“It’s fine.” Tara knew from his tone of voice that “it” was not fine, but Abelard didn’t press the issue. They walked on between walls of dead words. “You seem very … confident around all this stuff for someone so young.”
She pondered that as she scanned the labeled stacks of scrolls. Old World contracts, A through Adelmo. Good. The in-house Craftsmen followed standard filing practices. “I studied hard at school. If I ever take you up on your invitation to the furnaces, I’ll probably feel the same way when you talk about them.”
“I don’t know. There’s a lot less death and war in furnaces.”
“Ironically, right?” No response. “I mean, because of all the fire, and the flame, and the pressure.” She stopped trying. They were close.
“How many times,” he asked, “have you raised a god from the dead?”
“Ms. Kevarian has been a partner with Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao for thirty years. She’s handled a dozen cases this large, and at least a hundred smaller ones.”
“Not her. You.”
She let out a breath, closed her eyes, and yearned for the day when she could answer this question without feeling inadequate. “This is my first.”
The hall dead-ended in a circular clearing, from which seven more paths branched out into the stacks. By twisting and turning through the maze of those paths, one could reach any scroll in the archives. A shallow bowl of cold iron rested on the stone floor, precisely in the clearing’s center. “We’re here.”
Abelard drew up short. He looked from shelved scrolls, to Tara, to the bowl, and back to the shelves. Tara waited, and wished she could peek inside his mind without damaging it.
At last, his thoughts resolved into language. He cleared his throat, the ugly human sound echoing amid the books. “I was hoping for, you know, a…” He glanced back at the bowl, and made some vague gestures with his hands. “A desk. Or a chair, at least.”
Tara blinked. “Whatever for?”
“Reading?”
“That’s why we have the bowl.”
“So we put the books … in … the bowl?”
Comprehension dawned. She tried to keep a straight face, because Abelard didn’t deserve further ridicule, but in the end she had to physically stifle a laugh.
“This is some Craft thing, isn’t it?”
“You thought we were going to read this entire room? Tonight?” She walked over to the bowl and tapped it with the toe of her boot. It rang a deeper note than its size and thickness suggested. “Seriously?”
“I didn’t know,” Abelard said, defensive, “that there was another option.”
“Look.” She extended one hand and a scroll floated from the nearest shelf to her palm. Unrolling it, she revealed a carefully drawn list of abbreviated names, dates, figures, and arcane symbols, divided in neat rows and columns and simplified to the third normal form. “Your Craftsmen and Craftswomen told you to format your records this way, right?”
He nodded.
“They also set up the archive? Told your scribes and monks where to store everything, and in what order?”
Another nod.
“Why do you think that was?”
“I don’t know. Someone had to do it.”
Come on, Tara thought. New kid, monastery kid, churchgoer, and engineer. You’ve lived in the dark so long you’ve forgotten that everything has a reason. She beckoned him toward the center of the clearing. “I’m going to show you a trick.”
He hesitated, suddenly aware that he was alone with a woman he barely trusted, a woman who, had they met only a few decades before, would have tried to kill him and destroy the god he served. Tara hated propaganda for this reason. Stories always outlasted their usefulness.
“Give me your arm,” she said.
He shot a terrified glance at the iron bowl. “Hell no.”
“It’s absolutely safe.” Yokel. “Look, I’ll go first, but you need to promise me that after I show you, you’ll do as I tell you immediately.”
“Okay,” he said, uncomprehending.
“Great.” Tara reached beneath her jacket, to the neckline of her blouse, and opened her heart. The shadows about them deepened; her nerves tingled, half as though she were holding something and half as though her palm had gone to sleep. Cold blue light sparked between her fingers. Because she was doing this slowly for his benefit, she felt the aftershock of her knife’s detachment, a tremor in her soul like a caress from everyone who had ever wronged her.
Her expression must have betrayed some hint of pain or grief, but if it had, Abelard was too busy recoiling with fear to notice. The hairs on his arm stood at unquestioning attention.
“Never seen a knife before?” She held the blade before her face. It crackled.
It took him a few tries to find his voice. “I’ve never seen Craft so close.”
“You’ve seen Applied Theology, miracle work, right? This is the same principle, only instead of telling a god what I want, receiving power from him, vaguely directing it and letting him do all the hard parts, I do everything myself.”
“How is that the same? A god is supposed to have that power. You—”
“I’m a Craftswoman.” She knelt by the iron bowl and held out her left arm. “Come closer.” He did. “This will look like it hurts, but it doesn’t really.” Slowly, again for his benefit, she lowered the tip of the knife to her forearm. She chose a nice small capillary flowing near the skin and pricked herself with the blade of moonlight and lightning, cleanly as an old woman ripping open a seam in a worn-out dress.
A scarlet drop of blood swelled from the wound and fell to splash in the iron bowl. She shivered from the pate of her skull to the soles of her feet, as if she had plunged into a lake of metal.
Did Abelard feel the change as her blood sank into the iron, the turning and falling like tumblers in a lock, the sudden tension in the air? Could this boy who spent his life following gods tell when dormant Craft swung into action around him? Or had the color drained from his face merely at the sight of her blood?
When she reached for him, he pulled back.
“You promised,” she said. “It’s only a drop.”
“Your blood is still on that knife!” he shouted over the rush of wind that rose about them without ruffling the slightest leaf of paper. “You’re going to make me sick!”
Of all the things for him to know … “We make the knife out of lightning for a reason.” A sharp tug of building Craft almost pulled Tara from her body, but she resisted with dogged force of will. If Abelard were to help in his god’s resurrection, he needed to see. “You think we’d use the Craft where a pocketknife would manage if we weren’t worried about infection? Give me your damn arm!”
Thin blue lines had spread from her drop of blood up the sides of the iron bowl, and out, like cracks across thin ice. The cracks widened, and through them, Tara saw a fractal mosaic of spheres, big and small. Each held a design in its center: circles, toroids, slits, stars and spirals, and stranger patterns. Eyes, thousands of them, watched her through the cracks.
“Abelard!”
He lurched forward, arm out, as the archives trembled. His cigarette tumbled from his lips toward one of the hungry, ever-widening cracks, but he caught it before it fell through. Tara’s knife flashed, numberless eyes surged against the membrane of the world, and—
Silence.
All she saw was silence. All she heard was a faint, dead scent like fallen leaves in autumn. She tasted night, smelled smooth black marble, and felt ice melting on her tongue.
She had done this sort of thing before, and knew to wait as her senses twisted round again to normal. Abelard was not so fortunate. She would have warned him, she thought as she walked to where he lay collapsed in the dark, if he hadn’t been such a pansy about the blood.