Abelard kept dawn vigil on the morning of the war. Bede and Nestor and Aldis and the rest of the Council of Cardinals gathered in the sanctum to kneel, knees permitting, before the flame. Their chant swelled. Stars pinpricked the gray-blue sky. Eastward past the docks, a pale pink glow heralded the sun.
Crystal palaces flew south through the Business District, wreathed in sparks and rainbows. Their edges bled starlight. They should not be here, not in Alt Coulumb, free city of gods and men. Even the Hidden Schools had breached the city’s airspace only once, while his Lord was dead.
These skyspires were not scavengers or opportunists. They came to kill.
No. That wasn’t quite true.
The spires were weapons built to break cities, but even the fiercest weapons were only tools. About the spires, before them—so small they should have been invisible at this distance but were not, were instead singular points radiating darkness—hovered Craftsmen. Their fingers rested on rune-marked triggers.
Abelard blinked. He lacked training in the Craft, but God let him see its traces. He was glad he lacked training. Were his sorcerous vision more acute, he would have been blinded by the burn.
Hellfire webbed the black. Bonds of power tied the invaders—the opposing counsel—together. And two shapes hovered at the center of that infernal rose: a spider of crystal and thorn, and something else, a roil of worms and teeth.
Daphne Mains and Madeline Ramp, vanguard of the opposition.
“Impressive, aren’t they?” Cardinal Evangelist Bede stood by his side. He squeezed his hands as if working dough. “Each member of Ramp’s commission has sent observers to watch us fall. All this because I did not sign their deal.”
The Cardinal, Abelard realized, was scared. Abelard had no reassurance to offer.
So he was surprised when he found himself saying, “They’ll be disappointed.”
“Do you think so?”
He hadn’t before he spoke, but he remembered Slaughter’s Fell, the depth of faith in that young girl as he marked her forehead with ash above her glasses. Even the church’s smell seemed golden. “I believe in this city. I believe in Tara. I believe in our Lord, and His Lady.”
Bede’s head declined, and rose again. “Thank you.” He squeezed Abelard’s shoulder and went to kneel with the other Cardinals.
And thank you, Abelard prayed. The words had been his, and the urge to speak—but a greater power calmed his fear to let them pass his lips.
He felt the fire beneath Alt Coulumb and within its people.
He turned to the altar. Craftsmen would fight the external battle. Theirs was the inner war.
Nestor stood before them. For once the old man did not clear his throat before he spoke. “Let us pray.”
Kneeling, Abelard joined himself to God.
* * *
Madeline Ramp and Daphne Mains stood on air. A city lay at their feet and a host at their backs.
“Pleasant morning,” Ramp said.
Beautiful, in fact. The air sweet with coming triumph. Pleasure climbed Daphne’s backbone and nestled behind her heart. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Are you ready?”
“I am.” She hadn’t realized it until asked.
A silver circle surrounded them, and beyond it stood the Judge, clothed in the shadows of her office. She burned too black to bear.
Daphne squinted and turned away; Ms. Ramp’s second eyelids closed.
“I call these proceedings to order,” the Judge said in a voice that should have broken the ground and let devils spew forth. “We consider the matter of Associated Creditors and Shareholders against Kos Everburning of Alt Coulumb, and Seril Undying of the same.”
“For which our thanks,” Ms. Ramp replied. “We are prepared, once opposing counsel show themselves.”
“Oh,” said a new voice, scalpel cold and similarly curved, from across the circle, “we’re here.”
The voice’s owner wore a white three-piece suit, immaculate. A silver mask covered half a face Telomeri artists would have given their tongues to paint. The eye beneath that mask was red; its mate, still human, the blue Daphne had seen in glacial fissures. One skeletal hand closed around a cane.
Two associates in charcoal gray flanked Ashleigh Wakefield. They might have been Wakefield’s shadows, or afterimages.
“A pleasure as always,” Ramp said with a sharp slight smile. “Your clients have willfully misrepresented their God in market filings. Kos Everburning is a greater investment risk than his priesthood claims. In specific we allege that the God and His church are exposed through their off-books relationship with the renegade Goddess known as Seril Undying.”
Wakefield’s head edged to one side, like a cat considering a mouse that, rather than cowering, had performed a backflip. “Unfounded accusations. Kos’s filings were correct, his exposure is managed, and his relationship with Seril Undying founded on mutual collaboration rather than strict liability as you claim. The nature of Kos’s bond with Seril does not subject investors and creditors to undisclosed risk.”
“You’ll forgive us if we don’t take your word for it.”
“Why else would we be here?” Wakefield said. “Surely you would not waste Her Honor’s time.”
“You’re dangerously close,” the Judge said. “Present arms, Counsel, or get out of my sky.”
Ramp raised her hands, a staged surrender. “Of course, Your Honor. By all means, let us reach the point. We begin with the portion of our complaint directly addressing Kos’s personal vulnerability, and that of his church. Permit me to introduce to the court my associate, Ms. Mains.”
With those words, the cold behind Daphne’s heart turned. She thrilled to the sensation of herself unlocking, of long-dormant glyphs drawing light from the sky and power from the army arrayed behind her. The tight-wound trap of her mind sprung.
Somewhere in the unfolding, a girl screamed with her voice.
She ignored the scream.
Wakefield’s human eye widened slightly, but the being who was still, basically, Daphne noticed.
She smiled with sharp teeth and moved to the circle’s center. “Thank you, Ms. Ramp. Now, let us begin.”
She raised her hands, long fingered and strange, and made the world go mad.
* * *
Tara and Altemoc and the bone-borne bodies landed on the dry ground of the miners’ camp as the tunnel collapsed behind them. Dust choked the sky, but sharp morning sunlight shafted through. Tara stared into the sky’s bright face as the dust settled, and knew despair.
They’d spent too long wandering in the Keeper’s twisted time. Human shapes approached through dust, shambling over unsteady ground; they seized her arms and bore her from the tumbling rock. She choked on polluted air. She had not realized how tired she’d become, how little soul remained to her.
The sky blued as they carried her from the dust. Altemoc ran to the Quechal woman who had met Tara on her arrival at camp. His rhythm was off, or Tara’s was, the clock of her heart erratic. The woman hugged him, fierce, stepped back and shouted words Tara couldn’t sort from one another. Altemoc pointed at the mountain in stutter-step motion, slow and too fast at once.
Gray chewed the edges of her vision, and her colors bled. The ground was not where she expected it to be, the force vector into her ankle a crucial few degrees off just. She fell hard on her knee, felt trousers, stocking, and skin tear.
Human speech was wind through a flapping aperture of meat. Altemoc ran three-legged toward her, mouth producing more dumb meat-sounds. The fields back home looked like this in the hours before dawn, hueless and achromatic. But the home wind tasted of earth and dew and waking things. Where was that taste now? Had she lost it?
He caught her, and his scars burned green.
The sun rose.