“Why? So far I’ve heard only conjecture and spite.”
“You covered your tracks well. Idols paying idols to rent the gray-eyed girl’s apartment. A different set of shell Concerns and Kavekanese mystery cults to hire Varg. But the Talbeg priest who stole this skull had a demon inside him, like the demons in the others, and he sent the skull to you. So that chain leads us at least as far back as Varg.”
“Your chain has flimsy links, Counselor.”
“Did you attack Kos just to cover up your theft?”
“I brought suit,” Ramp said, “because Seril is a weakness at a time we can afford none. Kos and the Iskari are bad enough: gods and their servants prating on as if the Wars never happened, binding simpletons to their service. They’re brake pads on the troika of history. But at least the Craft binds them. With Seril’s return Kos gains new freedom, which slows progress. These gods of yours are a dead end for life on this planet: a disgusting self-centered inversion, music played on the deck of a sinking ship when we should be saving ourselves.” She shrugged. “More to the point, I brought suit because my clients asked me to. You do remember clients? Or has your time among god-botherers replaced fiduciary duty with faith?”
“Is that the game we’re playing? Denials and pushback?”
“You accused me of acting for an ulterior motive. I tell you I had none. But Alexander’s skull is a treasure. Whoever thought to send it to me has my thanks, whatever their methods.”
“Why waste our time? There are no Judges here.”
Ramp sipped wine. “Because I’ve worked against people like you before,” she said.
“Like me.”
“Jumped-up junior Craftswomen with a swollen sense of their superiority to the morally compromised elder generation. You mistake the ability to walk without a parent’s aid for competence. In your world everything has an explanation, an ultimate motive, and all you have to do is dissect and diagram these for a Judge, as if the court were a nanny who could ease your pain. I wouldn’t put it past you to have witnesses on the other end of this link, though it runs against common decency.”
“Decency.” Her fingers tightened on the skull. “As if you have a right to talk. Daphne—”
“Ms. Mains,” she said, “was a tragic loss, but don’t dare talk to me about her as if you understand. Did you seek her out? I did, after Alexander’s death. She lay in a bed, dreaming horrors. Her family kept her in a tower room, surrounded by the stuffed toys of her childhood, tended by a live-in nurse. Unable to care for herself in the most basic ways, at twenty-two. And she was still inside that wasted meat, do you understand? Suffering. Broken. A mind in pieces. I fixed her. I offered her a path out, and I made her take it. The pieces of her that were gone, I rebuilt. I filled her hollows with demonglass. I summoned and bound beings into her body. In the end she was almost herself again.”
“And you talk about the man who broke her as if he was some kind of saint.”
“He was a genius, which is something other than a saint. And in his genius he left many projects, including Ms. Mains, and I daresay you, unfinished. I have always been more of a theorist than a Technician, but we can’t afford to abandon his work.”
“His evil work.”
“And there you show your true colors. You, student of the Hidden Schools, child of centuries of struggle, fall back on that old pathetic word fools and idiots chanted at the first Craftswomen they bound in the stocks, while they warmed the branding irons.”
“We fought the God Wars for freedom, and you throw that struggle in my face to endorse the work of a madman developing better tools of slavery.”
“We fought the God Wars for power, child. That’s what freedom is. No one fights for any other reason.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Which of us do you think has the surer truth?” She spread her arms. “The one who believes continents are shattered in the name of high-minded ideals, or the one who believes contents are shattered because two people who can shatter continents want different things?”
Abernathy clutched the skull in her hands as if to crush it.