Four Roads Cross (24 page)

*   *   *

Claire stocked the stall and kept it herself all day, without father or sisters, complaint or apparent fatigue. She even smiled when she thought Matt wasn't looking, though not more than once or twice an hour and never more curve than the blade of a paring knife. The produce moved. She kept the books and collected soulstuff for the family shrine. Sandy dropped by after the fiercest wave of customers passed to talk with Claire. Claire answered her politely—not that Matt was eavesdropping, only they were close enough he could hear her tone of voice.

Sandy visited his stall next. “You well?” Capistano'd come by too and asked the same question, but when Matt answered yes, the other man did one of those nods you could do only if you had a neck as long as his, where the whole head moved independent of the body like a spring-spined toy doll, and left. Sandy stayed. “And the girls?”

“Them, too.”

“I came over here to tell you off for letting Claire come to work,” she said. “But I won't.”

“Wouldn't stay behind. Strong kid.”

She gave him a sideways expression he couldn't read.

“You should get your shocks fixed, on your truck. Ray's cousin knows a guy.”

“You said that last night.”

“I did.” Though he didn't remember. “Thanks, Sandy.”

He took Claire to Cadfael's that afternoon. They ate in a silence that seemed deeper than the silence of the morning mist and country roads. She ate little, and though she looked at his beer when the waitress brought him one, she ordered tea.

“I'll go see Father tonight,” she said. “Sandy says they took him to Branch Staffords. He's still asleep.”

“Good of her to look into that,” he said. “I'll go with you, if you want company.”

She chewed each bite of chicken breast ten times before she swallowed. “I do. Thank you.”

They took the cart back to the garage near Matt's apartment and walked home. A light sea breeze cleared the air of smoke and damp. Hannah and Ellen and Donna weren't home. Donna had left a note: she'd taken the girls with her to work.

“They won't be home 'til late,” he said. “We could pick them up before we head over.”

“No,” Claire said. “They don't need to come with us.”

So as the sun fell faster, they rode the trolley southeast to Branch Staffords Hospital, three blocks of red brick cubes with tall curtained windows. As they descended to the curb Matt saw a ripple in the top-floor curtains and looked up into a face staring down: dark eyes and an open mouth. Claire led him across the street. An orderly in the first building directed them to a second, who directed them to a building back behind the parking lot. Crossing the parking lot, Matt watched his feet. He did not want to see the dark eyes and the open mouth again.

“Are you okay?” Claire said.

Fine is what he meant to say, but what he did was, “My mother passed here, three years ago. That was her room.” Third floor from the top, second from the left, north wing. “We expected it, but she didn't go clean.”

“I'm sorry.” She held her hands in front of her skirt.

The east wing orderlies consulted a book heavier than most scriptures Matt had seen.

“Relation?”

“I'm his daughter,” Claire said. “Matt is a friend of the family.”

They rode up three floors in a white lift that smelled of alcohol. Matt leaned against the rail to the rear of the lift. Claire touched nothing.

Rafferty lay in a bed. He did not move. “He had a rough night,” the nurse said. “He's unconscious, but you can watch him if you want.”

“Thank you,” Claire replied. “This is all we need.”

The man left them in the room together. There were no bags and drips, no tangled wires, and fewer of the foul smells Matt remembered from his last visit.

“I don't need you,” Claire said. “Go, if you want. I know the bus route back to your place.”

Matt's mother had not known where or who she was when she died. There had been love in the room, but bile and blood, too. It was a bad echo of birth, her eyes dark as the inside of her mouth. She did not understand what was happening. For Matt, the memory was one more weight to carry, and there was no place in him where it could rest easy, this ungainly thing that clunked and rattled but would not break.

“I'll wait,” he said.

 

30

Raz opened the captain's cabin door on Cat's third knock. He paused when he saw her and shook his head as if she'd slapped him. “Who let you on board?”

“Davis,” she said.

“Davis.”

“Don't blame her. I'm on official business.” She raised the scroll Tara gave her. “Salvage agreement for the
Dream.
We need to sign it there.”

“Let Davis sign it. She's co-captain.”

“She wasn't in command when the salvage took place. We don't want any loopholes.”

“Give me a minute to square this lot away,” he said, and turned to his crew. Even angry, Raz moved beautifully—perhaps a particular grace emerged from his anger. The crew scattered before him like goats before a lion.
Bounty
's early evening business took less time to settle than she expected, probably due to the fact that Raz was three, four times faster than most humans. He blurred around the edges.

“Let's go,” he said when he was done.

She passed him the scroll, which he skimmed as they walked over. “I don't understand this.”

“Tara says if we took the
Dream
under Coulumbite authority, we can't wake up the people in her hold. If we claimed her under a different authority”—with a meaningful nod toward the new-risen moon—“we can wake them, just like that. But since you were involved, you need to sign.”

He reread the scroll, examined it front and back. “Okay.”

“Any questions?”

“Do whatever you want, and justify it later if you don't like the consequences. Sounds like your kind of plan.”

“That was beneath you,” she said.
Dream
's gangplank was down. She climbed first, and he followed her. The cry came: “Captain on deck!” The skeleton who'd given it saluted them with a clatter of finger bone against skull.

Raz returned the salute. “Come on. Let's finish this.”

*   *   *

Abelard joined vigil early. Outside the sanctum window, the blued sky deepened to black. Around him, the Sanctum of Kos Everburning beat like a heart. Hydraulic fluid pulsed through pumps. Steam sang down pipes. He lit incense in the Everburning Flame and knelt before the chromed altar with hands outstretched. Firelight glazed the faces of long-dead saints, women and men of faith who'd raised Alt Coulumb from river mouth port to metropolis, who'd shed their blood for God, who'd let the Lord's heat work through them. As a novice, he dreamed of following their path.

Some felt he had.

He had been convenient to God back then, that was all.

But he could earn his place.

His voice framed the prayer. He'd knelt here so often the words seemed to speak themselves. These days he struggled to keep his heart in the ceremony, to feel the ritual as praise rather than a series of rehearsed steps.

Tonight the words formed as they should:
Glory to You, Ever-burning, Ever-transforming—
and within them he framed his appeal.

We need to talk.

The world around him took fire, and he was lifted.

His body knelt. His voice prayed. It was his context that changed. A cold rush climbed his spine, spread through his limbs, and he stood astride the city. But when he looked down on Alt Coulumb's teeming streets and sidewalks and the wharfs that pulsed with broad-backed men and women strong as sprung steel, he saw them as if he was them, as if he moved through and within them, as if his thoughts were pieces of theirs—

fuck they want to buy at that price
for
I don't even

              
gotta hold the knife like
this
so you won't cut

                    
even know where
was
he last night and he comes

                    
home all

                               
consider
the
alternatives

                                 
I don't
mind
if you just want to screw

                                       
fillet
of
whitefish six thaums a pound

                                             
God
-
damn Blacksuits make it so

                                             
a man can't live

Gods, or at least the few with which Abelard was on speaking terms, could use human speech, as a person who lacked sign language could point to a flower or a passing cloud. The bigger the god, the harder that became. Rather than reducing themselves to human syntax, larger deities preferred to elevate humans to theirs. That approach had drawbacks, though. Human beings were good at comprehending things that looked, thought, and spoke at roughly human size, speed, and complexity. A modern god in a modern city, networked through faith and bond to pantheons and Deathless Kings around the planet, was larger, faster, and more complex than monkey-derived man. Divine communions sometimes made as little sense as Cathbart's sermons might to an ape. Some saints went mad from the experience.

Not that Abelard could have expressed such thoughts in that moment, borne on the tide of God, burning in the flame at the heart of His city. Kos Everburning, Lord of Flame, gave His servant knowledge of Himself. Tears streamed down Abelard's face.

Through the awe and wonder, though, he thought: you won't get off the hook that easily.

The city web wriggled and drew back, cold, nonchalant. God had no idea what he could possibly mean.

I'm here to talk about Seril. You know what's happening. Everything Tara's said in council. There's no use playing dumb.

(Lord Kos was great and benevolent and wise. Why feign politeness, as if such an Interlocutor could only hear your surface thoughts?)

The city moved. Far below, in a body that was but one axon of the Mind with which he now conversed, he spoke the second stanza of the Litany for the Coming Burn. Ocean rolled against pier and distant sand, with a sound like the shuffling of enormous feet.

I know you love Seril. I know what you went through to bring Her back.

The world collapsed to a spark, all while he was coiled and compressed until thought's whirlpool became a slow sludge spinning downward toward a drain. Curled inside Abelard's cigarette, Lord Kos had been a flame quivering on the wick of a single soul.

But the more you work for her, the more you set us all at risk. Tara says, and Bede says, if you support her, Craftsmen will use that against you. Break you. Seize control of the city. You might die. Seril has to stand alone, or fail.

If there was a change in the God, he did not feel it. The city's many voices receded, and he heard his own again, praying.

The God wanted to know what he thought. Not Bede. Not Tara. Him.

They know the market, Abelard prayed reluctantly. They know how the world works, and the Craft. They know the risks. I trust them.

The flame danced within its wire throne.

But do we trust each other?

*   *   *

“It's strange,” Daphne said when the balloon reached its intended altitude. She bent over the basket's edge and looked down upon the tops of skyscrapers and jagged streets, as if a drunken civil engineer had broken a case of matchsticks with a hammer, then dropped the pieces on a map. “The sky's so clear.”

“It's dirty,” Ramp replied. “Smog and smoke and steam and fumes. Though the god does give them a sustainable power source, at least.”

“I don't mean the air,“Daphne said. “I mean the sky. No spires. No optera. No airbuses or blimps or platforms. We're all alone. We're all alone!” she shouted out to the north, and “Alone!” to the south, but neither horizon answered. Her words didn't echo. They were too high up for that.

“All in good time,” Ramp said. She reclined on the nest of cushions she'd made in the basket, and paged through this week's
Thaumaturgist.
A teacup lifted itself to her lips. “Be patient, and be ready.”

 

31

Glyph-lines burned around the door of the
Dream
's refrigerated hold. Cat climbed down a rope ladder; Raz dropped in straight-legged, and rolled his shoulders, producing a drum line of pops and cracks. “Do I have to sign in blood?” he asked. “Naked, dancing under a full moon?”

“I wouldn't complain.”

He smiled halfway but didn't rise to the joke.

“Ink's fine,” she said.

“Do you have a pen? I left mine in my other pants.”

She produced a ballpoint from her pocket; the white barrel glowed in the shadows. He reached for it. She did not offer it to him.

“So that's why you wanted to come down here,” he said. “Privacy.”

“We need to talk.”

He spread his arms. “Cat, we each have our own problems. When we're close, those problems get mangled together. Best to back away.”

“That's why you spend so much time on the ocean,” she said. “Can't back off any farther than that. If you could go to the moon you probably would.”

“My job is on the ocean. I like my job. If living there helps me manage, why not? You don't understand what I deal with. You think you do, but you don't.”