She heard a man laugh, and swung round on the cot to face him. She was clothed—shirt untucked, slacks torn and wrinkled, and unshod, but dressed enough for modesty if not for armor. She set down the glass and glared across the tent at Altemoc. “What’s so funny?”
He sat in a folding chair, ankle crossed over knee, cane propped against his hip. His fingers trailed over the frog crouched on a silver globe that served for his cane’s handle. “You reminded me of someone,” he said. “How’s your head?”
“Outside of the tap-dancing elephants, I’m fine.” Exploring, her fingers found a scabbed cut beneath her hair. She asked the question she’d been dreading: “What day is it?”
“You’ve been asleep two hours.”
“I grayed out. I shouldn’t be up for days. If ever.”
“I gave you soulstuff. You’re fine.”
“What was the contract? What did you offer? What did you ask me for?”
“Nothing.” He raised his hand. Green fire danced down his scars and faded. “That’s not how we work.”
“You offer services free of charge.”
“Not exactly,” he said, and spun the cane. “Our beneficiaries aren’t the ones who pay. A Deathless Queen on a throne of melted swords asks us to heal a War-made plague in a border village. The plague poses her no threat, but she doesn’t want the people of that village dead.”
“Out of the goodness of her heart?”
“I used to think that,” he said, “but that’s a village of potential customers. Hard to rule if your instrument of rule breaks the land it touches. Craftwork destroys the world, so it must learn to heal.”
She did not rise to the bait.
Only three hours lost. Somewhere in Alt Coulumb, the case began. There had to be some way to salvage this. For Shale, locked under a mountain in a goddess’s mind. For Seril. For Alt Coulumb, besieged. “How much do you remember?” she asked.
“Most of it. I was alive, inside her. Her will was mine, but not. Like I was part of something bigger.”
Tara knew the feeling. She did not shiver. “You know my name. You know why I’ve come.”
“You’re Tara Abernathy. And you need something from me. I have little enough to give.”
The ice in her glass melted. She tried to stand, and swayed, and settled back onto the cot. “Last year, the King in Red gave you some unreal estate—specifically, Alt Coulumb’s sky.”
“He did.”
“Do you know why he was so generous?”
Altemoc trapped the spinning frog between his fingers and spun it again. The movement was tight, practiced, obsessive. She remembered a friend from the Hidden Schools, Daphne’s ex, a sometime gambler; he kept a stack of poker chips on his desk to rifle as he read. “He likes our work.”
“He gave them up because they weren’t his to give. He took them from the corpse of Seril Undying, Lady of the Moon—he thought. Deathless Kings accept the right of salvage; the King in Red used his rights to Alt Coulumb airspace as collateral, even if he couldn’t exploit them directly due to Kos Everburning’s competing claim. Back in the Wars, when people thought all gods would be dead by the century’s end, those rights were worth millions of souls.”
Altemoc whistled.
“With those funds, the King in Red rebuilt Dresediel Lex and made himself a peer of the world. Without them he would have had to accept more outside investment in RKC, which would have reduced his control over your city. Ancient history. The King’s salvage rights depend on Seril’s death, but she wasn’t really dead. She returned last year. Her survival negates the King in Red’s claim. Theft is more optically uncomfortable than salvage. Modern banks do a lot of business with Old World sovereign churches, which don’t like reminders of the bad old days.”
Spin. Trap. Spin. Trap. “He gave us the sky.”
“I imagine he wrote it off as a tithe on his foreign income filings, since your Concern looks a lot like a clerical aid bureau.”
“He’s a donor,” Altemoc said, as if that explained everything.
Here’s the critical part, Ms. Abernathy. Take care. “Seril sent me to ask you to return Her sky.”
He stopped spinning the cane. Bad tell, that. “You’re offering a trade?”
“No. Seril is under attack. She’s too weak to defend Herself, let alone pay market value for something so enormous.”
“You’re talking about two years of operating budget. We could rebuild cities with that power. Heal people.”
“If the Goddess had anything to offer in trade, I wouldn’t be here.”
“I wish I could help you,” he said.
That was it. The flat no.
She heard gods die a long way off, and did not like the sound.
“Mr. Altemoc.”
“Caleb.” His voice was flat and a little sad, as if his first name were the greatest concession he could offer.
“Caleb. I studied your Concern on our trip here from Dresediel Lex. A bridge between gods and men, that’s your slogan.”
“Yes.”