Authors: Max Gladstone
“You’re not even
listening
to me.”
“I’d listen if you—”
Kai walked on, and their argument receded into insignificance.
She reached the office levels and kept climbing, two more floors and right, down a hall paneled in cherrywood, through a glass door, to the library.
A golem sat behind the front desk, bucket of coffee clutched in a clawed metal hand. Servos spun as it raised the coffee to its mouth-port. Lenses in its eyes realigned with delicate clicks. Kai walked past the desk to the windows at the library’s far wall, which opened on to the caldera. Other office windows glowed across the pit, human constellations echoing the stars in the alien sky above and the pool below.
No sense lingering, but how could she resist one glance, possibly her last, on the star-studded space at the caldera floor where by all rights lava should have bubbled, one glance at the hole where she’d rebuilt herself, the womb that birthed her people? A few figures stood there on the beach at the end of everything, heads bent in prayer. Her shoulders ached, and her heart too, to swim again through the black, to breathe the uncreated, once more to weld soul and dogma into living form.
Not now. Maybe never again.
She turned, and ran into a wall of Gavin.
He stood behind her, lumbering and tall as ever. He clutched a bag of scrolls to his chest, and he wore a polo shirt and slacks and a shocked expression. His lips tried three times to form her name before it came out once: “Kai! What are you doing here?”
She would have winced anywhere, but most especially in the library at night. The carrels and long tables were almost empty—a handful of acolytes leafing through old contracts and Craft journals—which made the silence, and their anger when it broke, more profound. Still, she couldn’t begrudge his wide smile, so glad to see her.
“Gav. Keep your voice down.” She laid a finger beside her lips.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “You’ve been gone awhile, is all. How have you been? We miss you.”
“I miss you, too, Gav.” She hugged him around the scrolls. He was large and warm and soft.
“Did you come to visit? I’ll get some of the guys. I think Cal has a flask at his desk, I mean, it’s not good booze I think and it’s not much, but we should celebrate.” Gavin wasn’t a drinker, and the word “booze” sounded strangely affected in his mouth.
“I’m sorry, I can’t. Wish I could.” Clicks and spinning gears: the golem librarian turned toward them and the apertures of its eyes irised tight. Still holding Gavin by the shoulder, Kai walked him out past the desk, into the hall where at least the wooden panels would dull their voices. He followed, easily steered, like a two-hulled catamaran in a strong breeze. Easily steered, and just as easily tipped. “I can’t stay long.”
“I thought you were still recovering. Working with pilgrims.”
So “recovery” was how Jace sold her exile to the team. “I need information to seal the deal for this one pilgrim. I don’t want to promise the world only to learn we can’t deliver.”
He nodded slowly. “That happened to me a while back. Someone thought we could make an idol who’d just resurrect things for fun.” He chuckled. “Hard commitment to back out of. But, I mean, here, let me tell the guys, and when you’re done you can come down to the pool and we’ll all hang out. Only the night crew’s here now, and it’s slow.” He pressed the scrolls closer to his chest. “I wanted to catch up on my reading.”
She should have used that excuse, rather than concocting something about pilgrims. “I’d love to. Just…” I’m not supposed to be here at all, and every second I stay is a risk I shouldn’t take? It would hurt too much to sit with friends and talk as if nothing happened? Both were true, and neither would help. “I’m recovering. I don’t want to push it. Maybe you could all come down the mountain and hang out with me. I’d like that.”
He breathed in through his mouth, stuck out his jaw, and nodded. “Sure. I can see that. Most of the guys don’t go anywhere except the mountain and their own apartments, but I think I can swing something.” His eyes widened. “I mean, are you okay? I’m sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Is there anything I can do for you? Should you even be up here without help?”
Damn. “I’m fine, Gav. I only need a couple files.” She grinned winningly as she could manage, and hoped she didn’t look too tired. If Gavin’s misplaced sense of chivalry engaged, she wouldn’t be rid of him for hours. “I can do this myself. Just a little research, is all.” She touched his bag of scrolls. “Go on. You have work.”
“Okay,” he said, still skeptical. “It’s good to see you again, Kai.”
“Good to see you, man. It won’t be so long next time.”
He nodded, once, smiled, and lumbered away down the corridor. She watched him go until he turned left and disappeared. Letting out the long breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, she sagged against the wall and stayed there until her heart calmed again. Fear chilled her brow and neck. She didn’t like being afraid of Gavin.
She tugged her clothes straight and returned to the library. The golem glared at her, and refilled its mug of coffee from a percolator in its chest, but did not stop her or ask her business. This time she ignored the window and the view, stepping softly so as not to attract more attention. None of the library’s denizens looked up from their books as she passed. Pages turned, scrolls rolled. A young woman coughed. A teenage acolyte’s leg twitched up and down like a sewing needle as he read.
He,
Kai thought, noting the military hair and the loose shirt and the other signs that the acolyte with the restless leg was waiting for initiation, waiting for the pool, waiting to remake himself into himself.
She smiled, and wanted to say something to him, but she’d stood out too much already. Get the data, and get out. That was all she could afford now.
She counted four doors, five, on the outer wall: small, curved, and paneled to match the walls’ wood, marked over the jamb with names on bronze tags. Once, every senior priest had her own niche, but office space had grown too crowded for such luxury. Kai passed her own door without hesitation and continued an eighth-rotation around the caldera until she reached the door bearing Mara’s name.
She stepped through into a tunnel of volcanic stone. Cloying warm air bore a sulfur stench and hints of ozone. Ghostlight tubes painted everything pale purple-green: the worn smooth path down the center of the hall, the petroglyphs, the thick brass pipes gleaming with silver Craftwork. Her footsteps and her cane’s taps joined the pipes’ weird symphony: the clink and groan of heating and cooling metal, the rush of hydraulic surf.
The tunnel opened into a cave cramped with machines and carved wooden totems wound with wire. Kai stepped onto the grate that served for a floor, and did not look down; beneath, the cavern plummeted to a pinprick of perspective, its walls lined with scrolls. A central pylon plumbed the pit’s depth, and bejeweled pneumatic spindles rose and descended that pylon, sparks arcing from their tips to the scrolls. All the history of Mara’s idols lay here, entombed.
And Mara was here, too.
Kai had not expected that.
An iron stair rose to a catwalk that ran below five niches in the rock wall. Mara stood in the center niche, head back, eyes closed, body rigid, rimmed by metal thorns. Wires pressed against her wrists, snared her neck, snaked along her legs. One thorn hovered above the vein at each elbow, tipped not with metal but with a spine of light.
This arcane contraption was one more cost of doing priestly business in a Craftsman’s age. No single human being could comprehend the millions of points of data that made up an idol: bargains, transactions, contracts, records of prayers received, heard, fulfilled. Old-fashioned gods handled most operations themselves. “Makawe hears all prayers,” the old saying went, “and laughs at them.” The idols Kai and her comrades built could handle basic functions on their own, but priests had to make harder choices for their idols. Theologically risky, of course, which was why they asked Craftsmen for help—Craftsmen had a history of stretching theology’s borders, or else ignoring them altogether.
Kai had not expected Mara to be working late. Fresh off a promotion, elevated to the highest levels of the priesthood, why would she spend her evening on low-level prayer management? The Order paid acolytes to do this sort of thing. But there was no sense trying to justify away an unfortunate reality. Maybe Mara had a high-stakes audit coming. Maybe she was reviewing her archives for inspiration. Whatever the reason, she might notice Kai entering the system. Best to leave and wait for another chance.
If she had another chance. Mara might be here the next time, anyway. Or Jace might cancel her clearance, or Gavin let word of her visit slip. To wait was to lose. She could still learn what she needed, if she moved fast, and subtly.
This was a bad idea, she thought as she climbed the stairs and leaned back into the niche farthest to Mara’s right. Machines woke about her. Dormant Craftwork smelled her blood and burned with hunger. The system’s demons knew their feast approached. Oh yes. A very bad idea.
Leaning back in the niche, Kai stared at the opposite wall, at the painting of a starlit beach on West Claw, white sands and spreading calm water. A suggestion of sunset lit the horizon. She forgot whether the painting was Jace’s idea or if it sprang in full tacky glory from the forehead of a Graefax Tepes Ross consultant. Each carrel had one, always the same scene. The intent was to calm priests amid this unholy system of metal and wires. We promise to make the process of ripping your spirit out of your flesh as painless and routine as possible. In her early days with the Order, Kai had wondered at the choice of scene, until she realized that the rush of arcane fluid through hydraulic pipes was supposed to provide an audio component to the painting, a sound of surf. Better to have chosen a foreign image. An alpine meadow, maybe, like the ones in old mystery play musicals: priestesses capering among goats, singing swollen songs to their living mountains. Kai had grown up with surf, and sand, and the painting felt like a fake smile from a trusted friend.
She swung counterweighted metal claws into position. Gears ground in hidden mechanisms. Metal fingers settled against her temples, her ankles, her waist, her neck. The cavern air was warm, but the metal cold. She shivered in her linen suit. Wires and needles waited within those arms, cold tendrils coiled under tension. She looked up at the ceiling, raw unfinished hungry black. “I offer myself,” she whispered. The machine heard her. The claws at her arms extended thin points of lightning that tickled the inside of her elbows, sought and found the veins there. The hairs on her arms snapped to attention. She was the core of a thrumming beast. All she had to do was straighten her arms, and plunge the lightning needles in.
She clenched her teeth, and punched her arms straight, and fell into the open mouth above.
23
Falling, again, and always. Kai’s eyes sang. Broken glass was the world and gleaming, every moment and memory a cutting edge. Assembling those shards into a mosaic hurt.
Teeth ground teeth, a vibration in her skull. That was reality, distant, fading, gone.
She hung inside the gaping mouth, in the blackness charged with idols. They formed a perfect sphere with Kai at the center, frozen skeletons of many-colored lightning. Some she recognized, forms she’d helped Mara shape. Fish-men, kings of ocean and stream. Great burning bull-beasts who ate children and dispensed prophecy. Winged serpents who bore planets in their talons. Others she did not know, older projects, even a few quaint ancestor spirits. She found Seven Alpha at once: winged woman, legs bent backward, floating dead and dull in the black. An echo of her former glory, echo even of the frightened, drowning creature Kai had tried to save. Patches of her had been torn open, lines of breast and stomach. One wing hung crooked, pinions shorn. The ray-trace suggestions of her eyes seemed closed.
Kai approached, and heard voices.
“I don’t know how many other ways I can say it.” Mara, tired. Drawn drum-tight. Nervous. “An individual idol has too few believers to support more than a handful of basic functions.”
“That much I understand.” The second voice she also knew, cold, precise, clipped. Pinstriped suits, and an arched eyebrow. Ms. Kevarian. Kai froze in simulated space. The Craftswoman could walk through nightmares, and this was a sort of nightmare. Her body might be on the other side of the world. The how wasn’t so important as the fact of her presence. If Mara didn’t notice Kai, the Craftswoman would. “Which means the idol’s behaviors are automatic, and circumscribed.”
“That’s the theory.” Kai heard the slight hitch in Mara’s voice. She didn’t like this conversation.
“Then, if your records system works, any discrepancy in the accounts must result either from malice or negligence. Which is it?”
Space and size were malleable in this imitation realm. Kai became small and swift, and gnat-sized swam toward the skyscraper of dead Seven Alpha, toward vast and broken wings and the gaping seas of her wounds. So close to discovery. Kai’s throat constricted. Damn it, she didn’t even have an endocrine system here. Shouldn’t that soften the fear a little? Control yourself. Do what you came to do, and leave.
“This is a complicated situation,” Mara said.
“Truth is truth, Ms. Ceyla. People make it complicated.”
Kai slipped between two lines of Seven Alpha’s body and hovered. Mara sat huge and cross-legged on the idol’s spreading back, between the roots of her wings. Ms. Kevarian paced in front of her, along the idol’s spine, her footsteps sharp, as if she strode on stone.
They hadn’t noticed her yet. Good.
Kai turned back time, and felt the idol wake around her: a shudder in the lines, a memory of breath. Mara and Ms. Kevarian vanished, phantoms of the abandoned present. Kai sank back past the idol’s death, her flail for almost-survival. Months rewound in minutes.
She changed her perspective: the wires of Seven Alpha’s body faded, replaced by a web extending from the pumps of the idol’s artificial heart. Each wire was a deal, a contract, appended with relevant names and account numbers in angular glyphs. She spun time on its axis and slid forward again, looking for some gold, for Kevarian might be hunting some treasure for the Order to protect. Over time, Seven Alpha bound herself to more Kavekana idols as Mara diversified her investments. Kai wouldn’t have made so many bonds—hundreds, it looked like, and multiplying fast—but it happened sometimes.