Authors: Max Gladstone
They climbed. Izza helped Nick, and he helped her. A dragonfly watched them both from its stone perch, then buzzed off, wings scattering light to rainbows.
By the time they reached the funeral ledge, the sun had just kissed the western horizon, and the mountain’s shadow lay long upon the ocean to the east. The other kids were here already, ten of them, representatives of the rest. They’d built the pyre, and crouched back against the rock. Izza felt their eyes, eyes of every hue in faces of every color, all hungry, all watching her. She’d heard them whispering before she reached the ledge. They fell silent now.
A row of ash smears lined the cliff, one for each funeral past, and in their center stood the pyre, a small pile of twigs and palm thatch. On the pyre lay a jade-breasted bird with folded blue wings.
Ivy had found the bird outside a hotel, neck broken. At least, she claimed she found it dead. The girl had a crooked sense of humor, and an even stranger sense of worship. She hugged herself and smiled grimly at Izza. Breath whistled through the gap between her front teeth.
Izza crouched beside the dead bird. Nick took his place with the others, and waited with them.
Izza felt her age. At fifteen, she was the oldest, had been since Sophie was taken for a Penitent after the Green Man died. So the story was hers to tell.
The others waited. Little Ellen curled her legs up under her chin. Jet ground his teeth, and picked at the side of his sandal where a strip of rubber had come loose.
Izza licked her lips. She’d seen Sophie do this before, for other gods. Her turn, now. That was all.
“The Blue Lady,” she said, “is gone.”
The others nodded. “Yes,” a few whispered. There was no ritual beyond what felt right, and nothing did.
She told the story as she’d thought it through. “She died helping us. The way she lived. Tired of waiting for his dead boys to do his work for him, Smiling Jack himself came down the mountain to hunt her children through the streets. When he caught them, he threw them into his sack, and shut the sack, and when it opened again there was nothing inside.” This had never happened. She’d made the story up days before, a patchwork of invention and theft and half-remembered dreams. None of these kids had been caught, and none had seen Smiling Jack. Still, they listened. “He caught me in a dead end, with stolen gold in my pocket. I offered him the gold, and he said he didn’t want gold. I offered him my next night’s take, and he said he didn’t want that, either. I asked him to spare me, and he refused. He came at me, with the sack open—it looks like burlap outside but inside is all needles.” Heads bobbed. They knew, though they’d never seen. The sack, the needles, both felt true. “The Lady fell on him from above, tearing and pecking at his eyes. I ran, but as I ran I felt her die.”
More nods, emphatic. They’d all felt the death, and heard her scream.
“She saved me. I didn’t deserve that. I didn’t deserve her.” The backs of Izza’s eyes burned. She tried to breathe, and realized she was gulping air. She looked down at the bird, and saw everything it wasn’t, everything it should have been. This small feathery stand-in never sheltered her in sickness, never whispered promises to her at sunset, never caught her when she fell. Her heart beat double-time in her ears, loud and distant at once. The whistle of breath through Ivy’s teeth sounded like a scream.
“We didn’t.” Nick, again. She hated the confidence in his voice. As if he believed this made-up ceremony would help. “None of us.” Izza’s heart kept up its strange double-beat—physical, an echo as if she stood too close to a loud drum. A familiar feeling. Her blood chilled. “When I first met the Blue Lady, I—”
Izza lunged for Nick. He hit the cliff face hard, and swore, but she clapped a hand over his mouth, and raised one finger to hers. He understood then, and froze.
The others did, too. Jet stopped picking at his sandal.
Izza’s heart beat in her chest, but the echo she felt was not a heartbeat. And that high keening was not the whistle of breath through Ivy’s teeth.
She released Nick, and uncurled herself on the ledge. Spread flat, she edged out her head so she could see.
A hundred meters to their left, a Penitent climbed the slope.
The Penitent was built on the model of men, but larger: a statue three meters tall and almost as broad, features carved of planes and angles, two massive three-fingered hands, two feet like slabs of rock. It did not climb like Izza and Nick had climbed, feeling for handholds, testing and trusting. It marched up the mountain as if stairs had been carved into the eighty-degree slope. Joints ground rock against rock. Dust drifted down behind it. Jewel eyes in its stern stone face scanned the mountainside.
With every step, the Penitent screamed.
Izza wondered who was trapped inside. Some dockside tough too smart or drunk or angry for his own good. Dope peddler, or murderer, or a kid old enough to be tried like an adult. Maybe that was Sophie. You couldn’t tell from looking which Penitents held men and which women. You could only guess from the sound of their cries.
Penitents made you better. That was the line. You went in broken, and came out whole.
They just had to break you more first.
Izza did not shake. She’d given up shaking when her mother died, when her village burned. She did not make a sign to ward off bad luck or evil spirits. She’d tried all those signs, one after another, and none had worked for her before. Staying still, though, had.
So she stayed still, and watched the Penitent climb.
It drew level with their ledge.
She stopped breathing. Its steps slowed—or else her terror slowed time.
The Penitent climbed on.
Ivy shifted, dislodging gravel. A whisper of a sound, but Izza glared at her nonetheless, and the girl’s pale skin paled more.
Footsteps receded. Faded. Vanished up the mountain.
Wind blew soft and cool over shaded slopes. The sun set, and the first stars pierced the sky.
The dead bird lay on the pyre. The kids watched her. Scared, and waiting for direction. For their leader to tell them what happened next.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said.
No one spoke.
“Let’s go,” she said. “We don’t need gods who die and leave us afraid. We don’t have to be the ones who survive.”
Their eyes glistened in the light of new-risen stars.
“Okay,” she said. “Fine. But this is the last. Care for the gods yourselves from now on. I’m done.”
She fished a coin from her pocket and handed it around. Each of them sank a piece of their soul into the metal, and by the time Nick passed it back to Izza, the coin pulsed with heat and life.
She took all their soul scraps, and held them, and touched them to the thatch. The dry grass caught at once, and burned, and the bird burned, too. A thread of sickly smoke rose to the sky. Izza removed two incense sticks from the black box, and lit them in the pyre. They smelled of the desert after rain, of blood shed on cold stone, of empty temples pierced by shafts of light through ruined roofs. Beneath all that, she smelled burning feathers.
Nice, the old man had said. She wasn’t sure.
One by one the others left. Ivy stayed longer than the rest, curled into a ball against the ledge, chin propped on her knees as reflected fire and burning bird made a hell in her pinprick pupils. At last even she climbed down, and only Nick remained.
Izza could barely breathe. She told herself it was the smoke.
They climbed down together, and through the woods, and strolled along Southern past rich folk’s houses until plaster walls closed in again and streetlamps put the stars to flight and they could walk easy, camouflaged by drunks and madding crowds.
“What did you mean,” he said, “that you can’t do this anymore?”
“What I said. I won’t wait around to be locked in one of those things, just for one of you to take up as storyteller after me and get locked up in turn. I won’t be Sophie for you. For them. I have to go.”
“You can’t.”
“Watch me.”
“They need this. They need you.”
“They shouldn’t,” she said, and walked away down Southern toward the beach. He didn’t follow. She told herself she didn’t care.
3
Kai met the Craftswoman a week later in a nightmare of glass. She sat in a glass chair in front of a glass table and her fingers trailed over the slick armrests without leaving a trace of oil or sweat. In one corner a glass fern stood in a glass pot, glass roots winding through glass soil. Other identical rooms stretched above, below, and to all sides, beyond transparent walls, ceiling, and floor, and in those rooms sat identical Kais and Craftswomen. As Kai crossed her legs beneath the table her infinite other selves crossed their legs, too, a susurrus of stockings breaking the silence of the dream.
In the distant waking world, she lay bandaged on a bed. Here, no injuries bound her except the ones she earned herself.
She’d set her hand on the table’s edge as she sliced her palm to the pink, a long deep wound that healed at once. The blood on the table stayed, though. Millions of red streaks surrounded her on millions of tables, catching the nightmare’s sourceless light.
“Before we discuss the idol’s death,” said Ms. Kevarian, “please explain the services your firm provides.”
“Our Order, you mean.”
“Yes.”
Myriad reflections offered Kai a choice of perspectives on her interviewer: a severe Craftswoman in a gray pinstriped suit, with black eyes, short white hair, and a thin wide mouth. Ms. Kevarian sat statue still. Her eyes held neither pity nor humor, only a curiosity like Kai had seen in birds’ eyes, alien, evaluative, and predatory.
Behind Ms. Kevarian sat her client, a shadow in a white suit, a smudge of gray with a broad and gleaming grin. Fingers like wisps of smoke never seemed to rest. They laced together and unlaced, and trailed down his lapels and along the chair’s arm without seeming to care whether the glass edge cut. He hadn’t spoken since they shook hands; nor had the Craftsman Jace sent into the dream to protect and advise Kai, a round-chested skeleton who bore down so heavily on his note-taking pad that Kai wondered if he might be writing with rips instead of ink.
“I thought your clients would have told you,” Kai said, and the Craftsman shot her a sharp look.
Don’t get cute,
Jace had cautioned her. So much for that.
Kai wished she looked nearly so cool or collected as Ms. Kevarian. She had a choice of perspectives on herself, too, and didn’t like what she saw: tan suit rumpled, a few strands loose from her tied-back hair, her round face strained. Gray circles lingered under her eyes, and a haunted look within them. Her mouth was dry. A glass of water stood on the table before her, but she feared its sharp edges and didn’t drink.
“I am asking you,” Ms. Kevarian said. “For the record.”
She felt small in front of this woman, and hated the feeling. When she remade her body she should have made herself taller. “I’ve never worked with your clients directly.”
“In general terms, then. What do priests do here on Kavekana Island?”
“We build and sustain idols—constructs of faith—for worshippers.”
“Would you say that you build gods?”
“No,” she said. “Gods are complex. Conscious. Sentient. The best idols look like gods, but they’re simpler. Like comparing a person to a statue: the resemblance is there, but the function’s different.”
“And what, precisely, is the … function of your idols?”
“Depends on the idol and the client. Some people want to worship fire, or fertility, or the ocean, or the moon. Changes from client to client.”
“What benefits would a worshipper derive from such a thing?”
Even such a simple question might be a trap. “The same as from a god. A fire idol might confer passion. Strength. Return on investment in various heat-related portfolios.”
“Why would someone work with one of your idols, and pay your commission, rather than deal with gods directly?”
“Each pilgrim has her own reason. Why don’t you ask your clients theirs?”
“I am asking you.”
“The mainland’s a dangerous place,” she said. “If you live and work in the Old World, gods demand sacrifices to support themselves. If you’re in the New World, the Deathless Kings and their councils charge heavy fees to fund police forces, utilities, public works. If you travel from place to place, a horde of gods and goddesses and Craftsmen chase after pieces of your soul. You can give them what they want—or you can build an idol with us, on Kavekana, and keep your soulstuff safe here. The idol remains, administered by our priests, and you receive the benefits of its grace wherever you go, no more subject to gods or Deathless Kings than any other worshipper of a foreign deity.”
“So, you believe your idols’ main function is sacrifice avoidance.”
The water glass tempted, despite its sharp edges. “I didn’t say that. We offer our pilgrims freedom to work and worship as they choose.”
“And part of that freedom is the assurance you will care for the idols you create. That you will protect the souls with which your clients trust you.”
“Yes.”
“Is that why you jumped into the pool?”
“I thought I could save your clients’ idol,” Kai said. “She was drowning.”
“By ’she’ you mean the construct designated Seven Alpha.”
“Yes.”
“Were you familiar with Seven Alpha’s case history?”
“I was not.”
“Would you say your High Priest Mister Jason Kol is a competent judge of an idol’s health?”
“Jace? Yes. He trained me.”
“And Mara Ceyla?”
“Of course.” She’d said that too fast, she knew, when Ms. Kevarian made a note of it. Or else she hadn’t, and Ms. Kevarian was making notes at random to confuse her. “Our Applied Theologians are the best anywhere.”
“What made you second-guess your coworkers?”
“I didn’t.” She bristled at the implicit scorn. Jace had cautioned her, and their Craftsman, too:
keep your answers short, within the limits of the question
. As if she were a child to be led. She swallowed her anger, and it cut her stomach. “I thought I could do more.”