Four Roads Cross (37 page)

Bede took hold of his pipe and leaned against the table. Abelard did not listen to his response. Maybe God had brought him here to correct the Cardinals if they went astray? But he barely understood the issues under discussion. He could hold his own against anyone in matters of engineering, but when the conversation veered to evangelism and archive work, he was lost.

But God wasn't.

Oh.

Snarled gears unmeshed in his mind to mate again.

Abelard prayed, for real this time, and conference voices blurred into a polyphonous drone.

He greeted the Lord of Flame with a still heart. He surrendered his worldly mind to the spark. Fire curled an autumn leaf into a fist of ash.

He listened—not for words, splinters of the Lord's thought, but for the rhythm beyond words.

Kos had been betrayed by Cardinals before, and if traitors were to strike again, now was the time. But gods made poor detectives, their perspectives unmoored from time. Who better to be Kos's spy than Abelard? So He whispered to the Cardinals and folded the young Technician in their confidence.

Because He was afraid.

But He was wrong.

Bede was more loyal to Kos than to Seril. Nestor was a busybody. Aldis had her territorial insecurities. No person, no church, was perfect. But the Cardinals were faithful. Bede could have taken Ramp's deal and left Seril to die.

Kos did not trust His Cardinals, so He inspired them to include Abelard in their work. And the Cardinals were smart. They knew the score.

You're micromanaging,
Abelard prayed,
because you're scared.

Only crackling fire answered.

These people love You. They joined the church to serve You, and they do so now, though service scares them. Let them serve.

The fire in Abelard popped and pitted, and sparks burned his skin.

We're wasted in here, You and I. We could be out in the city, spreading miracles. The work your Cardinals do is important, which is why You called priests to do it for You. Trust them.

Presumption? Temerity? Pride?

Of course.

But what was a saint for, if not to talk with God?

Sun warmth spread through his limbs. That was Abelard's answer.

When they broke for coffee and tobacco—sorcerers' hunger for caffeine surpassed only by priests' need for a smoke—he sought Cardinal Nestor and Cardinal Bede. “Your Excellencies. Thank you for including me in this meeting, but I'm no use here. I can best serve Our Lord by working with Prelate Evangelist Hildegard.”

“Thank you, my son,” Nestor said, and Abelard felt embarrassed by the relief he read in the old man at the news God trusted him. Even Bede's shoulders rose.

“Do what you can,” the Cardinal said. “Go with God.”

“And you as well,” Abelard replied.

 

47

“Whatever happens,” Tara cautioned Shale as they flew west between skyspires and over the mansions of the Drakspine ridge, “do not try to kill the King in Red.”

“Okay.” Shale sounded unconvinced.

“This is important.” She fed their optera from her expense account—far from bottomless, but she could afford the ride. Travel by dragonfly felt strange at first. She'd been surprised when Shale accepted one rather than flying under his own power.

“He's a monster.”

Tara shook her head. “He's a respectable citizen. This city wouldn't exist without him.”

“A man can be both citizen and monster. Especially here.”

“In which case he's a monster
and
a respectable citizen, whom we're about to ask for a big favor. Besides, if you try to kill him, you'll probably just piss him off.”

“We almost broke him in the Wars.”

“Almost only counts with horseshoes and elder gods. He's grown since you fought. And, honestly, I know you've had a rough few decades, but I wish things like
don't attack the immensely powerful necromancer we've come to ask for help
could go unsaid.”

Streets crazed the irrigated ground like cracks on the scab of an infected wound. Elevated carriageways laced between pyramids—the largest, at 667 Sansilva, eighty stories tall and obsidian sheathed. Black glass grooves cast an illusion of writhing serpents on the pyramid's steps.

As far as Tara could see, the city bore little damage from the eclipse fiasco a few years back; she'd been at Contracts with her friend Kayla when the news came through, and waited with her in the long line of weeping students at the nightmare telegraph to call her dads. The dreams around Dresediel Lex were so tangled Kayla couldn't get through for two days, which Tara spent on the couch in Kayla's dorm, sleeping poorly; she'd told Kayla to wake her if she needed anything, and the girl took her at her word. Kayla's dads both lived—one broke his leg in the riots and the other spent three days stuck in a collapsed mall—but the waiting, not knowing, hurt.

Rebuilding, the city had turned a quarter mile of Sansilva Boulevard into a memorial walk. Tara decided she would visit if there was time.

For now, they had business at the Grisenbrandt Club.

North of Monicola Pier the beachside shops grew more expensive and elegant until they reached an expense and elegance singularity: the Grisenbrandt, a red-roofed, white-walled palace on the continent's edge. A ward misted the air above its courtyards and rooftop baths, to keep even the most inquisitive journalist from observing the club's clientele. The ward might have been opaque, but that wouldn't have allowed spies and onlookers to envy the rainforest green inside.

Tara and Shale landed on a riverrock path between two lawns that beggared any adjective but “verdant.” The doorman (a Quechal fellow in sunglasses and a funereal suit, whose posture suggested experience as valet, bouncer, and special forces commando) frowned as their optera flew away. People who belonged in the club arrived under their own power. Rentals were for those not rich enough to own.

“Hi,” Tara said with the cheer she always felt when about to ruin a snob's day, and produced the invitation the porter had delivered to her cabin this morning. “We have an appointment.”

The doorman took the invitation, skepticism evident even through his dark glasses. Tara savored his surprise as he read the document twice, turned it over to check for a watermark, then read it again.

“Of course,” the doorman said joylessly. The doors opened at his gesture. A young woman in a white blouse, an uncomfortable black skirt, and heels that forced her
en pointe
emerged. “Antonia will guide you.” Antonia's smile slipped when she read the invitation. “Enjoy your visit.”

And to the nine hells with you too,
Tara thought as she led Shale into the club.

They followed Antonia down a pillared arcade between two courtyards shaded with plant life stolen from around the world. Antonia's absurd heels left bloodred footprints on the white marble tiles. Ripples of color spread from those footprints as they faded, interlacing with the ripples Tara's and Shale's footsteps cast.

In a courtyard, a jazz quartet played soft music while clubgoers, skeletal or amorphous or many-limbed, broke their fast at an enormous buffet: glistening piles of fresh-cut exotic fruits and bewitching pastries, an omelet station, an elegant silver bowl of wriggling insects that laughed when eaten. In a salon to the left, a Shining Empire magistrate sipped tea with a Zurish mask-lord in the shade of a broad-leaved Dhisthran tree, all equally far from home.

The part of Tara that would always hail from a farming village on the edge of a desert pondered the expense of the shifting marble, the plants, the wards, the water, the band, the silver, the price of Antonia and the front-door jerkface and their comrades, carried the three to the ten million's place—then abandoned the exercise. In a way, this kind of wealth was easier to accept than the ease with which Daphne picked up their check at lunch. Even if Tara made partner at Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao, she wouldn't have lived in this world. You earned this power by stealing continents and breaking nations; this was wealth you tore from dying gods.

She frowned at the thought. What kind of radical was Alt Coulumb making her, anyway? Focus on the mission, Tara. Follow Antonia in the absurd heels.

The club doors opened onto a marble stair that led down to a white sand beach. Tara blinked brilliant ghosts from her vision.

The beach was empty save for a man who was not a man anymore.

Antonia extended her hand. Tara thanked her and descended.

The King in Red lay in swim trunks on a lounge chair, his pale anklebones crossed atop bamboo slats. The red gold crown set into his skull glinted dull and bloody in the sun.

White sand pillowed Tara's footsteps. Waves rushed and rolled. Bodies thronged the beach a hundred meters to her left and right: college kids tossed Frisbees, musician circles played guitars and drums and fiddles, surfers charged the breakers. Children kicked ullamal and cackled as they fell. Tara did not hear them. Their voices died on the crystal air.

The King in Red kept still as she approached. She gave his chair wide berth, rounding to the side. His ribs jutted from the chair like tree trunks a fire had stripped of bark and left to die.

One skeletal hand held a round glass three-quarters full (or one-quarter empty) of a weapons-grade pink cocktail shaded by four paper umbrellas and sporting a spear of tiny melon cubes interspaced with jadeite giraffes. Ice shifted in the glass.

He wore sunglasses, which made no sense. Golden tabs affixed the glasses to the holes where his ears would have been.

She stood, hands clasped behind her, watching and waiting. There were greater powers than the King in Red. It was just hard to think of any at this precise moment.

He raised the glass to where his lips once were, and drank. She watched the liquid disappear.

“Your Majesty,” she began, to be on the safe side.

“I know who you are, Ms. Abernathy. I know why you've come.”

His voice was almost human. The difference mattered.

“That will save time, Your Majesty.”

“Drop the Majesty. I have enough. I told Elayne I'd see you, and I have. You can go now.”

“I want to present my argument.”

“It's good to want things.” He drank again, and again the fluid disappeared—reduced to chaos, all useful properties stripped to feed the Craftwork that kept the King in Red whatever he was. “Alive” was the wrong word. “I want to hear from an old friend once in a while for some reason other than business. You want me to hand you a fortune for no reason. Your stone companion wants to murder me, though he's displaying admirable self-control.”

“Would you like me to stop?” Shale asked. Jewel facets glinted beneath his imitation human eyes.

“Try me.” The skeleton sounded bored. “Get this over with. I've killed so many of you before, in very many ways.” His voice went singsong for that last bit, then lost all humor. “I tore your goddess open and ripped her heart and lungs from the ruin of her chest. Break yourself on me, if you like. You're not the hundredth or even the thousandth to try. And when I'm done with you, I'll go back to my drink.”

He took another sip. Translucent giraffes danced with sun.

“Shale!”

There was no Craft in Tara's cry, but Shale stopped anyway, halfway to the King in Red. He'd begun to change. His skin was veined with gray and hatched with gleaming gaps, his back a wreckage of wings. The human seeming reasserted itself; the jaw cracked to fit shrinking teeth together. He knelt, gasping, on the sand. His shirt hung tattered from his shoulders. Scars crossed his back where the wounds had been.

The King in Red sat up and turned to face them both, elbows on knee bones, ridged spine rising between his shoulder blades. Cocktail sweat darkened his fingers. Of their own accord, the sunglasses slipped down to reveal the dead-star sparks in his eye sockets. “Interesting. It listens to you.”

“
He,
” Tara said, “is an envoy of my client, Seril Undying of Alt Coulumb. Who is still alive.”

“As I learned yesterday.”

“News travels fast.”

“Fast as fear.”

“Ramp approached you.”

He shrugged. “I own a good deal of Kosite debt in my own name. Red King Consolidated holds more. She's approached everyone with a substantial stake. Some of us have better things to do at the moment than fight a war, even a limited one.” He waved toward the waves. “As you see. So you needn't worry about me participating in her coup.”

“I wasn't.”

“Why did you listen to her?” he asked Shale. The gargoyle had recovered, mostly. Sweat slipped down curves of muscle. “Here I am. You've hated me for decades. I killed your lady, or close to it, and I liked it. I'll even give you first crack. No shields, or wards, or tricks.”

Shale stood. Tara prepared to bind him, in case her voice would not suffice this time. Given how hurt he'd seemed in that momentary shift, her restraint might break him. He wasn't in shape for a fight.

He might still try.

“Tara asked me not to fight you.”

“And you listened,” the skeleton said.

“Yes.”

Crimson sparks turned on her. “You've inspired a divine monster's loyalty. Nice trick. It earns you my time.” He glanced at the sky. “In five minutes the sun will turn the waves to gold and mark a path straight out over the bay to my favorite island. The air and sea are perfect, and the world sings. You'll be gone by then, one way or another. Speak quickly.”

“When you killed Seril in the God Wars, you stole Alt Coulumb's skies from her.”

“They were spoils of war.”

“Alt Coulumb's liturgy holds that Kos owns Alt Coulumb's skies in the event of Seril's death.”

“Which is why I've never been able to use the rights I won, outside of as collateral.” He finished his cocktail, ate the fruit, removed umbrellas and straw and jadeite giraffes and arranged them on the sand. “I claim ownership, Kos resists. I almost got my way when he died, but it turns out he was faking.”