Tara slipped into the boiler room of the Church of Kos and landed soundless in shadows. Enormous metal tanks, basins, and pipes swelled in angry twilight to fill the vast chamber. Gauges ticked up. Valves opened and closed. Hydraulic fluid surged through pipes. Steam hissed. Far away, a great gear wound and wound. She smelled copper and concrete and burned air, which did not bother her. She felt the presence of a god, which did.
“Abelard?”
She heard footsteps behind a huge compression tank and moved toward them. The red and the rhythm and the smell reminded her of walking through a giant heart, and the impression was not far from truth. These boilers and generators and coils translated Kos Everburning’s heat into the power on which his people relied. She understood the dynamics of their faith, but its machines were alien to her. Growing up in the country, a girl awed by tales of the urban horrors her grandparents fled to live as tillers of soil, she’d known no device more complex than farm equipment. When she ran away from home to seek those horrors herself, she found teachers who preferred sorcery to mechanism. Generators and pipes remained strange to her. In a way, she was trespassing now more than she had the year before, when she walked on the flesh of the dead god himself.
He hadn’t been dead, of course. Which was part of their current problem.
Rounding the tank, she saw more pipes, more valves, more pulleys and belts and shifting gears, oil-slick surfaces none of which had the decency to keep still and let her find the man she sought.
She peered beneath the physical world. All this metal was quite simple on the level of Craftwork: tricks to convert energy from one form or vector to another. To her gaze the machines pulsed in heartbeat time, and there, in a nook ten feet off the ground, nestled between a wall and a steam tank, was a man’s spinning soul.
“There you are.”
“Can anyone hide from you?” His voice echoed.
“Not like that,” she said. A ladder led up to his nook, concealed behind a bundle of thin pipes. The rungs were warm. “Kos could hide you if you asked; He couldn’t do the same for me, because of my glyphs.”
“No hide-and-go-seek for necromancers.”
“Oh, we play. We hide in bargains and loopholes and fine print.” Tara crested the ladder and pulled herself into the niche between tank and wall. Abelard sat within, legs curled against his chest, arms crossed on his knees. Beneath him lay a thin pallet, and across from him a small altar. Tara tested the floor for dust, and sat. “You sleep here?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “How do you sleep?”
“Well,” she replied. “On my back.”
“I mean, you see things with your eyes closed.”
“So do you. Light filters through the lids, creates patterns, that warm pink edge to darkness. You can’t turn off your skin, can’t close your ears, but you sleep fine.”
“Not these days,” he said.
“Why did you leave the meeting?”
“Did I miss much?”
Here in the half-lit dark, she felt like she could say anything. “Same story as ever. Don’t like the news? Question the bearer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It could be worse. Sometimes clients play dumb—they go to you for expertise, then argue with your conclusions. Back in Edgemont I hung out my shingle and dealt small-time magic, before Ms. K found me. You know what phrase I learned to hate more than any other? How bad can it be?” She leaned her head against the cool rock. Hair bunched and coiled against her skull. “You should have stayed. You could have helped them understand.”
“Cardinal Bede knows more about bond markets than anyone else in the church; Cardinal Nestor’s a wise Technician. I’m … me.”
“You kept your God alive when everyone gave him up for dead. You kept faith when there was no chance your faith would be rewarded. Those old men don’t know what that was like. What you did. What you almost lost.”
“I died, Tara. Let’s not put too fine a point on it.”
“I was getting to that,” she said. “Let me build up a rhythm.”
He tapped cigarette ash onto the tray atop his little altar. “The Council of Cardinals wanted to canonize me. There was a whisper campaign around the solstice.”
“Saint Abelard. You’d fit right in with the gaunt-faced fossils in the murals.”
“The Cardinals are afraid—they think I’ll undermine them by going directly to God. And I fear them, too. Cardinal Gustave was a pillar of strength, and he betrayed us all. Do you think he could have done that without help?”
The metal heart throbbed around them.
“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “conspiracies don’t tend to be the massive webs you’d imagine from mystery plays and adventure novels. More often you have a few people willing to do bad things to get results, and a few more who look the other way while everything stays quiet. That’s what happened to me back at the Hidden Schools. Professor Denovo had been binding wills, stealing minds, for years. But he was famous, and his lab produced groundbreaking results, so people looked away. They didn’t ask. They didn’t even whisper. And when my friend Daphne and I started to work with him, we were so excited we didn’t realize the danger until it was too late.” She waited, and listened to gears.
“What happened?” he asked after a while. His voice sounded flat and small.
“She broke. Wrung out from the inside. They sent her home comatose. The shock freed me. I destroyed Denovo’s lab in revenge, and got myself graduated with extreme prejudice, and Ms. K found me, and you know the rest.” She envied the priests their smoke, sometimes. Cigarettes gave you something to do with your heart: you concentrated everything you should be feeling to an ember and let it burn. “Nobody in your church had anything to gain by doubting the official story about Seril. That’s all Gustave needed. That’s why you’re important, why you should be at that table, asking questions Nestor and Bede are too hidebound to ask.”
He wasn’t looking at her.
“Dammit,” she said, “I’m trying to help,” and realized when he froze that she’d let too much anger out. “Sorry. It’s not like I have some immense fund of experience and wisdom to draw on. I lived on the road longer than I’ve been a professional Craftswoman. You think the Cardinals distrust you, gods, would you like to borrow my skin for a while? I’m a Craftswoman, and I’m young, and I’ve ironed the accent out of my voice but they still know I come from yokel country. I can do things they can’t, and that’s all I have over them: their crazy atavistic fear of people who can raise the dead and carve their names into the moon. So they listen to me. But I need help. I can’t do this alone.”
The words burst from her like rust water from a tap, rough and fast and without warning. They left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Abelard whispered something she couldn’t hear over the noise of the boiler room and her own heartbeat.
“What?”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t thought. This is hard for you, and you’re a long way from home.”
“That’s not what you said.”
He stared at the tip of his cigarette. Then he turned to her. The darkness made his face a mask, and she remembered those mosaic saints twisted by the tortures that earned their place in heaven. “I said, I don’t think I trust God anymore.”
She waited.
“I carried Him inside me for three days and didn’t notice, even when He worked miracles through me.”
“Kos hid himself. And he was only half-conscious, or less, the whole time. Mostly dead, and scared for the shreds of life that remained to him.”
“Did He have so little faith as to doubt He could turn to me in His need? Did He fear I would refuse Him? Gustave fell from pride—he did not hear the Lord’s will. Did Kos doubt my faith?”
“No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Ask him, then. He’s your god.”
“Would He tell me the truth?” Abelard raised his hand, and flames surrounded it. Tara flinched from the sudden light and heat.
“How long have you been able to do that?”
Abelard waved away the fire. “He’s given me gifts. I don’t know if the truth is one of them.”
“Trust him,” she said. “He’s not that bad, as gods go. And he needs your help. So do I.”
“When you came to Alt Coulumb, I had years of novitiate left, decades to grow in faith before anyone asked me to make big decisions.”
“And by all rights I should be a junior associate somewhere, making bank, not sleeping, paying down my student loans, following orders like a golem all day. That’s not how it worked out. I don’t mind, except when I look at my account balance. But we’re here together. We can do this.”
“Maybe.”
“Abelard, you did the right thing under pressure. You will again.”
“I wish I had your confidence.”
“I wish I had your student loans.”
“I don’t have student loans.”
“Right.”
Either he didn’t get the joke, or didn’t think it was funny. He sat beside her, limp. She wished she could reach inside his skin, snatch him from whatever mental cavern he’d chosen to hide within, and pull him free. “Look. We both stumbled into weird spaces in our careers. People need things from us we’re not sure we can give. Doubt’s healthy. But we can’t let it cripple us.”
“Why not?”
The question took her aback. She’d never considered letting herself fail before—the struggle’s difficulty always seemed proof of its value. “If we do, they win: the Cardinals who wonder why you’re at the table, or I am. The little gnome in your skull who says you shouldn’t be here, and when you try and fail it laughs and says, ‘See? You never should have tried at all.’”
“He’s in your head too?”
“Inside everyone’s, I think.”
“You don’t let on.”
“Mine’s loud enough I got deaf to the little bastard a while ago.” She looked down at her hands, and over at his, and before she could think better of it she laid her left on his right. Abelard was skin and gristle and bone. Not fit for roasting, Ma would have said. “The church will need a saint before this is over. It’ll need you. And I might, too.” Gods and demons, but that last felt hard to say—like peeling a hangnail into blood. What diagnosis would a headshrinker make of a woman who found admitting weakness less terrifying than necromantic war?
His hand stayed limp under hers. “I’ll try,” he said, and smiled weakly.
She hoped her disappointment didn’t show. “Good.”
She’d reached the ladder down before he spoke again. “We can win this, can’t we?”
“Sure,” she said, covering the lie.