Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone Page A

sane for … I’d guess a minute. If they only wanted to keep his soul bound to his body, and didn’t care about his sanity, it could have lasted longer. Much longer.” It would have felt longer still to Cabot. The heart kept time in the human body. Without its beat thoughts elongated, stretched, changed. She had stopped her own heart as an experiment back at school, under close observation, keeping her brain alive the entire time. For Cabot, seconds of agony would have felt like hours.
    Stay professional. Keep your breakfast where it should be, and your voice level.
    The Blacksuit cocked her head to one side. Is there any way to call him back?
    Tara continued her slow revolution around the corpse. “The body’s a complicated system. Bringing someone back requires the corpse have enough order to build upon, and there’s hardly any of Cabot left. Even if we had the proper equipment to sift his memories, we’d need the organs that bear the imprints of sense experience. The eyes have burst. The tongue, here, well. The brain, missing out the back of the skull. The spine you see, and the heart is gone entirely.” She looked up at the Blacksuit. “Did you really think it was possible he died of natural causes?”
    These are strange days. We have had to widen the definition of the word “natural” six times in the last decade.
    “Well, whoever did this was a poor student of the Craft, otherwise she wouldn’t have needed the bones—only beginners use such a strong physical focus for something this simple—but she knows enough to keep the dead from talking. Which brings me to another oddity. The body is pristine, or at least no more rotten than it ought to be based on time of death. The Craft used to bind his soul should have accelerated decay.” There was that scent again, the urgent tang of hot silver. She breathed it in, and turned from the body to the thick vegetation. “Do you mind if I look around the garden? The murderer could have hidden the missing organs nearby. Keeping them out of our hands for an hour would spoil them. Our killer needn’t have run through the city in broad daylight with a bleeding heart clenched in her fist.”
    I will remain to guard the corpse.
    Tara walked off between the looming sunflowers. The garden growth was thick, but not thick enough to dampen all sound. With a shout, she could call the Blacksuit to her.
    It was indeed possible that the murderer, whoever, whatever she was, hid Cabot’s heart somewhere nearby. She could also have burned the heart to ash and mixed it with the blood as an additional focus for her ritual. But searching for the heart gave Tara a plausible excuse to investigate without supervision.
    The burnt silver smell haunted the garden. She traced it to a point near the terrace’s corner, between a trellis of ivy and a carefully cultivated orchid. Approaching the edge, Tara reached to her heart and drew her knife.
    The odor’s source was not hidden behind the trellis, and the orchid provided no cover. Elsewhere in the rooftop garden, vines had been strung overhead to blot out the sky, but here she looked up and saw nothing but clouds. No ambush would come from above.
    She leaned over the roof’s edge. Far below ran the street, full of tiny people and tiny carriages. Gargoyles leered at the passersby. At ground level, the carvings were common monsters, sharp-nosed and snaggle-toothed, but as the building rose, their complexity grew. The sharp gouges Tara had seen from below marred the intricate artwork.
    The gargoyles one floor beneath Cabot’s penthouse seemed almost alive. To her right loomed a giant with three eyes and a massive tusked maw, each of his six arms clutching a different weapon. To her left stood a similar statue, and clinging to the ledge beside that another, in a different style. The first two were built from planes and angles, while this last gargoyle’s sculptor had carved the curves of its hunched back and powerful torso with an