He pursed his lips, but finally allowed, “Swiftwing I made up. The rest are honorifics.”
“What were you doing in the penthouse?”
“I don’t know.”
She clenched her fist in frustration. “Oh, come on!”
“Do you think it makes me happy, being kept in the dark? Cabot was supposed to give me a package. That’s all I know.”
“Shale, you’re cute, but you’re frustrating.”
“You think I’m cute now, you should see me when I have a real body.”
“How could you possibly not know what you were doing there?”
“I was told the Judge would give me something to bring back to my Flight.”
“Who told you?”
“Aev. Our leader.”
“She didn’t say what the package was? Why she needed to speak with a Judge? Anything like that?”
“I don’t know.”
If she pressed him, he might stop talking entirely, and she needed more information. Move on. “You were supposed to return to your, ah, Flight, after you retrieved this package. Where are they?”
At first she thought he was being reticent, but she realized, from the twitches in his cheeks, that he was trying to shake his head. “I know where my Flight rested yesterday, but they’re long gone by now. We know this city better than anyone. We were born of its stone, and it bears our mark. On the rare occasions when we return, we keep moving from hiding spot to hiding spot so the Blacksuits can’t find us.”
Dammit. “How were you planning to bring them the package?”
“Wasn’t.” His voice was fading. A limitation of face-stealing: the consciousness tired easily when free of the body. “They’ll find me, or I’ll find them. By smell.”
A knock on the door. Tara swore under her breath.
“Ms. Abernathy?”
Factors in this case multiplied too swiftly for her taste. Gargoyles. Abelard. Blacksuits. Foolishness.
“Ms. Abernathy, you rang.” Abelard started to turn the doorknob.
“Wait! Hold on a second. I’m not decent.”
The door paused, already open a crack. “But you rang.”
“Hold on!”
“Trying to keep me a secret?” Shale sneered.
“Shut up,” she whispered.
“What if I call for help?”
“Ms. Abernathy, is there someone else there?”
“Talking to myself,” she said as she raised the hammer.
Fortunately, the setup took less time to dismantle than to assemble. A few pulls with the prying end of the hammer, a slow peel from the wig stand, and Shale’s face was safely back in the book by the time Abelard opened her bedroom door. The young priest stood on the threshold peering into the room as if afraid something within might leap out to dismember him. A fresh cigarette drooped from his lips, and he appeared, if possible, more disheveled than a half hour before.
“Ms. Abernathy?”
“Sorry,” she said, slinging her purse back over her shoulder. “Female troubles. Shall we go?”
*
The Sanctum had been built in the optimistic era before the God Wars reached the New World, when the Church of Kos saw the future as an endless sequence of bright vistas, one opening upon the next. Mad with expansionist dreams, the Church planned its new Sanctum with enough empty space to accommodate a century of growth. Then the war came, and the bright vistas crumbled. To this day, great tracts of the Sanctum remained unoccupied and unknown to the world. Which was to the best, really, because sometimes the Church required spaces that were large, unoccupied, and unknown.
This was the explanation Abelard gave Tara when, after climbing another winding stair three stories up from the guest chambers, they arrived at an otherwise unassuming door, which opened, once Abelard found the proper key, into the largest room she had ever seen. The Hidden Schools’ main quadrangle would have fit inside, easily, along with the east wing of Elder Hall.
The entire room was filled with paper.
Loose sheets of foolscap lay piled by the ream in boxes around the chamber’s edge. Near the center, the boxes gave way to thick piles of scrolls, some in racks, some loose. The dry, comforting aroma of scribe’s ink and parchment filled the dead air.
“It’s a lot of paper,” Abelard admitted. “Lots of scribes, and lots of Craft supporting the scribes. Every deal the Church of Kos ever made, every contract with deity or Deathless King. The founding covenant of Alt Coulumb is here somewhere. Not the original, of course.”
Tara couldn’t resist a low whistle at the sheer quantity of information. She’d seen larger libraries in the Hidden Schools and in the fortresses of Deathless Kings, but most of those held the same sets of dusky tomes. This archive was unique in the world. A bare handful of people knew even a fraction of what was written here, and her job was to learn it all. Her mouth went dry from desire and a little fear.
Abelard preceded her down a narrow alley between piles of paperwork. “It’s crazy that we keep all this stuff, but the Church’s Craftsmen insist. They don’t know anything about engines or steam or fire but to hear them talk you’d think they knew the Church better than Kos’s own priests.”
“It’s beautiful.” The words slipped from her mouth, but once they were out she couldn’t find fault with them. Abelard fixed her with a confused expression.
“Beautiful?”
“There’s so much. You really kept everything.” Spreading her arms wide, she walked down the alley, running her fingers over dusty boxes and the polished wood rollers of professional-grade scrolls. Secrets pulsed within, eager to escape.
“Impressive, sure. I don’t know about beautiful.” Abelard followed her. “You want to see beautiful, I’ll take you down to the furnaces sometime. Not an ounce of steel wasted. Kos’s glory runs through every pipe, shines from each bearing and gauge. They are the heart of the city, and the center of the Church.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said, unable to think of anything nice to say about a furnace however efficient it might be. “But furnaces aren’t relevant to this case. Everything we need to know about Kos is here.”
“These are just glorified receipts. Lists of goods bought and sold.” From his mouth those words sounded small and petty. “Shouldn’t you try to understand who He was before you look at His accounts?”
Tara let the archive’s silence swallow his words, and wished that the Hidden Schools had taught her how to work with clients. Her textbooks mentioned the subject in a sidebar, if at all, before they moved on to important technical concerns like the Rule Against Perpetuities or the seven orthodox uses of the spleen. “These papers,” she said at last, “will show us how Kos died, and what we need to do to bring him back. That’s my main concern. Faith and glory are more your line of work.”
Abelard did not reply, and Tara walked on, knowing she hadn’t said the right thing, and mystified as to what the right thing would have been. She almost sagged with relief when Abelard spoke again, however tentatively. “Your boss, Lady Kevarian, said that the, ah, problem, happened because of an imbalance.”
Had Tara been a god-worshiper, she would have given thanks for a chance to return their conversation to technical matters. “She’s making an educated guess based on what your Cardinal told her, but it’s too general to be much use.”
“What do you think happened?” Abelard gazed up at the vaulted ceiling.
“Me?” She shrugged. “I don’t know more than Ms. Kevarian does. Some kind of imbalance almost has to happen for a god as big as Kos to die. If he expends much more energy than he reaps from his believers’ faith and supplication, poof. We’re here to learn specifics: what drew Kos’s power away, and why.”
“That’s how you kill gods?” Abelard’s voice had gone hollow, but she didn’t notice.
“Sort of. That’s how gods kill themselves. If you want to kill one, you need to make it expend itself trying to destroy you, or trick it somehow.…” She trailed off, hearing his silence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I know this is a sensitive subject.”