“I will speak with the Cardinal. You should return to your cell and rest.”
The crowd screamed behind him—the voice of his city in pain. “I don’t want rest. I want to do something. I want to help.”
She hesitated halfway up the broad front steps. “You’re a Technician, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Check the Church’s generators. We’ve reached a delicate stage of the case. The Iskari question came out in our favor, but if the Church has been wasting power, we will lose ground. While Tara seeks weapons, you can tend our armor.”
When he didn’t respond, she began climbing again. He caught up with her at the top step, in front of the tall double doors. “There are dozens of miles of pipe in this tower, of every gauge and purpose. Not to mention the boiler rooms, the engines … Going through the logs alone will take days. Isn’t there something more immediate I can do?”
“You could talk to them,” Ms. Kevarian said, and pointed to the sea of people through which their carriage had come.
Behind him, a deep-voiced man somewhere within the crowd cried shouted: “God is dead!” A few among the group took up his chant. Ms. Kevarian didn’t appear to notice.
Abelard swallowed hard, and envisioned himself preaching to their wrath. What words would he use? What could he say to bring the people of Alt Coulumb back to themselves, to remind them of the glory of Kos? In his vision, he shouted into a whirlwind of rage, and his own breath returned to choke him. “I’ll check the generators.”
“You’d best get started, in that case.” Lady Kevarian flicked a finger at the front gate, which flew open with a resounding gong. She strode into the tower’s gullet, eyes front and ready for battle.
Abelard straightened his robe and followed her. As he entered the shadows of the worship hall, she gestured again and the doors slammed shut behind him, closing off the repeated cry of triumph or lamentation: “God is dead! God is dead!”
*
A blanket of clouds muffled the declining sun. The sky should have caught fire. Instead, the light began to die. Tara and Cat rode through its death throes in a driverless carriage, and watched the city.
“Is it always so cloudy here?”
“No,” Cat said, “though you wouldn’t know it from the last few days. Our autumns are usually clear, because of the trade winds.” Color had returned to her face, and mirth to her voice. Her hands lay still in her lap, and she smiled, if weakly. Tara watched her body fight its way free of the Blacksuit, and knew better than to mention the change.
“You sail?” she asked instead.
“No. I just hear sailors talking.”
They found the Infirmary of Justice much as they had left it: white institutional walls, too-bright floors, and a reassuring smell of antiseptic. Reassuring at least to Tara, because the smell signaled that the people running this infirmary knew about antiseptic. It was surprising how much people didn’t know once you left the cities of the Deathless Kings. A young man in one of the caravans she joined after first leaving Edgemont had claimed in all earnestness that alcohol made people drunk because demons liked its taste, crept within the bottles, and slept there, invisible and intangible. When you drank the alcohol, you drank the demons. Different demons liked different kinds of booze, which was why a man belligerently drunk on whiskey would sleep after a glass of vodka or laugh after drinking beer.
The other girls in the caravan had found this theory fascinating, but to Tara its parsimony left something to be desired.
“What do you need to see here?” Cat asked, drawing ahead of her in the hallway.
“The kid with no face. The witness in Cabot’s murder.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “We still don’t have any leads on the face, by the way. We’re scouring local Craft suppliers, but the equipment for stealing a face isn’t all that specialized, it turns out.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Some poor Craftswoman was having a rough day dealing with Blacksuits in her shop, but better her than Tara. She reviewed the last several hours she had spent with Cat, trying to figure out when the woman could have received a report from the other Blacksuits. “Did you check in while I was arguing in court?”
“Justice told me when I put the suit on back at the library.” Cat wiggled the fingers of one hand in the vicinity of her temple.
“All this information comes and goes from your head, without your permission. Gods.” Tara wasn’t given to swearing or to mentioning deities in general, but both seemed appropriate.
“What’s so weird about that?”
“How can you let something into your mind? Justice could tie you in knots if she wanted.”
“She wouldn’t.”
“You know what I mean.” Her voice grew sharp, and Cat froze in midstride. Tara made to brush past her, but the other woman seized her arm. She tried to shrug Cat off, but her grip was strong. “Let me go.”
“Is there something you need to get off your chest?”
Tara pulled again, harder this time, with no more success. “I don’t like it when people mess with my head. I can’t understand how you’d volunteer for the experience.”
“Justice isn’t a person.” Cat was cold and immobile. “I wouldn’t allow this if she was.”
“Like you’d have a choice.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You need your fix.”
Cat’s eyes narrowed. “I have a job to do. I keep this city safe.”
Tara didn’t reply.
The sudden surge of anger passed, and Cat’s shoulders sagged. “Gods, look, if you want to talk…”
“No. Thanks.” She nearly spat the second word.
Cat let go, and Tara stormed down the hall. On the third step she realized she didn’t know where she was going.
“Do you know where the witness is?” she called over her shoulder.
“I do.”
“Well?”
“I’m not going to tell you.” Deep within the infirmary, an unseen doctor chose that moment to set a broken bone or pull a tooth. The patient’s scream echoed in the empty hall, and Tara and Cat winced at the same time. Apparently these doctors were more familiar with antiseptic than anesthetic.
“What do you want?” Tara said.
“You’ve trusted me less since you learned I was a Blacksuit than when you thought I was a simple junkie. Tell me what I’ve done, what Justice has done to earn your contempt.”
“It’s not contempt.”
“The hells it isn’t. Will you be straight with me?”
Tara considered Cat: her hands on her hips, her firm, generous mouth, the steel behind the green lake of her eyes, the scars at her throat, the emblem of Justice that hung beneath her shirt. She thought about her own fall from the schools, about Shale resting faceless in a white-walled, black-curtained room. She thought, too, of another room in this same building, where Raz Pelham lay sleeping. He could not have returned to his ship. Suntan or no suntan, the walk would have fried him.
“Fine,” Tara said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
*
Daily maintenance reports were kept on the Sanctum’s eighth floor, in the windowless Efficiency Office at the heart of the tower. Despite its location, the office was well ventilated; turbines in the massive boiler room beneath sucked air through the chamber to regulate the boilers’ temperature. In winter, the office remained ten degrees warmer than the rest of the building thanks to its proximity to the generators, and in summer ten degrees cooler, thanks to the air flow.
Ingenious.
Abelard first visited the Efficiency Office at the age of twelve, on a field trip for introductory theology. He had stared about himself in awe as a Novice Theologian, who seemed so mature to Abelard at the time and had been at most twenty-six, used the second law of thermodynamics as a metaphor for original sin. Upon leaving the office, twelve-year-old Abelard promptly forgot the color of its walls (red), its dimensions (forty feet across and ten high, with a ladder in the center leading down into the boilers), and even its shape (round), not to mention the theologian’s argument. He remembered the ventilation system. It was the first complex machine he understood, and its union of physical law with man’s creative spark filled him with joy and love for God.