Tara claimed she was on his side, and indeed she had pulled him from the jaws of death. The Blacksuits, blasphemers, wasted no love on Seril’s children. She did not seem perturbed by his suffering, though, or eager to return him to his body. She needed his information, and who knew what black arts she could practice on him to force compliance? Could she bend him to betray his Flight?
Shale could not break Tara’s hold over him, but one act of protest remained to him that not even sorcery could bar.
He had no mouth to open, nor throat through which to draw breath; neither lungs to hold that breath nor diaphragm to propel it out. Yet he howled.
A gargoyle’s howl is only in part a sound carried on air like other sounds. A gargoyle’s howl, like a poet’s, resounds from spirit to spirit within the walls of a city.
Shale’s howl shook the darkness beyond his prison.
He let the blankets press him down, and he began to wait.
*
“Let me get this straight,” Abelard said as he chased Tara down the Sanctum’s spiral staircase. “You can buy a sheet of paper that tells you what’s happening on the other side of the world?”
“Yes,” Tara replied, focusing on her steps rather than the conversation. Why weren’t these stairwells better lit?
“How does it know?”
“Every evening, reporters in the Old World write down what happened that day, and tell the Concerns that print the paper.”
“How can they get the information across the ocean so fast?”
“It’s like a semaphore, with Craft instead of a flag, and the message moves through nightmares instead of air.”
“What?”
“Look,” she shouted over the clattering of their feet, “it works. Trust me.”
“Then they print the news on paper, and make so many copies that anyone who wants can read one?”
“Exactly.”
“Where do they get the paper?”
“The same way you get it for your archives, I imagine.”
“The Church makes its own paper,” Abelard said, panting with the speed of their descent, “and it’s very expensive. We couldn’t sell paper for what people could afford to pay.”
“Which is why it’s so expensive.”
“What?”
“If you bought the paper from other Concerns instead of making it yourself, you could have them compete against one another for your business. Each Concern would try to make paper better and cheaper than its competitors, and you’d pay less.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would the Concerns try to sell paper cheaper than one another? That hurts them all in the end.”
Exasperated, she dropped that line of discussion. She would have time to explain the problems of a command economy to Abelard after Kos’s return. “How do you get news in this city, if you don’t have newspapers?”
“The Crier’s Guild. Their news about the Old World lags a week or two. Dispatches come on the big, slow ships, because the fast ones are too expensive.”
Tara fell silent. As they clattered down endless winding stairs she thought about ships—about Kos’s contract with the Iskari Defense Ministry’s Naval Division, and about the damage to the Kell’s Bounty’s hull, long and narrow wounds as if someone had raked the ship with claws of flame. Two days ago, Raz Pelham said, we had a bit of nasty business south of Iskar. Running toward trouble, not away.
Pelham’s crew had been closemouthed when she pressed them. Unlikely that they’d warm to her now. Pelham himself, on the other hand, had seemed less reticent, and more knowledgeable.
“Abelard.” She paused on the steps and turned back to face him. “Where would a vampire go for a drink in this city?”
He smiled. This worried her.
*
As night sunk its claws into the world, Cardinal Gustave reached a caesura in his paperwork. He handed a stack of documents to his assistant, returned his pen to his desk drawer, stood, and, gathering his crimson robes about him and leaning on his staff, descended to walk the grounds of the Holy Precinct.
Dark thoughts prowled his mind as he searched the empty evening sky. The lights of Alt Coulumb rendered the stars dim and faint, but usually the strongest burned through. Their light invited quiet remembrance of things past, and contemplation of the future. Tonight, though, the heavens were a blank slate.
He wandered, wondering.
His steps took him down the long roads that bisected and trisected the Holy Precinct, along this paved arc section, that curving path. The tip of his staff dug pits in the white gravel as he walked. Occasionally he stopped and stood swaying, and his lips moved without sound. Long fingers gripped the staff as if it were a living thing that might betray him. His face in those moments was made from slabs of rock.
During one such pause, he looked up from his prayer to see a pale figure in a deep lavender dress approaching on the narrow path that led from the Sanctum. Elayne Kevarian. No one else would advance on the Technical Cardinal with such determination as he prayed. He did not want to speak with the Craftswoman, but neither could he avoid her.
She stopped a few paces from him, short-nailed fingers tapping at her slender hips. “Praying, Cardinal?”
“As is my custom,” he admitted with a nod. “Not every night, but as many nights as I can manage, I walk the grounds. Pray the prayers. See to the wards.”
“I wondered about that,” she said. With her toe she carved a small trench in the gravel before her. “I understand the basic protective circles, the purifying patterns, but containment … Wards to keep Kos in? Doesn’t seem very respectful.”
“They were built years ago, in the depths of the God Wars. Seril’s death hit this city hard.”
“I arrived shortly afterward to work on Justice. I remember.”
He shuddered, and searched the empty sky for words. “Some of the Church fathers worried Kos would try to leave his people, run to the front and perish with his lover at the hands of the Deathless Kings.”
She said nothing.
“They made this circle in vainglorious hope of keeping him here, safe, with us. All were punished for their presumption, but the circle remains to remind us of the cost of hubris.”
Ms. Kevarian looked back at the tower, rising black and thin above the precinct. “War,” she said. “It sounds so normal, doesn’t it? So pretty.” That last word blighted the air as it left her throat. “A few bodies impaled on a few swords, some bright young boys skewered by arrows, and done. What we did, what was done to us, was not war. The sky opened and the earth rose. Water burned and fire flowed. The dead became weapons. The weapons came alive.” A gleam appeared at the Sanctum’s pinnacle as a novice set lanterns for the evening. Their light reflected off Ms. Kevarian’s flat eyes. “Had Kos joined Seril at the front, she might not have died. We might not have won. If you can call anything that happened in that … war … winning.”
It took effort to find his voice. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because,” she said, quietly, “whatever you think of me and my kind, whatever you blame us for, know this: Kos was a good Lord. I will not let the same thing that happened to his lover happen to him.”
Gustave let out a harsh bark that could not have been called a laugh. “Was that what you told Seril’s priests before you blinded their goddess and made her crawl? Before you blackened their silver and tarnished their faith?”
The distant lights of Alt Coulumb cast a thousand shadows at their feet.
“I was a junior partner last time,” she replied after a long silence. “I did not have much control over the case. This will be different.”
A tide of anger swelled within the Cardinal, and he mastered the urge to snap back: I hope so, for your sake and mine. I have fought to defend my Church and my God, and I will fight for them again, until the seas boil and the stars fall. He took a slow breath, and rode that tide until it subsided. This woman was his ally, or so she claimed. She deserved a chance. He turned his face studiously downward.