Poor son of a bitch.
She was lucky, she thought as he held her, that the vampire was unconscious. There was no telling what she would have done for a bite, for a rush to fill the empty space Justice left behind. She would have sold her soul. Maybe she’d done that already. It was hard to remember.
9
Tara fled down dream corridors from a great and terrible fate. Or was she indeed fleeing from a great and terrible fate, and not toward one?
Demons and gargoyles hounded her, talons gleaming with her blood. In terror she turned and struck, and soon her knife gleamed with theirs, but there were more of them, endless and brutal, and she ran. A turn in the strobe-lit hallway confronted her with an old wooden door, painted white with a brass knob. A sign was pinned to the wood, a child’s scrawclass="underline" gone.
Whatever she fled, or sought, it was beyond that door, nameless and writhing.
She turned the knob and pushed. Shadows scrabbled around the doorjamb, long and slender and hooked like spider’s legs. The howling, clawed things neared behind her. She steeled herself and leapt through.
Blackness melted and ran like wax. She heard a voice.
*
“Quite to the contrary, Professor. I wasn’t surprised to get your letter. Though I admit the curse was a shock.”
Ms. Kevarian reclined in an ornate armchair the color of fresh blood, and sipped the dregs of a vodka tonic. Her lips were more full and red than in waking life, and her skin, while not precisely flush with youth, possessed a pleasant rosy hue. Her hair, too, was darker. She seemed a woman still innocent of the years of sleepless nights and deep Craft that would sculpt her into Elayne Kevarian. Only her eyes betrayed the illusion. “I thought we were beyond such games.”
With a practiced slump of her wrist, she held out her drink to be refilled, and Tara plucked it from her. The hand that took the glass did not belong to Tara, though. It was too pale, skin alabaster against the black cotton of what appeared to be a waitress’s uniform shirt, and its nails were painted red. Tara would have dropped the glass in shock had she been in control of her body, but that hand, hers and not hers, carried out its duty automatically.
She set the glass on the table in front of Ms. Kevarian, removed a tiny bottle of vodka and a tonic spritzer from the tray she carried, set the tray on the table, and mixed the drink. Tara experimented, trying to set aside the vodka bottle or push the glass away, but could not control her movements. Odd. This was her dream, wasn’t it?
It was fortunate Tara had no control over her dream body, or she would have spilled the drink when Ms. Kevarian’s companion spoke. “You know, we used to enjoy our jokes, you and I.”
“Jokes?”
The bearded, barrel-chested man in the sport coat looked no younger in this dream than when Tara had last seen him in the Hidden Schools, leading the faculty to cast her out, flame and starlight shining like a crown about his brow. Professor Denovo.
She handed the vodka tonic to Ms. Kevarian and straightened, reclaiming her tray. Professor Denovo paid her no mind. She was hired help, beneath notice. He held a tall glass of beer and gestured vaguely with his free hand as he spoke. Tara remembered the cadence of his voice from lecture halls long distant.
“Please don’t take it poorly, Elayne. We will, regrettably, be working against each other in the coming months, but that hardly requires us to be uncivil.”
“We will,” Ms. Kevarian corrected, “be working together.”
“Exactly,” he said with a smile that showed the tips of his upper teeth. “You working for the Church, I for its creditors. It’s in neither of our best interest for Kos’s demise to last longer than necessary.”
“This won’t be another Seril case, Alex.”
“Of course not.” He dismissed the idea with a wave of a hand and a contemptuous expression, as if scooting away a student’s distasteful paper. “But you needn’t be so vindictive. We were in the creditors’ employ during the Seril case. Naturally we strove for their advantage.”
“This is necromancy,” Ms. Kevarian said. “There is no winning, and no losing. Death is our enemy. We’re both trying to overcome her.”
Denovo laughed like a river. “A remarkably traditional paradigm considering your own work’s influence on the field. I think I will hold a conference on the subject once my schedule clears. Adversarial Relationships in Necromantic Transaction, that sort of thing. There’s been a metric ton of Iskari theory on the subject in recent years, to say nothing about what’s come out of the Shining Empire. Camlaan’s always half a decade behind the times, of course.” He waited for her to comment or interrupt, but when she did neither he returned his attention to his beer.
“What does your party want out of this?”
“Oh, you know clients. Never agree on anything. The radicals want the Church destroyed, or transformed as in the Seril case. There’s a conservative faction, content to leave matters largely as they lie. And the Iskari, of course.”
“Of course.” Ms. Kevarian cradled her glass in both hands, as if it were a slender neck that she was about to wring. “Where do you stand?”
“With my employers. What about you, my dear?”
In the ensuing pause, Tara experienced a moment of terrifying frisson. The interlocutors’ dream bodies and the elaborate illusion of time and space fell away, and seated across that table from each other were two forces, irreconcilable and profound and not altogether human, locked in a duel so intricate their conscious minds were barely aware of its complexity. The vision endured for an instant, then broke, and left them old colleagues sharing a drink once more.
One corner of Elayne Kevarian’s mouth turned up. “On the side of Kos Everburning.”
“I never took you for a sentimentalist.” He said that word as if it referred to a form of parasite.
She sipped her drink, and looked up at him. Now she was smiling indeed. Tara thought she preferred Ms. Kevarian’s previous expression. This one chilled.
*
Tara opened her eyes in a bare room with pale blue walls and an unfamiliar ceiling. Through the gap between the curtains she saw the raw gray of what might have been twilight, but exhaustion told her was the first hint of dawn. Cloth scratched her bare skin: a hospital gown.
Ms. Kevarian stood at the foot of the bed, waiting, arms crossed.
“How long was I out?” Tara croaked.
“Not long. Abelard contacted me soon after your collapse. We’ve no proper facilities for a Craftswoman’s recovery, but the Infirmary of Justice is the best in the city. I added some of my soulstuff to your own, to bring you around faster. I thought you might not wish me to trouble the firm’s insurance policy by requesting their aid.”
“Thank you.” Tara recoiled from the thought of asking Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao for help. The firm would not approve of her nearly dying after two days on the job.
“You were acting in our interest, and I want to ensure you continue to do so. Besides, this is a learning experience. I expect that in the future you will be more careful than to engage an adversary of unknown power without preparation or backup.”
She nodded, and the world shook around her. “Raz. Did I save him?”
“Hard to tell. Captain Pelham seems whole, but I haven’t picked his brain in decades. Any damage will be more apparent to you than me.”
“I’ll…” A dew-slick glass of water rested next to a tin pitcher on the bedside table. She almost dropped the glass twice as she worked it to her mouth. Her throat absorbed the liquid like a dry sponge. “I’ll see him after I get dressed. Where is he?”
“A few rooms away, angrily maintaining that there’s nothing wrong with him and he’s fit to return to his ship.”
She poured herself another glass of water. “I’ll move quickly. I imagine he still sleeps most of the day?”