Authors: Max Gladstone
Mako swung, and missed the ball by a foot. He frowned. “Lots of things force folk to think in ways that aren’t human. Try joining an army someday, if there’s ever a war for you to fight. Hells, I bet you thought at least five inhuman thoughts before work this morning.” Another swing, another miss. The club slipped in the old man’s hands, and Kai flinched. Mako reset his grip. Sunset transformed his face, scarred and cragged and wrinkled, into a landscape of flame. Not for the first time, she wanted to ask what he’d done in the war. Not for the first time, she decided against it. “You shouldn’t be here yet,” he said. “What’s brought you?”
“You expected me?”
“Always do.”
“You’re often disappointed, then.”
He swung. The golf ball tipped off the tee, and rolled to rest in sand.
“It’s by your feet.”
“I know where it is.” He knelt again, and patted about his knees until he found the ball.
“I can’t believe Eve lets you keep those clubs.”
“She doesn’t know I have them.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Doubt what you like.” Back on the tee, and standing. He adjusted his feet.
“A little to the right.”
He grunted, and bent from the waist, wagging the club. “What’s up?”
“I’m in a fix.”
“Must be hard for you.”
“No harder than for a blind man to golf.”
“Great thing about the ocean,” he said, “is that it’s one big hole. Easy to hit.” He draped the club across his shoulders, hooking his wrists over its either end. He twisted his torso sharply left and right, and his back popped like festival fireworks.
“Oh my god.”
“Yes?”
“You should get that checked.”
“Eve sends me to a masseuse every other week. Says it’s the least she can do for all the pain I cause her.”
“I don’t think a massage counts as revenge.”
“You haven’t been with my masseuse.” He laughed, and coughed, and spit. His spit landed with a solid fleshy sound in the sand, startling up a seven-legged sand-colored beetle that reared, bared sickle mandibles in protest, then scurried away. “She’s from those jungles south of the Shining Empire. Girls there are born with chisels for fingers and pistons for arms. Every other Thirdday she avenges each acre of forest I burned in the God Wars.”
“She know you talk about her this way?”
“Hells, I talk about her this way to her face. She only really opens up on the back when she wants to hurt me.”
“You’re a horrible human being.”
“Never have been any good at it.” He thrust his hips forward and bent back. His shirt rode up, revealing stomach roped with scars. “And yet you come to me for advice, so what does that make you?”
“A horrible human being,” Kai said with a sigh.
“What’s the problem?”
She pressed her fingers into the sand, past the warm top layer, into the damp cool beneath. The beetle marched past, and saluted her with its mandibles. She flicked it, and it hissed at her. “You know Jace sent me away from the mountain.”
“You may have mentioned it a few hundred times or so when you were drinking.”
“He wanted to appease some clients who are suing us because their idol died. They don’t have a chance—but they keep prying anyway. I think they’re looking for something.”
“Like what?”
She heaped the sand beside her into a fortress, and carved a moat around its walls. “The idol that died was tied to a lot of others. If the Craftswoman gets those records, she might be able to learn about our other clients—who they are, how they spend their souls. And if that happens, we could all be in trouble.”
“Is that possible?”
“Maybe.”
“So tell your boss.”
“Who will call me obsessed and maybe he’s right. I might be making things up to compensate for being reassigned. Seeing conspiracies everywhere. I don’t want to be the girl who cried kraken.”
He adjusted his grip on the club, and held it out to her. “Are my
V
’s pointing in the right direction?”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“Just say yes or no. You have a fifty-fifty shot at being right. Better than most coaches in my experience.”
“No.”
“That’s what I thought.” He shifted his hands, and turned back to the artificial green.
She demolished the fortress she’d built, and filled the moat with its sand. “I should trust Jace to deal with this.”
The club rose without tremor or hesitation. The old man’s body was a perfect line. Then the club fell.
A sharp clean crack echoed across the beach and back again. The ball flew out, and up, and straight, until it disappeared into the sunset-singed sky. Mako nodded. “That look as good as it felt?”
“Yes.”
He fished for another ball. “Find what’s wrong with the foundation, then fix it.”
“You think I won’t be able to move forward until I settle this question.”
“I was talking about my swing,” he said, fishing for another ball. “But why not?”
She stood, slapped sand off her skirt, and leveled her fortress’s ruins with her shoe. “Guess I better get to work.”
“What’s your plan?” Mako asked.
No one remained to answer him. He shrugged, raised his club, and swung again, missing.
21
That evening Izza crept to the Godsdistrikt, where she panhandled for scraps of soul and watched an itinerant players’ opera. The performers were boat people, island-hoppers of the Archipelago, who lashed watertight barrels of props and costumes to the outriggers of their canoes. They sang while they paddled. Their proud voices rang out over the ocean as they approached on the morning tide.
No performance could match that pure dawn cant. Hearing them across the water, if Izza shut her eyes she could imagine they were not players at all but Makawe home from the wars, bearing treasure in crystal boats. Izza wasn’t Kavekanese of course, but she’d always liked the prophecy of the gods’ return and the paradise to follow.
More, anyway, than she liked this opera. Hard to pin down why. At first she thought she didn’t believe the abandoned bride would really wait three years for her husband to return. Later, watching from a fire escape above the crowd, face pressed between iron rails, she decided that, no, people believed crazier things every day. The problem was the last act, when the bride received a letter announcing that her husband was dead or remarried or something—Izza didn’t know enough Descended Telomeri, especially when sung at high volume with poor intonation, to follow the fine points of the plot—and committed suicide. Izza bought the suicide. The bride’s acceptance of the letter was a stretch. A real person would put more work into self-deception.
But the singers sang beautifully despite the occasional dropped consonant. After the bride plunged her knife into her neck and the orchestra crescendoed its last crescendo, Izza only stole a little from the hat they passed around for donations.
The sun had long since sunk. Godsdistrikt lights burned a million shades of red, and mainlanders milled down narrow streets seeking food, drink, and sex from businesses happy to oblige. Izza bargained for her dinner with a kabob stand owner: an hour’s work passing out glyphed placards to pedestrians, each placard stamped with a crude picture of a meat skewer and a subtle charm to guide its bearer to the owner’s stall. She ate the kabobs she earned for her work on a rooftop near a thronged intersection where smuggler priests promised pieces of cut-rate heaven to passersby.
When she finished the kabobs the priests were still chanting discount salvation, with no more takers. Some nights she could watch them for hours, but now she was only killing time. She wiped her hands clean on her pant leg, left the skewers piled on the red tiles, and crossed roofs north to the poet’s house.
22
Kai watched bubbles of light bob down and up the mountain. Evening cable cars descended the slopes of Kavekana’ai, burdened by priests and shamans, acolytes and overseers all homeward bound. The night shift arrived before the day shift clocked out: functionaries passed functions to their counterparts, so the idols would not be left untended.
She shouldn’t do this. Better to take Jace’s broad hint and see a shrink. The psychological underpinnings of her theory were so obvious even she could see them: anger at Mara’s promotion turning to denial of reality, to rationalization, to the spinning of elaborate stories about how the world went wrong. Kevarian had motive enough without any need for conspiracy. The Craftswoman wanted to win her case. This whole exercise was one more piece of proof that Jace was right, that Kai was cracking.
But it wouldn’t hurt to sneak back into the mountain, to take a final look at Seven Alpha’s death, see what dirt Kevarian might find if she went looking. Wouldn’t hurt, so long as no one caught her.
And besides, while she was here she could investigate the poem.
Jace had banned Kai from the pool, but she didn’t need to dive. The mountain’s library held a wealth of information about Seven Alpha’s death. With luck, Kai could enter the library, do the research, and leave without Jace hearing of her visit.
At night she faced a smaller staff, and fewer chances of detection, but she still didn’t want her name on security logs, which ruled out the cable car. She’d have to take the stairs.
Kai returned home, spent a half hour cleaning to settle her mind, and changed out of her heels into walking shoes. She wished she could have dressed for the climb, but though the Order wasn’t as white-shoe as mainland Craft firms, walking its halls in gym clothes would attract notice. So she donned her lightest linen suit and a black shirt, slid her purse over her shoulder, and set out to break the rules.
She entered the forest a half mile from her apartment via an unmarked dirt path overgrown by roots and thick foliage. Soon the forest writhed around her, come to life. If she glanced back over her shoulder she would not see the road or distant streetlights. She did not look back. Hidden wards had welcomed her onto secret ways.
Before the cable car, before pilgrims traveled from around the globe to Kavekana, before the gods sailed off to fight the world’s wars, priests had only climbed the mountain on holy days: a journey of fear and trembling that began with this walk down a narrow dirt path through dense forest that smelled of motherhood and rot.
Trees and heavy air pressed close. Swelling silence overcame insect song. A bird cried. Another screamed. Soon she lost her bearings in the wood.
After a long wander, she found a path to her right blocked by thorny vines. She turned that way and the vines writhed tighter, snakelike. Thorns dripped dew and poison.
She walked into the vines, passed through tearing thorns, and found herself at the foot of a moonlit slope. Shallow steps switchbacked three thousand feet up the mountainside to the balconies and overlooks that ringed Kavekana’ai.
She took the climb slowly. As a novice, she’d sprinted up the stairs until her legs jellied and she almost tumbled off into space. Older now, and injured, she broke her climb into twenty-minute increments counted on her pocket watch, with five minutes’ rest between each. Her blood sang, and her legs burned, and her wounds, too, a sharper wire-pain compared to the muscles’ fire. The fat moon laughed overhead, outshining stars and the burning city below.
She prayed as she climbed. With no idols to care for, she prayed to the old and absent gods, who’d run off to the God Wars and not returned: Makawe, Heva, Maru, Aokane, all the rest. Mako had gone with them, fought his youth away in foreign lands. Last human survivor of the Wars on Kavekana, but even he was not immortal. Soon his strength would fade. The Rest would lose its heart.
The old gods’ songs had good rhythms, and she sang them to keep her pace. Makawe’s journeys below the world, seeking fire from the older powers of the depths. Heva comforting the first humans as they scraped, lost and cold, at the mud in which their souls were trapped. The war between Maru and his siblings. She climbed the long stair until the moon hung full overhead.
When she reached the lowest balcony of Kavekana’ai and found it vacant, she sagged against the railing, breathing hard. She wasn’t in mountain-climbing shape anymore. Her leg had ached during the climb, but she only used her cane for the last few hundred feet. Should have used it the whole way. She’d regret all this tomorrow, or later tonight.
A delta of sweat ran from her collar down her shirt to her stomach. As her heart calmed, the chill of wind and heights raised goose bumps on her arms. She wrapped herself tight in her jacket. The thin fabric did little to cut the wind, but little was better than nothing.
Kai stepped forward, and stumbled. Her leg gave way. She cursed, caught herself, and stood still again, listening to the wind and the silence of the slope, wondering who might have heard. Leaning on the cane, she tried again to walk, and this time held her balance. Three-legged, she proceeded to the wall, and stepped inside.
The stone accepted her. She knew its secret name, and it knew hers. This mountain was formed when gods and humans first rose from the earth. Men and mountain were made of the same stuff. For those who knew its secrets, the stone itself was a gate, and this gate had not been closed to her. Yet.
She stepped out of the stone into a semicircular chamber, brightly ghostlit, walls painted flat beige. Decades ago they’d been rough-hewn rock, lit by flickering candles, but occult design customs didn’t mesh with the demands of a modern office. In the seventies Jace’s predecessor had hired Graefax Tepes Ross, design consultants to the Dread Empire and to the Deathless Kings of the New World, to modernize the Order’s look. Kai thought she would have preferred it the old way.
Tunnels branched from the chamber. Kai turned left: up, and in.
She passed two junior priests arguing Iskari theology. “They want to reduce sacrifice flight domestically, which makes it a policy goal when negotiating treaties abroad. Which means us. You don’t seem to understand our position.”
“No, I do. The thing is we can’t afford to recognize their rules. Preparing to satisfy reporting requirements is tantamount to honoring those requirements. If you think—”