Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  Tonight the words formed as they should: Glory to You, Ever-burning, Ever-transforming—and within them he framed his appeal.

  We need to talk.

  The world around him took fire, and he was lifted.

  His body knelt. His voice prayed. It was his context that changed. A cold rush climbed his spine, spread through his limbs, and he stood astride the city. But when he looked down on Alt Coulumb’s teeming streets and sidewalks and the wharfs that pulsed with broad-backed men and women strong as sprung steel, he saw them as if he was them, as if he moved through and within them, as if his thoughts were pieces of theirs—

  fuck they want to buy at that price for I don’t even

  gotta hold the knife like this so you won’t cut

  even know where was he last night and he comes

  home all

  consider the alternatives

  I don’t mind if you just want to screw

  fillet of whitefish six thaums a pound

  God-damn Blacksuits make it so

  a man can’t live

  Gods, or at least the few with which Abelard was on speaking terms, could use human speech, as a person who lacked sign language could point to a flower or a passing cloud. The bigger the god, the harder that became. Rather than reducing themselves to human syntax, larger deities preferred to elevate humans to theirs. That approach had drawbacks, though. Human beings were good at comprehending things that looked, thought, and spoke at roughly human size, speed, and complexity. A modern god in a modern city, networked through faith and bond to pantheons and Deathless Kings around the planet, was larger, faster, and more complex than monkey-derived man. Divine communions sometimes made as little sense as Cathbart’s sermons might to an ape. Some saints went mad from the experience.

  Not that Abelard could have expressed such thoughts in that moment, borne on the tide of God, burning in the flame at the heart of His city. Kos Everburning, Lord of Flame, gave His servant knowledge of Himself. Tears streamed down Abelard’s face.

  Through the awe and wonder, though, he thought: you won’t get off the hook that easily.

  The city web wriggled and drew back, cold, nonchalant. God had no idea what he could possibly mean.

  I’m here to talk about Seril. You know what’s happening. Everything Tara’s said in council. There’s no use playing dumb.

  (Lord Kos was great and benevolent and wise. Why feign politeness, as if such an Interlocutor could only hear your surface thoughts?)

  The city moved. Far below, in a body that was but one axon of the Mind with which he now conversed, he spoke the second stanza of the Litany for the Coming Burn. Ocean rolled against pier and distant sand, with a sound like the shuffling of enormous feet.

  I know you love Seril. I know what you went through to bring Her back.

  The world collapsed to a spark, all while he was coiled and compressed until thought’s whirlpool became a slow sludge spinning downward toward a drain. Curled inside Abelard’s cigarette, Lord Kos had been a flame quivering on the wick of a single soul.

  But the more you work for her, the more you set us all at risk. Tara says, and Bede says, if you support her, Craftsmen will use that against you. Break you. Seize control of the city. You might die. Seril has to stand alone, or fail.

  If there was a change in the God, he did not feel it. The city’s many voices receded, and he heard his own again, praying.

  The God wanted to know what he thought. Not Bede. Not Tara. Him.

  They know the market, Abelard prayed reluctantly. They know how the world works, and the Craft. They know the risks. I trust them.

  The flame danced within its wire throne.

  But do we trust each other?

  * * *

  “It’s strange,” Daphne said when the balloon reached its intended altitude. She bent over the basket’s edge and looked down upon the tops of skyscrapers and jagged streets, as if a drunken civil engineer had broken a case of matchsticks with a hammer, then dropped the pieces on a map. “The sky’s so clear.”

  “It’s dirty,” Ramp replied. “Smog and smoke and steam and fumes. Though the god does give them a sustainable power source, at least.”

  “I don’t mean the air,“Daphne said. “I mean the sky. No spires. No optera. No airbuses or blimps or platforms. We’re all alone. We’re all alone!” she shouted out to the north, and “Alone!” to the south, but neither horizon answered. Her words didn’t echo. They were too high up for that.

  “All in good time,” Ramp said. She reclined on the nest of cushions she’d made in the basket, and paged through this week’s Thaumaturgist. A teacup lifted itself to her lips. “Be patient, and be ready.”

  31

  Glyph-lines burned around the door of the Dream’s refrigerated hold. Cat climbed down a rope ladder; Raz dropped in straight-legged, and rolled his shoulders, producing a drum line of pops and cracks. “Do I have to sign in blood?” he asked. “Naked, dancing under a full moon?”

  “I wouldn’t complain.”

  He smiled halfway but didn’t rise to the joke.

  “Ink’s fine,” she said.

  “Do you have a pen? I left mine in my other pants.”

  She produced a ballpoint from her pocket; the white barrel glowed in the shadows. He reached for it. She did not offer it to him.

  “So that’s why you wanted to come down here,” he said. “Privacy.”

  “We need to talk.”

  He spread his arms. “Cat, we each have our own problems. When we’re close, those problems get mangled together. Best to back away.”

  “That’s why you spend so much time on the ocean,” she said. “Can’t back off any farther than that. If you could go to the moon you probably would.”

  “My job is on the ocean. I like my job. If living there helps me manage, why not? You don’t understand what I deal with. You think you do, but you don’t.”

  “Because every time I try to get closer, you push me away. You think you’re the only one in the world with a problem? There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  He laughed without humor and jabbed a finger toward his mouth where the fangs were. “Everything is wrong with me. You want to learn how far you should trust desire, spend fifty years trying not to see every passing person as a well-cooked meal. Hells, you don’t even have to see—you smell them. There’s nothing natural about this. I was dying, and I was given a choice. I chose to live. Not live—survive. And even that went sour. Life skews. It’s skewed us both.”

  “Which is why you’ve spent five decades on a rampage, tearing people’s throats out.”

  “Of course not. I have a condition. I manage it.”

  “Can you extend me the common fucking courtesy of understanding that I’m trying to manage, too?”

  “You don’t care about me. You need people like me. I’ve seen it before. For you I’m a hit, that’s all. A fang.”

  “No.” She stepped toward him. “I like you.” Say it fast, like tearing off a bandage or a scab. “I want you. Maybe you’re afraid of what that means. I know I am. But I’ve known enough need to tell the difference between that and this. And I’ve known enough suckers to tell hunger from attraction. If you want to say I’m wrong, fine. But I’m not.”

  He shook his head. “If things were different, maybe. If I didn’t have my problem, if you didn’t have yours. But now, I can’t trust you.”

  “You can,” she said. “You do. But you’re scared. Of me, because I screwed you over last year when I was out of my head. But under that, you’re scared of yourself.”

  “If I lose control, people die.”

  “We can be careful. And if all else fails, I can kick your ass.”

  This close to a human being, Cat would have felt the warmth. He could feel hers, she knew. He could hear her heartbeat. He was an inch taller than her, which didn’t matter except when they were this close. She reached for him.

  He took the pen from her and stepped away. He unspooled the scroll atop a crate
of dried papaya and read it through once more as Cat watched—bandage peeled back, scab ripped free, blood flowing, stunned by the speed of his retreat.

  He signed on the dotted line. Tara’s glyphs’ light swelled. The boat did not sway, but the world beneath the boat swayed, and settled into a deeper trough.

  Raz wrung the scroll closed and tossed her the pen. She caught it by reflex.

  “There,” he said. “That’s done.”

  She opened her mouth, unsure what to say.

  * * *

  The echoes of the sunset song stayed with Tara through their cab ride to the Ash, which was all to the good, because Jones was no conversationalist. She watched out the window and made notes in her book.

  “You’ve never been here before?”

  “Of course I have,” Jones said. “But you see something new each visit.”

  “Just you wait.”

  When they reached the broken tower, the sky was the blue of blood seen through skin, and pierced with bright stars. Jones followed Tara through the rubble, stepping where she stepped, touching what she touched. “Nice place.”

  “A fixer-upper.” Tara parted the curtain of creepers that lay across the stairwell opening. “Don’t touch the walls. I’ll keep back anything that could hurt you. And watch your step.”

  “Can’t you”—Jones wiggled her fingers—“make light?”

  “You don’t want to see what lives on these walls.”

  They climbed. Jones did not question the few sharp decisive sounds Tara made, or the occasional flash that ensued when she killed something vicious. Tara reminded herself to speak with the goddess—firmly—about the general unsuitability of temple traps and rat kings and hand-size poisonous spiders to modern temples.

  As they neared the twelfth floor, Tara found that she could see. The darkness silvered, less cavelike and closer to the dark of starlit cornfield night, swelling with form, navigable despite obscurity.

  “I thought you wouldn’t make light. Powers man was not meant to know and so on.”

  “This light isn’t mine,” Tara said. “It’s the courtesy of our host.”

  Silver chiseled geometry from the dark. They ascended steep stairs. Ahead, the tunnel ended.

  Tara expected the roof of the day before, the broken dome and stone-strewn platform beneath the wrecked orrery. What she found was different.

  Solid moonlight completed the broken arches and patched and polished the pitted metal. The roof was clean. In its center rose a granite throne flanked by curving horns claw-carved from the rubble that once littered the platform. The carving lacked mortar: gravity locked each piece in place. The work would have taken a human sculptor months without magic or machines, but Seril’s children were their own magic, and their own machines.

  Gargoyles awaited them.

  They stood in a loose circle around the throne. Wings crested monstrous shoulders. Aev, nearest, looked down at the human arrivals with the same composure Tara’d seen on Abelard’s face praying, and mistaken for haughtiness. Shale, at the circle’s rear, watched Tara, uneasy, trusting. A year ago Tara couldn’t have identified the meaning behind his fangs. She could now—and the other gargoyles’ expressions too, the determination on the face of tusk-toothed Gar and the haughtiness of scale-skinned Scree, the nervous twitch in great Grimpen’s cheek.

  None of which mattered beside the light that occupied the throne.

  The goddess wore a cloak of majesty. There were many faces within her face.

  Tara stepped out of Jones’s way. The Crier emerged into the light. Her pen rested against notebook paper. Ink seeped from its tip.

  Tara tried to conceal her satisfaction. She thought she did okay.

  Jones lowered the notebook and approached Aev. Tara followed, flanking, in case of ambush or gonzo journalism.

  “Ms. Jones,” she said, “this is Aev, who leads Seril’s children.”

  “We’ve met.”

  “You are in much better health than when last we spoke,” Aev said with a wry rumble.

  “Is this the part where you give me instructions? Don’t offer or accept anything? Don’t make any bargains?”

  “The Lady is eager to meet you,” Aev replied. “Any deals you make with her are yours to keep. She will communicate in your mortal tongue.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “Can I get you anything before we start? Water, coffee? Doughnut?”

  Jones blinked. “Water, thanks.”

  “Water will be found.”

  Shale walked to the rooftop’s edge and dove into space.

  “Of course,” Jones said. “You don’t need water yourself.”

  “Our few needs are met by moonlight, earth, and rain. He will return.”

  “Thanks.” Jones flipped forward in her notebook until she reached a page not blotted with the ink of her surprise. “Let’s go.”

  Aev ushered her toward the throne.

  32

  Abelard, fire-flooded, spread through his city, burning in ecstasy of communion, remembered his confession to Tara in the temple boiler room. And Kos remembered it too, because Abelard was part of him as he was part of Abelard.

  Yet Abelard was still the man he had been a year before, tumbling into darkness, dead, only to learn the darkness into which he fell was burning. That fire buoyed him up. The Lord caught him, time and again, as Abelard caught Him in turn. They fought for each other.

  Cardinal Gustave burned in the Temple of Justice, full of rage and futile hope, hair blown in smoke and hurricane winds. Cardinal Gustave fell. Cardinal Gustave, Abelard’s anchor, who held church and faithful in his iron conviction’s grip—dead, after betraying his Lord for a reason he thought was right.

  Peel off the old man’s face like a player’s mask, and Abelard saw himself.

  I must not become Gustave. I must not believe that I know best how God should be in the world. But Gustave was a wise man, and good. If he could turn from You unsuspecting, what might I do?

  What was Gustave’s fault? Pride, in thinking himself wiser than his fellow priests, wiser even, at the end, than God? But pride stemmed from a deeper source. If pride was flame, what was fuel?

  Fear. Fear Kos would reject him. Fear his iron would rust from within.

  In the end, it had.

  Where does that leave us? he prayed. What can we do in the face of fear?

  What else, came the whispered reply, but love and trust.

  Were the words his, or did they belong to Kos? What was he, anyway, but a piece of this burning web spun from a city’s dreams? He joined to Him by faith, by the burning of incense, by prayer, by kneeling before a fire. Where did Abelard end and God begin? They grew from each other.

  And in that unity he felt Seril, diminished though present—a chill to match His flame, an equal and an adversary, haughty and swift, fluid and eternal. Kos had burned alone for fifty years, with only cables of contract and debt to bind Him to other gods, bereft of gift and humor, of all that matters in life save duty. The city had been His alone.

  She was back, but She was weak.

  But, Abelard reminded him, Her return had not broken His obligations—to church and city as well as love.

  We need to work together, Abelard prayed. And, though the fear was not gone: I trust You.

  The web echoed with that word.

  Then the Fire said: You may have to prove it sooner than you think.

  * * *

  Cat was still deciding what to say when someone knocked on the door to the refrigerated hold of the Demon’s Dream.

  The knock came from within.

  She looked from Raz, to the contract he held, and back to the compartment.

  “You told me to sign the thing,” Raz said.

  “I didn’t think it would work that quickly.”

  The knock repeated, a hammer-blow strike.

  “Hold on.” She raised her voice. “We’re coming.” She pressed the amulet to the door, turned, and pulled. The door swung open and a chill
wind gusted out.

  A woman stood behind the door. Frost painted her skin. She lurched across the threshold. Her knees buckled, and Cat caught her by the arm, felt her flesh still stiff and cold. Kos and Seril. There should be someone here to deal with this. Specialists. Doctors. They should have thought. “You’re safe,” she said. The woman turned to her from the neck up. “I’m Cat. You’re in Alt Coulumb.” The woman did not respond. What language did these folks speak? Others approached the door, arms slack at their sides, staring.

  Raz tore free a tarp that had been lashed over a loose crate and folded it around the woman, rubbing her shoulders through the cloth. He spoke to her, first in a smooth language heavy with l’s and aspiration, and when that produced no response, in a more halting, guttural tongue, then a third with singsong tones Cat could barely classify. No answer.

  He tried another seven languages then swore. “That’s all I’ve got.” The hold was filling slowly with woken, silent people. Raz turned from the woman to the others. “Anyone here speak Kathic? Talbeg?”

  The woman quaked in Cat’s arms. Not shivering, or at least not shivers as Cat knew them. Heaving spasms. A seizure?

  Cat tried to lay her on her back, but the woman shook her off. Then she looked at and through Cat, and opened her mouth too wide. Her teeth were long and narrow.

  “Cat?”

  The others from the hold stood before Raz: tall and short, muscled and fat and lean, male and female and those not obviously either. Their mouths hung open.

  Cat looked back to the woman she held. Sticky darkness seeped between her teeth, and sharp glass gleamed within, swelling as if it approached down a tunnel much longer than the woman’s throat. Reflective tendrils skittered against enamel, caught and cut her lips, tensed—

  Cat threw herself to one side as a mirror shard shot from the woman’s mouth. Raz hit the deck too—shards burst from all the open mouths, a storm of crystal darts unfolding wings and legs, and unfolding again, like those creased-paper birds kids from the Shining Empire made, that when you undid them formed a bird larger than the one they had been. The people from whom the crystals flew all fell like string-cut marionettes.