The hall in the Aurelia house-ground ran long enough that the walk itself was a kind of talk.
Armandel moved at the beat he always moved—not pushed, not slow—the beat of someone who'd been steering house-halls long enough that the steering had turned to bone. Aldric walked beside him. Outside, the city was chewing its morning work with the blank beat of a place that didn't yet know what was being picked inside its house walls.
"The hunt-order has full green," Armandel said. "Thing-grab. Hold without ground-bishop say. They'll swing through the high houses tied to the order inside the week."
"The houses will fight it."
"Through which law-bones?" Armandel's voice sat flat. Not for show. Straight asking what wheel they thought would shield them.
Aldric said nothing. The law-bones the high houses would lean on were the same bones the Church's shake-greens had just stepped over.
They walked another twenty meters in hush.
"The Guild looks," Aldric said.
"Eight spots hung. Three more under live dig." Armandel glanced at a door they passed without slowing. "The head desk is playing along."
"Playing along because he wants to or because the other road bites harder."
"Does it split."
It didn't. Aldric knew this and had known it when he asked. The ask had been something else—something that didn't have a cleaner way to be said.
The hall turned. The late-day light fell through a high glass at a slant that made the stone floor read older than it was.
"The Iron Group's crack is speeding," Armandel said. "Faster than the order wanted. They're losing grip on the squeeze."
"Because someone else is yanking the string."
Armandel looked at him short. "That's the now-guess."
They walked.
The thing neither of them said sat in the sharp cut of the hush between words—in the way Armandel picked his words with the care of someone who'd long quit leaning they'd spit the end they named. The Church was swinging with more weight than it had burned in a life-stretch. It was swinging into bones that were already cracking under it—and all the weight in the world couldn't spin what the bones were doing.
The hunters would take the high houses. The Guild would get scrubbed. The Children of Medusa would get pulled apart with a deepness that would eat years to wrap and would still leave the ask of the body hanging—because the body sat in a room under a city and nobody had yet picked what to do about a dead god.
And none of it touched the bond-hole. Or the loan-squeeze. Or the winter.
"There was a time," Aldric said, not closing the line.
Armandel nodded once—which was as much nod as the line wanted.
They hit the door.
The Pope was on his feet when they stepped in—which wasn't normal. He stood at the glass, staring at Aurelia's roof-cut with the face of someone who'd been staring a while and had chewed no ends from the staring.
He turned when they walked in. Armandel hung near the door. Aldric crossed to the room's gut.
"Sit," the Pope said, and sat himself.
Aldric sat.
The Pope looked at him a beat with the sharp eye of someone taking stock before speaking. He was older than his street-shows let on—the held-together weight of those shows asking a push that was seeable up near, in the lines at the edges of his eyes, in the way he carried his shoulders like weight was spread across them, not just there.
"Your paper on the second body," he said. "I've chewed it three times."
"I figured you'd have asks."
"I had asks. I've bit most of them myself." He folded his hands on the table. "The ones I couldn't bite are the ones that count. You lean this body is new."
"The oldest track I have is four months. The working sharpness doesn't match a body of four months."
"Which means either the track is off or the body was there before it turned seeable."
"Yes."
The Pope sat still a beat. "And you lean they're the hand behind what kicked in the floor under Vhal-Dorim."
"I lean the hand I hit was a tool of this body. I lean they'd been inside the floor before the gather was cracked—which means they had word about the floor's spot that we didn't hold. I lean the stuff they pulled is now in this body's hands."
"The stuff from the third room."
"Yes."
Another stop. The Pope stared at his folded hands, then back at Aldric.
"The Children of Medusa will be bit by the hunt-order," he said. "That's locked. I want you to grip what locked aims in this cut: it aims the hunters hold weight that steps over lone sends. If your dig crosses their work, the cross falls their way. That's not up for chew and it's not a mark on my lean in your work."
Aldric heard this clean. "Got."
"What I'm handing you," the Pope kept on, "is green to chase the second body with the hands open to your send—plus a door to three old bones from the side-vault. Armandel will green the vault door." He stopped. "I'm handing you this because your push bit and because the other road—looking past a new and fat body working inside Elysion's house-bones—isn't something I can stand in front of myself or the Lord with."
"But the hunters step first."
"In all that brushes the Children of Medusa. In all else, you have room." He looked at Aldric with the flat of a sharp-head who'd picked that flat was the faster road. "Find them. Bite what they want. If lining up sits open, bring me the words. If it doesn't—"
He didn't wrap the line.
He didn't need to.
"One more thing," the Pope said. He looked worn in a way the hold didn't full hide—the worn of someone who'd been chewing a rotting shape long enough to have quit waiting for it to spin back. "What's chewing in Elysion will get rougher before it has any chance of getting smoother. The Church will be asked to do things in the next few months that will cost us. Some of those costs will be seen. Some won't." He held Aldric's eyes. "I mean to pay them. I want you to know that."
Aldric said nothing.
"That's all," the Pope said.
Armandel stood in the hall when Aldric walked out.
They went back the way they'd come—through the long hall with the high glass and the late light on the old stone. The walk back hung quieter than the walk there had—both of them chewing what had just been locked, not guessed.
"The vault green will be set by first light," Armandel said.
"I'll need a ride back to Vhal-Dorim."
"It's laid."
They walked.
At the hall's bend, Armandel stopped. Not for any seeable why. He stood a beat staring at the floor, and Aldric stopped beside him.
"The Lord's word," Armandel said. "Line them up if we can. Cut them out if we can't."
"Yes."
"The word leans we'll reach them." He stopped. "I want to lean we will."
Aldric looked at him. It was the nearest thing to bare he'd caught in Armandel in eleven years of working under him—and it bit exactly as long as Armandel let it bite, which wasn't long.
"We'll reach them," Aldric said.
Armandel nodded once. They kept walking.
The house was quieter than the shop.
Gepetto liked it better this way. The Domus Memorion had its own drifting weight—the stacked feel of a place that had been shaped over time to spit sharp prints on sharp faces. The house behind it was just where he slept—which meant it had the feel of a space that didn't need to put on anything.
Mira sat on the floor near the glass with the sharp cross-leg hold of a kid who'd picked that floor was better than chair and hadn't yet grown the crowd-teach that would flip the pick. She was staring at her own hands with the aimed eye of someone who'd just been told a thing about herself she was still chewing on.
Alaric sat beside her in the low seat that was the nearest thing the room had to a kid-cut piece—which wasn't very near. He'd been laying something out when Gepetto walked in, and stopped.
"She pulled one from a memory that wasn't hers," Alaric said.
Gepetto looked at Mira. "Which memory."
"She doesn't know whose. She knows it's not hers because the body in it is too tall and the city wears a different face. She said the body was sad in a way she hadn't felt before."
Mira was still staring at her hands. She had the cut of a kid who'd learned early that tall faces chewed her like she wasn't there—and had grown the knack of being there and not at once because of it.
"Mira," Gepetto said.
She looked up.
"What did it look like? The thing that walked out of the memory."
She chewed this with the weight of someone who got that the ask was real. "Like the feel," she said. "When you're somewhere and you want to go home but you don't hold where home is. It looked like that."
Gepetto sat still a beat.
"She's doing it without knowing she's doing it," Alaric said. "The calling is on its own. She feels something and it grabs a shape. What we've been working today is whether she can feel it coming before it lands."
"Can she?"
"Getting sharper."
Mira had gone back to staring at her hands. She was eight and had been alone in Edren before Gepetto's net had caught her—and the things she'd felt in that stretch had been fat enough to cook a class whose wheel was turning feel-stuff into something that could be walked into in the world. He chewed on what it aimed that her reach was already stretching past her own head.
"She shouldn't be here for what's coming," Gepetto said. Not at Mira. At Alaric.
"I know."
"But she's safer here than anywhere she'd else be."
"I know that too."
They looked at each other with the grip of two heads who'd hit an end that didn't sit easy but sat right. Mira was too young for the war. She was also too seen, too bare, and too alone to be anywhere else.
"Keep working her," Gepetto said. "Slow. The point isn't reach. It's grip. She needs to chew what she does before she does more of it."
Alaric nodded.
Gepetto turned toward the back room.
The puppet stood where he'd left it—locked in the sharp still of something with no inner spin pointing it toward any one hold or spot. With the Soul gone it was just there—hanging with the patience of a thing, not the patience of a face.
He sat across from it.
The string was already there—the thread that ran between him and all his puppets, forever and sleeping till lit. With the Soul gone, throwing the full string with this one was different from how it had been. There was no bones to chew with, no own-spin that his push had to step around or work next to. He aimed and the puppet stirred.
He burned a few minutes with this, settling into the split.
There was a why he didn't do this with all of them.
Split-Thinking made it work-possible. He could hold full straight rein of every puppet at once—each one a clean stretch of his push with no Soul-buffer chewing between. The reach was there. He'd poked its edges enough to know where they sat.
What he'd also poked—in smaller cuts and with more care than he gave most things—was what steady full straight hold did to the head keeping it. The feel of being at-once there in more than one body, chewing more than one feed with no Soul bones draining and squeezing them into something bitable—spit marks he'd boxed early and hadn't circled back to because the box was enough: the self-blur, the slow wash of the line between him and tool, the sharp drift of a head that had been spread across too many spots for too long.
He'd killed the pokes before the marks turned into anything more than passing.
His head was the one thing in this world he couldn't swap, couldn't brace through the stores, couldn't pull back through any wheel he could touch. All else—the puppets, the net, the hands, the spot he'd stacked across two years—ran down from the head that had stacked it. Dropping any of those was a hit. Dropping the head was the full stop of the run.
The Soul bones sat, in part, because he'd picked that the price of leaning on them was swallowable and the price of the other road wasn't.
It was the split he'd drawn to himself after pulling the Soul from this one: a hand against a glove. The glove near-bit the hand's work in most spots. The hand, bare, was just the hand. What he hadn't said then—because the see was flat and flat things didn't ask saying—was that a body could only chew peeling the glove from one hand at a time.
He stood. The puppet stood.
He walked to the door. The puppet walked to the door.
He went back to where Alaric sat. Alaric watched the puppet step into the room with the eye of someone catching a thing they'd been told about and were now seeing first-time.
"It'll be at the shop," Gepetto said. "All it says is what I want said. All it sees, I see. All it does is because I aimed it. There's no Soul in there trying to near-me. It is me—in the cut that bites for anyone brushing it."
Alaric looked at the puppet, then at Gepetto. "It's a sharper skin."
"It's a sharper tool. The skin is second."
Mira had turned from the glass and was eyeing the puppet with the open stare of a kid who hadn't yet caught the crowd-bone that said don't let them see you looking.
"Is it live?" she asked.
"No," Gepetto said.
She chewed this. "It stirs like it is."
"That's the point."
She swallowed this with the flat of someone who'd hit weirder stuff and had learned that chasing more asks didn't always spit better feed than sitting with the first answer.
Gepetto looked at Alaric. "I'm pulling for Eldravar."
Alaric said nothing, hanging.
"There's a man there whose work is going to bite. I need to weigh him straight before I lean him with what I'm going to ask him to haul." He stopped. "There are also names in Eldravar that need to go dark. Faces who've been shaping the head-ground of Elysion in ways that make putting back together harder. The run is always the same. First, pull the stage. A voice with no spread is a voice in a room. If that's not enough, crack the work, not the worker—a broke name hangs longer than a live body's reach to climb back. If that's not enough, pull the body from the ground. A push, willing or not. Steel is the last door—not because it's off the table but because it's the loudest and the hardest to make blurry, and blur is the thing I'm most hungry to hold."
Alaric drank this with no face-shift.
"And the third thing," Gepetto said, "is the press. Eldravar has four sheets that touch Elysion's taught heads. I'm going to hold them before I go."
Alaric looked at him. "All four."
"Three straight. One through a middle hand that won't trail back for at least two years." He moved to the coat by the door. "The sheets won't spin right off. Their head-hands will keep their seats. Their word-hands will keep their work. What will spin is which stories get fed and which don't, which voices get stage and which ones find their stuff steady-stalled. Nothing seeable. Nothing that kicks a walk-off or a noise that could be trailed. Just a slow turn in what the taught heads of Elysion chew as worth jawing." He stopped. "Emeric's work needs ground to land on. I'm cooking the ground."
He pulled on the coat.
Lit Metamorph.
The shift wasn't loud. It never was. It was the sharp cut of change that worked under the line of live eye—the face locking into something that would be read as a face without being read as his, the hold shifting by hairs that stacked into a different body without any one hair catching. He looked like a man in his thirties with the sharp blank of someone whose look threw nothing that would make them worth holding in head.
"Don't let her shove herself," he said to Alaric—meaning Mira. "If something walks she can't box, pull back. There's no clock."
"Got."
He swung the door.
Somewhere in Aurelia, in the house-halls of a ground-seat that had been poured to last ages, two men who gripped flat what was chewing their house were walking back through a long hall and saying—in the space between words—what they couldn't say straight. The Church was laying its full weight on bones already cracking under it. The hunters would swing. The high houses would drop. The Guild would get scrubbed. All of it right, all of it called for, all of it landing too late to spin the way of what was coming.
Gepetto walked toward the train-yard and chewed on none of this—because he'd chewed it already and the chewing was done.
What hung was the work.
The train to Eldravar pulled at noon. He had time.