There. A line of pulsing red was worked into the timbers of the hold. Tara wiped frost from the bulkhead. There, carved with exact knifework, lay nesting geometries of Craft. She cut a piece of canvas from an indenture’s trousers and continued around the hold, wiping away the frost. By the time she completed the circle, she shuddered with lost heat and had to return to the hold and rub her hands until feeling needled back into her fingertips.

A Blacksuit brought Cat a form to sign, and she did. “I don’t understand how you can let this happen,” Cat said. “It’s disgusting.”

“I agree. This is part of the reason the Craft’s uncomfortable with addiction and games, even stories. Prices are a negotiation. If you control desire—if you make people want something—you can do strange stuff to them. That’s before we get into newfangled treachery, like balloon payments and variable interest rates. Most forced indentures wouldn’t hold up in court, but few victims have access to Craftsmen.”

“So why haven’t they woken up?”

“Because that room technically isn’t part of Alt Coulumb. It’s Kavekanese territory; the whole place is a chapel to one of their idols.”

Cat frowned. “To a fake god? Can they do that?”

“Sure. Kos is bound to recognize the Kavekanese pantheon, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do business with Concerns based in Kavekana, which is most of them. So he can’t overrule the circle.”

“And why can’t we drag them out?”

“Without the permission of the person who holds the indenture, dragging them out means you’re trying to void their contract. Which Kos is bound to enforce in this case, because of the good faith clauses in his treaty. When you pull them out, Kos fights himself. Like one of those finger traps.”

“Can you fix it?”

She shook her head. “This is why I studied necromancy. Dead things behave predictably. Transactional work would give a dragon a headache. Their Craftswoman has tied this declaration of territory to a powerful, open-sourced binding ward. If that ward had a weakness in it, a million Craftswomen would have found it by now. We can fight her on the particulars of the case, by asserting primacy—basically, refusing to recognize the Kavekanese claim to their territory. In Crafty terms, it’s like sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting really loud to keep the other person from persuading you; it’s not good form, but it works temporarily. For that I’d need Kos’s backing, though, which he can’t give, because of the treaty. It’s a neat trap.”

“But Kos isn’t the only God we have available.” The top button of Cat’s shirt was open; she reached beneath and fished out an ivory pendant Tara knew too well.