Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  The glass that missed Cat struck the bulkhead arrow-deep and quivered there as claws tore gouges in the wood. Sawdust and wood chips and scraps of cloth filled the air, and all around the hold there were these things, huge winged bugs, reflective carapaced and slick and growing. Their mouths held fangs and twitching blade lips. They were hungry.

  Blood seeped from the corner of Cat’s ear, from a cut she hadn’t felt.

  “Demons.”

  Cat raised the truncheon from her belt, just in time. The nearest demon-bug flew toward her; she batted the glass insect into a bulkhead. It bounced off a tarp, reversed its legs, shook itself, and launched at her again. The second’s relief gave Cat’s hand time to reach the Justice medallion at her neck, and the cold perfection of service carried her away.

  This time, when she swung the club, the creature shattered to smoking shards. One down, forty-something to go.

  She looked up. Raz had pulled the tarp from the fallen woman and thrown it to snare a clutch of demons. Legs and mandibles pierced fabric, but before they could fight free he smashed the tarp against the deck. Glass spines cracked. A bug landed on Raz’s scalp and clawed bloody strips away. He screamed. Cat leapt, clubbed the thing off him, and it burst into a shower of sharp dust. Blood streamed down his forehead.

  They stood ringed by unconscious former demon-hosts, and twenty-five glass insects, now the size of toddlers and still growing. Spindly limbs merged and thickened. Plates of mirrored chitin sprouted between joints. Ruby eyes grew further facets. Claws lengthened and serrated.

  Too many to fight.

  Raz bared his fangs.

  She didn’t know how strong he was. But he could bleed. And they could cut him.

  They could cut her, too, even through the Suit. This many, they could tear off her arms like children plucking daisy petals. But she could kill—not all of them, the distributed tactical mind of Justice told her. Skill, speed, and strength went only so far against sheer numbers. But she could take many with her.

  She spread her arms in front of Raz. In one hand she held her truncheon. Her other hand’s fingers lengthened into claws.

  Come on, she told them in the Suit’s silver-coated nightmare voice. Maybe demons had bad dreams too. Show me what you’ve got.

  They stared at her, opened mandibles, wriggled razor mouthparts.

  She tightened her grip on the truncheon.

  The demons’ wings snapped wide, and as one they flew.

  They boiled toward the opening of the hold, still growing. Claws scrabbled against timber, and they were out. She ran after them. With a leap she caught the slowest demon’s trailing leg; if she’d touched it barehanded its edges would have laid open her palm, but the Suit let her hold it, let her catch its wing too, both of them spinning above the deck of the Dream. The demon’s head rotated on its neck; fangs snapped, but she was too close for them to bite deep. Its claws, though, could. They tightened like a diamond-tipped vise. One talon tore a line in her Suit. The fluid flowed free of its claw to mend the gap, but not before its talon plunged beneath, exploring her flesh.

  She wrapped her arms around the demon’s belly and squeezed. Glass squealed, popped, shattered. The Suit closed her wound. She fell, turning, turning, and slammed into the deck. Glass shards rained onto her, melting as they fell. Above, unfolded demons flew. Their wings rainbowed streetlamp light and beat dragonfly fast, gaining altitude, flying inland.

  “Ma’am?”

  The skeleton-sailor bent over her, head cocked to one side. Concern. How interesting that she could read the man’s, no, woman’s, expressions. Maybe you had to learn, once you became a skeleton, how to act so people could tell what you were thinking. Like guiding a puppet.

  She remembered this feeling from back before Seril’s return, when the Blacksuit was still Black. The fog of assurance, the Suit guiding her reeling mind to detached logic.

  She stood. The Suit blunted the pain in her side, kept pressure on the wound, guided blood to proper vessels.

  Across the city, Justice called her children. Under attack. All units. Suits patrolling backstreets paused midstep and turned skyward, preparing to run. But they couldn’t fly.

  One hand crested the edge of the hold, then another, and Raz pulled himself onto the deck. Regrown skin closed the cuts in his scalp. He did not need to breathe, so he wasn’t breathing heavy. He ran to her, held her, his hand tight enough on her arm she could feel it through the Suit’s narcotic haze. “Are you all right?”

  She wasn’t used to laughing through silver. You?

  “Fine.” He turned to the skeleton. “There are injured people in the hold. Help them.”

  We have to go. Her mind raced through the matrix of Justice, assembling scenarios, considering data. Scraps: the sleepers woke when Raz signed the contract bringing them into Seril’s domain. Demons sought freedom. These were bound, now, by Seril’s rules alone—and if she died, they’d be free. Limitless.

  “You’re hurt.”

  Not much. She stood. Come on. The other officers won’t be able to stop them in time.

  “We can’t either.”

  You can learn, Aev had told her last night, on that rooftop. Well. No time like the present.

  Yes we can, she said.

  And, in silence, to the moon: you wanted me to pray, dammit. You wanted me to need you. Here you go. Here I am.

  The smooth silver of her back rippled, and bulged, and birthed wings.

  When she turned to him, he was looking at her differently.

  She held out her hand. Are you coming?

  33

  The goddess condensed to human shape as Jones approached. The moonlight whirl receded behind a surface too slick and shimmering for skin. Gargoyles sang, a chorus whose treble notes flirted with the lowest range of human hearing. Theater? No, Tara saw stone faces fixed with holy effort: rising into prayer, lending the goddess the platform of their minds to help her address this faithless mortal.

  So Seril had told the truth: Tara was, in some sense, a priestess.

  You’ve fused the chain around your neck, and handed them the dangling end.

  Dammit.

  Tara saw traces of her own features in the face Seril assumed: her cheekbones, and a line of jaw more her mother’s than her own. Perhaps she saw only what she knew to see. That was often the way with gods.

  Part of why she didn’t like them. Craft was clear: no wiggle room with ink and blood and starlight. A deal worked, or did not. Rights relinquished could not be willed back. Absolute truth issued from signatures on paper. Subjectivity was for people who couldn’t hack it objectively.

  She had thought like that when she first came to Alt Coulumb. Still did, most days. But then why had she removed her glyph from Shale?

  Jones slowed as she neared the throne, like the Ebon Sea philosopher’s arrow that crossed first half the intervening distance, then half that, then half again. She stared into Seril’s face.

  At the foot of the throne she hesitated, and looked away. Tara saw a bright wet line on Jones’s cheek.

  Tara knew the feeling. She’d felt that way herself last year when the gargoyles introduced her to their Lady. Cynical analysis: gods prompted this neurochemical reaction as a form of self-defense. Awe each human you encounter. Seduce them with ultimacy. If she examined herself the way the schools taught her, she could see classic signs of subversion—a drastic change of behavior upon exposure to a divine being. Broken by blessing. The libraries of the Hidden Schools held volumes about conversion, indoctrination, torture. She remembered the woodcuts of rats in mazes and babies raised in boxes.

  Priestess.

  But the scholastic method was a conditioning all its own. Any break in the pattern of thought she’d learned was a moral failing, an intrusion of dark powers to be met with suspicion and fear.

  Daphne held the flightless bird in the temple gardens.

  We’re so alone, she thought. We touch one another too firmly and wound or break, or else we pull away. We
tell stories in which we are lone noble heroes, until we stand face-to-face with a goddess and see something older and bigger than each of us because it is each of us, our souls touching, the subtle interaction at a distance of minds with minds, when we reach the edge of loneliness and teeter uncertain at the brink.

  Or else, old teachers’ voices whispered, you kneel because you lack the strength to stand.

  Jones asked the Goddess a question Tara could not hear.

  But she heard the answer: “Yes.”

  * * *

  The night before, when had Cat crouched on the roof’s edge, Aev told her: first we invite the wind into our wings. Without the wind, we cannot fly.

  It sounded stupid. Mystical mumbo-jumbo, self-evident, of course you needed the wind to fly, that was how wings worked.

  Raz took her hand. She invited the wind.

  She’d tried last night, three times, and three times fallen, plummeting ten stories until Aev swept down to catch her. No room for failure now. Wings wide.

  Two beats buffeted the deck. The Suit did what she asked, when she asked, but she felt like a climber with a finger grip on a narrow ledge: the wind was there, but she could not pull herself atop it.

  The demons reached the port-facing rooftops, gaining altitude.

  You can’t muscle yourself up from this position. Change the angle. Use your body, not your arms. Swing.

  She bent her legs, gathered Raz to her, and leapt.

  He squawked, undignified. The deck receded below, the ship rocking from the force of her departure.

  She began to fall.

  Come on, wind, she thought. I need you.

  Her wings filled. She saw deep currents rising from the city, colored red below red: heat, a path she could use. Beneath her—beneath her!—lay Alt Coulumb, port streets she’d patrolled, the warehouse where she cornered the gargoyles the year before, Pleasure Quarter alleys down which the younger woman she had been staggered sickly and strung out hunting for an easy fix, and there, ahead, the tower of Kos Everburning. A moon shone on her spread wings, and another on the skyline, atop a tower in the Ash, where Seril held court.

  Raz laughed, his arms around her, his grip tight with monkeyfear of falling.

  She laughed, too, fiercely. To fly was glorious.

  The demons sped north and east. Cat hunted them.

  * * *

  Thus Jones, in the light of an unfamiliar goddess:

  “Would you consider yourself a refugee?”

  “A survivor. It took me forty years to reach home, and then only in a reduced condition.”

  Jones stood in silver light. The world shifted as she shifted angles, like a hologram postcard. One blink, one turn of the head, and she stood before a woman whose face she almost recognized, not quite Mother, not quite her, not quite Grandma. Another blink, another turn, and the roof was gone and the sky too and the woman, replaced by a frothing silver sea.

  But Jones still held her notebook.

  “Your gargoyles attacked Alt Coulumb after you died.”

  “I was not dead. I was dismembered. Parts of me were stolen. But I lived, reduced, with and through my children. Fallen, I went mad. So did they. It took us a long time to learn to think again.”

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I belong here,” she said. “My love is here, as are my people. Justice fails many. She follows rules without question. The night must have a compassionate face.”

  The crucial question: “How do you operate with Justice, then?”

  “She was built from stolen pieces of my corpse. Now that I have returned, we are one and two. Her children are freer than they were, thanks to me. The system is more flexible. In her old, rigid form, Justice was vulnerable. We are better now.”

  Gabby’s pen trailed shorthand scrapmarks on paper. She’d expected visions, mind-racking battles on a symbolic plain, gnomic pronouncements issuing from a vent in the earth. This was good copy.

  “How do you respond,” she asked, “to allegations—”

  Then the goddess screamed.

  34

  Shale flew toward the tower, water cask in hand, above the tracks of a southbound train. He hadn’t exactly rushed to find the reporter a drink. Honor guards were well and good, but why not linger on the return trip, to stop a mugging and right an overturned carriage?

  Far away he heard his brothers and sisters sing, though the humans below did not. When he wore flesh he accepted its limits; few of Seril’s children knew how tinny and limited were the sounds Alt Coulumb’s softer citizens heard. (And how strange human words for what they could not hear—subsonic, as if there was no sound below the narrow band those odd small ears could catch.)

  He hummed along, and beat time with his wings.

  The demons struck him in midair.

  He felt the impact first, three blows against his legs, and on his back between his wings—then piercing pain. He roared in shock and rage and dropped, in that second, the cask. It tumbled, he tumbled, while his mind worked out (thought came slowly, as if someone had turned down the metronome that beat the world) the truth of the situation: he’d been attacked. Illogical, impossible to be struck in flight in his Lady’s city, but—

  He furled his wings and fell past blurring windows and shocked human silhouettes, then stretched his wings to brake. The burrowing thorns in his back tore free, and a crystal thing shimmered under him, falling, shard edged with four broad thin wings and a sharp proboscis.

  Burning eyes, multifaceted.

  Demon.

  He’d fought them before. Most had no opacity or smell, no internal organs, because these were irrelevant to the purpose for which they were summoned. They had claws and teeth, because these were not.

  Crystal wings buzzed as the demon darted toward him. He dodged up and back and caught the creature as it passed through the space he had occupied a second before. It was fast, almost as fast as Shale. Hooked legs jabbed toward his face, but he brushed them aside, wrapped them beneath his arm. Claws raked his stomach. He blocked one; the other burrowed into him. They fell onto an elevated train track, crashed apart.

  Shale leapt from the track as a train charged past. The demon blurred up from the ground. He folded his wings and dove to meet it.

  He struck the demon with his full weight—and then the demon struck pavement with Shale on top, and shattered.

  He crouched in the street, wreathed in demonsmoke. Horses reared. Carriage wheels clattered on cobblestones. Human shapes approached from the sidewalk. A girl held out her arm. She recoiled when he turned to her. Out here, in the light, he felt exposed.

  He flew.

  When he crested the skyscrapers, two more demons hit him at once.

  * * *

  Abelard felt glass knives carve his city’s sky. He saw them through the eyes of a frightened boy on a fire escape, of an old man watching the few visible stars through a telescope, of a girl singing on a rooftop in the Paupers’ Quarter.

  God’s knowledge washed against his own like waves at an island’s shore, leaving traces of itself. Demons in the city but not of it—demons marked as Seril’s people.

  They flew toward the gargoyles’ tower. Through an accountant working late Abelard saw two catch Shale in midair, whiplike limbs seizing his arms, proboscises jabbing. They drank from him.

  On the northeastern tower, the moon began to set.

  Then, a silver streak—

  * * *

  Cat saw Shale tumbling, held aloft by two sets of demon wings. She heard his cry through the Suit; without the Suit she would have only felt it in her bones. We need to help him, she said.

  “You can’t fight them and carry me,” Raz said.

  I’ll set you down—

  “Throw me.”

  Are you crazy?

  Shale’s roar weakened as they drained him.

  “Do it.”

  She gathered him in her arms, let the Suit judge trajectory, and threw. He was a missile of cloth and muscle and teeth.
>
  He landed on a demon’s back, and as she closed the gap she saw him wrap his legs around its abdomen, grab its bulbous head and pull, back and up. A proboscis sprang free of Shale’s back, spun around, split into snapping jaws, but too late. Raz snapped the head free of the body.

  And fell, as the demon disintegrated beneath him.

  Godsdammit she didn’t have time—the fall, the Suit offered, would take thirty seconds—she tore two legs off Shale’s remaining demon. Claws caught at her but Shale’d regained enough strength to help. She speared the demon through the heart with its own leg. Its carapace cracked, and twenty seconds, she planted her legs on Shale’s body and dove down from him, fifteen, ten, flare—

  She caught Raz thirty feet from the pavement, turned his plummet to a sideways swoop, then soared.

  He was, she noticed, still grinning.

  They met Shale in the air. Silver light leaked from cracks in his skin. He pressed one hand to his side, and more light trickled through his fingers.

  Can you fly?

  “I must.”

  He pointed to the tower in the Ash atop which Cat had seen the second moon.

  It was setting now, and glass bugs buzzed around it.

  * * *

  Panic of order time breaks the.

  Tara, in some sequence:

  —hutched under skittering claws as a spear mouth jabbed at her face—

  —threw herself to rough stone and raised her hands and a shield of Craft—

  —turned from the goddess’s throne to see crystal rainbows and claws approaching and—

  —saw gargoyles tense and throne light flicker, Seril lose coherence as Jones dropped to one knee—

  To the nine hells with order anyway. Fight.

  She stabbed through her shield into demon-skin. The crystal reflected her knife, but the demon recoiled anyway, allowing Tara space to rise, cloaked in shadow.

  Demons swarmed Seril’s children. Gar went down beneath the weight of two; he clutched one to his chest, shattering it, but the other stabbed him with its mouth and drank. Aev fought three at once, battered a fourth with her wings. Their chorus had broken into roars and rage. Tara closed her eyes, saw their Craft.