Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

The Suit said no. She was holding down half the forecastle by herself, pinballing from pirate to pirate; she risked letting them regroup, had to trust Raz to evade the shot, or the sailor to miss.

  Cat said yes. She forced divinely wrought muscles to obey her, tore free of the scrum, and vaulted into the sailor’s line of fire. The quarrel crackled through the air, and Cat caught it in her hand.

  Her skin burned even through the Suit. Lightning discharge blanked her. She slammed to deck planks, stunned. Saw Raz turn, shocked—then spin back around as a sword raked his side and blood stained his shirt. Cat, struggling to regain her feet, saw one of the sailors she had been fighting sprint toward the gong at the bow, grab its hammer, and strike.

  The gong made no sound.

  Nor did anything else. Silence covered the deck.

  She tried to rise but could not. An enormous weight pressed her down; her Suit strained and surged, and with tremendous effort she forced herself to stand, every movement trembling at the max-rep edge of her enhanced strength. The gong’s silence pealed through her. Raz sunk to one knee. Blacksuits and sailors and skeletons alike lay prone.

  The captain’s cabin opened, and a figure of knives and wheels emerged. Clawed feet cut into deck wood, and the lenses within its eyes slipped from point to point of focus. Scalpels unfolded from its fingers, and springs turned wheels within the hollow of its chest.

  Golem, Cat thought, though she had never seen a golem like this before—a mouthless work of art, moving delicately despite this weight that pressed upon them all. Maybe it was immune, or so strong it did not feel the pressure. It approached Raz and bent over him. Scalpels clicked into place. Its head turned sideways, considering how best to cut. Internal mechanisms ticked through the artificial quiet, as if she held a watch to her ear. The ships’ lanterns glinted off its blades as they slid, so gently, along Raz’s jaw.

  Then Aev fell out of the sky on top of it.

  Knives blunted and thin metal limbs snapped beneath a ton of high-velocity gargoyle. Gears and springs and shattered glass flew out in all directions. The deck stove in beneath her feet. Lightning danced from broken planks, and the strange weight that bound Cat to the wood vanished. She rose, as did the other Blacksuits; Raz and the crew of Bounty and Dream took longer to recover.

  The golem’s skull rolled from its shattered body. Aev looked down at it, quizzical, then crushed it to dust with her heel. A shadow rose screaming from the metal husk, and faded on the wind.

  What took you so long? Cat asked.

  Aev pointed up with one clawed finger. Cat looked, saw nothing, then heard a whisper of wind. A huge bat-winged creature fell to splash between the two ships. It lay faceup in the water, twitching in its swoon.

  “Busy,” Aev said.

  They secured the ship in minutes. Dream’s remaining crew surrendered; Blacksuits moved through their ranks, taking names and faces for prosecution. Raz’s crew spidered up the rigging to prepare the Dream for sailing into port.

  “Do you feel useful now?” she asked Aev after the worst was done.

  “I enjoyed this,” the gargoyle replied. “But what was our purpose here? Helping pirates take a merchant ship?”

  “Follow me,” Cat said, and led her down below.

  The gargoyle could not use the ladder—too heavy—so she jumped into the hold, splintering more timber when she landed. The ship rocked, and Cat steadied herself on the wall. Belowdecks the Dream smelled foul, animal stink mixed with tar and pine. She worked fore past wine barrels and bales of cloth and crates marked for Iskar and the Schwarzwald. A black wall closed off the forward hold; the wall had a single door without handle or visible lock save for a shimmering Craft circle.

  “We’ve suspected Varg of zombie trading for a while, but without proof we had no excuse to search the ship.” They’d taken an amulet from Varg’s coat that afternoon, and she drew it from her belt pouch now. “But she reached out to a dreamglass supplier in Alt Coulumb this time, and dreamglass is illegal in the city, so.” The seven-pointed star on the amulet’s face matched the symbol at the Craft circle’s center; she applied the one to the other, twisted, and the door creaked open. Chill wind fogged her breath. “Here you go.”

  Aev entered the cold, dark room. Cat could barely see the hold’s contents over the swell of her wings and back, which was just as well; it wasn’t a good sight. “They’re shipping bodies.”

  “Those people are still alive, just suspended.” Frost crisped and blued the bodies’ skin. Looking at them tightened cords in Cat’s chest. She slid past Aev into the hold and touched a sleeping woman’s shoulder. The flesh was softer than if she were frozen. A hundred, perhaps, lay on racks. When Cat drew back her hand, it was chilled beyond her blood’s power to warm.

  “Who would let this happen?”

  “Let doesn’t have much to do with it,” she said. “They’re indentured, people who’ve mortgaged themselves away, suspended their own wills while the body works to repay their debt. It’s cheaper than raising a corpse, if you believe that. Dead stuff decays, you know. These people live without any choice but to do what their contract holder tells them, until the indenture’s done.”

  “Slaves,” Aev said.

  “Zombies. Craftwork isn’t supposed to let people become property, but there are ways to treat the one like the other if you’re a sick kind of clever, and no one catches you. Which is why people like Varg deal dreamglass: every price is a negotiation, and nothing skews negotiations like addiction. You hook people, then raise the loan rates until indenture’s their only option. And if they don’t have the resources to hire a good Craftswoman, the indenture deal can be pretty bad.”

  “This is allowed?”

  “Not in our city,” she said. She didn’t say, but we can only stop it when we find it or but who knows how people make the fortunes they invest with us or but you won’t find one port in the world this business doesn’t pass through. Aev’s claws tightened on the doorjamb, leaving deep grooves in the wood. “Come on. Let’s get up top.”

  Raz met her on deck with a blanket for her shoulders. She accepted it with a nod and stood shivering by the wheel for reasons that had nothing to do with the night air.

  “More down there than we thought,” Cat said. “I bet Tara can wake them.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” he said. And then: “That was a brave dumb thing you did, catching the bolt for me.”

  “I saved your life. Maybe.”

  “I’m not exactly alive. And the golem could have killed us all if not for Aev.”

  “And I brought her along. So, you’re welcome.”

  “You should have let her take the shot, I mean, instead of letting the sailor reach the gong.”

  “The Suit agreed with you, for what it’s worth.”

  If he understood, he didn’t acknowledge it.

  Aev joined them, and faced homeward toward the horizon candelabra of Alt Coulumb. Her lips peeled back to bare teeth, but no sound escaped her throat.

  “Something wrong?”

  “The city,” she said. “I am too late.”

  “What do you mean?” Cat asked. But before Aev could answer, the moon opened.

  16

  Ellen did not pray at first. She stood shadowed by lamplight, before her father and the market square crowd. Her left hand closed white-knuckled around her right. She looked back at her sisters; Hannah turned away. Claire did not, but Ellen avoided her older sister’s gaze as if there was fire in it.

  Matt read that fire: if Ellen had not spoken at lunch, she would not be here now.

  Whispers rippled from the clearing to the crowd’s edge and back. The Crier took notes.

  By Matt’s side Sandy stood silent, tense. What should he do now, with all these people watching and Rafferty pacing, his high color deepening to purple?

  “Ellen,” Rafferty repeated, in a tone of voice Matt could tell he thought was kind. “Pray. If you’ve told the truth.” Which even Matt could tell was not a choice between
two roads so much as the choice between a devil and a cliff.

  Ellen’s head bobbed. The first time she tried to speak no words came out, but on the second they emerged: “Mother, hear me—” the prayer the Criers sang this morning, its words made eager by her fear.

  She watched her father while she spoke, as if the man was a crumbling wall that might collapse on her at any moment. She cut her finger with a knife from her belt. Blood welled to fall on stone.

  No noise dared intrude. People must have breathed, hells, Matt must have breathed himself, but he only heard the splash.

  A loud whip crack split the night, and he jumped. A hundred eyes darted skyward at once, toward the stars and moon. No winged shape passed overhead, no shadow rose from the rooftops. Shifting wind had snapped the flag on the market’s flagpole. Matt laughed nervously, and others joined him.

  Sandy held herself tense as a watch spring. The Rafferty girls did not laugh, either. Hannah and Claire watched Ellen, and Ellen stared at their father, and Corbin Rafferty was silent and still and grim.

  He raked the circled crowd with his regard. The blotched colors of his face merged and deepened. “Don’t you laugh at my girl. She said she saw the Stone Man. She said it came, and it came.” He swung back to Ellen. “Go on. Call it. Now.”

  She gave no answer. Whatever she willed against him when she drew her knife, whatever doom she hoped to call down from the skies, it had not fallen.

  “She made the whole thing up,” a man shouted outside the circle. Matt didn’t recognize the voice, or else he would have made the owner regret speaking. “She’s cocked, Rafferty.”

  “You call my girl a liar?” Corbin’s voice low and dangerous now, as Matt had seen him crouch in bar fights. “Pray, Ellen.”

  She lowered her head. Rafferty clutched his stick in a strangler’s grip.

  Before he could do anything, Sandy spoke. “Corbin, she’s telling the truth.”

  “Of course she is.”

  The Crier kept writing. Matt wanted to break the woman’s pencil.

  Sandy looked like she’d just torn off a bandage over a burn. “Look, I heard the same voice as Ellen, in my dreams. Most women in the Quarter have. But do you think this works like Craft, you just wave your hands and make things happen? The Stone Men didn’t come for a prayer, they came because your girls needed them. It’s wrong to draw them out like this.”

  “The Stone Men don’t get to come into my family whenever they think it’s right. They don’t own our city.”

  He roared that last, and Ellen flinched.

  “You think,” Sandy said, “maybe they’re cutting in on your business?”

  “What the hells is that supposed to mean?”

  “You scared Ellen might call the Stone Men down on you someday?”

  Rafferty stopped as if someone had nailed his feet to the ground. Only his head turned toward Sandy. “What did you say?”

  “I said it’s disgraceful the way you treat those girls, shout them scared of their own damn shadows.” She stepped into the open space, toward him. “I say you’re scared they might call the Stone Men on you. I say stop this now and let these people go home.”

  “I did this for us.”

  “You do everything for you, Corbin. Let it go.”

  Corbin Rafferty’s eyes went wide as an angry horse’s, and showed as much white, and he grew very still. Folk at the crowd’s edge turned away.

  Rafferty’s shoulders slumped.

  Sandy relaxed, too. But the girls did not, and neither did Matt, because he’d seen Corbin Rafferty drunk, had seen him fight, and knew his tell: that moment of slack before he moved snake-quick with a bottle or a nearby chair. Or with that cane, which he swung up and around, toward Sandy—

  But the cane never fell, because Matt ran forward and grabbed Rafferty’s arm. Rafferty twisted fast and vicious, pulled free, and struck Matt in the side of the head. He stumbled back, ears ringing and wetness on his temple and his cheek. Matt smelled Corbin’s whiskey, saw his white teeth flash as the cane came down; he put his hand in its way, but the cane knocked down his arm, then struck the side of his head. Matt barreled forward. His shoulder took Rafferty in the stomach but the man squirmed like a hooked eel and Matt couldn’t hold him. The audience roared and Sandy joined the fray and somewhere a large beast or a small man snarled, and Ellen’s prayer rolled on like a river, or else that was the blood throbbing in his, Matt’s, ears.

  There came a crash and a splintering sound, followed by a hush.

  Even the Crier’s pencil stopped scratching.

  Matt forced himself to his feet.

  The top half of Rafferty’s stick lay broken on the ground. The man himself had drawn back, hunched around his center, clutching the remnants of the cane. Sandy wasn’t bleeding. The girls were safe.

  A Stone Man confronted Corbin Rafferty.

  He did not resemble the monsters of Matt’s imagination or his father’s stories. The Stone Man was thinner than Matt expected, carved with lean muscle like a runner or dancer. His face was narrow and short muzzled with a bird’s quizzical expression, and his wings were slender and long. Maybe their kind came in as many shapes as people.

  “Shale!” Ellen sounded happy for the first time in the years Matt had known her.

  Rafferty recoiled. One crooked accusing finger stabbed toward the statue. “There! You see. They sneak around our city, taking what’s ours!”

  The gargoyle’s—Shale’s—expression didn’t change like a normal person’s. It shifted, like windblown sand. “We take nothing,” he said. “We help.”

  “We don’t need your help.”

  “If someone asks,” the gargoyle said, gentle as a footfall in an empty church, “should I refuse?”

  Rafferty spun from the gargoyle, to Matt, to Sandy, to Ellen. Whatever he sought from them he didn’t find, because he revolved on Shale again, still holding the broken cane.

  Then he ran toward the gargoyle and stabbed his chest with the splintered end of his stick. Matt tensed, waiting for claws to wet with blood.

  The gargoyle took Rafferty by the shoulders.

  The moon came out.

  Before, the moon had been a slender curve. No longer. An orb hung overhead, and there was a face within it Matt recognized from a distant past that never was, and since it never was, never passed. Shadows failed. Silver flame quickened within paving stones.

  Alt Coulumb lived. There was a Lady in it, and She knew them.

  Matt was not a religious man—he sacrificed on time and paid little heed to the rest—but this, he thought, must be how the faithful felt: seen all at once in timeless light.

  There was no source to this light, but Corbin Rafferty stood at its center, transfixed, reflected on himself in that moonlit time.

  The moon closed.

  Corbin’s knees buckled and he fell.

  Clocks started again, and hearts. Blood wept from the wound on Matt’s face.

  Matt thought the gargoyle was as shocked as anyone, and awed, though he covered it fast. “Blacksuits are coming,” he said to them all but mostly to Ellen. “This is their place. I must go.”

  He left in a wave of wings. Sandy limped to Matt and touched the skin around his wound; her fingers stung. The girls watched, quiet, still, as Corbin Rafferty wept.

  The gargoyle was right. Soon the Blacksuits came.

  And the Crier wrote the whole thing down.

  17

  Tara collapsed on her walk home.

  She’d been turning the Seril problem over in her mind—gods and goddesses, faith and credit, debt and repayment and Abelard’s despair and the gargoyles atop their ruined tower. Swirled round with sharp-toothed dilemmas, she marched past the shadow people who drifted down the sidewalk toward home or gym or bar. A beggar held out a cup and she tossed him a coin with a few thaums of soul inside. Might as well be kind while she could afford it. Soon none of them might have the luxury of generosity.

  The man thanked her with a wave of a soot-
caked hand as she swept past. Strings of curses ran together inside her skull. Streetlights cast bright puddles on the pavement.

  Brighter than usual, in fact, and of a different color too, as of molten silver. Far off, a giant struck a mountain with a hammer in heartbeat time. She stumbled. Eyes closed, she searched the lightning-lit world of Craft for the source of her sudden weakness, but saw nothing—and beneath the nothing, a tide. Her knees buckled, and she fell beyond herself into a sea of churning light whose waves sang a chord no choir could have matched. And she saw—

  The market square, unfamiliar faces. Matthew Adorne, bleeding. The fierce man from the produce stall wept beneath a moon that was also a face she knew—mother and tiger at once. And Shale stood before them both, Shale overshadowed by his Goddess, Shale the clawed vector for a Lady who refused to hide.

  Something soft struck her whole body at once, as if she’d fallen onto a featherbed from a height.

  Rough fingers touched her cheek. Her vision focused and refocused until it carved the beggar from the moonlight haze. The lines of his face mapped a territory of confusion and concern. “Miss?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and realized she was lying on the sidewalk, staring up at the moon. When she tried to stand, the world spun sideways.

  “You fell.” His breath smelled harsh and there was liquor in it.

  She took quick inventory: skirt and stocking torn by impact, jacket dusted with road, a scrape on her cheek. Unsteady sitting, and more unsteady rising. Her soul, that was the problem: her soul ebbed out, a few hundred thaums gone, like leaves into a fire. “Did you feel that?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Thank you.” She pushed a few more thaums into his hand, but he forced them back.

  “You need help.”

  “Which way to Market Square?”

  “Left at Bleeker,” he said, “but the stalls are closed.”

  She could not run, but after she killed the pain receptors in her ankle, she forced herself to a brisk walk.

  By the time she reached the market, there was little left to see—only a crowd around the Crier’s dais, and there, interviewing a young dark-skinned couple whose body language screamed “traumatized onlookers,” Gavriel Jones.