Like last time, before the fire.
But the sky broke, and burned, and froze. Craftsmen fought gods for the city’s future. In Dresediel Lex, she’d watched, and after the slaughter she left—crossed a continent to flee the memory of crisped skin and seared flesh and the chemical stink of gripfire. In twenty years she’d made this city her own, fought for its people with the only weapons she knew, with voice and pen and conductor’s baton.
If Seril lost, the city would break. The voices would stop—the Godsent dreams, the brief intimations of a city striving toward justice. Chains would bite the gods’ flesh, and bind.
Gabby was afraid.
She would have struck anyone else who suggested it, but she could not strike herself. She was afraid. These girls fought—easy for them. They did not know what loss might mean. By staying quiet, staying small, staying on the sidelines, you could outlast even that madness in the sky. People who did not fight, survived.
And Aev was in the sky, dying. Aev, who saved Gabby from danger she’d taken on herself.
She prayed.
There must have been words for this back before the Wars, but Gabby didn’t know them. She directed her mind to moments her life touched the Lady’s, silences in which she felt a presence, an intimation, a still voice from still water, a whisper from stone. Not Kos’s all-embracing, all-consuming love, not the voice that left you ashes, but something cool and deep and lonely. She was asked, and she gave.
The silence lived with stories. Jones felt them: a square of people offering themselves. Trade was a pale echo of this feeling, of raw self offered up to Someone who knit it to a whole.
There were so many tales.
Hundreds clashed and recombined in the market, bitter with suffering, gingered with joy. They drew sparks when they struck. Every person here knew the Goddess in a different way. They lacked tongues to name Her, myths and prayers to fit Her. They offered themselves with love or humility or fear or pain, and if the Goddess accepted them all, She would break herself to shards.
Joining those shards was a priestess’s task, and Ellen was not ready.
She shook with strain. Scoured by private terrors, the girl could not shoulder her congregation’s burden, could not filter their pain through herself.
What had Gabby expected? For Ellen to knit a people from scattered threads beneath a demon-haunted sky?
She felt the first stirrings of despair.
Then she heard footsteps.
“Excuse me,” a man said behind her.
Gabby turned.
A group of people wearing mismatched clothes had entered the market from the south. Their leader, a tall, thin man with a graying beard, approached the dais beside Ellen, working his way through the congregation while his fellows spread out to ring the crowd. He held out his hand, and Ellen accepted.
“Hello,” he said. “You may call me Dr. Hasim. I am a Doctor of Divinity, which means I heal gods. Your Lady saved me, and she saved my friends. We offered Her our help in turn. She asked us to come here, to tell you Her stories, and pray Her prayers with you. She is a Lady of great age, with as many stories as She has faces.”
“Tell us, then,” Ellen said, and Jones heard her relief, her desperation.
“No.” Hasim did not turn from Ellen, and though he did not shout, his voice filled the market. “Gods do not know how best to help themselves, any more than human patients do. I know old stories, written for a different time. You must tell Her tales yourself.”
“I can’t,” she said. “All our stories are different.”
“All people are different,” Hasim said. “They are also more or less the same. In your tale, they will hear their own.”
Ellen let his hand slip. She looked out over the crowd.
Gabby held her breath. Claire stood rigid beside the stage.
“My father,” Ellen said, “roars.”
65
War is a hard problem. Even simple physical conflicts have so many moving interlocking systems, physical and moral and technological, meteorological and geographical and historical, that attempt to name their edges far out into the borders of complexity theory. Craftwork battles leap over those borders and swim in the chaos beyond. Courtly wards and rules contain that chaos like rolled-up towels on a bathroom floor contain gushing sewage.
Good thing Daphne Mains was built for battle.
Part of her was, anyway. Somewhere within the shell game of her soul, she observed the seams of her construction: her hands drew glyphs in air precisely as a machine tooling metal, and words in a dozen dead tongues spilled from her lips without trace of affect. Back in the Hidden Schools she’d had no talent for languages, progressing slowly from rote memorization through info-gap exercises with classmates to actual contact with contorted other-dimensional horrors. Each syllable had cut her throat from the inside, as if the words themselves were demonglass.
Tonight they flowed from her like water from a faucet.