Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  She grabbed the badge at her neck and let the Suit pour silver over and through her. But though it made her strong, though it made her fast, it didn’t feel the way it had back when Justice was a cold clear mind without an I inside, the working out of brutal math. Now the ice joined her to something else. She felt the others in the back of her mind, but she was still herself, still Cat.

  Faster, though, and stronger. She leapt from roof to roof, and the drunks and dreamdust trippers, the tripmasters and cots and clouds of smoke, the railings and roads all blurred. She leapt over alley after alley, ignoring the bloodrush.

  Fine, she thought up to the immense cold silver web. Fine, she screamed at the moon. You want me to let you in. Take me, then. I’ve worked and worked, and here I am back where I started. My room’s a cot and a dresser and a mess. You want worship? Take it all. Take everything I have. Drag me back to where I was before: at least in you I had a space where I was gone. Peel me out of me.

  She reached the broad ring road at the Quarter’s edge. She couldn’t jump that distance. She gathered herself and spread wings from her back and flew.

  At the apex of her arc she realized she was falling.

  Her wings slipped on the wind. She tumbled, mouth open beneath the silver mask, screaming through the sky to land and skid on a roof. The force of her fall blinked off the world. When she came back to herself, she hurt. She lay, human again, in torn clothes at the end of a furrow her fall had plowed through gravel. Gasping. Salt tears wet her face. She hadn’t cried in a while.

  She became aware, later, of a shape crouching over her, massive and stone. Aev settled beside her.

  Cat lay still, not knowing whether she was dreaming.

  “I’m here,” Aev said, soft as an avalanche.

  “I fell.”

  Her touch on Cat’s arm was firm and light. She used the pads of her fingers, not her talons. “It’s hard to fly,” she said. “But you can learn.”

  * * *

  On the Alt Coulumb docks, in the hold of a ship, a hundred bodies waited, and other minds waited within.

  24

  No pig wants to start the morning trussed.

  This one woke on its back in a forest clearing. Nearby, past screening shrubs and evergreens, large wagons rolled down a highway. The pig did not know highway or wagons, but it knew the sound. Rough, heavy cord bound its trotters. It squirmed and surged and wriggled. The coils on its left foreleg began to slip.

  A knife flashed in the cold, too bright for pain. The pain came later. Then—nothing.

  Two women stood in the clearing. The pig bled on bare earth. The blood from its opened throat traced drunken spider trails along the soil toward a circle of burned pine needles around the corpse. When the blood reached the circle’s edge, it pooled as if it had run against glass.

  The younger woman sheathed her work knife. Her hands were clean. She pondered the blood patterns within the circle.

  “Camlaan First Credit and HBSE are on board, Ms. Ramp,” she said after a long silence of mental calculation. “Shipping arrangements have been settled.” She pushed back her hood. The face revealed was smooth, and smiling. “Looks like we’re ready.”

  The second woman said, “Well done, Ms. Mains.” She reviewed the blood herself. “Competently read. Though your knots are loose. He almost slipped free.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. I’ll review my knot work today.”

  When the older woman withdrew from the circle she brushed the fingers of her gloves together as if rubbing off a stain, though she had not crossed the circle herself or approached the blood. “Onward, then.”

  Ms. Mains removed her work robe and packed it inside a valise that was larger inside than out. She made sharp folds and dangerous corners. “Alt Coulumb, ma’am?”

  “In haste. The church needs time to ponder our proposal.” She produced a coin from her sleeve, examined its head and tail, and closed it in her fist.

  “It’s so nice to take country walks,” said Ms. Mains brightly as she lifted the valise. “I think someday I’ll move out here. Get a nice house. Settle down. Raise chickens in the backyard. Even pigs.” She drew her fist to her mouth as if to catch the laugh that escaped. “After I retire from the firm, of course.”

  The older woman opened her fingers. The coin was not there. “Leave all this? You’d be bored blind in a week.”

  Ms. Mains considered asking which”this” she meant. It occurred to her, not for the first time, that Madeline Ramp did not quite live in the same world she, Ms. Mains, occupied. For Ms. Mains, the sky was pale blue some pansies fade to, and beyond the clearing’s edge brown earth rolled southeast through pine forests to a low brook that might contain a few trout. For Ms. Ramp, there was a dead pig in the center of the clearing, some quantity of useless information in front of her, and behind her, the road to work.

  Ms. Ramp turned to go, then turned back to the pig and moved her finger in a sharp cutting motion. Skin peeled from its belly and invisible knives carved out a square of flesh eight inches on a side and an inch thick, muscle marbled with fat. Ms. Ramp muttered beneath her breath and the flesh shrank, dried, colored. The sky deepened (Daphne Mains thought) to the violet of a pansy’s core. Ramp spread her fingers, and the flesh sectioned into narrow strips. The scent of seared meat filled the clearing. When she was done, still gloved, she plucked a piece of bacon from the air and ate it. Grease glistened on her gloved fingertips. “Would you like some, Ms. Mains?”

  “I ate at the airport, ma’am.”

  “Not even a light snack?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Your loss,” she said, and left the clearing, crunching. Ms. Mains followed with the valise.

  As they left, the spider-tracery of blood clotted. The first flies landed to drink, and died. Later, crows landed to gnaw the spoiling flesh.

  They died, too.

  * * *

  Tara was three coffees into the morning by the time she reached the Alt Coulumb docks and the Dream moored there under Blacksuit guard.

  Cat met her on the pier. She looked, charitably, horrible: Tara associated the kind of circles under her eyes with fistfights more than restless sleep, and her skin was worryingly pale. But she clutched her coffee firmly, and her expression seemed set. Tara decided to keep this professional. She and Cat could be combative enough under the best circumstances.

  “Late night?” Cat said, when she was close enough.

  Oh, fine. “Looks like I’m not the only one.”

  Cat pointed with her coffee toward the Dream. “The operation was a success.” Which wasn’t the whole story, to judge from her tone of voice, but it was a start. “I think by right of salvage this belongs to me. What do people do with boats, anyway?”

  “Sail them,” Tara said, climbing the gangplank. “And it’s not yours. You found it occupied. If you took it, you’re engaged either in piracy or law enforcement.”

  “Bit of both, in this case. Law enforcement with pirates.”

  “Is there more coffee?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it coffee exactly,” Cat said. “More like coffee-adjacent.”

  “Adjacent is fine. I didn’t sleep until after two.” She’d promised herself bed after Shale left, but the silver poems lingered in her mind. And then, being too tired for cause-and-effect thoughts like “I have to get up in the morning,” she’d read her mother’s letter, or tried, and when that didn’t work she read her student loan statement again, and then her balance book, and decided that if she ate instant noodles for the next month maybe she could pay down the principle. She had planned to sail straight for the church archives this morning but ran aground instead on the message Cat left with her office doorman. “What can I do for you?” Four Blacksuits stood on the ship’s deck, immobile and faceless as unfinished statues.

  Cat led her into the hold; once she saw the refrigeration wards, she understood. “Indentures. Zombie traders. They docked here?”

  “Not their idea,” she said. �
��Raz knew that the captain, Varg, was involved in the trade, but she never docked with us, just anchored out of port and ferried in. We caught her in a dreamglass deal in the city, which gave us grounds to search and seize the ship.”

  “Clever.” Tara tugged the door open. Icy air vented into the hold. Row upon row of bodies lay in the cold dark, clad in rough canvas, immobile. Men and women from the Gleb, by the look of it. Tara’s shiver had nothing to do with the temperature. “Gods.”

  Cat propped the door open and followed Tara inside. Her coffee started to steam again. “I hoped you could wake them up. We tried dragging one out of the freezer but he started…” She shook her head. “It looked like a seizure. We put him back.”

  Tara paced the hold. Bodies lay four deep on either side. “What do you normally do when you catch a zombie trader?”

  “They don’t pass through here often, since Kos forbids indefinite indentures and debt slavery. Most of the time indentures just wake up when they’re brought in. It’s traumatic, but I’ve never seen anything like this. I figured you could help. If not, we can hire someone, but I know Craftsmen aren’t wild about property seizures.”

  Tara frowned. “They’re not property. That’s the problem. The Craft depends on freedom of contract: people can trade away whatever they want, except their ability to agree to trades. But they can offer labor as collateral.”

  “That’s the same thing.”

  “Not technically,” she said. “But practice is the problem.” She searched the room. There were many ways to cool a space: elementals were the most common, but none lived here. This ship’s owners must have used unshielded Craft to suck heat from this space to power something else. But what?

  There. A line of pulsing red was worked into the timbers of the hold. Tara wiped frost from the bulkhead. There, carved with exact knifework, lay nesting geometries of Craft. She cut a piece of canvas from an indenture’s trousers and continued around the hold, wiping away the frost. By the time she completed the circle, she shuddered with lost heat and had to return to the hold and rub her hands until feeling needled back into her fingertips.

  A Blacksuit brought Cat a form to sign, and she did. “I don’t understand how you can let this happen,” Cat said. “It’s disgusting.”

  “I agree. This is part of the reason the Craft’s uncomfortable with addiction and games, even stories. Prices are a negotiation. If you control desire—if you make people want something—you can do strange stuff to them. That’s before we get into newfangled treachery, like balloon payments and variable interest rates. Most forced indentures wouldn’t hold up in court, but few victims have access to Craftsmen.”

  “So why haven’t they woken up?”

  “Because that room technically isn’t part of Alt Coulumb. It’s Kavekanese territory; the whole place is a chapel to one of their idols.”

  Cat frowned. “To a fake god? Can they do that?”

  “Sure. Kos is bound to recognize the Kavekanese pantheon, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do business with Concerns based in Kavekana, which is most of them. So he can’t overrule the circle.”

  “And why can’t we drag them out?”

  “Without the permission of the person who holds the indenture, dragging them out means you’re trying to void their contract. Which Kos is bound to enforce in this case, because of the good faith clauses in his treaty. When you pull them out, Kos fights himself. Like one of those finger traps.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  She shook her head. “This is why I studied necromancy. Dead things behave predictably. Transactional work would give a dragon a headache. Their Craftswoman has tied this declaration of territory to a powerful, open-sourced binding ward. If that ward had a weakness in it, a million Craftswomen would have found it by now. We can fight her on the particulars of the case, by asserting primacy—basically, refusing to recognize the Kavekanese claim to their territory. In Crafty terms, it’s like sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting really loud to keep the other person from persuading you; it’s not good form, but it works temporarily. For that I’d need Kos’s backing, though, which he can’t give, because of the treaty. It’s a neat trap.”

  “But Kos isn’t the only God we have available.” The top button of Cat’s shirt was open; she reached beneath and fished out an ivory pendant Tara knew too well.

  She did a little math in her head. Removed the black book from her purse, consulted her notes from yesterday’s flight. Lady of Sky and Stone, okay, and the moon had tidal influence. “Cat, that’s a really good idea.”

  “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

  “As Justice, she’s pledged to support Kos; as Seril, she’s independent. And since the Blacksuit is a repurposed temple contract, you’re technically her priestess. You said you seized this boat—”

  “Ship.”

  “Ship, you seized it with other Blacksuits?”

  “And with Raz.” She made a face when she said his name.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Fine,” she said. Cold bodies lay behind the closed door. “So, you and Raz. Anyone else?”

  “Aev.”

  “Good. We can claim Seril, rather than Kos, seized the boat. Ship. Seril died—at least, we all thought she did—before they started building idols on Kavekana, so she’s never signed a full-faith-and-credit agreement with them. That should work.”

  “So Seril gets the ship.”

  “In a way, the timing’s perfect. Yesterday I would have said no, because this would tip off the world that Seril was still alive. But we’re announcing her survival in an interview tonight. I can set up the triggers in advance. When we’re ready, you and Raz sign the paper and wake these people up, giving us more evidence Seril’s separate from Kos—because if she was not, we couldn’t break this circle.” She rifled through her purse. Vials, vials, astrolabe, sextant, compass, paring knife, rabbit’s foot, black bag, silver nails, more vials. “Shit. Do you have any cinnabar?”

  “I’ll send someone,” Cat said.

  “We need the good stuff. There’s a guy on Twenty-third and Vine—”

  “I’ll send someone.”

  “And I’ll get to work.”

  25

  Matt woke at quarter to three as usual, and found Claire sleeping. He lit the stove with his morning prayers, made coffee, and pondered eggs. The coffee smell woke her, and she entered the kitchen wearing Donna’s robe belted tight around her waist and closed up to her throat. Couch cushions left a deep crease down her cheek.

  “Coffee?” she asked before he could offer. Her voice was a crackle of dead leaves. He poured from the percolator and she drank as if racing to reach the bottom. “Thank you,” she said when she finished, and he poured more. The coffee filled in the cracks of her voice.

  “Do you like eggs?”

  “Every way but boiled.”

  He’d planned to take a few hard-boiled from the bowl in the refrigerator, but she was a guest. “Cheese?”

  “Yes.” She poured herself more coffee. Emptied the percolator halfway through the cup. “I’m sorry. I didn’t ask if you wanted—”

  “I’ll make more.” He was not whispering, but he talked low. “I don’t have company in the mornings.”

  “I’ll do the coffee. You make eggs.”

  He grated a handful of sharp cheese, heated oil, cracked the eggs into a bowl, did his best to ignore Claire moving through the kitchen. Her footsteps weren’t Donna’s, and he hadn’t realized how unused he was to anyone else’s presence here. “Coffee’s in the cabinet upper left of the sink.” Outside the sky was still black, and streetlights burned. Scramble, scramble.

  “You buy it ground?” As if he’d confessed to killing children.

  “The store grinds it for the percolator.”

  She kept quiet, leaving him space to ponder the wrongness of his opinion. She dumped grounds into the sink, which made him wince—they didn’t have a disposal. He re
membered yesterday’s sharp-edged conversation and compared it to whatever was happening this morning, so early that Donna still called it night. There was dew on the window. The eggs set; he tossed in cheese, and didn’t correct her about the grounds in the sink.

  She watched the coffee as if it were the spring’s first flower opening from a bud. Snapped off the burner, poured fast. When he drank, the flavor opened and kept opening into the back of his throat.

  “Good eggs,” she said around a mouthful.

  “What did you do to the coffee?”

  “If you overboil it, there’s too much acid,” she said. “The taste’s weaker than it should be but that’s what you get using ground beans. I added cinnamon, but it’s not the same.” She shoveled the remaining eggs into her mouth, swallowed hard, then added coffee. “Good, though.”

  “You’ll have to show me.”

  “It’s easy.”

  Dishes in the sink. He grabbed his jacket. By the time he returned, he found she’d washed the dishes, racked them to dry, and scooped the grounds out of the sink.

  He stabled the wagon in a garage three blocks over. The morning’s chill fingers ignored his jacket, shirt, and skin, shoved right into him to grab handfuls of viscera. Claire kept her chin down. Theirs was the first cart to leave the garage; the golem plodded forward on four legs. They descended the garage ramp to the street and picked up speed as they drove west through drifting mist beneath a sky still hung with stars.

  “I’ll take the leads,” Claire said when they cleared the quarter’s edge. “You can sleep.”

  The offer confused Matt. He had not considered letting someone else drive his cart, because he never had someone else to do so. Navigating the morning with this girl beside him made his whole routine, the road and the cart and the mist, seem strange. “I can’t sleep once I’m awake,” he said. That sounded like a riddle told by those head-shaved kids who studied with the Shining Empire sages down on Bleeker, so he tried again. “I mean, I don’t nap.”

  “I’m the same,” she said. “I asked because it’s boring to sit here with nothing to do.”