Four Roads Cross (20 page)

There. A line of pulsing red was worked into the timbers of the hold. Tara wiped frost from the bulkhead. There, carved with exact knifework, lay nesting geometries of Craft. She cut a piece of canvas from an indenture's trousers and continued around the hold, wiping away the frost. By the time she completed the circle, she shuddered with lost heat and had to return to the hold and rub her hands until feeling needled back into her fingertips.

A Blacksuit brought Cat a form to sign, and she did. “I don't understand how you can let this happen,” Cat said. “It's disgusting.”

“I agree. This is part of the reason the Craft's uncomfortable with addiction and games, even stories. Prices are a negotiation. If you control desire—if you make people want something—you can do strange stuff to them. That's before we get into newfangled treachery, like balloon payments and variable interest rates. Most forced indentures wouldn't hold up in court, but few victims have access to Craftsmen.”

“So why haven't they woken up?”

“Because that room technically isn't part of Alt Coulumb. It's Kavekanese territory; the whole place is a chapel to one of their idols.”

Cat frowned. “To a fake god? Can they do that?”

“Sure. Kos is bound to recognize the Kavekanese pantheon, otherwise he wouldn't be able to do business with Concerns based in Kavekana, which is most of them. So he can't overrule the circle.”

“And why can't we drag them out?”

“Without the permission of the person who holds the indenture, dragging them out means you're trying to void their contract. Which Kos is bound to enforce in this case, because of the good faith clauses in his treaty. When you pull them out, Kos fights himself. Like one of those finger traps.”

“Can you fix it?”

She shook her head. “This is why I studied necromancy. Dead things behave predictably. Transactional work would give a dragon a headache. Their Craftswoman has tied this declaration of territory to a powerful, open-sourced binding ward. If that ward had a weakness in it, a million Craftswomen would have found it by now. We can fight her on the particulars of the case, by asserting primacy—basically, refusing to recognize the Kavekanese claim to their territory. In Crafty terms, it's like sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting really loud to keep the other person from persuading you; it's not good form, but it works temporarily. For that I'd need Kos's backing, though, which he can't give, because of the treaty. It's a neat trap.”

“But Kos isn't the only God we have available.” The top button of Cat's shirt was open; she reached beneath and fished out an ivory pendant Tara knew too well.

She did a little math in her head. Removed the black book from her purse, consulted her notes from yesterday's flight. Lady of Sky and Stone, okay, and the moon had tidal influence. “Cat, that's a really good idea.”

“You don't have to sound so surprised.”

“As Justice, she's pledged to support Kos; as Seril, she's independent. And since the Blacksuit is a repurposed temple contract, you're technically her priestess. You said you seized this boat—”

“Ship.”

“Ship, you seized it with other Blacksuits?”

“And with Raz.” She made a face when she said his name.

“Something wrong?”

“Don't start.”

“Fine,” she said. Cold bodies lay behind the closed door. “So, you and Raz. Anyone else?”

“Aev.”

“Good. We can claim Seril, rather than Kos, seized the boat. Ship. Seril died—at least, we all thought she did—before they started building idols on Kavekana, so she's never signed a full-faith-and-credit agreement with them. That should work.”

“So Seril gets the ship.”

“In a way, the timing's perfect. Yesterday I would have said no, because this would tip off the world that Seril was still alive. But we're announcing her survival in an interview tonight. I can set up the triggers in advance. When we're ready, you and Raz sign the paper and wake these people up, giving us more evidence Seril's separate from Kos—because if she was not, we couldn't break this circle.” She rifled through her purse. Vials, vials, astrolabe, sextant, compass, paring knife, rabbit's foot, black bag, silver nails, more vials. “Shit. Do you have any cinnabar?”

“I'll send someone,” Cat said.

“We need the good stuff. There's a guy on Twenty-third and Vine—”

“I'll send someone.”

“And I'll get to work.”

 

25

Matt woke at quarter to three as usual, and found Claire sleeping. He lit the stove with his morning prayers, made coffee, and pondered eggs. The coffee smell woke her, and she entered the kitchen wearing Donna's robe belted tight around her waist and closed up to her throat. Couch cushions left a deep crease down her cheek.

“Coffee?” she asked before he could offer. Her voice was a crackle of dead leaves. He poured from the percolator and she drank as if racing to reach the bottom. “Thank you,” she said when she finished, and he poured more. The coffee filled in the cracks of her voice.

“Do you like eggs?”

“Every way but boiled.”

He'd planned to take a few hard-boiled from the bowl in the refrigerator, but she was a guest. “Cheese?”

“Yes.” She poured herself more coffee. Emptied the percolator halfway through the cup. “I'm sorry. I didn't ask if you wanted—”

“I'll make more.” He was not whispering, but he talked low. “I don't have company in the mornings.”

“I'll do the coffee. You make eggs.”

He grated a handful of sharp cheese, heated oil, cracked the eggs into a bowl, did his best to ignore Claire moving through the kitchen. Her footsteps weren't Donna's, and he hadn't realized how unused he was to anyone else's presence here. “Coffee's in the cabinet upper left of the sink.” Outside the sky was still black, and streetlights burned. Scramble, scramble.

“You buy it ground?” As if he'd confessed to killing children.

“The store grinds it for the percolator.”

She kept quiet, leaving him space to ponder the wrongness of his opinion. She dumped grounds into the sink, which made him wince—they didn't have a disposal. He remembered yesterday's sharp-edged conversation and compared it to whatever was happening this morning, so early that Donna still called it night. There was dew on the window. The eggs set; he tossed in cheese, and didn't correct her about the grounds in the sink.

She watched the coffee as if it were the spring's first flower opening from a bud. Snapped off the burner, poured fast. When he drank, the flavor opened and kept opening into the back of his throat.

“Good eggs,” she said around a mouthful.

“What did you do to the coffee?”

“If you overboil it, there's too much acid,” she said. “The taste's weaker than it should be but that's what you get using ground beans. I added cinnamon, but it's not the same.” She shoveled the remaining eggs into her mouth, swallowed hard, then added coffee. “Good, though.”

“You'll have to show me.”

“It's easy.”

Dishes in the sink. He grabbed his jacket. By the time he returned, he found she'd washed the dishes, racked them to dry, and scooped the grounds out of the sink.

He stabled the wagon in a garage three blocks over. The morning's chill fingers ignored his jacket, shirt, and skin, shoved right into him to grab handfuls of viscera. Claire kept her chin down. Theirs was the first cart to leave the garage; the golem plodded forward on four legs. They descended the garage ramp to the street and picked up speed as they drove west through drifting mist beneath a sky still hung with stars.

“I'll take the leads,” Claire said when they cleared the quarter's edge. “You can sleep.”

The offer confused Matt. He had not considered letting someone else drive his cart, because he never had someone else to do so. Navigating the morning with this girl beside him made his whole routine, the road and the cart and the mist, seem strange. “I can't sleep once I'm awake,” he said. That sounded like a riddle told by those head-shaved kids who studied with the Shining Empire sages down on Bleeker, so he tried again. “I mean, I don't nap.”

“I'm the same,” she said. “I asked because it's boring to sit here with nothing to do.”

The golem trudged through the muck of unswept streets.

“You've worked golems before?”

“We have one.”

“We'll switch off. No sense just one of us being bored.”

She accepted the leads. Her hand wasn't so steady as Matt's. She took corners harder and stopped faster, and hummed tunelessly as she drove, notes crushed and skewed and not at all like her sister's song. But she watched the road. Donna always made fun of Matt for his caution with the leads. Came from the business: eggs were strong, but he didn't like to jostle them. A carton broken was a carton lost.

“You drive often?”

She let the wheels roll the question under and golem feet trample it. When he thought it crushed to death, she spoke. “I drive most days. Dad doesn't tend to wake this early. When he's sick, I go. When he isn't, I pretend I'm sleeping.”

When she said “sick,” he heard hung over, and remembered Corbin's foul look in the stalls of a morning. “It's good of you to take care of him.”

“I take care of the girls.”

He almost asked what she meant by that, by not including herself with her sisters, but he had an idea. “It's not fair that you have to do so much.”

“How's your head?”

He didn't understand the question. She touched her own left temple; he mimicked her, and felt the bandage there and the scab beneath. It was a dull ache.

City gave ground to country as grudgingly as the night surrendered to dawn. Trees replaced sidewalks, grasses invaded the gaps between buildings. The sky crushed houses down to soil. They made good time thanks to Claire's driving. Fields opened, with dirt roads winding into them, and they followed those roads, collecting from her suppliers and his. “Didn't know you had a girl,” Cummings said when Matt picked up his eggs.

“I don't,” Matt said. “Just doing a favor for—” A friend? Was Rafferty a friend? Was he doing this for him? “Just doing a favor.”

Cummings came from people who didn't talk much and spoke mostly with their faces: brows raised, lips pursed, cheeks hollowed, breath drawn through the nose. He spit into the dirt. “Mighty fine. Mrs. Cummings made more coffee. You want some?”

“Could use some, thank you, Samuel.”

Cummings brought two mugs. “Bring 'em back tomorrow is all.”

“Thank you,” he said, and she said to him when he brought the mugs to her. The coffee wasn't as good as Claire's, but it passed.

 

26

The runner from the Church of Kos found Tara an hour and a half later. She'd mainlined two more cups of coffee-adjacent liquid to stop the glyphs from squirming beneath her knife as she carved them. The cinnabar was the good stuff after all. Once Tara was in motion, she found the chill invigorating.

Occasionally as she worked she added up the fees she would have billed for this job in private practice—like humming, only with regret instead of music. She could be off with Ms. Kevarian in the Archipelago, jetting from case to case rather than miring herself in local politics. Certainly she'd have made more progress on her debt. But then who would have been left to help these people? Or deal with Gavriel Jones?

Or to swear a blue streak when she opened the sealed scroll the runner brought her and read: representatives from Grossman and Mime arrived to meet with Cardinals, come at earliest convenience?

Cat spun around and dropped into a fighting crouch when Tara stormed onto the deck. “What the hells is going on?” She had to sprint to catch Tara.

“I'm done downstairs,” she said, and tossed Cat a scroll. “Get Raz's signature; this will wake them when the time's right. Meanwhile, make sure no one goes inside, and if anyone does, don't let them touch anything. I have to leave.”

“What is it?”

“I'll explain later.” She ran down the gangplank to the docks, past the Blacksuit cordon into a haze of spice and silk and shouted sales pitches. A kid tried to pick her pocket but she caught her wrist and let her go. Past the market, she raised one hand and swore to pass the time until a cab arrived.

Abelard met her at the sanctum doors. He paced outside the front steps, leaving little holes in the gravel when he turned. Just like old times.

“Bede's meeting the Craftswomen now,” he said. “They arrived an hour ago. Took a red-eye from Dresediel Lex, they said. Two of them. I didn't get their cards. They just showed up and demanded to speak with the Cardinals. The senior's a woman named Ramp.”

He led her through the forechamber with its stained glass and pointed arches and vaulted columns and kneeling faithful. No amount of people gathered here could possibly make the place feel full, but the pews were packed, and even side shrines occupied. Abelard led her at a jog down a hall so narrow it seemed more like a fissure in rock than a space built for humans. “Madeline Ramp?”

“That's the one.” They stopped in front of a lift. Abelard pushed the
UP
button, and as they waited, asked, “You know her?”

There were many ways to answer that question. “She's a demonic transactional specialist. She was coauthor on a paper I read back at school. Very high-level stuff.”

“What was the subject?”

“Strategic modeling in distributed action networks.”

“What does that mean?”

“It'd take more than an elevator ride to explain.” The doors dinged and rolled open. “What matters is the name of the first coauthor.”

Abelard followed her into the lift. “Denovo.”