Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)
Max Gladstone
1
Tara Abernathy’s first job as in-house counsel for the Church of Kos was to hide a body.
A Blacksuit led her down a winding stair to a windowless stone room, empty save for a sturdy table, a counter, a sink, and Alexander Denovo’s corpse.
Her old teacher and tormentor looked much as she’d last seen him—at least, physically. Even in death, his lips kept their self-satisfied smirk. The eyes had lost their triumphant gleam, though, the conqueror peering from behind the bumpkin professor’s. He wore off-the-rack approximations of his usual wardrobe: tweed jacket with elbow patches, red suspenders, brown shoes. Of course they hadn’t let him keep his own clothes in jail. A Craftsman’s jacket might hide anything.
He was dead.
“Did you kill him?” she asked the Blacksuit. “Did Justice?”
The burnished silver statue answered: No. Familiarity bred neither contempt for nor comfort with Blacksuit voices, which did not carry through the air so much as manifest in the mind, built from screams, skewed cello notes, and breaking glass. He died in his cell, of a heart attack.
Blacksuits did not lie, at least not in their official capacity as representatives of Justice. Nor did they murder. They preferred to execute.
Tara walked a slow circle around the body. The signs were right. They would be, no matter Denovo’s true cause of death. No one who went to the trouble of breaking into the cell where the Blacksuits held the man, killing him, and escaping without detection would leave signs he’d perished of anything but natural causes.
“He’s a Craftsman,” Tara said, to remind herself as much as the Suit. “He murdered gods. He bound the wills of hundreds to his service. He almost destroyed this city. Hells, he almost became a god himself. He wouldn’t die like this.”
Nonetheless.
“I won’t bring him back for you,” she said.
We did not expect you to. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“You want me to make sure he stays dead.”
The Blacksuit nodded.
Tara cracked her neck, then her knuckles. “All right. Let’s get started.”
The problem was simple, insofar as the necromantic logic of the Craft was concerned. A hundred fifty years before, as the first Deathless Kings formed a society free of divine meddling—and, incidentally, of mortality—they’d faced a practical concern: How does one discourage antisocial behavior among formerly human beings for whom life imprisonment is a brief inconvenience, if not an undefined term, and the death penalty a slap on the wrist? How do you keep a necromancer bound to the world by thousands of debts from climbing back out of her grave?
The answers ranged from grotesque to merely inhumane, but all shared a theoretical foundation: you don’t let the dead go free.
Tara set her purse on the counter and produced from within a retort, a bit of silver chalk, three gas burners, several large pieces of glassware, and two silver bracelets. She shucked her jacket, rolled up her sleeves, donned the bracelets, and struck them against each other. They sparked, and slick black oil rolled from them to cover her hands. The glyphs machine-tooled into her forearms glowed silver against her dark skin. She drew her work knife from the glyph above her heart, and its moon-lightning blade cast queer light into the corners of the stone room.
Denovo lay before her.
She took a deeper breath than she cared to admit she needed, and touched the cold dry skin of his temple.
“Hi there,” the corpse said.
Ms. Abernathy?
“It’s all right,” Tara told the Blacksuit. She forced her heart back to a slow and proper rhythm. “He’s dead, but there’s still power inside his body. That power can”—she groped for terms the Blacksuit would understand—“push on my memories of him, like organ keys. The gloves keep most of it out, but he was strong. I’ll be fine.” She made her knife sharp, took hold of his collar, and carved off his clothes.
“Fine,” the corpse said in a wry voice. “Will you be fine, Tara, really? Fine, in this benighted city, slaving for a mad goddess and an equivocating god not fit to kiss a Craftsman’s boot?”
Answering a phantom’s taunt was bad form, but she was not being graded here. “Kos Everburning is a good God. He stayed out of the Wars. He’s needed an in-house Craftswoman for a long time. And Seril isn’t mad anymore.”
Ms. Abernathy?
“You can wait outside,” she told the Blacksuit, “if you’d rather. This will take a while, and you’ll make me nervous if you just stand there.”
The statue flowed out the door and shut it after, leaving her alone with the body.
She removed his shoes one at a time, and cut his trousers off. He lay nude on the slab, paunchy and pale.