“I didn’t notice when Daphne stopped laughing, though one day I realized I couldn’t remember the last time she smiled, and that I couldn’t remember the last time I smiled, either. I examined the two of us, and the others who worked in our lab. My head felt stuffed with cotton, but after days I could trace the web of subtle Craft Denovo had woven through our souls. In the service of his will, we worked as a massive organism. Separate from his purpose we were half ourselves, or less.
“I confronted him about it. He laughed. ‘We do good work,’ he said. ‘Better than any Craftsmen or Craftswomen in history. Together, we achieve greatness.’
“‘Not of ourselves,’ I said, ‘or for ourselves. We achieve greatness for you.’
“‘Someone has to direct our studies,’ he replied. He invited me to go to the leaders of the schools and unmask him. I did.”
Another turn. Stairs. A nurse wheeled a small cart laden with bloody knives past them.
“Denovo’s lab, they said, was one of the greatest centers of learning in the world. The lab advanced the knowledge of all Craftsmen everywhere. They questioned my judgment, questioned my priorities, as he sucked his students dry and grew fat on the power he stole from them. I tried to quit, but he didn’t let me. Tried to strike him down, but with his lab behind him, he was too strong. Daphne fell asleep in her room one day after a week of work with no rest, and didn’t wake up. Her parents came to take her home. I never saw her again.
“Late one night, after the students left, I snuck into Denovo’s lab and burned it. That place was the focus of the web he had spun through us all. As it burned I felt his grip on my soul burn, too. Power returned to me. My Craft was mine again.
“I didn’t announce what I had done, but I made no secret of it, either. Discovering my rebellion, Denovo had me dragged before the Disciplinary Board. He wanted to kill me, but there was no punishment on the books allowing a student to be put to death. They graduated me instead, because no rule states that when you graduate the school has to put you down somewhere you can survive. I confronted the entire faculty, and laughed as they threw me down over the Crack of the World, not far, I suppose, from where Seril died.
“I survived.”
Cat stopped at a bare wooden door with a brass number riveted onto it. No sound emerged from beyond, not even breathing. Tara felt the tingle of her own Craft within. This was the place.
She set a hand upon Cat’s shoulder and squeezed, hard. Her nails dimpled skin through cotton, but Cat didn’t start or draw away. The other signs, when she checked them, were all correct. Slightly dilated pupils, breathing in time with Tara’s own. When she closed her eyes she saw the tiny threads that now connected Cat’s mind to hers.
In three states is the mind most vulnerable, Professor Denovo had once told her: in love, in sleep, and in rapt attention to a story. Cat hated gargoyles. She would not have understood Tara’s protection of Shale, nor would she believe he was innocent. Even if, by some miracle, Cat did believe, Justice would not, and Cat was too much in her dark Lady’s thrall to resist wearing her Blacksuit for long. As Tara searched the other woman’s dark, uncomprehending eyes, she felt a moment of intense self-loathing for what she had done, and was about to do.
“Cat?”
A slow “yes” followed a second later, as if Cat had forgotten how to use her own voice.
“I’m going to review the witness. Look for evidence Justice may have missed.”
This time, a more ready answer. “Yes.”
“I can do this alone. I’ll be safe. I want you to be sure Captain Pelham is safe, too. If he’s hurt, we’ll lose our best lead in the case.”
“Should I check on him?”
That was how Denovo’s trick worked, at its subtlest. The target didn’t lose her will, but became malleable, grateful for guidance. “Yes. I think you should make sure he’s well.”
Cat’s footsteps sounded heavier than usual as she retreated down the long white hallway.
There was a Hell, and there were demons in it. Tara had visited, on school vacation. Nobody knew much about the demons’ society or motives, and there was considerable argument as to whether they captured dead souls or merely copied them before they went elsewhere. The demons themselves were coy on the subject.
But if, in Hell, wicked souls were tortured for their sins, Tara expected she was bound there.
She opened the door into Shale’s room and stepped inside.
14
Abelard swung from the last rung of the ladder to an overhanging pipe and dropped into the red-flushed dark of the boiler room, landing lightly on his feet. Steam and coolant lines tangled about and above him like jungle vines, and beyond them squatted the boilers, huge and round and warm. Humid air condensed into a slick sheen on his skin, mingling with new sweat. The heat was familiar and oppressive as the memories of an unpleasant childhood.
But the part of his childhood Abelard spent in the shadow of these giant clanking machines had not been unpleasant. Complicated, rather, full of adventure, of hide-and-seek and narrow escapes. The tiny crannies grownup engineers resented as side effects of poor design gleamed to a child’s eyes like silver roads to freedom. Mastering this sweaty, benighted labyrinth, learning every path and obstacle, had been an ordeal of fascination and obsession. Abelard and his friends approached the garden of metal as if they were the first people in the world, consumed by its every facet, creating in the act of discovery.
The boiler room was not a safe place to play, and children were injured every season in their games. Abelard boasted a half-moon scar on his abdomen where, at thirteen, a falling girder tore through his leather work apron and robes to embed itself in his side. That afternoon he first felt the healing touch of his God, the holy fire that seared his skin, blackening and purifying.
He bore himself away from the boilers and up, sliding and swinging from pipe to girder to scaffold until the plummeting temperature made the steam that rose from his skin crackle and grow sharp. The Sanctum’s generators were a closed system, though imperfect. Water flowed into the massive boilers, where it became steam that drove the turbines that powered Alt Coulumb’s trains and lights and lifts and the endless smaller mechanisms by which four million people lived in close quarters without strangling on their own filth.
Superheated steam raced along a series of exhaust pipes to the fourteenth floor, where the coolant system wrapped its icy tendrils about Kos’s hot iron veins. The coolant system was more dangerous by far than the steam pipes. Those would scald and burn, but these would grip one’s flesh with the strength of ice, and not all the hot water in the world could thaw skin so frozen. When the principles behind the generators were explained to him, Abelard had envisioned the coolant system as a ravenous monster, devouring heat and life. His childhood nightmare was not far from the truth.
He ducked under a pair of dangling chains and approached the thick net of coolant coils, slick and shining with frost. Each coil curled thrice about an exhaust pipe before bearing the heat thus drained back to the coolant system’s core, which waited like a hungry maw in the darkness above. He climbed toward it.
Once, Sister Miriel liked to tell, there had been no coolant system. Once, Seril granted Her touch of moonlight and ice and cold stone to the pipes, calling Her element back to itself: rushing, cool-flowing water. When Seril died, the Church desperately sought another solution.
Seril. The dead Goddess had loomed large in Abelard’s life in the last two days. As he climbed through the monstrous tangle of the coolant system, he wondered how life in Alt Coulumb had differed while She lived. What were those nights like, lit by a watchful eye, guarded by creatures powerful, imperfect and passionate, fierce as they were relentless? Had the moon shone brighter on that city? Had its fullness caused the blood to leap for joy? Had Kos, too, been different?