“I see. This is a likely culprit, then.” He made a check mark.
“What do you mean by that?”
Abelard hesitated, but at last he answered, in a determined voice without stammer or flinch: “It was probably what killed Him. You said the chakras move up from basic life functions to the most advanced—tailbone, groin, stomach, heart, throat, forehead, crown. This is the farthest south any of the deals have gone. If there was a draw here at the wrong time, it might have taken too much power, and the rest of Him shut down.”
“Couldn’t have happened. It’s too small a contract.”
Abelard regarded the blue conduit and its red mate skeptically. Each was thick around as an old redwood tree.
“Too small to do that kind of damage, I mean,” Tara said. “It looks large to us, but compared with the rest of the body? Have some respect for your god and your Church. They would never let anyone patch in this far down if there was a chance they might kill the system.”
“Kos.”
“Excuse me?”
“At least call Him Kos, please. When you say it like that, ‘your god,’ ‘the system’…”
“Sorry. But my point stands.”
“I thought you said Kos was weak.”
“Weaker than he should have been, yes, but not that weak.”
Abelard made a note. Even the angle of the cigarette in his mouth suggested doubt.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I’ll show you.” She untied her string from the conduit and pulled back, skidding and turning on nothingness until she drew even with Abelard.
“What now?” he asked.
“I’m going to turn back time.”
She began before he could protest or ask for clarification.
It was an illusion, of course, but an impressive one. Every record in the Sanctum’s archive bore a date and a time stamp. Tara could manipulate the Craft that modeled dead Kos to show his body from minutes, hours, weeks ago. When she raised her hand, time flowed backward.
Blood and ichor rushed in reverse down the conduits that pierced Abelard’s god. The festering sores and decayed pits on his skin shrank and closed without scabbing over; horrible hungry things writhed in the darkness, their inverted drones taunting and tearing at the strings of Tara’s mind. The body swelled beneath them, grew supple. Light streamed from the flesh, and especially from the heart, an unconscious, vital flow of grace from the god to his mortal servants. When time wound back to the third day, Tara felt rather than heard a great pounding, like distant explosions echoing over a desert. The backbeat of the universe.
His heartbeat.
It battered her soul, demanding worship. Awe quickened at the base of her spine.
You, she thought to it, are an echo. A spirit grown fat trading on its own majesty. I’ll be damned if I let you see me yield.
She summoned ice to her mind, endless fields of it, cool starlight and the black between the stars that human minds stitched together into meaning and Craft. There is no difference between us, she shouted into the vortex of that heartbeat. I cast you out, and stand unassisted.
Her knees wanted to bend.
She closed her fingers, and the whirl of time ceased. “We’re close to the night of your watch, moving forward at thirty times normal speed.”
Abelard had clapped his hands to his ears. Rapture shone from his face. Useless, but at least he was watching.
“See how smoothly the blood flows? And the light, of course, and the heartbeat.”
“What?” he shouted over the noise.
“The heartbeat!”
“What?”
She was about to try again, when the conduits that tied Kos to the shambling horror of the Iskari Defense Ministry erupted with brilliant light. Enough power flowed through those contracts to collapse the walls of a city, to sink a fleet or tear a dragon limb from limb in flight. The light rendered Kos’s body in harsh monochrome, and faded as fast as it had burst upon the dark.
When it faded, the heartbeat was gone.
“Amazing,” Abelard said, his voice faint and reverent. Then, “It looks like the Iskari contract was a factor to me.”
Tara’s cheeks flushed. She took a deep breath, and another.
“That can’t be it,” she said at last.
“Sudden burst of light, and nothing. What more do you need?”
She rolled time back again, to the peak of the Iskari contract’s brilliance. Her calculations had been perfect. Well, not perfect perhaps, but good enough. The contract was too small to destroy Kos, yet there it shone, glorious, and seconds later, the god died.
“That’s strange.” She rolled back time at one-twentieth speed. The Iskari contract flared, faded, died, alone. “Very strange.”
“An ‘I’m sorry I shot down your idea’ would be nice.”
“No other contract even flickers. And the Iskari didn’t draw any more than their pact allowed.”
Abelard looked from Tara, to his God, and back. “So?”
“I’m sorry I shot down your idea. It looks like you were right—the Iskari pact dealt Kos his dying blow. There was no other significant draw on Kos at that time. But I was right, too; the Iskari didn’t drain enough power to hurt your god if he was as strong as the Church records show. He must have been weaker. Much weaker. To die from the Iskari pact, Kos must have been half the strength your people thought, maybe less.”
Abelard shook his head. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know yet, but it’s great for us. The Church didn’t know Kos was weak, so the Iskari pact wasn’t negligent, which means we keep more control over Kos’s resurrection. Now, all we need to do is figure out what happened in Iskar.”
“Aren’t we going to look for the source of His weakness?”
“Of course, but that information isn’t here. The problem’s deeper than your Church. Tomorrow, we’ll dive into raw Craft, and find where Kos’s power went. For now, Iskar is our best lead.”
“We know what they drew, and when. What more do we need?”
“We need to know why. The Iskari made that pact for self-defense, but I haven’t heard any news of war from Iskar or the Old World. If your god died because the Iskari abused their pact, we gain ground on his creditors, and even more control over the case. We might be able to bring some of the old Kos back after all.”
She released her grip on the visualization. The world around her blurred, cracked, inverted. This time, at least, Abelard didn’t scream.
When the cosmos righted itself, they stood flanking the iron bowl in the center of the archives, surrounded by scrolls. A faint odor of iron and salt lingered in the air, the smell of steam from boiled blood. The room was darker than before, but more familiar, too. Abelard clasped the notebook to his chest. His skin was slick with sweat and his eyes were wide from the transition, but he’d get used to this stuff in time. Already he looked more confident than when he had met her on the Sanctum’s front steps.
She pulled her watch from her jacket pocket and checked its skeleton hands. Eight in the evening. Not bad.
“Where can I find a newspaper in this town?”
Abelard’s expression was blank. “A what?”
7
Shale floated in a pit of night, encircled by cords of lightning. He sought within himself for the fire of rage and found nothing, sought too for the quickened shivering breath of fear and was no more successful. It was as if he had reached down to the fork of his legs and felt there undifferentiated flesh, smooth and polished as a wood floor.
Of course, he had no hands with which to reach down, no legs, nor anything at their fork. The girl had taken all that from him and left him in this prison, where a thousand blankets piled atop his mind and every thought came with slow deliberation or not at all.