“Does all this walking serve a purpose?” he asked after a while.
“I’m inspecting the body,” she replied. “God-meat decays like the human variety. Small dark things, neither god nor man, sneak in and chew at it. Spiritual lampreys: ghosts, half-formed concepts that might become the seeds of new deities. We can tell from the damage they inflict on the flesh how long a god has been dead. Other signs indicate the cause of death.”
“What do you see?”
“Some confusing things.”
“For example?”
“For example.” She let out a rush of breath that fell over the quiet corpse-scape like a heavy robe on a cold floor. “We’ve passed pools of ichor—divine blood, divine power. Little ones, consistent with a god who died recently. The maggots have dined, but not much. There are more wounds than there should be, though, and they’re distributed, where they should cluster. Scavengers are drawn to weak points in the body’s defenses. Then there’s the flesh itself. Perhaps you’ve noticed.”
“It’s cold, and hard.”
“Where it should be warm, yes?”
“If He were alive.” Abelard shuddered when he said the last word.
Poor kid. “The heat of gods fades slowly. He should still feel lukewarm, at least. Also, there’s not enough blood.”
“What?”
“A body with much blood in it doesn’t remain firm for long. The blood—the power—attracts pests that accelerate decay. This has not happened with Kos. Your deity had much of his blood removed before he died. The drain wasn’t sudden, or the skin would be more discolored. His power faded slowly, over time.” She looked up. “Do you know what might have caused this?”
Abelard shook his head, mute.
“Has there been anything strange about Kos’s behavior in the last few months?”
“Not really. He’s been strong as ever.” He faltered, as if wondering whether to continue. She didn’t wait for him to make up his mind.
“Save for what?”
“Save … He has been slow to respond to my prayers for the last few weeks. He always came, but it sometimes took half an hour or longer to attract His attention.” Abelard’s gaze fell to the ground beneath his feet. “On the night He died, I thought he was ignoring me. Perhaps He found me unworthy. Perhaps I was.”
“Did other people have this problem?”
He shifted from foot to foot, unwilling to face her. “The Everburning Lord doesn’t often respond directly to prayer. Even the most faithful may receive little more than a moment of His grace. Once in a while, maybe a couple words from Him.”
“Don’t priests get a direct line?”
“There’s a range of faith in the priesthood, as in the laity, but the Technicians of the Divine Throne, who oversee the patch between the Everburning and the city grid, we meet God whenever we come to our post. Or we should.”
“If you had a problem, others might have as well. Did you mention it to anyone?”
“To Cardinal Gustave, when we spoke this morning.”
“You didn’t report anything before his … before two nights ago? Didn’t ask for help?”
“No.” Abelard exhaled smoke. His eyes were red.
“Why not?”
“Would you run to Lady Kevarian at the first sign of trouble, if this investigation grew difficult?”
She didn’t answer.
“I’m the youngest Technician in the office,” Abelard said. His voice was quiet, and his quietness cut her. “Positions open up once every few years. I barely made it this time around. If I let on I had trouble speaking with our Lord, what do you think would happen? There are scores of people hungry for my place.” His narrow shoulders slumped, as if he was melting beneath the folds of his robe.
“The others might have kept silent as well.”
“I heard them talking. Maybe they hid their problems, as I did, but Cardinal Gustave sounded surprised when I told him. It was just me.”
She reached out and gripped his frail, thin arm. He didn’t pull away.
No wind blew in this space beyond the world. Not even the sound of their heartbeats intruded on the silence. “I thought,” he said at last, “that if I helped you, I might be able to deal with His death. Find some meaning in it.”
“My boss and I aren’t in the meaning business,” Tara replied. “I’m sorry.”
“I know.” Abelard did not look up from the god at his feet. “But what am I supposed to do? My faith was weak before. Without my Lord, what’s left?”
Millions of people live without gods, she wanted to say. They live good lives. They love, and they laugh, and they don’t miss churches and bells and sacrifice. She weighed all the words that leapt to mind, and found them wanting. “I don’t know.”
He nodded.
“I’d still like your help.” Silence. “What would he want you to do?” She pointed to the body at their feet.
Abelard sagged. “He’d want me to help—help Him, help the city, help the world. I want to. Helping is the only way I have left to honor Him. But I don’t know how.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do.”
“We’re like insects here. Less than insects. How can we make a difference?”
“Maybe the problem isn’t as big as you think. Maybe we’re trying to see it from too close. Want to get a better view?”
He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. When he looked up, they were dry. “What do you mean?”
She glanced up. He followed her gaze into the black.
“You can fly?”
“Not outside. It takes too much power for me, even if flight weren’t interdicted in your city. But this is a shared hallucination. We can do anything here, as long as it doesn’t change the truth behind the picture.”
She raised her hand.
There was no sensation of movement, because they were not truly flying. Gravity broke, and they ascended.
As they rose, Kos shrank. At first, the slopes and valleys of his ribs and the swells of his oblique muscles filled Tara’s field of vision. Then she saw his whole chest at once, sculpted and magnificent. The stomach she saw next, and for the first time she detected edges to the universe of him, an endless gulf separating the peninsulas of his arms from the plateau of his mighty chest. His face glowed softly, its features almost but not quite those of a man. They shifted as she watched, now blurred and unfocused, now clear and distant as the tiny upside-down image in a magnifying glass. A single detail remained constant: the corners of his mouth quirked into a knowing smile, the smile of one who had seen the earth as a distant blue marble, one who swam in the liquid flames of the sun.
I’ve seen the world from a distance, too, Tara thought, full of awe and ambition. Someday I’ll match you stroke for stroke.
“Those wounds,” Abelard said, pointing down. “Those are from the creatures you mentioned earlier? The maggots, the ghosts?”
“Yes.” Though they had been large as lakes when Tara and Abelard walked beside them, they were barely visible from this height. Little gouges, as if someone had taken a chisel to Kos’s flesh. “But those…” She indicated large round gaps in the god’s arm and leg and throat and chest, punctures from which no blood issued. “Those aren’t wounds.”
“They look awfully woundlike,” Abelard said.
“A defect of the system. You see there’s no blood around their edges, no sign of forced entry.” He blanched and wavered, but seemed to be handling this part well enough. “They’re patch points. When a god makes deals with other people, deities, or Craftsmen, they borrow his power, his blood, through those holes. Out when it’s paid out, and in when it returns, increased by the terms of the contract.” She frowned. “Here, it’s easier to see this way.”
She turned her hand, and glowing conduits of power coalesced about the gaping patch points. Blood coursed up half of them, tinted red, sluggish and reluctant, drawn by contracts stronger than iron now that it was no longer sent forth in a free rush by the ceaseless pulse of Kos’s divine will. Down the other conduits, blue-tinted blood returned, swift and pure.