Tara caught a cab at sundown and settled in to read and ponder fate.
The near crash shocked her awake. The horse reared, hooves pawing. The carriage rocked and landed hard on bad shocks.
Tara dove out the door, blade drawn, shadow-clad, expecting cutpurses, demons, treachery, some machination of Madeline Ramp’s. She found Shale in the center of the road dodging hooves, hands raised. A black leather valise rested at his feet.
Tara released her knife and banished her shadows. “What the hells are you doing here?”
Shale snatched his bag and darted past hooves toward her. “Coming with you.”
“No.” She touched the beast’s flank, and it steadied, though its ears slicked back.
“You needed me to translate. You might need me again.”
“Aev put you up to this.”
“She would be angry if she knew I was here,” he said. “I already bought a ticket.” A white hologram-stamped card protruded from a side pocket of his valise. “I will follow you.”
“I could stop you.”
“You are fighting for my people. I endangered us all two nights ago. Let me help.”
The horse snorted and scraped a spark off the cobblestones.
“Fine,” she said. “Get in before I change my mind.”
He carried the valise as if it weighed very little—not that Tara’s luggage was much larger—but a blink told Tara the bag lacked any magical capabilities, folded space, or hidden compartments. “That’s all you brought?”
“Books,” he said. He pulled the door shut, and they rolled west into the night.
“No toothbrush? Clothes?”
“This flesh doesn’t work the same as yours. Close enough for imitation only. I do not need to eat in this form. My sweat’s pure water unless I wish it otherwise. Conserves salts.”
Tara pushed back the velvet curtain. They rode past a broad dark space walled with brick: a park or a graveyard. Shale would know which. Wind shifted leaves like clouds above the wall. If there were graves, she could not see them.
Leaving a city was like peeling off a sticky bandage: no matter how fast you tried to go, a few grimy traces still lingered on your skin. Even after buildings gave way to open fields, Tara still didn’t feel as though they’d left Alt Coulumb. The skeleton of a burned house stood watch over swaying wheat.
“The moon roads would be faster,” Shale said. “All places are one where Seril’s moon shines.”
“The red-eye will get us to DL by sunrise, and I don’t want to take any more of Seril’s power than I have to. If we need her roads later, we’ll use them.”
They crested the western ridge and took a right turn through a spur of the Geistwood. Stars shone clear in the dark. Tara tasted their light. In Alt Coulumb, where human fires blunted the stars, wielding Craft felt like doing surgery wearing wool mittens. Out here, the mittens fell away, and her scalpel was sharp as ever.
“Was that really why you refused?” Shale asked.
“What, you think I’m unnerved by the thought of Seril carrying me through the god-realm? Conventional air travel’s safer, more comfortable, and almost as fast.”
The trees failed and the cab descended a long shallow slope to the airfield. Crystal fangs surrounded a blacktop paved with some distant volcano’s ash.
A dragon crouched on the runway.
Even at this distance, its scale beggared thought. The road passing beneath the dragon’s left wing to the embarkation hall seemed no thicker than a hair at this distance. Word problems: Based on that proportion, estimate the size of the creature on the tarmac. Determine the width of those black shining scales, the curvature of those teeth.
Trick question. No number could match the beast. Math did not follow the mind down such dark roads.
The dragon faced west. The tail gave an earthquake twitch. Broad chains crisscrossed its back, supporting the gondola. The observation deck across its shoulders perched on hydraulics to keep level as the wings beat. Vast slitted eyes cast spotlight circles on the ground.
“Safer,” Shale said, doubtful.
A bus rattled past them, bound cityward and uphill, carrying only an old woman in dark glasses, her hands crossed over a carpetbag.
* * *
Gavriel Jones ducked under the police line and entered the topless tower in the Ash where she had almost died the night before.
She picked her way across ground-floor rubble. At the entrance to the long, dark, winding stair she hesitated, though she would never have admitted any reason for the pause beyond a wish to finish her last cigarette.
The climb was easier than she remembered. Moonlight leaked through chinks in the tower’s mortar, but did not relieve the darkness.
A long time later she emerged onto the tower roof.
Last night she’d found a troop of gargoyles waiting here. Troop probably wasn’t the correct noun. An intimidation of gargoyles? And a throne, and a Lady atop the throne. The interview of a lifetime, half-finished.
The troop was gone. The throne lay broken, one great horn snapped off at the base. Demonglass had melted like dew, leaving scores on stone to mark last night’s battle.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
She did not, to her credit, jump. Her Hot Town alley savior emerged from behind the broken throne: broad-shouldered and tiger-faced Aev. Curled beneath her wings, she’d blended with the rubble. Clawscratch mapped her skin.
Gabby remembered Aev wrestling with demons last night, remembered the moonlight that wept from her wounds.
“The rooftop is not safe.” Aev rounded the dais. Dust shivered at her footsteps. “We drained this stone too much for you to trust it.”
“You’re still here.”
“We have spent much of our faith here,” she said. “We made this space holy, thin and timeless. Someone must guard it, though the stone here is no longer strong enough to heal us.” She touched the scars across her chest. “I remain. The others sought holes in the soil, deep shadows in the water, abandoned warehouses where they can recover.”
“Will they?”
“One has passed,” Aev said. “Karst. You did not know him.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We will carve another in his honor,” she said. “If we live so long.”
“You don’t—die—often.”
“We do not age in your manner. Few accidents harm us. We fall in battle, or never. But that is not so rare as you may think.”
“This is my fault,” she said.
“Did you let demons into Alt Coulumb?”
“If I hadn’t reported on you, none of this would have happened.”
“Or it would have happened later.” Aev sat on the dais and laid one hand on a fallen horn of stone. “You might as well call this my fault for saving you, when you entered the Hot Town. My child rebuked me for that. We are both creatures of obligation, Ms. Jones: I was built to serve. You haven’t walked the path of a cause until you molded yourself to its form.”
“Why did you save me? You knew what I was.”
“They were hurting you.”
Gabby kept quiet for a while. “Seril isn’t here.”
“She is everywhere. But She is not here as She was last night.”
“I wanted to finish our interview.” The words sounded foolish even to her. She brandished her notebook.
“The time for interviews and revelations has passed. We live under threat of attack. Soon Alt Coulumb will face a fire fiercer than its god.”
Beyond the tower’s rim, the city burned.
“I heard,” Gabby said. “That’s my job. And that’s why you need this interview. People don’t know who you are, why you’re here. I can tell Seril’s story. Or yours.”
“Mine?”
“Why not? You’re at least as scary, in most people’s minds, as your goddess.”
“We are imposing by nature.”
“It’s not helping you.” Gabby approached the dais, leaving footprints in dust, and sat beside Aev. She flipped to a blank page in her notebook, took pencil and knife from her pocket, and cut the pencil sharp. “Just say what comes naturally.”
“Where should I begin?”
She looked out, and down. “Start with the city.”
* * *
“You should leave,” Cat told Raz that night by the Bounty’s wheel, while skeletons and snakelings and the rest of his shadowy nighttime crew busied themselves on deck.
“Leave?”
“Leave Alt Coulumb. Get to sea. There’s bad stuff coming.”
She’d found him working through a ledger on a low table by starlight. No lanterns. He didn’t need them. The book creaked as he closed its spine. “Tough day?”
“You have no idea.” She leaned against the wheel. “You know how long Justice’s regulations are?”
“Few hundred pages?”
“Try a few thousand, all dense Craftspeak, little shades from act to act. Ninety different kinds of fraud. Seven classes of assault, each with seven subclasses. Why seven, don’t ask me.”
“You’re not the type to spend her off hours reading rules.”
“No. But we’ll be under attack in a few days, so I figured it might help.”
“Attack.”
“Craftsmen coming for Seril, or Kos, or both of them. Kos can handle himself; Seril can’t—the part of Her that’s Herself, I mean, the conscious bit. She doesn’t have enough power. I wanted to make the Blacksuits help. It’s not easy. Turns out Justice wasn’t built to interfere with Craftwork. This will get bad. You should go.”
He capped his pen. “To save myself.”
“Fighting these bastards is my job. I don’t want you doing hero stuff on my part. Leave. Get safe.” It hurt to say. “Come back when it’s over.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You couldn’t fight the demons last night,” she said. “And you can’t fight what’s coming, either.”
“Worse than demons?”
“Bigger,” she said. “Craftsmen riding engines of war.”
“I’ll help.”
“You can’t swashbuckle this problem away. Unless you have some crazy secret vampire pirate god you haven’t told me about.”
He ran his nails over the leather cover of his book. “Tell me the problem.”
“Seril needs allies. No one will stick their neck out to help her. What’s it to you, anyway? You don’t care for gods or Craftsmen. Look out for yourself and keep clear of land, isn’t that the way you play it?”
“Usually.”
The deck between her feet had gone through more cycles of scuff and swab and polish and scuff than she cared to guess. “So what’s stopping you from leaving?”
“You,” he said.
She couldn’t answer that. Her face felt hot.
“If Seril dies,” he said, “and Justice remains, she’ll go back to the way she was before. You’ll lose yourself in the Suit. It’ll get you high again.”
“What’s your point?”
“Seril’s been good for this city. And for you.” He stared out over the water. “I know people who might help. I don’t like talking to them, but they’ll listen to me. And there will be a price.”
The ship’s sinews hung limp in the still night. “If you get hurt on my account, I’ll kill you.”
“Someone beat you to it.”
* * *
Airfield security was the usual pain: prick of the finger to draw blood, and a winding passage through three layers of wards all of which could be subverted in minutes by any half-blind idiot with a shred of determination. After security, at least the decor improved. Crystal chandeliers hung from high arches, and clockwork songbirds flitted from perch to perch while chrome raptors circled. Brass orchids grew amid hedges of real plants. Restaurants and coffee shops dotted the concourse, mostly caged shut; the ten fifteen to Dresediel Lex was the evening’s last flight and boarding now, as indicated by the glowworm sign upon which three of the fake songbirds perched. Tara led Shale up the marble stair to the gantry level.
Birdsong broke into squawking panic. She glanced back: two birds had flown from the sign, their resting place usurped by a raptor. Of the third clockwork songbird there was no trace.
Shale frowned at the metal birds. The raptor preened and puffed the razor feathers of her breast. An organ tritone down the hall signaled preboarding. “Come on,” she said. “We’re late.”
They ran past janitors mopping floors; the dragon eclipsed the sky outside the window. A deep rhythm pulsed through the floor tiles. At first she mistook it for the thrum of ventilation or of escalator machinery, but they’d passed no escalator, and ventilation would be softer.
Heartbeat, she thought.
Passengers waited in long lines by the gantries: beings human and once human in robes and suits. A three-meter-tall statue of silver thorns in the economy line held this week’s Thaumaturgist open with two hands and turned the pages with his third. The fourth fingered his ticket sleeve nervously.
She reached the business-class gantry and fell into line behind a woman with long golden braids and a man wearing a mask of tanned skin. The ticket taker’s smile was riveted in place, literally. The tritone sang again.
“Tara!”
She turned, and saw Abelard sprinting toward them.
The ticket taker extended her hand to the braided woman. Tara waved Shale on. “Get to the cabin. I’ll follow.”
Abelard tripped over the thorn statue’s valise. His robes flared at the hem, and he hopped one-footed three steps until Tara caught him by the wrist.
“I worked all afternoon,” he said, breathless. “When I looked at the clock I realized it was nine, and I’d last seen you in that nightmare.”
“How did you get in here?”
“I kind of shouted my way past the guards. Said I was on a mission from God.”
“I really have to go.” Shale had vanished down the gantry. At the third tritone, economy passengers filed over their bridge. “Shale will get in trouble if I’m not around.”
“When I looked at that clock,” he said, “I realized: she could just leave. Nothing ties her here. She could go to Dresediel Lex and let us deal with this ourselves.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“I know,” he said. “You could, but you wouldn’t.” The coach line was almost gone. Tara felt faintly ridiculous, as if underdressed—exposed in the high-ceilinged hall.
“I’ll be gone a couple days,” she said. “Hold the city together while I’m out, okay?”
He hugged her. His arms were tight and narrow, and the body beneath the robes might have been made of thin pipe. His close-cut tonsure prickled against her temple.
She patted him on the back. Her hand made a hollow sound against his ribs. She squeezed and tried to remember the last time she’d touched someone or been touched, not for instrumental purpose, but for the sake of touching. She had been too busy to notice the lack. “Thanks,” felt lame by comparison.
“Come back to us,” he said when he stepped away.
“I will,” she said. “Make sure there’s something for me to come back to, okay?”
“I promise.”
The thorn statue glanced over its spiny shoulder; Tara thought she heard it clear its throat.
“Take care,” she said, and saluted him, and retreated to the business-class gantry. The ticket taker met her with a smile full of knives. At the foot of the gantry, Tara looked back. Abelard waited, watching.
She waved, and so did he, before she entered the crystal tunnel.