Full Fathom Five (29 page)

“We met yesterday. She cut our conversation short. She planned to speak with me again, but I have not heard from her since.”

“I saw you with her last night.”

“Ah. Yes. I thought I saw you, vanishing into simulated time. Ms. Ceyla claimed she had information to share with me; she presented the outline of her argument, but left before we could discuss specifics. I thought you scared her off. Hence my surprise to find you scraping dream-paths searching for her.”

“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

“Not here, perhaps,” Ms. Kevarian said. “But in a Court of Craft, you may be so required.”

“You won’t get me to betray my people.”

“I was hired to uncover the truth behind the death of my client’s idol, and to take action if called for. I have uncovered a series of artful stories, and you—the piece of the puzzle that does not fit. Plagued by misplaced loyalties to superiors who have sidelined and betrayed you.”

“They saved my life.”

“They stopped you from saving a life. And when they tore you from the pool they did you more harm than good. You could have healed your injuries if you remained within the water.”

“If I survived long enough. They wanted to help me.”

“You claim they did. Mind their deeds, not your generous interpretation of their motives. You think because my clients are strange and wicked people that I mean you ill. But my clients have never set foot on your island. They have not injured you and yours. Their murders and vices are strictly onshore. They are not the source of your misery.”

“You’ve trapped me here inside my mind to interrogate me, and now you ask me to trust you.”

Ms. Kevarian rubbed her temples. “You tax my patience.”

Kai hung immobile in the web, and traded gazes with the Craftswoman in the stretching silence.

“What was Mara trying to tell you?” Kai said at last.

“We discussed discrepancies in the Seven Alpha records, before she left.”

“You called her a liar.”

“On the contrary. She was the one who expressed the initial desire to talk with me. She ran when she saw you.”

Kai blinked. If Mara hid the records in the first place, why tell Kevarian? “If Mara ran when I arrived, why do you think I might help you find her?”

“You hunted for her unprotected, in dangerous territory.”

“Maybe I wanted you to see me looking.”

“Perhaps. But if you had a choice, I imagine you would have warded yourself for this journey. Besides, I hold you a person of grave conscience. Such people commit atrocities, of course, but they suffer for them. Yet your nightmares are old: fears of being trapped, and devoured, and contained. I can taste their age, like that of a fine wine. I do not think you have killed a friend in the last forty-eight hours.”

“Killed?”

“Nothing I have said so far would stand as evidence in any court, but one of the few advantages of private contemplation over the paid variety is that I am not compelled to present my logic in court.” She sipped her tea, again. “I have been honest with you. More honest than with many in similar circumstances. Do you trust me?”

“No.”

She nodded. “I doubted you would. A colleague … a friend once accused me of using people, of manipulating them without their knowledge. She did not understand, I think, how difficult it is to convince others you have their best interests at heart.”

Kai could not break the web. But she refused to hang here any longer, listening.

The silk was her dream. It bound her, but bonds were clothing of a kind. Perhaps the silk that caught her body was in fact a dress, the silk around her hands spun to gloves. The spider gown cascaded, shimmering. She stood; her feet touched a floor of no texture.

Ms. Kevarian saluted her with raised teacup. “Well done.”

“I don’t know what Mara wanted to tell you, but Seven Alpha’s death was completely aboveboard. Mistakes happen.”

Ms. Kevarian’s teacup disappeared. She brushed off the front of her suit, though as far as Kai could see the fabric was black and unstained as the space between high stars at midnight. “Two points worth considering, Ms. Pohala. First. I do not believe your idol’s death was a mistake. You would not have jumped into the water beneath the world to save a flawed product. You jumped because you thought there was someone in the water who should not die. And second. The nightmare in which I found you was not your own.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. This dream is yours: the spider, and the silk. The one from which you entered this place was not.”

“Why would I have someone else’s nightmares?”

“A good question,” Ms. Kevarian said. “I do not envy you, Ms. Pohala. You have, I think, convinced yourself that a spider’s web is a silk dress.” From her pocket she produced a business card and flipped it in Kai’s direction. The card floated through the air, spinning slowly, ignorant of gravity. Kai caught it in one hand. “I sympathize. I wish I could help, but I can give you little assistance so long as you feel you require none. If you tear this card in half, I will hear you. If need be, I will come to your aid.”

“And if I don’t want your help?”

“We make our own choices. If we are lucky, we last long enough to live with them.” Ms. Kevarian opened a door in the dreamspace, into a rippling emptiness. She stood edged against the deep. It burned and chewed her outline. “Be well. And be careful.” The door swung shut behind her, and vanished with a click. Kai remained, alone in her dress in the empty room. Green moonlight bloomed on the spider-head hat, glinted off faceted eyes.

Kai tried to approach the hat, but her legs would not lift, her arms would not reach. The spider head twitched, and rose, topping a body of suggestion and fear. It scuttled forward. Fine-furred forelegs touched her neck. Its mouth sang triumph, and Kai cried out and woke in her own bed, where her arms were pinned to her sides and a sliver of steel rested at her throat and a woman’s voice said, “Why shouldn’t I kill you now?”

41

As Edmond Margot wrote, the stars went out. He did not need them. A page lay on his desk. His fingers held a pen. With these tools he built a world. Perhaps the world he built lived behind his eyes and was transmitted to the page by the instrument of ink, or else it lived beneath the page somehow, his pen’s progress sculpting form out of a purer white than sculptor’s marble. He coughed blood into a handkerchief. His illness worked angrily inside him, drawing him close to the beyond. He gloried and dissolved in the heat of his blood and heart and brain.

He lost the stars, first. Then the sky around them, and after the sky the borders of the horizon. He lost the waves next, and beaches, and the vast and lucent sea. The mountain too faded. Wind stilled. The universe compressed to his block, his house, his apartment, all trees wind leaves and stone, all human life and structure, all bars and fiddle-players and dancers and drinkers, all lovers and friends and gamblers and back-alley muggers and red-faced priests fallen away until only he remained, and then he even lost himself. Pen met paper, and paper and pen fading left, at last, the line. Not even the line: the point of contact, a wet green moving dot in a space without time or dimension.

But this space was not empty. Emptiness collapsed, while this stretched, defined by relations between invisible enormous beings who swam like whales in the deep. Closer than these eminences, small by comparison, hovered snowflakes of light, snowflakes such as he had not seen since in childhood he first caught them on the fine hairs of a wool mitten. Snowflakes, very like, but made of bone. Skeletons hanging in the night, tied to one another by strings of dried skin and muscle. Flayed crystal corpses, bodies human and animal and every mix of both, skyscraper horns and suspension bridge wings, rib cages thick as magisterium trees. The skeletons twitched, mocking life.

A skull the size of a small moon turned to him, a massive hand extended, a mouth moved. No sound could carry in this absent space, but still he heard someone speak.

We have missed you.

He recognized the voice.

Then the door burst open behind him.

42

When Izza was a block away from Margot’s house she felt Penitent footsteps vibrate through the paving stones. She swore and sprinted up the alley, dodging trash cans and broken glass until she reached Margot’s backyard wall and climbed it. Still the footsteps shivered in her legs and chest.

She pulled herself over the wall. Margot bent at his desk by the window, transfigured. Before, his focus made him seem to burn; now, his skin actually shone. Izza blinked, looked away, looked back, but it was true. He glowed green, as if his body were a wine bottle with fireflies trapped inside. Light flowed from his eyes and fingers. Flames licked the tip of his pen. He did not look up. Did not notice her, or the shaking of his apartment as the Penitent climbed the stairs.

Paint and quartz on the Penitent’s stone skin caught the streetlights; its eyes gleamed blue. The stairs shuddered under the statue’s feet, and Izza heard its prisoner groan: a new recruit, adjusting still to pain. Margot wrote on, oblivious. The statue reached the top of the stairs.

They’d sent only one. Strange: Penitents rarely made arrests alone, since they couldn’t speak or think fast. Each thought worked first from the stone shell into the human prisoner for processing, and back. They were blunt tools, lacking subtlety or social grace.

But even blunt tools had their uses.

The Penitent raised one hand, ponderous and slow. Two massive fingers and one thumb balled into a fist and it struck the door, a blur of stone faster than Izza’s eye could follow. The door snapped down the middle; the hinged half swung in and slammed against the wall, while the latched half tore free of the jamb and fell.

That, Margot noticed. He stood, turned. Green fire trailed him, and seeped out his eyes and mouth. Izza could not hear what the poet said, but she did not think he spoke a human tongue. Human or divine, his words did not faze the Penitent; it stepped forward, splintering the doorjamb. Izza ached for Margot to run, to escape through his barred window, over the balcony into the night. He could not outrun the Penitent, but at least he might have given it a chase.

He stood before the statue, rigid, proud.

Izza knew what came next.

The Penitent’s hand caught Margot around the throat. It lifted him off the ground with so little effort he seemed made of paper.

Margot stabbed the Penitent’s arm with his pen; he kicked, and slapped, and clawed.

Izza went cold. Penitents did not kill. They enforced bad laws. They caught stupid or unlucky dock rats. But Margot was dying. The flames that suffused him flickered and dimmed.

The priest had sent not cops, but an assassin.

“Leave,” a thin high voice whispered in her ear, Smiling Jack’s voice, all metal and wheels. “That’s all you can do. Margot built his own coffin. Let him lie.”

Margot stabbed the Penitent’s sapphire eye with his pen. The statue did not flinch. The prisoner within wailed.

Izza could not help Margot. But perhaps she could save a piece of him.

She leapt from wall to tree to balcony, ducked beneath the window to stay out of sight. The apartment floor creaked with the Penitent’s weight. Izza was close enough now to hear the poet gasp for breath, the faint percussion of his fists against stone.

With the Penitent’s attention fixed on Margot, Izza might be able to snatch his notebook. The window was open. Her arm could fit through the bars easy. Grab the book, and run.

Now.

She did not move.

Dammit. Go. This is how they get you. They march, and they terrify, and when they come for you in the end you’re so scared you let them do what they want. Like Dad, and Mom, like the priestess with her throat slit.

Margot tried again to scream, and failed.

Izza stood, snatched the notebook, and stuffed it into her pocket. Heat surrounded her: the twin spotlights of the Penitent’s stare. Margot twitched one last time, and hung still. The Penitent let him fall, and then Izza was alone, pinned by light from the murderer’s eyes.

She ran.

The first step was the hardest. She dove over the railing, fell, and rolled to her feet on the grass. Up again, running for the alley wall. Behind her, three heavy footsteps and an eruption of plaster and brick: the Penitent burst through Margot’s wall, scattering dust and broken glass. It crashed after her into the yard, tearing up great gashes of turf. She vaulted into the alley and ran. She was halfway down the block when she heard a cliff face collapse as the Penitent landed where she had been a minute before. Searchlights swept the darkness, and she felt that telltale heat.

Izza didn’t bother knocking over trash cans in her wake. The Penitent would ignore them. She could take to the rooftops, but the Penitent had strong eyes. It would follow, and she couldn’t hide forever.

Stone footfalls accelerated into an avalanche, and behind that avalanche she heard the prisoner’s cries as gears and needles and knives goaded her on. Izza squeezed down a narrow gap between two walled gardens, and heard the Penitent turn left onto a larger, parallel street to keep pace.

Out onto Victoria, two blocks from shore, two steps ahead of the Penitent. Options, hastily assembled, more hastily compared—across the road and down to the docks, a maze of narrow passages and turnings before she reached water and safety. To make it, though, she had to beat the Penitent in an open sprint. And if the statue tracked her to the water it could just follow her from shore.

Not the docks, then, she decided ten steps after she sprinted south into East Claw. Two blocks down, up onto a shop awning, from there three windows’ climb to a rooftop, then south again. Searchlight eyes swept the night and caught a flash of heel, an arm, a glint of eye turned back to check how much distance she’d lost. Once, as she was leaping across a gap between buildings, the light flooded Izza, so dense it seemed to lift her up before she arced out into shadow.

Her legs throbbed, her heart pounded. She could not run much farther. Fortunately, she did not have much farther to run.