“The red tubes send his power out into the world, and the blue tubes bring it back. More blood is going out than returning. You can see, even maintaining the current contracts costs your Church by draining away the little innate power that would defend Kos’s body against the maggots.”
“And you’ll what, fix it so Kos brings in more than He sends out? Restart His heart? Make Him live again?”
She considered lying. Abelard hadn’t asked for any of this. He wanted to be reassured, wanted to hear that yes, within a few weeks the madness would be over and Kos whole.
She considered it.
“The Craft doesn’t work that way,” she said.
He didn’t respond.
“We can make something from this body that will honor Kos’s obligations, but we will have to cut out other parts of him. Alt Coulumb will be warm this winter, and the trains will run on time. Gods and Craftsmen throughout the world will continue to draw on the power of Alt Coulumb’s fire-god, but the entity you call Kos is gone.”
“What will be different?”
She tried to think of something encouraging to tell him, but failed. “It sounds like Kos was a hands-on deity. Knew the people of Alt Coulumb by name. That will change. He used to visit your dreams, in the long nights of your soul. I imagine the faithful felt his radiance throughout the city. No more. Even his voice won’t be the same.”
“But we’ll have heat, and trains.”
“Yes.” Don’t sneer at heat and power and transportation, she wanted to say. Hundreds of thousands in this city would die without them even before the winter, from riots and looting, pestilence and war.
She kept silent.
“There’s no other way?”
“What would you propose?” she asked.
“Surely some of my Lord’s people loved Him more than they needed His gifts. Couldn’t that love call Him back to life?”
“Maybe.” She chose her words carefully. “He could take refuge in their love to escape his obligations. Consciousness is a higher order function, though. A god requires the faith of around a thousand followers before displaying rudimentary intelligence, and that’s if those followers ask nothing in return for their love. If a heavily contracted god, like Kos, tried to do what you describe, he would be barely alive, and in constant, excruciating pain from the contracts that tore at him. If you asked him, he would probably rather die.”
“It sounds horrible.”
“It is.”
He said nothing for a while, and neither did she. There was no sound but their breath.
“He loved this city, you know. Loved His people, and the world.”
“Yes,” Tara said. She didn’t know if this was true, but she didn’t care. Abelard did.
He tapped ash from his cigarette and it floated down the miles below. “How do I help?”
She removed a pad of paper and a quill pen with a silver nib from her purse, and handed them to him. “Start by taking notes.”
*
Somewhere, there was a bright room in a high tower, with windows that opened on a field of mist. Other towers rose from the mist, too, forming a forest in the sky beneath a moon that burnt the world silver.
The sun had set, and night was come. Within the bright room, people were hard at work. A young woman bent over a laboratory bench, making careful incisions in a cadaver. Next to her, a jowly older man scanned tables of densely written figures. At a chalkboard in the corner, two students reviewed an equation from an obscure branch of thaumaturgy. Conversation, when it occurred, was hushed. Each individual diligently pursued their portion of the project at hand. It was a laboratory among laboratories, a perfect, organized system.
As the pretty young vivisectionist inhaled so, too, did the thaumaturgy scholars at the blackboard; when she exhaled, so did the man with his tables. Chalk left white lines on slate as the scalpel parted skin and fat. Sluggish blood flowed. The supervising student at the window sipped his tea and swallowed. A foot came down in one corner of the room and a hand was raised in another. Whispered questions received muted answers. Students relinquished equipment precisely when their successors required it.
The Professor strode through the laboratory, breathing in time with the rest—or they breathed in time with him. His light steps on the worn checkerboard floor were the taps of the primum mobile on a wheel that moved their world. The beats of his heart drove blood in their veins.
He held a clipboard and a pencil. Once in a while, in his ceaseless circuit, he made a note, erased an older mark, modified a sum, or sliced out a sentence. The work of ages lingered on that clipboard, and many were the men and women who would have killed for its contents.
His eyes lingered on the vivisectionist’s legs as he passed her table. They were well curved beneath the hem of her lab coat. Supple. And her work was exact.
Pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of the flesh. Unimportant compared with the keen joy of the mind.
He moved to the window where the supervising student waited. The Professor tilted his head back to regard his own image in the window glass: round, high brow, bushy brown beard, pince-nez glasses perched on a broad nose. Reflected in his orbit was the world of his lab.
He closed his eyes, and saw the ties that bound.
He knew the student next to him was about to say something, and prepared his answer as he waited for the words. “You received a letter, Professor. They want you in Alt Coulumb.”
He listened to the music of his world, to gentle footfalls, to the murmured symphony of conversation and the slick passage of blade and needle through dead human meat, to the splash of fluid in glass bowls and the flow of blood. Always, he listened to the flow of blood. He thought about the vivisectionist’s legs.
He accepted the letter, examined the lead seal, and broke it with a narrowing of his eyes that cut through the dull metal like a hot razor. Removing the folded creamy paper within the envelope, he held it up to the light and read.
“Well,” he said at the proper moment. “Tomorrow morning I descend.”
The clouds beneath them were a field of black, and the moon shone down.
*
Tara approached the last of the blue-tinted conduits, and measured its girth with a piece of knotted string. As the string drew taut, glyphs appeared on the conduit’s surface in silver spiderweb script. “This is the return from the Iskari Defense Ministry’s Naval Division, which amounts to principal plus ten percent guaranteed over rate of inflation, accounted monthly, priority secured, drawn off the stomach chakra.”
“That’s not usual, right?” Abelard had mostly filled Tara’s notepad with sketches and figures. He possessed an excellent draftsman’s hand, far more exact than Tara’s own. As they worked, he had asked a slow but constant stream of questions, trying to learn enough about their task to help rather than merely assist. The questions kept Tara focused, at least. Document review, even for so momentous a case as this, even with your career on the line, was always a chore. “Most of the patches so far have drawn off the arms, or the legs, not the chakras themselves.”
“It’s not usual. Nor is it especially unusual.” She double-checked the glyphs to ensure she had read them correctly. “Different circumstances call for different contracts. The Is’De’Min is a grotesque, many-tentacled entity ruling over a population of millions, challenged to the south by Deathless Kings, to the north by Camlaan, and to the east by Koschei. This contract is earmarked for use in their own defense. If they rely on Kos for firepower, they have to be able to call upon it at a moment’s notice, no matter what. The contract is dangerous for Kos because the power leaves him at such a fundamental level, but it nets him a high rate of return, absolutely guaranteed.”