“That’s Alt Coulumb. The city’s not perfect, but its gods are trying, and so’s the church. For forty years Kos ruled alone, complacent. With Seril back, He’s worked more to help His city. If She goes, He’ll collapse.”
“I have to care for my people.” She heard the thorn twisting in his voice. “What would I tell the board?”
“Tell them you spent their donations to save a city. To heal a wound made long ago, in the Wars.” She shifted forward on the bed and laced her fingers. “I’m not a hired gun. I have friends in Alt Coulumb. I left them to fight a losing battle on the chance you could help us. Shale, who took your place, he’s under that mountain wrestling a demon-goddess from the dawn of time so we can have this conversation. I am breaking every rule of negotiation: I have no leverage to exploit, and no alternative. You don’t know me well enough to know how hard that is. But here I am. What would you do, if these were your friends?”
He had an even, unreadable expression.
Gambler, for certain—and knowing that, she knew illegibility was a mask he wore to hide.
His eyes were darker than hers, but a gold halo surrounded the pupils, like a false-colored picture of a collapsing star.
“Save them,” he said.
She waited.
“The board will kill me.”
She wouldn’t fault them if they did, but she didn’t say that. Nor could she say any of the other preprogrammed words: you’ve made the right decision, or, pleasure doing businesses, or let’s talk details. She managed “thank you,” and hoped it was enough.
He touched a bruise on his cheek. “Now I know why you hit me so hard.”
“You have a punchable face.”
“That explains a lot.” He held out his hand. The scars there took fire. “Good luck, Ms. Abernathy.”
“Tara,” she said. Small concession for a small concession.
“Tara.”
They shook, as did the world.
61
Corbin followed Umar down empty Ember Street. He did not look up at the impossible sky, but could not escape it by looking down. Weird lights cast weird shadows. Twisting reflections shimmered from shop windows, from parked carriages, from skyscrapers, from the muscles of Umar’s back.
Corbin rarely ventured this far into the Business District, domain of witches and madmen in jackets that should have been straight. But he knew it was not supposed to be like this: streets and sidewalks bare, workers huddled in offices or homes. Several blocks away a Blacksuit shouted Remain calm. The danger will pass.
The danger did not look like it would pass to Corbin. He could not tell how much time had elapsed since he left the hospital. There was no sun, or else the sun was everywhere.
Umar did not seem bothered by the sky, by the emptiness, or by his bare feet. Corbin’s soles were dirt crusted now, his steps ginger. “Where are we going?”
“Here.” Umar pointed as they turned left. Corbin felt a chill that had nothing to do with the atmosphere.
A white marble colonnade supported a peaked roof. White steps descended from double doors to the street. A robed statue of a blindfolded woman stood atop the steps, one arm raised, holding scales.
“There should be paint,” Umar said. “Many colors. The white is a mistake.”
“Why are we going to the Temple of Justice? Will it help us against”—he still could not think of the moon without cringing—“her?”
“I need a weapon,” he said.
“You can’t break into a temple.”
Umar pointed to the sky. Corbin did not look. “Justice is busy.”
“There are three Blacksuits on those stairs.”
“We will not use the front door,” Umar said. “Follow me. Or not.”
He did.
Umar led him down an alley to an office building stitched by skyways to the temple and surrounded by a tall fence. Umar vaulted the fence and somehow severed the barbed wire at its top. Corbin climbed after him, landed harder than he’d hoped on the other side, and hopped after Umar, brushing gravel from the pads of his feet. He knew better than to speak, though he also should have known better than to follow.
Still. Revenge.
Umar broke the chain off a loading dock door with the heel of his hand. Behind the door, steps led into a darkness made deeper by dim light. Umar climbed down.
Corbin looked up out of habit, to search the sky for guidance. At that moment, the world’s colors inverted, reddened, and failed; everything became matte black with edges suggested by thin lines like those a razor left through paint. The illusion, if illusion it was, could not have lasted a second, but when it ended he had a sense it had endured much longer—that something had gone out of the reasserted world, some note stilled he’d been hearing so long he no longer knew how silence sounded.
He ran into the basement and pulled the doors shut to close away that sky.
The basement was not built to reassure. Bare pipes dripped onto bare concrete floors. Piled boxes closed him in, their cardboard stamped with serial numbers and bar-code glyphs. No Umar. A door in the far wall stood open.