“You think so. I don’t have the luxury of trust.” She turned to Tara. “Unless you’d care to tell me why a Craftswoman working for the Church of Kos would take such an interest in crushing reports of the gargoyles’ return?”

“If the gargoyles are back,” she said, choosing her words carefully, “they might raise new issues for the church. That makes them my responsibility.”

Jones looked down at the floor. “The dreams started about a year ago, after Kos died and rose again. There were gargoyles in the city when Kos died, too. Maybe they never left. It sounds like more than the gargoyles came back.”

Tara built walls of indifference around her panic. “That’s an … audacious theory.”

“And you began to work for the church at about the same time. You sorted out Kos’s resurrection, saved the city. Maybe when you brought him back, you brought something else, too. Or someone.”

Tara unclenched her hand. Murdering members of the press was generally frowned upon in polite society. “Do your editors know you make a habit of baseless accusations?”

“Don’t treat us like children, Ms. Abernathy—not you, not Lord Kos, not the priests or the gargoyles or the Goddess Herself. If the world’s changed, the people deserve to know.”

Time’s one jewel with many facets. Tara leaned against the desk. A year ago she stood in a graveyard beneath a starry sky, and the people of her hometown approached her with pitchforks and knives and torches and murder in mind, all because she’d tried to show them the world was bigger than they thought.

Admittedly, there might have been a way to show them that didn’t involve zombies.

“People don’t like a changing world,” she said. “Change hurts.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

She left Gavriel Jones at her desk, alone among the bees.

5

5

Every city has forsaken places: dilapidated waterfront warehouses, midtown alleys where towers close out the sky, metropolitan outskirts where real estate’s cheap and factories sprawl like bachelors in ill-tended houses, secure in the knowledge their smoke won’t trouble the delicate nostrils of the great and the good.

Alt Coulumb’s hardest harshest parts lay to its west and north, between the Paupers’ Quarter and the glass towers of the ill-named Central Business District—a broken-down region called the Ash, where last-century developments left to crumble during the Wars never quite recovered, their land rights tied up in demoniacal battles. Twenty-story stone structures rose above narrow streets, small compared to the modern glass and steel needles north and east, but strong.