Full Fathom Five (20 page)

“Visions of the Blue Lady?”

Drunks stumbled down the alley behind her, singing sea shanties off-key. Margot’s eyes were the same shade as the ink spilled from his pen. Fear showed in the green, under light. “I hadn’t dreamed of her for weeks. You understand? Find the love of your life. Fear her at first. Welcome her into your mind, your work. And one morning, wake to find you’ve lost her for good. You cannot even dream her anymore. Watch your fame grow in her absence as you struggle to mate dead words on dry paper. Then, when you stand drunk in a spotlight reciting stale work, you see a vision, strong and clear as yours used to be—a girl, in danger.”

“You saw her.” Izza had not meant to whisper. “That night.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I saw you. I knew where you were, and I tried to help. I thought you could lead me to her again.”

She’d felt nothing since the Lady died. No presence, no dreams. But Cat said ties still bound the faithful, even once their gods were gone. If so, she’d never be free, no matter how far she ran. Unless she gave the Lady up forever.

“Please,” Margot said. “Tell me about the Blue Lady. I miss her. Where did she go?”

She wanted to tell him everything: tell him about the Lady wreathed in fire who blessed the hungry with her kiss, who fought Smiling Jack to save the souls of Kavekana’s children. She wanted to tell him how she had healed Izza from the depths of a searing fever. The Lady set a cool hand on her brow, whispered a promise in her ear. Day broke when Izza thought she would never see another dawn.

But when she opened her mouth, those words wouldn’t fit through, because they were bigger than mere sound, like islands weren’t just the part above the water but the parts below it, too, mountains rising miles over seabed.

In the end all Izza could say was, “She died.” She owed him that at least.

He did not flinch. Did not cry. Did not move except to ask: “How?”

She knew that look, the hunger behind it. Margot needed her, surely as the children did, and that need would not fade no matter how many answers she gave him. Izza would remain priestess of a dead goddess, clutching the jagged edges of a broken dream, until she broke.

Cat’s voice:
You have to choose.

“The same way as anybody else,” she said, and leapt away into the deepening night of her failure.

25

Kai rode down the mountain with Claude. The cable car was clean, well lit, and empty but for them. Reflections chased her from the glass. She did not speak, and neither did Claude. He watched her, not the reflections or the slope. His hands rested on his knees. He rarely crossed his legs, or his arms, or his beliefs. His fingers drummed against his thighs. He saw her looking, and stopped.

They slid past a stanchion. Pulleys and rollers realigned. The car swayed, and continued down into the canopy of trees.

Claude followed her out of the empty station. Cable cars didn’t generally run this late. Jace must have started them again for her. Another allowance. She ran her hand over a painted rail, descended three steps to the vacant street, and walked along the sidewalk from the puddle of one streetlamp’s light to the next.

Claude kept pace three meters back, his steps slower than hers to account for his longer legs. Her faithful follower, backup, and minder. The Zurish gods Dread Koschei had supplanted, those lords of gold and raven hair who once ruled the steppe, they used to send priests (she had read) to accompany every warrior and diplomat, tradesman and spy and scholar who traveled abroad. Theological officers, the priests called themselves, haunting those they escorted, noting their every failure.

She wasn’t being fair to him.
Gods and rarely priests are fair, and seldom right.
Screw that.

“Why are you walking so far back?” she said, and stopped.

“Jace sent word through the Penitents that they needed someone to escort a priest home. He didn’t say why.” She stood at the edge of one streetlight circle, staring out into shadow; he stood at the circle’s other pole, staring in, at her. His gaze burned her neck. “He didn’t say you.”

“Or you wouldn’t have come.”

“Of course not. You don’t want to see me. It was hard to accept for a while. Still is hard. But this is for the best, for both of us.”

“Then why walk so far back?”

“I like the view.” He heard how that sounded. “No, that’s not. I mean. It’s hard to walk next to you.”

“When have we ever done things the easy way?” She glanced over her shoulder. Streetlight blanched him, and made him seem small. “Come on. Walk with me at least. We don’t need to talk. But you freak me out, trailing back there like a Dhisthran bride.”

“I won’t jump onto your pyre,” he said, approaching slowly, as if she were a scared monkey.

“That’s a weight off my shoulders.” Being with him was easy. They knew each other’s jokes, even the bad ones, and the weak points in their walls. That was why their fights were so harsh.

They walked together, neither looking at the other. “Why did they need someone to come get you?” he asked after a while.

“Off-limits. Sorry.”

“You can tell me.”

“I can’t,” she said, “actually. Rules.”

“Okay.”

They continued down.

“Jace asked if I minded that it was you,” she said. “He offered to send you home.”

“And you said no.”

“We’re adults.”

“We’re sort of adults,” he agreed. “It’s like we’re tied together. I mean.” He fell silent.

“Bound in promissory chains,” she said. The words floated up from the pit of her mind, from Margot swaying on the stage.

“What’s that?”

“A poem.”

“Poetry,” he said, as if that one word encapsulated everything unsatisfactory in the world. Dry fallen fronds scraped together behind them. Pebbles rolled on the road. But there was no wind, and the road was empty. “You ever go back to the Rest?”

“Sometimes.”

“You’re limping.”

“Busy night,” she said.

“Do you want a shoulder?”

“I have two.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. The answer’s no.”

“Okay,” he said. In the silence, she took inventory of her wounds. Bones broken and harshly healed, flesh welded back to flesh, nerves rewired, soul rebuilt. All the physical traces of her fall.

They reached her house ten minutes later. She opened the front gate. He followed her up the footpath to the porch. He had to duck beneath the vines that trailed from the overhang. Loose dead ivy leaves stuck in his hair. He waited, quiet, eyes averted, hands in pockets. Muscles stood out on either side of his clenched jaw, like they did when he had something to say and was trying not to say it.

Kai searched her purse for her keys, found them, kept searching. She closed her eyes and leaned against the door.

She thought of the red notebook in her bag, but all she felt was tired. One more conspiracy, one more chance to jump in and try to save the world. Always throwing herself at other people’s problems. Sickening, and a sign of sickness. Stand aside. Let go. Accept.

“Are you okay?”

She took the key from her purse, slid it into the lock, turned the knob sharply as if breaking a kitten’s neck. The house received her, warm and empty, walls and furniture and the drug dealers’ bad shag carpet. She should get a pet. A dog, maybe. A big, noble dog. One of those with floppy ears. Strong across the shoulders. Happy to see her.

“Would you like to come inside,” she said. It wasn’t a question. For a sentence to be a question, you had to care about the other person’s answer.

He stood at uneasy equilibrium, not quite balanced, not quite falling. She prepared for him to ask—are you sure. Is this what you really want. You’re upset. Whatever happened to you tonight, it set you off, and it wouldn’t be right of me to take advantage. Prescient, telepathic, she saw him form all those answers, all those ways to say no and make her feel a fool for asking.

She dreaded his voice. Even if he said yes, she thought, she’d close the door in his face.

He stepped inside. He took her in his arms. They kissed like crashing rocks. Their teeth touched. He smelled of sweat and scorn and so did she. They broke, separated, saw each other: her dead eyes reflected in his own. She closed the door. The latch clicked. She left her cane propped against the wall and with the wall’s help walked to the stairs, pulling him behind her, up to the bedroom they had last shared months ago, the bedroom hung with charcoal drawings and dark curtains. A spider crawled across her down comforter. She swept it away with the back of her hand.

His jacket fell to the floor behind him. As she watched he pulled his polo shirt off over his head. She hadn’t turned the lights on, and he did not, either. Scars crossed his chest and arms, where the Penitents once and forever broke him.

They seldom talked about his crime: he was a tough poor kid, and he ran with a dangerous crowd, and one day a fight turned bad, and a boy died. He wasn’t part of the fight, but he didn’t stop his friends, either. Only watched. The court judged him old enough to serve, and threw him into a Penitent. When he emerged, his body was a molded weapon, his mind a made thing. When they met again at the Rest three years back, she barely recognized the boy she’d known. He barely recognized her.

He’d gained weight since she last saw him naked. Muscle, mostly. She bit her lip, hard, and clenched her hands into fists. Nails dug half moons into her palms. Blood tasted copper. He stepped forward. She hadn’t yet removed her jacket.

Her life was bounded by mistakes. Trying to save the idol was not her first, and she’d made others since. So Jace told her, and Mara, and even Gavin by his eyes and his hesitation. This was a mistake, she knew. He had always been a mistake, her greatest.

She let her jacket fall, and made him.

26

Hours later Kai still ached. She lay hung over on her own bed, alone despite the swell of sleeping flesh beside her. She wanted a cigarette. She’d never smoked. She padded downstairs and sat on her couch in her dressing gown. Her purse lay by the door, discarded in that rush of anything but passion. Hatred, maybe. Disgust—but with whom? She limped to the door, grabbed the purse, returned to the couch, and sat again, purse on the table before her, lump of leather tangled in its own strap.

She clawed inside, past wallet and keys and comb and lipstick and gloves and bandages. The red notebook looked gray as everything else in the dim light of streetlamps through her windows.

She untied the ribbon and opened the book. Its stiff spine cracked, and the pages clung together. Most were blank. Sketches covered several near the beginning, the outlines of a goat-legged woman with horns and spreading wings. Despite the artist’s poor draftsmanship Kai could tell she was supposed to be beautiful. On later pages the drawings degenerated into flowcharts and diagrams, arrows connecting labeled circles. Names, some she recognized, most she didn’t, none human. Concerns, gods, idols. Lists of numbers. Accounts, maybe, or thaums transferred, or the addresses of certain dreams.

Aside from the diagrams and the lists, the book was blank. No memories inscribed here. No explanations. No name, either. Good practice. The notes here could cost a lot of people their jobs.

Not as many, though, as the five loose and folded sheets that fluttered out from the notebook when Kai fanned its pages. The sheets were vellum, not paper, which told her everything. On Kavekana, only the Order used such expensive material for bookkeeping, and then only for Craft-readable records. These pages had been sliced neatly from a ledger, and she recognized the format: a list of true names, and beside each, columns of numbers. Someone had cut these sheets from an idol’s records, no question. The script was right, and the watermark, and the silvery Craftwork glyphs that headed each column of the table.

As for which idol, she did not need to wonder. Each page, at its bottom, was stamped with a long number that ended with a dash and the symbols “7A.”

Most of the names on these pages were cryptic, like those earlier in the book, but one she recognized. A few thousand thaums of grace had been dispensed to Edmond Margot.

Kai read the ledger pages twice, but the name remained.

Howl, bound world.

She folded the parchment again, returned the pages to the notebook, and tied the book with its ribbon. She moved to the kitchen and found a glass, and whiskey, and ice cubes from the icebox. The ice clinked in the glass. The shadow of glass and ice lay long on the counter, sparked in its middle with focused light. Kai threw the ice into the sink, and turned on the water. The ice pitted, shrank, vanished. She turned off the water, poured herself a finger of whiskey, threw back the whiskey, washed the glass, and returned bottle and glass to their cabinets and the notebook to her purse. She stood alone in the living room and listened to the night. Wind, insects, a whooping bird she could not name.

Margot was a poor poet, no follower of the Grimwalds, no mainlander hoodlum. But if these records were correct, he had drawn power from the Grimwalds’ idol.

Any discrepancy must result either from negligence, or from malice.

Back in the database nightmare, Ms. Kevarian had accused Mara of manipulating records. Another baseless accusation, Kai had thought. More intimidation.

But here, in Kai’s purse, were vellum pages cut from the Order’s own ledgers. A handful of people could access the ledgers in person—and of that handful, Mara was the most likely culprit. Why would she hide the pages with Kai, then turn her in to Jace? Unless Mara hoped Jace might search Kai and find the papers. Unless she planned to frame Kai for the cover-up.

Mara was her friend. Mara had come to her this morning, to apologize.

To apologize for what?

Kai could go to Jace with this theory, about Mara trying to frame her—for what exactly? What was Mara trying to hide? Margot, perhaps, but what did Margot have to do with anything? He was an awkward poet with a three-month-old case of writer’s block.