The Ruin of Angels--A Novel of the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone

Author:Max Gladstone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Chapter Thirty-nine

KAI SOUGHT TARA ABERNATHY in nightmares. She’d grown accustomed to the practice since her first chaotic attempts, and knew how to follow the terror down. These days different fears claimed her—she seldom dreamed the cocoon dream, chained to a bed and guarded, cared for, kept from all that might shatter or break. She dreamed, instead, of puppets: she knelt naked onstage before an invisible audience, and worked a marionette kneeling also naked and also, of course, onstage, working a smaller marionette, and so on down, and each marionette looked like her, same haircut, same scars. Only of course the marionette wires were not tied to the puppets’ limbs, but hooked through, piercing skin she thought at first was fake, but the puppets bled when she moved them. She tried to let the puppets go, but their guide wires hooked through her fingers and palm. And she tried to rise and flee, only to feel, in her wrists and arms and legs, the bite of still greater wires tying her to something bigger, higher, and as she turned up to look, she saw the other marionettes turn too, seeking her, and through her seeking something too enormous to comprehend, a Her so much larger than Kai that when she tried to understand it the wires that held her up and made her strong all broke.

And she fell.

There followed a tumbling broken interval of pain, Kai’s self held by an enormous hand, her body broken. Somewhere in that scream she found a door, and, though she could not move, she knocked.

Tara Abernathy stood on the other side, panting, bloodslick from her elbows down, her own blood mostly. Wounds carved her over and over, on arms and legs and flank, always in the same pattern: four deep parallel cuts and one slightly slant, as if she’d been caressed by hands made of knives. Behind her towered a sharp-toothed shape Kai tried not to think about.

“It’s time,” Kai said.

Abernathy swallowed her heartbeat, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she seemed cool and calm. “Good. I wasn’t getting much rest anyway.”

They met at Gavreaux Junction in the waking world just before dawn, Tara in a light gray suit, Kai in dark. The freight elevators ran full capacity, one container every five minutes, and behind thick walls capped with barbed wire machines ground and stevedores called to one another in a coarse tradesman’s dialect of Talbeg. Kai knew the sounds and smells from the industrial port back home, where deepwater container ships deposited their wares and police reviewed the cargo for smuggled gods and joss. This was bigger, though, and at least some gods were welcome.

“Tickets” was the first waking word Tara spoke. She did not mention the puppet Kai she’d seen in her dream, and Kai said nothing about hands that were knives, or a gray-eyed woman made of glass. And yet Kai realized that for the first time, in her own head, she was calling the other woman by her given name.

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