“Our few needs are met by moonlight, earth, and rain. He will return.”
“Thanks.” Jones flipped forward in her notebook until she reached a page not blotted with the ink of her surprise. “Let’s go.”
Aev ushered her toward the throne.
32
Abelard, fire-flooded, spread through his city, burning in ecstasy of communion, remembered his confession to Tara in the temple boiler room. And Kos remembered it too, because Abelard was part of him as he was part of Abelard.
Yet Abelard was still the man he had been a year before, tumbling into darkness, dead, only to learn the darkness into which he fell was burning. That fire buoyed him up. The Lord caught him, time and again, as Abelard caught Him in turn. They fought for each other.
Cardinal Gustave burned in the Temple of Justice, full of rage and futile hope, hair blown in smoke and hurricane winds. Cardinal Gustave fell. Cardinal Gustave, Abelard’s anchor, who held church and faithful in his iron conviction’s grip—dead, after betraying his Lord for a reason he thought was right.
Peel off the old man’s face like a player’s mask, and Abelard saw himself.
I must not become Gustave. I must not believe that I know best how God should be in the world. But Gustave was a wise man, and good. If he could turn from You unsuspecting, what might I do?
What was Gustave’s fault? Pride, in thinking himself wiser than his fellow priests, wiser even, at the end, than God? But pride stemmed from a deeper source. If pride was flame, what was fuel?
Fear. Fear Kos would reject him. Fear his iron would rust from within.
In the end, it had.
Where does that leave us? he prayed. What can we do in the face of fear?
What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust.
Were the words his, or did they belong to Kos? What was he, anyway, but a piece of this burning web spun from a city’s dreams? He joined to Him by faith, by the burning of incense, by prayer, by kneeling before a fire. Where did Abelard end and God begin? They grew from each other.
And in that unity he felt Seril, diminished though present—a chill to match His flame, an equal and an adversary, haughty and swift, fluid and eternal. Kos had burned alone for fifty years, with only cables of contract and debt to bind Him to other gods, bereft of gift and humor, of all that matters in life save duty. The city had been His alone.
She was back, but She was weak.
But, Abelard reminded him, Her return had not broken His obligations—to church and city as well as love.
We need to work together, Abelard prayed. And, though the fear was not gone: I trust You.
The web echoed with that word.
Then the Fire said: You may have to prove it sooner than you think.
*
Cat was still deciding what to say when someone knocked on the door to the refrigerated hold of the Demon’s Dream.
The knock came from within.
She looked from Raz, to the contract he held, and back to the compartment.
“You told me to sign the thing,” Raz said.
“I didn’t think it would work that quickly.”
The knock repeated, a hammer-blow strike.
“Hold on.” She raised her voice. “We’re coming.” She pressed the amulet to the door, turned, and pulled. The door swung open and a chill wind gusted out.
A woman stood behind the door. Frost painted her skin. She lurched across the threshold. Her knees buckled, and Cat caught her by the arm, felt her flesh still stiff and cold. Kos and Seril. There should be someone here to deal with this. Specialists. Doctors. They should have thought. “You’re safe,” she said. The woman turned to her from the neck up. “I’m Cat. You’re in Alt Coulumb.” The woman did not respond. What language did these folks speak? Others approached the door, arms slack at their sides, staring.
Raz tore free a tarp that had been lashed over a loose crate and folded it around the woman, rubbing her shoulders through the cloth. He spoke to her, first in a smooth language heavy with l’s and aspiration, and when that produced no response, in a more halting, guttural tongue, then a third with singsong tones Cat could barely classify. No answer.
He tried another seven languages then swore. “That’s all I’ve got.” The hold was filling slowly with woken, silent people. Raz turned from the woman to the others. “Anyone here speak Kathic? Talbeg?”
The woman quaked in Cat’s arms. Not shivering, or at least not shivers as Cat knew them. Heaving spasms. A seizure?
Cat tried to lay her on her back, but the woman shook her off. Then she looked at and through Cat, and opened her mouth too wide. Her teeth were long and narrow.
“Cat?”
The others from the hold stood before Raz: tall and short, muscled and fat and lean, male and female and those not obviously either. Their mouths hung open.