Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  “Mine?”

  “Why not? You’re at least as scary, in most people’s minds, as your goddess.”

  “We are imposing by nature.”

  “It’s not helping you.” Gabby approached the dais, leaving footprints in dust, and sat beside Aev. She flipped to a blank page in her notebook, took pencil and knife from her pocket, and cut the pencil sharp. “Just say what comes naturally.”

  “Where should I begin?”

  She looked out, and down. “Start with the city.”

  * * *

  “You should leave,” Cat told Raz that night by the Bounty’s wheel, while skeletons and snakelings and the rest of his shadowy nighttime crew busied themselves on deck.

  “Leave?”

  “Leave Alt Coulumb. Get to sea. There’s bad stuff coming.”

  She’d found him working through a ledger on a low table by starlight. No lanterns. He didn’t need them. The book creaked as he closed its spine. “Tough day?”

  “You have no idea.” She leaned against the wheel. “You know how long Justice’s regulations are?”

  “Few hundred pages?”

  “Try a few thousand, all dense Craftspeak, little shades from act to act. Ninety different kinds of fraud. Seven classes of assault, each with seven subclasses. Why seven, don’t ask me.”

  “You’re not the type to spend her off hours reading rules.”

  “No. But we’ll be under attack in a few days, so I figured it might help.”

  “Attack.”

  “Craftsmen coming for Seril, or Kos, or both of them. Kos can handle himself; Seril can’t—the part of Her that’s Herself, I mean, the conscious bit. She doesn’t have enough power. I wanted to make the Blacksuits help. It’s not easy. Turns out Justice wasn’t built to interfere with Craftwork. This will get bad. You should go.”

  He capped his pen. “To save myself.”

  “Fighting these bastards is my job. I don’t want you doing hero stuff on my part. Leave. Get safe.” It hurt to say. “Come back when it’s over.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “You couldn’t fight the demons last night,” she said. “And you can’t fight what’s coming, either.”

  “Worse than demons?”

  “Bigger,” she said. “Craftsmen riding engines of war.”

  “I’ll help.”

  “You can’t swashbuckle this problem away. Unless you have some crazy secret vampire pirate god you haven’t told me about.”

  He ran his nails over the leather cover of his book. “Tell me the problem.”

  “Seril needs allies. No one will stick their neck out to help her. What’s it to you, anyway? You don’t care for gods or Craftsmen. Look out for yourself and keep clear of land, isn’t that the way you play it?”

  “Usually.”

  The deck between her feet had gone through more cycles of scuff and swab and polish and scuff than she cared to guess. “So what’s stopping you from leaving?”

  “You,” he said.

  She couldn’t answer that. Her face felt hot.

  “If Seril dies,” he said, “and Justice remains, she’ll go back to the way she was before. You’ll lose yourself in the Suit. It’ll get you high again.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “Seril’s been good for this city. And for you.” He stared out over the water. “I know people who might help. I don’t like talking to them, but they’ll listen to me. And there will be a price.”

  The ship’s sinews hung limp in the still night. “If you get hurt on my account, I’ll kill you.”

  “Someone beat you to it.”

  * * *

  Airfield security was the usual pain: prick of the finger to draw blood, and a winding passage through three layers of wards all of which could be subverted in minutes by any half-blind idiot with a shred of determination. After security, at least the decor improved. Crystal chandeliers hung from high arches, and clockwork songbirds flitted from perch to perch while chrome raptors circled. Brass orchids grew amid hedges of real plants. Restaurants and coffee shops dotted the concourse, mostly caged shut; the ten fifteen to Dresediel Lex was the evening’s last flight and boarding now, as indicated by the glowworm sign upon which three of the fake songbirds perched. Tara led Shale up the marble stair to the gantry level.

  Birdsong broke into squawking panic. She glanced back: two birds had flown from the sign, their resting place usurped by a raptor. Of the third clockwork songbird there was no trace.

  Shale frowned at the metal birds. The raptor preened and puffed the razor feathers of her breast. An organ tritone down the hall signaled preboarding. “Come on,” she said. “We’re late.”

  They ran past janitors mopping floors; the dragon eclipsed the sky outside the window. A deep rhythm pulsed through the floor tiles. At first she mistook it for the thrum of ventilation or of escalator machinery, but they’d passed no escalator, and ventilation would be softer.

  Heartbeat, she thought.

  Passengers waited in long lines by the gantries: beings human and once human in robes and suits. A three-meter-tall statue of silver thorns in the economy line held this week’s Thaumaturgist open with two hands and turned the pages with his third. The fourth fingered his ticket sleeve nervously.

  She reached the business-class gantry and fell into line behind a woman with long golden braids and a man wearing a mask of tanned skin. The ticket taker’s smile was riveted in place, literally. The tritone sang again.

  “Tara!”

  She turned, and saw Abelard sprinting toward them.

  The ticket taker extended her hand to the braided woman. Tara waved Shale on. “Get to the cabin. I’ll follow.”

  Abelard tripped over the thorn statue’s valise. His robes flared at the hem, and he hopped one-footed three steps until Tara caught him by the wrist.

  “I worked all afternoon,” he said, breathless. “When I looked at the clock I realized it was nine, and I’d last seen you in that nightmare.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I kind of shouted my way past the guards. Said I was on a mission from God.”

  “I really have to go.” Shale had vanished down the gantry. At the third tritone, economy passengers filed over their bridge. “Shale will get in trouble if I’m not around.”

  “When I looked at that clock,” he said, “I realized: she could just leave. Nothing ties her here. She could go to Dresediel Lex and let us deal with this ourselves.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I know,” he said. “You could, but you wouldn’t.” The coach line was almost gone. Tara felt faintly ridiculous, as if underdressed—exposed in the high-ceilinged hall.

  “I’ll be gone a couple days,” she said. “Hold the city together while I’m out, okay?”

  He hugged her. His arms were tight and narrow, and the body beneath the robes might have been made of thin pipe. His close-cut tonsure prickled against her temple.

  She patted him on the back. Her hand made a hollow sound against his ribs. She squeezed and tried to remember the last time she’d touched someone or been touched, not for instrumental purpose, but for the sake of touching. She had been too busy to notice the lack. “Thanks,” felt lame by comparison.

  “Come back to us,” he said when he stepped away.

  “I will,” she said. “Make sure there’s something for me to come back to, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  The thorn statue glanced over its spiny shoulder; Tara thought she heard it clear its throat.

  “Take care,” she said, and saluted him, and retreated to the business-class gantry. The ticket taker met her with a smile full of knives. At the foot of the gantry, Tara looked back. Abelard waited, watching.

  She waved, and so did he, before she entered the crystal tunnel.

  45

  What grim beast lay on Alt Coulumb’s back that night?

  Ellen cross-legged on her rooftop watched a filling moon, and hummed, and rocke
d to her heart’s beat.

  In a hospital room, Dr. Hasim rose from rough, overstarched sheets. His long fingers explored the cables and straps at his wrists and arms, unbinding each in turn. A puzzled smile pulled the wounds on his lips; his tongue traced stinging sores inside his mouth where demon legs had cut. He framed his mind in prayer. Hospital bonds fell from him. He walked between beds, consulting charts and confirming diagnoses. (Divinity grows from mortal souls; a doctor of gods need not be a doctor of the flesh as well, but it doesn’t hurt.) All asleep: young Tariq in deep dreams, wrapped around and through the Lady he bore with him from the sands. Large-bellied and fierce Akhil held his waymaking master/mistress to his heart. A goddess fragment walked the labyrinth of the girl Aiya’s dreaming face.

  When the door opened behind him, Dr. Hasim turned to the orderly. “Please take me to the roof, and fetch me paper, pen, and ink.” Bare-assed in a hospital gown, Dr. Hasim commanded, and the orderly obeyed.

  Elsewhere in the same building, Corbin Rafferty curled like a pill bug in his delirium. In the once empty bed beside him another man lay, massive and still, and there were no scars on his mouth.

  Atop a tower in the Ash, beneath the jagged remnant arches of a never-quite orrery, Gavriel Jones sharpened a pencil with her pocketknife. Aev watched her work. “How do you see yourself?” the gargoyle asked.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “My brothers and sisters are protectors, scouts, warriors. My youngest, who has gone with Ms. Abernathy to her war, thinks he is a rebel. What are you?”

  “I find stories that are true,” Jones said. “And I tell them.”

  “A poet, then.”

  She did not know how to answer that, but a laugh did not seem wrong.

  By ghostlight, Cat consulted her blank gray bedroom carpet. The twenty-four-hour laundry on the corner of Bleak and Lattice had taken the sackful of clothes from her hamper without comment. She’d refilled the hamper with clothes from the floor. Clean, her room seemed both smaller and larger.

  She touched the statue at her neck.

  Cat had fought for Seril, and saved her, and argued with her, and would fight again. She’d risked her body. But she had never risked her soul. To fly, we must invite the wind.

  She had never, quite, prayed.

  She took the statue on its chain from around her neck and opened her blinds so the moon could peer through.

  Abelard knelt once again before his altar. Priests at late-night services across the city preached to full congregations.

  Dr. Hasim, seated with pen and paper on the hospital roof, examined the moon and wrote. Behind him the orderly stood with arms crossed, wary and wondering, primed to lunge should the patient turn suicidal.

  Ellen rocked. A door opened behind her, and she recognized Claire’s footsteps. “I’m fine,” Ellen said. “They tried to kill the moon last night. That’s why I collapsed. She’s better now, but they’ll try again soon.”

  Claire lowered herself to the roof. Ellen read loneliness and exhaustion on the planes of her face—emotions that would one day frame themselves into lines. “I don’t know what to do,” Claire said.

  “Sit with me.”

  She did. And because Claire was not used to sitting, she spoke. “We could kick him out. Cut him off. But he’d stay Dad, somewhere. I went to the hospital. I wanted to confront him, but I couldn’t. I’ve spent so much time trying to keep our life together, I’m not brave enough to break it. So what good am I?”

  “You’re my sister.”

  “I haven’t been here for you in the last few days, or for Hannah. I’m sorry.” She hadn’t said more words to Ellen at once in months. Years, maybe.

  “I need your help,” Ellen said.

  “With what?”

  “The moon.”

  “Ellen—”

  “She’s in trouble. She needs strength. I’ve prayed to her, but I can do only so much alone. She’s helped so many in the last year. I could bring them together. But I don’t know how to start. I need help.”

  “Okay,” Claire said.

  Even the moon casts shadows, when bright enough.

  A brass band marched through the Pleasure Quarter, and revelers wound behind it, a gyrating snake of hips and arms and naked backs. Hairy, big-bellied men and sweaty women pounded feet against cobblestones. A gymnast in gemmed pink cartwheeled alongside; two acrobats tossed a spinning third into the air in place of a marshal’s baton.

  In many rooms and on some balconies, people made love.

  So whither the beast, and whence its roughness? Insects keep their skeletons on the outside; human beings only display their structure under force. The doom that neared Alt Coulumb, the twilight of the gods sung by street-corner Criers, pressed down with grand weight. But not all that’s wounded breaks.

  Not, at least, at first.

  * * *

  Dragon-borne, westward bound, Tara woke in need of a walk.

  Shale slept like a stone, which she supposed was reasonable. He did not even lie down: he sat on his bench-bed in their cabin, hands on knees. The creases of his slacks fell like plumb lines to his shined shoes, swayed by the wingbeats that rocked the gondola.

  “You awake?”

  No response.

  “If you’re ignoring me, I’ll do something horrible to you.”

  Nothing.

  “With chisels.”

  Hollow circles in crimson and cloth-of-gold patterned the ceiling, and these stared down at her, judging. She stood in her pajamas, slid into her slippers, and walked the empty, dim hall, hair clouded around and above her head. False flames glimmered behind smoked glass along the dark baseboards, illuminating the maze-patterned rug. A light blinked green over the door to the observation deck, indicating the platform was mostly safe.

  She emerged into the chill of great height. She shivered from the breeze, but she soon adjusted. It was not so cold as it should have been. Craftwork managed wind and pressure, and oven warmth radiated from the dragon’s scales. Broken clouds scudded below, and beneath those lay puzzle piece fields. They were east, yet, of Edgemont, but the country looked similar from so far up. She’d crossed these fields a year before in the opposite direction, with a job offer and an uncertain destiny.

  Wings claimed the sky in huge slow sweeps. Her stomach lurched when she watched those spreading bones and the taut scaled skin between. Raz had told her about a time when a hurricane caught him at sea, and walls of water rose higher than the Bounty’s topmast. We’re plains apes at root, he explained. Loping strides and a regular horizon, that’s what we like. Our body thinks nothing large enough to be landscape should move.

  Tara needed stars. She gripped the observation deck’s railing and vaulted over.

  Glyph-lines woke on her skin and whispered moonlit arguments. Old deals the first Craftsmen struck with the sky arrested her fall. She stood on a platform of air and walked uphill beneath and around the wide neck.

  The double drumbeat of the dragon’s heart faded as Tara walked. Another sound replaced it as she climbed past the shoulders’ shelf and along the four-story neck: a deep mellow drone on the low edge of hearing, accompanied by creeping dread in her gut. The sound she heard was only an overtone. The dread was the note the dragon hummed.

  The dragon’s head was twice the Bounty’s size, its crest taller than the ship’s mainmast.

  She reached the slope of its brow, high and arched like an eagle’s, and continued forward, contemplating the ground. Breath steamed the air. It smelled more of ozone than of the sulfur she expected.

  The gut dread stopped.

  She stood beside the dragon’s eye. It was taller than she was, and not completely closed. A curve of hunter’s moonlight showed beneath the lid.

  The eye opened.

  It glistened, wet, immense, slit-pupiled like a cat’s. The dark beyond the pupil seemed sharp, as if there were facets inside.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she said. Dragons did not eat people often,
certainly not ones they’d agreed to carry.

  The dragon watched her as they flew west.

  She looked up, because down was too far and so was out, and back and to either side only confronted her with more dragon. The space between the stars comforted her, thick and rich as good chocolate. She’d spent too long in cities. Even the stars above a Craft-ruled metropolis could not match a country midnight. Her eyes adjusted, and the universe emerged. Meeker stars assembled into constellations for which she knew a hundred names, and at last the galactic bow curved above, milky and mottled with indistinct millions. “Nice night.”

  —Yes.

  Sound below sound composed the voice. She did not fall, nor did she yelp, though she almost did both. Even a Craftswoman could fake only so much composure set beside, well.

  “I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

  —There was song before, and there will be song after.

  “I see.”

  —I play no role in cabin service. If you have trouble, please direct your concerns to the crew.

  “I don’t,” she said. “Or at least I don’t have any trouble they can fix. I needed a walk. Were you singing?”

  —Meditating.

  “Dragons meditate?”

  —You do not carry all your soul within yourself.

  “I’d go mad. The more you have, the faster your mind spins. It comes apart. That’s what banks are for.”

  —Imagine how it feels to have a hoard.

  “Oh,” she said. “So you meditate to handle it?”

  —Some lose themselves in riddle games or chess or weiqi. Some tell tales or explore. Some dream new worlds. I still the spinning.

  “I could use some of that myself.”

  —Yes.

  “And you carry people from place to place.”

  —Yes.

  “Why?” After she spoke, she felt a stab of fear that drawing the dragon’s attention to the ludicrous fact of its employment might cause the creature to shrug free of chains, cabins, and gondola alike.

  —Are you interested in the particulars of my case, or in general philosophy?

  She did not know how to answer, so she said nothing.

  —You wonder at power yoked to service. You wonder because you have come into power young and are learning that power comes through the acceptance of a bond. But if to have power is to be bound, then what is power?