Hours later Kai still ached. She lay hung over on her own bed, alone despite the swell of sleeping flesh beside her. She wanted a cigarette. She’d never smoked. She padded downstairs and sat on her couch in her dressing gown. Her purse lay by the door, discarded in that rush of anything but passion. Hatred, maybe. Disgust—but with whom? She limped to the door, grabbed the purse, returned to the couch, and sat again, purse on the table before her, lump of leather tangled in its own strap.
She clawed inside, past wallet and keys and comb and lipstick and gloves and bandages. The red notebook looked gray as everything else in the dim light of streetlamps through her windows.
She untied the ribbon and opened the book. Its stiff spine cracked, and the pages clung together. Most were blank. Sketches covered several near the beginning, the outlines of a goat-legged woman with horns and spreading wings. Despite the artist’s poor draftsmanship Kai could tell she was supposed to be beautiful. On later pages the drawings degenerated into flowcharts and diagrams, arrows connecting labeled circles. Names, some she recognized, most she didn’t, none human. Concerns, gods, idols. Lists of numbers. Accounts, maybe, or thaums transferred, or the addresses of certain dreams.
Aside from the diagrams and the lists, the book was blank. No memories inscribed here. No explanations. No name, either. Good practice. The notes here could cost a lot of people their jobs.
Not as many, though, as the five loose and folded sheets that fluttered out from the notebook when Kai fanned its pages. The sheets were vellum, not paper, which told her everything. On Kavekana, only the Order used such expensive material for bookkeeping, and then only for Craft-readable records. These pages had been sliced neatly from a ledger, and she recognized the format: a list of true names, and beside each, columns of numbers. Someone had cut these sheets from an idol’s records, no question. The script was right, and the watermark, and the silvery Craftwork glyphs that headed each column of the table.
As for which idol, she did not need to wonder. Each page, at its bottom, was stamped with a long number that ended with a dash and the symbols “7A.”
Most of the names on these pages were cryptic, like those earlier in the book, but one she recognized. A few thousand thaums of grace had been dispensed to Edmond Margot.
Kai read the ledger pages twice, but the name remained.
Howl, bound world.
She folded the parchment again, returned the pages to the notebook, and tied the book with its ribbon. She moved to the kitchen and found a glass, and whiskey, and ice cubes from the icebox. The ice clinked in the glass. The shadow of glass and ice lay long on the counter, sparked in its middle with focused light. Kai threw the ice into the sink, and turned on the water. The ice pitted, shrank, vanished. She turned off the water, poured herself a finger of whiskey, threw back the whiskey, washed the glass, and returned bottle and glass to their cabinets and the notebook to her purse. She stood alone in the living room and listened to the night. Wind, insects, a whooping bird she could not name.
Margot was a poor poet, no follower of the Grimwalds, no mainlander hoodlum. But if these records were correct, he had drawn power from the Grimwalds’ idol.
Any discrepancy must result either from negligence, or from malice.
Back in the database nightmare, Ms. Kevarian had accused Mara of manipulating records. Another baseless accusation, Kai had thought. More intimidation.
But here, in Kai’s purse, were vellum pages cut from the Order’s own ledgers. A handful of people could access the ledgers in person—and of that handful, Mara was the most likely culprit. Why would she hide the pages with Kai, then turn her in to Jace? Unless Mara hoped Jace might search Kai and find the papers. Unless she planned to frame Kai for the cover-up.
Mara was her friend. Mara had come to her this morning, to apologize.
To apologize for what?
Kai could go to Jace with this theory, about Mara trying to frame her—for what exactly? What was Mara trying to hide? Margot, perhaps, but what did Margot have to do with anything? He was an awkward poet with a three-month-old case of writer’s block.
And his words called out to Kai through Seven Alpha when she died.
Three months ago.
Idols, gods, and muses. Was it possible?
The living room seemed darker. Whiskey fuzzed her nerves, and shadows spun laughing in the corners of her living room.
Couldn’t tell Jace, not yet, not after their fight on the mountain. She could not go to him without proof. Kai needed to learn the whole story first. Then, act.
Now, though, she needed sleep. If she could find it.
Kai walked to the stairs, almost climbed them, turned back, and tucked her purse under the couch.
Claude lay in bed. He breathed heavily through his nose, choked every few breaths from the weight of his neck and his chest. He’d spun the bedclothes around him into a cocoon. She wondered what butterfly might emerge, and decided not to wait and find out.
She prodded his shoulder until he snorted and flailed at her with one arm, an easy dodge. “Behold the great watchman, forever on guard against danger.”
He blinked sleep from his eyes. When he looked at her, though, his eyes held something else, something he could not blink out. She wondered if he would call it love. “You’re not danger.”
“Time for you to leave.”
“Other guests?”
“Me, myself, and I. Scoot. I’ll have a hard enough time explaining tonight to myself come morning without you around.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry for a lot of things.”
He stretched on the bed, a rigid rod, eyes screwed shut. When he opened them again they just looked tired. He sat up, and stood, and after a minute’s padding around the bedroom found his pants, shoes, and shirt. “My socks are here somewhere.”
“I’ll mail them to you.”
“There’s no need for this.”
“No. But I want you gone anyway.”
He pulled on his shoes without the socks, slid the shirt over his head, and walked downstairs. Heavy footsteps vibrated up and down the steps, through the floor.
She followed, and watched him fumble with the latch. “Thank you,” she said when he got the door open.
“I hope that helped,” he said. “I hope. We need to stop doing this to ourselves.”
“Thank you,” she repeated. Her voice was harder and less kind.
He shut the door and left. She waited until he wouldn’t hear to lock the door behind him, then limped back up the stairs to her room. Shutter-slat shadows striped the ceiling above her bed. She must have slept, but she remembered only those shadows fading as morning neared.