“Such service,” the corpse said. “I should come here more often.”
“You’re an asshole,” she told him, without rancor. What rancor could there be in a statement of fact? She donned a surgical mask and returned to the table with a glass jar, a rubber tube, and a silver needle. The needle she slid into his arm, and the glass jar began to draw his blood—eight pints. Fortunately, the jar, like her purse, was larger than it looked from outside. “You always were.”
“I helped you, Tara, as I helped all my students. I made you part of something bigger: a community dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, the advancement of Craft, the salvation and elevation of the race.”
“You stole minds. You tried to break me, and when I fought free you tried to destroy my career.” The exsanguination vessel worked fast; his skin tightened as his veins collapsed. “When that didn’t work, you followed me to Alt Coulumb, and now you’re dead and I’m not.” She pressed the skin taut below his collarbone’s V, sliced a straight line down to his groin, and peeled back his chest. Slabs of muscle and fat glistened, and she cut into these until she bared the bone. “I guess that settles the question of whose methods work better.”
Spectral familiar laughter answered her. “Please. You had two gods, Elayne Kevarian, and a host of gargoyles and Blacksuits on your side. You didn’t beat me so much as outnumber me. But you can’t outnumber what’s coming.”
She pressed her lips together, and flensed his legs. Silver glyph-lines sparked around tibia and femur; his patella sported a star with six, no, seven, no, six points. As she cleaned his bones, she carved through Craftwork sigils, hidden mechanisms and machines. In his left thigh she found a bullet wrapped with scar tissue.
“I wanted to kill Alt Coulumb’s god and take his place,” he said. “It was a long shot, but if I’d won, imagine the rewards.”
“I’d rather not.” Corpse meat squelched beneath her gloved hands. Blood did not stick to her shadowy gloves.
“But now—do you have any idea of the weakness of your position? Your moon goddess Seril has returned, in secret of course, since half the city still hates her. They’ve hated her for decades, since she abandoned them to fight in the Wars and died. That she’s back, concealed, changes nothing. Kos will defend her to the death—so she’s a weak spot, pure leverage for your enemies to exploit. Hundreds of Craftsmen find the very existence of a godly city in the New World an affront. You’ve given them an opening. When they learn Seril’s back, girl, they will come for you. They’re not as smart as me, nor half so ambitious. They won’t pussyfoot like I did. They will kill your gods, and your friends. They’ll carve them to pieces. They will occupy this city and remake it into a gleaming citadel of Craft and commerce. No more Criers—newspapers on every corner and zombies in the market. You’ll weep if you live to see it. You’ll wish you’d never clawed your way out of that fleaspeck town where Elayne found you.”
She scooped out his organs, one at a time, weighed them piece by piece, and burned them to ash.
“You have my job for the moment, sure. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
“This wasn’t your job,” she said. Meathooks of Craft raised and turned the body. She tore off his back in a single sheet.
“I was the Cardinal’s advisor for forty years.”
“And you used him to kill his own God.”
“If you don’t use people, they use you. The whole world’s chains, Tara—Gerhardt said it, and the God Wars proved him right. When I worked with the church, I made sure I wrapped a chain firmly around its neck. You’ve fused one around yours and handed them the dangling end. You can’t command these people from within—and command’s the only way you’ll beat what’s coming.”
The slab lay empty save for the bones. To a laywoman all skeletons looked more or less alike. Experts could read differences: healed fractures, specific ratios of limb length to torso. Tara had never seen Alexander Denovo’s bones before. She would not have recognized him had she not carved him apart with her own hands.
“This city will stand,” she said.
“What city? It’s a mess of gargoyles and priests, Craftsmen and common folk, gods hidden and revealed. When trouble comes, they’ll tear out one another’s throats. You can’t stop them. Either you’ll be chained to them—one piece of a breaking machine—or you’ll be alone, a girl naked against a flood. They won’t trust you. They won’t follow you. They won’t work with you unless you kneel to them, and if you kneel, they lose anyway.”
“You’re lying.” She made her knife thick and sharp and heavy, a cleaver built of light.
“I’m in your head. I’m your worst memories of me, your greatest fears. And the greatest fear of all—the one that still makes you sweat at two in the morning when the world’s quiet—is that I was right all along. That I was right, and you are—”
Her blade parted skull from spine.