Four Roads Cross (54 page)

She was quite sure that had been a slip of the tongue, but she'd not asked him for clarification.

She walked to the charcuterie spread she'd prepared, rolled a straw of prosciutto, popped it in her mouth, and chewed. She tasted meat and salt, smoke and fat. A bottle of pinot noir tipped wine into a glass, which floated to her hand as she turned back to the box. Bunny slippers scuffed across the gold thread of a Skeld rug.

She settled into her armchair, and with a flick of her fingers began to unwrap. Brown string untied itself and curled into a coil on the table. Tape split.

She ran her fingertips over rough cardboard and checked for signs of tampering, finding none.

She opened the lid, plunged her hand into packing immaterial, and found—

Nothing.

Wine sloshed over her fingers. She set the goblet down and groped in the impenetrable shadows. It was here. It had to be. Shrunk, maybe, or phase-shifted by post office mishandling, she'd flay the boy who brought it to her, or better yet find him in dreams and—

“Looking for this?”

Tara Abernathy sat in the armchair opposite, legs crossed. She held a silver-glyphed skull in one hand, like a jester's puppet or a philosopher's dummy.

“Ms. Abernathy,” Ramp said. “I thought you would know better than to bother me in my home.”

She did not need to move. The leather of the chair in which Abernathy sat split into thin straps, lashed up and around to snare and bind—

And passed through the woman as if she did not exist.

The straps reared back and swayed like confused cobras. Abernathy slapped one, and it slithered to quiescence within the upholstery.

Ramp glanced down at the open box. To either side of the lid she saw, taped, a business card:
TARA ABERNATHY, CRAFTSWOMAN
. No logo.

“Projection,” she said. “A shame. I can't offer you a drink.”

“You would have tied me up to offer me a drink?”

“I have a strict vision of hospitality.”

Abernathy smiled at that, a bit.

“Do you know who that is you're holding?”

“Yes,” she said, with a touch of distaste as if she'd smelled something foul.

“One of the greatest minds since Gerhardt. If not the greatest.”

“I don't know about that,” Tara said, assuming a mockery of the man's voice, that old country Craftsman's tones he'd faked so well. She tilted the skull down and sideways, so it seemed to be embarrassed. “I'm just a plain simple bastard.”

“Impertinence. You do not understand what Alexander Denovo was, what he did.”

“I understand better than you, I think.”

“I worked with him for decades.”

“And I was one of the people he worked on.” She considered the skull. “You know, I prefer him this way. Looks less sinister, for starters.” Tara uncrossed her legs, stood, and paced the small chamber, tossing the skull from hand to hand. “Justice found what was missing from the evidence locker. The package was harder to trace. We thought we were out of leads, until a friend asked for my help with a family matter. Her father showed up in the middle of our court date in the sky, ranting, warped. Someone had messed him up with Craft I recognized. Turns out he was roommates with a Talbeg priest who also escaped the hospital during the crisis. We found the priest—who's fine, by the way, thanks for asking—and we found the post office. The whole thing involved too many last-minute heroics for my taste. We had to waylay the delivery truck this afternoon. Sorry it was late.”

Ramp said nothing.

Abernathy tossed the skull into the air, caught it, and hooked her fingers through the eye sockets. “During the package chase I got talking with Cat, and Raz, and a bunch of other people, and talking leads to thinking—about Maura Varg's mystery client, who hired her to pick up indentures in the Gleb and collect a load of dreamglass in Alt Coulumb, even though dreamglass is illegal there. We asked ourselves where Raz's tip came from, and I remembered the mysterious gray-eyed girl who set Gabby Jones on the Seril story in the first place. Daphne has—had—gray eyes. Jump in whenever you're ready.”

“Why? So far I've heard only conjecture and spite.”

“You covered your tracks well. Idols paying idols to rent the gray-eyed girl's apartment. A different set of shell Concerns and Kavekanese mystery cults to hire Varg. But the Talbeg priest who stole this skull had a demon inside him, like the demons in the others, and he sent the skull to you. So that chain leads us at least as far back as Varg.”

“Your chain has flimsy links, Counselor.”

“Did you attack Kos just to cover up your theft?”

“I brought suit,” Ramp said, “because Seril is a weakness at a time we can afford none. Kos and the Iskari are bad enough: gods and their servants prating on as if the Wars never happened, binding simpletons to their service. They're brake pads on the troika of history. But at least the Craft binds them. With Seril's return Kos gains new freedom, which slows progress. These gods of yours are a dead end for life on this planet: a disgusting self-centered inversion, music played on the deck of a sinking ship when we should be saving ourselves.” She shrugged. “More to the point, I brought suit because my clients asked me to. You do remember clients? Or has your time among god-botherers replaced fiduciary duty with faith?”

“Is that the game we're playing? Denials and pushback?”

“You accused me of acting for an ulterior motive. I tell you I had none. But Alexander's skull is a treasure. Whoever thought to send it to me has my thanks, whatever their methods.”

“Why waste our time? There are no Judges here.”

Ramp sipped wine. “Because I've worked against people like you before,” she said.

“Like me.”

“Jumped-up junior Craftswomen with a swollen sense of their superiority to the morally compromised elder generation. You mistake the ability to walk without a parent's aid for competence. In your world everything has an explanation, an ultimate motive, and all you have to do is dissect and diagram these for a Judge, as if the court were a nanny who could ease your pain. I wouldn't put it past you to have witnesses on the other end of this link, though it runs against common decency.”

“Decency.” Her fingers tightened on the skull. “As if you have a right to talk. Daphne—”

“Ms. Mains,” she said, “was a tragic loss, but don't dare talk to me about her as if you understand. Did you seek her out? I did, after Alexander's death. She lay in a bed, dreaming horrors. Her family kept her in a tower room, surrounded by the stuffed toys of her childhood, tended by a live-in nurse. Unable to care for herself in the most basic ways, at twenty-two. And she was still inside that wasted meat, do you understand? Suffering. Broken. A mind in pieces. I fixed her. I offered her a path out, and I made her take it. The pieces of her that were gone, I rebuilt. I filled her hollows with demonglass. I summoned and bound beings into her body. In the end she was almost herself again.”

“And you talk about the man who broke her as if he was some kind of saint.”

“He was a genius, which is something other than a saint. And in his genius he left many projects, including Ms. Mains, and I daresay you, unfinished. I have always been more of a theorist than a Technician, but we can't afford to abandon his work.”

“His evil work.”

“And there you show your true colors. You, student of the Hidden Schools, child of centuries of struggle, fall back on that old pathetic word fools and idiots chanted at the first Craftswomen they bound in the stocks, while they warmed the branding irons.”

“We fought the God Wars for freedom, and you throw that struggle in my face to endorse the work of a madman developing better tools of slavery.”

“We fought the God Wars for power, child. That's what freedom is. No one fights for any other reason.”

“You're wrong.”

“Which of us do you think has the surer truth?” She spread her arms. “The one who believes continents are shattered in the name of high-minded ideals, or the one who believes contents are shattered because two people who can shatter continents want different things?”

Abernathy clutched the skull in her hands as if to crush it.

Ramp took her silence as license to continue. “The world is breaking. The Wars made cracks, and we have broken it further. Our work turns soil to ash and water to poison. Even as we push ourselves to the brink of doom, beings of a size you cannot comprehend watch us with many eyes across vast gulfs of space. The universe is larger than this petty island of rock. As if we needed an external threat: this planet will not last forever, and when it dies we must be elsewhere. We have not done the work we need. Gods slow us with compromise. Small minds see only small context: local politics and squabbles of history. It takes genius to see large enough to build the tools to break the world, not like a man breaks a mirror, but like a chick breaks an eggshell. And great minds keep their secrets close.”

“Here.” Abernathy traced the skull's glyphs with one finger and cocked her head as if hearing voices far away. “That's why you wanted it. Access to his networks, his students, all those unfinished projects. Me.”

“And again you invite me to support your demented conspiracy theory. Alexander's intellectual property assets were professional secrets, not registered with any patent authority, and many of his resources operated on a trusted pair model—the keys reside within his body. As such, his body represents incalculable value.”

“I won't sell it to you.”

Ramp swished wine and watched its legs roll down the inside of the glass. “Then why not help me strip the secrets from that skull, and save the world?”

“No.”

She sighed. “This, in the end, was always Alexander's flaw.” She removed a piece of folded parchment from the pocket of her dressing gown. “He leapt to command. Better to ask first, and hold the power to command in reserve until it's needed.” She unfolded the parchment. “Do you recognize this paper? Specifically, the signature at the bottom?”

Abernathy did not need to squint. “That's a student loan contract. Mine.”

“Thank you.” Ramp set the parchment on the table beside the empty box. “I expected acquiring this to be more difficult, but the Hidden Schools were surprisingly cooperative. Education is not cheap; a shame, really, you haven't made more progress paying it back. Working for gods is, alas, less lucrative than private practice. You owe me ninety-eight souls.” She set power into those words; the contract bound Ms. Abernathy, for all the distance that divided them. Ninety-eight souls of debt represented a great deal of leverage, and Madeline Ramp knew how to exploit leverage. “Bring me the skull, Tara.”

Her will closed around Abernathy like a hand. The woman stiffened. Her fingers tightened on the skull, until Ramp feared she might damage the bone. Her lips curved into an empty smile—

And kept curving into an expression decidedly more self-satisfied. Her eyes snapped into focus, and Ramp's grip melted. “You might want to check that contract.” Ramp looked down, and as she watched, a silver-ink stamp took shape.
Paid in full.
“Work with gods isn't lucrative from a salary standpoint, no. Especially not work with goddesses in incubation phase. That's why our forebears invented contingency fees and performance bonuses.” She checked her watch. “I'm late for a meeting. We'll have to skip the parting-threats phase of the conversation, which is a shame—I've never done one of those before. Still have to figure out what to do with this skull, though. Paperweight? Raz mentioned this Old World game with a ball and a flat wooden bat. The kind you hit stuff with, I mean, not the kind with wings. Anyway. Bye.”

Ramp stood in her tower, angry and alone.

*   *   *

The delegation climbed the Godmountain: Ms. Batan from the Two Serpents Group, a few CenConAg emissaries, bodies grown through with vines, a golem bearing the King in Red's vision-gem. At the rear of the trail, escorted by a Craftsman with a gold watch and skin darker than Tara's own, strode a thing that looked human, though made from shadow. Lines of darkness trailed fingers that walked a featureless silver disk down and up.

The two-page summary bios the delegations had sent around in advance did not include a first name for this person, or a pronoun of preference, or any other information for that matter.

Tara matched the shadow's pace as she decided what to say.

“M. Grimwald,” she said. “I have a few questions, if you don't mind.”

The shadow's head inclined. The disk flashed. Was it silver after all?

“I don't expect you have full knowledge of your, ah, firm's operations. But I believe you recently supplied a shipment of indentured laborers for delivery to Alt Coulumb. You sourced them by early foreclosure on the credit lines of a divine refuge in Agdel Lex. The indenture's purpose was to smuggle demons into Kos's city—but the persons smuggled were instrumental in disrupting the smuggler's plans. Which is a bit neat, if you ask me. Almost as if the person Ramp approached for help meant her to fail.”

The shadow's footsteps sounded exactly as heavy as a normal person's. An odd patina marred the surface of the coin.

“I'm pretty far out in my speculation,” she said. “Paranoid, even. But it never hurts to say thank you.” They had almost reached the summit. “So, thank you.”

Grimwald turned to her. Within the nothing of its face, its teeth were pure white and sharp. It offered her the coin, and she accepted. The coin was not silver at all, but cool, and rocky, and rough. The shadows on its surface were the same as the shadows on the moon.

She passed the coin from hand to hand, and offered it back.

The moon-coin vanished up a white sleeve, and still the shadow smiled.

*   *   *

The Godmountain's peak was flat, as if long prepared for this purpose. A stone table and chairs grew from living rock.