Three Parts Dead (26 page)

“This isn’t a normal scroll. Blot it and the ink will shine through. As for stealing it, do you think the court would build a library without a way to keep people from walking off with their books?” She was talking to fill space, her thoughts rushed ahead of her words. Burned-out entries. Judge Cabot, lying disemboweled beside his azaleas, tea mixed with blood, his dead body untainted by Craft. Kos’s corpse, more decayed than it should have been after three days of death. Shale’s reply to her questions yesterday morning: he was a messenger, but didn’t know what message he was to have carried.

“We need,” she whispered, “to visit the infirmary.”

*

The lonely Sanctum tower rose above the crowd gathered in the white gravel parking lot. Word of Kos’s death had spread from the Third Court of Craft across the city like a ripple over a still pool, through scraps of overheard conversation and whispers in quiet rooms, rumors mixed with truth. Most of Alt Coulumb’s four million citizens remained ignorant. Some heard and disbelieved. Some heard and hid within their work or their homes or their false hopes. But a few heard, and grew angry, and came to the Holy Precinct, bearing with them frenzy and fear and crude signs made from paint and planks of rough wood. This fraction numbered in the thousands, and they cried out and pounded against Abelard and Lady Kevarian’s carriage as it shouldered toward the Sanctum.

Abelard stared out the window at the mass. “What are they doing?”

“They’re afraid,” Lady Kevarian said. “They want guidance.”

He sought in those wild faces the men and women of Alt Coulumb that he knew, their reason and their compassion, their faith. He found none of these things. He saw a thin ice-shell of anger, and beneath that, fear.

“What will they do?”

“If your Church does not respond to their complaints? Perhaps storm the Tower, though I doubt the Blacksuits will allow it.” Justice’s servants stood in a loose cordon between the crowd and the Sanctum steps. The crowd had not yet dared approach them. “Perhaps they will linger. Perhaps loot some stores or set a building or two in the Pleasure Quarters on fire before they are stopped.”

“They wouldn’t be so angry if Kos were here.”
Of course they wouldn’t,
Abelard thought.
Foolish thing to say.
“Are you going to do something?”

Ms. Kevarian shook her head. “I am a Craftswoman. Public relations are my client’s responsibility.”

They rolled through the Blacksuit cordon and stopped at the foot of the Sanctum steps. Ms. Kevarian paid the horse as Abelard stumbled out. The crowd’s cries intensified when they saw his robes. He took a deep drag on his cigarette. “We need to tell Cardinal Gustave,” he said.

“I will speak with the Cardinal. You should return to your cell and rest.”

The crowd screamed behind him—the voice of his city in pain. “I don’t want rest. I want to do something. I want to help.”

She hesitated halfway up the broad front steps. “You’re a Technician, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Check the Church’s generators. We’ve reached a delicate stage of the case. The Iskari question came out in our favor, but if the Church has been wasting power, we will lose ground. While Tara seeks weapons, you can tend our armor.”

When he didn’t respond, she began climbing again. He caught up with her at the top step, in front of the tall double doors. “There are dozens of miles of pipe in this tower, of every gauge and purpose. Not to mention the boiler rooms, the engines … Going through the logs alone will take days. Isn’t there something more immediate I can do?”

“You could talk to them,” Ms. Kevarian said, and pointed to the sea of people through which their carriage had come.

Behind him, a deep-voiced man somewhere within the crowd cried shouted: “God is dead!” A few among the group took up his chant. Ms. Kevarian didn’t appear to notice.

Abelard swallowed hard, and envisioned himself preaching to their wrath. What words would he use? What could he say to bring the people of Alt Coulumb back to themselves, to remind them of the glory of Kos? In his vision, he shouted into a whirlwind of rage, and his own breath returned to choke him. “I’ll check the generators.”

“You’d best get started, in that case.” Lady Kevarian flicked a finger at the front gate, which flew open with a resounding gong. She strode into the tower’s gullet, eyes front and ready for battle.

Abelard straightened his robe and followed her. As he entered the shadows of the worship hall, she gestured again and the doors slammed shut behind him, closing off the repeated cry of triumph or lamentation: “God is dead! God is dead!”

*

A blanket of clouds muffled the declining sun. The sky should have caught fire. Instead, the light began to die. Tara and Cat rode through its death throes in a driverless carriage, and watched the city.

“Is it always so cloudy here?”

“No,” Cat said, “though you wouldn’t know it from the last few days. Our autumns are usually clear, because of the trade winds.” Color had returned to her face, and mirth to her voice. Her hands lay still in her lap, and she smiled, if weakly. Tara watched her body fight its way free of the Blacksuit, and knew better than to mention the change.

“You sail?” she asked instead.

“No. I just hear sailors talking.”

They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signaled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic. It was surprising how much people didn’t know once you left the cities of the Deathless Kings. A young man in one of the caravans she joined after first leaving Edgemont had claimed in all earnestness that alcohol made people drunk because demons liked its taste, crept within the bottles, and slept there, invisible and intangible. When you drank the alcohol, you drank the demons. Different demons liked different kinds of booze, which was why a man belligerently drunk on whiskey would sleep after a glass of vodka or laugh after drinking beer.

The other girls in the caravan had found this theory fascinating, but to Tara its parsimony left something to be desired.

“What do you need to see here?” Cat asked, drawing ahead of her in the hallway.

“The kid with no face. The witness in Cabot’s murder.”

“Yeah.” She nodded. “We still don’t have any leads on the face, by the way. We’re scouring local Craft suppliers, but the equipment for stealing a face isn’t all that specialized, it turns out.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Some poor Craftswoman was having a rough day dealing with Blacksuits in her shop, but better her than Tara. She reviewed the last several hours she had spent with Cat, trying to figure out when the woman could have received a report from the other Blacksuits. “Did you check in while I was arguing in court?”

“Justice told me when I put the suit on back at the library.” Cat wiggled the fingers of one hand in the vicinity of her temple.

“All this information comes and goes from your head, without your permission. Gods.” Tara wasn’t given to swearing or to mentioning deities in general, but both seemed appropriate.

“What’s so weird about that?”

“How can you let something into your mind? Justice could tie you in knots if she wanted.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“You know what I mean.” Her voice grew sharp, and Cat froze in midstride. Tara made to brush past her, but the other woman seized her arm. She tried to shrug Cat off, but her grip was strong. “Let me go.”

“Is there something you need to get off your chest?”

Tara pulled again, harder this time, with no more success. “I don’t like it when people mess with my head. I can’t understand how you’d volunteer for the experience.”

“Justice isn’t a person.” Cat was cold and immobile. “I wouldn’t allow this if she was.”

“Like you’d have a choice.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You need your fix.”

Cat’s eyes narrowed. “I have a job to do. I keep this city safe.”

Tara didn’t reply.

The sudden surge of anger passed, and Cat’s shoulders sagged. “Gods, look, if you want to talk…”

“No. Thanks.” She nearly spat the second word.

Cat let go, and Tara stormed down the hall. On the third step she realized she didn’t know where she was going.

“Do you know where the witness is?” she called over her shoulder.

“I do.”

“Well?”

“I’m not going to tell you.” Deep within the infirmary, an unseen doctor chose that moment to set a broken bone or pull a tooth. The patient’s scream echoed in the empty hall, and Tara and Cat winced at the same time. Apparently these doctors were more familiar with antiseptic than anesthetic.

“What do you want?” Tara said.

“You’ve trusted me less since you learned I was a Blacksuit than when you thought I was a simple junkie. Tell me what I’ve done, what Justice has done to earn your contempt.”

“It’s not contempt.”

“The hells it isn’t. Will you be straight with me?”

Tara considered Cat: her hands on her hips, her firm, generous mouth, the steel behind the green lake of her eyes, the scars at her throat, the emblem of Justice that hung beneath her shirt. She thought about her own fall from the schools, about Shale resting faceless in a white-walled, black-curtained room. She thought, too, of another room in this same building, where Raz Pelham lay sleeping. He could not have returned to his ship. Suntan or no suntan, the walk would have fried him.

“Fine,” Tara said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

*

Daily maintenance reports were kept on the Sanctum’s eighth floor, in the windowless Efficiency Office at the heart of the tower. Despite its location, the office was well ventilated; turbines in the massive boiler room beneath sucked air through the chamber to regulate the boilers’ temperature. In winter, the office remained ten degrees warmer than the rest of the building thanks to its proximity to the generators, and in summer ten degrees cooler, thanks to the air flow.

Ingenious.

Abelard first visited the Efficiency Office at the age of twelve, on a field trip for introductory theology. He had stared about himself in awe as a Novice Theologian, who seemed so mature to Abelard at the time and had been at most twenty-six, used the second law of thermodynamics as a metaphor for original sin. Upon leaving the office, twelve-year-old Abelard promptly forgot the color of its walls (red), its dimensions (forty feet across and ten high, with a ladder in the center leading down into the boilers), and even its shape (round), not to mention the theologian’s argument. He remembered the ventilation system. It was the first complex machine he understood, and its union of physical law with man’s creative spark filled him with joy and love for God.

Now Kos was gone, but the system remained.

He sat at one of the four curved metal desks in the circular room, overshadowed by a pile of papers and plans and schedules. First he browsed through the energy output records and found nothing unexpected. Draw on the generators peaked at evening and midday, bottoming out between midnight and dawn, and again between three in the afternoon and twilight. The logs showed no major repairs, and hardly any tinkering since the coolant system’s upgrade months before. Materials and parts consumption normal. But the service records for the last few days …

He raised one hand. A few seconds and a rustling of robes later, he heard a woman’s voice. “Yes, Brother?”

He looked up from the records to see the almond eyes and wizened face of Sister Miriel, who had ruled the Efficiency Office and kept its archives for longer than most Cardinals could remember. Sister Miriel was the reason no young novice had ever successfully pranked the maintenance department. She was disarmingly sweet but viciously clever, and detected each planted gas bomb, every swapped document and mislabeled pot of glue in time to turn the jokes against their plotters.

“Sister,” he said, “you’ve logged twice as many maintenance shifts as usual in the last three days, but made no repairs.”

“We’d have made repairs if we found what we needed to repair, wouldn’t we?” she answered ruefully.

“I’d expect so.”

“Well, there you are.” She leaned forward, skimming the plans and timesheets. “We’re tracking a bug in the works. Though truth be told, it’s less a bug and more a monkey.”

“Monkey?” That was a new term on Abelard.

“Bugs nest in one place and stay there. A monkey roams.”

He waved at the paperwork. “I don’t see any service outages.”

“Because you’re thinking of the problem wrong,” she said with the kindness of a grandmother offering candy. “Our generators are redundant, so you wouldn’t see a drop in output. Look here.”

“The coolant system is operating under capacity.”

Sister Miriel’s head bobbed, and Abelard felt as if he were back in school.

“Which means…” He chewed the words before saying them. “The exhaust isn’t as hot as it should be. Heat must escape before exhaust reaches the coolant system.”

“Our reasoning exactly, but we found no leak, even though we tore the system apart.”

“That would have taken weeks, not just three days of double shifts.”

“It did take weeks.” She pointed to the schedule. “If you look at the older maintenance logs, you’ll see that our crews have been pulling extra hours for months. The problem first showed up in spring, though back then it was predictable—every night, between one and four in the morning. In the last few days the drain became chaotic. Yesterday there was a peak just before dawn, and one or two small surges during the days before that. Nothing for the last twenty-four hours, though. There’s no pattern we can see.”

Between one and four in the morning, as he knelt before an altar, waiting in vain for God to answer his prayers. “It changed three days ago?”

“A few before that, actually, but the early morning draw stopped three days ago. We wondered if our current theological”—she paused out of propriety—“troubles were at fault, but the problem isn’t worse, only less predictable. We’ve waited all day for a repeat incident with no luck.”