Five hours of archival research later, Tara hung in the astral void above a living god.
Kos Everburning, like all his divine ilk, did not quite exist in the usual, physical sense of the term—but human minds weren’t good at comprehending n-dimensional noosphere entities, half-network and half-standing wave, propagating in all directions at once through time. They could, of course. Tara had worked out the theory from first principles back at the Hidden Schools, the derivation of divine anatomy from raw data being a particular favorite of problem-set-dependent TAs. But nightmare matrices did the math for you these days, if you didn’t mind shifting some particularly difficult problems to universes where they happened to be easier. Then, back-convert the mess to three spatial dimensions with a fixed arrow of time—and, since everyone who’s going to deal with this particular simulation will be a Craftswoman well versed in anatomy and forensics, add a filter to present the data analogically in terms of corpses. Just don’t go too far, since a simulation this detailed is a new cave chamber inside the old philosopher’s cavern, and if you’re not careful you might tunnel into another chamber already occupied by capital-letter Things.
Even convenient fictions can delve too greedily and too deep.
Tara’s head ached, and she was in desperate need of a second lemonade. She’d started after lunch with a deep dive into the Court of Craft across town, where carts guided by rat brain brought her volume after volume of notes and ledgers. Claims there matched her notes from last night’s survey, but she needed more, and so returned to the sanctum to pace above Kos Everburning’s body.
The diagnostic Craft she used had been built to display Alt Coulumb’s God in cross section through time: a three-dimensional flip-book showing a naked continent-size man whose limbs hung limp in a dark sea, whose face shone too bright to look upon. It was meant to deal with well-structured archive data.
It wasn’t made to model the living operations of the God.
She watched him—watched Him, the capital letter inserting itself slyly despite her insistence that adulation of a client was counterproductive.
She heard Him breathe.
His heart beat and blood surged in His veins. She’d thought to walk on His skin, to take inventory from up close as she had when He was dead, but the closer she drew the harder it was to keep her heart from matching time with His, to keep His heat from suffusing her.
Even at this distance—a mile up in notional space, far enough away that she could see His edges—Kos distorted the surrounding world. So much so, in fact, that she almost didn’t notice when the simulation tore.
A ripping sound filled the synthetic dark as great wounds gaped in the fabric of unreality.
Multifaceted eyes stared through diamond slits, and spider legs clawed the void. She called on her Craft, forged chains of light to stitch the cut universe back together.
When she was relatively certain she wouldn’t die in the next few minutes, she searched for the problem’s source.
She didn’t have to search long. She recognized the scream.
Abelard had taken shape in the nightmare half a mile beneath her, spinning over the Body, arms pinwheeling in a futile attempt to steady himself. The glowing tip of his cigarette trailed circles around him.
She stopped his spin with a thought and a slight tweak of the dream’s parameters.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.
“How you get used to that, I will never know.” He brushed stray hairs back into his tonsure, and straightened his skewed robes. “Um. I seem to be upside down.”
“Gravity’s relative to your body here. Your modesty’s safe. You really should go.” She righted him with a twist of her forefinger.
“I hoped we could talk,” he said when he recovered.
The stitches with which she sealed in the sky surged as the Things beyond adjusted their attack. “This isn’t a good time.”
“What are you doing, anyway?”
“Looking for evidence,” she said. A stitch gave way, and a tendril of shadow wormed into the dark. She shredded it. “I wanted to see how Kos owns the sky.”
He pointed up. “What are those?”
“Demons. Don’t worry about it.”
“Sounds like I should.”
Vines of light wound about the wound, and sharp darkness tore her bindings from within. “I’m running a lot of poorly structured data through the system. Too much of that and the nightmare snarls. Demons are like us, really—but their worlds work on different logic than ours. Points of divergence let them cross over without a summoning contract, without limits. You have to work hard to make one of those in physical space, but analytical engines aren’t continuous. If I break the simulation, they can get in.”
“That sounds bad.”
She swooped toward the body, and brought him with her. “Annoying, mostly, here in n-space. If they breach, we pull out, shut the simulation down, start again. So long as we don’t bring them back to the supposedly real world with us.”
“Is that possible?”
“I’m warded, so they can’t crawl into me—not without a fight. You, though—”
There came a massive pulse against the curvature of nothing. Her stitches distended and the wound opened like a mouth, only instead of teeth it was full of eyes.
“Hold on a second,” she said. “I’m almost done.” Great tubes sprouted from the god’s body, vessels bearing His power, His blood out into the world. The city formed around them, like the impression of a body beneath a rubber sheet.
“Tara,” Abelard said, afraid. Great hands tore the folded newspaper of the dream down the center. Logical consistency stretched like taffy. She hurt, and ignored the pain. Kos’s power blushed through the ghost-glass city’s sky. Drawing closer, she saw the blush was in fact a candyfloss haze of hooks wrestling with a Great Unseen.
Demon thorns pulled the edges of the world-wound wide. Beyond spread a noonday kaleidoscope of blunt angles and teeth, a story in which she had no part, which would consume her and her world alike. Four bridge-wide stitches remained, and fractal blights wilted their edges. One gave a sound like a bass string breaking. Three left. Two, soon.
“Tara!”
But that Great Unseen, the mystery against which Kos struggled to own the sky—she recognized it. Drew close to the hooks. Squinted. And saw a series of numbers in the tangle of each hook, and glyphs: Kos Everburning v. Red King Consolidated.
The last stitch broke with a bone-shivering A-sharp. The whole sky split at once. Arms that were tongues that were spears flew down.
But Tara and Abelard were not there anymore, and then the world was not, either.
Orbs of Tara throbbed flutterstep beneath wingskin as if rocked in pleasure. Eyes, she opened them. Air, she breathed it, and the dust it held. Ears, she heard with them the silence of a large paper-filled room, and the panting of a terrified monk. Skin, with curves of the stuff she felt the grain of a stone floor under her. She should install a bed in the archives someday.
Oh, and she had blood too, and a mind, and emotions not yet fully understood, one of them a distant cousin of compassion. Abelard. She sat up. Mountains of leather-bound codices and racks of scrolls swayed like willows blown in the storm of her unsettled mind. He sat cross-legged across the silver bowl at the archive center from her. He held his cut finger in one hand. The singed coppery smell of burned blood rose from within the bowl.
She stood, though her legs seemed unfamiliar devices. Leaning against her thighs, she orbited the bowl. “You okay?”
He stopped praying. “I thought it would be easier when He was alive.”
She pulled him to his feet, though her own balance wasn’t perfect and she almost toppled them both into a case of scrolls. “He’s more complicated alive than dead.” Back in this world they agreed was real, she could ditch the capital letter. “You cut your finger yourself?”
“Pierced it. With a needle.”
She winced.
“Don’t worry, I burned the needle first.”
“Use alcohol next time.”
“Are those things—”
“The demons?”
“Will they be there the next time you go into the dream?”
“No. I shut it down completely. That notional world doesn’t exist until I need it again. Why did you come looking for me?”
“I need your advice,” he said. “About God.”
As they walked through paper mountains toward the lift, he told her about his conversation with the Cardinal. She pressed the button and waited as motors surged behind closed doors. “You want to know if I think you should do it.”
“The Cardinal’s right. Lord Kos might listen to me. But isn’t it hubris to give a God advice?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” she said, “when it comes to avoiding hubris. My teachers thought gods were a quaint affectation.” She remembered the goddess in her room, wearing her face. Remembered, too, Daphne’s flightless bird. “If the outside world thinks Kos will come to Seril’s rescue whenever she’s in trouble, that’s bad for both of them. Debts falling due, margin calls, flights of wicked angels in the skies, spiritual armageddon.”
“So you think I should do it.”
“From a Craftswoman’s perspective, sure. But no Craftswoman would be caught dead kneeling to a god.” It sickens me, Daphne’d said. Was Tara a Craftswoman anymore? She had her glyphs. She had her power. What else was there? “You have to weigh the options yourself. But the Cardinal’s right about the danger.”
The lift arrived, bearing a trio of maintenance monks headed down. One of them, a large woman, worked the beads of her rosary until the lift reached the twelfth floor, and the trio left together. Abelard did not speak until they reached ground level and stepped into an empty hall. “I know you’ll do the right thing,” Tara said, “whatever that is. You might as well stop fretting. You’re not binding yourself to a contract, or incurring debt.”
“You’re more confident than I am.”
“That’s what friends are for.”
“Thank you for last night,” he said, “for the encouragement. I was selfish when we talked. I didn’t realize how hard this is for you.”
There was a cold breeze in the narrow hall. “What do you mean?”
“You’re out here on your own. I have the church, and Kos. Cat has her force. You should have a firm, Craftswomen and Craftsmen at your side. But you don’t. It’s just you, and you’re not even from here. You’re so good at what you do that it’s easy for me to think you don’t need anything or anyone. But that’s not true. Whatever you were doing in the library, it was dangerous.”
“Not for me.”
“What if your wards didn’t work as well as you hoped? What if the demons were stronger?”
“It was a calculated risk. My calculations skewed when you dropped in, that’s all.”
“I’m not questioning your abilities.”
“That sure sounds like what you’re doing.” A door opened and closed. Footsteps trickled over the nave’s stone floor. A men’s choir sang. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once. Tara couldn’t make out the words, but the harmony was close and smooth. She made herself smile. “I can do this,” she said. “I just need to be smarter than everyone else. So what else is new?”
“Cat and I are here for you. You’ve spent the last year working and sleeping, outside of one poker night that didn’t go well. If you wanted to, you know, have a beer, or anything—well, I’m here. That’s all I wanted to say.”
Her watch chimed. “I have to go.”
“See you later,” he told her retreating back.