“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“The air out here feels too cold, and I haven’t been … healthy. Lately.”
“You might try quitting.” She nodded at his cigarette.
He let his head loll back to the sky, and his eyes drifted closed, as if he was waiting for rain. None fell, and he opened his eyes again. “I started when I joined the priesthood. A sign of my devotion. I won’t stop now.”
“You’re talking about—”
He shot her a look, but she’d already checked her tongue.
“How many people know about our problem?” she asked instead.
“As few as possible. Technical staff, mostly. The higher-ups. We’ve put it about that the Holy One is contemplating His own perfection, and must not be bothered by mortal concerns.”
“How long will that hold?”
He started up the stairs. “We’ve wasted too much time already.”
The tower’s twenty-foot-tall main doors were opened on feast days alone, Abelard explained as he led Tara to a smaller side entrance. “Takes too much time. You know, to move these monsters you need about fifty monks hauling on each door.” He patted one of his branch-thin arms. “We’re not the heartiest people around.”
“You can’t get Kos to give a push?”
“Of course not. It’d be disrespectful on a feast day. Plus, we wouldn’t get to see the Cardinals fall over when the doors finally budge. I think Kos finds it as funny as the rest of us.” He looked as if he was about to say more, but pain contorted his features, and he fell silent.
The Sanctum’s foyer loomed over them in the shadows. Somehow the single room, with its vaulted ceilings and tall windows, seemed vaster from within than the whole tower appeared from without. Flames of stained glass rose on all sides, and a hundred yards away the golden fires of the nave flickered in the half-light. A pair of initiates in bright red robes swept the otherwise empty hall.
“Nobody comes here during the workday.” Abelard indicated the whole room by swinging one forefinger in a quick circle through the air. The hem of his robe flared out around his bony ankles. “Bread and circuses, strictly.”
“Expensive bread.”
“You have no idea.”
A sharp left brought them up against a metal lattice worked to resemble a thick growth of ivy. Abelard placed his hand upon the lattice, and the vines parted with a slow clank of gears. He ducked his head low to pass through. Tara just walked.
More abrupt turns, more shadowy doors, and a rap on a carefully chosen brick in what appeared to be a solid wall, which swung open on a hidden hinge to reveal a long winding stair. As they climbed, occasional shafts of light broke the darkness, concealed peepholes peering into meeting rooms and conference chambers: here a break room where tired priests stood waiting for a tea kettle to boil, there a chamber at least the size of the Sanctum’s front worship hall and crowded with pipes, cams, pistons, and gears upon gears, here a tiny room half-glimpsed, where Craft circles glowing blue surrounded a modest wooden altar. She saw these things in eye blinks, shadows on a cave wall as they climbed.
“You said you were a novice Technician. Which means you, what, clean the steam pipes?”
His barking laugh echoed through the stairwell. “We have cleaners for that. Repairmen and machinists. A Technician oversees the Divine Throne, the heart of the city. We design, improve, optimize the devices that keep this place running. Not me, yet, though. I was only promoted to Technician a few months back.”
“You’re low on the totem pole?”
“As low as a Technician gets. The king of the backed-up burners, that’s me, archdeacon of scut work. I’m learning, though. Or, I was learning.” He paused, searching the featureless wall for something, and in that pause Tara caught up with him.
“Did they bring you in on this for training? So you’ll know what to do if there’s ever a problem like this in the future, when you’re in charge?”
Abelard faced her. His eyes were dead as a charred forest. “I was the one watching the Throne when God died.”
He pressed a hidden catch, and the wall opened smoothly on hidden gears.
After her steady climb through darkness, the well-lit office was blinding. Pale wood panels everywhere, a couple leather chairs, and a large desk of polished oak. A glass bookcase stood against one wall, though few of its shelves contained actual books or codices, the lion’s share of space reserved instead for sacred icons, trophies, ceremonial plaques. An aerial picture of Alt Coulumb hung beside it, for comparison, Tara supposed, with the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
The city stretched there, a teeming metropolis beneath slate-gray skies, beating heart of commerce, bridge between the god-benighted Old World and the Deathless Kingdoms of the West. Millions breathed, worked, prayed, copulated in those palaces, parks, and tenements, sure in the knowledge that Kos Everburning watched over them. If their faith was strong, they could feel the constant presence of his love, sustaining and aiding them in a thousand ways, breaking fevers and checking accidents and powering their city.
Millions of people, unaware that Kos’s ever-beating heart had been still for days.
Ms. Kevarian stood by the window, engaged in low, earnest conversation with a senior priest Tara assumed to be their client. He sat behind the oak desk, clad in deep red robes and his own authority. Physically, he was unremarkable, silver-haired and thin with age, but his posture suggested that he often spoke while others listened. Never before had Tara seen someone with such presence who was not a Craftsman.
But Kos’s death must have strained him beyond endurance. His shoulders bent as if they bore a heavy weight, and his face looked drawn and robbed of sleep. Accustomed to power, he was scrambling for purchase on events beyond his control.
Abelard announced her. “Technical Cardinal Gustave, Lady Kevarian, this is Tara Abernathy.” He closed his eyes, opened them again, shifted his feet. “I, uh, assume. She never showed me any identification.”
Ms. Kevarian’s expression darkened, but before she said anything Cardinal Gustave extended a firm, reassuring hand. He had a preacher’s deep voice, quiet at the moment, though Tara did not doubt it could fill a cathedral. “Novice Abelard must have recognized Ms. Abernathy from your description. He’s usually prudent, but the current … situation has shaken him, as it has shaken us all.”
“I’m sorry.” Abelard bowed his head, and with shaking fingers raised his cigarette to his lips. Finding it nearly exhausted, he dug frantically into the pockets of his robe for a fresh pack. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it does not,” Ms. Kevarian said. “If we are to succeed in this case, we must control the flow of information. The future of your faith depends on your ability to keep secrets.”
Abelard froze, and Tara felt a spark of pity for him. He was terrified to the brink of endurance by his god’s death, and neither Ms. Kevarian nor his own boss were being much help.
So she lied. “He checked my name. I should have remembered to show him some ID. Security only works if both sides are on board, after all.”
Gratitude beamed from Abelard’s face as he produced a new cigarette and lit it from the embers of the old. Ms. Kevarian’s gaze flicked from Abelard, to the cigarette, and back. She watched and weighed him for a silent moment before continuing the introductions. “Tara, meet His Excellency Cardinal Gustave. He contacted Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao via nightmare courier two days ago.”
“A pleasure, Your Excellency,” Tara said with a slight bow. “Happy to serve.”
“You may,” Cardinal Gustave said, “address me as Cardinal, or Father. Anything more presumes that, at the end of this process, I will still have a Church to lead.” He laughed without a trace of humor. “Have Lady Kevarian and Novice Abelard told you the basics?”