Footsteps approached from her left, and a rustle of stiff cloth. A woman’s long fingers touched the sleeve of her coat. “Madam, your table has been set, and Professor Denovo is waiting.”
“Thank you,” she replied, and the hostess led Ms. Kevarian forward with a gentle grip about her upper arm. She heard nothing but her own breath and the breath of her guide, their intermingled footsteps and the tiny friction of fabric as they walked.
Twenty steps, twenty-five. The hostess stopped, and so did she. The pressure of fingertips left her upper arm and settled on her wrist, guiding her hand to the ridged back of a plush-cushioned chair. “Thank you,” Ms. Kevarian repeated. With her free hand, she located the chair’s padded velvet arms. It faced a table covered with smooth cotton. She sat, and leaned back into stiff, overstuffed cushions. “I’ll have a vodka tonic.”
“And the gentleman?”
She knew Alexander Denovo would be waiting for her, but somehow it was still a surprise to hear his voice emerge from the subterranean darkness. “Whiskey and water,” he said. “We’ll have dinner after our drinks, please.”
“Of course.” Footsteps retreated from their table.
“I’m impressed,” Ms. Kevarian said. “Those sound like very high heels to wear when you can’t see where you’re going.”
“Practice,” Alexander replied offhand. “Anyway, I think the club lets her see in the dark.”
“Hardly sporting.”
“What in life is?”
“Neither of us, certainly.” After a pause to give him the opportunity of a rejoinder, she continued. “What are you here for, Alexander?”
“What did I ever do, Elayne, to make you hate me?”
She crossed her hands upon her lap, and schooled her voice. “You made me fall in love with you.”
“Weak justification for such wrath.”
“And. You took advantage of my trust to twine your will through my mind, drain my power, and leave me a shrunken wreck.”
“Well,” he said. “Fair enough.”
The ensuing silence was broken by the tap of approaching heels: their hostess, bearing drinks.
*
“My father and I never agreed about much,” David said, looking at the ground, at the ceiling, at anything but Tara. He stood outside the circle’s perimeter, behind Aev’s left shoulder. “He was happy the God Wars ended as they did, felt the gods should have given mortals control of their own affairs long ago. He knew the Craftsmen, and especially the Deathless Kings, were hurting the world, but he thought it was manageable. I thought he was wrong.” He looked for approval in Tara’s countenance, or in her body language, but she had none to spare.
“We fought. A lot. When I was old enough, I left, went to the Old World and tried to help there. It’s amazing the damage Craftsmen can do if they’re not careful. Miles of farmland reduced to desert in a day by a battle between a Deathless King and a pantheon of tribal gods. Of course the Craftsman doesn’t care. He lives off starlight and bare earth. The people are left without water, without homes and the little protection their gods afforded them. ‘Free,’ the Craftsmen say.” As would Tara, but she wasn’t here to argue politics. “I wrote Dad letters, trying to explain, but he never answered, so I came back. There had to be something local I could do, to show him he wasn’t always right. I didn’t expect to meet Aev and her people.” He placed a hand on the stone woman’s arm, and she did not shrug him off.
“We found him,” Aev said, “wandering in the deep forest with little food and less water. He said he believed we had been driven unfairly from the city. He was wrong. We fought Alt Coulumb because it betrayed our Goddess. But while David’s facts were wrong, his heart was right.”
Tara could not restrain herself. “Wait a second. What do you mean, the city betrayed your goddess? The people of Alt Coulumb salvaged as much of her as they could.” No response. “They couldn’t do anything more. Seril died in the war.”
Aev bared her rear teeth, which was the closest Tara had seen her come to a smile. “Did She indeed?”
*
“It’s not as though you didn’t get your revenge,” Denovo said after they sipped their drinks for a quiet interval. “When you discovered what I was doing, you escaped my clutches. Cut me off from Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao. I don’t know what rumors you spread, but for forty years I haven’t been able to get another job at a Craft firm, and I loved private practice.”
“I told the truth,” she replied, between sips. “The firm agreed it was too risky to keep you on staff if you were going to subvert their employees. It’s not like I cast you into a joyless, featureless limbo for all eternity. You parachuted comfortably into academia.”
“Which is different how?” His tone sharpened, but kept its detached amusement. “I admit, the academy is more comfortable than I expected. To my surprise, the Hidden Schools were not so afraid of my … eccentricities as the great firms.”
“Perhaps not so afraid as they should have been.”
“If everyone thought like you, Elayne, no one would have seen the potential in Das Thaumas when it came out a hundred fifty years ago. We’d still be scratching at the edges of the gods’ power with paltry Applied Theology, rather than wielding their might ourselves.”
“If everyone thought like you, Alexander, we would never have realized the God Wars were killing this world in time to stop.”
“There are other worlds.”
“None we’ve been able to find that are suitable for human habitation.”
“You think we’ll still be human when we get there?” he asked with a gentle note of mockery. “Come, Elayne. If you think I’m satisfied with humanity’s current form, you’ve missed the point of my work. I’ve been developing networks capable of distributed action, directed by a single will. You saw what happened at the Court of Craft this morning. Tara’s brilliant, but had it not been for that information dump, I would have broken her mind wide open. There’s no question my way is better.”
“Still, she beat you.”
“She does have a singular facility at that,” he admitted.
“It’s one reason I hired her. Any young woman so resourceful deserves better than to be blacklisted because she avenged her friends against an unethical professor.”
“Unethical? If you asked most of my, ah, students, they’d claim they are quite happy with my methods.”
“Because you don’t allow them to be unhappy.”
“It’s a fulfilling experience, being devoted to a cause.”
“I didn’t feel fulfilled, as I remember.”
“Your experience was a prototype. An early model. I’ve ironed out most of the kinks.”
She took a sip of her vodka tonic, relishing the sharp, burning flavor and the bubbles on her tongue. “I’ve read your papers, Alexander.”
“All of them?”
“Your vision is compelling. But you insist on a proposition I don’t think you can support.”
Ice clinked against the side of his glass. “Indeed?”
“You claim your collective action networks are most efficient when a single node directs the whole.”
“That’s what my experiments suggest.”
“I recommend you re-evaluate your assumptions.”
“You think I’m corrupting my own data?”
“I think you’re only happy with a philosophical framework that allows you to be a god.”
The smell of roast meat washed out of the darkness, and once more she heard footsteps.