Had he killed Cabot?
His mind recoiled from this prospect, but he couldn’t deny that a tiny part of him quickened in excitement at the thought of death. A tiny, desperate, hungry part.
Shit.
His people, his Flight, would know what to do, but they were hidden, and if he sought them, the Blacksuits would follow.
He needed a place of refuge, the last place they would look.
First, he had to evade pursuit. With stars set and the moon hidden in Hell, it was hard to change, but he had no other options. His heart beat faster, his nostrils flared. He stumbled forward, tripped, nearly face-planted onto the cobblestones. Smells and sounds rushed in to overwhelm him, muck and alley filth and the savory odor of fresh-fried dough from a street-side breakfast stand, the clatter of carriage wheels and the jingle of harness and the pounding of the Blacksuits’ feet. Sweet, transcendent power pulped his mind and turned his muscles into mush.
And transformed that mush to living rock.
The bones of his shoulders broke, warped, and became whole again. Wings of stone burst from his smooth granite back and fanned to taste the air. His jawbone swelled to anchor sharp and curved teeth. Frail, fleshy human hands and feet split and opened like tree buds in spring, his great talons flowering from within.
The world slowed.
He bounded forth faster than Blacksuits could follow, now on two legs, now on four, leaping from wall to wall, talons leaving deep grooves in stone. He did not have much strength left, but sweet Mother, he could run. He could fly.
He was bound once more for Al Cabot’s penthouse.
Behind him, the four Blacksuits stopped, their unearthly fluid motion transformed in an instant to the dead stillness of statues. They turned smooth, eyeless faces to one another, and if they conferred in some way that human beings could not hear, they gave no outward sign.
*
“Boss,” Tara asked when she woke and saw beneath her a rolling field of blue and green, “why are we over the ocean?”
Ms. Kevarian sat cross-legged in midair, the backs of her hands resting on her thighs, a meditating monk in a pinstriped suit. A corona of starfire clung to her skin, woven by her will into the platform that held them both aloft. Gone were the lightning and gale-force winds she had used to blow them across a continent. The air was clear and crisp, the sky the light purple of imminent dawn. Clouds loomed on the horizon.
“Why do you think?” Ms. Kevarian replied.
Tara opened her mouth to answer, closed it again, then said, “This is a test.”
“Of course it’s a test. Reasonable people do not answer questions with further questions. I know from your performance at the Hidden Schools that I want to work with you, but I have not seen your logical abilities firsthand. I do not know whether to treat you as an assistant, or an associate. Show me.”
A seagull flew beneath them as Tara thought. It looked up, squawked in astonishment, and plunged into a dive toward the water.
“There’s only one answer that makes sense,” Tara said at last, “but a piece of the evidence doesn’t fit.”
Ms. Kevarian nodded. “Continue.”
“We’re not going to another continent. Or to an island. Judging from the books you had me borrow, we’ve been retained for a more extensive case than you’d get on some Skeld Archipelago god-haven. Definitely on our side of the ocean—the New World, liberated territory. We were traveling east, and now we’re traveling west, so we couldn’t simply land at our destination. We had to fly past and wheel back around. We must be bound to a place where flying is restricted. In other words, a city still ruled by gods. But…”
“Yes?”
“If we’re going to Alt Coulumb, why can’t I sense it from here?”
Ms. Kevarian waited, and watched the western horizon with black, unblinking eyes. Below, amid the swells and breakers, Tara saw huge ships, tiny as toys from this height. Some sported sails bowed out by captive winds, others spouted thick gouts of smoke. Red-and-black ironwood hulls glowed with wards wrought by diligent Craftsmen. These were no mere bedraggled merchant vessels laden with cut-rate goods. On this coast of the New World, only Alt Coulumb could attract such a fleet. Two-thirds of all cargo from the Old World across the eastern ocean passed through that city’s mighty port, from Iskar and Camlaan and the sweltering Gleb, from the regimented realm of King Clock and the icy wastes that bowed to Dread Koschei. Caravans and traders by the thousands bought the ships’ wares in their turn, wholesale, and bore them west, up river and over road, to the free cities of Northern Kath.
“Everything else makes sense.” Tara squinted at the ribbon of land visible beyond the ocean and beneath the high, threatening clouds, but could not see details from this distance. A few sharp peaks that might be the tips of skyscrapers, that was all. “The defenses to the Alt’s west, south, and north are strong enough to keep us out. They’re a trading and shipping power, though, so their ports have to be open. But if that’s the home of Kos Everburning, the last divine city in the New World, I should be able to feel something, and I’m drawing a blank. No soulstuff, no starshine, no faith, no aura. As if the whole place were dead.”
Ms. Kevarian nodded. Tara held her breath. Was that nod a good sign, or a bad one? “Perhaps you require a change of focus, Ms. Abernathy. Close your eyes, and wait.”
She did. The world was black, stretching without pause save for Elayne Kevarian’s silhouette, a coruscating pattern of lightning whose every facet mirrored its whole. This much Tara expected. Through closed eyes, a Craftswoman could see behind and beneath the world of gross matter. Ms. Kevarian’s pattern was smudged, though, as if emptiness overflowed its edges.
Then the emptiness moved, and Tara realized it was not empty at all, but full of dim and pervasive light: a net of power more intricate than any human Craft Tara had ever seen, layer woven beneath layer upon layer, reaching to the heavens, plunging into the earth, arching over the sea. Within that net she felt the echoed, billowing heat of a distant fire.
“My god.” Tara’s jaw went slack. When she opened her eyes, Ms. Kevarian remained unmoved.
“Quite,” she said. “You’ve never dealt with deities before, have you?”
“Not directly.” She counted her breaths, and stilled her racing heart. “Once or twice at school, in a controlled environment. I know the theory, of course, but I’ve never seen anything like this.” Tara closed her eyes again, and sat amazed by the complexity ahead.
Divine Craft was less obvious than the mortal variety, much as the mechanisms of a living creature were less evident to human sight than those of springs and steel gears. Few Craftswomen could see a god’s work at first glance. Still, Tara had not expected the wards with which Kos shrouded his city to be so subtle, nor so large that she couldn’t find their edge.
The Craft was difficult to master, half art, half science, and an extra half bull-headed determination. Most people could barely light a candle using their own soulstuff, let alone bind and direct the power nascent in the world around them. To bring a single corpse back to a semblance of animation required years of training and rigorous study. That grand construct, with its redoubts and fail-safes, its subtle interdependencies, would have taken a team of human Craftsmen fifty years to plan and shape. It was immense, organic, all-encompassing. Divine.
Looking on Alt Coulumb, Tara experienced for the first time the same emotions which, a century and a half before, had driven a handful of theologians and scholars to take up the Craft and become the first Deathless Kings: the awe at how well divine hands had made a thing, and the insatiable need to improve on that design. The backup filter, for example, which sheltered Alt Coulumb’s harbor from ocean beasts, could use some work. And there was something else, some faint, pervasive problem she couldn’t quite sum up in words.