Some parts of the city only live on such an evening. Far to the east, the Pleasure Quarter offers cosmopolitan seductions to sailors fresh ashore, to foreigners from the Old World, from Iskar or the Gleb or from Dread Koschei’s realm in Zur, from the Skeld Archipelago with its small gods and sunken cities, from Southern Kath where skeleton kings command indentured zombie hordes to work plantations in blistering heat. Hot Town’s something else again: footraces and drug trade, street music on drums and guitar, food carts selling a hundred variations on fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar, cheap carnival rides powered by burly mustachioed men, streetwalkers in private practice. This is where Westerling locals come to sweat and eat and shop and drink and sweat some more, as their parents did and their parents before them down the long centuries before Craftsmen stole fire from the gods and made the world weird. The Hot Town opens storefront windows and unrolls rugs of wares onto sidewalks and streets. Turquoise pendants and silver wirework glitter beside dyed silk scarves and shawls and stalls of pirated books and obscene unlicensed street theater.
So fixed were the people milling about their business of pleasure that they missed the broad-winged shadow that flitted overhead, gray against the darkening blue, as night wrestled day to the ground and kissed him so hard their teeth clicked.
Aev knew the scene below of old, had watched the street fair for centuries since her first kindling within a stone egg perched atop Alt Coulumb’s highest tower. The vices did not change so much as the clothes in which the practitioners wrapped themselves. She’d suffered forty years of exile in the Geistwood, hemmed in by trees, robbed of stone and familiar streets, but this was home. What matter if it feared her? What matter if these ants below thought her a harbinger of doom, believed Her Lady dead? Peace came with time and effort, and stone was well suited for both.
Aev flew east and south along the Hot Town strip, skyscrapers to her left, brownstones and tenements to her right. Fountains of ghostlight erupted at irregular intervals from gridded streets. The moon hung slivered in the sky, but growing—gravid with uncertain future.
Ahead of her rose the Temple of Kos in the center of the green: an enormous black needle that burned in the vision of the heart.
Once the God’s radiance would have been tempered by moonlit silver chill. But the goddess, returned though She might be, swollen from the echo Aev had sheltered in Geistwood shadows, was small set beside Her lover. He was a city and more, grown fat on foreign trade, while She belonged to Her children alone.
Aev sang in flight.
Wings flower-petal-spread
And teeth and claws the thorns
I grow to seek my Mother’s light
Her flesh my flesh, her skin my form—
Doggerel not worthy of inscription, but when moved to sing, one sang.
The moon swelled with her voice. Cold fire danced along the crystal lattice of her nerves, and she heard with heart’s ear an answering song.
She flew in widening circles until she reached the temple’s peak, at such height the city seemed made from children’s toys. The sea spread east past the docks to a horizon silver flashed by moon. She darted across the temple green. Any who looked up would take her for a swallow or a tiny bat. Deprived of context or comparison, they couldn’t know her size, or guess her speed.
She landed lightly on the roof, wings flared to brake. The wind of her arrival blew back the hood of the monk who awaited her: a tall thin young man with hollow cheeks and a shaved tonsure, whose cigarette was mostly ash. She knew him: the boy who fell and rose again, born aloft on the fire of his reborn God. “Abelard,” she said. He still flinched at the sound of her voice. “You look well.”
“Aev.” He bowed, with hands pressed together. She’d said “well,” but he looked paler than she remembered. He was not often in the sun. He lit a new cigarette from the ashes of the old, and ground the last beneath his boot.
“Those things will kill you.”
“Not while God provides.” He took a drag. “Besides, it’s comforting. Did you have a nice flight?”
She nodded.
“Come on. They’re waiting for you.”
She furled her wings and let him lead her into her Lady’s lover’s temple.
10
“This is the simplest way to kill a god,” Tara said. She stood at the foot of a long table in a dark room in the upper reaches of the Temple of Kos Everburning. A whiteboard on a pine easel somewhat spoiled the hidden chamber’s overall severity. “You find a flaw in his defenses. A deal that cannot be broken. A treasure the god cannot help but defend. Then you hammer it until the god breaks.”
Around the table sat the guests she’d spent the day inviting. At its head loomed dark-skinned Cardinal Evangelist Bede, globular beneath his crimson robes and puffing on a pipe, beside Technical Cardinal Nestor, a thin cold man with a thin cold face, elevated to his current post for stability more than genius. Neither of them looked at Aev, who stood, since no chair was large or strong enough to hold her. Abelard sat between the cardinals and the gargoyle, hands twitching in his lap. Across the table, Blacksuit representatives held attention. Catherine Elle uncrossed her legs. To her right sat Commissioner Michaels, a woman in her early fifties, heavy with strength. These would be enough for tonight’s purposes.
They watched her.
“You all have heard the news by now: for a year, Seril’s children have been offering, let’s call them neighborhood watch services, throughout Alt Coulumb. Pray, shed a little blood, and the gargoyles will aid you.”
“We should have been told,” Michaels said. “We should be working together.”
“We would have told you,” Aev shot back, “if your people hadn’t stoked hatred of Seril for four decades. We have to build love for Our Lady—not for Justice, but for the Goddess in Her own aspect.”