“You can’t.” Abelard rose halfway from his chair. “We need you.”
“You need a team to defend Kos. I’ll build one. But no Craft firm will touch Seril with a lightning rod, and if we don’t find her missing portfolio, she dies. If I go, we have a chance. If I stay, it’s to fight a losing battle.” She spread her hands. “If anyone at the table has a better idea, feel free to speak up.”
*
“Tara Abernathy can’t defend Seril. She faces a long grinding battle with defeat at the end. And nothing is more alien to Tara Abernathy. She is brilliant, talented, and fierce. She came from a podunk farm town near the Badlands and worked caravans studying with hedge witches for seven years before she reached the Hidden Schools. The schools kicked her out a thousand feet in the air above the Crack in the World, and she crawled home across a desert surviving on cactus flesh and vulture blood. This is not a woman who knows her limits. Back her into a corner, and she will seek a long-shot solution—or invent one. It’s a big world. Plenty of long-shot solutions out there. Deals with old slumbering powers. Pacts with the Golden Horde. Demon mortgages. Lost grails and hidden powers in all their forms. Brilliance can’t bear the prospect of futile struggle. So she’ll go for an edge play.”
“And fail,” the thunder said.
“Quests take time she doesn’t have. And when she fails, Alt Coulumb will be ours.” She clasped her hands and shook them as if preparing to cast a die. “Either way, gentlemen, I look forward to the next few days.”
The storm tolled satisfaction, and high dark clouds laughed, grim and vicious and proud, though not so grim nor so vicious nor so proud as Madeline Ramp.
*
“Okay,” Tara said. “Let’s get to work.”
41
“Thanks for coming,” Tara told Abelard as they rode north to the Alt Coulumb offices of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao.
“You really think this will work?”
“Maybe.” A pothole jarred them. “If the Cardinals hadn’t played so close to the vest since Seril came back, we wouldn’t be scrambling now.”
“Churches don’t change overnight,” he said.
“We’ve had a year.”
“A year is overnight for a church.” He leaned back into velvet cushions and crossed his arms, smiling around his cigarette.
“Why so smug?”
“You said ‘we.’”
The carriage let them off at the base of a forty-story glass thorn unmarked by gargoyle prayers and veined with elevator shafts. The building had no door, but one opened anyway when Tara approached.
Black marble and chrome walled the lobby. There were no security guards visible, visible being the operative word. Tara noticed, while they waited for the elevator, that striations in the marble moved when she wasn’t looking.
“That one looks like a mouth,” Abelard said. “So does that one.”
She said nothing. The elevator dinged.
On the ride up, she said, “The next few days will be hard for you.”
He lit a second cigarette with the ember of the first. “I’ll do what I can. Trust in the Lord and His work. I wish I could go with you.”
There was something swollen in her throat. Lousy time to come down with a cold. “I’ll be fine. We both will. This will work.” He didn’t ask how she knew, for which she was grateful.
With a ding, the doors rolled back, and they emerged into a glass maze.
Anywhere else, Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao’s local office would reside in a skyspire floating over the city. Craftsmen drew strength from starlight and needed buildings that could rise above cloud cover and clinging smog. Alt Coulumb’s flight interdict made such crystal palaces impossible, so the firm’s interior designers adopted an aesthetic echoing the heavens they were denied.
Glass walled the foyer, and glass hallways led to glass conference rooms and offices. Some panes were smoked translucent, others matte black; employees could adjust opacity as needed. The receptionist (a suited man with thin dark hair and the thick frame of an athlete who had abandoned his sport) sat at a translucent glass desk; his lower body was a textured black blur.
Tara’s skin felt so tight she feared it might split. What was she afraid of? This was just an immensely powerful firm she’d snubbed by quitting.
“Tara Abernathy,” she said to the receptionist, “and Technician Abelard of the Church of Kos Everburning, for Elayne Kevarian.”
The receptionist rifled through a book whose writing tangled and rearranged as the pages turned. “She’s not in the office. And she’s dreaming.”
“It’s urgent. Any way you could slot us in?”
“Your name, again?”
“Abernathy.”