“Well,” Ms. Kevarian said, “you will soon have firsthand experience with a deity who deserves his title.”
“But why,” Tara asked, “does it look so cold?”
“What do you mean?”
“The wards are all there, sure. But where’s the god inside them? He should shine through the whole system, but the wards are dark as ash. Is that normal?”
Ms. Kevarian opened her mouth to reply.
Before she could speak, however, the solid air upon which they sat lurched, quivered, and became distressingly permeable. Sunlight broke through the morning mist behind them and trapped the moment in liquid amber, sky and sea and distant cloud-covered city, blue waves and ships below.
They fell.
*
Flying isn’t easy, and falling is harder than most people think. Fortunately, Tara had practice at both. The last time she fell, on the occasion of her so-called graduation from the Hidden Schools, she had time to prepare; three days of excruciating confinement preceded her quite literal downfall. On the other hand, her prison cell had weakened her, as did her struggle against her former professors. Perhaps those effects cancelled the advantages of foreknowledge.
Blind, unreasoning terror is the first obstacle to be overcome if one wishes to survive a fall from a great height, but it is by no means the most dangerous. Fear can cloud the mind, but if one is on good terms with fear, as Tara was, it can also aid concentration.
Wind whipped past her face and the ocean accelerated toward her. Tara saw a glint of starshine out of the corner of her eye—Ms. Kevarian, no doubt, saving herself. Was this another test? A potentially fatal one, if so, but Ms. Kevarian did not seem a tender or forgiving person.
Suspicion later, though. Falling now.
The second, and far more insidious, obstacle to surviving such a fall is the pleasant inevitability of death. The brain shuts down, and the soul watches from a distance as the body tumbles at ever-increasing speed toward doom. This is because, though instinct is good at many things, it’s stupid about death. The body knows that any monkey falling thousands of feet to a distant sea would be dead in short order, so it starts to relax. There’s an enlightenment to be attained in these plummeting moments that men and women spend years in monasteries trying to achieve.
But Tara wasn’t a monkey. She wasn’t even precisely a human being anymore, and whatever her body’s opinion on the matter, she would not give up.
Eight hundred feet. Falling faster.
Ms. Kevarian no doubt knew an elegant solution to this problem, something grand and complicated, involving perilous pacts with demonic entities. Tara had no such resources at her disposal. All but the strongest stars had fled the rising sun, and what little of their light remained was weak. She could only rely upon her own mind. She hoped that would be enough.
Ignoring the chemical acceptance inundating her brain, Tara extended her awareness beyond the limits of her skin and made her soul flat and broad as a geometric plane, infinite in reach. She became aware of Ms. Kevarian’s falling body, of a flock of gulls a mile to the south, of flitting wisps of cloud and vapor.
When her senses were broad as the surface of a great lake, she closed them off, made them impenetrable and solid as old wood.
Some people thought matter and spirit were different substances engaged in a delicate dance. The first principle of Craft, which had taken thousands of scholars an embarrassing length of time to comprehend, was that matter and spirit were in truth different aspects of the same substance, and there were tricks for making one act like the other. If a broad piece of cloth, stretched taut by the wind, could slow her fall, so, too, could spirit.
Spirit, of course, is more permeable than matter under normal conditions. If one were foolish enough to rework one’s soul completely into matter, one would become a limp sack of flesh, a drooling idiot who might barely qualify as alive for the moment it took her to forget to breathe. There was a fine line to tread: concentrate, but don’t destroy, your consciousness. Spread your soul wider than any parachute, and slowly, slowly, slowly (but maybe a little faster than that, because now you’re only five hundred feet up) congeal your thoughts and feelings until they can affect physical matter, and a few square miles of empty air start to resist the passage of your body and soul.
Few people have felt their soul billow out behind them like a parachute. During Tara’s previous fall, she was numb from battle and imprisonment, and hadn’t appreciated how much it hurt.
She screamed. Not a normal scream of pain, but a deep and blind cry as reason deserted her. Of all the screams cataloged in the encyclopedic audio library of the Hidden Schools, Tara’s bore the closest resemblance to the scream of a man whose abdomen was being devoured by a jagged-clawed insect that wore a child’s face.
After the scream came oblivion. She was simultaneously a tiny feather of a body drifting down to a rolling ocean, and a diffuse cloud of soul, one with the sky, one with the wind. A thousand prickling tender touches lit upon her, as if she was caught in a rainstorm and the raindrops were love.
That’s new, she thought, before she hit the water.
*
Abelard sat in the confessional, smoking. He hadn’t been able to stop for two days. If he so much as paused between inhalations, the shakes began. He could barely catch a half hour’s sleep at a time before he woke, trembling and desperate for a drag from the cigarette that lay, ember somehow still glowing, by his bedside.
He should have been tired. Maybe he was, but the shakes were worse than exhaustion. They manifested first in his fingertips and toes, then crept up the limbs, taking root in his forearms and calves before clutching at his groin and chest. He didn’t know what might happen if he let them grip his heart. He didn’t want to find out.
“It’s normal,” the Cardinal’s doctor had told him when he reported his tremors the previous evening. “More intense than I expected, but normal. As an initiate of the Discipline of the Eternal Flame, you smoke between three and five packs of cigarettes a day. God’s grace has protected you from the ill effects of tobacco addiction, but under the current circumstances, His beneficence has been withdrawn.”
The doctor’s advice did not make Abelard feel better. Deep nausea clenched his stomach as he listened, and had not left him since. Even here, in God’s own confessional, he felt empty, deserted. The doctor warned him to quit, or cut back, but Abelard would not listen. He was dedicated to his Lord, no matter what.
The confessional was cramped and spare, walled to his right by a fine grille. His side was well lit, and the confessor’s side dark. He knew his confessor’s identity, though. Not strictly permitted, but this was an unprecedented situation.
“Tell me, my son,” said Senior Technical Cardinal Gustave, “did you notice anything strange before the alarms sounded?” His deep voice resounded in the confines of their confessional. A Church leader for decades, head of the Council of Cardinals, Gustave was accustomed to addressing great halls and inveighing against injustice. Years of leadership and Church politics had rendered him less deft at supporting a single troubled soul. He was trying, but he was tired.
Abelard’s biceps shook, and his thighs. Hold, dammit, he told himself. The Cardinal is watching. The confessing man sits bereft of God’s grace, seeking restitution, and does not deserve the taste of flame. You lasted before until the spasms reached your shoulders and the fork of your legs. You can do it again. “There was nothing out of the ordinary, Father.” His lips were still dry. He licked them once more. The Cardinal remains steadfast. Why can’t you? “Nothing out of the ordinary, on the technical side. All readouts nominal. Steam pressure low, but within tolerance.”