Last First Snow (37 page)

“You think he took out a hit on himself?”

“I think,” she said, taking a slow breath to compose her thoughts. “I think it's possible he had himself shot. There's no evidence. The assassin in Chakal Square may never be found. But Batac will profit immensely from what you do tomorrow.”

“You have no evidence.”

“Can you think of another reason he'd make that deal?”

“A weak case.”

“Are you willing to risk being manipulated into a mass murder? A crime from which someone else reaps the profits?”

“I thought reaping prophets was the whole point of religious war.”

“I'm not joking.”

The King in Red rested his hips against the desk. He crossed his arms, tapped forefingers against his bare tibia. “What do you want from me, Elayne?”

“Don't let one man profit on the wreckage of a war he caused.”

“Look. I understand. You're a genius. I've never known a Craftswoman like you.”

“Don't you dare patronize me. You have been playing at war while people die.” Visions of the boy bleeding in the hallway of the Monicola Hotel. She forced them from her mind. Growing too emotional. Bad tactic. Skeletons don't like emotion. Makes them nervous.

“You want a clever solution,” he said. “You want that moment when whole world ties together in a knot, and you chop the knot in half, because that's the way it works in court, with Craft and pure theory. We don't have that luxury here. History has happened. I need to resume control of Dresediel Lex. I will do that with fire, to show that rebellion and sacrifice will not be tolerated. You can try to stop me.” He sounded tired. “If that's how you want to play the game. You might be smart enough. You're cleverer with the Craft than I am. But you don't have the strength. So I'd advise against it.”

Which was the other thing about skeletons: he did not know how much his saying that made her want to try. For him, it was a statement of fact, free of adrenaline and glandular rage. Beneath the masks of performed emotion he was just a man still here twenty years after his body died. She stared into the abyss of his eyes, and he stared back.

“You've made your choice,” she said. “And you'll live with it.”

“To live with something, you have to be alive.”

“I would stop you if I could. You'd thank me for it in the end. But I don't think I can. All I can do is ask you. What would you have done, if you wanted to destroy the Skittersill without getting blood on your hands?”

He didn't answer.

“Do you think it's right that anyone profit off what happens in Chakal Square tomorrow? Do you think it's right that bystanders will die while Tan Batac grows richer?”

The sky above Sansilva was the only part of the city not covered by Craftwork clouds. Stars glittered like glass slivers spilled on velvet. Purcell's was the sole breath in the room.

“I won't call off the attack,” Kopil said.

“Then help me save the people outside the square. Help me save the Skittersill.”

She waited. She did not hold her breath.

He nodded.

“Thank you.”

“Even if Tan Batac is innocent, he will be enraged when he learns what you've done.”

“I'll survive.”

“And in exchange for my aid, I want your word: you will not protect the rebels in Chakal Square. Save their surrounding hovels, and the wretches crouched within them. The people in the Square are mine. Better, in fact, if you stay away from the Square altogether.”

She could not meet his gaze, but she did anyway. “I will not protect Chakal Square. I will not protect those inside its borders. Nor will I set foot on its stone.” The promise convulsed between them, and settled, harder than steel.

“Very well.”

“What,” said Purcell, “just happened?”

“We have an agreement,” Elayne said. “You're about to give me the contract. I will sign it for Tan Batac.”

“You can't do that.”

“Allow me to demonstrate.”

“No. I mean.” He'd retreated from them both already, and he took a few more steps back, hugging his briefcase. He glanced for a door or some other avenue of escape, but found none. “Tan Batac can't sign, and no one else can sign for him.”

“I represent Batac and the King in Red in the Skittersill matter. Your insurance contracts are a piece of that matter. I can sign in Batac's place.”

“The contract won't bind.”

“We'll make it work,” she said. “Trust me.”

“Batac's Concern will refuse to pay. The courts will not honor the contract.”

“I will provide the initial funds,” Kopil said. “Batac will settle the rest when he awakes.”

“But he hasn't agreed—”

“He will.”

Purcell's head jerked left and right. “I'm sorry. I know you think you know the man. But there's a lot of soul at stake. If Batac protests the deal when he wakes up, who's liable for damage to these properties? Or for the expense of protecting them? You can't just—”

“You mistake me,” said the King in Red. “I do not say a man will sign a contract because I believe he will sign that contract. I say he will sign, because he will sign. Do you understand?”

Purcell took another step back. His skull made a loud hollow noise as it struck the crystal dome. He looked up at the Craftsman and Craftswoman approaching him, and held out the briefcase.

“Good man,” Elayne said. She opened the briefcase without touching it, and snapped her fingers. Contract pages fanned out to hover in a circle around them. She scanned them, found the page she sought, fished a pen from her pocket, and marked Tan Batac's name on solid line there, with an added glyph tying the name into the contract they'd signed months back to appoint her mediator. Flimsy argument. Any competent court would overturn Elayne's right to sign. But once in a while there was an advantage to being war buddies with the Powers that Were. Invisible gears shifted and meshed as the Craft took hold. “So mote it be.”

“So mote it be,” the King in Red echoed. The contract stacked once more and floated back into the briefcase, which clicked shut. “He does have a point, though. That signature is too weak to hold by itself.”

“I'll enforce it.”

“I will not hold back on the assault for your sake,” he said.

“I know.”

“Fair enough.” He turned from her to Purcell. “As for you, Purcell. You will accept my hospitality tonight.”

Purcell was sweating. “I'd really prefer to return to the hospital. Or to my family.”

“Mr. Purcell. You are privy to a number of plans that cannot be announced until they become accomplished fact. This pyramid is large, and we have many apartments set aside for our guests. Some are more comfortable, and some less. I hope you will agree to stay in one of the more comfortable rooms.”

“And if I … refuse?” That word only made it past his lips over the extreme protest of his survival instinct. An interesting world we've made, Elayne thought, where bureaucrats risk death for technicalities.

“Well,” the skeleton said, turning his head as if he'd never considered the possibility. “I suppose we'd have to house you in a less comfortable room.”

There was not much air in Purcell to begin with, but what there was went out. “I'll go.”

“Good.” Behind Purcell, the floor screeched open to reveal a staircase winding down. Two Wardens climbed from the shadows. “These men will take you to an apartment. Ask if you need anything. It may be granted. And don't worry. All this will be over tomorrow afternoon.”

Purcell followed the Wardens down. Elayne felt a pang of pity as the floor swallowed them. “What now?”

“We attack after dawn, as planned. Who knows how long the battle will last?”

“Not long.”

“Probably not.” Kopil sagged. “I wonder why I am helping you.”

“A shred of goodness left in your heart?”

“Not even a shred of heart,” he said. “Mostly I'm helping because you asked.”

“I should go,” she said. “You know how weak that signature is. Aberforth and Duncan will fight tooth and nail for every thaum I pull from them.”

“Yes. And I plan to use gripfire.”

Stars watched. Worn obsidian carvings danced their frozen dance. Books sat on shelves, dead words on dead wood from dead forests.

“On civilians,” she said.

“They've sacrificed to blood gods. That makes them enemy combatants.”

“You mean you think they deserve it.”

“Well,” he said. “More or less.”

“More or less,” she echoed, and walked away from him.

“Where are you going?”

“To the front.” The wall flowed apart, ushering her from the pyramid's chill into the demon wind. She walked without looking back, toward the pyramid's edge and off, and flew south alone toward Chakal Square.

 

56

Seven things Elayne saw as she flew toward Chakal Square and the next day's burning:

1. Lights flooded a Downtown park. Brass instruments glinted gold from the bandstand, and people danced. Skirts twirled and unfurled around girls' legs. Dancers in slacks orbited as dots around swelling and collapsing suns. Too high up to hear the music, she placed it anyway as swing from the dancers' rhythm.

2. Huge golem-towed trucks snarled in traffic on an elevated highway, bearing goods from Longsands warehouses to train stations and the airport. Spider-golems skittered forward one massive claw limb at a time, and human drovers walked among them, gnats trying to correct the movement of greater forces. The cause of the traffic, farther up the highway: a truck on its side, four golems straining to right it while men ran between them, waving hand torches.

3. A billboard on an old sandstone pyramid, lit by bright blue ghostlights, bore a picture of a geyser and the word
ACTUALIZE
in block letters. If the billboard offered more context or instructions, they were too small to read from the air. She did not remember the old use of the pyramid upon which the billboard stood. Southern temples often belonged to moon gods. Or perhaps it had been a school, or a prison.

4. A half mile from the Skittersill the blackout began, and the sky opened. No lights shone below save the occasional red bloom of a fire. The stars here were sharper and clearer even than in Sansilva, where, despite the Craftsmen's best efforts, some light seeped up to dilute the stars above the city center. The Quechal gods had reclaimed their city. Black ribbon streets divided black blocks of black buildings below a black sky. Interesting choice, if it had been a choice, for the gods to clear the clouds away: Quechal religion did not trust stars. The night sky, for them, was an iron web enormous spiders wove to steal the sun's light. This new blackness was defiance of a kind, and a reminder to their people: you have enemies, and they work against you.

5. Wardens swarmed in camps lit by the brilliant ghostlights road workers used after dark, which mimicked noon sun but lacked its heat. From this height, their chaos resolved to order: each camp divided naturally into sectors, bunks here and armory there, temporary cells, guard rotations, clinic. Couatl circled. One passed near enough to ruffle Elayne's suit with the wind of its wings. With streetlights lit, Couatl shimmered from below thanks to their jeweled plumage. Without that light, nothing set them off from the sky where the demons lived.

6. Elayne could not read Chakal Square from overhead as she had the Warden camp. It looked like a forest made of people—individual humans visible only around bonfire edges, sleeping or dancing or drinking, making music or love. Beyond the firelight circles they were droplets in an ocean. Tendrils spread down alleys into labyrinthine Skittersill streets. Here and there, half-lit, she saw some structure: the beds of a field hospital, the command tents broken by the Wardens' assault, the makeshift temple. Grass mats, and the altar makeshift no longer—anointed in the old way, with blood.

7. Gods moved through the Skittersill. With closed eyes she saw them. Back in the wars she'd shipped out to the Shining Empire from a port in Xivai where whales gathered by the thousands to mate. Sometimes they exploded from the waves in majestic fountain breaches, but even hidden, they shaped the surface. The sea boiled with whales.

As Chakal Square boiled with gods, tonight. Elayne did not recognize most of them, nor could she see them all at once. Like whales, they presented hints to form: a gnarled face with a fanged mouth, an arm elegant as an Imperial dancer's, a hunched back and a single blinking eye.

They had slept long, and deep, and they had fallen far. So, woken by Temoc's sacrifice, they rooted in their faithful's minds and took strength from the dreams engendered there. Nightmares would rule Chakal Square this evening. No quiet rest before the day, and the fire.

*   *   *

She landed hard on the woven grass mats of Temoc's chapel. The force of impact knelt her, and raised a cloud of dust. Guards and faithful cried out in terror. A bowstring sang and an arrow slipped through the dust cloud to stop inches from her suit. Shaft and feather crumbled. She plucked the arrowhead from the air and held it between thumb and forefinger as the dust settled.

The kneeling faithful recoiled. Red-arms in scrap armor forced through the crowd, brandishing makeshift weapons. Others raised bows with arrows nocked. Torn tents and broken tentpoles rose into the sky. Flames licked the night.

Temoc stood by the altar. His hands seemed clean.

She saw Chel too, and the man with the broken nose, Tay, both running half-clothed from a nearby tent. Hair in disarray. Elayne forced the smile from her face: at least someone was enjoying the night while it lasted.

Temoc walked toward her. The crowd gave way to let him pass. “Elayne.”

“Temoc,” she said. “We have to stop meeting like this.”

“If you have come to fight, know that my gods live. I am your equal now.”