“She wasn’t in command when the salvage took place. We don’t want any loopholes.”
“Give me a minute to square this lot away,” he said, and turned to his crew. Even angry, Raz moved beautifully—perhaps a particular grace emerged from his anger. The crew scattered before him like goats before a lion. Bounty’s early evening business took less time to settle than she expected, probably due to the fact that Raz was three, four times faster than most humans. He blurred around the edges.
“Let’s go,” he said when he was done.
She passed him the scroll, which he skimmed as they walked over. “I don’t understand this.”
“Tara says if we took the Dream under Coulumbite authority, we can’t wake up the people in her hold. If we claimed her under a different authority”—with a meaningful nod toward the new-risen moon—“we can wake them, just like that. But since you were involved, you need to sign.”
He reread the scroll, examined it front and back. “Okay.”
“Any questions?”
“Do whatever you want, and justify it later if you don’t like the consequences. Sounds like your kind of plan.”
“That was beneath you,” she said. Dream’s gangplank was down. She climbed first, and he followed her. The cry came: “Captain on deck!” The skeleton who’d given it saluted them with a clatter of finger bone against skull.
Raz returned the salute. “Come on. Let’s finish this.”
*
Abelard joined vigil early. Outside the sanctum window, the blued sky deepened to black. Around him, the Sanctum of Kos Everburning beat like a heart. Hydraulic fluid pulsed through pumps. Steam sang down pipes. He lit incense in the Everburning Flame and knelt before the chromed altar with hands outstretched. Firelight glazed the faces of long-dead saints, women and men of faith who’d raised Alt Coulumb from river mouth port to metropolis, who’d shed their blood for God, who’d let the Lord’s heat work through them. As a novice, he dreamed of following their path.
Some felt he had.
He had been convenient to God back then, that was all.
But he could earn his place.
His voice framed the prayer. He’d knelt here so often the words seemed to speak themselves. These days he struggled to keep his heart in the ceremony, to feel the ritual as praise rather than a series of rehearsed steps.
Tonight the words formed as they should: Glory to You, Everburning, Ever-transforming—and within them he framed his appeal.
We need to talk.
The world around him took fire, and he was lifted.
His body knelt. His voice prayed. It was his context that changed. A cold rush climbed his spine, spread through his limbs, and he stood astride the city. But when he looked down on Alt Coulumb’s teeming streets and sidewalks and the wharfs that pulsed with broad-backed men and women strong as sprung steel, he saw them as if he was them, as if he moved through and within them, as if his thoughts were pieces of theirs—
fuck they want to buy at that price for I don’t even
gotta hold the knife like this so you won’t cut
even know where was he last night and he comes
home all
consider the alternatives
I don’t mind if you just want to screw
fillet of whitefish six thaums a pound
God-damn Blacksuits make it so
a man can’t live
Gods, or at least the few with which Abelard was on speaking terms, could use human speech, as a person who lacked sign language could point to a flower or a passing cloud. The bigger the god, the harder that became. Rather than reducing themselves to human syntax, larger deities preferred to elevate humans to theirs. That approach had drawbacks, though. Human beings were good at comprehending things that looked, thought, and spoke at roughly human size, speed, and complexity. A modern god in a modern city, networked through faith and bond to pantheons and Deathless Kings around the planet, was larger, faster, and more complex than monkey-derived man. Divine communions sometimes made as little sense as Cathbart’s sermons might to an ape. Some saints went mad from the experience.
Not that Abelard could have expressed such thoughts in that moment, borne on the tide of God, burning in the flame at the heart of His city. Kos Everburning, Lord of Flame, gave His servant knowledge of Himself. Tears streamed down Abelard’s face.
Through the awe and wonder, though, he thought: you won’t get off the hook that easily.
The city web wriggled and drew back, cold, nonchalant. God had no idea what he could possibly mean.
I’m here to talk about Seril. You know what’s happening. Everything Tara’s said in council. There’s no use playing dumb.
(Lord Kos was great and benevolent and wise. Why feign politeness, as if such an Interlocutor could only hear your surface thoughts?)
The city moved. Far below, in a body that was but one axon of the Mind with which he now conversed, he spoke the second stanza of the Litany for the Coming Burn. Ocean rolled against pier and distant sand, with a sound like the shuffling of enormous feet.