On the second day out, Connor guided them around a patch of flat dry ground several miles across that looked like any other stretch of Badlands. The detour set Dawn grumbling and might have frustrated Tara, too, if she hadn’t noticed the rainbows that swirled above that flat expanse when glimpsed out of the corner of her eye.
Human peripheral vision didn’t see color, as had been explained to her at length during eyeball dissection at the Hidden Schools. The eye was only a fine-grained instrument at the center of its focus. The high-color world most people thought they saw was an illusion knit by sleight of mind and rapid movements of the eye. And yet: out of the corner of her eye, she saw rainbows.
While they waited at a spring for their canteens to fill, Dawn hefted a stone and contemplated the sand flat. Connor saw what she was thinking and tried to catch her wrist, but before he could reach her, she threw.
The stone sailed, fell, landed, and rolled. Tara watched. She did not see any rainbows. She did, however, see the mouth that opened in the ground beneath the stone, and its layers of gnashing crystal teeth.
Connor glared at Dawn, who gaped at the sand flat where the mouth had been.
Tara’s canteen filled. She capped it and added it to her bag. “I hope that’s settled.” No one spoke. She mopped her sweat away, wet her bandanna in the spring, and tied it across her forehead to cool her. Then she adjusted her hat against the sun and stood. “Let’s get moving. I’d like to reach those hills before night.”
At the fireside that evening, Dawn chewed dried meat in silence while Connor played his flute soft and lonely. He’d told her the night before that he liked to play faster tunes, but out on the Badlands it was best to be mistaken for wind. Tara paced around the flames, stretching muscles bunched and sore after too long on horseback. The curse ached in her shoulder.
Dawn swallowed. “What was that thing?”
Connor set down his flute. “Nobody knows.”
“You mean, you don’t know.” She was looking at Tara instead, with an expression that made Tara wish she had a better answer than:
“He’s right. Mostly.”
“But how is that possible? It must have been born. It must die. There must be other things related to it, even if that particular sort of monster only, I don’t know, grows or hunts or lives out here. Someone must have given them a name.”
A dragon had mocked Tara for a similar assumption years ago, and she felt her mouth quirk lizard-wise as she tried to frame the answer in her own words. “Names are not the same as truth, or knowledge. The word ‘rhinoceros’ just means ‘that thing with a horn on its nose.’ Most names work like that, even the names we use in Craft: they’re labels. They refer. You’re making a number of assumptions, among them that this is a member of a class of beings. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the only one of its kind. Not the last—the only.”
“Then where did it come from?”
Tara sat down. “You tell me.”
Dawn’s face went through some interesting changes before she spoke next. “You’re serious.”
“Remember what I said back at Edgemont about gods, and complexity.”
“This is mean.”
“This is educational.”
Dawn frowned into the fire. She spoke one word at a time with breaks between, spinning the fuzz of her thoughts into thread. “So, life is a kind of pattern—all life, gods and humans and whatever that was out there. Small patterns link up to make bigger patterns. Each level…” Tara tried to keep her face neutral as she listened to the girl think. “Each level’s a base for the next, and guards the ones below.”
Tara did not let herself nod or smile. When she first decided to teach Dawn, she’d worried about her own desire to break out slate and chalk and pointer and enter full-on lecture mode. She had underestimated the electric joy of watching the girl piece truth together on her own.
“You called that thing an accident. And gods died out here.” Dawn bit her lower lip when she was lost in thought. “If you hurt a god, it might hide in something else. Could gods live in less complicated things? In rocks and stones?”
“Not well,” she said. “But when they do, they don’t look like that. You’re on the right track, though. Keep going. What do you need to have, to make a pattern? Say, if you wanted to make a cat’s cradle?” She held her hands apart and spun thin blue lines of Craft around them to demonstrate.
“You’d need string, I guess,” Dawn said. “Fingers. Something to weave the pattern in and against. You’d need time, and energy, that you weren’t using for something else. I suppose those are sort of related, time and energy. You’d need to know how.”
“Generally speaking,” Tara said, “if you want a pattern to arise in nature you need a substrate, which is a fancy way of saying you need something to make the pattern in, plus energy, time, and a seed—any asymmetry’s enough. Any small difference. The more you have, the less time the process takes.”
“And,” excited now, eyes glowing with reflected fire as she leaned in, “there was a war here.”
“Yes.”
“Lots of gods and Craftswomen throwing lots of power around. The desert is the … substrate? Lots of energy. And there were gods and Craftsfolk dying everywhere. Blood on the sand. Abandoned munitions. Plenty of, what was that word?”
“Asymmetry.”
“Asymmetry. So new patterns would form. Not quite gods, not quite machines. Accidents.”
Yes. Exactly. Full marks. Tara tried to take Dawn’s success as a given, to disguise her pride—let the kid feed on discovery rather than acclaim. But, damn, was she smart. “That one eats light, I think, but everything’s made of light if you hit it hard enough. Craftwork rearranges the world, and makes new patterns. If you’re not careful—and we weren’t careful back in the Wars, because we didn’t know any better and because we didn’t have time to be—those patterns take on lives of their own. That’s where the curse came from: a weapon we used against gods, or that gods used against us. A parasite that disrupts and absorbs the patterns it finds. These days we split major works of Craft between many Craftworkers to avoid this problem: if you give people simple, knowable work, most of the time it doesn’t try to eat them. Plus, there’s less of a chance you’ll contradict yourself and write a hole into the world.”
“You mentioned that before. Does it really happen?”
“It happened to a friend of mine.” She poked the fire with a stick and sparks danced up. In the middle of the desert she should have felt alone, but instead all the ages of history clustered around their fire, monsters rubbing shoulders with monsters. “Most of the time when that sort of thing goes wrong, it only makes a tiny hole, enough to kill a careless Craftswoman, not enough to cause lasting damage.” She set the stick down. In the sky above Alt Coulumb there rose a shining arch of demonglass with a flaw in the shape of a girl at its heart. Strange how, when you took on a student, all your personal tragedies, your friends’ disasters and despair and even their deaths, were transmuted into lessons. “We got very lucky. But she still died.”
“I’m sorry,” Dawn said, and after a silence that went on too long, her voice tentative, continued: “Is that accident in the sand flat really … alive?”
“What do you mean when you say ‘alive’? It eats. It defends itself. It’s hungry and simple and nasty, but you could say the same about a raccoon. Most accidents don’t reproduce, but some can. That’s one reason we’re reluctant to clean places like this up, even though they’re dangerous. The ethics are uncomfortable. Even for us.”
Dawn stared back out into the dark. She went very still when her mind worked, as if all the force that animated her body was otherwise occupied. Even her voice had a faraway, dreamlike sound. She was still getting used, Tara thought, to talking about her ideas, rather than brooding over them in midnight silence. “What about the Craft itself?”
“Okay. Run with that.”
“You said a pattern takes substrate, energy, and a seed. All the deals and contracts of the Craft, all those wards and bargains overlapping—they must make really complicated patterns. That’s a substrate. There’s so much energy involved already. And there must be seeds all over the place. Asymmetries. Could there be patterns in the Craft itself? Could it have a mind? Could it grow … accidents?”
Tara leaned forward. After the memory of the demonglass arch, the cold thrill of abstract reasoning was a relief. They might have been sitting on leather upholstery in a tutoring room at the Hidden Schools, with a coffee service and sherry a bell pull away. “Craftwork can host minds—that’s how Deathless Kings survive: they create frameworks of Craft to host the self-perpetuating patterns of their minds. And I’ve seen Craftwork constructs that caught sentience from gods—but that was on Kavekana, and those constructs were being treated like gods anyway, with priests and worship and everything. You’re not talking about that. You’re talking about truly autonomous behavior. The system acting on its own. Self-aware.”
Eagerly: “Could it happen?”
“I don’t think so. The rules of the Craft are rigid—they were made that way. The Craft takes, and it doesn’t give back. Gods come out of gaps, of slack, of quiet spaces, and the Craft doesn’t have a lot of those. We build contracts and systems to reduce uncertainty—so while there’s a lot of energy involved, very little of that energy is free. But we make a lot of transactions, and they bunch up against one another, and that bunching-up sends ripples through the system as it seeks balance, equilibrium. Patterns emerge. Maybe one day those patterns would gain enough complexity to wake up.” She shook her head. “I have to admit, I hope not.”
That pulled Dawn back from wherever her thoughts had taken her. She landed off-balance in the present moment, surprised by the existence of emotions, of hopes and fears. “Why?”
“If it did, how would we know? It would look like a problem at first: a system behaving in a way we didn’t expect. The first step most professionals would take if a contract started to behave weirdly would be to find out what was happening and stop it. When a corpse wakes up, the mortician stabs it through the heart before it can rise. If the Craft was aware, its first experiences would be of waking only to be killed, again and again.” She adjusted the coals. “I lost a year that way in Denovo’s lab before I could break free. I don’t know what was a dream and what was not. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
“But you did wake up.” As if repeating a prayer. “You got out.”
“Yes,” she said.
Dawn asked the next question tentatively, as if the answer scared her. “How?”
“He hurt a friend of mine. The one I was telling you about, actually—the one who died. Seeing her in pain woke me up. Made me ask questions I hadn’t thought to ask before, questions I’d been taught not to ask, about what was happening to us.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You said that already.” She broke the stick she’d used to stir the coals and broke it again until she held four small hot lengths. She tossed them into the fire, and stood. “We should sleep. Long day tomorrow, and after.”
Out in the dark away from the fire the stars unfurled and the ground lay in shadow, hidden and unknown. That was the great lie of cities: they told you that the place where people lived was bright and clear and sensible, and the sky a swirling void of melted neon horrorforms occasionally relieved by brave sharp points of light, when in fact that swirling void was a shadow the city cast, a shadow in its own shape. You had to leave to see the truth.
She sighed, hitched up and buttoned her slacks, and wandered back.
Connor stood by her tent, flute in hand, watching stars.
“You sat quiet through all that,” she said.
“Don’t know much about the topic, is all. I wanted to give the girl space. I don’t think she likes me much.”
“What gives you that impression?”
“Oh, the glares and the disregard and the distrust and the throwing rocks at monsters. Not to mention the scorpion in my bed last night.”
“Did she really?”
“No, I figure that the scorpion was acting on its own initiative. If Dawn wanted me dead she’d be more direct.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
“Don’t. I don’t know her well, but I expect I stink of what she wants to leave behind. And she’s jealous.”
“Jealous?”
“Of … us. Of my time with you.”
She kicked soil. “She’s a smart kid. She wants to learn.”
“You can’t see the way she looks at you. She wants to drink you up.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
Neither one of them had moved, but the space between them seemed to condense and harden, as if they stood on either side of a glass wall.
Back in Edgemont it had felt so easy to reach for him, like her whole life she’d been playing a favorite game a little wrong and had finally found a page of rules she’d never noticed before. Now, even if he was technically her guide, they played by her rules, the rules she’d taught herself to survive the world of Craft. Be fast, be hard, be clever and ruthless and swift. She had sculpted a self to fit those rules, like a golem shaped out of clay, and baked it and worked it with magic until its skin could shatter steel.
On the island of Kavekana they placed criminals in animated statues that broke them and rebuilt them into model citizens. Resist the statue and it tore you apart, but did not let you die. Work within its bounds and the statue fed you ecstasy. Criminals on Kavekana wept when they were freed. They begged to be imprisoned once more. Give me that strength again, give me tracks to follow, make me part of something greater than myself.
The curse was inside her. It would grow until she reached the Raiders and ended this and, if she was lucky, walked away. Her path was dark. Survival was not assured. So why did she feel more free and easy now than she had since she opened her mother’s letter back in Alt Coulumb?
Connor had grown close to her in a moment when they could both pretend the self she had sculpted and baked and worked and wore through battle after battle was just an accident, a mask, rather than her true and final form.
She thought of Deathless Kings she’d known, their bodies withered, their bones and appetites immortal, sustained in their power by chains they took for arms. She had thought their transformation occurred on the moment of death, but maybe it began much earlier.
“You’re good at waiting,” she said with half a smile, rueful.
“Comes from too much time out here.”
“I really am glad you’re with us. Not just because we need a guide. You’re about to see who I am at work—real work, not the small-time stuff I did back at Edgemont. Not the person I’ve tried to be these last few weeks.”
“That person is still you.”
“I’m not so soft as she is.”
“If you don’t like who you are back east,” he said with a church-voice quiet, “you could stay.”
What a thought: to walk away from Alt Coulumb, to break the life she’d made and find some quiet place out of the way of history to live free of consequence and chains. Abandon duty, friends, and future. Abandon the black folder and those footsteps in the sky, and let them be somebody else’s problem.
The possibility introduced a kind of vertigo. He was serious, she could tell, and she could also tell he had a reasonable sense of how likely she was, or was not, to take him up on the offer. She met his eyes and tried to look kind. “You don’t get it.” Here she was, cursed in the Badlands with an apprentice in tow and a camp full of Raiders ahead of her, on their home turf, as a clock ticked down to zero hour. You know: happy. “I love this.”
When they woke, they found the hills had moved around them in their sleep, but the needle still pointed true, and west.