Four Roads Cross (13 page)

Tara had summoned dead things to walk, ridden lightning; she knew the seventy-seven names of Professor Halcyon. There were ways to deal with this damn Crier, full of smug certainty. She could seize Jones's mind. Wouldn't be that hard—tell a story to bring the woman in, lower her defenses so Tara's Craft could take hold. She'd done it before.

As it had been done to her.

So easy.

Tara cursed the teachers who gave her options that were always easy, but never right.

“Report the gargoyles,” she said. “Hold off on the rest, the miracle, and I'll give you an exclusive like you won't believe.”

“When?”

“Two days,” she said. “Sooner, I hope. I need to make arrangements.”

Jones's face betrayed little. “Deal. But this better be big.”

“Trust me.”

 

18

Tara did not look at the moon while she stormed the three blocks to her apartment. The moon didn't seem to care. She slammed her front door open with a Crafty glance, and mailbox ditto. Bad form, she reprimanded herself as she marched upstairs, flipping from envelope to envelope. Ms. Kevarian would be disappointed. The weak-willed gratified themselves with needless displays of power. The shadows that stalked Tara, the deep drums her footfalls became, the tarnish that spread from her touch on the banister—these seemed impressive but were at heart only a child's tantrum strained through sorcery.

She allowed herself the tantrum's comfort. Ms. Kevarian wasn't here.

You shouldn't be either, chattered the contemptible voice in the back of her head. You should have stayed with her.

And left Alt Coulumb to weather this storm on its own? No. She'd chosen this path. She'd walk it. She just had to get hold of herself.

The mail did not reassure. This week's
Thaumaturgist.
An advertisement from a continuing education course. A sealed letter with an Edgemont postmark she'd not open yet. And, at the bottom, a utilitarian envelope from the Hidden Schools, containing a student loan bill.

“Fuck.” She leaned against her apartment door, 403. Her heart was racing for reasons that had nothing to do with the stairs. She stopped it entirely, and stopped breathing too. Her limbs chilled and she heard small sounds—carriages on the road outside, mice skittering over floorboards, a drunk man's laughter from the first floor, and beneath all these the bass fiddle note of the revolving world.

Okay. She started her heart again, breathed. Physical form had this to recommend it: your lungs let you know when they were happy.

She fished her keys from her purse, but when she reached for the latch, it popped open of its own accord. Still leaning against a suddenly open door, she lurched to catch herself on the doorjamb. Envelopes fell, and the
Thaumaturgist
flew like a drunken bird, flapping and spinning to land open to a two-page spread about the lure of shadow banking.

She knelt to retrieve her fallen mail.

Then she noticed that her apartment was not dark.

Nor were the lights on.

She closed the
Thaumaturgist,
set it on the table by the door along with the bills and letters, and took a deep breath. Then she looked up.

“I don't believe you.”

“You do, though,” the goddess said. “On some level.” She stood by the counter of Tara's kitchen-living-dining room, holding a knife. She looked precisely like Tara, only she glowed, and her jacket wasn't torn. “I made you a snack.” She pointed to a bowl.

“Carrots.”

“Simple, I grant, but you wouldn't believe how hard it is to
do
things with matter. Given how vigorously you people invent fables about machines that fly and boxes that talk, you'd expect opening a refrigerator door or picking up a kitchen knife to be easier. Every activity on this plane involves so many counterbalancing forces and microscopic, hells, quantum interactions; I would have made you cookies but I never can remember how the proteins denature. Besides, you should eat healthier.”

“You pull that stunt, then lecture me on my life choices?”

“The man was hurting his friends. He would have hurt his children next. In many ways he has already. He was scared, and alone, and do you think Shale breaking his arm would have helped?”

“So you broke his mind instead.”

“I offered him perspective. You people get so closed up inside those little brains. Their structure changes in response to thought, you know, like your muscles respond to use. The used parts bulk up. Bad training develops uneven strength; it takes time and painful work to balance unbalanced muscles.”

“Or a shortcut that deprives someone of all agency.”

“Trust me, this guy needed help. I did no permanent damage, just gave him short-term access to better cognitive machinery, superior theory of mind. What he does with the memory of that is up to him. Have a carrot.”

Tara grabbed the bowl from the counter. She'd had a late, fried dinner, and her stomach was growling. The carrot crunched. She didn't remember having carrots in her fridge, but she thought better of raising the point. “You could have asked before you used my soul to save his.”

The divine light dimmed, which Tara chose to read as embarrassment. “Here.” The goddess held out one hand, and a spark took shape. “Repayment with interest. I wish I could offer you more, but I'm close to the wire as it is.”

“What about Justice? Not to mention that fat chunk of soulstuff Kos gave you last year?”

“You know the difference between an asset and an income stream. As for Justice—she's strong. Since I joined with her, it's been a challenge to remain myself. I hear her in the back of my mind, like a heresy. Some nights I really do believe all that punishment-fit-the-crime stuff. Her jackboots march through my dreams.” She shivered. “You know what that's like, not being sole master of your mind, always afraid this thing you hate will rear back up inside you and make you dance.”

Tara grabbed the spark from the goddess's hand. Soulstuff sang through her blood, and the world bloomed with missing colors. “I want your word you won't steal from me again, or borrow without my permission. Your binding pledge.”

“Fine,” the goddess said. “My word: I will not take from you again unless you will it. Okay?”

“Deal.” The promise settled as a lock between them. “I didn't think you could do that in the first place.”

“The rules are looser between a Lady and Her priestess.”

“Oh, no.”

“Not that you're a good priestess: you don't sacrifice or pray, and you ward your dreams so thick I'm surprised you haven't gone insane. Humans need to dream, you know. It's how the mind breathes. But you have fought on my behalf. You let me live inside your heart. I must admit, this is a new one on me: I've never had a Craftswoman priestess before.”

“I'm not a priestess.”

“You just don't like the sound of the word. Priestess.” She savored the sibilants. “How else could I talk to you like this?”

“You're smaller than most gods. Makes it easier for you to assume human forms and speak human speech.”

“I couldn't talk this way with most priests, back in the day—I've been inside your skull. That, plus being, as you say, smaller, spread among fewer minds, it does help. It's like we have a bond.”

“That's deeply creepy,” Tara said. “And you've changed the subject. You've exposed us.”

“What's the alternative? I can't lean on Kos forever. I need my own operation. I spent most of his gift sending dreams, answering prayers. When the Criers' story hit the streets, my new followers began to doubt: maybe it's just the gargoyles, maybe there's no goddess after all. I had to show myself. It was a calculated risk, and it paid dividends. I have power to share now. People are remembering. I'm sorry I had to take from you to make it happen.”

Tara ate another carrot.

“Have you ever loved someone?” the goddess asked.

She set down the bowl.

“You don't know what it's like to be down here when he's up there. With so few faithful left, I live at your speed. I think the way you think. Even”—she gestured at her body, Tara's body—“reduced like this, my mind's wider than those meat brains of yours, but I should be deeper, bigger, the way he is. Thinking in this register feels like talking after a helium hit. I sound ridiculous to myself. Imagine being so close to your other half, and still so far below. Can you blame me for wanting more?”

“If it hurts the city? Yes.”

The moon-Tara crossed her arms and waited.

“Fine,” Tara said. “You want to be public, we can do that. You have an interview with a Crier tomorrow night.”

“What?”

“A woman named Gavriel Jones.” She felt very tired. She took that feeling, crushed it in a vise made of will, and tossed it into the corner of her mental attic with all her other weaknesses. “We jump the news cycle, come clean. Tell the people of Dresediel Lex you're here for them. You're back, to heal forty years of wounds.”

“You want me to preach through the news.”

“Maybe that's not how things worked back when you were starting out.”

“When I was starting out,” she said, “there were still—what's the Kathic name for those big furry things with the tusks?”

“Mammoths,” Tara said. “The Crier wants a story. Give her yours. After what you did tonight, our only option is to go public as fast as possible.”

“Thank you,” the goddess said.

“It's nothing.”

“It isn't, though. Craftswomen don't believe in gifts.”

“Some of us do.”

Seril could look awfully patient when she wanted. In the pits of those shining eyes, Tara saw herself as her mother might have seen her, complete in all her flaws.

“I do need help,” Tara admitted at last.

The goddess, to her credit, did not laugh.

“I need your archive. Your old records.”

“I don't have anything like that.”

“Impossible.”

Seril shrugged. “I was never the bookish type. I lived in shadow and claw and moonlight. My children were poets and mystics and warriors, not accountants.”

“You must have left some scripture, some trail.”

“Why would I need scripture? My children are living sermons.”

“In case you ever wanted to prove your claim to what you own.”

“If I have a thing, it is mine. What does a claim matter?”

“Gods,” Tara said.

“Clearly.”

“You can't possibly be this dense.”

“Excuse me?”

Tara's apartment wasn't large. She squeezed between her stained red couch and the bookcase. From the top shelf she took a slender black notebook and tossed it onto a skull-embroidered end pillow. “That's the notebook I used to jot down my first experiments with Craft. Take it, if you can.”

The goddess raised one eyebrow.

The room darkened and spun. Shadows danced. The walls shook, and dust rained down.

Dust ceased to rain and shadows stilled and light returned. The notebook had not moved.

“What exactly are you trying to prove?” Seril asked.

“That book's mine. I wrote every word myself. My name's inked on the inside cover in my own blood, and worked in glyphs I created back when I thought I'd invented a game of catching stars and stealing souls. No one can take that book from me unless I let them, and even then there's a limit to how much they can do with it. This book here,” she pulled a thick red-and-black tome labeled “Contracts” from the shelf, “this bears my name, but only in pen, and my first name, too, and lots of people share it. Besides, there are a few thousand copies of this edition. You could lift it without much effort. And this,” she returned the textbook and selected a dog-eared Cawleigh paperback from the lowest shelf, “I got this for two thaums from a secondhand dealer dockside. You could beat me half to death with this if you wanted.”

“I'm considering it.”

“The more proof you have something's yours, the more you control it. That's not even Craftwork, it's basic Applied Theology. I can't believe you don't know this stuff.”

“How do your cells do what they do, Tara? How do the impulses that bounce around that magnificent magic-addled hunk of ganglia atop your spine work together to be a person? What laws do they obey? Can you describe them to me?”

“You used to be bigger than Justice. I want to learn what happened to all that power.” She realized, then, that Seril had grown very still. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

“It's fine.”

Tara squeezed back around to the couch and sat, hands interlaced, not looking at the goddess for a while. When she trusted herself to continue, she said, “I got carried away.”

“It's fine, I said. Do you mind if I sit down?”

“No.”

She did, beside Tara. “There was a war, you know.”

“Oh yes.”

“Some days ‘was' seems the wrong word, given how long the Wars lasted and how they shape us still. Everything Kos is, comes from his neutrality back then. His priests are brokers to the world—so he's bound by your rules. Not so badly as the poor neutered godlings of Dresediel Lex, or for Spider's sake the Iktomi, but still bound by treaties and contracts and worse. But I—you have to understand, back in the Wars it seemed your kind would break the world before the century's end. Your power grew each passing year, and your claws pierced deeper.”

“We're better now. More sustainable.”

“An argument for another time,” she said. “I fell in the battle that made the Crack in the World.”

“I've seen it,” Tara said.

“Grass grew there once.”

“Not anymore.”

“We fought. You people have such grand names for yourselves, don't you? The King in Red. The Lady of Sorrows.”