“You may be surprised.” They rose into clouds and thunder. “Our work keeps us a single step ahead of the mob. That’s all. If you let your ego rule your reason, you’ll find the villagers with pitchforks waiting, no matter how far you’ve traveled, no matter what you’ve done on their behalf.”
A determined smile spread across Tara’s face, despite the rebuke. Let Edgemont shake its torches; let the Hidden Schools rail and Professor Denovo fume. Tara Abernathy would live, and practice the Craft, in spite of them. “Yes, ma’am.”
*
It’s hard to read a codex in a storm, ten thousand feet in the air. The rain wasn’t a problem; Tara sheltered herself and her books beneath a large umbrella. But the umbrella did not stop the wind, and when one is flying through the sky on a platform of solid nothingness, there is quite a lot of wind.
“In conflicts of deothaumaturgical interest, equity proceeds according to a paradigm originally formalized in the seventeenth century by—”
Just as the sentence was about to mean something, a particularly vicious gust tore the page from her fingers and flipped it, revealing a line of black spindly letters beneath, which read, “Chapter Seven: Personal Default.”
She closed the book with a sigh and placed it on top of the stack. Near the bottom of the pile lay basic texts, tersely titled treatises the contents of which she had committed to memory years ago: Contracts, Remedies, Corpse. Atop them teetered more comprehensive works Ms. Kevarian had had borrowed from the library during their midnight pit stop in Chikal. Tara had planned to scan these during the flight, but they were too dense, relying on obscure tricks and arcane turns of theory she haltingly grasped back in school, but hadn’t reviewed since.
She glanced up at Elayne Kevarian—Boss, she reminded herself, with the capital letter—and thought better of asking for her help. Ms. Kevarian was busy driving. She hovered fifteen feet in front of Tara, head cocked back, arms outstretched, and gripped bolts of lightning as if they were the reins of the clouds. Gale winds blew her hair about like billowing smoke, and raindrops burst into steam before they could wet the wool of her gray pinstriped suit.
Below them fell the rain, and below that stretched miles and miles of farmland. In the four decades since the God Wars ended, those farms and the villages dotted among them had recovered, prospered, and kept to themselves. Down there lived people who had never flown in their lives, never left their hometown, never seen another nation, let alone another continent. Tara had been one of them, once. No longer.
At that she felt a pang of guilt, and took from her shoulder bag a piece of parchment, a small writing board, and a quill pen.
She began the letter:
Dear Mother and Father,
I received an urgent job offer last night. I am excited by the opportunity, though I am sorry to leave home so soon. I intended to stay longer.
It was wonderful to see you both. The garden is coming along well, and the new schoolhouse looks like it will be even bigger and better than the last one.
Say good-bye and hello to Edgemont, and if you don’t mind, please bake some cookies for the chaplain and say they’re from me.…
*
It was too nice a morning for Al Cabot to die. The storm had passed in the night, leaving shredded clouds to catch red fire as the sun swelled on the horizon. Another bank of thunderheads approached on the western wind, but for the moment the sky was clear. Al stepped out into his rooftop garden, teacup in hand, and took a moment to breathe. According to his doctor he needed to take more of these, or he wouldn’t be around to breathe at all for much longer.
Al was a man grown nervously fat during a career of sitting behind a desk and shuffling from one poorly lit room to the next. He never had the time to sweat and acquire the hard-glazed muscles of a common road worker. He told his few friends that he had received the raw end of the deal, but nobody ever asked the road workers.
He savored the morning light, and with it a sip of nightshade tea—toxic to normal humans, but he was hardly normal anymore. Al was no Craftsman, but his occupation left its mark, like the coal miner’s dusty cough or the farmer’s crop-bent back. For half a century he had stood too close to darkness, and some of it crept into his bones.
It was almost over, though. His debts were nearly paid. Today he felt forty again, young and unburdened. His cares had passed with the storm, and once this last bit of business was complete he could stride into the dawn of his coming retirement.
His butler had left the morning’s pertinent mail on the table by the azaleas. Perusing the shallow stack, Al found a few professional notes and a letter from his son, David, who had left years ago to rebuild the world. Whole continents had been shattered in the God Wars, David proclaimed when he set off on his quest. So many nations and cities are less fortunate than we of Alt Coulumb, and we owe them aid.
Al had not approved. Words were said that could not easily be unsaid after one’s son shipped off to the Old World. Al tried to track him, making long and involved sacrifices to Kos and calling upon favors from priests and even from the Deathless Kings who frequented his chambers. All his efforts failed. Six months ago, however, David had returned on his own to propose a complex business deal, lucrative and good-hearted but of questionable legality. He remained an idealistic fool, and Al a standard-bearer of the old guard, but years of separation had taught them to avoid most of their habitual arguments. They were father and son, and they talked now. That was enough.
Al tapped the envelope, considered opening it, set it down. Wait. Start the day properly. He took a deep draught of tea, bitter and smoky and strangely sweet.
The azalea bush behind him rustled.
When the butler found his body forty-five minutes later, the strong, ruddy tea had spilled from his broken mug to mix with his blood. Al Cabot’s body had contained a great deal of blood indeed, most now spread in a drying, viscous puddle around the shredded remnants of his flesh. The spilled tea barely diluted it at all.
2
Shale recovered his senses soon after sunrise and discovered to his dismay that he was fleeing down a back alley, covered in blood. The sticky red fluid was everywhere—soaked into his clothes, drying in his hair. It dripped from his brow, rolled down his cheek into his mouth. Worst of all, it tasted good.
The blood wasn’t his most immediate problem. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw four black shadows with human shape, rough-featured as cave paintings, chasing him.
Blacksuits. Agents of Justice. The perfect police: you, a citizen, surrender your autonomy for one shift a day in exchange for a salary. Don a suit, and your mind is welded into the intricate network of Justice, seeking everywhere for criminals and enemies of the city. Justice patrols the streets and guards the populace. Justice is blind, but Justice sees all.
Justice was chasing him, implacable and tireless. It was only a matter of time before he faltered.
Goddess above, he was covered in blood. The last thing he remembered was climbing the façade of a tall building past immobile graven images of gargoyles toward a rooftop garden, to meet with Judge Cabot, the great fat man.
Another memory dawned out of rage-tinted mists: Cabot’s face, contorted in pain, screaming. Bleeding. Fire rolled in to consume Shale, consciousness fled him, and he had opened his eyes here.
If the Blacksuits were after him—omniscient Justice wondering no doubt how this apparently normal human could outlast her agents at a full sprint, ducking down side alleys and weaving between obstacles, there leaping a trash can, here climbing a chain-link fence in two massive pulls—if the Blacksuits were after him.… Was it possible he had lost his mind? Surely. Possible. If he had been betrayed.