Such thoughts verged on blasphemy, but climbing this scaffolding, smoldering cigarette jutting from the corner of his mouth, with no one near and with his God lying dead in starlight beyond the realm of man, Abelard allowed himself to wonder.
What had Kos been like, when Seril lived? God withheld the full force of his love these days, the old monks said, for fear He might burn the world to a cinder. Abelard had felt Lord Kos’s flame lap gently against his own mortal soul, but had He kept a part of Himself back even then? Could Seril’s presence have let Kos draw even closer to His people? If She still lived, would He have died?
The narrow cleft Abelard had been climbing opened; he stepped from the scaffold onto a vast plane of black rock, the ceiling of an entire clerical floor below, and found himself swaddled in darkness profound as the abyss. The air was chill as winter night, and there were no lamps. Light was heat, and this room was sacred to the deadly cold.
The chamber was three stories tall and nearly as broad as the Sanctum itself. Pylons thick and thin bridged the gap from floor to ceiling: staircases, people movers, large lifts for freight or groups of supplicants, all swaddled in layers of insulation to keep warm outside air from polluting the chill emptiness.
Abelard swept the narrow beam of his bull’s-eye lantern through the black.
Suspended from the vaulted ceiling and the rough stone walls by thick chains hung the immense, entwined double toroid of the central coolant tank. Black slick metal, it drank the beam of his lantern.
He wished he had Tara’s sensitivity to the Craft, for the central coolant tank was not a product of mortal engineering. Its inner workings were a mystery to even the most diligent and faithful of Kos’s priests. They knew the black box consumed heat and fed it to Justice by an unseen mechanism, powering Blacksuits throughout the city. That was all. It lay like an open wound in the center of Abelard’s mind, an affront to the laws of the universe.
He sat down on the stone, and closed his lantern.
Darkness rushed in, blacker than any night he had ever known, child of cities that he was. The tip of his cigarette burned against cold shadows.
He closed his eyes and traced in his memory the paths of the four hundred seventy-two threadlike coolant lines that wound over cold stone and through empty air to the central tank. They glowed in his mind’s eye, precise and exact.
He inhaled, and his breath froze in his chest.
They glowed not only in his mind’s eye, but in the black beyond his eyelids.
He opened his eyes, and saw nothing. Closed them, and the coolant pipes glimmered silver and cold in empty space. The silver lines seemed painted on the backs of his eyelids, or rather his eyelids seemed to have become filters that only this light could penetrate.
To his closed eyes, the coolant tank was a tangle of clockwork outlined in silver. Its innards spun and turned and wound, and in places silver light tangled about invisible, physical gears, pistons, camshafts. Power flowed down the chains that suspended the tank in midair, and proceeded through hidden paths across town to the Temple of Justice.
He inhaled smoke and exhaled it. The light gleamed more brightly. He opened his eyes, and the silver visions vanished.
“What is this?” he asked the empty space and the machines.
They didn’t answer, but something within him whispered, look further.
He closed his eyes again. Lines of spider silk filled the black, but not all of them were silver. In their midst, one ran a burgeoning red and gold along the floor to disappear into the rock. That line was darker than the others, barely shedding light. Dormant. It was not tied to the coolant system, he reasoned, and thus lacked the coolant system’s pale, hungry hue.
He opened his eyes and the cover of his lantern, shedding a narrow beam of light along the path of the anomalous pipe, fixed to the stone by iron bolts. It was less corroded than the surrounding coolant lines, but indistinguishable from them in gauge and make. Someone had intended this pipe to blend with the coolant system. Without his newfound vision, Abelard would never have seen the difference. No wonder the maintenance crews discovered nothing.
Returning to the scaffold, he traced the pipe back down into the boiler room’s sauna heat. His quarry wound about the primary steam exhaust pipe like ivy around the trunk of an ancient dying tree. It fed on the heat, draining it—slowly now, but he suspected it could drain faster, and indeed pull enough heat to steal power from Justice herself. This was no doubt the cause of the coolant fluctuations Sister Miriel had observed.
Back he climbed through the dark, guided sometimes by lantern light, sometimes by the vision that hung before his closed eyes.
Returning to the coolant system’s chamber, he traced the errant pipe until it plunged into the floor near a stairwell. By comparing the pattern of ventilation ducts and power conduits with the Sanctum’s floor plan, etched in his memory, Abelard identified the rooms below. Offices mostly, a scriptorium, a meeting hall. He knew the Sanctum better than his own body, but he did not know where this pipe led.
He paused to light another cigarette from the embers of his last. Breathing in, he closed his eyes.
Three steps to his left, beside the red ribbon of the fake coolant pipe, a red square burned in outline on the floor, a few feet on each side. At one edge of the square, the strange dull light illuminated a depression in the rock, invisible when Abelard examined the same space with his lantern.
A handle, concealed.
He placed his fingers into the depression and felt them wrap around a metal D-ring. When he pulled, the entire square of rock shifted up on an invisible hinge. Abelard expected the stone to be heavy, but it rose easily in his grip.
Below the hidden door, a tunnel dropped into darkness that Abelard’s new second sight could not pierce. A ladder was riveted to the tunnel’s round wall.
He glanced about, thinking that he should go for help. But access to the boiler room was limited to priests and monks and the occasional, heavily supervised consultant. Building such a complex project as this, with secret doors and tunnels and pipes, required time and power, or numbers, or both. An outsider could not have accomplished it without help from within the Church.
He thought back to Sister Miriel’s calm assurance, to her bafflement at the coolant problem. Sincere? Or secure, knowing he could not find what she and her comrades had hidden?
Perhaps Tara had made him paranoid, but Abelard did not feel like trusting anyone.
He set one foot on the ladder and descended alone.
*
Ms. Kevarian did not find Cardinal Gustave in his office, nor in the library. An aide said he had gone to the rooftop to meditate. She sought him there.
Cresting the stairs she found the Cardinal leaning on his staff near the edge of the roof. Ordinarily from this vantage point Alt Coulumb stretched from horizon to horizon, but today clouds wadded about the Sanctum like thick wool. The world ended in a blank expanse beyond the tower, as if some god had forgotten to draw the rest of the image on the page, or having drawn it, frowned, and reached for the eraser. The noise of the crowd below was barely audible, an undifferentiated mash of sound in the misty depths.
“Your people are angry,” she said without preamble.
“Their faith is weak.”
“They want someone to explain the situation. Assuage their fears.”
He did not respond. Wind whipped his robes about him, but did not touch her.