The address Mako gave led Kai to a quiet, poor part of the island: rows of tree-divided houses, stucco with highlights in pastel. A Glebland beggar girl crouched at the street corner; she watched Kai with shocking black eyes, and held out an empty hand. Kai dropped a coin into the girl’s palm, invested with a trace of soul, and walked on feeling lighter.
That lightness faded as she climbed the stairs to Margot’s apartment. Blank windows watched her from across the street. The sky hung close and blue above, as if only palm fronds supported it, and those might any moment give way and let the heavens crash. When she reached the second floor, the railing’s dust had stained her fingers black.
Knocking on the purple door yielded no answer. She tried again, louder. Still nothing. Wiped a patch of the door clean of storm scum and pressed her ear to the wood: heavy, slow breathing inside. Margot, asleep.
She should leave. Go to work, and try to corner him later at the Rest, if not tonight then tomorrow or the day after. But the Rest was a public place, and she couldn’t ask him the questions she wanted in public. Might not even be able to ask them in the privacy of his room. Besides, she was fed up with waiting. She struck the door, leaving dirty handprints on the bright purple paint. “M. Margot? Are you in there?”
A groan, a grunt, a cry, a scream. Thrashing amid sheets. The sound of flesh and bone striking a wall. Cursing in Iskari. Kai’s Iskari was rusty, but she thought most of the things he was saying weren’t physically possible, at least for unmodified humans. “M. Margot?”
“Go away.”
“Mako sent me.” A little lie, but Mako would forgive her. “My name is Kai Pohala. We met a few weeks back, at the Rest.”
The door shuddered, and opened a few inches, jerked short by the chain. Margot stared through the gap, one green eye bloodshot, swollen lips pursed. He had the crushed-flower look of a man hung over. “I remember you,” he said. “Go away.”
“I want to talk about your poems.”
“You accused me of stealing.”
“I think you’re in danger.”
He slammed the door. She blinked from the wind of its closing.
“Margot.” She pounded on the door again. “I won’t leave.”
He moaned from the other side. “Enjoy the balcony. Gets hot in the sun. Be careful about the flies. Their bites itch.”
“You treat all your fans this way?”
“You’re not a fan. You look like a Craftswoman.” Scorn on that last word. Typical poet. Typical Iskari.
“Howl, bound world,” she said. “Margot, I know where you got those words.”
“Go away.”
“You’re in danger,” she said. “You’re caught in something bigger than you know.”
“Leave me alone.”
“I know why you’ve stopped dreaming.”
The door jerked open again, and again the eye appeared.
“I just want to talk.”
“About poems.”
“About poems,” she said, and nodded.
He closed the door, softer. The chain rattled, and this time the door swung all the way open. “Come inside.”
* * *
Margot’s small room was bedchamber, study, and kitchenette combined. His desk, bed, sea chest, and chair occupied most of the floor space, and clutter consumed the rest. Stacked books and newspapers supported mugs of tepid tea. Clothes wadded and piled on the cheap carpet. His few possessions were spread in a thin film over every surface save the desk, which was bare but for leather mat, inkpot, and pen stand in which two pens stood straight. “Apologies for the mess,” Margot said. The man himself looked even sloppier than his room. A red-burned scalp showed through failing mousy hair. He wore a billowing white shirt and green velvet slacks, poorly mended and shiny with age. Toes jutted through the straps of his leather sandals; the hem of his open bathrobe swept against his calves. He swayed, he paced, he turned, never quite looking at her. “I rarely host visitors.”
“More than usual, recently?”
“No.” Too fast for an honest answer, but she didn’t want to press him on this, when she had to press him on so much else.
“M. Margot,” Kai said. “You were wrong, before, when you called me a Craftswoman. I am a priest.”
“Of what god?”
“Of no gods,” she said. “I’m a priest of Kavekana’ai.”
“I know your Order,” Margot said, “by reputation. Purveyors of false faith and strained promises.”
“We’re not so bad once you get to know us,” she said. “I think you’re in trouble. I think I can help you. But I need to hear your story first.”
Margot turned and fixed her with a bright, hungry stare. Again, she remembered her mother’s advice about drowning men. He began to pace again, hands stuffed in the pockets of his ratty robe. He didn’t try to kick her out, though. A good sign.
“You’re blocked,” she said. “You haven’t written new poems in months.”
He nodded.
“Why?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“The truth.”
He chuckled, meanly. “Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie.” With his toe he nudged a crumpled shirt on the dirty carpet. “This room says all you need to know.”
“You can think of ten ways to describe a glass of water. I can think of ten paths a man could take to this room. Which one’s yours?”
He lifted the shirt and tossed it in a hamper. The circle of revealed white carpet glared up at them like a glaucomic eye. “My path’s the one walked by a man who lived a good life in southern Iskar, a minor functionary in the troubadour’s guild, who wrote poems in his free hours and shuffled paper the rest of the day. Wine with friends on Sixthday and snatches of verse in university magazines, that was me. Couplets written in the odd hours between sleep and waking. I had a wife, until she ran off with a marine from Telomere. I took leave of my office and came to Kavekana, to live in solitude and write. I meant to go home a few weeks later. I would have gone home.”
“But you found something.”
“Words took fire in my brain.”
“More than words.”
He nodded. “My Lady. My queen. My muse.”
Kai felt as if a trickle of cold water had been poured down the inside of her spine. “Tell me.”
“In the first few weeks after I came here, I felt something scrape at the glass of my mind. Panic, I thought. You know that I was.” He swallowed. “Attacked. Mako may have told you.”
“Yes.”
“That night, when they beat me, the panic broke through the glass. Something crawled out of the hole it made. Blades tore from my lips. I do not mean that as metaphor. Glass and steel spines, a creature of solid light. That night, when I slept, I dreamed of green fire. A … a green man with a skull’s face and claws like a bear, only not. We embraced. It is strange to say. And the words came.”
“Not so strange.” A man. Interesting. “You said this muse was a lady.”
“The man was first. The Lady, later.”
“And after the attack, your work took off.”
“Yes.” He nodded. “The work had never seized me that way before. A whole-body trembling, a terror. I lived that scream. And then one night it stopped.”
“Stopped,” she echoed. “About eight weeks ago.”
“Yes.” He stopped, facing the off-white wall. “How did you know?”
She slipped the folded vellum out of the notebook, and held it between them, though he was not looking. “Three months back, on the twenty-ninth, an idol died up the mountain. I tried to save her, but I failed. When she died, I heard a line from your poem. Howl, bound world. Just that. Our idols don’t speak; they have no minds. Those words have haunted me ever since. That’s why I came up to you that night. That’s why I asked you for your sources.”
“Could have come from anywhere. That poem’s popular. They ran it in the Journal.”
“That’s what I thought, at first. I convinced myself I imagined the whole thing. But we keep track of our idols. Every gift they grant, every bit of grace they bestow, is written in our library. I found this list of gifts issued by the dead idol. Your name appears again and again. But you’re no pilgrim of ours.”
He turned from the wall to face her. “I don’t understand.”
Somehow she found the strength not to look away. “What do you know about idols, M. Margot?”
He swallowed. “They are … repositories. Holes where one hides soulstuff from gods and kings.”
“I think when you were attacked, you needed help so bad you somehow broke through into the pool, into the space where our idols live. I don’t know how, yet, but you took soulstuff from them. You prayed, and your Lady answered those prayers. Your poems caught fire, and some of them bled back along the bond into your Lady, and lingered inside her. Until one day she died. Now you have a reputation you can’t sustain without more poems. Meanwhile, our vaults have been pilfered, our pilgrims robbed. On paper, it looks like you were stealing from the Grimwalds, a family of, let’s call them legitimate businessmen. People who are very jealous of their property.”
“I didn’t steal anything. I wrote.”
“Great writers steal,” she said. “Didn’t someone say that once?”
“What happened was a consummation.”
“Maybe. Look. I bet the priests up the mountain have been hunting everywhere for Edmond Margot—but they’re looking for a thief, not a poet. You’re lucky my friends aren’t literary types.” He didn’t seem to get the joke. Kai continued. “It gets worse. The Grimwalds have a Craftswoman working for them, and she’s already suspicious. She’s combing through our records, and when she learns the truth, she’ll come after us both—the Order in public, and you, too, if your luck holds.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“She’ll come for you in private. I doubt her clients would use anything flashy. Knives are cheap. Efficient. Hard to trace.”
“I didn’t mean to take anything.”
“Intent doesn’t matter, it’s the fact of the taking. What you did should be impossible. If others can follow in your footsteps—the pool holds tens of millions of souls. If you knew what you had tapped into, you could be the richest man in the world today. Hells, I doubt the Grimwalds will even kill you. Their smartest play is to take you apart and learn how you wormed past our defenses.”
“Let me see that.” He reached for the vellum, but she pulled it away.
“No.”
“You expect me to believe you on the strength of evidence you refuse to show me?”
“I’m not supposed to have these papers. If you see what’s here, you could end up in even more trouble.”
“If you’re not supposed to have them—”
“That’s not important. If you come with me, I can protect you.” She’d think of something, anyway.
“Protect me,” he repeated. “You don’t want to return my muses. You want to stop me from finding them again. Your people will keep me in a cell. Deny me pen and ink until you can plug up the wellspring of my art.”
“You’ll be safe.”
He shook his head. “You offer me a cage, and say this cage will protect me from wolves I have never seen.”
“You don’t see these wolves. That’s my point. You’re walking down the street and all of a sudden you die. These people can destroy you.”
“Manuscripts don’t burn,” he said.
“Maybe not. But poets do.”
He looked at her as if she stood a great distance away, rather than a few feet. A ridiculous man, nothing about him noble or grand. Fool who traveled a foolish distance for foolish reasons, hungry for a foolish death. She wanted to help him climb from the hole he’d dug himself. She wished she didn’t feel as if she were the one in the hole, and he the one outside. “Will you force me to accept your help?”
“You mean am I going to wrestle you to the ground and drag you up the mountain if you say no?”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes, and breathed, and reviewed the extent of her injuries, of her weakness. “No. I’ll get someone to do that for me.”
“Someone who will understand where you found the slip of paper you aren’t supposed to have?”
She crossed her arms.
It took a long time for him to speak his next words. “I will not go with you.”
“You don’t believe me.”
“I believe you,” he said. “As much as I’ve ever believed anything.”
“This is for your own good.”
“I came to Kavekana for my own good,” he said. “I thought I knew what I needed, and I had to go to the edge of death to learn that I knew nothing. If you’re right, if my need is the gateway into your idols’ world, perhaps I’ll meet my Lady again when your gremlins come to kill me.”
“Your Lady’s dead, Margot. She never lived, not the way you think. You invented a muse, and made believe it loved you.”
He pulled his hands from his pockets, and set them on his hips. Gallantry, Kai thought, always looked ridiculous. “Her love was not a lie. She spoke to me. And I will wait for her. Call your people, if you can. Imprison me. But I will not walk into your cage of my own will. Now.” He pointed to the door. “Please, leave.”
She slammed the door behind herself so hard the trees by the balcony shook. Her chest hurt.
She waited, hoping he’d open the door and apologize, say he’d seen reason and would follow where she led. When he didn’t, she retreated down the steps and into the city. She was already late for work.