He shook. Tara felt empty and a little ashamed.
“Hey.” She knelt beside him and squeezed his arm. He didn’t look up, and kept shaking. “It’s easier when you realize you can’t throw up, and stop trying.” A bedraggled sound, like the whimper of a drowning dog, rose from the vicinity of his mouth. She assumed it was a question. “You don’t really have a stomach here, is why. It’s not a biological kind of place.”
His shivers stilled. Her hand lingered awkwardly on his shoulder.
The new world lightened around them. Finally, he stirred and sat up, blinking, eyes raw and unfocused. He raised the cigarette to his mouth with a trembling hand.
“It felt…” He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing to be ashamed of. It happens.” She stood slowly so as not to startle him, and extended her hand. He regarded her palm as if it might be a trap, but finally let her pull him to his feet. He swayed like a tree about to topple, yet he did not fall.
In the dim light, he looked past her and saw what lay before him, beneath him, all around him. They were standing on an immense body.
The god’s flesh was black and deep as night. The curvature of his limbs was the subtle and paradoxical curvature of deep space. He swelled in the dark, a pregnancy of form in nothingness.
The body had the usual four limbs, two eyes the size of small moons, a mouth that could swallow a fleet of ships—features that for all their immensity were beautiful, and because of their immensity were terrifying. It was a great and hoary thing ancient of days, a clutch of power that would shatter any mind that tried to grasp it all at once. It was more than man evolved to comprehend, and Tara’s job was to comprehend it.
She bared her teeth in a hungry smile.
“I know Him,” Abelard said, quietly.
“Yes.”
Kos Everburning, Lord of Flame.
His chest was not moving.
6
Elayne Kevarian meditated on the rooftop of the Sanctum of Kos as the sun declined behind its mask of thick clouds. Before her and beneath her, Alt Coulumb hungered for the coming night.
She was levitating two inches above the ground, and would have reprimanded herself had she noticed. Levitation was a reflex of immature Craftsmen. Students floated in air to feel in tune with the universe, but like any other unnatural posture, hovering caused more tension than it relieved—especially in this city, where Kos’s interdict prevented any flight higher than a fist’s breadth above the ground.
Thoughts wandered through the corridors of her mind like phantoms in an old house. Judge Cabot, her best contact in Alt Coulumb, was dead. Murdered with crude Craft designed to throw suspicion onto a third party. Had the gargoyle—the Guardian?—been purposefully framed, or did the killer simply set a trap for whoever might stumble by?
This case lay at the bottom of it all, like a fat and voracious catfish in a muddy river: the Church of Kos, the greatest divine institution left in the West, hub of thaumaturgic trade on this continent, wilting with its divine patron. Elayne didn’t believe incompetence was at fault. Cardinal Gustave made the right noises, and the documents seemed in order. Nor did it seem likely that Kos died of natural causes. Perhaps one of the Church’s far-ranging plans had gone awry. Or else … Treachery.
She tasted that word in her mind, exhaled it with her breath.
If it had been treachery, then the traitors were every bit as aware as the Church that Kos had failed, had fallen. Somewhere, they marshaled their forces.
Tara was a good kid. Smart. She would wrestle something like truth from the archives—truth, that strange monster often pursued but rarely captured. Meanwhile, Elayne watched, laid deep strategy, and prepared.
Soon her opposing number would arrive, a Craftsman chosen to represent the powers to whom Kos was bound by contract and debt. The creditors would select someone respected for age and strength, who had stood trial in dark matters and emerged strong and sure. Someone familiar with Alt Coulumb.
A handful of Craftsmen and Craftswomen in the world fit that description. She knew most of them.
Winds circled within clouds of slate, and the sun was setting. She and Tara had brought the storm with them to the city. Tomorrow, there would be work to do.
*
Abelard paled, and Tara feared he might collapse again. “God?”
She bit her lower lip and tried to think how to explain. “It’s not Kos. Not precisely. What you think of as your god is a manifold of power and information and relationships, deals and bargains and compromises congealed over millennia. For the last century at least, your scribes recorded the Church’s contracts and compromises in this archive. Our blood in the iron bowl triggered dormant Craft that combined information from those thousands upon thousands of scrolls into a three-dimensional image we can navigate, manipulate, and come to understand.” With a gesture she indicated the landscape of the divine corpse.
“He looks dead.”
“He is dead. How did you expect him to look?” She started walking. Abelard followed her, footsteps tender on the god’s marble flesh. “You’re familiar with what’s called a convenient fiction?”
Abelard answered with the flat tone of rote recitation. Good. Retreating to familiar concepts might help him cope. “A convenient fiction is a model used to approximate the behavior of a system. Like engines. Often, a mechanic doesn’t need to worry about compression chambers and heat exchange. He only needs to know that the engine transforms fuel into mechanical force. That description of an engine as a box that turns fuel to movement is a convenient fiction.”
“I’ve never heard that example before,” Tara admitted.
“What example do you use?”
“Reality.”
They skirted the enormous pit of Kos’s navel, broken and lifeless like the landscape of a distant planet.
“You’re saying that this,” Abelard said tentatively, “is not my Lord’s body at all, but a convenient fiction. You think of him as a giant corpse because … because it helps you evaluate him in the context of your black arts.”
“More or less,” she replied. “I’m sure the blueprints and daily logs of your furnaces tell you all sorts of things about your god. This is like a giant blueprint for another facet of him. It’s easier for me to understand than furnaces.” She saw a discoloration in the distance to her left: ichor welling up from within Kos’s body to form a river on his vastness.
When they reached the slick shelf of the god’s ribs, Abelard scampered up like a monkey, moving with a deceptive, jerky grace in his long brown and orange robes. Tara removed her heels and threw them overhand up the slope, pulled off her stockings, and attacked the ledge with fingers and toes. When she reached the top, she was slick with sweat and breathing hard. She couldn’t quite climb the last swell of protruding bone and muscle, and Abelard helped her up, nearly falling himself in the process.
“Where did you learn to climb?” she asked after she recovered her breath and patted her hair back into place.
“The boiler room,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Thousands of pipes, all shapes and sizes, and ladder after ladder. There’s no better place than the Sanctum of Kos to be eleven years old. Though maybe there are better places to be sixteen,” he conceded.
Instead of donning her shoes again, she stuffed her stockings inside them and put them in her purse. The divine flesh was cool beneath her feet. “The Hidden Schools are not a good place to be either eleven or sixteen. Fine place to be twenty-one, though, if twenty-one is something you wanted to be.”
“Nothing fun for kids?”
“Plenty of fun things for kids, but most would kill you if you did them wrong.”
They walked on. Abelard at last surrendered and tapped cigarette ash onto his god’s skin, no doubt repeating to himself that this was a model, not the actual divine corpse.