Authors: Max Gladstone
What people, she mocked herself as she said the words. A few refugees. Street kids. Children of no country, and a goddess with no children. Yet.
Are you sure?
And then there was Cat. Chosen of a goddess, and alone.
Like her, in a way. And maybe she’d known that weeks ago, when she saw the woman fight Penitents bare-handed. Lonely, unsure, marooned on a strange island, she saw a girl, a woman, about to make her own mistakes, and tried to save her from them.
“I am,” she said, and touched Cat’s arm. The silver shell parted, and so did the secret skin Izza wore outside her own. “Thank you.”
Then they let each other go. Izza turned to the goddess and the ghost. She cracked her knuckles. The sound did not echo. No walls off which to echo, here. “Come on. Let’s steal you.”
* * *
The Craftswoman turned to Kai, one eyebrow raised, silent.
“Jace,” she said, “was never working on the Order’s behalf. He operated in secret, against the island’s interests. He set all of us at risk, as your threat demonstrates. The Council of Families and the Sacerdotal Order bear no guilt for his crimes.” She was not looking at Ms. Kevarian. “In fact, that’s why Claude is here.”
Come on, she thought. Get it.
* * *
The goddess curled around Izza, a web of a thousand million strands, and she was in that web, and she was that web. The goddess settled over her like a mantle, like a shroud, and she felt fire on her skin, and the edge of a knife, and the weight of love.
* * *
“Yes,” Claude said.
Ms. Kevarian turned. Kai watched gears revolve behind Claude’s eyes. He looked younger than she’d ever seen him since his Penitence—a kid once more, watching a fight on the docks, unwilling to get involved.
“Yes?” the Craftswoman said.
Kai slid her hands into her pockets so no one could see her crossed fingers.
“We’ve come to arrest Jason Kol.” He sounded the words syllable by syllable. “For murder, and fraud, and the abuse of powers.”
Jace wheeled on him. “Claude.”
Claude kept his eyes on the Craftswoman. Kai was glad Ms. Kevarian had turned away from her. She didn’t want to see the woman’s triumph. “We have evidence,” Claude said, “that he’s been working to … to defraud his pilgrims. That he’s imprisoned people wrongly, and corrupted Penitents to help his schemes.”
And killed, she thought. Say the last bit.
“And that he has murdered an Iskari citizen. The island of Kavekana cannot countenance his actions.”
Jace stared.
“I will, naturally,” Ms. Kevarian said, “still bring suit against the Order.”
“And the Order,” Kai said, “will defend itself by disavowing Jace. He stands alone.”
Jace turned to her, and she took a step back when she saw his face. She had expected fury. She didn’t know what she saw: a slow shattering expression, a life stripped bare. He’d built a veneer of confidence over years of making what he thought were right decisions. With that scoured away, what remained wasn’t even fear.
He moved for her, fast.
Mara’s Penitent moved faster: a stone streak, and Jace barely had time to scream. She caught his wrist and yanked him off his feet. He twisted there, and did not speak—glared, instead, at Kai, at Ms. Kevarian, at Claude.
No one spoke.
Stone ground on stone, and the Penitent split open; green-tipped crystals gleamed inside, and within them, Mara, her eyes open.
Kai ran to her, and caught her as she fell. She was lighter than Kai would have guessed, and feverish. Her eyes met Kai’s, clouded, unfocused. She hadn’t used them in days. And what she’d seen in the meantime she didn’t want to remember.
“Hey,” Kai said, and held her closer. “Hey.”
Mara’s hands found Kai’s shoulders, squeezed. “Kai. It was in my head. It was my head.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” Her voice broke. She swallowed, hard.
The Penitent moved again, on its own. Granite jaws closed around Jace, and they were alone, on the shores of the pool: Kai, and Mara, and Claude, and Ms. Kevarian.
61
Ms. Kevarian left first, fading like a ghost in a child’s story, from the feet up until only a suggestion of form remained—then gone. Next Mara collapsed, convulsed, and Kai held her and shouted to Claude to get help, which he did; acolytes and lesser functionaries arrived soon after with a gurney, and though Mara clutched at Kai as they wheeled her away, Kai had to let her go.
Inside the statue, Jace began to weep.
Which left Claude and Kai. He approached her, by the pool, and together they gazed down into the black. They did not look at each other, and he did not touch her.
“They’ll make you a high priest now, I bet.”
“If only to find some way to clip my wings.”
“They put you in a Penitent,” he said, and seemed as though he might have said something else.
“You would have put me back.”
“Kai.”
“Don’t start. You would have.”
“You don’t have any idea what you risked, back there, with the Craftswoman. If I hadn’t—”
“I knew you would. That’s the thing. You have a duty. Or a duty has you.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re so caught in its grip you don’t see what happened here. Jace couldn’t have kept this up forever. There’s been a crossbow to this island’s head for a while, and he kept tightening his finger on the trigger. If I didn’t threaten to pull it now, he would have slipped up someday, and then there’d be no easy fix, no way to pretend this was all him.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Gods, do you think he would have taken the initiative on his own? He talked it over with people. I don’t know who. He wouldn’t have kept notes. But he was a committee man. For every person directly involved, there must be ten who guessed, but looked away. Like I did. We didn’t ask questions. We kept to our own business even when the idols started dying. The gods.”
“We would have caught him.”
“Who would have? Nobody wanted to rock the boat. To step out of line. To ask the first hard question, let alone the second or the third. No one wanted to realize the island was changing.”
“Except for you.”
“Except for I only came after him, came after all of you, for selfish reasons. Because everyone acted like I was crazy, and I had to prove I wasn’t. That’s not justice. Mara, maybe she should have been the one to save us. But Jace stuck her in one of those things. I’m not a just woman. I’m not a revolutionary. I don’t know what I am.”
“But you know who you are.”
“I guess.”
“That’s more than I do,” he said.
She looked at him, sideways, really looked at him: strong jaw, flat cheeks and nose, hard eyes under a heavy brow, muscles bulging against shirt and jacket, the man that had been made out of the boy. And she saw, inside him, something younger, like that trace of grit that stuck in oysters for years makes a pearl. Three years they lived together, and she’d never seen that. The broken boy, wondering now, maybe wondering always, what he’d be. The boy who never got the chance to decide, and searched in books for images of the hero he thought he might have been if he had not lost his way.
In that moment she almost forgave him—not everything, but a lot, including some things she should not have forgiven.
“Hey,” she said, and grabbed his biceps. “You got to save the world. Or a piece of it.”
“But I lost the girl.”
“You lost the girl a long time ago.”
Neither of them spoke for a while.
“Why are we standing here?” he said at last.
“I’m waiting.”
“For what?”
She saw a glint of green within the pool and slid her hand inside, smooth and slow. Then she pulled with arm and back and legs and in a confused half second Izza lay flat onshore, coughing. Kai waited as the girl curled into a fetal ball, and covered her mouth, and stopped shaking.
Izza stood. She swayed on her feet, but did not fall. Claude caught her shoulder anyway. She pulled back and glared demon-fire at him.
“I’ve seen this girl before,” Claude said. “Your guide.”
Kai laughed. She hadn’t remembered. “I guess she is, at that.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Izza.”
“Izza.” Claude knelt so their heads were level, which earned him another glare.
She placed a hand over her mouth, and nodded.
“She’s mute?”
“Yes,” Kai said, catching the drift. “Can you make sure she gets out of here? Safe?”
“Okay,” Claude said.
“Now, I mean.”
“You want me to leave.”
“I want you out. I want her out. I want all these damn things out.” She waved her hand in a circle to take in all the Penitents. “I want them shattered and I want those pieces ground into dust and the dust forged into a metal we sink to the bottom of the ocean so we can all forget them. I want us not to do this anymore.”
“You mean Jace.”
“I mean Jace. I mean Penitents. I mean gardening the fucking world because the chance of change scares us.”
“I changed, once,” he said. “Inside. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Maybe should think long and hard about what you mean. Because this sounds like one of those ideas where the way you say it matters.”
“Get out of here,” she said, and “thank you,” to him, and “thank you,” to Izza, who extended her hand.
They shook, and Kai didn’t notice until Claude and girl and Penitents were gone that Izza’d stolen her ring.
She did not leave the pool for a long while. She sat there, cross-legged, while lights went off in the windows that ringed the caldera. She willed them off, pressing deeper into the soft space around the pool, where centuries ago the people of the islands imposed a beginning on time. No one watched here. The caldera windows vanished, as did the tunnels carved into the mountain’s shell. She sat on the shore of a world not yet begun.
The silver woman pulled herself up onto the shore, and sat with wings furled and legs crossed and hands resting on her thighs. Moonlight draped her shining skin.
Kai said, “I’m sorry. I had to be sure no one would see.”
I should kill you,
Cat replied.
For that stunt.
“I see why you might want to. But bringing me here stopped a crime, and probably a war. Not to mention saved a goddess. Your Lady would appreciate that.”
She does,
and Kai shuddered to think the woman wasn’t guessing.
“That suit you wear. The metal skin. Is it anything like the Penitents?”
No,
she said.
And yes. There’s more to duty than compulsion.
“What?”
Love. Honor.
“You don’t sound as though you believe it.”
I do,
she said.
But believing isn’t the same as knowing.
She ran her hand through the rough gravel. “Maybe.”
Cat stood.
What happened to Izza?
“She’s safe.”
I wish I could have seen her go.
“I know,” Kai said. “But you should leave now. I have work to do. We do—Izza, and me. And if someone finds you here, that work only gets harder.”
She nodded.
I’ll be back.
“I hope you don’t have to be. But maybe we’ll meet somewhere else.”
Silver wings stretched out to a full span, testing and tasting the air. Kai wondered what it would be like, to be perfect.
“Tell Teo good-bye,” Kai said. “And thanks. And I’m sorry.”
I will.
Cat flew, and Kai watched her go: trailing moonlight as she rose through time and space and layers of story, out into the world. Leaving Kai here, at the center.
* * *
The watchman let Izza off in front of the small dockside apartment complex where she claimed to live, and waited for her on the sidewalk. She’d chosen the building for its easily jimmied lock, but as she reached out to slip the latch, green light flowed from her fingertips and the door popped open.
She waved to the watchman and slipped inside, down the entrance hall, out the back door, over the rear fence to an alley, and down the alley three blocks and a turn to reach the East Claw promenade. After a quick glance left and right to be sure she wasn’t followed, she dove off into the bay.
She swam along silt-choked shoals through the city’s refuse, until she found the wall she sought and wound through it and surfaced in the chapel beneath the stares of painted gods.
She was not alone.
“I didn’t expect you,” Nick said from beside the altar.
She removed a tiny envelope of wax paper from beneath her tongue. “I didn’t expect me, either.”
“I thought you’d follow Cat when she left.”
“That was the plan.”
“And now?”
“The plan changed,” she said. “I’m staying here. We have work to do.” She opened the envelope, and slid its contents out into her palm. One folded sheet of paper.
The great challenge, in theft, is the transport of stolen goods. A thief of souls must have a receptacle for the souls she’s stolen: gold and gems, magisterium wood, works of art, raw material transformed by human hands.
Like the last work of a brilliant poet.
She opened the paper she’d torn from Margot’s notebook. Ink shimmered green in the light of stars and candles.
The green glow rose, and other colors unfolded from it, drifting through the chapel toward the paintings on the walls. Red, for the Eagle; Silver, for the Squid; Blue, for the Lady.
And there in the room’s center, where the light mingled, hung a suggestion of face and form, indistinct, massive.
Izza realized her skin was shining.
“Who is that?”
“You know her,” Izza said. “You’ve known her all along. But we’ve never told her story before now.”
“Will you?”
She heard a note of hope there, and wondered whether she deserved it. Behind the altar, at the head of the chapel, she faced her audience of one. No. Two.
“In the beginning,” she said, “was the Mother.”
62
Kai didn’t return to the Rest for weeks. At first she told herself there was too much work: board meetings, explanations. Jace’s trial, in secret session before the Council of Families. As the Grimwalds’ suit progressed, swarms of Craftsmen and Craftswomen climbed Kavekana’ai and wandered through its halls, studying and being studied in turn. Craft crackled about the mountain peak. Gavin spent three days trying to explain the basic principles of idolatry to curious Craftsmen, without much success. He emerged from the sessions white haired and shaken.