Alabaster

"We've been watching for you child," one of the shades says. It's seated very near her, like the silhouette of something that's learned how to be a woman and a wolf at the same time. Its grey-smudge eyes flash a hungry emerald, and when it stands up, it's much, much taller than Dancy expected. "We've been hearing rumors about what happened down in Florida. There was a crow, wouldn't talk about nothing else. Miss Dancy Flammarion, the vengeful right hand of Jehovah, some pissed-off angel's albino concubine. But what the hell, you know? Rumors aren't usually much more than that, especially when you get them from crows. But here you stand, girl, big as life and twice as shabby," and the monsters laugh again.

"What I'm wondering," the wolf woman says, taking a step closer to Dancy, "is how you ever got yourself out of that insane asylum way down in Tallahassee. Or isn't that part of the rumors true?"

Dancy licks her lips again. "I can't fight you all," she says. "I wasn't sent here to fight you all."

More laughter, laughter loud enough to wake whatever dead might still lie sleeping in the overgrown cemetery next to Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church. And the thing that is neither a wolf nor a woman, the thing that's hardly anything more than a patch of smoke and depravity and wishful thinking, cocks its head and blinks at her.

"Something else drew you here," Dancy tells it. "All of you. Some-thing born of hurt and ill will, death and the cruelty of men, an old evil which lay a thousand years in the mud at the bottom of the river-"

"She's a regular William goddamn Shakespeare," the wolf-woman shade says, interrupting her, and there's more laughter from the black things that have taken refuge in the abandoned church. "We knew you were a force to be reckoned with, child, but no one mentioned you were a poet in the bargain."

"That's just what the angel told me," Dancy says, wishing she didn't sound so scared, wishing she'd known there'd be so many of them. "Something drew you here. And that's the one I've come for."

"I see," the shade replies and sits down in the pew again. "Fair enough, then. You won't have to wait much longer. She'll be along shortly, that one. In the meantime, why don't you have a seat here and-"

"You can't trick me," Dancy tells the shade and points her carving knife at it.The others laugh again, but not quite as loudly as before. Come and get me, Dancy prays silently, because she knows the angel can hear her, wherever it's gone. Please come now and take me away.

"Why don't you kiss me," the thing on the pew purrs. "You'd be sweet, I bet. I wager you'd be just as sweet as spring water and strawberries. Me, I haven't had a kiss in such an awful long time. Has anyone ever kissed you, Dancy Flammarion? I mean, besides that angel of yours."

Dancy shifts the carving knife from one hand to the other and wipes her sweaty palm on her the front of her T-shirt. The angel isn't coming for her. It led her here, and she followed of her own accord, and now it won't have anything else to do with her until she's finished what it's brought her here to do. The shade's eyes flash brilliant green again, and Dancy shakes her head and continues down the aisle towards the desecrated altar and the pulpit and the benches where a choir once sat on Sunday mornings when the sanctuary was filled with dazzling sunlight and song and a preacher's booming voice.

"Have it your way, kid," the wolf-woman shade calls out after her. "I'll just sit tight and watch the show. But if you change your mind, I'll be right here."

VII. Counsel Among the Dead

In King's Hale, the Glaistig has only just started her prayers of passage and release when the quake begins to rock the tower. She gets slowly to her feet, holding tight to one of the sturdy pediments of her husband's granite tomb, the clat clat clat of her unsteady hooves lost in the rumbling, splitting, cracking din rising up from the tortured earth far below the Weal. She stands alone on the wide funerary dais. Her ministers and astronomers and alchemists, her marshals and magistrates and the High Executioner and her Ladies Who Walk Behind, the Lord Chancellor and all the other members of her i

How much longer before they'd run? the Glaistig wonders. How long before ceremony and protocol wouldn't matter anymore?

The ancient walls of the Hale loom gigantic around her, two hundred feet from the glass mosaics set into the floor to the formerets and buttresses of the vaulted roof. The ceiling has been painted with the constellations of the Midsummer's Eve, yellow and white tempera stars dabbed against a sky of deepest indigo. A precise mural of the heavens so that all the generations of kings sleeping here can always find their way back down to the hub on that one night of the year. Their immense black statues line the walls, watching her, and the Glaistig wonders, too, if there will ever be another Midsummer's Eve and where the ghosts of kings go when their world has died.

"Kypre Alundshaw," she calls out, shouting to be heard above the upheaval, and the Glaistig jabs her glittering scepter of silver and ruby and andesite at one of the alchemists. Alundshaw, a short, balding man missing his left ear and his right eye, nods and begins to rise. But then the tower shakes again and the floor rolls like a stormy sea, and the alchemist, along with most of the other supplicants, is thrown roughly against the shattered tiles. The convulsion passes, but a narrow sort of rift or fissure has opened near the rear of the chamber, and now a geyser of steam and soot spews out from it, the breath of the Dragon himself or only the death rattle of Kearvan Weal.

"Yes, your Grace," Kypre Alundshaw wheezes as he manages to get to his feet, his hands and face cut and bleeding from the broken glass tiles. He brushes sparkling, kaleidoscopic slivers from his aubergine robes.

"You must understand," the Glaistig says, "I would not ask you this question if I did not believe that we have come finally to the hour of our uttermost need and that all other avenues have been exhausted."

The alchemist stops picking glass from his robes and nods his head once. "Yes, your Grace. Certainly. I understand."

The Glaistig takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, letting a few more seconds slip past, and she silently curses the gods of chance and circumstance that she has lived to know how the damned-to-be feel in that last instant before the trespass that will insure their spirits are forever consigned to perdition. She opens her eyes, and steam is still pouring from the crack in the floor; the air has begun to stink of sulfur and rotting eggs.

"The Weaver's constructs, these Seraphim, may not be killed," she says. "This much I understand, and also I understand why. But I have been told there may be another way, something which you've learned from the red witches. I ask you, is this true?"

When Kypre Alundshaw doesn't reply, she strikes her scepter against the dais with enough force that sparks fly from the impact of silver against the flagstones. Alundshaw flinches and immediately looks back down at the floor.

"Alchemist, you will tell me now, is this true? Or have I been wrongly advised?"

"No, your Grace. You have not," the alchemist replies, a quaver in his voice. "There may, indeed, be another way, but it would be a terrible deed if-"

"I am not asking you for a lesson in ethics," the Glaistig snarls and turns back towards her husband's tomb. She places one hand flat on its polished lid and listens to the foundations of Kearvan Weal trembling beneath her.