Full Fathom Five (19 page)

If Ms. Kevarian wanted to map the idol network, this would be a good place to start: before Seven Alpha’s death. Kai altered the artificial dreamscape to clear away all information Kevarian had not requested.

Night fell, infinite and everlasting.

Not this far back, then. So what did Ms. Kevarian want to see?

She advanced until Seven Alpha took shape again in the darkness, shining, smiling, divine, all assets invested in a massive bid on Shining Empire debt. Risky move. Kai had never pegged Mara for such a gambler. She hung back even from the office ullamal bracket, bet only a few thaums at a time. But bad gamblers took big risks. Seven Alpha borrowed, and bought. The investment’s value fell, and the idol collapsed. Kai watched Seven Alpha die in slow motion. The brilliant heart corroded. Claws caught nothing. That last single desperate surge, grasping for an invisible rope—Kai’s offer.

Then, death.

Kai hovered alone in the artificial past. She watched the death again, and again, and heard no strange words, saw no hidden truth.
Howl, bound world
was an invention of her drug-addled mind, a line from Edmond Margot’s diseased brain passed along to her by a strange and untraced course.

The idol died. That was it. That was all.

What else did she expect? Mara took a stupid risk. The idol suffered. Kai took a second stupid risk to save her, to save them both, and that didn’t work out, either.

Sometimes gambles don’t work out.

Sometimes people die.

She thought about her father, and the old gods.

Ms. Kevarian had not found any information that might expose the Order’s other clients. Either she hadn’t asked for it, or she had and Jace blocked her. So much for Kai’s cavalry charge. So much for discovering, in the depths of disgrace, a secret threat to island and Order. So much for Jace welcoming her back as savior. Arrogance, vanity, to think that she, by herself, could uncover a threat Jace and Mara and Gavin and all the others missed.

She did not return to the present. Why risk discovery again? The illusion slipped, and she fell back to her own body, pierced and sore. Air cut her lungs. The beach painting mocked from the far wall. Fake surf rushed and retreated.

Wires slithered like serpents and unwound from her neck, arms, legs. Claws unclenched. Lightning thorns withdrew. Shaking, she pushed the machines away, and on the third try grabbed her cane. She trusted it, and stepped out of the niche into the cavern.

The empty cavern.

Mara was gone.

Her conversation with the Craftswoman had sounded serious, midpoint of another long interview like Kai’s—hours ahead yet, the kind of drawn-out meeting no one quite knows how to end. Kai’d expected to leave long before Mara woke.

Don’t panic, she told herself. She might not have seen you. Conversations with Craftswomen took a toll on the mind. Maybe she staggered from her niche, down the stairs and out, without a backward glance. Yes. And maybe tomorrow morning Makawe would return from the Wars on a treasure-brimming boat, to usher in a new age.

Best not to depend on either.

Mara had probably left to find guards, or Jace, rather than confront Kai herself. A few minutes’ grace, then. With luck, Kai could escape down the mountain, deny the entire thing. Her word against Mara’s. Who would Jace believe: the woman he’d just promoted, or the one he transferred for mental health reasons?

She walked faster.

No one tried to stop her as she left Mara’s carrel; the library remained quiet. Plush green carpet consumed her footfalls, and the taps of her cane. The night owls didn’t look up as she passed. The librarian golem did, though. As Kai neared the door, it extended a talon to stop her. “Excuse me.” It had a voice of blades and wind. “I must inspect your bag.”

She almost ran, but couldn’t beat the golem on foot; she’d seen it reshelving books, quick as a blink. So she stopped, and opened her purse. Jointed metal fingers split into thin manipulators, and crawled through the jumble of wallet, medicine, notebooks, cosmetics. Kai blinked. Notebooks? She carried a small notepad for jotting down dreams and shopping lists, wire-bound with a thick green cover. But her bag held two: hers, worn green, and a newer volume covered in red leather and bound with a ribbon. The librarian golem returned the bag without comment and nodded once, a tickling of gears. Its eyes followed her as she left.

She kept her pace slow until she was out of sight. She wanted to tear the red notebook from her bag and read, but there wasn’t time. Her watch showed half an hour gone since she’d entered the niche.

Down she ran through echoing halls into the mountain’s beige depths, down until she reached the entrance she had used, and stepped out through rock onto the moonlit balcony. Slope wind blew cool beneath a black velvet sky. From this height the island’s green was a brief skirt before the spreading legs of the sea.

“I didn’t expect to see you here so soon,” Jace said from the balcony’s edge.

Every part of her stopped at once, and restarted slowly. He leaned against the banister, a sliver of shadow in gray turtleneck and navy slacks, thumbs hooked through his belt loops. She tried to walk toward him, calm and measured, but her knee buckled and she had to catch herself with her cane. “I had work to do.”

“Work up the mountain?”

“A pilgrim asked me some questions today. I needed an answer.”

“No answer you find here will help a pilgrim decide whether to invest. Some need us; some don’t. The ones that do, you only have to guide them. The ones that don’t, nothing you do will change their minds.”

She forced herself to look him in the eye. The hollows of his face were deep wells in the moonlight.

“Why are you really here?” he asked.

Someone else could have lied to him. Not Kai, not now. “I thought we were in danger. I thought Ms. Kevarian and her clients might be trying to learn about other idols—to use their suit as a pretext to map the pool, to learn our secrets.”

“You climbed the mountain, and snuck into the library. And what did you find?”

“Nothing,” she said. “They haven’t pushed discovery that far back.”

“They tried,” Jace said. “We stopped them.”

“Then Kevarian does want to map the pool.”

“Kevarian wants every scrap of information she can pull from us. Everything she doesn’t yet know is a potential weapon in her case.”

“They have a plan,” she said. “There’s something deeper at work here.”

“Even if there was, discovering it is not your responsibility.”

“I am a priest. I have a duty to the gods. The idols. The island.”

“And I sent you away.” The calm facade slipped, and beneath she saw his anger and his fear. “For your own good, for our good. If Kevarian heard you snuck in to investigate Seven Alpha, she could argue that you lied in your deposition. That you think we could have saved the idol. One lie blows the case open.”

“I thought we were in trouble. Was I supposed to stand by and do nothing?”

“Yes. Let us deal with the mess. Let go. Accept that good intentions don’t count.”

He stopped. The night closed around them both. In their anger they had grown large, but silence made them specks on the mountain under a spreading sky.

He walked to her, and around her, shoulders slumped. Kai tensed as he passed behind her back. When he emerged, he seemed smaller, like a comet part-melted by its orbit.

“Go on,” Kai said. “Might as well get all this out in the open.”

He removed his glasses, and rubbed his temples between the thumb and fingers of one hand. “Kai, why did you join the priesthood?”

“Does it matter?”

“It’s an honest question.”

“With an obvious answer.”

“You didn’t need to stay with us after your initiation, after your change. Could have chosen any line of business on the island or off it.”

“I wanted this since I was a child.”

“Why?”

The moon was full, and the rabbit-shadow inside dark. “My folks work with ships. Mom, Dad, they realized back before I was born that the boom market for Kavekana sailors wouldn’t last. We’re a small island in a big world. We wouldn’t always be the cheapest source of labor, or the best.” She struck the balcony stone with her cane. “That left the Order on the one hand, and on the other, waiting tables for cruise-boat tourists looking to guzzle a Mai Tai or seven.”

“Why not leave?”

“This is my home,” she said. “I don’t know what would have happened to me if I’d been born in Dresediel Lex, or Dhisthra, or the Shining Empire. This is where I became myself.” His bowed head, his careful soft voice, unnerved her. She’d expected the shouting match, not whatever this had become. “Why did you join, Jace?”

“Same reason, “he said, “different decade. I wanted to help my home. The gods didn’t come back from the Wars, and we had to keep the island together. Who knows what Kavekana might have become if we let history take its course? If we gave up after the gods left? No idols, no pilgrims, no Penitents. It might have been better.”

“No.”

“How do you know?”

“Look at Dresediel Lex, ruled by hungry skeleton kings. Look at crumbling Alt Selene. Would you rather we be the butcher of a continent, like Shikaw, or a mechanical wasteland like King Clock’s country? Or I guess we could have sold ourselves to the Iskari, or to Camlaan. Played host to military bases and squid cathedrals. They’re worse than tourists, I hear.” She nodded down the slope, to the lights of the bayside city. “This way, we stay ourselves.”

“Do we?” Jace stretched out his hand for her shoulder. She hesitated, then stepped closer so he could reach it. He was old, but his grip was firm. “You want to help Kavekana,” he said, “but what Kavekana? You have a vision, a dream of a place that’s not here anymore. I sent you away to save us, but also to learn. You don’t appreciate what we mean to our pilgrims, how we fit into the world. As long as you don’t know that, I can’t trust you.” He released her shoulder. “Do you understand?”

Jace was bent around a point a few inches above his heart. Craftsmen said that mass, energy, spirit, warped the world like weights on a rubber sheet, making straight lines curved. Younger, Jace had stood straight, a grand architect shaping idols. He’d lived a thousand years since then. Even light bent, in the spaces where he walked. “I think so.”

“I don’t like sending you away. But I will, to protect us, and you.”

“You can’t protect me from myself.”

“I can. I have. As of this midnight, the mountain’s locked against you. The rock won’t let you pass, nor the forest. The halls will turn your footsteps, the golems and glyphs bar your way. You’ll lose yourself if you try to climb the stair.”

“Forever?”

“For now.”

“This isn’t fair,” she said. “It isn’t right.”

“No,” he said. “But gods and priests are rarely fair, and seldom right.”

She said nothing.

“I love you, Kai. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t have to.”

“Do you expect thanks?”

“No,” he said. “We’ll go together to the cable car. I won’t make you walk down alone, like a novice or a thief.” He paused at the rock, and turned. “I asked the watch for someone to escort you home. They sent Claude. He’s waiting. I could send him back, keep you here until another watchman comes.”

Beneath them, the city shone. Water lapped the shore.

“No,” she said. “That’s fine.”

24

The poet lived in a walk-up apartment on the second floor of a two-story stucco house. Bed linen hung drying over the balcony. Palm trees grew in neat rows to the house’s either side, and more in the narrow yard behind, near the alley wall. Izza climbed that wall, jumped to a palm tree, and kicked a coconut crab off the trunk when it snapped a massive claw at her heel. The crab was large, and landed heavily, but it raised itself on spindly legs and lumbered off. From her perch, she watched.

Edmond Margot sat by his window. Candlelight glinted off his bald patch. She couldn’t see the details of his room, the packed bookcase and the bare china cabinet, the worn rug and the bed with no blanket but a sleeping pouch sewn out of a doubled cotton sheet. She didn’t need to see these things; she’d surveyed his apartment earlier, looking without success for hidden weapons or the remains of kids abducted, tortured, butchered. The room made him seem unbalanced, a good sign: the worst predators she’d known were the ones that put the most effort into seeming normal. Still, even poor predators had teeth.

The wraparound balcony ran beneath the window where Margot sat writing. Long jump, but this way she wouldn’t be seen from the street.

So she jumped, caught the railing, and pulled herself up and over, light as falling leaves. The poet, though, was less focused than she’d thought. His shoulders twitched, and he looked up. His eyebrows rose, mazing his high forehead with furrows.

Before he could speak, she set a finger to her lips. He closed his mouth. Izza thanked whoever was responsible that she was a girl, and skinny. She might be a threat, but she didn’t look it. If she’d been larger, or a boy, Margot might have cried for help before he recognized her.

“Pick up your pen,” she said.

“What?”

“Your pen,” she repeated.

He looked down. In surprise he’d let the pen droop to paper, and a pool of green ink had welled around the tip. He wiped the pen and slid it into a metal stand. “Thank you.”

“Do you know me?”

He nodded. “From dreams. And”—hasty, remembering their last meeting—“the police station. The girl whose name isn’t Marthe.”

“That’s right.”

“You sought me.”

“You’re not hard to find.”

“Artists learn not to be. Obscurity is our mortal enemy. I’ve seen minstrels in Palatine stand between lanes of traffic, holding their sonnets overhead.” He mimed in miniature, hands not higher than his eyes. “Painted on pine boards, you know. Dripping. Atrocious calligraphy. The word ’God’ ends up indistinguishable from ’gad.’”

“Good poems?”

“Not as a rule.”

She leaned back against the balcony. “How did you find me at the watch station?”

“Visions,” he said, and covered his mouth, and coughed. “As I said.”