“And there’s usually more than one courtroom in a building.”
“There’s more than one courtroom,” Tara said. “The hall only takes us where we need to go.”
“For privacy reasons?” Cat ventured.
“Privacy, and safety.”
“Theirs?”
“Ours. Courts of Craft are dangerous if you don’t belong.”
“We do, though, right?”
Rather than answering the question, Tara opened the door.
The courtroom was over a hundred yards across, circular, and walled in black. Ghostlight shone from jewels set into the domed ebon ceiling. A massive Craft circle had been acid-etched into the floor and the acid grooves filled with silver. Within the circle’s silver arc, at the far end of the room, rose the Judge’s empty dais.
Near the entrance sat an array of benches, upon which slouched their audience: a pudgy trailing-whiskered man in an orange Crier’s jacket, a few elder Craftsmen come out of curiosity, and a student with lines under her eyes, who glanced nervously at the empty benches around her, hoping more people would arrive so she could doze off without anyone noticing.
Tara felt sorry for the girl. There would be no eager masses today. Tomorrow, after rumors of Kos’s death spread, would have provided a better opportunity for a nap. The chamber would be so crowded then that nobody would notice a kid catching some sleep.
Cardinal Gustave sat at a low table to the left of the silver circle, and Ms. Kevarian stood near him, her face a professional mask. She twirled a dry quill pen between her fingers. A squad of Church personnel stood behind the Cardinal, backs pressed against the chamber’s rounded wall. They wore a range of expressions, but most were some degree of terrified.
None of the contract holders with claims against Kos Everburning had come in person, unsurprising considering that they were Deathless Kings and other gods. They would send envoys in the coming weeks to observe negotiations, but for now they merely hung immanent in the air about the desk to the right of the circle, where Alexander Denovo sat alone in his tweed jacket. His attention was bent on a yellowed scroll, and he didn’t seem to notice Tara’s arrival.
She had expected to feel more upon encountering him for the first time since her graduation: a dryness in her mouth, anger curling like a fire in her breast, a sour taste at the back of her throat, the bright purple pulse of fear behind her eyeballs. When she saw him, though, she just felt dead.
Dead. Adrift on currents of air, falling toward the Crack in the World, bloody and bruised, broken, her mind aching. His laughter echoing in her soul.
“Tara?” Abelard’s voice. Focus on it.
“What?”
“You looked funny for a second there.”
“Funny?”
“Scared, almost.”
“Not scared.” She wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but it wasn’t fear. Fear was weakness, and if she had been weak, she would have died a long time ago. “But almost.”
“You know that guy?” He pointed to Denovo, but she slapped his arm down. “What?” he asked, cradling his wrist.
“It’s rude to point.”
She brushed past Abelard toward Ms. Kevarian, who acknowledged her presence with a nod while continuing her conversation with the Cardinal. “Whatever else happens, you must be confident. Don’t break faith for a moment. Any weakness can be used against you in an engagement like this.” The Cardinal nodded, features stern, and Ms. Kevarian turned from him to Tara. “You’ve collected another friend.”
“Cat is a servant of Justice.” She indicated the other woman without turning around. “My watchdog. Says she’s supposed to keep me from getting into trouble.”
“Well.” Something about the way Ms. Kevarian said that word, long and drawn out, made Tara glance back to be certain Cat was still there. “She’ll have her hands full soon.”
“What do you mean?”
She consulted a codex splayed on the table. “Denovo will open by proposing that our defense contracts with Iskar were negligent, made with the knowledge they could lead to Kos’s death.”
“Logical.” There were two or three acceptable first moves in a complex case of Craft like this, but all involved breaking down the walls that preserved the divine client’s dead body against alteration. Tara might have chosen the Iskari contract as the first issue herself, had she been in Denovo’s place. Why was Ms. Kevarian reviewing the basics? “The truth will work as a counterargument, for once. The Iskari pact was too small to kill Kos under any conditions that could have been anticipated when it was drawn. Whatever drained Kos’s power was at fault, not the Church’s deal with Iskar.”
“Good.” She scratched a sharp black line of ink across the cream of the scroll. “Then you shouldn’t have any trouble maintaining that within the circle.”
“You’re not serious.” The stone beneath Tara’s feet felt spongy, unstable, soaked with panic.
“This will be a good learning experiene, and an excellent chance to demonstrate your value to the firm. Do either of these goals seem humorous to you for some reason that escapes me?”
“You don’t…” Tara wanted to steady herself, but the table kept shifting as she tried to rest her hands on it. She focused on her breath. “I assumed I’d have more warning, boss.”
“You do know what they say about assumptions, Ms. Abernathy.”
Before Tara could answer, a peal of thunder broke the hush of the dark stone room, and a wash of blackness obscured the light. When it passed, a man stood on the Judge’s dais. He would have been tall if he had straightened. His back arced forward like the blade of a sickle, and his sallow skin seemed ready to slough off at any moment to reveal the flesh and bone beneath. “I am Judge Cathbad, son of Norbad,” he announced in a voice deep and resonant enough to shake stone. “I call from chaos to order. I stand to witness the verities and falsehoods of Kos Everburning and his creditors. I invite counsel to approach.”
As he completed the formula, a stream of fierce blue fire rushed from his dais along the silver lines set into the floor, caught there, and burned.
Tara looked to Ms. Kevarian for reassurance, but in her eyes found only quiet expectation.
When Tara practiced for this moment at the schools, she had spent days, weeks memorizing every facet of the cases before her. There wasn’t time for that now. Maybe later, after the initial challenges were defeated.
It was this, she thought, or back to Edgemont.
She steeled herself and stepped across the line of blue flame.
11
Summers back home began hot and grew hotter. The sunbaked fields into pale dead yellow clay, and steam collected in toiling farmers’ lungs. Every child enduring daily chores yearned to finish her tasks and sprint off, limbs flailing, to the quarry.
It had never been much of a quarry, but for a brief period at the beginning of the last century it supplied rocks for Edgemont’s houses and fences. After idle decades the blasting powder and equipment were gone and only its sharp rock face remained, plummeting twenty feet to a deep pool of cold, murky water that seeped from unknown fissures in the earth. An enterprising priest a generation back had erected a prayer pavilion near the edge of the highest cliff, but this was rarely used in recent years save by the children who leapt from the pulpit over the quarry’s edge, down, down, screaming through sweltering air, to strike the surface of the pool with a loud splash and sink into chill darkness.
Every time Tara made that jump as a girl, she felt a moment of panic as the water closed about her and the cold of it, the cold of the world’s belly, struck her in the chest and seared her muscles and shocked her brain. If you lost yourself and opened your mouth in a desperate bid for air, the cold would reach down your throat, grasp your heart, and stop it with a squeeze.