Four Roads Cross (23 page)

“Tara,” Abelard said, afraid. Great hands tore the folded newspaper of the dream down the center. Logical consistency stretched like taffy. She hurt, and ignored the pain. Kos's power blushed through the ghost-glass city's sky. Drawing closer, she saw the blush was in fact a candyfloss haze of hooks wrestling with a Great Unseen.

Demon thorns pulled the edges of the world-wound wide. Beyond spread a noonday kaleidoscope of blunt angles and teeth, a story in which she had no part, which would consume her and her world alike. Four bridge-wide stitches remained, and fractal blights wilted their edges. One gave a sound like a bass string breaking. Three left. Two, soon.

“Tara!”

But that Great Unseen, the mystery against which Kos struggled to own the sky—she recognized it. Drew close to the hooks. Squinted. And saw a series of numbers in the tangle of each hook, and glyphs:
Kos Everburning v. Red King Consolidated.

The last stitch broke with a bone-shivering A-sharp. The whole sky split at once. Arms that were tongues that were spears flew down.

But Tara and Abelard were not there anymore, and then the world was not, either.

Orbs of Tara throbbed flutterstep beneath wingskin as if rocked in pleasure. Eyes, she opened them. Air, she breathed it, and the dust it held. Ears, she heard with them the silence of a large paper-filled room, and the panting of a terrified monk. Skin, with curves of the stuff she felt the grain of a stone floor under her. She should install a bed in the archives someday.

Oh, and she had blood too, and a mind, and emotions not yet fully understood, one of them a distant cousin of compassion. Abelard. She sat up. Mountains of leather-bound codices and racks of scrolls swayed like willows blown in the storm of her unsettled mind. He sat cross-legged across the silver bowl at the archive center from her. He held his cut finger in one hand. The singed coppery smell of burned blood rose from within the bowl.

She stood, though her legs seemed unfamiliar devices. Leaning against her thighs, she orbited the bowl. “You okay?”

He stopped praying. “I thought it would be easier when He was alive.”

She pulled him to his feet, though her own balance wasn't perfect and she almost toppled them both into a case of scrolls. “He's more complicated alive than dead.” Back in this world they agreed was real, she could ditch the capital letter. “You cut your finger yourself?”

“Pierced it. With a needle.”

She winced.

“Don't worry, I burned the needle first.”

“Use alcohol next time.”

“Are those things—”

“The demons?”

“Will they be there the next time you go into the dream?”

“No. I shut it down completely. That notional world doesn't exist until I need it again. Why did you come looking for me?”

“I need your advice,” he said. “About God.”

As they walked through paper mountains toward the lift, he told her about his conversation with the Cardinal. She pressed the button and waited as motors surged behind closed doors. “You want to know if I think you should do it.”

“The Cardinal's right. Lord Kos might listen to me. But isn't it hubris to give a God advice?”

“You're asking the wrong person,” she said, “when it comes to avoiding hubris. My teachers thought gods were a quaint affectation.” She remembered the goddess in her room, wearing her face. Remembered, too, Daphne's flightless bird. “If the outside world thinks Kos will come to Seril's rescue whenever she's in trouble, that's bad for both of them. Debts falling due, margin calls, flights of wicked angels in the skies, spiritual armageddon.”

“So you think I should do it.”

“From a Craftswoman's perspective, sure. But no Craftswoman would be caught dead kneeling to a god.”
It sickens me,
Daphne'd said. Was Tara a Craftswoman anymore? She had her glyphs. She had her power. What else was there? “You have to weigh the options yourself. But the Cardinal's right about the danger.”

The lift arrived, bearing a trio of maintenance monks headed down. One of them, a large woman, worked the beads of her rosary until the lift reached the twelfth floor, and the trio left together. Abelard did not speak until they reached ground level and stepped into an empty hall. “I know you'll do the right thing,” Tara said, “whatever that is. You might as well stop fretting. You're not binding yourself to a contract, or incurring debt.”

“You're more confident than I am.”

“That's what friends are for.”

“Thank you for last night,” he said, “for the encouragement. I was selfish when we talked. I didn't realize how hard this is for you.”

There was a cold breeze in the narrow hall. “What do you mean?”

“You're out here on your own. I have the church, and Kos. Cat has her force. You should have a firm, Craftswomen and Craftsmen at your side. But you don't. It's just you, and you're not even from here. You're so good at what you do that it's easy for me to think you don't need anything or anyone. But that's not true. Whatever you were doing in the library, it was dangerous.”

“Not for me.”

“What if your wards didn't work as well as you hoped? What if the demons were stronger?”

“It was a calculated risk. My calculations skewed when you dropped in, that's all.”

“I'm not questioning your abilities.”

“That sure sounds like what you're doing.” A door opened and closed. Footsteps trickled over the nave's stone floor. A men's choir sang. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once. Tara couldn't make out the words, but the harmony was close and smooth. She made herself smile. “I can do this,” she said. “I just need to be smarter than everyone else. So what else is new?”

“Cat and I are here for you. You've spent the last year working and sleeping, outside of one poker night that didn't go well. If you wanted to, you know, have a beer, or anything—well, I'm here. That's all I wanted to say.”

Her watch chimed. “I have to go.”

“See you later,” he told her retreating back.

 

29

Daphne met Ms. Ramp on the roof of the Alt Coulumb Arms a half hour before sundown, on schedule. Ramp was eating pistachios from a bag. They cracked in midair in front of her, and the nutmeat floated to her mouth. The shells crisped to ash and rained as a fine powder to the roof.

“How did you find your meeting with our dear Ms. Abernathy?” Ramp said.

Daphne sighed, and set her briefcase on the gravel. “Went about as well as you expected. I don't get it. The Tara I knew would never be satisfied with these conditions.” The brass latches popped and the briefcase clamshelled open, whereupon she opened it a second time, space unfolding from within until a three-meter pallet heaped with fabric and rope lay before them. “You think they got to her? Religious experience triggers an endorphin rush, which leads to dependency. Gods push inside your head. Like distributed Craftwork, but for everything at once.”

“Possible.” Ramp knelt, gathered striped fabric in both hands, and dragged it back over the gravel. “But you can't assume mind control every time someone's goals differ from your own.”

“She wanted to get out of her hick town. She wanted to be somebody.”

“And she's ended up in Alt Coulumb, which is hardly a hick town. She is a person of local importance. I bet she even thinks she's doing the right thing, in that wonderfully abstract language young people use, as if there were a ‘right thing' independent of context, interest, or timing.” She fluffed the fabric. A cloud of packing dust cracked from its taut surface. Daphne connected a hydrogen tank, and the balloon inflated. “If you build a roof without walls, it will fall. Build walls before foundation, and they will collapse. Lay a foundation without digging out the soil, it will crumble. Does that mean it is wrong to build roof or walls or foundation? Not at all. Whenever we build, we must dirty our hands first.”

The balloon bellied up, straining against the ground lines Daphne tied. In the gilded afternoon, its white-and-red curve seemed obscenely medical. Daphne pondered the exact source of her fear of that shape. A memory bubbled from deep nightmare: her hand sawing silverskin from a knob of flesh. But the hand wasn't hers at all. The flesh, though—and somewhere, in the dark, she heard a man's laughter. Her knees went slack. She slumped against the balloon, which bobbed and swung.

“Daphne. Come back to me.”

“I don't,” she said. “I can't.” The ghosts of laughter wouldn't fade.

Cool gloved fingers touched Daphne's temple through the layer of sweat. Daphne felt a small blade enter the side of her neck and twist, and she heard a dubious hum. The seesaw pitching of the world resolved, and colors lost their bite. “There,” Ramp said, and drew the blade away. A drop of blood dried on her gloved fingertip. “I'm sorry if meeting Tara was too much for you.”

Daphne forced her back straight and unclenched her hands from the ropes. Synthetic fibers had left crisscross tracks on her palms. “It's fine. I feel.” There were words somewhere to match her feeling. She touched her neck. The wound was gone. “I feel bad for her. She's fallen so far.”

Madeline Ramp examined the blood on her glove as it dried, as if she could read the remnant stain like tea leaves. “Daphne,” she said in the same soft voice, “Ms. Abernathy won't join our cause just because we ask her to. If her loyalty's misplaced, we will have to fight her—break her down and bring her into the fold. Do you think you can do that? If not, you can sit this one out. You've done so much.”

At those words, the ground under Daphne gaped. She could fall back into purposeless void—into pondering the milk-swirled depths of teacups as women in pale dresses moved around her and whispered:
Don't take the tea, you'll upset her.
A mother wept somewhere, a mother who might have been hers.

All that smeared memory of tea and milk and hospital gowns had ended with five words:
I have work for you.

“I can do this,” she said.

“Good.” Ramp vaulted into the basket and extended her hand to Daphne. “Come, then. Let's dirty our hands.”

She cut the anchor lines, and the balloon rose over Alt Coulumb.

*   *   *

Tara found Gavriel Jones in the plaza before the Crier's Guild entrance, on the southeast corner of Providence and Flame. Guild spires cut the scudding clouds above the gathered audience: nobles and merchants and bankers mixed with cabdrivers and off-duty construction workers in dusty coveralls. Hot dog and pretzel carts did brisk trade at the square's edge.

Alt Coulumb's people had come for the news.

“Crowded,” Tara grumbled after she shoved past stevedores and stockbrokers to reach Jones by the stage. “I thought we had a deal.”

“We do,” Jones said. “But rumor travels faster than truth. People hear what's said between the lines. I hope your exclusive's worth the delay.”

A hush capped the crowd's murmur, as if a conductor had given signal. The Guild's front doors opened and two lines of velvet-robed choristers emerged in step. At the square's edge a man argued with a hot dog seller, and traffic clanked and clattered as usual, but the silence by the stage was so deep Tara could hear each singer's footfalls. Onstage, they curved into a shallow U. A singer in darker robes stepped forth, raised her hand. Tara heard a pitch but saw no pipe.

That morning's song had been a stripped-down version of the Paupers' Quarter fight, sans goddess: incantation more than melody, like the call-and-response hymns from Edgemont services. The simple line emphasized the words, which were the point.

At least, Tara had thought they were.

But words were not the point of the Criers' song that night. Tara heard a theme stated in the bass and restated, discordant, by other voices, describing the Paupers' Quarter gathering. The music swelled, shards of melody grating against one other, when Shale arrived. And then, the piece trembled on the verge of decoherence—she was not musician enough to give what happened its proper name. Harmonic fragments locked into a new, shining tone, a strange expanded inside-out chord, a brilliance. She caught her breath to keep from weeping.

Exhaustion, she told herself. Heightened emotions from two days' hard work.

She knew she was lying.

No single word betrayed Seril or broke Jones's promise. But Shale—although four decades of suspicion had primed the crowd to call him a monster—brought them glory through this music.

The choir held the chord, shifting like the light a full moon cast through diamond. Then came the dying fall, a restatement of the initial themes to summarize the night's events.

Tara's eyes were hot. Entirely due to the intensity with which she'd watched the stage. Of course.

The song ended. The audience stood rigid as if a current ran through them.

Applause came in torrents.

Tara turned to Jones. The journalist had her hat cocked back, her chin up, her hands in the pockets of her overcoat. The corners of her mouth turned up.

“Between the lines.” Tara had to shout to be heard through the cheers.

Jones shrugged. Every line on her face said, satisfied. “I've waited a long time for something to fit that music.”

“You wrote that?”

“A year back. Finally had cause to use it.”

“That was”—she searched for the right word—“more generous than I expected.”

“You keep trying to cast me as a villain, Tara.” Jones looked like a wine connoisseur after a fine sip of a joyful vintage, holding the sensation's ghost in her mouth and mind as it faded. “I'm not. Our goals are different, that's all.”

“Come on,” Tara said. She checked her watch. Fifteen minutes gone. She wasn't sure whether she was surprised the song was so long, or so short. Clock time didn't map to music. “I have a friend who wants to meet you.”