Kai watched bubbles of light bob down and up the mountain. Evening cable cars descended the slopes of Kavekana’ai, burdened by priests and shamans, acolytes and overseers all homeward bound. The night shift arrived before the day shift clocked out: functionaries passed functions to their counterparts, so the idols would not be left untended.
She shouldn’t do this. Better to take Jace’s broad hint and see a shrink. The psychological underpinnings of her theory were so obvious even she could see them: anger at Mara’s promotion turning to denial of reality, to rationalization, to the spinning of elaborate stories about how the world went wrong. Kevarian had motive enough without any need for conspiracy. The Craftswoman wanted to win her case. This whole exercise was one more piece of proof that Jace was right, that Kai was cracking.
But it wouldn’t hurt to sneak back into the mountain, to take a final look at Seven Alpha’s death, see what dirt Kevarian might find if she went looking. Wouldn’t hurt, so long as no one caught her.
And besides, while she was here she could investigate the poem.
Jace had banned Kai from the pool, but she didn’t need to dive. The mountain’s library held a wealth of information about Seven Alpha’s death. With luck, Kai could enter the library, do the research, and leave without Jace hearing of her visit.
At night she faced a smaller staff, and fewer chances of detection, but she still didn’t want her name on security logs, which ruled out the cable car. She’d have to take the stairs.
Kai returned home, spent a half hour cleaning to settle her mind, and changed out of her heels into walking shoes. She wished she could have dressed for the climb, but though the Order wasn’t as white-shoe as mainland Craft firms, walking its halls in gym clothes would attract notice. So she donned her lightest linen suit and a black shirt, slid her purse over her shoulder, and set out to break the rules.
She entered the forest a half mile from her apartment via an unmarked dirt path overgrown by roots and thick foliage. Soon the forest writhed around her, come to life. If she glanced back over her shoulder she would not see the road or distant streetlights. She did not look back. Hidden wards had welcomed her onto secret ways.
Before the cable car, before pilgrims traveled from around the globe to Kavekana, before the gods sailed off to fight the world’s wars, priests had only climbed the mountain on holy days: a journey of fear and trembling that began with this walk down a narrow dirt path through dense forest that smelled of motherhood and rot.
Trees and heavy air pressed close. Swelling silence overcame insect song. A bird cried. Another screamed. Soon she lost her bearings in the wood.
After a long wander, she found a path to her right blocked by thorny vines. She turned that way and the vines writhed tighter, snakelike. Thorns dripped dew and poison.
She walked into the vines, passed through tearing thorns, and found herself at the foot of a moonlit slope. Shallow steps switchbacked three thousand feet up the mountainside to the balconies and overlooks that ringed Kavekana’ai.
She took the climb slowly. As a novice, she’d sprinted up the stairs until her legs jellied and she almost tumbled off into space. Older now, and injured, she broke her climb into twenty-minute increments counted on her pocket watch, with five minutes’ rest between each. Her blood sang, and her legs burned, and her wounds, too, a sharper wire-pain compared to the muscles’ fire. The fat moon laughed overhead, outshining stars and the burning city below.
She prayed as she climbed. With no idols to care for, she prayed to the old and absent gods, who’d run off to the God Wars and not returned: Makawe, Heva, Maru, Aokane, all the rest. Mako had gone with them, fought his youth away in foreign lands. Last human survivor of the Wars on Kavekana, but even he was not immortal. Soon his strength would fade. The Rest would lose its heart.
The old gods’ songs had good rhythms, and she sang them to keep her pace. Makawe’s journeys below the world, seeking fire from the older powers of the depths. Heva comforting the first humans as they scraped, lost and cold, at the mud in which their souls were trapped. The war between Maru and his siblings. She climbed the long stair until the moon hung full overhead.
When she reached the lowest balcony of Kavekana’ai and found it vacant, she sagged against the railing, breathing hard. She wasn’t in mountain-climbing shape anymore. Her leg had ached during the climb, but she only used her cane for the last few hundred feet. Should have used it the whole way. She’d regret all this tomorrow, or later tonight.
A delta of sweat ran from her collar down her shirt to her stomach. As her heart calmed, the chill of wind and heights raised goose bumps on her arms. She wrapped herself tight in her jacket. The thin fabric did little to cut the wind, but little was better than nothing.
Kai stepped forward, and stumbled. Her leg gave way. She cursed, caught herself, and stood still again, listening to the wind and the silence of the slope, wondering who might have heard. Leaning on the cane, she tried again to walk, and this time held her balance. Three-legged, she proceeded to the wall, and stepped inside.
The stone accepted her. She knew its secret name, and it knew hers. This mountain was formed when gods and humans first rose from the earth. Men and mountain were made of the same stuff. For those who knew its secrets, the stone itself was a gate, and this gate had not been closed to her. Yet.
She stepped out of the stone into a semicircular chamber, brightly ghostlit, walls painted flat beige. Decades ago they’d been rough-hewn rock, lit by flickering candles, but occult design customs didn’t mesh with the demands of a modern office. In the seventies Jace’s predecessor had hired Graefax Tepes Ross, design consultants to the Dread Empire and to the Deathless Kings of the New World, to modernize the Order’s look. Kai thought she would have preferred it the old way.
Tunnels branched from the chamber. Kai turned left: up, and in.
She passed two junior priests arguing Iskari theology. “They want to reduce sacrifice flight domestically, which makes it a policy goal when negotiating treaties abroad. Which means us. You don’t seem to understand our position.”
“No, I do. The thing is we can’t afford to recognize their rules. Preparing to satisfy reporting requirements is tantamount to honoring those requirements. If you think—”
“You’re not even listening to me.”
“I’d listen if you—”
Kai walked on, and their argument receded into insignificance.
She reached the office levels and kept climbing, two more floors and right, down a hall paneled in cherrywood, through a glass door, to the library.
A golem sat behind the front desk, bucket of coffee clutched in a clawed metal hand. Servos spun as it raised the coffee to its mouth-port. Lenses in its eyes realigned with delicate clicks. Kai walked past the desk to the windows at the library’s far wall, which opened on to the caldera. Other office windows glowed across the pit, human constellations echoing the stars in the alien sky above and the pool below.
No sense lingering, but how could she resist one glance, possibly her last, on the star-studded space at the caldera floor where by all rights lava should have bubbled, one glance at the hole where she’d rebuilt herself, the womb that birthed her people? A few figures stood there on the beach at the end of everything, heads bent in prayer. Her shoulders ached, and her heart too, to swim again through the black, to breathe the uncreated, once more to weld soul and dogma into living form.
Not now. Maybe never again.
She turned, and ran into a wall of Gavin.
He stood behind her, lumbering and tall as ever. He clutched a bag of scrolls to his chest, and he wore a polo shirt and slacks and a shocked expression. His lips tried three times to form her name before it came out once: “Kai! What are you doing here?”
She would have winced anywhere, but most especially in the library at night. The carrels and long tables were almost empty—a handful of acolytes leafing through old contracts and Craft journals—which made the silence, and their anger when it broke, more profound. Still, she couldn’t begrudge his wide smile, so glad to see her.
“Gav. Keep your voice down.” She laid a finger beside her lips.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “You’ve been gone awhile, is all. How have you been? We miss you.”
“I miss you, too, Gav.” She hugged him around the scrolls. He was large and warm and soft.
“Did you come to visit? I’ll get some of the guys. I think Cal has a flask at his desk, I mean, it’s not good booze I think and it’s not much, but we should celebrate.” Gavin wasn’t a drinker, and the word “booze” sounded strangely affected in his mouth.
“I’m sorry, I can’t. Wish I could.” Clicks and spinning gears: the golem librarian turned toward them and the apertures of its eyes irised tight. Still holding Gavin by the shoulder, Kai walked him out past the desk, into the hall where at least the wooden panels would dull their voices. He followed, easily steered, like a two-hulled catamaran in a strong breeze. Easily steered, and just as easily tipped. “I can’t stay long.”
“I thought you were still recovering. Working with pilgrims.”
So “recovery” was how Jace sold her exile to the team. “I need information to seal the deal for this one pilgrim. I don’t want to promise the world only to learn we can’t deliver.”
He nodded slowly. “That happened to me a while back. Someone thought we could make an idol who’d just resurrect things for fun.” He chuckled. “Hard commitment to back out of. But, I mean, here, let me tell the guys, and when you’re done you can come down to the pool and we’ll all hang out. Only the night crew’s here now, and it’s slow.” He pressed the scrolls closer to his chest. “I wanted to catch up on my reading.”
She should have used that excuse, rather than concocting something about pilgrims. “I’d love to. Just…” I’m not supposed to be here at all, and every second I stay is a risk I shouldn’t take? It would hurt too much to sit with friends and talk as if nothing happened? Both were true, and neither would help. “I’m recovering. I don’t want to push it. Maybe you could all come down the mountain and hang out with me. I’d like that.”
He breathed in through his mouth, stuck out his jaw, and nodded. “Sure. I can see that. Most of the guys don’t go anywhere except the mountain and their own apartments, but I think I can swing something.” His eyes widened. “I mean, are you okay? I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Is there anything I can do for you? Should you even be up here without help?”
Damn. “I’m fine, Gav. I only need a couple files.” She grinned winningly as she could manage, and hoped she didn’t look too tired. If Gavin’s misplaced sense of chivalry engaged, she wouldn’t be rid of him for hours. “I can do this myself. Just a little research, is all.” She touched his bag of scrolls. “Go on. You have work.”
“Okay,” he said, still skeptical. “It’s good to see you again, Kai.”
“Good to see you, man. It won’t be so long next time.”
He nodded, once, smiled, and lumbered away down the corridor. She watched him go until he turned left and disappeared. Letting out the long breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, she sagged against the wall and stayed there until her heart calmed again. Fear chilled her brow and neck. She didn’t like being afraid of Gavin.
She tugged her clothes straight and returned to the library. The golem glared at her, and refilled its mug of coffee from a percolator in its chest, but did not stop her or ask her business. This time she ignored the window and the view, stepping softly so as not to attract more attention. None of the library’s denizens looked up from their books as she passed. Pages turned, scrolls rolled. A young woman coughed. A teenage acolyte’s leg twitched up and down like a sewing needle as he read. He, Kai thought, noting the military hair and the loose shirt and the other signs that the acolyte with the restless leg was waiting for initiation, waiting for the pool, waiting to remake himself into himself.
She smiled, and wanted to say something to him, but she’d stood out too much already. Get the data, and get out. That was all she could afford now.
She counted four doors, five, on the outer wall: small, curved, and paneled to match the walls’ wood, marked over the jamb with names on bronze tags. Once, every senior priest had her own niche, but office space had grown too crowded for such luxury. Kai passed her own door without hesitation and continued an eighth-rotation around the caldera until she reached the door bearing Mara’s name.
She stepped through into a tunnel of volcanic stone. Cloying warm air bore a sulfur stench and hints of ozone. Ghostlight tubes painted everything pale purple-green: the worn smooth path down the center of the hall, the petroglyphs, the thick brass pipes gleaming with silver Craftwork. Her footsteps and her cane’s taps joined the pipes’ weird symphony: the clink and groan of heating and cooling metal, the rush of hydraulic surf.
The tunnel opened into a cave cramped with machines and carved wooden totems wound with wire. Kai stepped onto the grate that served for a floor, and did not look down; beneath, the cavern plummeted to a pinprick of perspective, its walls lined with scrolls. A central pylon plumbed the pit’s depth, and bejeweled pneumatic spindles rose and descended that pylon, sparks arcing from their tips to the scrolls. All the history of Mara’s idols lay here, entombed.
And Mara was here, too.
Kai had not expected that.
An iron stair rose to a catwalk that ran below five niches in the rock wall. Mara stood in the center niche, head back, eyes closed, body rigid, rimmed by metal thorns. Wires pressed against her wrists, snared her neck, snaked along her legs. One thorn hovered above the vein at each elbow, tipped not with metal but with a spine of light.
This arcane contraption was one more cost of doing priestly business in a Craftsman’s age. No single human being could comprehend the millions of points of data that made up an idol: bargains, transactions, contracts, records of prayers received, heard, fulfilled. Old-fashioned gods handled most operations themselves. “Makawe hears all prayers,” the old saying went, “and laughs at them.” The idols Kai and her comrades built could handle basic functions on their own, but priests had to make harder choices for their idols. Theologically risky, of course, which was why they asked Craftsmen for help—Craftsmen had a history of stretching theology’s borders, or else ignoring them altogether.
Kai had not expected Mara to be working late. Fresh off a promotion, elevated to the highest levels of the priesthood, why would she spend her evening on low-level prayer management? The Order paid acolytes to do this sort of thing. But there was no sense trying to justify away an unfortunate reality. Maybe Mara had a high-stakes audit coming. Maybe she was reviewing her archives for inspiration. Whatever the reason, she might notice Kai entering the system. Best to leave and wait for another chance.
If she had another chance. Mara might be here the next time, anyway. Or Jace might cancel her clearance, or Gavin let word of her visit slip. To wait was to lose. She could still learn what she needed, if she moved fast, and subtly.
This was a bad idea, she thought as she climbed the stairs and leaned back into the niche farthest to Mara’s right. Machines woke about her. Dormant Craftwork smelled her blood and burned with hunger. The system’s demons knew their feast approached. Oh yes. A very bad idea.
Leaning back in the niche, Kai stared at the opposite wall, at the painting of a starlit beach on West Claw, white sands and spreading calm water. A suggestion of sunset lit the horizon. She forgot whether the painting was Jace’s idea or if it sprang in full tacky glory from the forehead of a Graefax Tepes Ross consultant. Each carrel had one, always the same scene. The intent was to calm priests amid this unholy system of metal and wires. We promise to make the process of ripping your spirit out of your flesh as painless and routine as possible. In her early days with the Order, Kai had wondered at the choice of scene, until she realized that the rush of arcane fluid through hydraulic pipes was supposed to provide an audio component to the painting, a sound of surf. Better to have chosen a foreign image. An alpine meadow, maybe, like the ones in old mystery play musicals: priestesses capering among goats, singing swollen songs to their living mountains. Kai had grown up with surf, and sand, and the painting felt like a fake smile from a trusted friend.
She swung counterweighted metal claws into position. Gears ground in hidden mechanisms. Metal fingers settled against her temples, her ankles, her waist, her neck. The cavern air was warm, but the metal cold. She shivered in her linen suit. Wires and needles waited within those arms, cold tendrils coiled under tension. She looked up at the ceiling, raw unfinished hungry black. “I offer myself,” she whispered. The machine heard her. The claws at her arms extended thin points of lightning that tickled the inside of her elbows, sought and found the veins there. The hairs on her arms snapped to attention. She was the core of a thrumming beast. All she had to do was straighten her arms, and plunge the lightning needles in.
She clenched her teeth, and punched her arms straight, and fell into the open mouth above.