“I thought you’d been to court before,” Abelard hissed back.
“I’ve been to normal court. Where they have witnesses, and evidence, and, you know, light.”
“There’s light,” he observed.
“Light, I said. Not lightning.”
As he watched the clash and roar, he noticed something else disturbing.
“She’s not breathing.”
“She’s what?”
“Tara. Not breathing.”
Cat held up a hand to shield her eyes. “Hard to see.”
“You can see her skeleton,” he pointed out. “When it sparks. Her chest doesn’t move.”
“You would look at her chest.”
“Novice Abelard.” Lady Kevarian had spoken, from her seat to his left. In the dark, the lightning glow suffused her skin.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“This may take a while. You won’t be of any help here. Take your friend and sit with the rest of the audience.”
“Shouldn’t we stay, to support Tara?”
She turned from the action within the circle to him. Her face was smooth, ancient and unforgiving as water-worn rock. He glanced back at Tara, levitating in the circle, and it occurred to him that everything Cardinal Gustave was to him in engineering and theology, Lady Kevarian was to Tara in Craft.
Abelard touched Cat’s shoulder. “We should find a seat.”
Cardinal Gustave watched them go. His eyes followed the dancing ember tip of Abelard’s cigarette, before returning to the tableaux within the circle.
Ms. Kevarian saw it all.
*
As the fire scorched toward its target, Tara pulled her knife from the glyph above her heart. It gleamed, and her physical form dissolved. She became a creature of shadow and starlight, and wrapped her will about Denovo’s fire, stilling, smothering.
She knew his goal from the shape of his Craft. He was trying to force open the conduit forged by the Iskari pact and prove that enough power could flow through it to destroy Kos, even when the god was at full power. He was wrong, but this didn’t mean he would fail. Truth and falsehood were flexible, and Denovo a hardened warrior. He would distort the contract, warp it, force it open in ways the original designers never intended. When he was done, it wouldn’t matter that the Iskari had never drawn more than they explicitly bargained for, or that neither party ever believed their contract vulnerable to such exploitation.
Unless Tara stopped him. She swooped down toward Kos’s mountainous corpse and hovered above the gaping pit where the Iskari pact connected to the god. Her goal was to maintain the pact against distortion, as Kos would have done were he still alive, and to do it without being destroyed herself.
Denovo’s quenched flame writhed against her will, within her mind. She had read once of worms that laid eggs beneath human skin, larvae festering into adulthood on a diet of blood and living meat. He would do the same if she let him, consuming her strength and twisting it to his own ends.
She released his fire from her grip, and he struck with it again, in a narrow controlled stream of hungry, probing light. Standing inside the Iskari pact, she could exploit its structure in her defense. Breathing out, she woke the sleeping contract around her, and Denovo’s assault broke on an invisible wall.
So far, so good.
Vines of light descended from the black sky, coiling about the pact. Tara sliced them with her knife, flying in a tight spiral upward, but where she cut, the vines grew back together. She had never seen such Craft before. With her every wasted slash, the vines tightened around the pact wall, weaving through one another into a constricting lattice.
No. She looked again, and saw her mistake. Not constricting. Nor were the vines truly woven through one another. Rather, they twined through tiny holes in the pact, linking it with Denovo’s mind. The two were one. As she watched, the weave started, slowly, to expand.
Tara strangled a scream in her throat. She was within the pact; her will granted it power. Without realizing, she had let Denovo inside her defenses. When he pulled, when he stretched, it was her mind he pulled against, her soul he was stretching.
It hurt. Not as badly as when she had been cast down from the schools, but badly enough. Her eyes grew wide with the pain, her shadow shocked through with crimson light.
*
For the first hour the light show was fun to watch. Once or twice Abelard thought he spied repeated patterns in the lightning’s dance, but the shape of the conflict remained a mystery to him. He didn’t even know who was winning.
“Think Tara’s having fun?” Cat asked, bored.
“Doesn’t look like it,” he replied. Her face was twisted in a mask of agony.
“She never has much fun, that one. You can tell by looking at her.”
“She’s trying to help Lord Kos.” Why was he being defensive? “Even though she doesn’t believe in Him. Give her a little respect.”
A fierce, brilliant spark burst between Tara and the short, bearded man—Denovo.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I … It’s been a long week.” He exhaled smoke and breathed in more smoke. This cigarette was nearly burnt down to the filter. He searched within his robe for his pack. “Kos, and, well.” Anything to change the subject. “How have you been recently?”
She didn’t answer. As he tapped the pack, he thought about this woman next to him, his childhood friend, her nights spent chasing through narrow streets for a fix. He held the tip of his new cigarette to the ember of his old and inhaled, passing flame from one to the other.
“You’ll find your way through,” she said.
He wanted to reply that she didn’t know what it was like, living without a god. That she didn’t know what it was like to feel nothing where there should be warmth, companionship, love. The surviving echoes of Kos in the world, in sunlight and hearth-fire and glory, were a poor sop to the ache of His absence. She did know, of course. That was what being a Blacksuit meant. All the responsibility of a divine servant, and none of the joy.
“Her boss seems relaxed, at least,” Cat observed.
Abelard wouldn’t have used the word “relaxed.” Lady Kevarian looked impassive. Once in a while, she jotted a note on the scroll in front of her. “Her boss has been doing this longer than Tara has.”
“Yeah?”
“She was here when Seril died.”
Cat tightened beside him, and drew into herself. He laid his hand on the back of hers, as Tara hung in the burning darkness. She did not shake him off.
*
Denovo was almost unrecognizable, his features a black mask slit by alabaster eyes. He touched the quivering barrier between them, the meld of her Craft and his own, and it was the touch of a razor against her skin. “Tara.” His voice had not changed. “It’s been a long time.”
Don’t let him distract you, she told herself. Fight through it.
“You’re good at this,” he said. “Your defense is precise, and you have talent. If you hadn’t gotten yourself kicked out of school, we could have made a true Craftswoman out of you. Someone before whom the world would quake in fear.” He wandered lackadaisically around the edge of the expanding pact, here applying pressure, there easing it. His knife glistened sickle-silver in his hand as he sliced apart Tara’s defenses where they threatened his vines. “You have a frustrating tendency to make the wrong choices.”
“Like choosing to fight you?” The words came out strangled with exertion. Somewhere, her physical form was sweating.
“That’s one of them,” he admitted. “But only one.”
The vines woven through her mind began to burn.
She had expected an attack, and deadened her senses against it, but pain wracked her nevertheless. He was fast. Too fast. Craft moved at the speed of thought, and there was a limit to how fast human beings could think. Denovo pried at her defenses from all sides, artlessly but without apparent strain. He could not be spinning Craft this swiftly, unless …