Fortunately, the various prelates soon realized that whichever of them held the position of Technical Cardinal would be responsible for working with Elayne Kevarian and Tara Abernathy, and the brewing sectarian violence cooled to a simmer of backroom deals and machinations. Rival factions held long knives ready beneath their robes and waited for the Craftswomen to leave. In the meantime, Cardinal Gustave’s old office remained empty.
With vacancy came uncertainty. None save Sister Miriel noticed when Novice Technician Abelard took advantage of this uncertainty to adjust a few time sheets and schedule his attendance upon God for the more reasonable interval between ten at night and one in the morning.
This was the only reward he claimed. In the preceding weeks, members of each faction had sought him out to promise promotion, elevation, sainthood in return for his support. Abelard had borne Lord Kos inside his heart (or in his cigarette—the difference didn’t seem to matter). Whispers about his miracles resounded through Sanctum halls like echoes off flat rock, but Abelard did not heed them. He knew the truth. The prelates had not saved Alt Coulumb. Nor had Cardinal Gustave. Nor had he, for that matter.
All Abelard wanted was to think, and pray. The rest of the world could wait.
He knelt before the Altar of the Defiant, his back to the window beyond which spread Alt Coulumb’s roads, its elevated trains, its towers and its palaces and the great globe of its sky, all shining like diamonds on black felt. Before him, the Rekindled Flame burned on its throne. Life beat on the drum of his heart.
“Glory to Thy Flame, Thou Everburning, Ever-transforming Majesty,” Abelard chanted, kneeling, before the glistening brass and chrome altar. He exhaled, and waited.
In the space between thoughts, he heard a voice.
Hello there, old friend, God said.
*
Deep below the Temple of Justice was a cell, well-apportioned but spare, walled on three sides by rock and on the fourth by a cold iron mesh. No sunlight reached there, nor starlight nor the light of the moon. A water clock on the room’s sole desk told time, but it lost minutes on the hour and this effect had compounded itself over the last three weeks. The cell’s only occupant thought the time was ten minutes before noon, rather than a quarter past one in the morning.
Alexander Denovo had just finished what he believed was lunch.
A heavy iron door swung open. Heels clicked on stone. He looked up, trying to place the stride, and succeeded a moment before Elayne Kevarian walked into view. She looked as one looks who has been contentedly busy for some time. He looked as one looks who has been idle and happy.
“Hello, Alexander,” she said.
“Elayne.” His nod was a parody of manners. “I would invite you to sit, but my jailers neglected to provide me with a receiving chair.”
“You find your new quarters pleasant?”
“They are to my liking, for the moment. I have had time to read, to think, and to plan.”
“Plan for what? You’re here until the Blacksuits decide what to do with you. You have remained inviolate thus far only because they have not yet formulated a suitable punishment for deicide.”
“I’m quite safe,” he said with certainty. “Justice, possessed or not by your tame gargoyle-goddess, cannot harm me herself. Nor will Alt Coulumb extradite me to the Hidden Schools, or to the mercies of Iskar or Camlaan or even the Gleb; while Justice cannot harm me, neither can she countenance my release, and my crimes against Kos and Seril are not crimes in the lands of the Deathless Kings. So here I stay. Cocooned in iron below the earth.”
“You sound suspiciously comfortable with that fact.”
He shrugged. “I have many friends. They will loose me on the world again. Hell, you would do it yourself, if I asked.”
Even in this cell, he had been able to draw some power to him, devouring the souls of rats and centipedes and deep earth-tunneling insects, feeding off the few taproots that extended so far beneath the city. He put that power into his voice, but Elayne batted it away with a blink of her eyes.
“Not likely.”
“It was worth a shot.”
“You’re a bastard, Alexander.”
“A brilliant bastard. I won’t stay here forever. I’ve learned a great deal in the last few months. How to slay a deity in secret, and seize his power.” He listed these things as if they were items on an invoice. “It’s amazingly simple. I will achieve godhood one day. I’ll find you, Elayne, and I’ll do such beautiful things with you. Twist your soul into a pretzel and skewer your dignity with fishhooks. It’ll be like it once was. You and me.”
His tone was wistful and wicked, calculated for the shudder it invoked in her stomach. She stilled herself before it reached her shoulders.
He stood, and paced the confines of his cell. “There’s nothing you can do. This cold iron grate? Woven with divine Craft. You could smite it with powers the … children … who populate this city have never imagined, and I’d sit here smiling. I’m snug as a chick in its egg, babe, until it’s time for me to break this little world open and come hunting for you. And Tara of course. Sweet, stubborn girl. So proud.” He assumed an airy, daydreaming tone of voice.
Her eyes closed, and so his did, too. He saw her as a python outlined in blue ice, filling the hallway. Her tongue flitted out to probe the iron lattice, found no gap in its protection, and retreated.
They opened their eyes at the same time. An irrational chill pricked up the hairs on the back of Denovo’s neck. For no reason he could determine, Elayne was smiling.
“You’re right,” she said, with a perfunctory nod. “There’s no possible way I can damage you through this cage.”
He nodded, the lascivious gleam in his eye giving way to uncertainty.
“You worked it all out to perfection, Alexander. You planned Kos’s murder and your own ascension, Cabot’s assassination and Pelham’s attack on Iskar. You anticipated the Church’s asking me to represent them. You knew just how to slide back into control of my mind, and I expect you planned an alternative strategy if you failed at that. I do not doubt you have an escape plan, nor that if you continue down this path one day you will succeed, and make Ms. Abernathy and me grovel and scream and force us to commit all the other depravities you’ve dreamt of down your lonely, desperate, and angry life.
“But you made one crucial mistake.”
“Oh?” He crossed his arms over his chest.
“You used a bound shadow to watch over Cardinal Gustave’s dagger, in case he turned on you.”
“Yes, and that god-benighted novice of yours let it loose. I am amazed he escaped alive.” He nodded. “An error in judgment, I admit, but hardly crucial.”
“Oh, you misunderstand me.” Elayne shook her head. “Your use of the shadow wasn’t a mistake. It was an efficient guardian, invisible to my own search of the Sanctum because its obedience to you was not ensured by direct Craft but by the terms under which you summoned it. You’re right to be amazed at Abelard’s survival. Your trap almost killed him, and several of his fellow priests, when he unwittingly set it free.
“I saved them. Ate your shadow, in fact, right in front of Abelard. You should have seen him, jaw slack and eyes bugged out.” She laughed a little, and he laughed with her. “I took that darkness into me, but I did not destroy it. I made it mine.”
He stopped laughing. Then he stopped smiling altogether.
“You made your one great mistake in the carriage between the Xiltanda and Justice’s temple. You kissed me.”
He thought back to that strange sensation as they kissed: a tingle of power and something else, like a worm slithering into his mouth. He remembered his surprise at her ingenuity. He had bound her Craft. She should not have been able to do anything to him.
She raised her hand, fingers crooked into a claw. He felt a sudden tightness in his chest. Something many-legged and sharp moved within his gullet.