Three Parts Dead (27 page)

Abelard turned to another page of schematics, and tried not to think about the “current theological troubles.” The crowd’s cries echoed in his mind. He could collapse, or keep working. The choice was obvious, but it was not easy.

“Brother,” Miriel said after a quiet interval. “I hear you are accompanying the Godless ones.”

“I am.”

“What are they like?”

Those two lengths of pipe didn’t match up on the schematic. Were these really maps of the same subsection? “The younger one … she wants to be strong. The older, I don’t know what to say about her.”

“Will they help us?”

He was about to quibble over the definitions of help, but that was not what Sister Miriel wanted to hear. “I think so.” He rolled up the blueprints and slid them back into their cases.

“You’re done with the schematics?”

“No,” he said, and glanced down the ladder into the humid darkness of the boiler room. “Can I borrow a lantern?”

*

“I first realized I had an aptitude for the Craft,” Tara said, “when I was maybe five or six.” Her heels tapped down the hallway in perfect rhythm. “More importantly, I liked it. Liked using it, working it around me. It was almost a religious feeling. I wanted to make a life out of the Craft, so I had to leave Edgemont. Which was fine, because I wanted to do that anyway.”

She waited for Cat to speak, but she didn’t. Their footsteps were in time. Tara could have been walking alone, had she not been able to see the other woman by her side.

Good. This was hard enough without interruption.

“I took a job on the next merchant’s caravan that came through town, and wandered with them for a few years, learning everything I could from their lesser Craftsmen, fighting Raiders, keeping the scorpionkind at bay. One night after the campfire died, I sat naked on the sand, soaking in the starlight I would need for the next day’s Craft, and I looked up and saw the Hidden Schools: towers rising out of midair and plummeting into empty space, castles with parapets on both ends, hovering globes of glass and crystal the size of the Third Court of Craft.

“I was terrified. I had been calling the schools to me for months, as any young Craftswoman who wants to study there will do, but they never answered before.

“I’d tell you about the rainbow bridge that descended from the twelve-spired Elder Hall, a building so old it became new again, to offer me entrance; I’d tell you about the challenges I faced as I climbed that rainbow, of might and Craft and cunning; I’d tell you about being welcomed into the Hidden Schools as they cloaked themselves in clouds that were not clouds. But none of these things are important to my story.

“I had a room, for the first time in years, rather than a wagon bed, and a roommate, which took more getting used to. Her name was Daphne, and her family had been Craftsmen as far back as you could go, and Theologians before that. What I didn’t know about the Craftswoman’s world, she helped me learn. She was one of those people you hate a little on first meeting, until you realize their generous act isn’t an act at all.”

Tara let the pause drag out. She breathed in, and heard a faint inhalation beside her. Cat turned left. Tara followed.

“She introduced me to Professor Denovo. He was the most famous teacher on the faculty if not the best-loved, and she brought me to a dinner he threw for his advanced students. Denovo had come from the bottom, like me. His family had been well off, watchmakers, but ignorant of Craft until their son showed himself a prodigy. Before long Daphne and I began to work in his lab. There, I found camaraderie, acceptance, common purpose. You’ve felt the same, I’m sure. Your bond with Justice is probably similar to the bond between Denovo and his students, and no small wonder. It was Denovo that broke Seril’s corpse open and stitched it back together into Justice, forty years ago.

“Few people realize how blind human beings are to change. At the beginning I spent one hour a day at his lab; a few weeks later, six. The lab became my life, and its rhythms determined mine. I dreamed of work, and it seemed completely natural, as natural as you falling in step with me now. My strength dwindled, bit by bit. After weeks of this, I struggled to light a candle on my own outside the laboratory walls. Conversations with Denovo sparked with wit and life, and the rest of the world went dark by comparison, and I didn’t notice.

“I didn’t notice when Daphne stopped laughing, though one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time she smiled, and that I couldn’t remember the last time I smiled, either. I examined the two of us, and the others who worked in our lab. My head felt stuffed with cotton, but after days I could trace the web of subtle Craft Denovo had woven through our souls. In the service of his will, we worked as a massive organism. Separate from his purpose we were half ourselves, or less.

“I confronted him about it. He laughed. ‘We do good work,’ he said. ‘Better than any Craftsmen or Craftswomen in history. Together, we achieve greatness.’

“‘Not of ourselves,’ I said, ‘or for ourselves. We achieve greatness for you.’

“‘Someone has to direct our studies,’ he replied. He invited me to go to the leaders of the schools and unmask him. I did.”

Another turn. Stairs. A nurse wheeled a small cart laden with bloody knives past them.

“Denovo’s lab, they said, was one of the greatest centers of learning in the world. The lab advanced the knowledge of all Craftsmen everywhere. They questioned my judgment, questioned my priorities, as he sucked his students dry and grew fat on the power he stole from them. I tried to quit, but he didn’t let me. Tried to strike him down, but with his lab behind him, he was too strong. Daphne fell asleep in her room one day after a week of work with no rest, and didn’t wake up. Her parents came to take her home. I never saw her again.

“Late one night, after the students left, I snuck into Denovo’s lab and burned it. That place was the focus of the web he had spun through us all. As it burned I felt his grip on my soul burn, too. Power returned to me. My Craft was mine again.

“I didn’t announce what I had done, but I made no secret of it, either. Discovering my rebellion, Denovo had me dragged before the Disciplinary Board. He wanted to kill me, but there was no punishment on the books allowing a student to be put to death. They graduated me instead, because no rule states that when you graduate the school has to put you down somewhere you can survive. I confronted the entire faculty, and laughed as they threw me down over the Crack of the World, not far, I suppose, from where Seril died.

“I survived.”

Cat stopped at a bare wooden door with a brass number riveted onto it. No sound emerged from beyond, not even breathing. Tara felt the tingle of her own Craft within. This was the place.

She set a hand upon Cat’s shoulder and squeezed, hard. Her nails dimpled skin through cotton, but Cat didn’t start or draw away. The other signs, when she checked them, were all correct. Slightly dilated pupils, breathing in time with Tara’s own. When she closed her eyes she saw the tiny threads that now connected Cat’s mind to hers.

In three states is the mind most vulnerable, Professor Denovo had once told her: in love, in sleep, and in rapt attention to a story. Cat hated gargoyles. She would not have understood Tara’s protection of Shale, nor would she believe he was innocent. Even if, by some miracle, Cat did believe, Justice would not, and Cat was too much in her dark Lady’s thrall to resist wearing her Blacksuit for long. As Tara searched the other woman’s dark, uncomprehending eyes, she felt a moment of intense self-loathing for what she had done, and was about to do.

“Cat?”

A slow “yes” followed a second later, as if Cat had forgotten how to use her own voice.

“I’m going to review the witness. Look for evidence Justice may have missed.”

This time, a more ready answer. “Yes.”

“I can do this alone. I’ll be safe. I want you to be sure Captain Pelham is safe, too. If he’s hurt, we’ll lose our best lead in the case.”

“Should I check on him?”

That was how Denovo’s trick worked, at its subtlest. The target didn’t lose her will, but became malleable, grateful for guidance. “Yes. I think you should make sure he’s well.”

Cat’s footsteps sounded heavier than usual as she retreated down the long white hallway.

There was a Hell, and there were demons in it. Tara had visited, on school vacation. Nobody knew much about the demons’ society or motives, and there was considerable argument as to whether they captured dead souls or merely copied them before they went elsewhere. The demons themselves were coy on the subject.

But if, in Hell, wicked souls were tortured for their sins, Tara expected she was bound there.

She opened the door into Shale’s room and stepped inside.

Abelard swung from the last rung of the ladder to an overhanging pipe and dropped into the red-flushed dark of the boiler room, landing lightly on his feet. Steam and coolant lines tangled about and above him like jungle vines, and beyond them squatted the boilers, huge and round and warm. Humid air condensed into a slick sheen on his skin, mingling with new sweat. The heat was familiar and oppressive as the memories of an unpleasant childhood.

But the part of his childhood Abelard spent in the shadow of these giant clanking machines had not been unpleasant. Complicated, rather, full of adventure, of hide-and-seek and narrow escapes. The tiny crannies grownup engineers resented as side effects of poor design gleamed to a child’s eyes like silver roads to freedom. Mastering this sweaty, benighted labyrinth, learning every path and obstacle, had been an ordeal of fascination and obsession. Abelard and his friends approached the garden of metal as if they were the first people in the world, consumed by its every facet, creating in the act of discovery.

The boiler room was not a safe place to play, and children were injured every season in their games. Abelard boasted a half-moon scar on his abdomen where, at thirteen, a falling girder tore through his leather work apron and robes to embed itself in his side. That afternoon he first felt the healing touch of his God, the holy fire that seared his skin, blackening and purifying.

He bore himself away from the boilers and up, sliding and swinging from pipe to girder to scaffold until the plummeting temperature made the steam that rose from his skin crackle and grow sharp. The Sanctum’s generators were a closed system, though imperfect. Water flowed into the massive boilers, where it became steam that drove the turbines that powered Alt Coulumb’s trains and lights and lifts and the endless smaller mechanisms by which four million people lived in close quarters without strangling on their own filth.

Superheated steam raced along a series of exhaust pipes to the fourteenth floor, where the coolant system wrapped its icy tendrils about Kos’s hot iron veins. The coolant system was more dangerous by far than the steam pipes. Those would scald and burn, but these would grip one’s flesh with the strength of ice, and not all the hot water in the world could thaw skin so frozen. When the principles behind the generators were explained to him, Abelard had envisioned the coolant system as a ravenous monster, devouring heat and life. His childhood nightmare was not far from the truth.

He ducked under a pair of dangling chains and approached the thick net of coolant coils, slick and shining with frost. Each coil curled thrice about an exhaust pipe before bearing the heat thus drained back to the coolant system’s core, which waited like a hungry maw in the darkness above. He climbed toward it.

Once, Sister Miriel liked to tell, there had been no coolant system. Once, Seril granted Her touch of moonlight and ice and cold stone to the pipes, calling Her element back to itself: rushing, cool-flowing water. When Seril died, the Church desperately sought another solution.

Seril. The dead Goddess had loomed large in Abelard’s life in the last two days. As he climbed through the monstrous tangle of the coolant system, he wondered how life in Alt Coulumb had differed while She lived. What were those nights like, lit by a watchful eye, guarded by creatures powerful, imperfect and passionate, fierce as they were relentless? Had the moon shone brighter on that city? Had its fullness caused the blood to leap for joy? Had Kos, too, been different?

Such thoughts verged on blasphemy, but climbing this scaffolding, smoldering cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, with no one near and with his God lying dead in starlight beyond the realm of man, Abelard allowed himself to wonder.

What had Kos been like, when Seril lived? God withheld the full force of his love these days, the old monks said, for fear He might burn the world to a cinder. Abelard had felt Lord Kos’s flame lap gently against his own mortal soul, but had He kept a part of Himself back even then? Could Seril’s presence have let Kos draw even closer to His people? If She still lived, would He have died?

The narrow cleft Abelard had been climbing opened; he stepped from the scaffold onto a vast plane of black rock, the ceiling of an entire clerical floor below, and found himself swaddled in darkness profound as the abyss. The air was chill as winter night, and there were no lamps. Light was heat, and this room was sacred to the deadly cold.

The chamber was three stories tall and nearly as broad as the Sanctum itself. Pylons thick and thin bridged the gap from floor to ceiling: staircases, people movers, large lifts for freight or groups of supplicants, all swaddled in layers of insulation to keep warm outside air from polluting the chill emptiness.

Abelard swept the narrow beam of his bull’s-eye lantern through the black.

Suspended from the vaulted ceiling and the rough stone walls by thick chains hung the immense, entwined double toroid of the central coolant tank. Black slick metal, it drank the beam of his lantern.

He wished he had Tara’s sensitivity to the Craft, for the central coolant tank was not a product of mortal engineering. Its inner workings were a mystery to even the most diligent and faithful of Kos’s priests. They knew the black box consumed heat and fed it to Justice by an unseen mechanism, powering Blacksuits throughout the city. That was all. It lay like an open wound in the center of Abelard’s mind, an affront to the laws of the universe.