Three Parts Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

face was barely visible in the darkness of the confessor’s compartment. Hollow cheeks, high forehead, bushy eyebrows. That mustache grown a decade and a half ago, which never went out of style because it was never in style. He’s here to help, not judge, Abelard told himself. Take comfort in him, because nothing else remains to comfort you. “It sometimes takes a while for me to properly prepare my mind for union with the Everburning Lord. God is great, and I am young, and weak. Sometimes I come before him with my soul unshriven. Sometimes, try as I might, I cannot give my offering with a pure heart.” He cursed himself inwardly. He sounded like a pervert, or an apostate. He hurried on. “Sometimes the Consuming Fire of His Grace is simply … elsewhere. Gods are always present, but They don’t always pay attention. Like in Lehman’s parable about the monk guarding the pantry. He can only watch one set of cabinets at a time, and the rats get in.”
    “Thank you,” Cardinal Gustave said when Abelard stopped for breath. “That will be quite sufficient.”
    Talking had distracted him for a wonderful moment. His chest began to twitch. He felt so cold.
    “Tell me, my son, what methods did you undertake to attract the attention of the Most Fierce?”
    This part, at least, did not make him feel ashamed. “I intoned the Prayers for the Coming Flame, polished the conduits on the Throne, and recited the first ten stanzas of the Litany of the Burned Dead.”
    Gustave nodded and made more notes. While the Cardinal’s attention was on the paper, Abelard cupped mouth and cigarette with one hand, and sucked in tobacco-stained air. The cigarette flame flared in the confessional darkness, and his quivering muscles stilled. When he looked up, he saw Gustave waiting. The other man’s expression was illegible through the grille. He might have been an exquisitely crafted doll with human features.
    This is what we have become, Abelard thought. Seemings without souls, cut off from one another by our fear.
    “I’m sorry, Father, I’m so sorry, but the experience, the moment, Lord Kos…” He gestured vaguely at the cigarette.
    Gustave bowed his head. “I understand, my son.”
    “Are we in trouble, Father?”
    “I do not believe so.”
    “You said there were outsiders coming.”
    “These problems are more common beyond our walls than within our blessed City. There are firms that resolve such matters with speed, efficiency, and discretion.”
    “They’ll help us?”
    “They’re the best we could find.” Gustave’s eyes were gray, fierce, and confident. Iron towers of faith could have been built on the strength of his gaze. “Professionals. We’re safe in their hands.”
    The tips of Abelard’s fingers and toes began, once more, to twitch.
    *
    Tara floated in a cold womb, wrapped in sunlight. Fragmentary dreams grasped her and loosed her again into unconsciousness. She was six years old, running in the fallow fields of her father’s farm beneath the black angry belly of a thunderstorm. Lightning sparked in the clouds, flashed and crackled, bridging earth and heaven. She raised her hands, frail fingers cupped, and caught it.
    Something long, narrow, and heavy collided with her ribs, and she remembered that she needed to breathe. She thrashed in the waves with limbs of twigs and paper, and coughed up a lungful of saltwater. She heard a voice.
    “Catch the line, woman!”
    Line was what sailors called rope, her bedraggled brain recalled. That was what had struck her in the side, like a lead weight: a wet length of corded hemp, a line to salvation. Her hands sought blindly, grasping it before she sank again. The rope grew taut and pulled her halfway out of the water with a heave that almost tore her arms free of their joints. Her body slammed into a slick, smooth surface.
    Her warm pink stupor split like an egg from within and opened upon a brilliant day. The right-hand side of the world was sky and ocean, and the left a