Denovo turned his attention to Tara. Though his face was fixed in an expression of intense effort, his smile did not falter.
“You know,” he said through the roar and clash, “I nearly missed fighting in the God Wars. I was one of the youngest to join the battle.”
He spun Craft toward the orange sphere above, but She arrested it with moonlight. Thorns of shadow caught Aev, but She dulled their piercing tips. Denovo’s Craft lashed out at Tara as a bolt of flame, and She turned it aside.
Her thoughts came slowly now, and with effort.
“You’re not the first goddess I’ve fought,” he said, calm and cold. “You cannot abandon your faithful. I strike at what you love, and you protect it. When you’re stretched to the limit of your power, I squeeze. Just … a … bit.”
His eyes narrowed, and the thorns about Aev’s body were sharper, the hole into which Gar fell deeper, darker, hungrier, the spear of flame pointed at Tara’s heart more swift and sure.
With a sound like a ringing bell, the light of the world popped free from its perch in Tara’s skull and hung revealed before her, a beautiful woman of frostlight and stone bound to those she could not abandon by cords of her own making.
Tara’s wound reopened, and blood seeped through cracks in the cauterized flesh. Her mind was hollow, her own again, and the world not Seril’s but hers. The Guardians’ names she forgot, but she saw Cat curled in a fetal ball amid discarded iron restraints, trapped in a net of red wire. She had freed the Guardians. Good.
Ms. Kevarian lay on the ground, and next to her, Abelard. Unmoving.
“That’s the trouble with ties,” Denovo said. “They bind both ways.”
Denovo reached out with a rope of flame to draw the sphere toward him.
Tara screamed, wove starfire into her own rope, and lassoed the sphere. Denovo was a supernova of Craft. He pulled and she pulled and Seril pulled and the gargoyles redoubled their attack, and still the sphere approached his outstretched hand. He grinned.
Tara blinked, and the darkness endured.
*
Tara reclined in a leather armchair beneath a glittering chandelier. Ms. Kevarian stood across from her, dressed in a businesswoman’s black and in full control of herself.
Alexander Denovo sat in another chair to Tara’s left, mouth slack with shock.
“What the hell?”
“We are between instants,” Ms. Kevarian explained.
“How did you bring me here?”
“Ties bind both ways,” she observed. “I thought I would give you an opportunity to surrender.”
Denovo laughed outright. “Surrender? Apotheosis is within my grasp.”
“Don’t the odds trouble you?”
“I can hold out for the moments I require to assimilate Kos’s power.” He manifested a pipe out of dreamstuff and began to smoke it. “Then the opposition will fall.”
“I can’t guarantee your safety if you don’t surrender now.”
“When I am a god, Elayne, I will break you, body and soul.”
Her eyes and her voice were made of diamond. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“Boss—” But the moment slipped, and Tara fell between earth and heaven.
*
Alexander Denovo whirled within his protective dome, and through electric distortion saw Elayne Kevarian, standing. He ordered her to sit, to surrender, to die, but his commands rolled off the ice of her mind. The young priest’s body lay prone at her feet. A curving design, wet, red, and intricate, glimmered on the floor around them.
Breath caught in his throat.
Elayne Kevarian had lain prone under his control, twitching, pathetic, circling in place, bloody fingers grasping at pale stone. She had completed the circle. Drawn it in her own blood, worked it with sigils crude in their calligraphy but elegant in their architecture.
She stood within a resurrection circle, over a dead priest whose lips still clutched a smoldering cigarette. But this circle was not drawn for a man. It was drawn for a god.
Denovo called on all his Craft, releasing the gargoyles and their goddess and Tara, everything save for his hold on the fiery sphere. He threw doom and lightning against Elayne and rent the earth beneath her feet and cast her into the outer hells, or tried. Shadow seeped from her, devouring starlight and torchlight and his Craft alike. The blood circle blazed the myriad colors of pure white light.
Within the shadow, within the circle, the flame of a cigarette tip flared.
*
Abelard fell. It was a familiar sensation.
He fell farther, faster, and this time the fire did not merely linger at the edge of his vision and the borders of his mind. It burst upon him in a flood. It charred his soul and burnt his body to a cinder. It danced upon him the dance that destroyed and renewed. This fire was the heartbeat of the world. The fire was love. The fire was life.
The fire was his God.
A faint remnant of his logical mind remembered that for some reason, though he had smoked constantly since his Lord’s death, in three days he had not once used a lighter or a match. Always he passed flame from one cigarette to the next.
He surrendered to God. Every breath of smoke lingering in his lungs, every trace of fire that calmed him in his hours of need, he gave them forth freely.
He was the size of a city, the size of the world, the size of the universe, smaller than the smallest atom. He was ash, and he burned eternal in a million suns.
Brilliant and new as a phoenix, Kos the Everburning rose from the ember at the tip of Abelard’s cigarette.
*
There is a space beyond or beneath the world, where all that is not, which creates all that is, collects and congregates. Shadow dances and wars with light there. Life and mind play their eternal game of flight and pursuit.
That place looks like nothing the human mind can grasp, so think of it as a bar: polished wood, brass fixtures, dim lights, beer.
A woman sat alone, beautiful and lost and full of rage so old it had become a dull ache deadening every newborn sensation. She cradled a half-empty pint glass.
A man entered the bar from a door that had not been there before. He stood waiting for a thousand years as they measured time, but she did not acknowledge him.
He looked more lost than she, and more recently wounded. He opened his mouth to speak, but had no words in whatever tongue they used. He reached for her. Placed his hand on her shoulder.
For another millennium she did not respond to his touch.
She stared into the dregs of her glass. Her arm floated slowly upward, against the weight of history.
She closed her hand around his.
*
Tara heard Denovo scream, an ugly sound full of desire and thwarted ambition. Shadow rolled from Ms. Kevarian’s circle to obscure the world. The air grew warm.
Fire broke reality.
She closed her eyes on reflex, and was nearly blinded in her second sight as webs of god-flame spun through Alt Coulumb with a speed beyond speed. The numberless threads that kept Kos’s city running had hung slack; now they snapped taut as a spring-loaded trap. Across town, fire erupted on the altars of Kos’s Sanctum. A beacon of holy light shone atop the Sanctum tower; a cry issued from the crowd below, wordless and exultant as the shadows vanished from their faces. Their candle flames leapt for joy.
Here in Justice’s Hall, the Concern bloomed and fell like the folds of a bridal veil upon the silver shade that was Seril Green-Eyed. Denovo’s defenses shriveled and snapped.
It was possible, Tara had said to Abelard, for a god to hide himself from obligations within the faith of his disciples, letting all but his consciousness die. It hurt more than death, and only the strongest deities could endure the pain for long. But it was possible. If you were powerful and your need was great—if, for example, this were the only way to save your long-lost love and avenge a grave crime, and if you knew that the fatal draw on your power would soon pass, leaving your body unharmed and ripe for rehabitation—you just might manage it.