“I know that feeling.”
“What form of clients would a lady like yourself have?” he said with a leer.
She almost laughed, almost lost her grip on the rope, almost tumbled back into the water. She would not allow such a lapse before this man. “No clients, but my new boss is a bit of a witch.”
He didn’t respond. Pull, step. Two feet. One.
Raz reached down to take her outstretched hand. Her eyes adjusted. His skin was brown as old, worked mahogany, and he gripped her forearm with fingers just as smooth. He pulled her up one-handed with no more trouble than he might have taken to raise a bottle of beer. The railing brushed her shins. When he set her down on the gently pitching deck, she saw his body. Muscular, yes, but too thin to hold such preternatural strength.
He smiled, and she saw the tips of fangs peek beneath his upper lip. His eyes were the color of a dried scab, and deep as an ocean trench.
She exhaled. “Thank you for the hand, sailor.”
Raz laughed. “Well done! Not many meet my gaze and stand on the first try. Especially after almost drowning.” He clasped her shoulder and squeezed. “Good to see you’re not all tongue.”
She measured her breath. Her arms shook. “Thank you. You’re a vampire.”
“While you’re on my vessel,” he said, “you might as well call me Captain. For the crew’s sake.”
Still wobbling on her feet, Tara looked about the broad deck. It was busy with sailors: the three who had held the rope steady for her to climb, and twelve more tying off lines and raising sheets and swabbing decks, preparing the Kell’s Bounty for arrival in port.
She would have seen more, but her attention was occupied by a single figure, pale, slender, female, holding a steaming mug of coffee. The fall had not wrinkled Ms. Kevarian’s suit. Behind her, stacked on the deck neatly as if carried aboard by a conscientious porter, rested Tara’s books and their luggage.
“Thank you for rescuing Ms. Abernathy, Captain,” Ms. Kevarian said with a quick nod to Raz.
“Always a pleasure to be of service, Lady K. If you don’t mind me saying, this one has a nice mouth on her.” He winked at Tara, who ignored him. “I have to run below before I get any more of a tan. Captain Davis’ll be up in a flash if you need anything.”
“Won’t you stay and catch some sun?” Ms. Kevarian asked pleasantly.
“Oh, no,” Raz replied, already halfway down the ladder into his cabin. “You know me, crazy lady. I don’t brown. I burn.”
“Perhaps tonight, then.”
“I’m for the Pleasure Quarters soon as the sun sets. It’s been awhile since my last visit to Alt Coulumb, and I fancy a drink. Come find me if you’re interested in sharing one.”
When he had slammed and latched the trapdoor behind him, a cool silence settled between Tara and Ms. Kevarian. The older woman sipped her coffee. The younger stood there, dripping.
“A witch?” Ms. Kevarian said, bemused. “I’d think you’d give me more credit than that, Ms. Abernathy. Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has the time for such pleasantries anymore? Why, I haven’t been on a date since the late eighties.”
“Do I pass the test?” Tara tried to keep her voice level, but adrenaline stuck its cat claws into her heart, and her voice tightened at the wrong moment.
“I beg your pardon,” Ms. Kevarian said.
“You knew we were going to fall, Boss. You had this boat set up to catch us. The whole thing was a test.”
“Hardly.”
“So it’s a coincidence that we crash-land onto a boat captained by your vampire friend?”
A small audience of sailors had gathered. They looked to Ms. Kevarian for her reply, but soon shuddered and looked away. Something about her made the eyes cringe. Maybe it was the way her dark gray suit soaked in the light, maybe it was the way steam from her coffee cup swirled about her like a demon’s wreath of flames. Maybe it was the neon yellow smiley face on the cup’s side.
“Flight near Alt Coulumb is interdicted by divine wards,” Ms. Kevarian said, “but we are more than a thousand feet beyond their edge. I intended for us to land on this ship, and for Raz to bear us into port. I was every bit as surprised as you by our fall.”
Confusion blunted Tara’s anger. “People do business in Alt Coulumb all the time. There must be a shuttle to get them through the wards. Why bother with Captain Pelham?”
“Water taxis receive most incoming flights. We didn’t take one because professionals use them. Mages, vampires, businessmen and businesswomen of all sorts. Someone would recognize me, and guess what I’ve come to do.”
“Why be so secretive about Craftwork? Unless our client is so big that…” She recalled the great dim embers of Alt Coulumb’s wards, and remembered, too, the tingle against her soul as she fell, before she lost consciousness: the love like fire, or the fire like love. That had been the touch of Kos’s power, beautiful but faint—fainter even than the captive Gods she’d studied at school, and those were more ghosts than divine spirits, eviscerated and lonely.
The immensity of what she was about to say choked her off.
Ms. Kevarian drew close. Tara smelled her: coffee, lavender, magic, and something else, strange and unnamable. She whispered into Tara’s ear.
“Kos the Everburning is dead. We’re here to bring him back to life.”
3
The towers of Alt Coulumb dwarfed the gargantuan supply ships moored at the docks below, even as the ships themselves dwarfed the ferries that plied the Edgemont River back home.
Tara stared at those buildings, stunned. They were monuments to power. Every arch, every spire, every massy pillar proclaimed the city’s might. Even the Hidden Schools in their airy and metallic splendor hadn’t seemed so aware of their own grandiosity, or so proud of it.
It had taken armies to tear rock and metal from the earth to build Alt Coulumb, hosts of priests to beg fire from their god and twist that ore into skeleton frames. Legions broke their backs and arms and fingers piling stone on stone, melted skin and burned hair fusing steel with steel. These buildings remembered the taste of blood sacrifice, and hungered for more.
“Ah,” Ms. Kevarian said, joining Tara at the guardrail. “I missed this place. It has such … attitude.”
“You’ve worked here before, Boss?”
“Soon after the God Wars. It was less welcoming then. The Church hired us to fix a problem beyond the range of the priests’ Applied Theology.” She said that term with controlled scorn. “The whole affair was quite secret at the time, as I’m sure you can imagine. Alt Coulumb never entered the war, and Kos remained neutral, but there would have been public outcry had our involvement become known. It was hard to get office attendants, because everyone we interviewed was afraid we’d steal their souls.” One corner of her mouth crept up.
“What was the job? If it’s not a secret.”
“Oh, no. That’s been public for a while.” People swarmed the docks, dockhands loading and unloading, locals greeting passengers and haggling for the small luxuries that sailors smuggled to pad their meager wages: charms of pear wood, dyed silks, intricately woven rugs, pirate editions of the latest Iskari serial novels. Ms. Kevarian pointed to the crowd’s edge, where stood a line of figures dressed in black. No. Not dressed. Enclosed in black. Annihilated by it. Featured like unfinished statues: suggestions of eyes, a swell of nose, a hint of mouth. Hands clasped behind their backs. Mostly men, but a few women, too, each one pierced through head and heart and groin with a strand of lightning Tara doubted anyone here but Ms. Kevarian and herself could see.
“What are those?”
“Justice. They used to be the City Guard, anointed of Seril Green-Eyed, Seril Undying, the goddess upon whom Kos’s priesthood relied to keep order in the city.”