Abelard, fire-flooded, spread through his city, burning in ecstasy of communion, remembered his confession to Tara in the temple boiler room. And Kos remembered it too, because Abelard was part of him as he was part of Abelard.
Yet Abelard was still the man he had been a year before, tumbling into darkness, dead, only to learn the darkness into which he fell was burning. That fire buoyed him up. The Lord caught him, time and again, as Abelard caught Him in turn. They fought for each other.
Cardinal Gustave burned in the Temple of Justice, full of rage and futile hope, hair blown in smoke and hurricane winds. Cardinal Gustave fell. Cardinal Gustave, Abelard’s anchor, who held church and faithful in his iron conviction’s grip—dead, after betraying his Lord for a reason he thought was right.
Peel off the old man’s face like a player’s mask, and Abelard saw himself.
I must not become Gustave. I must not believe that I know best how God should be in the world. But Gustave was a wise man, and good. If he could turn from You unsuspecting, what might I do?
What was Gustave’s fault? Pride, in thinking himself wiser than his fellow priests, wiser even, at the end, than God? But pride stemmed from a deeper source. If pride was flame, what was fuel?
Fear. Fear Kos would reject him. Fear his iron would rust from within.
In the end, it had.
Where does that leave us? he prayed. What can we do in the face of fear?
What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust.
Were the words his, or did they belong to Kos? What was he, anyway, but a piece of this burning web spun from a city’s dreams? He joined to Him by faith, by the burning of incense, by prayer, by kneeling before a fire. Where did Abelard end and God begin? They grew from each other.
And in that unity he felt Seril, diminished though present—a chill to match His flame, an equal and an adversary, haughty and swift, fluid and eternal. Kos had burned alone for fifty years, with only cables of contract and debt to bind Him to other gods, bereft of gift and humor, of all that matters in life save duty. The city had been His alone.
She was back, but She was weak.
But, Abelard reminded him, Her return had not broken His obligations—to church and city as well as love.
We need to work together, Abelard prayed. And, though the fear was not gone: I trust You.
The web echoed with that word.
Then the Fire said: You may have to prove it sooner than you think.
* * *
Cat was still deciding what to say when someone knocked on the door to the refrigerated hold of the Demon’s Dream.
The knock came from within.
She looked from Raz, to the contract he held, and back to the compartment.
“You told me to sign the thing,” Raz said.
“I didn’t think it would work that quickly.”
The knock repeated, a hammer-blow strike.
“Hold on.” She raised her voice. “We’re coming.” She pressed the amulet to the door, turned, and pulled. The door swung open and a chill wind gusted out.
A woman stood behind the door. Frost painted her skin. She lurched across the threshold. Her knees buckled, and Cat caught her by the arm, felt her flesh still stiff and cold. Kos and Seril. There should be someone here to deal with this. Specialists. Doctors. They should have thought. “You’re safe,” she said. The woman turned to her from the neck up. “I’m Cat. You’re in Alt Coulumb.” The woman did not respond. What language did these folks speak? Others approached the door, arms slack at their sides, staring.
Raz tore free a tarp that had been lashed over a loose crate and folded it around the woman, rubbing her shoulders through the cloth. He spoke to her, first in a smooth language heavy with l’s and aspiration, and when that produced no response, in a more halting, guttural tongue, then a third with singsong tones Cat could barely classify. No answer.
He tried another seven languages then swore. “That’s all I’ve got.” The hold was filling slowly with woken, silent people. Raz turned from the woman to the others. “Anyone here speak Kathic? Talbeg?”
The woman quaked in Cat’s arms. Not shivering, or at least not shivers as Cat knew them. Heaving spasms. A seizure?
Cat tried to lay her on her back, but the woman shook her off. Then she looked at and through Cat, and opened her mouth too wide. Her teeth were long and narrow.
“Cat?”
The others from the hold stood before Raz: tall and short, muscled and fat and lean, male and female and those not obviously either. Their mouths hung open.
Cat looked back to the woman she held. Sticky darkness seeped between her teeth, and sharp glass gleamed within, swelling as if it approached down a tunnel much longer than the woman’s throat. Reflective tendrils skittered against enamel, caught and cut her lips, tensed—
Cat threw herself to one side as a mirror shard shot from the woman’s mouth. Raz hit the deck too—shards burst from all the open mouths, a storm of crystal darts unfolding wings and legs, and unfolding again, like those creased-paper birds kids from the Shining Empire made, that when you undid them formed a bird larger than the one they had been. The people from whom the crystals flew all fell like string-cut marionettes.
The glass that missed Cat struck the bulkhead arrow-deep and quivered there as claws tore gouges in the wood. Sawdust and wood chips and scraps of cloth filled the air, and all around the hold there were these things, huge winged bugs, reflective carapaced and slick and growing. Their mouths held fangs and twitching blade lips. They were hungry.
Blood seeped from the corner of Cat’s ear, from a cut she hadn’t felt.
“Demons.”
Cat raised the truncheon from her belt, just in time. The nearest demon-bug flew toward her; she batted the glass insect into a bulkhead. It bounced off a tarp, reversed its legs, shook itself, and launched at her again. The second’s relief gave Cat’s hand time to reach the Justice medallion at her neck, and the cold perfection of service carried her away.
This time, when she swung the club, the creature shattered to smoking shards. One down, forty-something to go.
She looked up. Raz had pulled the tarp from the fallen woman and thrown it to snare a clutch of demons. Legs and mandibles pierced fabric, but before they could fight free he smashed the tarp against the deck. Glass spines cracked. A bug landed on Raz’s scalp and clawed bloody strips away. He screamed. Cat leapt, clubbed the thing off him, and it burst into a shower of sharp dust. Blood streamed down his forehead.
They stood ringed by unconscious former demon-hosts, and twenty-five glass insects, now the size of toddlers and still growing. Spindly limbs merged and thickened. Plates of mirrored chitin sprouted between joints. Ruby eyes grew further facets. Claws lengthened and serrated.
Too many to fight.
Raz bared his fangs.
She didn’t know how strong he was. But he could bleed. And they could cut him.
They could cut her, too, even through the Suit. This many, they could tear off her arms like children plucking daisy petals. But she could kill—not all of them, the distributed tactical mind of Justice told her. Skill, speed, and strength went only so far against sheer numbers. But she could take many with her.
She spread her arms in front of Raz. In one hand she held her truncheon. Her other hand’s fingers lengthened into claws.
Come on, she told them in the Suit’s silver-coated nightmare voice. Maybe demons had bad dreams too. Show me what you’ve got.
They stared at her, opened mandibles, wriggled razor mouthparts.
She tightened her grip on the truncheon.
The demons’ wings snapped wide, and as one they flew.
They boiled toward the opening of the hold, still growing. Claws scrabbled against timber, and they were out. She ran after them. With a leap she caught the slowest demon’s trailing leg; if she’d touched it barehanded its edges would have laid open her palm, but the Suit let her hold it, let her catch its wing too, both of them spinning above the deck of the Dream. The demon’s head rotated on its neck; fangs snapped, but she was too close for them to bite deep. Its claws, though, could. They tightened like a diamond-tipped vise. One talon tore a line in her Suit. The fluid flowed free of its claw to mend the gap, but not before its talon plunged beneath, exploring her flesh.
She wrapped her arms around the demon’s belly and squeezed. Glass squealed, popped, shattered. The Suit closed her wound. She fell, turning, turning, and slammed into the deck. Glass shards rained onto her, melting as they fell. Above, unfolded demons flew. Their wings rainbowed streetlamp light and beat dragonfly fast, gaining altitude, flying inland.
“Ma’am?”
The skeleton-sailor bent over her, head cocked to one side. Concern. How interesting that she could read the man’s, no, woman’s, expressions. Maybe you had to learn, once you became a skeleton, how to act so people could tell what you were thinking. Like guiding a puppet.
She remembered this feeling from back before Seril’s return, when the Blacksuit was still Black. The fog of assurance, the Suit guiding her reeling mind to detached logic.
She stood. The Suit blunted the pain in her side, kept pressure on the wound, guided blood to proper vessels.
Across the city, Justice called her children. Under attack. All units. Suits patrolling backstreets paused midstep and turned skyward, preparing to run. But they couldn’t fly.
One hand crested the edge of the hold, then another, and Raz pulled himself onto the deck. Regrown skin closed the cuts in his scalp. He did not need to breathe, so he wasn’t breathing heavy. He ran to her, held her, his hand tight enough on her arm she could feel it through the Suit’s narcotic haze. “Are you all right?”
She wasn’t used to laughing through silver. You?
“Fine.” He turned to the skeleton. “There are injured people in the hold. Help them.”
We have to go. Her mind raced through the matrix of Justice, assembling scenarios, considering data. Scraps: the sleepers woke when Raz signed the contract bringing them into Seril’s domain. Demons sought freedom. These were bound, now, by Seril’s rules alone—and if she died, they’d be free. Limitless.
“You’re hurt.”
Not much. She stood. Come on. The other officers won’t be able to stop them in time.
“We can’t either.”
You can learn, Aev had told her last night, on that rooftop. Well. No time like the present.
Yes we can, she said.
And, in silence, to the moon: you wanted me to pray, dammit. You wanted me to need you. Here you go. Here I am.
The smooth silver of her back rippled, and bulged, and birthed wings.
When she turned to him, he was looking at her differently.
She held out her hand. Are you coming?