Free Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone Page A

as funny as the rest of us.” He looked as if he was about to say more, but pain contorted his features, and he fell silent.
    The Sanctum’s foyer loomed over them in the shadows. Somehow the single room, with its vaulted ceilings and tall windows, seemed vaster from within than the whole tower appeared from without. Flames of stained glass rose on all sides, and a hundred yards away the golden fires of the nave flickered in the half-light. A pair of initiates in bright red robes swept the otherwise empty hall.
    “Nobody comes here during the workday.” Abelard indicated the whole room by swinging one forefinger in a quick circle through the air. The hem of his robe flared out around his bony ankles. “Bread and circuses, strictly.”
    “Expensive bread.”
    “You have no idea.”
    A sharp left brought them up against a metal lattice worked to resemble a thick growth of ivy. Abelard placed his hand upon the lattice, and the vines parted with a slow clank of gears. He ducked his head low to pass through. Tara just walked.
    More abrupt turns, more shadowy doors, and a rap on a carefully chosen brick in what appeared to be a solid wall, which swung open on a hidden hinge to reveal a long winding stair. As they climbed, occasional shafts of light broke the darkness, concealed peepholes peering into meeting rooms and conference chambers: here a break room where tired priests stood waiting for a tea kettle to boil, there a chamber at least the size of the Sanctum’s front worship hall and crowded with pipes, cams, pistons, and gears upon gears, here a tiny room half-glimpsed, where Craft circles glowing blue surrounded a modest wooden altar. She saw these things in eye blinks, shadows on a cave wall as they climbed.
    “You said you were a novice Technician. Which means you, what, clean the steam pipes?”
    His barking laugh echoed through the stairwell. “We have cleaners for that. Repairmen and machinists. A Technician oversees the Divine Throne, the heart of the city. We design, improve, optimize the devices that keep this place running. Not me, yet, though. I was only promoted to Technician a few months back.”
    “You’re low on the totem pole?”
    “As low as a Technician gets. The king of the backed-up burners, that’s me, archdeacon of scut work. I’m learning, though. Or, I was learning.” He paused, searching the featureless wall for something, and in that pause Tara caught up with him.
    “Did they bring you in on this for training? So you’ll know what to do if there’s ever a problem like this in the future, when you’re in charge?”
    Abelard faced her. His eyes were dead as a charred forest. “I was the one watching the Throne when God died.”
    He pressed a hidden catch, and the wall opened smoothly on hidden gears.
    After her steady climb through darkness, the well-lit office was blinding. Pale wood panels everywhere, a couple leather chairs, and a large desk of polished oak. A glass bookcase stood against one wall, though few of its shelves contained actual books or codices, the lion’s share of space reserved instead for sacred icons, trophies, ceremonial plaques. An aerial picture of Alt Coulumb hung beside it, for comparison, Tara supposed, with the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
    The city stretched there, a teeming metropolis beneath slate-gray skies, beating heart of commerce, bridge between the god-benighted Old World and the Deathless Kingdoms of the West. Millions breathed, worked, prayed, copulated in those palaces, parks, and tenements, sure in the knowledge that Kos Everburning watched over them. If their faith was strong, they could feel the constant presence of his love, sustaining and aiding them in a thousand ways, breaking fevers and checking accidents and powering their city.
    Millions of people, unaware that Kos’s ever-beating heart had been still for days.
    Ms. Kevarian stood by the window, engaged in low, earnest conversation with a senior priest Tara assumed to be