Tara stood in the center of the room. Gargoyles surrounded her, each one between eight and nine feet tall. Some were unearthly slender, some thickset, some heaped with muscle and others armored by protruding stomachs of hard rock. Strong stone arms hung from shoulders that could support the world. Hands terminated in hooked talons. Folded wings twitched. Five were male, five female, and all terrifying.
Least human were their faces, no two alike, features hideous and strangely noble, this one long-snouted and fanged like a wolf but with four eyes, that are bird-beaked and crested with a ridge of stone feathers, the next tusked like a boar and bearded like an aging scholar. Intelligence shone in their emerald eyes, sharp as a human’s but bent differently. These creatures rejoiced in the hunt, not in the scavenger’s heaven of boredom, satiety, and sleep.
Shale crouched against the wall, breathing hard. Charcoal blood leaked from a wound on his side. A young human man—or a gargoyle in human form—knelt next to him, keeping pressure on the wound with a dirty towel.
A great gray lady gargoyle stood before Tara, her countenance blunt and broad like a tiger’s. She alone among them wore any form of decoration: a torque of silver that gleamed on her brow.
“What help can you offer us?” Tara remembered her earthquake voice from the Xiltanda’s roof.
“I. Ah.” Tara’s mouth was dry. Ms. Kevarian’s mouth wouldn’t be dry if she were standing here. “I saved your messenger’s life.”
“By kidnapping him.” Tara heard no rancor in the woman’s words. Even, maybe, a touch of amusement. Tara hoped she was right. She remembered Abelard’s story about the battle at the God Wars’ end, and remembered too the scarred stones of Alt Coulumb. Have you ever seen a gargoyle enraged?
She needed this. The gargoyles could prove that the Church of Kos was not responsible for the fire-god’s weakness. With their evidence she would send Denovo running back to his lab. Her weapon was here, if she survived long enough to find it.
“Justice believes your messenger killed Judge Cabot. Your attack on me last night didn’t help your case.”
Some of the gargoyles bared their teeth as she spoke. She heard snarls behind her. The stone woman raised one hand, and silence reclaimed the hidden chamber. Clearly she was their leader. Shale had called her Aev.
“What do you think?” Aev asked.
“Shale didn’t kill the Judge. He lacks even the rudiments of Craft needed to bind Cabot’s soul. I couldn’t have stolen his face otherwise. Besides, why kill Cabot when he was working for you?” Tara met her own gaze reflected in the gargoyle’s gemlike eyes. “Or, working to help you on Kos’s behalf. Months ago, the fire-god asked him for help transferring an immense amount of soulstuff without the Church’s knowledge. Kos loves his Church. Why would he do such a thing? Unless he wished to help the Church’s sworn enemy, a group this city exiled more than four decades ago, but toward which he still feels indebted: the Guardians of Seril.”
No reply.
“I may be the only person in this city who believes you’re innocent, but I need your help to prove it. I need to know why you sent Shale to Judge Cabot’s penthouse yesterday morning.”
Aev cocked her head to one side. Tara prepared to fight, and, most likely, to die.
“The story,” Aev said at last, “is not all mine to tell.”
Tara tried not to look relieved. There would be ample chances tonight to get herself killed. “Whose is it?”
The young human had divided his attention between the conversation and Shale’s wound. Aev indicated him with a sweep of a massive arm. “Its beginning belongs to David Cabot, late-come to our Flight.”
David stood, shoulders slumped and expression apprehensive. His features, now that Tara saw them straight on, were a younger, less fleshy (and less bloodstained) imitation of his father’s. He waved sheepishly. “Hi.”
*
The coach let Ms. Kevarian off at the Xiltanda’s gates. A queue stretched down the block, rank upon rank of pleasant young flesh revealingly clad to excite the club members’ appetites for sex or blood or human spirit. These confections of leather and black lace and pale makeup knew their city’s God was dead, their way of life doomed: Ms. Kevarian saw it in their too-broad smiles and too-loud laughs, in the self-congratulatory way they touched and kissed and pressed their bodies against one another, in the speed with which silver flasks moved from mouth to mouth within small circles of desperate friends. They knew, and they smiled and laughed and tempted and seduced and drank to fortify themselves against the coming storm.
She paid the coach and advanced on the rope line. She had wasted no time changing or applying makeup, but as she walked she called a modicum of Craft to herself. Her colors and outlines sharpened; the black of her suit lost its worn, professional three-dimensionality and assumed a uniform emptiness, as if she had clothed herself in a hole in space.
When she reached the entrance, the bouncers drew back without daring to check her membership. The club recognized her, and welcomed her return.
Entering, she spared an instant to appreciate the marble columns, the glowing sprites imprisoned in their crystal globes, the checkerboard stone pattern of the floor, and the intricate Old World tapestries that hung from the walls. Soft strains of smooth music in swing time floated through the bead curtain, and she followed them to their source.
As she swished toward the spiral staircase, she cut a wake through demons and skeletal Craftsmen, vampires and priests and technomancers and a deep purple, multi-tentacled horror it took her a moment to place as a client from a decade back. Voices familiar and strange enfolded her.
“Lady K! It’s been an—”
“—thought I’d have been informed before you—”
“—this morning at the Court of Craft! I don’t think you—”
“—will pay for your betrayal of the Seventh Circuit of Zataroth!”
“And would you care to join us for bridge someday soon?”
She excused herself from the conversation with a nod. The assassination attempt she thwarted according to club regulations, which politely but firmly requested members not damage the premises in their business dealings. She left her assailant, a vaguely familiar face from a cult she last remembered encountering in the Loan Crisis of the early eighties, a smear on the checkerboard floor. And she accepted the bridge date from the tentacled horror, with the proviso that her schedule would be inflexible for the next several weeks.
Up the staircase she climbed, escaping the party and the smooth jazz at once. Up through the sturm und drang of the dance floor, up through the pained screams of the dungeon level, where Craftsmen relished for a brief half hour the torments they inflicted on others during the workweek, gaining release upon the rack from whatever niggling sense of karmic inequity troubled their souls. Up, and up, and up, each level of private hell segmented neatly from the others. Nobody wanted to feel that his, or her, chosen medium of pleasure and punishment was anything less than a universal absolute.
At last she passed through a shell of darkness but did not emerge on the other side. She climbed through deep space, void of all light. Her suit fit right in.
Ten steps, she remembered, before the stairs drew even with the floor. Her mortal eyes were blind, but as she climbed she saw, with eyes of Craft, the clubgoers hovering in deprivation bubbles, and also the silver web that maintained the absolute darkness that settled around her as she stepped off the stairs onto a smooth tile floor.
She was not blind here, but close. This level had been designed for club members whose personal hell was the death of the senses. Since most clients were Craftsmen or Craftswomen, merely impeding mortal sight was insufficient. The club’s owners spent months designing a system to deaden the eyes of the Craft. It was not perfect, and cost the Xiltanda a great deal, but the effect was chilling. Ms. Kevarian had to hold her eyes closed for a solid minute to detect even the dim outlines of Craft through the artificial darkness.