“I don’t see a contradiction.” Their ascent grew steeper, and the horizon bucked and reared. Always at this stage of the climb Kai felt that deep monkey fear of twisted balance, of the eternal fall. “Yes, we evolved somewhere in the Old World, probably in the Southern Gleb. We spread over earth and sea for a few hundred millennia. An eon or so back, some people landed here after a long voyage, either from Kath or the Gleb, the Hidden Schools are still arguing which. And here, we became human.” Ahead and above, the cave mouth gaped. The car slid onto the cave roof track with the grinding, crunching sound of a metal throat being cleared. “Here’s our stop.”

Jamie the coffee girl threw open the door of the moving gondola, jumped out, and jogged to the security desk at the far wall, where a bored guard waited with feet up and newspaper spread. Kai stepped out and held a hand for Teo, who stumbled anyway. Dresediel Lex was a port city, but Kai’d never realized how landlocked its people could be, how unsteady when the ground betrayed them.

“You believe metaphorically,” Teo said.

“Metaphors are true.” Kai handed the guard her papers, Twilling’s signature showing. The guard returned the contract along with two visitors’ passes, moved two beads on an abacus, and the rock doors behind him rolled open. Kai led Teo inside. Her identity as Kai, a visitor from Twilling’s group, took precedence over her identity as Kai, exiled priest. So far, the wards did not protest her presence. Hopefully that held.

“We don’t need to grope around the edges of truth these days,” the Quechal woman said, behind her. “We know it.”

“Do we really?”

“Yes.”

With green visitor’s badges clipped to their jackets, engrossed in conversation, they presented exactly the right impression: pilgrim and intercessor, come to tour the holiest of holies. Kai guided Teo through a side door in the reception hall, and down a well-lit winding stair. “How much do you know about the Craft?”

“Enough,” Teo said.

“The world is a collection of power, right? That’s Maestre Gerhardt’s line. So we study relations that give rise to power. Reality’s made of self-perpetuating patterns, some of which are complex enough to”—she opened a door in the stairway wall that had not existed before she reached for it, and emerged onto a stone floor, Teo following—“to alter themselves.” They walked down a narrow hall, lined with doors behind which slithery things hissed. “Truth is a momentary condition of these fluctuating patterns, a matter of negotiation. Our agreements, this contract”—waving the contract itself—“these are realer than any property of what you’d call matter. Gerhardt understood this first through comparative mythology, then through math. Beliefs give rise to truth.”