14
Tara slipped into the boiler room of the Church of Kos and landed soundless in shadows. Enormous metal tanks, basins, and pipes swelled in angry twilight to fill the vast chamber. Gauges ticked up. Valves opened and closed. Hydraulic fluid surged through pipes. Steam hissed. Far away, a great gear wound and wound. She smelled copper and concrete and burned air, which did not bother her. She felt the presence of a god, which did.
“Abelard?”
She heard footsteps behind a huge compression tank and moved toward them. The red and the rhythm and the smell reminded her of walking through a giant heart, and the impression was not far from truth. These boilers and generators and coils translated Kos Everburning’s heat into the power on which his people relied. She understood the dynamics of their faith, but its machines were alien to her. Growing up in the country, a girl awed by tales of the urban horrors her grandparents fled to live as tillers of soil, she’d known no device more complex than farm equipment. When she ran away from home to seek those horrors herself, she found teachers who preferred sorcery to mechanism. Generators and pipes remained strange to her. In a way, she was trespassing now more than she had the year before, when she walked on the flesh of the dead god himself.
He hadn’t been dead, of course. Which was part of their current problem.
Rounding the tank, she saw more pipes, more valves, more pulleys and belts and shifting gears, oil-slick surfaces none of which had the decency to keep still and let her find the man she sought.
She peered beneath the physical world. All this metal was quite simple on the level of Craftwork: tricks to convert energy from one form or vector to another. To her gaze the machines pulsed in heartbeat time, and there, in a nook ten feet off the ground, nestled between a wall and a steam tank, was a man’s spinning soul.
“There you are.”
“Can anyone hide from you?” His voice echoed.
“Not like that,” she said. A ladder led up to his nook, concealed behind a bundle of thin pipes. The rungs were warm. “Kos could hide you if you asked; He couldn’t do the same for me, because of my glyphs.”
“No hide-and-go-seek for necromancers.”
“Oh, we play. We hide in bargains and loopholes and fine print.” Tara crested the ladder and pulled herself into the niche between tank and wall. Abelard sat within, legs curled against his chest, arms crossed on his knees. Beneath him lay a thin pallet, and across from him a small altar. Tara tested the floor for dust, and sat. “You sleep here?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “How do you sleep?”
“Well,” she replied. “On my back.”
“I mean, you see things with your eyes closed.”
“So do you. Light filters through the lids, creates patterns, that warm pink edge to darkness. You can’t turn off your skin, can’t close your ears, but you sleep fine.”
“Not these days,” he said.
“Why did you leave the meeting?”
“Did I miss much?”
Here in the half-lit dark, she felt like she could say anything. “Same story as ever. Don’t like the news? Question the bearer.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It could be worse. Sometimes clients play dumb—they go to you for expertise, then argue with your conclusions. Back in Edgemont I hung out my shingle and dealt small-time magic, before Ms. K found me. You know what phrase I learned to hate more than any other? How bad can it be?” She leaned her head against the cool rock. Hair bunched and coiled against her skull. “You should have stayed. You could have helped them understand.”
“Cardinal Bede knows more about bond markets than anyone else in the church; Cardinal Nestor’s a wise Technician. I’m … me.”
“You kept your God alive when everyone gave him up for dead. You kept faith when there was no chance your faith would be rewarded. Those old men don’t know what that was like. What you did. What you almost lost.”
“I died, Tara. Let’s not put too fine a point on it.”
“I was getting to that,” she said. “Let me build up a rhythm.”
He tapped cigarette ash onto the tray atop his little altar. “The Council of Cardinals wanted to canonize me. There was a whisper campaign around the solstice.”
“Saint Abelard. You’d fit right in with the gaunt-faced fossils in the murals.”
“The Cardinals are afraid—they think I’ll undermine them by going directly to God. And I fear them, too. Cardinal Gustave was a pillar of strength, and he betrayed us all. Do you think he could have done that without help?”