The cuffs of her cotton shirt were too tight. She undid the buttons, rolled them up. Tiny blue veins pulsed beneath the pale skin of her forearm.
Outside, the sun kissed the edge of the horizon.
She walked toward the bed.
*
The darkness soon yielded to a dim blue glow. Abelard stepped off the ladder’s last rung onto an unfinished rock floor, and turned to face the source of the light: three shining concentric circles set into the floor, graven round with runes. In their center stood a rough wooden altar, upon which lay a writhing pool of shadows impaled by a crystal dagger. A sharp stench of blood and ozone hung on the air. The fake coolant pipe descended from the low ceiling to merge with the altar. From the pipe’s terminus spread eight cardinal lines of blue flame, which intersected the circles.
Someone had built this Craft at the heart of the Church, to drain Kos’s heat from His own generators. Many questions burned in Abelard’s mind, but three burned brightest: who, and why, and how could he stop them?
Abelard approached the altar. His skin tingled as he stepped over the first circle, careful not to touch the glowing lines. With another stride he crossed the second. A breath of hot air kissed his face and ruffled his robes. One left.
This, too, he crossed, but as his second foot touched down the world vanished. He was familiar with the sensation by now, and welcomed the nothingness and warmth, and the red edges to his vision as if a great light burned behind him. For the first time, he had the presence of mind to turn around and see what waited there.
Fire filled the void.
When he opened his eyes, he stood within the innermost circle. Before him lay the dilapidated altar, and the crystal dagger buried in its surface. Shadows writhed beneath the blade’s tip.
No, not shadows. These were too coherent for shadows. An animated tangle of liquid black, like a catch of seaweed flowing with the tide.
When he closed his eyes, he saw the room mirrored in his newfound second sight. Innumerable silver threads drew heat from the pipe to the circle, then wove back up the altar to knot through the crystal blade. Whatever had been done here, that dagger was the keystone. Remove it, and the system might fall apart.
Or perhaps accelerate. Tara would know, or Lady Kevarian, but Abelard didn’t want to risk leaving this chamber to find them. The conspirators wouldn’t have made this intricate siphon of power so that disturbing it would damage the generators they hoped to use. Removing the dagger might break the Craft at work here, but there should be enough evidence left to find the people who had desecrated the holy places of Lord Kos.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he pulled the dagger free. It came loose easily, as if drawn from a sheath, and left a low ringing sound in the air.
The black tangle fell limp, but nothing else changed. The circles glowed with cold light. With eyes closed, Abelard saw the silver threads still knotted through the dagger. He opened his eyes again, and examined the weapon. Trapped within its crystal blade was a red fleck, the color of fresh blood.
When he lowered the dagger, he saw that the wooden altar was bare. There was no sign of the writhing shadow.
He heard a harsh rasp, like a chisel scraping over stone.
Was it his imagination, or had the chamber grown darker? Perhaps the light was fading.
No. The light had not changed, but the surrounding gloom was closer and more viscous, especially eight feet up the wall where a black pustule swelled, extending small tendrils to drink in the lesser shadows around it.
He backed out of the circle, gaze locked on that wriggling, growing darkness. Its limbs stretched out, some thick and others narrow, some soft, some hard, glittering like nightmares. As those tendrils moved over the stone, he heard the faint rasp again, and saw bits of rock dust fall.
Another step back. His breath was loud in his ears. Or was that only his breath?
His eyes burned. Without thinking, he blinked.
When he opened his eyes a fraction of a second later, the shadow on the wall was gone.
Above, he heard a thousand tiny chisels rake over bare stone.
He reached blindly behind himself and found the rungs of the ladder. His fingers shook; it took him two tries to jam his cigarette between his teeth. He turned around and began to climb.
He felt, rather than heard, a heavy diffuse collapse behind him, like a hundred pounds of dead insects falling from the ceiling. He surged up the ladder, granted strength and speed by fear. Scrabbling on stone below: the shadow creature, climbing. A few more feet and he would reach the main coolant chamber and its pitch darkness. With luck the shadow could not be behind and ahead of him at the same time.
The shadow skittered up the wall after Abelard, a herd of centipedes crossing a floor of night-black stone. Pain sliced through him—his leg caught by what felt like a circle of thorned rope. Abelard kicked, pulled. His robe tore, and his skin, too, but he was free, up, out, panting spread-eagled on the rock beneath the curved cold immensity of the coolant system. Darkness surrounded him, crisscrossed by pipes and tubes and vents and chains.
Below, behind, the shadow wound its first tendrils over the ladder’s top rung.
Abelard forced his unwilling body to run.
*
Reattachment of a face was a simple process. Once Tara inscribed the geometric sigils and the ancient runes, only a few final cuts remained. Seven, for the seven apertures of the senses, on the reverse side of the face and on the blank flesh of Shale’s head. Two cuts for the two eyes, two for the ears, one for each nostril, one for the mouth.
She found a spare bedsheet in a dresser drawer, ripped it to long thin shreds, and used the shreds to knot Shale to the bed frame. Then she matched the fresh wounds on face and head to one another and said the words that untied her bonds of Craft.
She kneaded the cheeks, pressed in at the temples, smoothed the eyes back into their sockets. Flesh knit to flesh, and the body welcomed its spirit’s return. His features swelled and grew pink as blood rushed to them once more. Breath rattled in a throat that had not tasted air in more than a day. A pair of emerald eyes opened to regard the world. The lingering fog of Shale’s exhaustion parted in a rush when Tara leaned close and whispered into his ear, “Time to wake up.”
His sharp teeth snapped for her throat, but she had expected that and pulled back in advance.
“Not a good idea, Shale.”
Steel-cord muscles strained against her improvised cloth ropes, but the knots held, and the strips of blanket were tight enough to deny him the leverage to tear free. He convulsed on his bed like a netted fish.
“I’d like you to answer my questions,” she said.
“I’ll kill you!” This time, Shale’s voice was fierce, and passionate. Tara saw the gargoyle’s eyes widen at the force of his reclaimed rage.
Which was all well and good, but if he didn’t quiet down, he’d call the Blacksuits to them. “I gave you back your body as a show of good faith. I need your help.”
“You imprisoned me.”
“We’ve been over this,” she said. “I got you off that roof without the Blacksuits seeing. Would you rather be in prison? Or dead? Everyone in Alt Coulumb seems to think Seril’s Guardians are monsters. Would they give you a fair trial? You’re an animal to them.”
“Blasphemy.” He spat the word at her.
“You know that’s how they see you. You said as much yourself, yesterday. Let me help you prove them wrong.”
“I don’t know anything. I won’t tell you anything.”
“Those are two very different statements.”
“My people will come for me.”
“I’ve blocked their sense for you.” Not true—how else had the gargoyles found her last night on the Xiltanda’s roof?—and perhaps not even possible, but Shale was no Craftsman, and didn’t know what she could and could not do. “I want to help them as much as I want to help you. Your leader, Aev, sent you to Judge Cabot’s penthouse to receive a message. You pretended not to know more when last we spoke, but she wouldn’t have sent you in blind.”