It was nearly time for court.
He fished a silver coin from his jacket pocket, crossed the road, and dropped it in the bowl at the Crier’s feet. The young man bowed his head in thanks and continued to sing. When he looked up, Denovo was gone.
*
“So the Iskari murdered Kos,” Cat said as she led Tara and Abelard down the halls of the infirmary, walking backward.
Abelard shook his head. “This isn’t a criminal investigation.”
“Isn’t it? Someone’s dead.”
He looked at her as though she had suggested an obscenity.
“You said the Iskari could access Kos’s power at a very basic level. He didn’t have a choice about whether he gave it to them or not, right? Even if the Iskari didn’t murder him themselves, someone could have planned that attack on the treasure fleet to kill him.”
Abelard looked to Tara for support, and she hesitated. Tara barely trusted Cat, and didn’t trust Justice at all, whatever protestations it made of its impartiality. Cat was here in part to protect her, of this Tara had no doubt, but also to watch and report back. Anything she said here, she said to Justice. Then again, the more Tara shared, the less Justice would suspect she was hiding. “It’s an interesting idea,” she said at last, “but the treasure fleet is a rich target, and this might be a case of simple bad timing. Anyone who wanted to use the pact as a weapon had to know about it first. The Church holds its archives sacred, and the Iskari Defense Ministry is a blood-mad cult that doesn’t share knowledge with outsiders. Also, the Iskari contract only hurt Kos because he was low on power already, which not even the Church seems to have known. If this was a murder, our murderer is absurdly well informed.”
Abelard, who had grown more agitated as the conversation progressed, stopped and threw up his hands. “Could we please not talk about God as if He were a corpse on the floor?”
Both women fixed him with curious expressions. He lowered his arms, but remained defiant.
“There has to be a connection,” Cat continued.
Tara frowned. “There are too many pieces to this puzzle. We’ve got a murder, an attempted assassination, a divine death, and a case of piracy that may or may not be linked to any of the above.”
“Assassination?” Cat asked.
Tara cursed herself silently for letting that slip. “Someone tried to kill my boss and me as we flew toward Alt Coulumb yesterday. Outside of the city’s jurisdiction.”
“You should have reported it.”
“I’ve been busy. My point is, there are so many puzzles it’s hard to keep them straight.”
“Don’t forget the Guardians,” Abelard interrupted, petulant.
“The Stone Men. Shit.” Cat looked as though she were about to spit in disgust. “They’re crows before the storm. They don’t need an excuse to go where they’re not wanted.”
“Hard for me to believe they aren’t tied in somehow,” Tara said, “considering that they showed up for the first time in forty years in the thick of this mess.”
“They’re drawn to doom.”
They reached a juncture in the branching hallway, and Tara stopped short. “Wait. Where are we going?”
Abelard glanced from one hall to the next. “I thought you knew.”
She rolled her eyes. “I need to get to court. Does anyone know how to reach the street?”
*
The carriage they hailed was a tiny, driverless two-seater. Cat knew a quick route to the courthouse, and sat up front to direct the horse, which left Abelard in the back with Tara.
This was not an accident. The first carriage that tried to pick them up had been large enough for four, but its right wheel locked on the axle and the two-seater beat it to the curb. Tara felt bad for the first cab’s owner, but she wanted to talk with Abelard in private and this was the easiest way to arrange it.
“Do you think Cat’s right?” he asked as she glanced back to undo the Craft with which she had bound the first carriage’s wheel.
“About what?”
He watched the pedestrians outside their window, garbed in business blacks and blues and grays save for the occasional burst of a Crier’s orange. “She thinks God was murdered.”
“Cat’s a policewoman. She knows one thing, and she knows it well. There are problems with the murder theory, as I said.”
“But it’s possible.”
“Yes,” she admitted, rather than lying.
He fell into silent contemplation. She framed a question in her mind, but before she opened her mouth, he spoke again. “What got you into this business?”
“What do you mean by that?”
He looked hurt, and she relented.
“Sorry. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have snapped.” The risen sun hung invisible behind low clouds. Skyscrapers converged into the haze.
“I was thinking about what you said to the v— to Captain Pelham.”
“Vampire,” she corrected. “You can say it.”
“Back there. About your choices. I can’t imagine being happy in the life you lead.”
“It’s not normally this hectic.” Which wasn’t an answer. Their carriage proceeded slowly through traffic. She remembered long stretches of empty dirt road winding through Edgemont fields. “I come from the country. My folks were teachers, my friends farmers. I wanted more.” It was a question she’d asked and answered a hundred times at the Hidden Schools: Who are you, and why are you here? None of the answers she had given then seemed right now. “And here I am.”
“It’s a weird kind of more. Necromancy. Black arts.”
“That was part of why I chose to study the Craft. It was different from anything I knew. I thought, whatever I get out of this life, it won’t be what I would have had in Edgemont.”
At age six, Tara had first recognized the divide between her family, refugees who fled west during the Wars, and the native clans of Edgemont with their deep roots in the land. She remembered feeling, as a child, a need to prove something to her classmates. What right had they to look down on her family for hailing from beyond their postage-stamp town? But that memory was likely false. Six years old, she probably felt only confusion: Why don’t their parents like mine? Why don’t they like me?
Abelard did not reply, and she seized the opportunity to change the topic. “What about Cat? Why does she give half her life to Justice?”
“I don’t know.” He flicked cigarette ash out the window. “We grew up on the same street. A simple neighborhood, poor enough that the people there struggled to keep up the illusion they weren’t poor. Cat wanted to serve the city, but in a different way from me. Gears, pulleys, pistons, theology didn’t interest her no matter how I tried. She saw people getting hurt, and other people doing the hurting, and thought she could make a difference through Justice.”
“Does Justice make a difference?”
He shot her an odd look. “You should know. Your boss helped create her.”
“Ms. Kevarian doesn’t really talk about her last visit to Alt Coulumb.” This was why she had gone to the trouble of getting the two of them alone. “I hoped you could give me a history lesson.”
“About what?”
“Seril. Justice. The gargoyles. They fit together, don’t they?”
Abelard’s face looked thinner than yesterday morning, as if something inside him were melting flesh and fat and muscle away. “They fit,” he said.
“Tell me.”
He squirmed, but her silence was unrelenting and at last he surrendered. “Seril was night and moon and rock, everything cold and proud and untouchable. Maybe that was why Kos loved her. She wouldn’t burn.”
“Kos loved her?” Tara hadn’t known that. A pair of gods ruling together, one for day, the other for night, one creating, another ordering. Bonds of love between opposites were powerful, stable yet dynamic. No wonder Alt Coulumb had stood for so long and grown so vast.
“They loved each other,” Abelard acknowledged. “But the God Wars were like the opening of a dam for her. She rushed to the front lines, with her priests and soldiers.”