He spun Craft toward the orange sphere above, but She arrested it with moonlight. Thorns of shadow caught Aev, but She dulled their piercing tips. Denovo’s Craft lashed out at Tara as a bolt of flame, and She turned it aside.
Her thoughts came slowly now, and with effort.
“You’re not the first goddess I’ve fought,” he said, calm and cold. “You cannot abandon your faithful. I strike at what you love, and you protect it. When you’re stretched to the limit of your power, I squeeze. Just … a … bit.”
His eyes narrowed, and the thorns about Aev’s body were sharper, the hole into which Gar fell deeper, darker, hungrier, the spear of flame pointed at Tara’s heart more swift and sure.
With a sound like a ringing bell, the light of the world popped free from its perch in Tara’s skull and hung revealed before her, a beautiful woman of frostlight and stone bound to those she could not abandon by cords of her own making.
Tara’s wound reopened, and blood seeped through cracks in the cauterized flesh. Her mind was hollow, her own again, and the world not Seril’s but hers. The Guardians’ names she forgot, but she saw Cat curled in a fetal ball amid discarded iron restraints, trapped in a net of red wire. She had freed the Guardians. Good.
Ms. Kevarian lay on the ground, and next to her, Abelard. Unmoving.
“That’s the trouble with ties,” Denovo said. “They bind both ways.”
Denovo reached out with a rope of flame to draw the sphere toward him.
Tara screamed, wove starfire into her own rope, and lassoed the sphere. Denovo was a supernova of Craft. He pulled and she pulled and Seril pulled and the gargoyles redoubled their attack, and still the sphere approached his outstretched hand. He grinned.
Tara blinked, and the darkness endured.
*
Tara reclined in a leather armchair beneath a glittering chandelier. Ms. Kevarian stood across from her, dressed in a businesswoman’s black and in full control of herself.
Alexander Denovo sat in another chair to Tara’s left, mouth slack with shock.
“What the hell?”
“We are between instants,” Ms. Kevarian explained.
“How did you bring me here?”
“Ties bind both ways,” she observed. “I thought I would give you an opportunity to surrender.”
Denovo laughed outright. “Surrender? Apotheosis is within my grasp.”
“Don’t the odds trouble you?”
“I can hold out for the moments I require to assimilate Kos’s power.” He manifested a pipe out of dreamstuff and began to smoke it. “Then the opposition will fall.”
“I can’t guarantee your safety if you don’t surrender now.”
“When I am a god, Elayne, I will break you, body and soul.”
Her eyes and her voice were made of diamond. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“Boss—” But the moment slipped, and Tara fell between earth and heaven.
*
Alexander Denovo whirled within his protective dome, and through electric distortion saw Elayne Kevarian, standing. He ordered her to sit, to surrender, to die, but his commands rolled off the ice of her mind. The young priest’s body lay prone at her feet. A curving design, wet, red, and intricate, glimmered on the floor around them.
Breath caught in his throat.
Elayne Kevarian had lain prone under his control, twitching, pathetic, circling in place, bloody fingers grasping at pale stone. She had completed the circle. Drawn it in her own blood, worked it with sigils crude in their calligraphy but elegant in their architecture.
She stood within a resurrection circle, over a dead priest whose lips still clutched a smoldering cigarette. But this circle was not drawn for a man. It was drawn for a god.
Denovo called on all his Craft, releasing the gargoyles and their goddess and Tara, everything save for his hold on the fiery sphere. He threw doom and lightning against Elayne and rent the earth beneath her feet and cast her into the outer hells, or tried. Shadow seeped from her, devouring starlight and torchlight and his Craft alike. The blood circle blazed the myriad colors of pure white light.
Within the shadow, within the circle, the flame of a cigarette tip flared.
*
Abelard fell. It was a familiar sensation.
He fell farther, faster, and this time the fire did not merely linger at the edge of his vision and the borders of his mind. It burst upon him in a flood. It charred his soul and burnt his body to a cinder. It danced upon him the dance that destroyed and renewed. This fire was the heartbeat of the world. The fire was love. The fire was life.
The fire was his God.
A faint remnant of his logical mind remembered that for some reason, though he had smoked constantly since his Lord’s death, in three days he had not once used a lighter or a match. Always he passed flame from one cigarette to the next.
He surrendered to God. Every breath of smoke lingering in his lungs, every trace of fire that calmed him in his hours of need, he gave them forth freely.
He was the size of a city, the size of the world, the size of the universe, smaller than the smallest atom. He was ash, and he burned eternal in a million suns.
Brilliant and new as a phoenix, Kos the Everburning rose from the ember at the tip of Abelard’s cigarette.
*
There is a space beyond or beneath the world, where all that is not, which creates all that is, collects and congregates. Shadow dances and wars with light there. Life and mind play their eternal game of flight and pursuit.
That place looks like nothing the human mind can grasp, so think of it as a bar: polished wood, brass fixtures, dim lights, beer.
A woman sat alone, beautiful and lost and full of rage so old it had become a dull ache deadening every newborn sensation. She cradled a half-empty pint glass.
A man entered the bar from a door that had not been there before. He stood waiting for a thousand years as they measured time, but she did not acknowledge him.
He looked more lost than she, and more recently wounded. He opened his mouth to speak, but had no words in whatever tongue they used. He reached for her. Placed his hand on her shoulder.
For another millennium she did not respond to his touch.
She stared into the dregs of her glass. Her arm floated slowly upward, against the weight of history.
She closed her hand around his.
*
Tara heard Denovo scream, an ugly sound full of desire and thwarted ambition. Shadow rolled from Ms. Kevarian’s circle to obscure the world. The air grew warm.
Fire broke reality.
She closed her eyes on reflex, and was nearly blinded in her second sight as webs of god-flame spun through Alt Coulumb with a speed beyond speed. The numberless threads that kept Kos’s city running had hung slack; now they snapped taut as a spring-loaded trap. Across town, fire erupted on the altars of Kos’s Sanctum. A beacon of holy light shone atop the Sanctum tower; a cry issued from the crowd below, wordless and exultant as the shadows vanished from their faces. Their candle flames leapt for joy.
Here in Justice’s Hall, the Concern bloomed and fell like the folds of a bridal veil upon the silver shade that was Seril Green-Eyed. Denovo’s defenses shriveled and snapped.
It was possible, Tara had said to Abelard, for a god to hide himself from obligations within the faith of his disciples, letting all but his consciousness die. It hurt more than death, and only the strongest deities could endure the pain for long. But it was possible. If you were powerful and your need was great—if, for example, this were the only way to save your long-lost love and avenge a grave crime, and if you knew that the fatal draw on your power would soon pass, leaving your body unharmed and ripe for rehabitation—you just might manage it.
Kos was awake once more, strong, and angry.
Seril vanished. Tara heard a great grinding of stone and looked up. The statue of Justice opened the pits of its eyes, and they blazed green.
Denovo hunched into a fighting crouch, knife out, nostrils flaring. The Guardians lurched out of striking range, but David was not so fast, and Denovo’s knife slashed, sharp as thought.
Tara was faster. She reached David in a step, thrust him out of the way, and intercepted Denovo’s knife with her own. The two blades met in arcs of light. Denovo’s broke.
The Blacksuits moved.
Fifty fell upon Denovo, but Cat beat them all, grasping his neck as her colleagues wrapped arms of iron about his limbs and body. Craft struck him, too: the Craft of Elayne Kevarian.
His eyes rolled white, and he fell limp.
Tara stepped back.
Breath came heavy in her throat.
She turned from the unconscious professor to her boss. Ms. Kevarian was covered in cuts and bruises, fingers bloody and clothing charred.
At her feet sat Novice Technician Abelard, rubbing his forehead. An extinguished cigarette dangled from his lips.
Sunset cast shadows of Alt Coulumb onto the soft waves of the turning tide. Along the docks, ropes creaked and boots tromped over wet planks; women swore and men strained against the weight of their burdens as the merchant fleet prepared to face the deep. Lookouts climbed webs of sheet and sail to nest in the rigging, and harpooners manned their posts warily, barbed and poisoned spears in hand. Serpents waited beyond the coastal shelf, and every sailor had sat vigil at least once for friends dragged screaming into the deep.
Raz Pelham emerged from his cabin onto the deck of the
Kell’s Bounty.
The lingering sun burned his tanned skin. He had never felt more ready to sail. Twice he had visited this city at the bidding of Craftsmen, twice been brought to the edge of death and beyond. Affairs had fallen out better this time than forty years ago, but still he yearned for the water. Land lied to the feet, and to the soul. You stand, it whispered, upon unchanging ground. You build upon certainty, and your foundations will never crumble.
Ms. Kevarian had told him, on her first visit to Alt Coulumb four decades past, that beneath its solid shell the world was an ocean of molten rock and metal. Captain Pelham preferred the sea, which misled but seldom lied. The world flowed, the world changed, and many-mouthed terrors lurked beneath its surface.
According to the Church and the Crier’s Guild, the city had reclaimed its usual equilibrium in the three weeks since Denovo’s arrest. The College of Cardinals pronounced Kos’s resurrection a miracle passing understanding, and Gustave a martyr to his Lord. This rhetoric did not persuade Alt Coulumb’s people, who sensed the near passage of disaster and moved in its wake like sailors after a bitter storm. They did the work the world asked of them—bargained hard, loaded and unloaded cargo, paid their debts, and drank their wine—but beneath routine and ritual, Raz sensed a growing apprehension.
More had changed than they imagined. Pieces of the truth would surface in the coming months. Already moonlight shone mingled with fire in their dreams. Waves moved over and through Alt Coulumb, scouring its heart and tearing new channels in its soil.
The boatswain called to him from the hold. The last of their cargo loaded, the
Bounty
stood ready to depart on the evening tide for Iskar, bearing a cargo of luxury goods, textiles, and books. Harpooners stood ready, the windweaver sat cross-legged at the bow, and scarred and tattooed deckhands went about their disparate business.
Raz bared his fangs to the world as the sun fell below the horizon.
His smile faltered when he heard someone call his name from shore. Reluctantly, he approached the gangplank.
On the dock, dressed in loose slacks, a blue shirt, and a battered leather jacket, stood Catherine Elle. Her skin looked ruddier than he remembered from their last meeting, weeks before.
“Captain,” she called out when he did not speak. “I wanted to drop by before you left.” A pair of dockhands walked between them, wheeling a wagon piled with bales of wheat. “To apologize.”
“For what?”
“For hitting you while your back was turned.”
“Hit?” He shook his head. “You broke my neck.”
“You got better.” She bit down as if to catch the sentence’s tail before it escaped her teeth. “And I wanted to apologize for what happened in the hospital.”
“That wasn’t your fault.”
“Not entirely.” She shifted her weight from one leg to the other, and ran a hand through her hair. “I don’t think even Tara knew her suggestion would take me that far. I think I have a long road ahead of me.”
She didn’t say the next words, so he did. “But you’re starting.”
“I’m starting.”
“I accept your apology.”
A brief, bright smile crossed her face, but she stilled it. “Will you come back this way?”
“Sometime next month, I think.”
“Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Maybe.” Twenty feet down the dock, some ship’s steward sprinted cursing through the crowd after a fleeing urchin who clutched a fat purse to his chest. “You have time? I can show you the
Bounty
.”
“No, thanks,” she replied. “I have work.”
“See you around.”
She nodded. “See you around.” She turned from him and stepped back into the milling crowd. Two paces, three, he followed her retreating back before a spark of deep gray gleamed at her neck and flowed upward, out, over her clothes. She became a statue of quicksilver. Broad wings rose from her back, and spread. In a streak, she was gone.
He watched her go.
It was time to leave.
*
Tara found Ms. Kevarian packing at eight o’clock that evening. Her black valise stood open on her office desk, and as Tara watched, she placed into it five folded suits, six shirts, a black robe, ten thick tomes of theoretical Craft, a writing stand, three vials of ink (one silver, one red, one black), two cheap novels, seven pens (three for contracting, one for cancellation, two more for professional work, and one used exclusively in personal discourse), a silver bowl, a bell of cast iron, a box of bone chalk, and five blood candles.
“Only the essentials, boss?”
“Only the essentials, Ms. Abernathy,” she said without turning. “But one must never be caught unprepared.”
“Leaving already.” Tara glanced around the room. The bed was made, its corners sharp and its covers turned down just as her own had been when they arrived in Alt Coulumb three weeks before. Not a speck of dust adhered to the bolsters, nor to the slick surface of her boss’s desk.