“Hello,” he said. “You may call me Dr. Hasim. I am a Doctor of Divinity, which means I heal gods. Your Lady saved me, and she saved my friends. We offered Her our help in turn. She asked us to come here, to tell you Her stories, and pray Her prayers with you. She is a Lady of great age, with as many stories as She has faces.”

“Tell us, then,” Ellen said, and Jones heard her relief, her desperation.

“No.” Hasim did not turn from Ellen, and though he did not shout, his voice filled the market. “Gods do not know how best to help themselves, any more than human patients do. I know old stories, written for a different time. You must tell Her tales yourself.”

“I can’t,” she said. “All our stories are different.”

“All people are different,” Hasim said. “They are also more or less the same. In your tale, they will hear their own.”

Ellen let his hand slip. She looked out over the crowd.

Gabby held her breath. Claire stood rigid beside the stage.

“My father,” Ellen said, “roars.”

65

65

War is a hard problem. Even simple physical conflicts have so many moving interlocking systems, physical and moral and technological, meteorological and geographical and historical, that attempt to name their edges far out into the borders of complexity theory. Craftwork battles leap over those borders and swim in the chaos beyond. Courtly wards and rules contain that chaos like rolled-up towels on a bathroom floor contain gushing sewage.

Good thing Daphne Mains was built for battle.

Part of her was, anyway. Somewhere within the shell game of her soul, she observed the seams of her construction: her hands drew glyphs in air precisely as a machine tooling metal, and words in a dozen dead tongues spilled from her lips without trace of affect. Back in the Hidden Schools she’d had no talent for languages, progressing slowly from rote memorization through info-gap exercises with classmates to actual contact with contorted other-dimensional horrors. Each syllable had cut her throat from the inside, as if the words themselves were demonglass.

Tonight they flowed from her like water from a faucet.

She had not always been this way.

But she could not remember how she had changed. Other systems forbid her such speculation.

Knives peeled back the night, and the cuts laughed. Gargoyles seethed through the sky. Thorns of lightning lanced them, finding mostly emptiness but sometimes stone. Chips and dust fell. When Daphne’s Craft pierced rock skin, she drank moonlight.

The goddess went down sweet and sour, like buttermilk.