Four Roads Cross (12 page)

“I saved your life. Maybe.”

“I'm not exactly alive. And the golem could have killed us all if not for Aev.”

“And I brought her along. So, you're welcome.”

“You should have let her take the shot, I mean, instead of letting the sailor reach the gong.”

“The Suit agreed with you, for what it's worth.”

If he understood, he didn't acknowledge it.

Aev joined them, and faced homeward toward the horizon candelabra of Alt Coulumb. Her lips peeled back to bare teeth, but no sound escaped her throat.

“Something wrong?”

“The city,” she said. “I am too late.”

“What do you mean?” Cat asked. But before Aev could answer, the moon opened.

 

16

Ellen did not pray at first. She stood shadowed by lamplight, before her father and the market square crowd. Her left hand closed white-knuckled around her right. She looked back at her sisters; Hannah turned away. Claire did not, but Ellen avoided her older sister's gaze as if there was fire in it.

Matt read that fire: if Ellen had not spoken at lunch, she would not be here now.

Whispers rippled from the clearing to the crowd's edge and back. The Crier took notes.

By Matt's side Sandy stood silent, tense. What should he do now, with all these people watching and Rafferty pacing, his high color deepening to purple?

“Ellen,” Rafferty repeated, in a tone of voice Matt could tell he thought was kind. “Pray. If you've told the truth.” Which even Matt could tell was not a choice between two roads so much as the choice between a devil and a cliff.

Ellen's head bobbed. The first time she tried to speak no words came out, but on the second they emerged:
“Mother, hear me—”
the prayer the Criers sang this morning, its words made eager by her fear.

She watched her father while she spoke, as if the man was a crumbling wall that might collapse on her at any moment. She cut her finger with a knife from her belt. Blood welled to fall on stone.

No noise dared intrude. People must have breathed, hells, Matt must have breathed himself, but he only heard the splash.

A loud whip crack split the night, and he jumped. A hundred eyes darted skyward at once, toward the stars and moon. No winged shape passed overhead, no shadow rose from the rooftops. Shifting wind had snapped the flag on the market's flagpole. Matt laughed nervously, and others joined him.

Sandy held herself tense as a watch spring. The Rafferty girls did not laugh, either. Hannah and Claire watched Ellen, and Ellen stared at their father, and Corbin Rafferty was silent and still and grim.

He raked the circled crowd with his regard. The blotched colors of his face merged and deepened. “Don't you laugh at my girl. She said she saw the Stone Man. She said it came, and it came.” He swung back to Ellen. “Go on. Call it. Now.”

She gave no answer. Whatever she willed against him when she drew her knife, whatever doom she hoped to call down from the skies, it had not fallen.

“She made the whole thing up,” a man shouted outside the circle. Matt didn't recognize the voice, or else he would have made the owner regret speaking. “She's cocked, Rafferty.”

“You call my girl a liar?” Corbin's voice low and dangerous now, as Matt had seen him crouch in bar fights. “Pray, Ellen.”

She lowered her head. Rafferty clutched his stick in a strangler's grip.

Before he could do anything, Sandy spoke. “Corbin, she's telling the truth.”

“Of course she is.”

The Crier kept writing. Matt wanted to break the woman's pencil.

Sandy looked like she'd just torn off a bandage over a burn. “Look, I heard the same voice as Ellen, in my dreams. Most women in the Quarter have. But do you think this works like Craft, you just wave your hands and make things happen? The Stone Men didn't come for a prayer, they came because your girls needed them. It's wrong to draw them out like this.”

“The Stone Men don't get to come into my family whenever they think it's right. They don't own our city.”

He roared that last, and Ellen flinched.

“You think,” Sandy said, “maybe they're cutting in on your business?”

“What the hells is that supposed to mean?”

“You scared Ellen might call the Stone Men down on you someday?”

Rafferty stopped as if someone had nailed his feet to the ground. Only his head turned toward Sandy. “What did you say?”

“I said it's disgraceful the way you treat those girls, shout them scared of their own damn shadows.” She stepped into the open space, toward him. “I say you're scared they might call the Stone Men on you. I say stop this now and let these people go home.”

“I did this for us.”

“You do everything for you, Corbin. Let it go.”

Corbin Rafferty's eyes went wide as an angry horse's, and showed as much white, and he grew very still. Folk at the crowd's edge turned away.

Rafferty's shoulders slumped.

Sandy relaxed, too. But the girls did not, and neither did Matt, because he'd seen Corbin Rafferty drunk, had seen him fight, and knew his tell: that moment of slack before he moved snake-quick with a bottle or a nearby chair. Or with that cane, which he swung up and around, toward Sandy—

But the cane never fell, because Matt ran forward and grabbed Rafferty's arm. Rafferty twisted fast and vicious, pulled free, and struck Matt in the side of the head. He stumbled back, ears ringing and wetness on his temple and his cheek. Matt smelled Corbin's whiskey, saw his white teeth flash as the cane came down; he put his hand in its way, but the cane knocked down his arm, then struck the side of his head. Matt barreled forward. His shoulder took Rafferty in the stomach but the man squirmed like a hooked eel and Matt couldn't hold him. The audience roared and Sandy joined the fray and somewhere a large beast or a small man snarled, and Ellen's prayer rolled on like a river, or else that was the blood throbbing in his, Matt's, ears.

There came a crash and a splintering sound, followed by a hush.

Even the Crier's pencil stopped scratching.

Matt forced himself to his feet.

The top half of Rafferty's stick lay broken on the ground. The man himself had drawn back, hunched around his center, clutching the remnants of the cane. Sandy wasn't bleeding. The girls were safe.

A Stone Man confronted Corbin Rafferty.

He did not resemble the monsters of Matt's imagination or his father's stories. The Stone Man was thinner than Matt expected, carved with lean muscle like a runner or dancer. His face was narrow and short muzzled with a bird's quizzical expression, and his wings were slender and long. Maybe their kind came in as many shapes as people.

“Shale!” Ellen sounded happy for the first time in the years Matt had known her.

Rafferty recoiled. One crooked accusing finger stabbed toward the statue. “There! You see. They sneak around our city, taking what's ours!”

The gargoyle's—Shale's—expression didn't change like a normal person's. It shifted, like windblown sand. “We take nothing,” he said. “We help.”

“We don't need your help.”

“If someone asks,” the gargoyle said, gentle as a footfall in an empty church, “should I refuse?”

Rafferty spun from the gargoyle, to Matt, to Sandy, to Ellen. Whatever he sought from them he didn't find, because he revolved on Shale again, still holding the broken cane.

Then he ran toward the gargoyle and stabbed his chest with the splintered end of his stick. Matt tensed, waiting for claws to wet with blood.

The gargoyle took Rafferty by the shoulders.

The moon came out.

Before, the moon had been a slender curve. No longer. An orb hung overhead, and there was a face within it Matt recognized from a distant past that never was, and since it never was, never passed. Shadows failed. Silver flame quickened within paving stones.

Alt Coulumb lived. There was a Lady in it, and She knew them.

Matt was not a religious man—he sacrificed on time and paid little heed to the rest—but this, he thought, must be how the faithful felt: seen all at once in timeless light.

There was no source to this light, but Corbin Rafferty stood at its center, transfixed, reflected on himself in that moonlit time.

The moon closed.

Corbin's knees buckled and he fell.

Clocks started again, and hearts. Blood wept from the wound on Matt's face.

Matt thought the gargoyle was as shocked as anyone, and awed, though he covered it fast. “Blacksuits are coming,” he said to them all but mostly to Ellen. “This is their place. I must go.”

He left in a wave of wings. Sandy limped to Matt and touched the skin around his wound; her fingers stung. The girls watched, quiet, still, as Corbin Rafferty wept.

The gargoyle was right. Soon the Blacksuits came.

And the Crier wrote the whole thing down.

 

17

Tara collapsed on her walk home.

She'd been turning the Seril problem over in her mind—gods and goddesses, faith and credit, debt and repayment and Abelard's despair and the gargoyles atop their ruined tower. Swirled round with sharp-toothed dilemmas, she marched past the shadow people who drifted down the sidewalk toward home or gym or bar. A beggar held out a cup and she tossed him a coin with a few thaums of soul inside. Might as well be kind while she could afford it. Soon none of them might have the luxury of generosity.

The man thanked her with a wave of a soot-caked hand as she swept past. Strings of curses ran together inside her skull. Streetlights cast bright puddles on the pavement.

Brighter than usual, in fact, and of a different color too, as of molten silver. Far off, a giant struck a mountain with a hammer in heartbeat time. She stumbled. Eyes closed, she searched the lightning-lit world of Craft for the source of her sudden weakness, but saw nothing—and beneath the nothing, a tide. Her knees buckled, and she fell beyond herself into a sea of churning light whose waves sang a chord no choir could have matched. And she saw—

The market square, unfamiliar faces. Matthew Adorne, bleeding. The fierce man from the produce stall wept beneath a moon that was also a face she knew—mother and tiger at once. And Shale stood before them both, Shale overshadowed by his Goddess, Shale the clawed vector for a Lady who refused to hide.

Something soft struck her whole body at once, as if she'd fallen onto a featherbed from a height.

Rough fingers touched her cheek. Her vision focused and refocused until it carved the beggar from the moonlight haze. The lines of his face mapped a territory of confusion and concern. “Miss?”

“I'm fine,” she said, and realized she was lying on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon. When she tried to stand, the world spun sideways.

“You fell.” His breath smelled harsh and there was liquor in it.

She took quick inventory: skirt and stocking torn by impact, jacket dusted with road, a scrape on her cheek. Unsteady sitting, and more unsteady rising. Her soul, that was the problem: her soul ebbed out, a few hundred thaums gone, like leaves into a fire. “Did you feel that?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Thank you.” She pushed a few more thaums into his hand, but he forced them back.

“You need help.”

“Which way to Market Square?”

“Left at Bleeker,” he said, “but the stalls are closed.”

She could not run, but after she killed the pain receptors in her ankle, she forced herself to a brisk walk.

By the time she reached the market, there was little left to see—only a crowd around the Crier's dais, and there, interviewing a young dark-skinned couple whose body language screamed “traumatized onlookers,” Gavriel Jones.

“Excuse me,” Tara said to the couple, politely as she could manage, then grabbed Jones's trench coat and pulled her aside. “We need a moment.”

“Ms. Abernathy. Care to comment on tonight's events?”

“What did you do?”

“I don't
do.
” Jones raised her hands. She still held her notebook. “I came for a color piece, reactions to this morning's story. Are you okay?”

“Let me see that.” She tried to grab the notebook, but Jones hid it behind her back.

“You'll hear everything in the dawn edition.”

“Give me a preview. Please.”

“Another gargoyle in the open, and a genuine miracle. I've never seen a better prompt for poetry.”

“Don't sing this,” she said. “It's not what it looks like.”

Jones looked at Tara as if she'd grown a second head.

“You don't know the full story.”

“Are you implying, on the record, that there is a full story for me to know?”

“Do not test me, Jones. I might bring you back to life just to kill you again.”

“You use that line on all the girls?” Jones straightened her coat and stuck her pencil behind her ear. “We have gargoyles on the rooftops and a goddess in our sky. A goddess who's supposed to be dead. What right do I have to keep this secret?”

“There's more at risk than you know.”

“Fill me in.”

“I can't.”

“Typical Craftswoman,” she said. “Force a few dead gods to dance for you, all of a sudden you think you know what's best for everyone. No trust in people.”

Trust,
the moon whispered in her ear.

“Don't give me that,” Tara said. “You say you care about people, but you don't help. You just watch them fall and write about it.”

“That's my job. I saw a fight, I saw a gargoyle, I saw a miracle. You want me to help? Where were you? Where were the Blacksuits?”

“You choose what to watch.” She reined her voice before it rose to a shout. “You choose what to say.”

“And you choose what to show me. You know exactly what's going on here. You've known since the beginning. When the church hides, I go digging. And this is the second time you've tried to shut down my story.” The couple whose interview Tara interrupted shifted behind Jones, on the verge of leaving. Jones held a hand up to Tara and turned back to them with an easy smile. “Just a sec, sorry.” The couple didn't seem happy, but they didn't leave either. “We're done, Ms. Abernathy. Unless you have something you want to tell me.”