than wielding their might ourselves.”
“If everyone thought like you, Alexander, we would never have realized the God Wars were killing this world in time to stop.”
“There are other worlds.”
“None we’ve been able to find that are suitable for human habitation.”
“You think we’ll still be human when we get there?” he asked with a gentle note of mockery. “Come, Elayne. If you think I’m satisfied with humanity’s current form, you’ve missed the point of my work. I’ve been developing networks capable of distributed action, directed by a single will. You saw what happened at the Court of Craft this morning. Tara’s brilliant, but had it not been for that information dump, I would have broken her mind wide open. There’s no question my way is better.”
“Still, she beat you.”
“She does have a singular facility at that,” he admitted.
“It’s one reason I hired her. Any young woman so resourceful deserves better than to be blacklisted because she avenged her friends against an unethical professor.”
“Unethical? If you asked most of my, ah, students, they’d claim they are quite happy with my methods.”
“Because you don’t allow them to be unhappy.”
“It’s a fulfilling experience, being devoted to a cause.”
“I didn’t feel fulfilled, as I remember.”
“Your experience was a prototype. An early model. I’ve ironed out most of the kinks.”
She took a sip of her vodka tonic, relishing the sharp, burning flavor and the bubbles on her tongue. “I’ve read your papers, Alexander.”
“All of them?”
“Your vision is compelling. But you insist on a proposition I don’t think you can support.”
Ice clinked against the side of his glass. “Indeed?”
“You claim your collective action networks are most efficient when a single node directs the whole.”
“That’s what my experiments suggest.”
“I recommend you re-evaluate your assumptions.”
“You think I’m corrupting my own data?”
“I think you’re only happy with a philosophical framework that allows you to be a god.”
The smell of roast meat washed out of the darkness, and once more she heard footsteps.
“Dinner,” he said, “is apparently served.”
*
“Can’t we go faster?” Abelard asked the horse, who whinnied something that, though Abelard had never learned to interpret Horse, likely translated to, “Perhaps if you got out and pushed.”
The tracking rosary had led him through Alt Coulumb with the constancy of a compass. The closer he drew to the waterfront, the more insistent the beads became, yanking at his arm. He kept a firm grip on them. This was not a good neighborhood in which to dismount in pursuit of an errant necklace.
He had to find Tara. Not because Lady Kevarian required it, but because he needed someone he could trust. The Church itself harbored a traitor, who not only stole from Kos, but set His resurrection at risk.
Two days ago, Abelard would have called such blasphemy impossible. He wasn’t sure what he believed anymore—save in Lord Kos, and He was gone.
As they rattled down uneven cobblestones, urgency and desire warred in Abelard’s heart. The shakes were back, severe as the day after Kos’s death. Cigarettes barely helped; he had stopped in the Pleasure Quarters to refresh his supply. He had not slept straight through a night in three days, but whatever exhaustion he felt was buried under adrenaline and fear.
“Look, I’ll pay double if you pick up the pace.”
He had made this offer once before, and the horse accepted it again, surging into a slow trot down the narrow sea-rank streets of the waterfront.
*
“Seril died in the war,” Tara said automatically. “She fought the King in Red and fell.”
Growls rose around her, stone grinding on stone, but these didn’t move her as much as Aev’s slow shake of the head.
“Her power was spent,” Tara protested. “There wasn’t enough left to sustain her.”
“Sustain? No. Not as She was.”
“Consciousness is one of the first things to go when a goddess loses power.”
“Not,” Aev cut in, “if consciousness is all that is required.”
Tara’s eyes narrowed as dormant wheels in the difference engine of her brain began to rotate. She remembered Abelard saying that Seril created the gargoyles directly. If that was true, an immense amount of her soulstuff was bound inside them. They were obliged to her for their very existence, and she to them for their worship. How much of Seril’s power had been at her own disposal after all, and how much anchored in the bodies of these magnificent monsters? Could the King in Red have killed Seril completely, while her Guardians remained? “You’re saying you kept Seril alive, pared down. An echo of the goddess she used to be.”
“Not an echo. Still that Goddess, only less.” The gargoyles lowered their massive heads in reverence. Wings drooped. “She died by the Crack in the World, but as the King in Red struck the killing blow, our need, the need of Her true faithful, caught at Her. She fled into our hearts.”
Translating from the religious jargon, Tara watched the confrontation play out inside her mind. “A part of her died in battle, but another part, the part bound up with you and your people, survived. The power she invested in the Guardians, and the hooks of your faith in her, pulled her back from the brink, but the process ripped her in half. To her devotees in Alt Coulumb she perished, and to you she lived, or a part of her did. But,” Tara objected, “even if you could support her by faith alone, she would be an invalid as goddesses go. Powerless. She couldn’t help you.”
“We did not require Her help.”
“Why bring her back, then? Why not let her die?”
“Because She loves us.”
Tara paced the confines of the circle, uncomprehending, heedless of the several tons of violent stone that surrounded her. “You kept the rituals, worshiped her, sacrificed to her, to keep her alive. Even though she could do nothing for you, whatsoever, other than love you and be loved by you.”
“Is that strange?” Aev asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It makes you the most stupid, single-minded collection of religious fanatics I’ve ever come across. I mean,” she amended as growls rose about her and green eyes narrowed, “I could not imagine ever doing something like that, but it’s terribly sweet.”
“We did not expect Seril’s half-death to last. When we returned Her to the city, we saw the Church of Kos cooperating with outsiders, godless Craftsmen. We appealed to the Church, but our appeals were rebuffed.”
“Really?” Tara was eager to move the conversation away from the evils of godless Craftsmen. “I haven’t heard anything about this.”
“After Seril’s death, heretics within the Church of Kos claimed their Fiery Lord should reign unopposed by our Lady. They contrived that Kos should not know Seril survived, and they kept us from the city.”
Tara saw, as if from above, the binding circle of white gravel laid into the green grass of the Holy Precinct. It had not, after all, been intended to keep Kos locked within the City—no mortal Craft could do such a thing—but it was more than strong enough to keep a barely living echo of a theologically problematic goddess out. Black hells.
“You fought them.”
“Our brothers in Alt Coulumb lost their minds when the Lady died, for they were far away and could not feel that She lived. They fought like wild things. When we returned, we were barred from our own city, as our enemies desecrated our Lady’s body to create an enslaved mockery of Her. What would you have done?”
Burn the city to the ground. “Abelard said that you fled when the Blacksuits joined the battle.”
“Justice is an echo of the Lady we love. We could not fight her then. Today, we would not be so selective.”
“You ran to the woods.”
“Yes. We hid among the weak, wet, stinking trees.” Aev made no effort to hide her disgust. “Far from our home. We lived there for years, until David came. And Kos.”
*
“Divinity,” Alexander said between bites, “was always the point, wasn’t it? Remember the first sentence of
Das Thaumas.
‘Societies characterized by the relationship between the divine and the mortal’—all societies, when Gerhardt was writing—‘appear as an “immense accumulation of power.”’ It’s the energy that matters, not the nature of the participants in that relationship. Gods and men only differ in how they accumulate and apply power.”
Ms. Kevarian had barely touched her salmon steak. “Don’t take Gerhardt out of context. His next sentence was, ‘To improve these societies, we must understand the dynamics of power.’ He was trying to help civilization, human and divine.”
“Sure, and as soon as we began to apply his writings the gods tried to kill us all.”
He couldn’t see her roll her eyes, so she made her derision evident in the tone of her voice. “They were scared. Gerhardt’s first experiments created half the desert we call the Northern Gleb. Twenty years later, Belladonna Albrecht made the Crack in the World.”
“It was a war,” he said with an audible shrug.
“We fought for our freedom. For the human race’s freedom, so we could live with or without gods as we chose. The course of action for which you argue in your papers, not to mention your private life, would make Craftsmen and Craftswomen no better than the tyrant deities we overthrew in that damn war.”
“Language, Elayne.”
“My apologies,” she said after another sip of vodka. “One gets carried away when one feels one’s dinner companion has made an inexcusable moral error.”
*
“How did Kos get into this?” Tara asked.
“The Everburning Lord,” David said in the tones of the unquestioning devout, “sees all. This is a lot to sort through, however. Occasionally His attention must be drawn to particular issues.”
“We thought Kos turned against our Lady with his priests,” Aev supplied. “Not so.”
David continued. “I hoped to find the Guardians in the forest and record their stories, document their practices. For posterity. I, ah.” Suddenly nervous, he glanced left and right. “I thought the Seril tradition was about to die out. I didn’t expect to find a live culture, and a live Goddess, too. I returned to the city for supplies, prayed for guidance, and, well, I received an unprecedented answer. God was confused.”
He broke off, and Aev took over the story. “It was soon after that,” she began, “that my dreams of fire started. They spread through the pack. Flame overshadowed our souls, seeking truth within us. The next month, as we danced in the sky at the dark of the moon, we sang to the Goddess about the fire-dreams, and She shivered in anticipation.” The rapture on Aev’s face twisted in Tara’s gut. She had never looked at anything that way.