When Izza was a block away from Margot’s house she felt Penitent footsteps vibrate through the paving stones. She swore and sprinted up the alley, dodging trash cans and broken glass until she reached Margot’s backyard wall and climbed it. Still the footsteps shivered in her legs and chest.
She pulled herself over the wall. Margot bent at his desk by the window, transfigured. Before, his focus made him seem to burn; now, his skin actually shone. Izza blinked, looked away, looked back, but it was true. He glowed green, as if his body were a wine bottle with fireflies trapped inside. Light flowed from his eyes and fingers. Flames licked the tip of his pen. He did not look up. Did not notice her, or the shaking of his apartment as the Penitent climbed the stairs.
Paint and quartz on the Penitent’s stone skin caught the streetlights; its eyes gleamed blue. The stairs shuddered under the statue’s feet, and Izza heard its prisoner groan: a new recruit, adjusting still to pain. Margot wrote on, oblivious. The statue reached the top of the stairs.
They’d sent only one. Strange: Penitents rarely made arrests alone, since they couldn’t speak or think fast. Each thought worked first from the stone shell into the human prisoner for processing, and back. They were blunt tools, lacking subtlety or social grace.
But even blunt tools had their uses.
The Penitent raised one hand, ponderous and slow. Two massive fingers and one thumb balled into a fist and it struck the door, a blur of stone faster than Izza’s eye could follow. The door snapped down the middle; the hinged half swung in and slammed against the wall, while the latched half tore free of the jamb and fell.
That, Margot noticed. He stood, turned. Green fire trailed him, and seeped out his eyes and mouth. Izza could not hear what the poet said, but she did not think he spoke a human tongue. Human or divine, his words did not faze the Penitent; it stepped forward, splintering the doorjamb. Izza ached for Margot to run, to escape through his barred window, over the balcony into the night. He could not outrun the Penitent, but at least he might have given it a chase.
He stood before the statue, rigid, proud.
Izza knew what came next.
The Penitent’s hand caught Margot around the throat. It lifted him off the ground with so little effort he seemed made of paper.
Margot stabbed the Penitent’s arm with his pen; he kicked, and slapped, and clawed.
Izza went cold. Penitents did not kill. They enforced bad laws. They caught stupid or unlucky dock rats. But Margot was dying. The flames that suffused him flickered and dimmed.
The priest had sent not cops, but an assassin.
“Leave,” a thin high voice whispered in her ear, Smiling Jack’s voice, all metal and wheels. “That’s all you can do. Margot built his own coffin. Let him lie.”
Margot stabbed the Penitent’s sapphire eye with his pen. The statue did not flinch. The prisoner within wailed.
Izza could not help Margot. But perhaps she could save a piece of him.
She leapt from wall to tree to balcony, ducked beneath the window to stay out of sight. The apartment floor creaked with the Penitent’s weight. Izza was close enough now to hear the poet gasp for breath, the faint percussion of his fists against stone.
With the Penitent’s attention fixed on Margot, Izza might be able to snatch his notebook. The window was open. Her arm could fit through the bars easy. Grab the book, and run.
Now.
She did not move.
Dammit. Go. This is how they get you. They march, and they terrify, and when they come for you in the end you’re so scared you let them do what they want. Like Dad, and Mom, like the priestess with her throat slit.
Margot tried again to scream, and failed.
Izza stood, snatched the notebook, and stuffed it into her pocket. Heat surrounded her: the twin spotlights of the Penitent’s stare. Margot twitched one last time, and hung still. The Penitent let him fall, and then Izza was alone, pinned by light from the murderer’s eyes.
She ran.
The first step was the hardest. She dove over the railing, fell, and rolled to her feet on the grass. Up again, running for the alley wall. Behind her, three heavy footsteps and an eruption of plaster and brick: the Penitent burst through Margot’s wall, scattering dust and broken glass. It crashed after her into the yard, tearing up great gashes of turf. She vaulted into the alley and ran. She was halfway down the block when she heard a cliff face collapse as the Penitent landed where she had been a minute before. Searchlights swept the darkness, and she felt that telltale heat.
Izza didn’t bother knocking over trash cans in her wake. The Penitent would ignore them. She could take to the rooftops, but the Penitent had strong eyes. It would follow, and she couldn’t hide forever.
Stone footfalls accelerated into an avalanche, and behind that avalanche she heard the prisoner’s cries as gears and needles and knives goaded her on. Izza squeezed down a narrow gap between two walled gardens, and heard the Penitent turn left onto a larger, parallel street to keep pace.
Out onto Victoria, two blocks from shore, two steps ahead of the Penitent. Options, hastily assembled, more hastily compared—across the road and down to the docks, a maze of narrow passages and turnings before she reached water and safety. To make it, though, she had to beat the Penitent in an open sprint. And if the statue tracked her to the water it could just follow her from shore.
Not the docks, then, she decided ten steps after she sprinted south into East Claw. Two blocks down, up onto a shop awning, from there three windows’ climb to a rooftop, then south again. Searchlight eyes swept the night and caught a flash of heel, an arm, a glint of eye turned back to check how much distance she’d lost. Once, as she was leaping across a gap between buildings, the light flooded Izza, so dense it seemed to lift her up before she arced out into shadow.
Her legs throbbed, her heart pounded. She could not run much farther. Fortunately, she did not have much farther to run.
She cut east, away from shore, up the slope. The Penitent followed.
She could have found her way blind, just by following the heat: cook fires and bonfires and torches and drunken bodies mashed together. And after the heat, the stink symphony of drug smoke, spilled liquor, vomit, barbecue, incense, blood sacrifice, and burnt offerings. Noise too, a wash of sitar and swing and contrabass chant, theological argument, hawk and sell, sin and expiation, lust resisted and satisfied. She slid down a drainpipe into the red-lit mess of the Godsdistrikt.
She landed behind a priest selling indulgences out of his open black coat, and snatched a prayer book from his hand. “Thief!” The priest lunged for her, missed, and tumbled instead into the back of a hefty henna-inked cultist from the Gleb, who turned smooth as sunrise and punched the priest in the face.
The fight spread, and Izza slid away through the crowd, skipping, dodging. She risked another glance back, and saw her Penitent pursuer wade into the Godsdistrikt, brawl. The crowd broke like waves against its chest.
A woman by an incense salesman’s cart reached for her purse and found it gone, then turned to see it in the grip of a hapless young monk, who had blindly taken the bundle a young girl thrust into his arms as she ran past. Izza tripped, and poked, and ducked away. She shouted discord into a missionary chorus. The crowd rose from simmer to boil. Fights broke out and merged into a riot like streams merging into a river. At last, she ducked into an abandoned confession booth, hugged her knees to her chest, and listened until she heard the drum swell of more Penitents approaching.
Six pairs of spotlights opened at once on the Godsdistrikt crowd, and Izza, hiding, waited, and hoped.
Penitents did not kill. This one had. Which presented two options: either all Penitents killed, or this was an exception. If all killed, they went to great lengths to keep people from learning of their murders. Preserve the people until Makawe and his sisters return, that was their mandate, and Izza had never heard of them breaking it. Which meant this statue was murderer more than Penitent—and like all murderers, it had to hide its deeds.
Hence, the riot. The more Penitents, the greater her danger of being taken, but the less her danger of being killed.
She waited in the confessional as Penitents cordoned off the street. The smell of cedar boards edged out the incense, sweat, and musk outside. A great shadow passed in front of the confessional door. She tried not to move, but could not stop shaking.
The riot died. The Penitents moved on. Izza slipped from the confessional, crossed the recovering roil of the Godsdistrikt, and from there, unobserved, walked north and west into the Palm.
The moon smiled down and she smiled back. She walked too fast, and breathed too deep. The whole world was velvet padded. She whistled to herself, an old tune from across the sea, a song she remembered a mother singing once. She wasn’t sure if the mother had been hers. There were so many mothers.
The whistle shrilled in her ears. Some god sharpened the streetlights and the stars. The moon’s smile turned wicked. She hid behind a trash bin, gripped her ankles, and thought of Edmond Margot dead.
A broken, tired man, far from home, a deserter of his people, deserted in turn by gods and muses. And anyway, others had died before this. Why weep for him?
She did anyway.
This surprised her.
A while later she emerged onto the street, and moved north and west with dreadful purpose.
She ignored crowds, drunks, and flower-draped tourists. Three skeletons in tie-dyed shirts stumbled past, drinking from silver flasks and singing God Wars songs. Soon the streets narrowed, and yards unfurled from the houses.
She found the priest’s house dark, shuttered. She walked the block twice, casing it from every angle. Once in a while she heard a cry from within, a yowl like a cat would make, or else a person with bad dreams.
Nick had been right: the house was warded. Cross the fence and Izza would wake the alarm. But the house next door was less secure, and in its yard grew those trees Izza didn’t know what to call, the ones like a buried chicken’s upturned claw. A limb of one such tree overhung the fence. The ward was younger than the tree, and rather than cutting back the tree, the contractor must have bent the ward around it.
Izza climbed the claw tree and crept out along the thinning branch. Crossing the ward burned like a bath in cold iron. Spiderwebs of light and lightning spread around her. She pressed herself against the bark, always at least one patch of skin touching. She was one with the tree. The pain built, sharpened, vanished.
She was through.
Faint ghostlight flickered from the priest’s second-floor window: a nightlight, or a bedside lamp left on. Between that and the occasional moans, she might have suspected the priest was entertaining callers. But she heard only one voice, and the wind, and a creak from the branch beneath her.
Now to find a way down, Izza thought before the branch broke.
She landed hard on the lawn. False stars spun above, in front of the real ones. The limb of the neighbor’s tree now ended in a jagged line above the fence. So much for her clean exit. Fine. Revenge was best served hot, whatever Camlaander playwrights said.
The priest bolted and chained her front door, but used a pushover of a key lock for the back: a rake of pick over tumblers and it gave. Izza locked the door behind her, and stood in the empty kitchen, breathing.
This was the part she’d not thought through.
She’d never killed before, not while meaning to anyway. She hadn’t brought a weapon, but the house offered all the arsenal she needed. Pokers, boards, pillows for suffocation, wrenches and pliers in a toolkit under the sink. This had all seemed so much simpler on the walk over.
Of course it’s simple.
Well, yes, but. When she held the pliers and imagined grabbing fingers and applying torque, she thought of her own fingers breaking. Same with the wrench. And couldn’t people breathe through pillows?
She settled for a knife from the block on the granite counter. The big carvers felt unwieldy, so she chose a paring blade instead: sharp tip, sharp edge, balanced. She only needed a slice or two.
She realized she’d been haggling with herself over knives for ten minutes. The priest killed Margot, or handed him over to those who did. Justice wasn’t some force in the air. Justice was something you do.
She thought about Cat. The cop in her would not approve. But she wasn’t a cop anymore. And anyway: We’re the Lady’s children, and there’s nobody to help us but us.
She hadn’t meant that when she said it. Thought she was just convincing Nick to help her with a few clever words. But she heard her own voice in her ears now.
So.
She climbed the stairs. The priest’s bedroom door was open, her bedside lamp on. The woman lay sleeping, twisted in cotton sheets, breathing rapidly through nose and mouth. Izza slipped out of her shoes and approached, soundless, over white carpet. The knife weighed no more and no less than any other piece of steel about so long and about so thin.
How did you kill someone in bed? Izza hadn’t done this sort of thing before.
She’d fought. She’d lived through war. She could figure it out.
People get up, when hurt. They fight back. Even weak folk don’t die easy.
Stabbing, then, might not work. Anyway, Izza couldn’t stab her from the bedside: the woman’s bed was the size of a small stage, built for two, and she lay in its center. From the edge, Izza lacked enough leverage to drive the blade in deep. No doubt proper killers knew how to deal with this.
She climbed onto the bed.
The mattress was soft as wet sand. The woman shifted, but did not wake.
Izza climbed nearer on knees and one hand. She straddled the woman, pinned her arms to her sides, and raised the knife.
The skull was hard. Breastbone too. The throat, though, the throat was soft.
Stab, or slice?
Her blade wavered.
She remembered Sophie’s screams when the Penitents caught her. Remembered the Blue Lady’s dying breath. Remembered her mother, and her father, and the fire. The priestess at home, in the village square, and the sound of the knife across her throat. She’d never wondered how it felt to hold that knife, and now she would know. Dying, Margot had sounded like a draining bath.
One death equals one death.
Did it?
Was this justice?
What had she seen? The woman talked to Margot. Talked to the Watch after. A Penitent came, and killed. A chain of events. She imagined Cat asking her: Did you see this woman kill? Do you know she was at fault? Justice is like math: anyone can think she knows the answer, but not every answer is right.
She’d gone this far to make sure of the death. Knife at the woman’s throat, all her weight ready to press down. Why not make sure of its justice, too?
The woman trembled on the edge of waking.
Izza touched the knife to her skin.
Two black eyes snapped open. Swollen pupils sought and found Izza’s face.
“Tell me,” Izza said, “why I shouldn’t kill you now.”