Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  Not all the shapes were human, or humanlike: Cat saw sleek bottle-nosed bodies, fangs curving from their open beaks. Hundreds streaked through the night—tiny beside the kraken, but pale corruption spread where their spears bit, and their teeth, and the kraken shriveled as it rose.

  The kraken hit her again. She sprawled on its mantle as a translucent sack of flesh inflated overhead. That bloodred mass held many eyes, their pupils figure eights within which Cat could have stood upright.

  Then the mantle collapsed and they fell, propelled down by the kraken’s jet. Cat stared up into a beak that could crush mountains, ringed with lightning, and within that gnashing mouth a furnace. The speed of the kraken’s retreat slapped its arms and tentacles together, and Cat and Raz and all the hunters tumbled down, down—

  To land dust-clouded on a stony plain.

  Raz recovered first, which pissed her off. He offered her a hand. She ignored it and stood on her own.

  Around them the dust curtain settled, unveiling an ancient city.

  What she’d taken for a stone flat was in fact a plaza ringed with column-fronted, wedge-topped buildings. She remembered the style from textbook woodcuts, though those ruins had never been crusted with coral and seashells. Towers rose beyond the temples.

  Vampires surrounded them.

  They hung in water, red eyed and alien, half-visible at this depth even to her. Were they living, she could have seen their heat. They were not. Coins glistened in wide red watching eyes. She looked up and saw no surface overhead. The hunters returned, blood-wreathed, spears and teeth sharp. Dolphins swam alongside. Sonar clicks played over Cat’s skin.

  Raz swam into the center of the crowd. His hands moved, not just for swimming. Sign.

  A woman emerged from the crowd. She might have been thirty or three thousand. Seaweed trailed her limbs. The signs she addressed to Raz were crisper and more elegant than those he offered in reply. Whatever their language, he spoke it only haltingly.

  The conversation continued for tense and quiet minutes. Raz frowned after the woman—the priestess—responded to his third statement with a hook of her finger as if inviting. Their exchanges grew sharp. The priestess bared her teeth. Cat doubted this indicated progress.

  Excuse me, Cat said.

  A ripple passed through the crowd. Heads turned toward her.

  I’m sorry if we interrupted you, she said. I’m—we’re—from the surface. My name’s Cat; Raz brought me here because he thought you could help.

  Silence, full of clicks and curiosity.

  My Goddess, she said, is in danger. Her enemies want to kill Her. She needs strength to fight them off. Raz hoped you could help us.

  The priestess swam toward Cat like a snake would swim. Long braids trailed her. She stopped just beyond Cat’s reach. Her feet did not touch the seafloor. The priestess’s head cocked to one side, as if she’d been presented with a joke and was deciding whether to laugh.

  Do you understand me?

  The priestess nodded.

  They pushed you down here centuries ago. They’re trying to push my lady out now.

  The priestess opened her arms and twirled a circle, taking in the city and those who swam around her.

  Cat was about to ask what she meant, when she heard the singing.

  Water might garble ordinary speech, but song carried.

  —What God

  —Shall we seek

  —Save the Blood?

  They laughed.

  —Let us see

  —Your need

  The priestess held out her hand and raised her thin lips to reveal fangs more beautiful than any Cat had ever seen.

  Cat reached—

  The glamour broke. Raz interposed himself between them in a blur. Through the weight of water, she heard him hiss.

  Cat touched him on the shoulder.

  Raz. It’s fine.

  The priestess nodded, once.

  Raz looked back at her, scared.

  I can do this.

  She did not know what to call his expression as he swam aside. Despair, maybe, or hope.

  She offered her wrist to the priestess, who accepted, and bent her head.

  Her teeth dipped through Suit and skin with equal ease.

  A line of incandescent pleasure shot through Cat’s heart, spread out and up and so much more dangerously down, to her crotch, through arms and legs, fingertips, toes. Joy rattled the cave of her skull. Her thoughts came to pieces in a single pulse.

  Her taste of Raz in the ruined tower had been strange, surreal, exciting, but Cat had felt like this before. She knew to ride the feeling. She did not collapse or go mad. She’d felt weaker versions of this rush in Paupers’ Quarter backstreets or on the Business District’s rain-slick rooftops.

  The priestess was not drawing her, thank gods. Cat felt enormous hunger behind the woman, old and overwhelming, deeper than the ocean. The priestess tasted Cat’s soul, that was all, savoring her need, and through her the Suit’s, and Seril’s.

  Cat followed that taste back and in, to a network of which the priestess was but a piece—the blood of all assembled here in the sea’s night ran through her, and hers through them, joined to a throbbing heartbeat greater than any one alone and wiser, a mind that shook her to ecstasy with its faintest touch. She could offer herself to that hunger, fall into its perfection, let herself be hollowed out and worn as a glove by God—

  No, she told the hunger.

  The priestess lifted her fangs from Cat’s wrist, and the connection broke.

  Cat fell. She tried to gasp, by reflex, and choked when the Suit did not let her.

  After timeless time, she calmed.

  The priestess’s head declined and rose again, in a slow, gentle nod.

  The priestess drew a line across her own wrist with her thumbnail. A stream of blood snaked through the water and curled into a cloud rather than dispersing. The priestess took the cloud in her palm, and squeezed. When she opened her hand, she held a smooth oval of red jade that caught the not-light strangely. She offered it to Raz. He drew back at first, as if the sun lay in her palm. Then he looked at Cat, and sagged, and accepted.

  It was done.

  Cat had wondered how they would return to the surface—Raz could swim on his own, but even the Suit might tire with the strain of bearing its own weight back. Two from the congregation—the girl who drank the star kraken, and a slender man who had been Dhisthran before he became this—bore her skyward.

  Rising, she heard the music again: a choir of superhuman voices howling praise in the abyss, their meld an imperfect reflection of the living web she tasted through the priestess. It echoed undersea. No, she realized as they rose, those were not echoes but other songs, the ocean chanting glory and blood through eternal night.

  By the time Cat pulled herself back onto the dinghy and let the Suit slip away, the sky was purple with the threat of dawn. Open air felt weak, easy. The sunrise seemed obscene. Raz flopped to the deck.

  They lay alone on the water.

  When she could bear to move again, she reached for him. Her hand fell heavy on his leg, and squeezed. His did the same a second later, on hers.

  “That,” he said when he found words to speak, “was a brave dumb thing you did.”

  “At least we were dumb together. And brave.”

  He laughed, then coughed—and coughed and laughed harder, until he had to bend over the boat’s edge and hack water out of his lungs.

  She slapped him on the back. “Let’s get to shore before you burn.”

  53

  “It’s dangerous for you and your sister to be out alone,” Matt told Claire as they opened the stands. He’d chosen his words in the silence of their morning rounds, which had not been silent at all but full of rocking wagon wheels, plodding golem feet, the leafy shiver of lettuce loose in crates. For the second day in a row, they had not talked on the road. Dark circles undermined Claire’s eyes, and she stared over the golem’s surging shoulders. She napped when he
drove, which she had never done before.

  While he waited for her answer he unlocked his stand’s cupboard, removed the carved wood signs and stepladder, and climbed the one to hang the others from brass hooks. The paint caught dawn’s blush. He hung EGGS, and ADORNE, and FRESH between them. “I was worried for you.”

  “Worried” was too neat a word. He’d stayed up an hour past bedtime at the kitchen table with Donna, drinking mint tea brewed with leaves from their window garden. Hannah and Jake had abandoned their game of checkers and thunder lizards long before that; Hannah was sweet with the kid. Then again, neither Donna nor Matt was so free as Hannah to pin Jake down until he said sorry.

  Waiting, Matt and Donna counted sirens through the open window, and fistfights, and curses, and mating cats’ cries. Matt wanted to go look for them, but Donna counseled him to stay. After an hour they switched roles, and after that again.

  He slept, expecting to wake and find them still gone. But when he emerged robed after his morning shower, Claire was back, with a pot of coffee strong enough to double as industrial solvent.

  He’d asked her a wordless question, which she hadn’t answered and still wasn’t answering.

  “Your sister needs looking after,” he said, “and the city’s full of crazy confused people.” He arranged cartons of eggs, and a loose pyramidal pile in their center. Claire hauled a crate of eggplant onto the Rafferty stand’s counter and pulled plump dark plants out two by two. She set them down hard enough to bruise the flesh, but he didn’t say anything about that because she certainly knew. “What if your sister had another episode?”

  “Stop,” was the first word she’d said to him all morning other than “hello.” “Matt.” She leaned against the counter, lowered her head so her blond hair fell across her face, then turned to him. He held one egg in each hand, and felt faintly ridiculous. “You think I don’t know?”

  “I’m worried,” he repeated, and put down the eggs.

  “Yesterday we met a blind old woman who fell, alone, in her house—her son who lives with her was stuck on a double shift dockside—she hurt herself and no one came to her but—” She pointed up, and she was not pointing to the sun. “A five-year-old girl’s cat escaped through a window cracked open at night and she chased it out of doors only to lose herself until Seril’s children found her. A university student was being”—she shook her head, to clear it—“raped. Until. A single mother lost her job and would have lost her home if not for. Ellen talks to them all. People I couldn’t see. You don’t let others’ pain inside, you know? Not if you have enough already, and everyone always has enough.”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Everything’s dangerous in this city, Matt. Especially for women. I’m not a religious person, but Ellen is. Seril’s good for her, and for us. You’ve seen that.”

  “Gargoyles can’t solve the world’s problems.”

  “But they can help. They have helped. And Seril needs help now. Ellen wants to get everyone together, everyone who’s prayed to the goddess.”

  “You can’t fight Craftsmen.”

  “We can try. This will be over in a day or two, one way or another. For now, my sister needs me.” Lettuce shook as she dropped heads onto the counter. “You saw what happened to Ellen when they hurt Her. I won’t let that happen again.”

  He finished his pyramid of eggs. Then he built a second.

  “Hey,” he said after a while. “I’m sorry.”

  Ray Capistano’s knife blade struck his butcher’s block.

  “Donna and I care about you. If we can help, let us.”

  When he looked at her, she was looking back.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said.

  * * *

  The red lightning struck more often as Tara and Shale descended into the mountain.

  Not without warning—always the growl behind them or ahead. When crystal veins in the rock took fire, they ran or hid. Once, they could not run. Tara knelt in the tunnel’s center, Crafted a ward, and held Shale close as the fire buckled her shield. If the mind that moved this mountain wanted to crush them, it would.

  “Are you certain there’s a mind?” Shale asked.

  “I hope there isn’t, so I’ll assume there is.”

  They descended for hours. Back on the mythical surface, the Alt Coulumb express winged east. Tunnels turned back on themselves, confounding Tara’s stubbornly two-dimensional map. She could see Craftwork woven through the stone, which would help her retrace her steps; finding a way down was harder.

  She thought she recognized a triple junction through which they passed. Were they lost? She carved a glyph into the stone above the center passage. When they reached the triple junction again, the glyph was gone. Either she’d been wrong, or the something erased the glyph.

  Cave air tasted close and dank.

  She had to sleep, after a while. “That or collapse.” One side chamber, hewn to store drill bits and spare equipment, had walls free of crystal, which she hoped meant they’d be safe from the lightning here.

  Shale kept first watch. Tara unfolded a sleeping pad from her pack. She hung her jacket on a lantern hook, made a pillow of her knapsack, and slept in a cave silence broken only by Shale’s breathing.

  Nightmares struck, as hoped: a message from Wakefield, reporting the Alt Coulumb team was ready to defend Kos. Next she saw Abelard, praying alone in an enormous chapel; the altar grew, and the chapel’s flames melted his flesh from his bones. She did not know if Abelard sent her that dream, or if she built it for herself. After that, the bad dreams were real.

  A hand on her shoulder woke Tara to the tunnel’s black. She recoiled from the touch, scraped her knuckles against the wall, cursed, and summoned a light. Shale crouched beside her. “We should go.”

  “You kept watch without lights?”

  “I thought we should save the hand torches,” he said. “I hear well.”

  She smoothed the wrinkles in her suit and adjusted her slept-on hair. A small rodent had crawled into her mouth, died, and rotted. She swished canteen water in her mouth, gargled, and spit in the corner. Checked her watch again—the dawn flight had left already. “Any more lightning?”

  “Five clusters passed.”

  They returned to the tunnels and the blunt smell of undisturbed stone.

  “Do you think the lightning-balls are guards?” Shale asked.

  “Bad ones, if so. We’re not dead yet.”

  “They’d have killed us already if not for you.”

  “And the first would have got me if not for you. Good thing we keep each other around.”

  “Glad to hear I’m a useful asset.”

  “Not an asset,” she said, remembering the dragon’s voice.

  “What, then?”

  “A friend,” she said. “If you like.”

  He chuffed, and she thought she saw him smile. “What are they, if not guards?”

  “A goddess, maybe. Or god.”

  “A goddess is doing all this?”

  “She might be all this. Remember the myths about this place: the lady and the fire.”

  “Myths,” Shale said. “Fingers pointing at the moon.”

  “That’s an interesting point for you to make, knowing someone who is the moon.”

  “Our Lady is not ‘someone,’” he said. “And the goddess in the guidebook story lacks even a name. Who believes in her? What life could she possess?”

  “Human minds are a good divine substrate,” she said. “But they’re not the only one. Goddesses can be trapped with bone thorns and blood-cooled silver and other tools. The traps keep the goddess from fading when her faith is broken. Maybe something similar’s at work.”

  “Sometimes I forget how evil you can sound.”

  “The Craft,” she said, “is not inherently good or bad.”

  “Its best efforts notwithstanding.”

  “The point is, to trap a goddess, you might build a system much like this: a conductive lattice webbed th
rough a rich deposit of necromantic earths.”

  “You’re suggesting the mountain is artificial, and alive. And nobody discovered this during the mining operation.”

  “Miners bind local spirits before major excavation, but this place is too big, too rooted, for it to even notice normal bindings. All this”—she tapped a crystal vein—“anchors the goddess, puts her on a clock so slow mortals don’t register. Excavation must have woken her, made her mad.”

  “Hence the zombies.”

  “It’s a theory.”

  They walked for some time in silence.

  She folded the map, refolded it, frowned. “We should have found Altemoc’s team already. The chart shows a huge chamber that isn’t here. And we’re running out of time.”

  Shale hummed. “You say we’re inside a goddess.”

  “Maybe. Or something like one.”

  “And it is hurt.”

  “Wouldn’t you be pissed if someone bored holes into you?”

  “Not angry,” he said. “Hurt. A person who’s hurt guards her wound. The mountain curls around the place where the blade went in. It would explain why we can’t find Altemoc—he sought the injury, made it worse, and she’s enclosed him.”

  Tara stuffed the map into her jacket pocket and turned to Shale in the gloom. “I can’t fight something this big.”

  “You don’t have to fight,” Shale said.

  “How else do we make her let us in?”

  “Ask,” he said.

  “I just did.”

  “No. Ask her.”

  “You are making no sense.”

  He laid his palm against the wall. “You Craftsmen have odd ways of being. You force the world to your will, and you force your wills on one another. Your power’s built from bonds and obligations. There are other ways.”

  “The world doesn’t just … do things because you ask.”

  “Have you tried?”

  She raised her arms to the ceiling. “Hi! We’re here to help. Take us where we need to go!”

  Nothing happened.

  She fixed Shale with a stare she’d used to curdle milk.

  “You could use a less sarcastic tone of voice. And say ‘please.’”