Four Roads Cross (40 page)

“Did you just say, in this thing's defense, that it reminds you of knife juggling?”

Moonlight glinted off his teeth.

Cat leaned back. “What's this big secret, anyway? Or do you plan to kidnap me and save me from the battle?”

“Why not both?”

“My duty's back on shore. And I'm pretty sure I can beat you up.”

“Who would sail you home?”

“I'd fly. Or use your breastbone for a paddle.”

“I'll scratch kidnapping off the agenda.” The sail's lower edge flapped like a flag in a breeze. He let out line, and it filled again.

She turned back to the glow ashore. City towers shrank to needles of light.

“Looks beautiful, doesn't it?”

“A bit,” she said. She trailed one hand in the waves. The V's that trailed her fingers caught moonlight. She thought about time and water.

“We'll soon pass the continental shelf.”

“I shouldn't be out here,” she said.

“That makes two of us.”

She flicked salt water toward his face. “I should be on patrol. That song at sunset—Justice needs everyone on the streets.”

“Fair.”

“You said two of us, though. Why shouldn't you be here? Isn't the ocean your thing?”

The sounding weight made a small splash. They watched each other as the line unspooled. She touched the back of his hand. It felt as cool as the water.

The reel clicked.

“I'm about to tell you something we don't talk about much,” he said. “Did you ever study history?”

“What, you mean in high school?”

“Do you remember what happened to High Telomere, to the Empire?”

Those schoolbook words sounded silly out here at night. She stifled a laugh with her knuckle against her lips.

He was not laughing.

“Cult, or something,” she said at last. History was a stuffy schoolroom a decade gone—more than that, gods—with big Mrs. Askel pacing through pillars of sunlit dust. “Took over the Empire. Expanded. Fought Schwarzwald tribes. They allied, invaded back, broke Telomere to pieces.”

“Burned the topless towers,” Raz said, “tore temples stone from stone and sank the stones into the Midgard Sea. You can still find them, if you dive.”

“We're two thousand miles from the Midgard. I don't think there were any Telomeri temples here to sink.”

“Do you remember anything else about the cult?” he asked.

“If we're playing Questions, I think your turn's over.”

“Humor me.”

Chalk screeched blackboard in memory; the back of her hand stung with a ruler's impact. She'd drifted off, forehead on crossed arms, pigtails against her ears (didn't cut her hair short 'til tenth grade, and she dropped out soon after), tired from fighting with Mom the night before. Mrs. Askel wore heavy powder on her face. Miss Elle, recite the next section of the text. “Usual sort of accusations people level against folk they don't like. Eating flesh. Drinking blood. Raising the dead.” She blinked. “No.”

“The sucker's deal,” Raz said, “shows up on its own every few centuries. Elayne says it's baked into our species, though that sounds like what Crafty folk say when they don't want to admit they don't know the answer. The point is, you don't see as many, ah, people like me around, not anywhere near as many as you'd expect given how easily kid leeches lose control.”

“We kill them when they slip up.”
Them,
not
you.
She wasn't sure how she felt about making that distinction.

“You don't kill everyone,” he replied. “And the Iskari and Schwarzwaldens and the angels of Alikand didn't kill the Imperials—not all of them. What's good for the temple's good for the cultist. You remember back in your apartment, when I mentioned walking into the ocean?”

The night grew brighter as her eyes widened.

“It's a good life down there, if you don't need this one. Dark and cool, with like-minded company. And there's plenty in the sea that bleeds. I stay clear; to them I'm the one that got away. I should have been a fresh father for a new line. The way they tell it, I should join their congregation, settle down, start a colony of my own. Stop rambling. A life for which, as you can imagine, I have little taste.” He unbuttoned his shirt. Age-paled scars hatched skin the color of rosewood. “But you need help, Seril needs allies, and desperation makes strange bedfellows. They want me. If I can use that to help you, I will.”

“I was joking,” she said, “about vampire gods.”

“I wasn't.” He pointed down into the depths. “Good thing you sink in the Suit. We'd have had to bring weights otherwise.”

*   *   *

“We can run,” Dr. Hasim said when they were safe behind a locked door. “Or we can stay and help these people fight. We must choose.”

The refugee council gathered in an empty on-call room Hasim had persuaded the orderlies to lend them: Aedi who'd worked with him in the Refuge for a decade; Akhil who collapsed on their doorstep five years back, having wandered half-blind out of the Wastes shrunken as a dried fig; Zola who handled the shrines' day-to-day management; quiet Mohem to whom the Refuge's younger guests looked in their troubles.

Mohem, to his surprise, was the first to speak, her voice velvety with rare use: “We are all here, and gods too. Seventy-one awake, and twenty-eight still sleep. Of those, twenty-four dream shallow enough for me to taste. Four are too far gone for me to hear their voices.”

Zola had found herself a clipboard and everyone proper clothes, though the fabrics were coarse and the styles ill-fit and ill-fitting: Hasim wore twill slacks three sizes too large, a belt in which he'd awled an extra hole, and a cotton shirt with ill-considered checks. Zola had not said how, in a building where people died regularly, she acquired the clothes.

She consulted her clipboard. “Our debts appear to have been canceled.” Murmurs around the circle. Akhil looked up from his stitching. “We have a soul apiece, offered by the Goddess Seril. I applied for credit at HBSE and First Camlaander, without success. By freeing us, the Goddess has placed us in thaumaturgical limbo: we are members of Her community, under Her protection—but the broader Craftwork world does not acknowledge Her existence.”

Akhil had been, among other things, a tailor before his town fell, and was adjusting his Zola-found shirt to fit. He pulled his thread taut, pursing a long seam's lips. “Then there's the chorus in the sky.”

“What do you make of that?” Hasim said.

Akhil tied off the thread and cut it with a scalpel liberated from a nursing station. “The city is in danger. These aren't the days, and this was never the land, for a God so leveraged to Craftsmen to address His people directly. He's afraid.”

Zola turned pages on her clipboard. “The locals love Kos, but few remember Seril as anything but a threat. Their faith is structured for a diad, but they don't have the praxis.”

Akhil cocked his head to one side. “How do you know what the people think? We've scarcely had a chance to leave this building.”

“A hospital—” She frowned, set a hand to her mouth, shook her head. Hasim recognized that expression. The word had pulled at the cuts on her lips. “A hospital tangles many lines. Nurses have one background, doctors another, and everyone falls sick sometime. People talk, especially when they do not think one speaks good Kathic. I have limited my vocabulary in public spaces.”

Mohem rubbed her upper arms. “We could run to the ghost cults in Alt Selene. A train leaves tomorrow.”

Akhil pinched, and pierced, and drew the needle. “Would that not violate the terms of our redemption?”

“There are no terms.” Zola flipped back to the first page. “Seril refused to recognize our indenture. Her soul-gift is simple grace. We owe her nothing.”

“If she falls, the indenture may seize us again.”

“We can be safe under a new guardian before that happens. I know it sounds ungrateful, but this is not our fight. Someone—presumably Grimwald Holdings—attacked us, and we woke here. Seril stands against our enemies, but she will fall. We have”—Zola checked the wall clock—“thirty-two hours to find a better bulwark. Alt Selene's ghost cults offer generous asylum terms. Alternatively, we could sue for Kosite asylum in the Court of Craft, claiming Seril is subsidiary to Kos, and he inherits her obligations.”

“Which would aid the Craftsmen who attack Her,” Hasim said. “I dislike that idea.”

“We have to protect ourselves, Doctor. And our Partners.”

“And so the choice remains,” he said. “Run or fight.”

Zola leaned back in the chair and caged her long fingers. “I say run.”

“As do I.”

Zola turned in surprise to Akhil, who shrugged as if their agreement were not a momentous occasion.

Mohem pressed her lips into a line as she thought, and when she decided, they unfolded and filled with color again. “The Refuge took me in, back in Agdel Lex. I helped it in return. Seril took us in. I think we should help her. We fight.”

“I agree,” Hasim said. “She needs us as much as any broken deity who ever stumbled to our doorstep. What are we for, if we desert her now? Fight.”

One by one they turned to Aedi. Aedi spoke seldom when she was not praying, and when she spoke she did not use her own words, drawing instead from scriptures the source of which mystified even Hasim. In the Refuge, as each new destitute arrived, Aedi sat reading beside them, working the prayer beads woven into her hair between knuckle and thumb. She was older than Hasim, and wiser. He did not know how great was the gulf between them in either category, but since they first met, he had grown to suspect it was considerable.

Aedi's braids snaked over her shoulders when she nodded, twisted left and right when she shook her head. They snaked today. “There will be war,” she said, “even in the dry places of the earth.”

 

51

“Boardrooms,” Shale said as they entered the mountain. Circles of light from their hand torches played over blast-hewn tunnel walls. “We should expect boardrooms and arguments, you said on the flight. You didn't mention mines, or undead beasts.”

Tara led the way, thankful for her borrowed boots, which were large but at least had traction. In the flats she brought, she'd have broken three bones by now. Water dripped from a wall seam to the tunnel floor. “If I expected this, I would have packed for it.”

“If I expected this, I would have—”

“Stayed home? Let me do my job?”

“No.”

“I didn't think so,” she said, and checked her watch, as she had three times since arriving in camp. If it took them more than an hour to find Altemoc, they'd miss the evening flight back to Alt Coulumb. Another flight left the next morning, and after that nothing until sunset. Miss both of those, and she'd not make the court date, with or without the deal. She snapped her watch shut. “Shouldn't you be happy? This seems like your kind of place.”

“Unfinished stone?” His face twisted in disgust. “I was born in Alt Coulumb. My block was quarried from a moonlit pit and weather-shaped on rooftops. Descending into living Rock—it doesn't feel right.”

“You're made of stone.”

“You're made of meat. Maybe after this we can find a nice tight wet dark meat tunnel for you to squeeze down.”

“Point taken.” Her stomach unclenched slowly.

They reached a three-way fork in the tunnel. Each path led down, and all were smaller than the main concourse they'd followed so far. Tara folded and unfolded the map until she found the relevant square. Altemoc's route continued straight.

She set one hand on the stone and closed her eyes. Lightning spun spiderwebs around her and down into the bones of the world. “Ms. Batan said her team went for the mine offices while Altemoc led his into the depths. Batan heard the scream, went to find him, but ran into a ‘wall of shadow.' She pushed at the wall; it tried to pull her in, but she escaped.” She frowned. “Huh.”

“Problem?”

“The Craftwork in these tunnels is weaker than it should be. Something draining it would explain the slurry leaks, the revenants. But I don't see any trace of shadow walls or the other stuff Ms. Batan describes.” The mountain pressed around them, blacker than black, squeezing tiny lines of human Craft, which
quivered
like seaweed as a leviathan moved through—“Shit.” She grabbed Shale's wrist. “Run!”

He did, as the tunnel walls began to glow. Ore veins shone brilliant red, and Tara smelled ozone. Red light chased them down the tunnel, casting crimson shadows. Behind her, a roar issued from no throat. Tara glanced back and saw blinding fire. Her boot struck a jutting rock. Her ankle turned. She stumbled, swore. Shale had pulled ahead of her. She skipped three steps, tried the ankle again—sound, though gods and demons did it hurt.

The roar was nearer. She heard a lightning crack. She could not outrun the coming fire.

She tried, though, dammit, even as the hairs on the back of her neck stood up and her skin charged with the memory of fire.

A stone hand pulled her into a side tunnel. The thunder ate her squawk of protest. She brought her knife around, brilliant in the shadows, before she recognized Shale in stone form—though not the healthy sculpture she remembered. Moonlight bled from deep wounds, from the missing corner of an ear and a hole in his right wing.

Red lightning carved grotesque shadows from the dark. Tara woke her glyphs, more for reassurance than out of faith they'd save her if whatever-it-was in the tunnel struck them.

Lightning jumped between crystal veins in the tunnel wall. Another bolt followed, and a third, and then they came too fast to count, arc after arc crisscrossing fractal dense. Her brain constructed figures from their dance: bison-headed men and goat-legged somersaulting acrobats, artifacts of spark and flame, the roar their laughter.