She did not rise to the bait.

Only three hours lost. Somewhere in Alt Coulumb, the case began. There had to be some way to salvage this. For Shale, locked under a mountain in a goddess’s mind. For Seril. For Alt Coulumb, besieged. “How much do you remember?” she asked.

“Most of it. I was alive, inside her. Her will was mine, but not. Like I was part of something bigger.”

Tara knew the feeling. She did not shiver. “You know my name. You know why I’ve come.”

“You’re Tara Abernathy. And you need something from me. I have little enough to give.”

The ice in her glass melted. She tried to stand, and swayed, and settled back onto the cot. “Last year, the King in Red gave you some unreal estate—specifically, Alt Coulumb’s sky.”

“He did.”

“Do you know why he was so generous?”

Altemoc trapped the spinning frog between his fingers and spun it again. The movement was tight, practiced, obsessive. She remembered a friend from the Hidden Schools, Daphne’s ex, a sometime gambler; he kept a stack of poker chips on his desk to rifle as he read. “He likes our work.”

“He gave them up because they weren’t his to give. He took them from the corpse of Seril Undying, Lady of the Moon—he thought. Deathless Kings accept the right of salvage; the King in Red used his rights to Alt Coulumb airspace as collateral, even if he couldn’t exploit them directly due to Kos Everburning’s competing claim. Back in the Wars, when people thought all gods would be dead by the century’s end, those rights were worth millions of souls.”

Altemoc whistled.

“With those funds, the King in Red rebuilt Dresediel Lex and made himself a peer of the world. Without them he would have had to accept more outside investment in RKC, which would have reduced his control over your city. Ancient history. The King’s salvage rights depend on Seril’s death, but she wasn’t really dead. She returned last year. Her survival negates the King in Red’s claim. Theft is more optically uncomfortable than salvage. Modern banks do a lot of business with Old World sovereign churches, which don’t like reminders of the bad old days.”

Spin. Trap. Spin. Trap. “He gave us the sky.”

“I imagine he wrote it off as a tithe on his foreign income filings, since your Concern looks a lot like a clerical aid bureau.”

“He’s a donor,” Altemoc said, as if that explained everything.

Here’s the critical part, Ms. Abernathy. Take care. “Seril sent me to ask you to return Her sky.”

He stopped spinning the cane. Bad tell, that. “You’re offering a trade?”

“No. Seril is under attack. She’s too weak to defend Herself, let alone pay market value for something so enormous.”