He broke off, and Aev took over the story. “It was soon after that,” she began, “that my dreams of fire started. They spread through the pack. Flame overshadowed our souls, seeking truth within us. The next month, as we danced in the sky at the dark of the moon, we sang to the Goddess about the fire-dreams, and She shivered in anticipation.” The rapture on Aev’s face twisted in Tara’s gut. She had never looked at anything that way.
“Kos learned that Seril was still alive,” Tara said, fitting the pieces together. “But he couldn’t break the binding circle and communicate with her directly without his clergy knowing. He didn’t want to confront his priests; maybe he was afraid of what he would learn if he did, afraid of what his faithful had done, or might have done. He wanted to help Seril in secret. And you”—she turned to David—“suggested he work through your father.”
“I tried to tell Dad myself,” David stammered. “He didn’t understand, at first. But he was a faithful man, and when Kos spoke to him in a dream, he listened.”
“These dreams of fire came in the middle of the night?” Tara asked. “Between one and four in the morning.” She remembered Abelard’s pain when he spoke of his lack of faith. His faith had not been weak. God’s attention was simply elsewhere. He was so caught up in stealing power from himself that he couldn’t bother to comfort a poor, distraught cleric. Typical. “Kos couldn’t risk the clergy tracking you down, so he bought a couple Concerns with Cabot’s aid and combined them into one, a shell that could hold his power and transfer it to Seril.” She raised one finger. “The last step was to give her part control over that Concern, so she could use his power. Which was supposed to happen yesterday morning, I imagine.” David stared at her, stunned. She ignored him. “Shale found the Judge dead, and tried to run.” No sense dancing around the truth. “Neither he nor the Judge’s body contained any Craft that I could see, though. No Concern.”
“The murderer must have taken the Concern,” Aev supplied. “Now, with your help, we will claim the power that rightfully belongs to our Lady.”
Tara chose her next words with care. The gargoyles waited. Their patience made her silence deeper. “Without that Concern, there’s nothing to prove your claim on Kos.”
“We will testify. David will testify. Surely that will be enough.”
“That might help prove Shale’s innocence of the murder, but it won’t give you a claim to Kos’s body.” And if they had no solid claim, then the evidence that Kos was responsible for his own weakness was suspect. Professor Denovo would shred her story and flay her arguments. The Guardians had to have something incontrovertible, some documentation they weren’t telling her about. “You’re interested parties with little corroborating evidence, and no contract in hand. You’d rank below every one of Denovo’s clients on the creditor’s committee.”
Aev bared her teeth. “That man robbed us of our birthright and mutilated our Goddess. We shall not crawl to him in supplication!”
“I’m not suggesting you do. When we take this before a Judge, though, she’ll say your tale could be a big fabrication.”
“You accuse us of lying?”
“No.” She held out her hands against their threatening growls. “I’m saying that we need proof. So far I haven’t even seen evidence that Seril is still alive.”
“What do you think is lighting this room?”
No candles or lamps were set into the rough stone walls about them. A broken lantern lay in one corner, but it was not the source of the faint radiance. Unconsciously, Tara had assumed the light was a form of Craft, but when she closed her eyes she saw no mortal thaumaturgy. After a moment of darkness, a swirling vortex appeared at the edge of her vision, interwoven lines and overlaid patterns, an echo of the aura that shrouded Alt Coulumb when seen from the sea.
When she opened her eyes, the Guardians glowed with moonlight.
“If you do not believe,” Aev said, voice deep as surf, “we will show you.”
Light rolled in on Tara like the tide, and on that tide she heard a voice.
*
Information from the erstwhile muggers narrowed Cat and Captain Pelham’s options to three warehouses on the same row, two well-defended and the third dilapidated. It was an easy choice.
“We shouldn’t have let them go,” Cat whispered as they approached the broken door. “They were criminals.”
“Eh.” Raz waved dismissively.
“What if they hurt someone else? It will be our fault.”
“I don’t think those four will take any more purses for a while. Muggers are as superstitious as fishermen, and much less stubborn. Two unfortunate encounters in one night would cause the heartiest to reconsider his choice of career.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What should we have done, exactly?”
“Tied them up, and called the Blacksuits.” It would have been so easy to summon them, if only Cat let Justice take over. No. Not yet.
“With broken arms and legs they still would have wriggled free before the Blacksuits got here. Don’t you think those kids have suffered enough for one night?”
“Kids? If we hadn’t kicked their asses, they’d probably have killed us.”
“If we hadn’t been able to kick their asses, we wouldn’t have been in the back streets of the waterfront after dark.” Captain Pelham stepped over the rotted threshold into the warehouse. He laid a finger to his lips, and she clapped her mouth shut. As if she needed to be told when to keep silent.
Shadows everywhere. Cat and the Captain spread out, communicating with hand signals across the empty space. Five minutes later, they determined the warehouse clear of any watch or rear guard, and met in the center of the room.
“I haven’t found anything,” Pelham breathed into her ear.
“Neither have I.” She kicked the bare stone floor in frustration.
The bare stone floor.
“Wait,” she said.
“What?”
“No tracks in the dust on the floor.”
“Of course not. There’s no dust on the floor.”
She didn’t say anything. He pulled back from her. Understanding dawned slowly on his face.
“Well,” Captain Pelham said, “curse me for a seagoing idiot.”
“A trapdoor.”
“Yes.”
Not one trapdoor, but four, they discovered in short order, one in each corner of the warehouse. Designed to store valuables, equipment or foodstuffs or shipments of magesterium wood that might otherwise walk off the premises in the pockets or lunch pails of warehouse staff, these doors were once marked with yellow paint, but someone had painstakingly removed that paint with a sharp chisel (or talon, Cat thought). Only tiny cracks around their concealed edges remained.
None of which would have mattered had tracks on the warehouse floor indicated the direction of foot traffic. Whoever was using this warehouse must have scoured the floors for the first time in decades, ridding them of dust and foul refuse, all in vain. That very cleanliness had caused Cat to look further.
Her hand rose to the level of her neck, but she forced it down. There were many reasons to hide a door, and Justice would not forgive her failure with Tara if all she offered in penance were a paltry smuggler’s cache.
The first three trapdoors were unoccupied. They heard no sound within them, and no light leaked from the crack between door and doorjamb after Cat worked the dirt packed there free with her pocketknife.
She and Raz knelt beside the fourth trapdoor and pressed their ears to the stone. Cat heard distant chants, and an oceanic roar. She cleared away some gravel near a hidden hinge, and peered inside.