Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone Page A

slipped from her mouth, but once they were out she couldn’t find fault with them. Abelard fixed her with a confused expression.
    “Beautiful?”
    “There’s so much. You really kept everything.” Spreading her arms wide, she walked down the alley, running her fingers over dusty boxes and the polished wood rollers of professional-grade scrolls. Secrets pulsed within, eager to escape.
    “Impressive, sure. I don’t know about beautiful.” Abelard followed her. “You want to see beautiful, I’ll take you down to the furnaces sometime. Not an ounce of steel wasted. Kos’s glory runs through every pipe, shines from each bearing and gauge. They are the heart of the city, and the center of the Church.”
    “Sounds like fun,” she said, unable to think of anything nice to say about a furnace however efficient it might be. “But furnaces aren’t relevant to this case. Everything we need to know about Kos is here.”
    “These are just glorified receipts. Lists of goods bought and sold.” From his mouth those words sounded small and petty. “Shouldn’t you try to understand who He was before you look at His accounts?”
    Tara let the archive’s silence swallow his words, and wished that the Hidden Schools had taught her how to work with clients. Her textbooks mentioned the subject in a sidebar, if at all, before they moved on to important technical concerns like the Rule Against Perpetuities or the seven orthodox uses of the spleen. “These papers,” she said at last, “will show us how Kos died, and what we need to do to bring him back. That’s my main concern. Faith and glory are more your line of work.”
    Abelard did not reply, and Tara walked on, knowing she hadn’t said the right thing, and mystified as to what the right thing would have been. She almost sagged with relief when Abelard spoke again, however tentatively. “Your boss, Lady Kevarian, said that the, ah, problem, happened because of an imbalance.”
    Had Tara been a god-worshiper, she would have given thanks for a chance to return their conversation to technical matters. “She’s making an educated guess based on what your Cardinal told her, but it’s too general to be much use.”
    “What do you think happened?” Abelard gazed up at the vaulted ceiling.
    “Me?” She shrugged. “I don’t know more than Ms. Kevarian does. Some kind of imbalance almost has to happen for a god as big as Kos to die. If he expends much more energy than he reaps from his believers’ faith and supplication, poof. We’re here to learn specifics: what drew Kos’s power away, and why.”
    “That’s how you kill gods?” Abelard’s voice had gone hollow, but she didn’t notice.
    “Sort of. That’s how gods kill themselves. If you want to kill one, you need to make it expend itself trying to destroy you, or trick it somehow.…” She trailed off, hearing his silence. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think. I know this is a sensitive subject.”
    “It’s fine.” Tara knew from his tone of voice that “it” was not fine, but Abelard didn’t press the issue. They walked on between walls of dead words. “You seem very … confident around all this stuff for someone so young.”
    She pondered that as she scanned the labeled stacks of scrolls. Old World contracts, A through Adelmo. Good. The in-house Craftsmen followed standard filing practices. “I studied hard at school. If I ever take you up on your invitation to the furnaces, I’ll probably feel the same way when you talk about them.”
    “I don’t know. There’s a lot less death and war in furnaces.”
    “Ironically, right?” No response. “I mean, because of all the fire, and the flame, and the pressure.” She stopped trying. They were close.
    “How many times,” he asked, “have you raised a god from the dead?”
    “Ms. Kevarian has been a partner with Kelethras, Albrecht, and Ao for thirty years. She’s handled a dozen cases this large, and at least a hundred smaller ones.”
    “Not her.