Statues. The smell was strongest here, burning in her nostrils. Tara tightened her grip on her knife, and pondered.
This building had been built to a careful pattern, architects and artists weighing each decoration against every other. Nothing was accidental or asymmetrical save for the strange rune carvings, which did not seem part of the original design. Yet to her right there was a single gargoyle, and to her left—
As she turned to look, something long and sharp pressed against her throat, the point dimpling her skin. She swallowed, involuntarily, and her skin almost gave.
“Scream,” said a low voice like crushed rock, “and you die.”
It was amazing, she thought for the second time that day, how imminent death focused the mind.
She remained still and quiet with the gargoyle’s claw at her throat, to show she would not call for help. When he didn’t say anything further, she whispered, “There’s no need to kill me.”
“There is if you scream.”
“What would my death accomplish if I did? As soon as they know you’re here, they’ll be after you, and they move fast.”
“So do I.”
She had to admit that. He was fast, and quiet. She hadn’t heard him climb onto the roof and approach her, for all his bulk. “Killing me will convince them you killed Judge Cabot. No evidence will stand against your murder of an innocent while fleeing the scene of the crime. The Blacksuits will track you to the ends of the earth. They’re tireless.” His claw twitched against her throat. “And you’re tired already.”
“Quiet.”
“How long have you been hanging off this building? Hiding from them? Hoping they couldn’t smell you the way I can?”
“Stop.”
“What’s your name?”
“I am a Guardian.”
She heard the capital letter. “I’m not interested in your title,” she said, as conversationally as she could manage. “I asked you to tell me your name. Because if I’m going to help you get out of this alive, we should get to know each other.”
His breath should have been hot on the back of her neck, but he did not breathe. One cannot breathe with lungs of stone. She fought to control her pounding heart.
“You need my help,” she said. “You’re obviously innocent.”
“What?”
Keep him talking, Tara thought. If you’re wrong, and you’re seldom wrong, then you want him to think you’re on his side. If you’re right, he wants to believe you. Recite the facts. Her throat was dry. Her breath came short. Dammit, be calm. Cool as crystal, as ice. Cool as Ms. Kevarian. “Whoever killed Cabot planned the murder well. Knew how to do it without leaving traces someone like me could follow. The murderer kept Cabot alive, more or less, until you came. You broke that pretty little bone circle, Cabot’s spirit left his body, and bam, his wards went off and the Blacksuits had a nice picture of you looming over his corpse, talons out. It won’t even matter if they were bloody.”
The pressure against her throat eased.
Ms. Abernathy?
The Blacksuits were coming. She had to work fast.
Tara turned around. The claw did not leave her neck. The gargoyle stood before her, seven and a half feet of silver-gray stone bowed forward until his face was level with her own. Furled wings rose like twin mountains from his back. His open eyes were emerald green and large—at least three times as big as hers, eyes the size of billiard balls. She focused on the eyes because otherwise she would focus on his hooked, toothed beak.
“Listen. Is there any way you can make yourself less threatening? More human?”
“They might recognize me. I looked human earlier, when I ran from them.”
“Did they see you up close?”
“No.”
“Fine. I’ll deal with that. Just try to be a little less with the huge and monstrous, please?”
There came a horrid twisting, and an inrush of air. The creature collapsed into himself, passing through a stomach-churning stage where he was emphatically not gargoyle, but not human either. Strands of muscle showed through the broken stone, which melted into yielding, warm flesh.
A young man stood before her, strong, good chin, ripped clothes, ripped chest. His eyes remained green as gems.
Tara’s eyebrows floated upward of their own accord.
“What?” the gargoyle said.
“You’re…”
“A monster?”
“I was going to go for cute.”
Ms. Abernathy? Are you well?
Again the shout scraped across her soul.
“Thanks?”
“Don’t thank me. That makes it harder.”
He opened his mouth to ask what she meant, but before he could speak, before he could react with all that mind-numbing speed and strength, she drove her knife deep into his stomach. It entered with a sizzling of seared flesh. His mouth opened in a silent gasp.
As she pulled the knife up and out, his body was already healing. With a swipe of her mind she took that power from him. He started to turn himself to stone, but the glyphs on her left arm sparked silver as she stopped him. The plan relied on him looking human: no swift healing, no claws, no rocky skin. His blood would have stained her clothes, but a wave of heat surrounded her and turned that blood to vapor.
She’d chosen her target well, and her depth. Missed the intestines and vital organs but nicked a few arteries going in, not so bad that he’d bleed out in minutes, but bad enough. He went slack, and fell free of her blade.
She knelt beside him and passed the knife to her left hand. The glyph-rings on her fingers, the spider on her palm, sparked silver as the blade faded into them. Next came the hard part. She framed his face with her fingertips and tightened her grip. Her nails pressed into flesh, and her Craft pressed deeper.
She twisted her wrist and peeled his face away. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears. Behind, she left a smooth, unbroken pane of skin.
Why do this? Why get involved? Save that someone had tried to kill her before breakfast, and someone else apparently succeeded at killing Judge Cabot. Two attacks in one morning, both on people connected with the case. Tara needed to know more, and she had little confidence in these Blacksuits and their Justice.
Holding the face in her left hand, she reached into her purse with her right and produced a black, leather-bound book, cover scrawled with silver. She stuck the face, carefully folded, between pages 110 and 111. Click went the latch, then back in her shoulder bag.
She had little power left. Enough to make a pass over the bleeding, faceless body and wipe away the miniscule traces of her Craft. Add to that a light ward against discovery, strong enough to block normal sight, but weak enough that it would never fool a Craftswoman.
Ms. Abernathy?
She stood, stepped back from the body, brushed a stray lock of hair into place, and squeezed her fists tight. Her nails bit into her palms, and she screamed.
*
The Blacksuits weren’t the individuals Tara would have chosen to comfort a person who had discovered a faceless body. If she had been telling the truth, and indeed stumbled upon a wounded, comatose man while wandering through the garden, their precise questions would have driven her to hysterics. As it was, after she staunched the gargoyle’s bleeding and bound his wound Tara felt compelled to hyperventilate, sit down in Cabot’s parlor, and ask for a strong cup of tea.
What might have happened to this young man?
“I almost tripped over him, by all the gods. Couldn’t have seen him if not for the Craft. I mean … Shit. I think … Maybe he was here. Talking to Cabot? Maybe whoever killed Cabot didn’t notice him at first?”
Why not kill him in the same way?
“Not enough time. Oh. Thank you. Tea. Maybe not enough power. We’re dealing with an amateur here—little skill, less soulstuff to work with than a full Craftswoman. Easier this way. Stab him, take his face, run.”
What can we do?
“Not much. Steal the face, steal the mind. The wound will recover, but you won’t get any testimony from him. On the plus side, once stolen, the face is almost impossible to destroy. Neither half can live without the other, but they can’t die, either. Keep his body safe, and you might find the face if you look hard enough.
“Of course I’ll be available to answer questions. I don’t know where we’ll be staying. You can reach my boss or me through the Sanctum of Kos Everburning. I assume you know the—
“Yes. Absolutely.”
Heart pounding, she reached the street, hand in the air and a gargoyle’s face in her shoulder bag. It had been an odd couple of hours, and she had a feeling that, before the week was out, her life would grow stranger still.
But she could deal with strange. She was starting to like the big city.
“Taxi!”
At Alt Coulumb’s heart, the press of humanity and architecture yielded to a green circle half a mile in diameter: the Holy Precinct, with the towering Sanctum of Kos at its heart. To the north it bordered the business district, where skeletal mages in flowing robes bargained with creatures from beyond the mortal world in towers of black glass that scraped the sky. To the south lay the university campuses, gentrified, upper-class, and comfortably distant from the machinations of Northtown. East and west spread the no-man’s land between the poles, home to residential zones, slums, dives, and vice.
The most notorious of these regions, the Pleasure Quarters, actually abutted the Holy Precinct, a holdover from centuries past when some saint decreed that the fire in the blood and loins belonged to Kos Everburning as much as the fire of hearth and furnace.
“Problem being,” Tara’s taxi driver said as he swung the goad halfheartedly at the flanks of his slow-moving nag, “that Kos is great and wise”—he pointed to the holy symbol suspended from the buggy’s rearview mirror, a stylized three-tongued flame within a diamond—“but not as practiced as a fertility deity in managing diseases. I love our Lord with all my soul, but the Church did well to give up on sex and focus on the burning. Stick to what you know, I say.”
“So the priests got out of the business, but the brothels remained?”
“Well. I wouldn’t say the priests got out of the business. They’re still, ah, joined to it, at the hip as it were. The Church got out, though, and well done, too. Man goes to pray to leave that kind of stuff behind. Nowadays, if the girls and their boys go wild and roll onto the temple grounds, the priests tromp over, round them up, and cart them off.”
Their buggy rattled along, and the basalt tower grew ever larger before them. Tara watched the buildings that flanked their taxi. The closer they drew to the Holy Precinct, the more grooved scars she saw in the towers’ stone, always several stories above street level. “What about those marks on the buildings? Did the priests take up decorating, too?”
Harness jangled and leather creaked. When the driver spoke again his voice was low and strained. “Ah. Those.”
“I’m sorry. If it’s a sensitive subject, I can…”
“No trouble, miss. They’re war scars, is all.”
“I thought Alt Coulumb wasn’t damaged in the God Wars.”
He snorted. “Weren’t any Craftsmen, but it was damaged all the same.”
Tara was confused, but her driver seemed uneasy with the subject. She chose her next words with care. “Shouldn’t someone have fixed them by now? It’s been fifty years.”
“Can’t be fixed.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Stone Men made ’em, didn’t they?” He spit onto the street. “Can’t cover up their claw marks. The building remembers. Put in new stones and a minute later they’re scarred again.”
Tara’s breath caught, but she tried to keep her tone conversational. “Stone Men. You mean gargoyles?”
He didn’t respond, but it was an affirmative silence.
“Some of the … scars … look like writing.”
“Some are. Marking territory. Blasphemous prayers written by mad beasts. The rest are battle scars.”
“Are the gargoyles still around?”
The man glanced back at her and she saw that his face had closed like a door. “No Stone Men here.” He said those words as if they were a curse. “Not since my father’s time.”
“What happened?”
“They left.”
He turned the cab down a broad road leading into the temple compound. Seen from above, the path they traced over white gravel would follow the outer curves of a massive binding circle, large as the Holy Precinct. Tara wondered if the design served a purpose beyond decoration. Without an army of Craftsmen to manage it, not even a circle this size could contain a god as strong as Kos.
“Why’d they leave? Religious differences?”
He didn’t answer, and Tara didn’t ask for further clarification. Arguing war-era politics with a fanatic in a god-benighted city could be trouble. She wasn’t concerned for her own safety, but arriving on her client’s doorstep in a burning taxi with an injured driver would make a horrible first impression.
They approached the black tower of the Sanctum of Kos, tall and polished, an abstract vision of flame trapped in dark and unscarred stone. The same echoed warmth she had felt while falling washed over her again. Was it always like this here? And if the divine radiance was this strong when Kos was dead, what must it have been like when he was alive?
Their road dead-ended in a broad semicircle of white gravel where a double handful of other vehicles lingered, awaiting their masters: a couple ordinary taxis like Tara’s own, five or six fancier models, and even a few driverless carriages.
A young man in brown and orange robes sat at the base of the steps leading into the Sanctum. He was tonsured, smoking a cigarette, and represented the only non-carriage-related life in the vicinity.
“That’s funny,” her driver said.
“There’s usually a crowd?”
“Place is generally packed with folks, you know, come to pray for this or that or the other thing. Monsters from Northtown come when they’ve got business. If you dream about fire, you visit to pay your respects.” The cabbie frowned. “Fewer than usual today.”
She slid from the cab to the ground, fished a small metal disc out of her purse, and passed it to the driver. A piece of Tara’s soul flowed from her to him through the token. The soulstuff mattered, not the token; metals were just an easy focus. Soon after she paid him, all traces of her would fade from the payment, and only raw power remain, for the driver to trade with others in exchange for food or shelter, goods or services, or pleasure. If he were a Craftsman, and gained enough of this power from others, from the stars, or from the earth, he could use it to resurrect the dead and rain doom upon a nation. If the power remained in Alt Coulumb, on the other hand, some faithful citizen would inevitably sacrifice it to Kos, who kept the city protected and commerce secure and the whole damn system functioning.