Now Kos was gone, but the system remained.
He sat at one of the four curved metal desks in the circular room, overshadowed by a pile of papers and plans and schedules. First he browsed through the energy output records and found nothing unexpected. Draw on the generators peaked at evening and midday, bottoming out between midnight and dawn, and again between three in the afternoon and twilight. The logs showed no major repairs, and hardly any tinkering since the coolant system’s upgrade months before. Materials and parts consumption normal. But the service records for the last few days …
He raised one hand. A few seconds and a rustling of robes later, he heard a woman’s voice. “Yes, Brother?”
He looked up from the records to see the almond eyes and wizened face of Sister Miriel, who had ruled the Efficiency Office and kept its archives for longer than most Cardinals could remember. Sister Miriel was the reason no young novice had ever successfully pranked the maintenance department. She was disarmingly sweet but viciously clever, and detected each planted gas bomb, every swapped document and mislabeled pot of glue in time to turn the jokes against their plotters.
“Sister,” he said, “you’ve logged twice as many maintenance shifts as usual in the last three days, but made no repairs.”
“We’d have made repairs if we found what we needed to repair, wouldn’t we?” she answered ruefully.
“I’d expect so.”
“Well, there you are.” She leaned forward, skimming the plans and timesheets. “We’re tracking a bug in the works. Though truth be told, it’s less a bug and more a monkey.”
“Monkey?” That was a new term on Abelard.
“Bugs nest in one place and stay there. A monkey roams.”
He waved at the paperwork. “I don’t see any service outages.”
“Because you’re thinking of the problem wrong,” she said with the kindness of a grandmother offering candy. “Our generators are redundant, so you wouldn’t see a drop in output. Look here.”
“The coolant system is operating under capacity.”
Sister Miriel’s head bobbed, and Abelard felt as if he were back in school.
“Which means…” He chewed the words before saying them. “The exhaust isn’t as hot as it should be. Heat must escape before exhaust reaches the coolant system.”
“Our reasoning exactly, but we found no leak, even though we tore the system apart.”
“That would have taken weeks, not just three days of double shifts.”
“It did take weeks.” She pointed to the schedule. “If you look at the older maintenance logs, you’ll see that our crews have been pulling extra hours for months. The problem first showed up in spring, though back then it was predictable—every night, between one and four in the morning. In the last few days the drain became chaotic. Yesterday there was a peak just before dawn, and one or two small surges during the days before that. Nothing for the last twenty-four hours, though. There’s no pattern we can see.”
Between one and four in the morning, as he knelt before an altar, waiting in vain for God to answer his prayers. “It changed three days ago?”
“A few before that, actually, but the early morning draw stopped three days ago. We wondered if our current theological”—she paused out of propriety—“troubles were at fault, but the problem isn’t worse, only less predictable. We’ve waited all day for a repeat incident with no luck.”
Abelard turned to another page of schematics, and tried not to think about the “current theological troubles.” The crowd’s cries echoed in his mind. He could collapse, or keep working. The choice was obvious, but it was not easy.
“Brother,” Miriel said after a quiet interval. “I hear you are accompanying the Godless ones.”
“I am.”
“What are they like?”
Those two lengths of pipe didn’t match up on the schematic. Were these really maps of the same subsection? “The younger one … she wants to be strong. The older, I don’t know what to say about her.”
“Will they help us?”
He was about to quibble over the definitions of help, but that was not what Sister Miriel wanted to hear. “I think so.” He rolled up the blueprints and slid them back into their cases.
“You’re done with the schematics?”
“No,” he said, and glanced down the ladder into the humid darkness of the boiler room. “Can I borrow a lantern?”
*
“I first realized I had an aptitude for the Craft,” Tara said, “when I was maybe five or six.” Her heels tapped down the hallway in perfect rhythm. “More importantly, I liked it. Liked using it, working it around me. It was almost a religious feeling. I wanted to make a life out of the Craft, so I had to leave Edgemont. Which was fine, because I wanted to do that anyway.”
She waited for Cat to speak, but she didn’t. Their footsteps were in time. Tara could have been walking alone, had she not been able to see the other woman by her side.
Good. This was hard enough without interruption.
“I took a job on the next merchant’s caravan that came through town, and wandered with them for a few years, learning everything I could from their lesser Craftsmen, fighting Raiders, keeping the scorpionkind at bay. One night after the campfire died, I sat naked on the sand, soaking in the starlight I would need for the next day’s Craft, and I looked up and saw the Hidden Schools: towers rising out of midair and plummeting into empty space, castles with parapets on both ends, hovering globes of glass and crystal the size of the Third Court of Craft.
“I was terrified. I had been calling the schools to me for months, as any young Craftswoman who wants to study there will do, but they never answered before.
“I’d tell you about the rainbow bridge that descended from the twelve-spired Elder Hall, a building so old it became new again, to offer me entrance; I’d tell you about the challenges I faced as I climbed that rainbow, of might and Craft and cunning; I’d tell you about being welcomed into the Hidden Schools as they cloaked themselves in clouds that were not clouds. But none of these things are important to my story.
“I had a room, for the first time in years, rather than a wagon bed, and a roommate, which took more getting used to. Her name was Daphne, and her family had been Craftsmen as far back as you could go, and Theologians before that. What I didn’t know about the Craftswoman’s world, she helped me learn. She was one of those people you hate a little on first meeting, until you realize their generous act isn’t an act at all.”
Tara let the pause drag out. She breathed in, and heard a faint inhalation beside her. Cat turned left. Tara followed.
“She introduced me to Professor Denovo. He was the most famous teacher on the faculty if not the best-loved, and she brought me to a dinner he threw for his advanced students. Denovo had come from the bottom, like me. His family had been well off, watchmakers, but ignorant of Craft until their son showed himself a prodigy. Before long Daphne and I began to work in his lab. There, I found camaraderie, acceptance, common purpose. You’ve felt the same, I’m sure. Your bond with Justice is probably similar to the bond between Denovo and his students, and no small wonder. It was Denovo that broke Seril’s corpse open and stitched it back together into Justice, forty years ago.
“Few people realize how blind human beings are to change. At the beginning I spent one hour a day at his lab; a few weeks later, six. The lab became my life, and its rhythms determined mine. I dreamed of work, and it seemed completely natural, as natural as you falling in step with me now. My strength dwindled, bit by bit. After weeks of this, I struggled to light a candle on my own outside the laboratory walls. Conversations with Denovo sparked with wit and life, and the rest of the world went dark by comparison, and I didn’t notice.