Three Parts Dead (37 page)

Provided nothing untoward happened.

Provided.

“I won’t let what happened to Seril happen to Kos,” Elayne Kevarian had said. Cardinal Gustave would not let such a disaster come to pass either.

“Lord,” he said, praying to a God no longer there to hear, “my life’s work has been to glorify You.” Lantern light cast his face in shadow and flickering flame. “I will set matters right.”

He walked from the altar to the floor-to-ceiling window. As he passed the bas-relief carvings, he tapped a carved monkey’s head on the ear, twisted a soaring falcon twenty degrees counterclockwise, raised a trio of frolicking fish a few inches within their wooden pond, and pulled a lever disguised as a lamp stand. Gears clanked behind metal walls and the window rose, jerkily at first, from its moorings. A rush of wind caught the Cardinal’s thin hair in a silver tangle.

The air rising off the Holy Precinct smelled of fresh-cut grass and urban excess. Far below, the gathered crowd with their lit candles watched the Sanctum and waited for their God to present Himself. They sang old hymns half-remembered from childhood, but even in youth their faith had been weak, and they only remembered traces of the holy words. When the songs could not sustain them they turned to chanting, and occasionally to curses shouted at the black tower. They wanted guidance, and He would guide them, later. At the moment, more important matters commanded His attention.

Northward, an elevated train wound serpentine through the crystal towers of the Deathless Kings. Amid those pinnacles, the Cardinal saw the black pyramid of the Third Court of Craft, and beside it, an edifice of white marble. The Temple of Justice.

Kos might be dead, but His power lived on.

Cardinal Gustave breathed in deep and stepped out of the open window.

Wind buoyed him up, whipping the red robes of his office about his frail form. Divine power sang in his aged veins. A wish could whirl him to far continents, a whim could raise him to the stars and a fancy sink him to the depths of the earth. He laughed, and Kos’s majesty bore him north, away from the Holy Precinct and the desperate crowd.

The window closed behind him. A half hour later, when Theofric sought his Cardinal in the Sanctum Sanctorum, he found only an empty room.

As night deepened, the Business District died. Its workers bled out in a dual current, west to the residential neighborhoods and east to the Pleasure Quarters. Their beds received them, or else the welcoming embrace of pub doors and back-alley dancers; they rested their heads on pillows or the flesh of lovers or the slick countertops of mostly clean, almost well-lighted diners that never closed, even when the night-shift waitress drowsed off at two in the morning and left the patrons to serve themselves from the pot of bitter, bad coffee warming on the slow burner.

Those who sought solace in the city that night found it wanting. Uncertainty took root and flourished even in minds and hearts ignorant of Kos’s death. When tired people sought their lovers or clients, their usual hungry and desperate companions, they found them unable to reassure, cherish, or comfort. They whispered broken sentences to one another, or fought and slept angrily apart, or drank and laughed in the dark, or wandered to the Holy Precinct and joined the candlelit crowd.

A few stragglers remained in their skyscraper offices near the Temple of Justice, sludging toward an illusory finish line. Work weighed them down and tied them to their desks. None rose to look out their windows, so none saw the line of black wagons pull up to the curb beneath the blind, accusatory gaze of the statue of Justice with her sword and scales.

They labored on in ignorance, while around them the world began to change.

Some Blacksuits jogged beside the wagons as they rolled through the vacant streets, while others rode atop them, guarding against escape or rescue. Arriving at their destination, Justice’s servants cordoned off the street, creating a gauntlet that led up the broad white steps and into the Temple’s inner chambers.

A Blacksuit detachment escorted the prisoners from the wagons. Most of the gargoyles went limp from protest, forcing Justice’s servants to carry their thousand pounds of weight. Tara and Abelard gave their captors no trouble, and were allowed to walk under their own power.

Tara looked at the imposing white marble Temple, fronted with columns and statuary, but did not see it. Her mind raced, reviewing all Abelard had told her on the ride over, about Denovo’s desire to work on this case and his consultation with Cardinal Gustave; about the shadow creature, about the circle of Craft inside the Sanctum, about a crystal dagger with a drop of blood at its heart—the same dagger Cat had taken from him. As Tara weighed these facts against the gargoyles’ story, she felt like a mosaic artist with a box of colored tiles and no plan.

“You can get us out of this, right?” Abelard said around his cigarette.

“I don’t know.”

“That’s encouraging.”

She shook her head. “I can show the gargoyles are innocent, but that tips my hand to Professor Denovo. He’ll have time to prepare a response, and that will hurt the Church’s case.”

“Will a strong case do us any good if we’re in prison?”

“Ms. Kevarian can bail us out.”

“If Justice lets her.”

“I know.” She forced the words out through her clenched teeth. “I’m trying to think.”

They crested the stairs and passed around Justice’s statue, Abelard to the right and Tara to the left. Together, they continued down the gauntlet of Blacksuits through the open Temple doors into shadow.

The main corridor was long and straight. Lanterns hung unlit from iron mounts on polished marble walls. Every few feet stood iron tripods upon which iron braziers rested, their incense fires ebbed to embers. Thin strings of fragrant smoke rose from the piles of ash. The hall ended in a large wooden door, open to reveal a broad chamber and a gigantic statue within. Tara did not deviate from her path or slow, and soon she and Abelard entered the Inner Sanctum of Justice.

She closed her eyes and saw.

Justice was a goddess remade in the image of man. Craft wound through her Sanctum, a great silver web of mind connecting thousands of Blacksuits across Alt Coulumb, but the web was not Justice. She swelled within it unseen, a colossal distortion at the heart of coarse human Craft. Tara saw her in outline, a face pressed against, or trapped beneath, a shroud of silk. She was immense, she was beautiful, and she had no eyes.

Tara opened her own eyes and looked upon the chamber as Abelard did. A glass dome arched forty feet above the unfinished marble floor. At the hall’s far end stood a polished obsidian statue whose head nearly touched that glass; Justice, robed as outside the Temple gates, with her blindfold removed. Her empty eye sockets were pits of broken, glittering stone.

Tiered steps were carved into the chamber’s sloping walls, and on each tier a row of Blacksuits stood single file, heads thrown back to contemplate the statue of their maimed Lady. The enormity of the scene pressed against Tara’s skin, against her soul. Great and terrible work had been accomplished here. She imagined Professor Denovo climbing that statue, chisel in hand, to pry the goddess’s eyes from her face. Her stomach turned, and she tried not to vomit.

When the Guardians saw the statue, they surged against their bonds, raging. Blacksuits struck them and forced them to their knees. Aev fell last.

The doors swung shut behind Tara.

The statue spoke.

*

“I will destroy you,” Elayne Kevarian said.

“Not in the near future, obviously,” Alexander replied, crossing and uncrossing his legs. “You know they don’t let you smoke indoors at the schools these days? I had to quit. Wish I had a cigarette now.”

“You’ve been trying to kill us all along.”

“Have not.”

“Liar.” His grip on her mind blocked the course of her fiercest emotions, and denied her the mental clarity required to work Craft, but she could speak, if she remained civil. He had not made a move against her body after that first kiss, intended as a mere demonstration of his control. This did not make her comfortable with the situation. “You wanted me out of the way.”

“Hardly.”

He peeked out of the coach’s curtains, and Elayne seized on his momentary distraction to test the limits of his control. What she found did not please her. Denovo’s technique had grown subtle down the decades. She could adjust her posture, even gesture in conversation, but dramatic movements were denied her. Standing up, striking him, throwing herself from the carriage, all felt pointless, tiring. Why fight? Her heartbeat quickened.

“Elayne, if I wanted to kill you, you would be dead already.”

She inclined her head, neither agreeing with nor denying his assertion.

“I have not moved against you or your assistant. You simply had the misfortune to wander into my experiment.”

“Your experiment.” She found she could still express scorn. “What is its object, pray tell?”

“What else?” Denovo asked rhetorically. “Immortality, and the benefits customarily thought to accrue to it. Feel this.” Leaning forward, he cupped her cheek in his hand. His fingers were deathly cold, as was proper for a Craftsman of his age. She knew her face felt the same, two statues of ice touching. With a shake of his head he released her and drew back. “Was this what Gerhardt wanted, do you think, when he published
Das Thaumas
? To stretch into eternity, until life becomes nothing but the search for more life? Or did he dream of something greater?”

Elayne, who had never found such questions worthy of meditation, did not reply.

Their carriage drew to a halt amid a jangle of tack and bit and a creaking of wheels. Denovo opened the carriage door, and Elayne saw the marble columns and blind statuary of the Temple of Justice. Leaping to the pavement, he offered her a hand, which she accepted.

“Shall we?”

*

The accused stand before us,
said a voice several octaves too deep and too high at once to be human. Reverberating from the skin of the eyeless statue and the flesh of the rapt Blacksuits alike, it nearly bore Tara to the ground. The gargoyles, whose hearing was more acute than her own, quaked where they knelt.

The accused stand before us, charged with abetting the murder of a Judge of Alt Coulumb.

The air about struggling Shale glowed with corpse-light, casting him in sickly green.

This one is charged with murder.
Above the prisoners, shining motes of dust danced and rearranged themselves into a picture, three-dimensional and vivid: Judge Cabot’s rooftop garden picked out in neon, rotating in empty space. The Judge lay as Tara had found him, dismembered in a pool of his own blood. David let out a choked sound, sobbing or retching. Shale reared over Cabot’s body, blood slick on his stone hands and talons and chest. Tara saw pain in his snarl, but to someone burdened with years of hate, the gargoyle’s expression would look like a roar of bestial triumph.

How do the defendants plead?

This was all wrong. There should be a chance for the accused to present evidence and consider the evidence presented against them before entering a plea. This was no trial. They were at the mercy of an arrogant, crippled goddess.

The bonds about Aev’s mouth slackened. She rose to her feet. The sound of her weight settling on the stone floor echoed through the hall. She looked up at the holes where the statue’s eyes should have been, and spat gravel and dust at its feet. The bonds tightened about her again, but she did not kneel.

The gargoyles would be executed, or worse, for murdering Cabot. Tara remembered Ms. Kevarian’s words as they flew away from Edgemont: “We stay one step ahead of the mob.” Justice might claim she was blind, but she saw through her Blacksuits. She was the mob, given a single voice.

But she believed she was fair. Tara could use that belief to save the gargoyles, and Abelard, and herself.

All she had to do in return was give up her advantage over Denovo. She had no illusions about her chances of defeating him if they were on an even footing. Denovo was the stronger and cannier Craftsman, even without his lab.

What was more important? Assuring her own victory, or protecting these people, whose city had betrayed them and cast them out? Whose own countrymen thought them monsters?

As the defendants have refused to enter a plea, they are subject to confinement—

“No.”

It was a single word, but Tara put all her Craft into it. Justice fell silent. A vast mind settled its attention on her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Abelard hissed.

“Making things up as I go along,” she replied in a harsh whisper. She stepped forward, summoning her composure and her technique and her reserves of voice. “Lady,” she said to Justice, “I enter myself as counselor for the accused, and register a plea of not guilty.”

*

Crimson robes flapped about Cardinal Gustave like a vulture’s wings as he flew toward the Temple of Justice. The sky pressed against him, trying to force him back to earth. He thought of Lady Kevarian’s assurances, and of the demon Denovo, encouraging, pricking, convincing with his teeth bared in mockery of a smile.

The lights of a passing train lit the Cardinal from below. An idle Crier paced the business district, singing listlessly to empty streets. The city had deserted him.

As it had deserted the Church.

Rounding a skyscraper, Cardinal Gustave saw the Doric and gleaming Temple of Justice. Beneath the glass dome of its inner Sanctum, tiny figures moved at the blind goddess’s feet. Even from this height, Gustave could identify Abelard among them, and Lady Kevarian’s apprentice.

He descended, watching.

*

Tara advanced between bowed figures and Abelard followed. As she neared the statue of Justice, a Blacksuit barred her path. Tara recognized Cat, and the crystal dagger in her grip.

Justice spoke again.
What do you intend to prove, Counselor?

“Lady, the accused did not murder Alphonse Cabot. The Judge was assassinated by a third party, who wished to prevent him from serving the god who until three days ago watched over this city and its people. Nor was Judge Cabot the sole victim of assassination in Alt Coulumb this week. There has been one other.