“You reported that the Most Holy was reluctant to answer your prayer?”
The heavy scratch of Cardinal Gustave’s pen sounded like stone tearing. The confessional walls loomed on all sides. “You know how it goes, Father.” Abelard gestured weakly with his cigarette. The ember at its tip danced a trace in the air.
“I know many things, my son,” Gustave said, “but there are outsiders approaching to help us, and they will not be familiar with the particulars of serving our God.”
“Yes, Father.” If only he would turn away for an instant, or blink. “I … Ah … Um.” Gustave’s face was barely visible in the darkness of the confessor’s compartment. Hollow cheeks, high forehead, bushy eyebrows. That mustache grown a decade and a half ago, which never went out of style because it was never in style. He’s here to help, not judge, Abelard told himself. Take comfort in him, because nothing else remains to comfort you. “It sometimes takes a while for me to properly prepare my mind for union with the Everburning Lord. God is great, and I am young, and weak. Sometimes I come before him with my soul unshriven. Sometimes, try as I might, I cannot give my offering with a pure heart.” He cursed himself inwardly. He sounded like a pervert, or an apostate. He hurried on. “Sometimes the Consuming Fire of His Grace is simply … elsewhere. Gods are always present, but They don’t always pay attention. Like in Lehman’s parable about the monk guarding the pantry. He can only watch one set of cabinets at a time, and the rats get in.”
“Thank you,” Cardinal Gustave said when Abelard stopped for breath. “That will be quite sufficient.”
Talking had distracted him for a wonderful moment. His chest began to twitch. He felt so cold.
“Tell me, my son, what methods did you undertake to attract the attention of the Most Fierce?”
This part, at least, did not make him feel ashamed. “I intoned the Prayers for the Coming Flame, polished the conduits on the Throne, and recited the first ten stanzas of the Litany of the Burned Dead.”
Gustave nodded and made more notes. While the Cardinal’s attention was on the paper, Abelard cupped mouth and cigarette with one hand, and sucked in tobacco-stained air. The cigarette flame flared in the confessional darkness, and his quivering muscles stilled. When he looked up, he saw Gustave waiting. The other man’s expression was illegible through the grille. He might have been an exquisitely crafted doll with human features.
This is what we have become, Abelard thought. Seemings without souls, cut off from one another by our fear.
“I’m sorry, Father, I’m so sorry, but the experience, the moment, Lord Kos…” He gestured vaguely at the cigarette.
Gustave bowed his head. “I understand, my son.”
“Are we in trouble, Father?”
“I do not believe so.”
“You said there were outsiders coming.”
“These problems are more common beyond our walls than within our blessed City. There are firms that resolve such matters with speed, efficiency, and discretion.”
“They’ll help us?”
“They’re the best we could find.” Gustave’s eyes were gray, fierce, and confident. Iron towers of faith could have been built on the strength of his gaze. “Professionals. We’re safe in their hands.”
The tips of Abelard’s fingers and toes began, once more, to twitch.
*
Tara floated in a cold womb, wrapped in sunlight. Fragmentary dreams grasped her and loosed her again into unconsciousness. She was six years old, running in the fallow fields of her father’s farm beneath the black angry belly of a thunderstorm. Lightning sparked in the clouds, flashed and crackled, bridging earth and heaven. She raised her hands, frail fingers cupped, and caught it.
Something long, narrow, and heavy collided with her ribs, and she remembered that she needed to breathe. She thrashed in the waves with limbs of twigs and paper, and coughed up a lungful of saltwater. She heard a voice.
“Catch the line, woman!”
Line was what sailors called rope, her bedraggled brain recalled. That was what had struck her in the side, like a lead weight: a wet length of corded hemp, a line to salvation. Her hands sought blindly, grasping it before she sank again. The rope grew taut and pulled her halfway out of the water with a heave that almost tore her arms free of their joints. Her body slammed into a slick, smooth surface.
Her warm pink stupor split like an egg from within and opened upon a brilliant day. The right-hand side of the world was sky and ocean, and the left a wall of dark, wet wood: a keel. Tara followed the rope up the side of the ship with her eyes and saw a man leaning over the deck’s railing to look down at her. He was silhouetted against the clouds.
Someone on the other end of the rope heaved again. Another wash of pain drew Tara’s legs free of the water and left her dangling and dripping against the keel. Black dust and fragments of charcoaled wood stained her clothes and flaked off on her face.
“We’ve caught a young lady, boys,” the silhouette called over his shoulder. “Or a young woman, at any rate.”
She gulped in breath and, recovering her voice, shouted, “Stop the torture! Hold the rope, and I’ll make my own way up.”
“With those skinny arms, and you waterlogged to half again your normal weight? I’ll not believe that.”
“If your last couple pulls are any indication, I’ll make my way up with these skinny arms or without any arms whatsoever.”
“Well said! Hold her steady,” the silhouette advised his invisible assistants.
She hung dripping until certain the other sailors would heed her interlocutor. Satisfied, she planted her feet against the keel, and, with agonizing slowness, began to walk up the side of the ship.
“Keep climbing this slow and we’ll be in port before you reach the deck.”
“I prefer to…” Pull, step. Breathe. Pull, step. “… to take a measured pace!”
“What are you measuring it against?”
Pull. Step. “Not your tongue, certainly.” To her left, she saw a rich and massive ship, and a third past that one. In the distance, she made out the green-black ribbon of the horizon, spiked with pinnacles, towers, minarets. The great city approached. Clouds brooded above it and spilled out over the water.
“What’s your name, sailor?”
“Raz,” the shadow called down. “Raz Pelham, of the Kell’s Bounty, bound from Iskar to Alt Coulumb by way of Ashmere. What’s yours, beauty?”
She laughed harshly. Whatever she looked like, drenched and half-drowned, she doubted it was beautiful. At least bantering with this sailor took her mind off the strain of climbing his ship. “Tara Abernathy, of nowhere in particular.” She spat a flake of charcoaled wood out of her mouth. Free of the water, she saw that burn scars tiger-striped the hull of the Kell’s Bounty, save for a few undamaged spots where new planks marked the site of hasty repairs. “Do you know your ship is falling apart?”
“We’re keenly aware,” he replied. “A few days ago we ran into a spot of trouble in Kraben’s Pillars west of Iskar, but we had little time for repairs before a client hired us for a speedy passenger run to Alt Coulumb. We’ll dry-dock here, with luck.”
“I should have thought a swift ship like this could outrun any trouble.”
“Ah, there’s your error. You assume we were running from the trouble, not toward it.”
She paused to breathe, and rest her aching arms. “Why not refuse the passenger? Seems dangerous to sail while damaged.”
“Does the Kell’s Bounty look like one of those fat-heeled merchantmen yonder, rich enough to accept and refuse commissions on a whim?” He slumped against the railing. “My arms are open to all who pay, though I do wish I were more my own master and less the client’s slave.”