“The basics.” Judge Cabot is dead, she wanted to shout at Ms. Kevarian across the room. Someone’s trying to kill us. Business can wait.
But of course it couldn’t.
Cardinal Gustave stood in a creaking of leather. He was a battered edifice, deep lines on his face and dark circles under his eyes. She recognized the look; the events of the few days had worn joy and certainty from him, like a flood scouring away topsoil to reveal the bedrock beneath. “What do you know, Ms. Abernathy,” he said, “about the death of gods?”
*
Tara knew quite a lot, actually. Her grasp of the underlying theory was probably more profound than Cardinal Gustave’s, but she did not interrupt the lecture that followed. The Cardinal looked to have frayed without the fire of his Lord to shelter him. He was desperate, and lecturing Lady Kevarian’s junior associate (and whence that title “Lady” anyway?) was a chance to establish his knowledge and authority.
“Gods, like humans,” he said, “are order imposed on chaos. With humans, the imposition is easy to see. Millions of cells, long twisted chains of atoms, so much bone and blood and juice, every piece performing its function. When one of those numberless pumps refuses to beat, when one of those infinitesimal pipes gets blocked, all the pent-up chaos springs forward like a bent sword, and the soul is lost to the physical world unless something catches it first.
“So, too, with gods. Gods live and reproduce much like humans, and, like humans, their higher functions (language, pact-making, careful exercise of power, sentience) developed quite recently on the timescale of eons. In the unrecorded mists of prehistory, when mankind prowled the savannah and the swamps, their gods hunted with them, little more than shadows on a cave wall, the gleam in a hunter’s eye, a mammoth’s death roar, primitive as the men they ruled. As men grew in size, complexity, and might, the gods grew with them.
“Gods, like men, can die. They just die harder, and smite the earth with their passing.”
This was basic stuff. It had formed the theoretical foundation for Maestre Gerhardt’s famous (or infamous, depending on which circles you ran in) treatise Das Thaumas, the work that first theorized, a century and a half ago, that human beings could stop begging for miracles, take the power of the gods into their own hands, and shape the course of destiny.
Gerhardt’s work spread like wildfire through academies and lecture halls around the world; in ten years the shuddering and imprecise research of the former masters of Applied Theology, who became the first adepts of the Craft, laid waste to hundreds of miles of verdant countryside and sparked the jealous gods to war. Cardinal Gustave had been born during the century-long conflict that followed, and raised by an order that cleaved to the old ways and the old gods. Tara’s parents were teenagers during the Siege of Skeld and the Battle of Kath near the God Wars’ end, and fled to the edge of the Badlands to escape the convulsions of their dying nation. Ms. Kevarian, who had lived through most of the story, stood by the window, read her scroll as the Cardinal spoke, and kept her thoughts to herself.
The key difference between gods and men in the manner of their dying was that men possessed only two deep obligations: to the earth, from which came their flesh, and to the stars, from which came their soul. Neither earth nor stars were particularly concerned about the return on their investment. Humans were very good at adding order to the earth, and enlivening the world of the stars with ideas and myth. When a human being died, nobody had a vested interest in keeping her around.
Gods, however, made deals. It was the essence of their power. They accepted a tribe’s sacrifice and in turn protected its hunters from wolves and wild beasts. They received the devotion of their people, and gave back grace. A successful god arranged to receive more than he returned to the world. Thus your power and your people grew together, slowly, from family to tribe, from tribe to city, from city to nation, and so on to infinity.
Nice strategy, but slow. Theologians centuries back had developed a faster method. One god gave of his power to another, or to a group of worshipers, on a promise of repayment in kind, and of more soulstuff than had been initially lent. Gods grew knit to gods, pantheons to pantheons, expecting, and indeed requiring, their services to be returned. Power flowed, and divine might increased beyond measure. There were risks, though. If a goddess owed more than she could support, she might die as easily as a human who shed too much blood.
When a goddess neared death, the needs of her faithful, and of those to whom she was bound in contract, stuck like hooks in her soul. She could not desert her obligations, nor honor them and remain intact. The tension tore her mind to shreds of ectoplasm, leaving behind a body of inchoate divine power that a competent Craftswoman could reassemble into something that looked and functioned like the old goddess. But …
Well. Much like Tara’s revenants back at Edgemont, a being once resurrected was never quite the same.
*
“How did he die?” Tara asked.
Cardinal Gustave frowned. “I defer to Lady Kevarian’s judgment here.”
“It appears,” Ms. Kevarian said, setting down her scroll, “that as Novice Abelard undertook his routine prostrations two days ago, a complex set of agreements fell due. Kos”—Abelard flinched at the casual tone with which she said his deity’s name—“was unable to satisfy these agreements, and unable to back out of his pacts. The strain seems to have killed him.”
“Seems?” Cardinal Gustave asked.
“Seems.”
“What else could have happened?”
Ms. Kevarian clasped her hands behind her back. “Ms. Abernathy, please list some of the other possibilities for our friends.”
“Kos’s willing abandonment of his responsibilities. Some fundamental inconsistency in his pacts with the city. A mass crisis of faith.” She took a breath there, and searched Ms. Kevarian’s face for some sign of approval, no matter how vanishingly swift. Nothing.
“Not to mention,” Ms. Kevarian said, “death in battle. As happened with Seril.”
The Cardinal’s face was firm, fixed, and ashen.
“We must rule out other options in the early stages of the process and assemble our case before the adversary asserts his claim.”
“Adversary?” Poor Abelard. He sounded like he wanted nothing more than to return to his engines and pipes and altars.
Ms. Kevarian let the question hang. Cardinal Gustave stared out the window into the overcast sky. Tara’s turn, apparently. “The Church is not the only group interested in Kos’s revivification. Your god was one of the last in the New World, and his influence extended around the globe. The pantheons of Iskar draw power from him. His flame drives oceangoing vessels, heats the sprawling metropolises in Koschei’s realm, lights the caverns of King Clock. Gods who wish to deal with Deathless Kings pass their power through Kos to do so, and Deathless Kings who deal with gods do the same. People around the world are invested in his survival. When these groups realize Kos is no longer alive to honor his agreements, they will choose a representative and send him here, to ensure Kos’s pacts are fulfilled. If the representative discovers something we didn’t know, some sign, say, that the Church made unwise bargains in Kos’s name, he’ll use that to gain more control over your god’s resurrection.”
Abelard’s expression clouded as she spoke. Cardinal Gustave stood with his back to her, and it was impossible to see his face. His shoulders were squared off ready to resist a terrible wind.
“We should begin work as soon as possible,” Ms. Kevarian said. “Ms. Abernathy and I require a staff, until the rest of our firm’s complement arrives.”
“Whatever you need,” Gustave replied.
“Security is of the essence. We must keep the number of people involved to a minimum. Perhaps you could loan us Abelard?”