Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

* * *

  Late late late, and more than a little drunk, Cat wove toward the Bounty. They’d drawn up the gangplank, but with a running leap she cleared the few yards between dock and ship, caught a net slung over the side to dry, and face-planted against wood that smelled of tar and salt. She climbed the side, caught the railing, vaulted over, and was promptly tackled by a skeleton.

  The tackle didn’t go well for the skeleton, since skeletons by and large don’t have enough mass for tackling. Cat tossed the skelly across her shoulder to the deck. Poorly linked bones jarred loose as it fell. Two blades glinted in firelight to her left. She grabbed the skeleton’s fallen sword, slipped, and tumbled into a front roll that she hoped looked planned. Upright more or less, she spun sternward to face the blades: a shiny woman—with gills?—and a man whose left arm was some sort of golemetric construct. She raised one hand, palm out, lowered the sword. “Hey. Hey. No trouble. I just want to see your boss.”

  “Should have climbed higher,” Raz said from the foredeck. She turned and waved with the sword. Lantern flames added orange to the scab-red of his eyes.

  “I was just looking for you!”

  “I know.” He landed in front of her, strong enough his weight didn’t cause his legs to bend.

  “Show-off.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  She laughed. “You’re funny.” She set the sword on the deck. Well, maybe dropped would be more accurate. No worries. Swords were tough.

  “Come inside. Let’s get you something that isn’t poison.”

  He led her into his cabin and poured her a tall glass of water. She sat on the couch-bed, dimpling the velvet with her fingers. The cabin was silver and gold and crimson everywhere, neat and dusted and polished—Raz couldn’t have space, so he compensated with luxury. “Went to see Abelard’s family. You know. End of the world stuff. We drank to solve problems.” She touched the badge at her neck and invited Justice to burn the alcohol from her blood. “See? All better.”

  “Drink water anyway. I know what you’re like hung over.”

  “Friends drink with you,” she said when the glass was half-done. “Good friends make you hydrate.” She set the empty glass on the end table.

  “Why are you here, Cat?”

  “Can I see the token she gave you?”

  He produced it like a street conjurer summoning a coin. Up close it seemed clouded and deep. Strange shapes shifted within. Her head swam as she watched them. She passed the stone back. “What does it do?”

  “It’s their blood,” he said. “Their family. Two thousand years and more of not-quite-life, feeding off the great monsters of the deep. Two thousand years of recruiting sucker refugees kicked out of their homes by torchbearing lifers, two millennia of converts and dark miracles. All that power, all that hunger in a single package.”

  “It’s a drug.”

  “It’s a religion. It’s more than a religion.”

  “You take it, and they own you. Like the dreamdust.”

  “They don’t own me,” he said. “When I take this, I can use their power. All the family’s hunger is mine, as I need it. And when I’m done, when the power recedes, the dregs of my soul drain out into the ocean with theirs. I’ll have to go there to fill myself. And what I get back won’t be me. It’ll be one drop of my blood to a million of theirs. I’ll be a faint flavor. Most of what’s left will be them.”

  “You’ll die.”

  “You need help, and so does Seril, and so do Abelard and Tara. I’ve lived a long time already.” He sat on a chair before his writing desk. “You’re going to tell me to let it go.”

  “No.”

  “What, then?”

  This was the part she’d had to get drunk for, and she wasn’t drunk anymore. But then, if being sober made some things hard to say, maybe the things said were better for it. “You’re not doing this because of some half-assed sense of civic duty to a place you don’t live. You like Tara, and Abelard, and the others, but you’re not doing it for them. You’re doing it for me. Because Seril helped me get unfucked in the head, and you’re afraid if she goes, I’ll slide back to the way I was before.”

  “And this is the part where you curse me out for presuming to live your life for you, where you say you can handle yourself—”

  “Listen to me.”

  He stopped.

  “We keep second-guessing each other. I don’t think we’ve been on the right foot two days running since this thing started.”

  “Maybe if you hadn’t broken my neck that one time.”

  “Shut up,” she said softly. “Please.”

  Water slapped the ship’s side. A dockside drunk sang a warbling Talbeg song.

  “Tomorrow I’ll do something dumb for my goddess, and I might die. Tomorrow you’ll do something just as dumb for me, and you might die. Tonight we deserve each other’s honesty. This isn’t my habit talking. I want to be with you now. Do you want to be with me?”

  He said the word she was afraid to hear.

  He could move faster than the human eye could follow. Now, though, he moved slow as a statue would be if it decided to walk. He joined her on the couch. His fingers were cool against her cheek, and she let out a breath as they traced the line of her jaw to her neck, and the line of her neck to her shirt.

  She ripped his getting it off him, and tangled his pants in his boots; they had to stop and tug, laughing, together. The couch velvet was hot and soft against her skin, and he poised above her, one hand firm against her side. “Oh,” he said, and cursed, rolled off the bed and returned a second later with a sheet. “Sorry. In case.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, and stood naked in the cabin; he was, too. Moonlight lit old scars on his skin and hers, but for now the scars were not the point.

  They reclined again. She held him like a vise, and then, and then—

  Mechanically, it wasn’t altogether different from her other trysts. There were mouths and two tense bodies. He was strong, and so was she, which he knew when they were dressed but it took him a few minutes to understand it was still true when they were naked. She wouldn’t break. Neither would he. There were teeth, too, and there was some blood, which the sheet caught, and there was sweat and meat and bones and spit and slickness.

  There were no strange-godded cities beneath the waves; there were no necromancers lurking in the shadows. There were no contracts, no gargoyles, no moon, no water, no Justice.

  Just us, she thought, and laughed.

  It was enough.

  Well. Once wasn’t. So after a rest they tried again.

  57

  “I hate dungeons,” Tara said when they reached the third lightning-lit gallery. Far above, leathery wings fluttered, too large and loud to belong to normal bats. A grim red glow lit their path, and as they walked Tara tried not to think about the writhing shapes in the shadowed halls to her left and right, or the stone’s tremor underfoot like the quivering of a wounded animal’s skin.

  “It is a neat effect,” Shale said.

  “Neat is how a room looks when it’s clean. This place could crush us.” Crystal veins grew thicker on these walls, and their light left her shadowless and red. She switched off her hand torch. The tunnel narrowed; walls warmed her fingertips. She did not touch the crystal. “You know why we use anesthetic in surgery?”

  “To spare the subject pain?”

  “That’s a nice side effect, but the real benefit’s for the surgeon. Patients thrash when you cut them open. The body fights intrusion. Muscles clench and skew the scalpel.” Another peristaltic tremor passed underfoot. False sunset lit the curving tunnel wall ahead. She smelled ozone and salt and bone. Something creaked. She hoped it was not the wall. “If your theory’s right, we’re performing surgery on a mountain. How do you sedate a rock?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Exactly,” she said, and then: “How long do you think we’ve been following this tunnel?”

  “I—” He stopped. “I don’t know.”

 
“Neither do I.” She showed him her watch. “Either we’ve lived through the last hour three times over, or she’s adjusting time for reasons of her own.”

  “Are we still on schedule?”

  “I have no idea.” She stuffed the watch back in her pocket, not bothering to conceal her frustration. “What’s fast here might be slow out there, or the other way round. The mountain’s reflexes are fiercer near the wound. Which is why it’s good and bad we’re getting close.”

  “You expect trouble?”

  Which was when they turned the corner and saw the bone-thing.

  “You could say that.”

  Their goal lay at the tunnel’s end: the largest gallery yet, daylit almost with crystal and flame. Tara ignored that for the moment.

  The bone-thing filled the tunnel mouth. Creaking, chattering, tangling and unwinding, it was no one shape entirely: an enormous bat’s skeleton propped with smaller bones, needle-sharp tail links of cave mice and translucent ribs from dead blind fish, a surface monster’s horned skull bleached by centuries. Wings tipped with curved claws flexed. Crimson lightning arced within the cage of its chest. Claw toes screeched chalk-white lines against the tunnel floor. Its jaw opened to roar, but no sound came.

  Shale stepped forward, but she held out her arm to block him. “Surgery. No anesthetic. The more we fight down here, the worse it goes for us.”

  He growled. She knew how he felt.

  The bone-thing pounced. Claw wings filled the tunnel.

  Tara closed her eyes.

  Fractal silver schema rushed toward her, the bone-thing a story told by the mountain’s need. Tara’s first aesthetic reaction was contempt. If she had submitted such sloppy work at the Schools, she’d have spent a week helping golems dig up corpses to remind her the costs of brute force.

  Her second aesthetic reaction, though, was pleasure. Such baroque profusion of power! The bone-thing was so dense she could barely see its individual strands. Crufty dynamism at its best. No calculating mind would make something so excessive. But the bone-thing was made, for a purpose, which you could see if you knew where to look—

  Help me it hurts it hurts it HURTS—

  So all she had to do (though quickly, because the clawed critter’s crossed half the distance between us already and only a fool trusts the arrow-flight paradox to keep her safe) was seize and redirect that purpose. I can ease the pain, if you help us.

  She offered a simple contract to the bone-thing.

  It fell in a clattering cascade. Wing tips drew sparks from stone walls as it tumbled. It landed in a crouch, so close it could tear out her throat before she blinked.

  It did not.

  It knelt.

  She set her hand on the skull between its horns. Her fingers traced the bone’s grain. “Think I’ll call him Oss,” she said. Glancing over her shoulder, she caught Shale staring. “Come on. Let’s finish this before more show up.”

  Oss drew its wings aside to let them pass, and followed.

  * * *

  Tara had hoped the next gallery might be the last, and for once reality conformed to her wishes without sorcerous encouragement. The chamber into which Shale and Oss followed her was the largest they’d yet seen, cathedral tall, thicketed with arches and outcroppings of red crystal. Ghostly fire danced on its walls and floor. She was no geologist, but even ignoring the rest of their excursion so far she would have suspected there was something unnatural about the cave.

  Aside, that is, from the man impaled by lightning in its center.

  He hung like a fly in an enormous spiderweb, or a specimen mounted on pins of light: three feet off the ground in the center of a lightning column, limbs splayed rigid, eyes shut. More lightning shafts danced from his body to the crystal in the walls and back, lancing him only to fade and lance again. She remembered Hidden Schools’ descriptions of brains, and the way a god looked splayed out in operant space beneath the knife.

  Glyphs burned crimson on the man’s skin, sharper and cruder and more extensive than she’d ever seen. His entire body was a single system designed by some twisted thaumaturge—no patterns, no machine tooling, just pictograms carved into his flesh by hand. She tried to imagine the pain of such work, the distortion of the mind, the risk of soul-rot from so much Craft. Who would dare?

  “Is that him?” Shale asked.

  “Altemoc,” she said. “I think so. Matches the pictures. And those around him on the floor”—prone bodies covered by ghostflame—“must be his crew. Let’s go.”

  She entered the lake of fire, and its flames shied from her feet. Beneath, where she expected rock, was a pane of what looked like diamond. Beneath the diamond coiled immense ropes of demonglass.

  Tara blinked, and the nested thorns of light below nearly blinded her. Demon coils battered and scraped the floor. “Don’t look down,” she said, and knew from Shale’s drawn breath that he had.

  Green flame dripped from the walls. It bubbled and convulsed as she approached the floating man, and assumed huge apelike forms.

  Oss’s teeth clattered.

  Shale regarded the fire-apes skeptically. “Can you fix them like you did our friend here?”

  “The closer I come to Altemoc, the more damage my Craft does,” she said, voice level. If she didn’t stay calm, who would? “Oss should buy us some time.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Shale said. Displaced wind battered her. He suddenly occupied more space than he had moments before.

  She neared the lightning nexus. Fire shapes closed in. One lunged at Tara, but several hundred pounds of gargoyle bowled it to the diamond floor. Oss charged two more elementals, and its bone talons tore through fire.

  Tara set down her backpack, smoothed the lapels of her jacket, and stepped toward the lightning.

  Uniformed figures splayed prone on the diamond floor, breathing deep. A cane lay at Altemoc’s feet. She was close enough to see the man himself, thirty-two or -three, nice cheekbones, jawline a bit too narrow. The glyphs that shone through his suit were not glyphs at all, but scars.

  She cleared her throat. Behind her, Shale roared and punched through an elemental’s face. “Good morning,” she said. It was morning somewhere. “I’m Tara Abernathy. The Two Serpents Group sent me to negotiate for your prisoners’ release. To whom am I speaking?”

  Altemoc’s head jerked down to face her, a poorly managed marionette’s movement. His eyes opened, and the space between his lids was flat and blinding red. Not a good sign. He opened his mouth. Blood-light lit his teeth from within.

  She was almost ready for the voice when it came: a man’s wrapped around and through a woman’s, if that woman were a thousand meters tall and made of fire.

  What/have/you/done/

  “Let’s start with a name. You have me at a disadvantage.”

  Two elementals seized Shale’s arms and tried to pull him apart. Moonlight from his wounds spilled on the diamond floor. His wings beat, the elementals lost their footing, and he pulled free—to rip one’s leg from its body and swing it clublike into the other’s face.

  Firekeeper/call/me/or/Deathwarden/Thunderspeaker/Shewhoburns/

  “Ms. Keeper,” she said. “I think I understand most of your situation, but let’s see if I have it right.”

  Speak/

  “Down there, under our feet, you’ve trapped a raw demon, one that entered this world through a crack, unsummoned, without limits on its power. I didn’t know that was possible in the pre-Craft era, but if you made me guess I’d say it came through during a war between gods, a few thousand years ago. About right?”

  Gods/serpents/thosebeyond/outspiders/skazzerai/

  “I don’t need particulars. Most of the time, unbound demons pop into singularity and take a few cubic miles of planet along, but this one’s big. It might have chewed up the whole world before it burst. So you caged it.” Keep her talking. Don’t think about what the thing beneath your feet might do if you screw up. “You tricked it into a part of your mind you clocked slow—a su
bjective second every million years, say. Must have used half the necromantic earths in Northern Kath to build this place. Impressive systems redundancy: any elements taken from the mountain will return in time. So millennia passed, until Kovak Central Mining started drilling.”

  An elemental tore Oss’s wing free, only for the wing to transform to a bony claw that strangled the fire.

  Ignore the battle. Focus on the—what was she at this point? Deponent? Witness? If so, Tara should be asking more questions.

  Torment/tear/efficiency/reduced/lose/seconds-on-century/

  “The mine damaged containment. You patched the wound by draining a convenient power source, which turned out to belong to the miners’ filtration system. Necromantic slurry seeped into the water table, and zombies rose throughout Centervale. You didn’t know what was happening—without human worshippers, your mind operates on a geologic time scale. So when Mr. Altemoc came to rescue his people, and used his scars to engage with you, well, you found a well-prepared mind to work through. He’s fighting back, though. You can’t think fast without him, but you can’t digest him any more than you can digest a knife.”

  He/feels/no/pain/visions-dreams-past-paradise/offer/

  “Let me be straight with you. You face a damages claim from Centervale Conglomerated Agriculture, another from KCMC, reckless endangerment and grievous harm from my employer, maybe tortious interference, a violation of the rule against perpetuities depending on whether you’re technically alive, and that’s before we address any personal claims brought by Mr. Altemoc, or by these folks on the ground.” The Keeper was older than the Craft. How to translate? “The kind of power about to descend on you, it eats gods for breakfast. Neither of us wants to go down that road.” Especially since your hole card’s terrifying. “But we can make a deal.”

  Explain/

  “Your containment system is, let’s say.” She licked her lips. Oss tried to bite through an elemental’s face but only blackened its own jaw. “Inefficient. We’ve developed better. We know more about demons now than they did in your day—we might be able to put the devourer-of-worlds down there back where she came from. Even if that’s impossible, the redundant ore you can spare by improving your efficiency will fetch a lot of soulstuff on the right market, and we could use that power to automate containment. You could walk the world again. Find believers. Or at least live without a demon gnawing your entrails.”