There was no Craft to read minds without breaking them, no magic to hear another’s thoughts without consent. Consciousness was a strange small structure, fragile as a rabbit’s spine, and it broke if gripped too tightly. But there were more prosaic tricks to reading men and women—and the Hidden Schools that taught Tara to raise the dead and send them shambling to do her bidding, to stop her enemies’ hearts and whisper through their nightmares, to fly and call lightning and steal a likely witness’s face, to summon demons and execute contracts and bill in tenths of an hour, also taught her such prosaic tricks to complement true sorcery.

The crowd teetered between fear and rage. They whispered: the sound of rain, and of thunder far away.

“Bad,” Matthew Adorne said in as soft a voice as he could make his. “Stone Men in the city. You help the priests, don’t you?”

Tara didn’t remember the last time she heard Matthew Adorne ask a question.

“I do,” Tara said.

“They should do something.”

“I’ll ask.”

“Could be one of yours,” he said, knowing enough to say “Craftsman” but not wanting, Tara thought, to admit that a woman he knew, a faithful customer, no less, belonged to that suspect class. “Scheming. Bringing dead things back.”

“I don’t think so.”

“The Blacksuits will get them,” Adorne said. “And Justice, too.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Excuse me, Matt. I have work.”

So much for breakfast.

4

4

One does not need an expensive Hidden Schools degree to know the first step in crisis management: get ahead of the story. If that’s impossible, at least draw even with it. Tara, who had an expensive Hidden Schools degree, hunted Gavriel Jones.

The Crier’s Guild was more hive than office. Stringers, singers, and reporters buzzed like orange bees from desk to desk, alighting coffee mugs in hand to bother others working, or pollinate them with news.

“Late report by nightmare telegraph, lower trading on Shining Empire indices—”

“You hear the Suits busted Johnny Goodnight down by the docks, taking in a shipment?”

“No shit?”

“—Haven’t found a second source for this yet, but Walkers looks set to knock down those PQ slums for her new shopping center—”

“Still missing your bets for the ullamal bracket, Grindel’s about to close the door—”

“—Loan me a cigarette?”

“Do you really want it back?”

They didn’t let people back here, exactly, but Tara wasn’t people. She forced her papers into the receptionist’s face—I’m Ms. Abernathy, Craftswoman to the Church of Kos Everburning, we’re working on a case and want to check our facts, without pause for breath. Then she held the receptionist’s gaze for the ten seconds needed for the word “Craftswoman” to suggest shambling corpses and disemboweled gods. Not that most gods had bowels.

Useful mental image, anyway.