Four Roads Cross (15 page)

“St. Hilliard's Grease,” Bede said. He sounded tired.

“I don't understand. I'm pretty sure you made up most of the words here.”

“We had to. There weren't words for what we were doing when we started doing it.” Bede unlocked the larger, second drawer of his desk. Abelard craned his neck and saw within a library of similar black folders. “This isn't everything, of course. There are piles and piles in the church archives. I know you Technical types don't enjoy thinking of our work this way—or of our God this way either—but we don't have the luxury of siloed faith tonight.”

Abelard returned to the pie chart. “Does this mean what I think?”

“The yellow slice is what we'd call organic worship—that's to say, souls available as a result of confirmed faith in Kos, priests and Alt Coulumb's secular citizenry combined. The green slice represents missionary work, which produces a real, if variable, return on investment. Sometimes you get lucky and find fertile, troubled territory—we've had good success in the Northern Gleb since the struggle there began—but you can't count on missionaries. You're just as likely to lose your investment. And sometimes, God forbid, you suffer a disaster like the Southern Kathic expedition.”

“Those two slices are less than half the pie. What's this big blue piece?”

“Transactional work,” Bede said. “My role. The reason this office looks the way it does. The reason, if you pay attention, you'll catch Technical Cardinal Nestor giving me the side-eye at council meetings. This income relies on our partners' faith we'll remain stable and make good on future obligations. And the red element down here, the quarter slice, that represents specific promises to perform—cities that rely on Kos for power, our contracts with the Iskari Defense Ministry, that sort of thing.”

“This is way too simple. I've seen these contracts in person. They're huge, complex. A breakdown like this—”

“My boy, believe me, I do not mean to elide the complexity of our work. You've seen the circulatory system firsthand, an honor I have not received. This merely indicates where the blood comes from, and where it goes. Some in this church overlook the importance of the Evangelate's work, because it bears so little connection to their naive sense of a church's role. But if our deals collapse, which they will if our partners lose faith, Kos will suffer effects comparable to those of a body deprived of half its blood.” The Cardinal closed the folder, returned it to his desk, and locked the desk. He sat. He laced his fingers together and watched Abelard over the lacing. “I hoped you could talk to God for me.”

Ash dripped from Abelard's cigarette onto his robe. He brushed the ash away and stamped out the cinder, leaving a gray smear on the carpet. “Sorry,” he said.

“Overdue for a wash.”

He knelt and tried to scrape the ash out of the fibers of the rug. “You don't have some spot treater? I mean, sorry, but it does stain.”

“You have an interesting way of ignoring questions.”

He stopped scraping, and stood instead, hands in pockets, weight shifting from foot to foot. Smoke drifted from his cigarette. “You want me to convince Lord Kos not to support Seril if She needs Him.”

“That's the most elegant solution, as our partners learn of the goddess's return. I will assure them she stands alone—aside from her involvement in Justice. Her obligations are not our Lord's. She is a separate entity. There may, naturally, be tests of that position, as Ms. Abernathy said this evening.” The fingers de-laced. “Seril is not strong enough to stand on her own—or to refuse His aid if He offers it. We need to convince Him to leave her to defend herself. I'd go to Him, but since Gustave's treachery He has been more reserved with the Council of Cardinals than ever.”

“Can you blame him?”

“This is not a question of blame. It is a question of what is, and what must be.” The incense on the altar burned low. Bede replaced it. “I know how this looks. You distrust me, as does my Lord. I do not relish being held in such low esteem by a bright young priest and by the Master I serve, but these are strange times and I forgive you both. But, Abelard, this is the only way I know to save us.”

“Tara's research—”

“Is a long shot. You know this, as does she. We cannot rely on her success. Not every hard decision is an evil plot.”

Abelard took a long, slow drag on his cigarette. God was in the smoke, and God was in his heart, and God was in the blood that burned through his veins and the air into which he exhaled, and others too, all through the city, a constant heartbeat. To live was to be loved was to burn.

—the world, o monks—

He remembered how cold he had been without that fire.

“I'll talk to Him,” he said. “But I can't guarantee He'll listen.”

“I ask no more,” the Cardinal Evangelist replied.

 

20

Aev chased Shale over rooftops and down dark alleys and from skyscraper to skyscraper. The whelp was small and weak, but fast—a flash of stone in motion behind a pinnacle, a glint of emerald from an antenna. He changed to human shape once and almost lost her in a crowd in the Pleasure Quarter, until she spotted him slinking down a peep show alley without regard for the fleshlings gyrating meatily in the red-lit windows. She swooped to cut him off at the alley's end, but he must have seen her—his stone ripped free of flesh again and in three seconds he'd reached the rooftops. In four he was gone, leaving in his wake a shocked dope peddler and a number of fleshlings who'd ceased, however briefly, those meaty gyrations.

“I didn't do anything wrong,” he roared back at her in Stone, over the rattle of the elevated train down which he ran, leaping from car to car. Within the cars, screams and shouts—panic at heavy footfalls on metal roofs. “They needed help. The Lady willed me to go. I don't see why you're so mad about this.”

That brought her up short. In surprise she almost let an overhead pylon strike her in the face. “You don't see why I'm so mad about this. You don't see why I'm so mad?” She spotted him two blocks back, climbing a skyscraper. She leapt off the train, wings spread, but by the time she brought herself around he'd vanished again. She flew forty stories up a jewel-faceted tower and perched at its peak, steadying herself against one of the needlelike protrusions Tara called nightmare antennas. Terrors clawed at Aev as she held it, like a kitten testing its claws. Not for the first time Aev wondered what exactly had broken inside Tara Abernathy's mind that let her judge her way of life normal.

Where, in the streets below, in the alleys and dead ends, in the shop windows and blacktop street ball playgrounds, where was her wayward son?

She remembered her debates with the Lady about carving him. We're strong, Aev had said, almost too strong, and fierce. Perhaps we need a young one who's fast, who can move unseen in shadows, a king of infiltrators and sneaks, a messenger no door will bar.

Should have made him clubfoot and slow, and ironed out that infuriating spark of personal initiative.

(Not really, but some days she wished.)

There. Two skyscrapers over, by a tower with a starburst logo and the legend
GRIMWALD HOLDINGS
—Shale was a winged black slice against garish ghostlit colors. She launched herself into space, mouth wide to drink the moon.

He hid in shadows, so she searched every shadow. He flew and she flew faster. He reared and she doubled back. No crowd could conceal him, no bolt-hole was deep enough to hide.

But he was fast. She'd carved well, with the Lady in her hands.

And he must have known this would happen, that midway through the chase her rage would unclench and leave her simply running, flying, as she had done centuries ago when Alt Coulumb was a small town and she its sole guardian. He must have known, because when she cornered him on a low roof between two skyscrapers near Uhlan and Brakenridge—when she slammed into him and they tumbled together on gravel, spinning, tearing gouges in tar paper, a ball of claws and teeth, and she ended the tumble on top, legs pinning his wings to the roof—he bared his throat to her and said, with an imp's smile she never could harden herself against, “Good chase, Mother.”

She sat back on her haunches astride him. “You don't even understand”—that last word even more a growl than usual in Stone—“why I'm angry.”

“Can you get off me?”

She bared teeth.

“It's hard to talk this way, is all.”

One wingbeat drew her to her feet. He stood more slowly, exaggerating submission. She'd seen him kip up from worse falls. “Your stunt risked the Lady's life.”

He picked gravel out of his ears and brushed more from the hollow between his neck and collarbone. Across the street, a billboard man with improbably orange skin blew smoke rings into the night. The rings, swelling, faded to air. “Let's not do this here.”

He flew slowly, painted greens and oranges and browns by billboards and streetlights. She followed. A late-night worker gaped from a high window at them both, and Shale waved. Aev landed after him, on an observation deck beneath a towering nightmare antenna. The city lay below, river flowing down to bay and blackly glittering ocean. Out there, Captain Pelham's crew guided the captured
Dream
and its foul cargo to port.

“I've seen the view before, Shale.”

“But it's no less beautiful for your knowing it,” he said. “They pay to come up here these days, the humans I mean. In the forty years since we left the rooftops, they've learned to love them.” He patted coin-op binoculars mounted at the observation deck's edge. “Five-year-olds press their faces to this lens and stare out to the edge of the world.”

“Wearing skin has fogged your mind.”

“The Lady made me to walk among them, with your hands. Will you blame me for that?”

“I blame you for your meathead stunt tonight.”

“I know those girls. Their father's a broken man—all the anger inside his skull has left a calculus of hate. We want followers for our Lady. Do we serve Her by deserting her people?”

“You did not intervene in the market to serve Her.”

“She asked me to go there.”

“You petitioned Her! You wheedled and convinced because you didn't want to let that girl down. You had to be the hero. And now we all might die because of your pride.”

“As if I'm the only one.”

“What are you saying?”

“You saved the reporter.”

Aev walked to the high railing, vaulted over, and let herself fall.

She grabbed the roof's edge and jerked to a halt above the windows; her talons scarred the concrete, leaving grooves that caught moon- and city-light.

“Mother?” Shale asked from behind her.

She said nothing.

He lowered himself over the edge and hung beside her in the calm of the wind.

“I have risked us all,” he said after a while.

“No,” she said. “And yes. You're right. Last night I tried to let her suffer. I thought: this reporter tempts fate and tests Seril. Let her save herself. I made myself watch her suffering, because I owed that much at least. But in the end I only hurt the ones who hurt her. I am angry at you because I am angry at myself, and I am angry at myself because I cannot fault my actions—or yours, though they send us teetering across a narrow bridge.”

“I was proud,” he said. “And I did not want to disappoint her.”

The ledge crumbled beneath Aev's grip. Concrete dust rained down sixty stories. She caught a chunk large enough to cause damage when it reached ground level, crushed it to sand, and let the sand drift. “Humans would not find this calming,” she said.

“Fear is different for each being that fears.”

“And stone fears change,” she said. “Change for us is a permanent unmaking. But our Lady is of the moon, and change is Hers: new life from death, waxing from waning. She waxes now, and we tremble. This may be blasphemy, but it is also right, for though She is Herself, we are still stone.” With her free hand she indicated Kos's black tower. “Great Kos stands alone and strong. He has power, and privilege by virtue of his power. But His power comes, as ever, from mortal fuel—and so mortal strictures bind him. We are free, and poor, and dangerous—to our enemies, but also to ourselves. In my anger and fear, I might have hurt you. I am sorry.”

Shale did not answer.

Aev heard a scraping sound, and smelled the sharp tang of spent lightning.

She looked down. A cold blue blade jutted from a window beneath them. She watched it slice a circle in the glass. A human head emerged from the hole, black curls bobbing. Then the head disappeared, only to pop back through the glass facing up. Tara Abernathy looked frustrated. Then again, she often did, at least when Aev saw her. “Aev! Didn't expect to find you here.”

“Ms. Abernathy. Good evening.”

Beside her, Shale tensed.

“Shale,” she said. “I'm sure Ms. Abernathy means well.”

“Her good intentions rarely come with deeds to match.”

“Cut off a guy's face once,” Tara said, “and he'll remember for the rest of his life.”

“It left an impression.”

“And you've thrown us all into the fire tonight. We're even, maybe. I hoped we could start fresh.”

“What do you want?”

“Poetry lessons.”

 

21

“I need a drink,” Cat said once Raz's sailors moored
Dream
and
Bounty
both and reefed the sails and jagged the mainmast and scuppered the jibjaw or whatever it was they'd been up to while she packed
Dream
's crew into Blacksuit wagons. “And before you get clever, I don't mean the kind where I'm the beverage. Care to chaperone?”

Raz signed a few forms and handed them to his ship's clerk. “You want me to come along and make sure you have no fun? Happy to oblige.”