Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  No answer. Battle raged behind Tara, and below, demon coils grated against the diamond floor. Elementals piled on Shale, dragging him down. He ripped at their arms with his fangs and claws, but they were too many. He knelt. They pressed his face into the flame.

  How/

  “Let Mr. Altemoc and his people go. Then we broker a settlement with the mining Concern and CenConAg. If you play your cards right, there’s freedom at the end of the tunnel. You’ve missed a lot in the last few thousand years.”

  Without/mouth/how/speak/

  “There are ways. We could make you a golem. Mr. Altemoc might even volunteer for the task. But I need him now.”

  He/leaves/we/feel/no/time/why/trust/you/

  Because I need you to. “Because we’re going to make a deal,” she said.

  Performance/clear/what/consideration/you/offer/

  She licked her lips.

  What would the Keeper accept? Tara didn’t have the time or resources to build a vessel for the mountain-mind. No promises of future payment would satisfy, since without Altemoc’s mind the Keeper had no sense of time.

  She needed a body.

  Terror welled from a pit within Tara, filling her stomach, heart, lungs. Blood rushed in her ears. Doors long locked inside her mind swung open, memories of shadowed days, the feeling of herself bent by another’s hands. But she could do this. Her glyphs would offer the goddess purchase on her mind, and keep her intact—for a while, at least.

  Shale could make their case for Altemoc. If he faltered, the goddess could speak through him. It was a long shot, but what other chance did they have, outfought in the mountain’s depths, surrounded by flame? Without Altemoc, they had nothing. Without Tara, they had a chance.

  Nothing was worth losing herself again, feeling another wear her.

  Nothing?

  Moonrise over Alt Coulumb seen from the ruined orrery. From the air, gargoyle-borne, the city’s rampant streets made sense the way some abstract paintings did, the ones mad drunks made by throwing cans of paint onto canvas. Dancers twirled at the Club Xiltanda. These were beautiful and broad, too large to hold in the mind. But she remembered Cat, and Abelard that night in the tower: I don’t trust God anymore. And, later, in the airport, an awkward embrace.

  Nothing, no thing, was worth what she was about to do.

  Maybe some people were.

  She opened her mouth. “I—”

  “I’ll do it.”

  She turned, too shocked to speak.

  Shale stood beside her, bleeding silver through his cracks. Carbon scores crisscrossed his chest. One arm had burned black to the elbow. Fire dripped from him. The elementals were gone. He must have beaten them back while she wasn’t looking.

  Acceptable/vessel/

  “No,” she said. “No, dammit.”

  “It’s the right choice,” he said.

  “It’s not any kind of choice. We are not doing this. I won’t let you.”

  “We need you to finish the negotiation. To get back to the city.”

  “If Seril loses you, She’ll—”

  His laugh was shallow and sad. “Without me,” he said, “She may weaken. Without you, She will fall.”

  “There has to be another way.”

  “You were about to give yourself up. If there was another option, you would have taken it.”

  She said nothing.

  “I will stand in his place,” Shale said. “You will return, and save me.”

  “If we win.”

  “If we lose, I would have been dead anyway. And you will not lose.”

  “It could take years to get you out. You’ll be in pain the whole time. You’ll barely even be you.”

  He shrugged. His right arm hung at a wrong angle. “I have endured worse. My wounds will help: if the Keeper forces too much of herself through me, I will shatter and she will return to timelessness.”

  “That is a stupid definition of ‘help.’ You’ll be in pain down here until—”

  “Until you rescue me,” he said, and to the goddess: “What do you say, Lady?”

  Yes/

  “It’s the right choice, Tara.”

  It was. That was the worst part.

  You can’t outsmart everything.

  There was a heat in her eyes she did not want to name. She looked from the goddess to the gargoyle, and back. “Shale,” she said, “is my,” and there was only the slightest pause before she said “friend. If you hurt him in any way, I will carve your bones into his monument. You have slept too long to know that you should fear me, but I am a Craftswoman of the Hidden Schools, and my people have slain the hosts of heaven and bound continents in iron chains. I will snap your spine and drink ichor from your skull, I will break you and the demon downstairs alike and send you wailing together to the stars as a feast for the beings that lurk there, if you give me cause. Do not fuck with me.”

  Lightning quivered. Tara did not breathe. Neither did Shale, which was to be expected. He took her hand.

  Understood/

  Shale touched her shoulder. “Finish this,” he said.

  “I will.”

  He approached the lightning, and with a wingbeat rose level with Altemoc in the air. He leaned into the red and brought his muzzle to the other man’s lips.

  He screamed. A tower fell.

  The lightning took him by pieces, darting forks tonguing stone skin before they approved the taste and pierced. His head rocked, his wings draped, his teeth flashed. A hundred ropes or spears of light bound him to the chamber walls. The brilliant central column vibrated like a plucked string, a thunderous cascade that went on and on.

  When the world stilled, Shale hung in the light, and Altemoc lay crumpled on the ground.

  Tara ran to the man; he groaned. She slapped him on the cheek. No response. Twice, three times, leaving sharp white finger tracks on ocher skin. His eyes opened, neither fixed nor focused. She heard a deep groaning, cracking sound. The ground beneath them shook. So did the walls.

  “Who—”

  She slapped him again for good measure.

  “Hey! Who the hells—where—”

  “Introductions later. We need to get out of here.”

  He groped for the fallen cane and struggled with its aid to his feet. His shoulders bent into a U. “My people.”

  They were waking up, slowly. She scanned the chamber for a tool, and saw, shattered to pieces but still clattering for someone to fight, Oss. Still hers.

  Assembling him would take too long—gaps opened in the floor, and the walls were closer together than they had been. The cave system was reconfiguring to fit Shale. But Oss’s bones still moved, and they would serve.

  Oss’s pieces scuttled to lift the fallen crew. A wing separated into centipede spines, wrapped limbs and lifted; a claw propped up another. Arm bones prepared themselves to roll. Multiplicitous phalanges supported a fallen woman. They skittered toward the door as the cave collapsed. “Come on,” she said. “My friend back there made a bad deal with a mad goddess to save you. And I may have threatened her, just a bit.”

  He blinked. “You’re crazy.”

  “You always question the sanity of women who’ve just saved your ass?”

  He smiled, too broad, and almost fainted. She grabbed him by the lapels. “No time for that. We need to move.”

  Shale stared down on them through the lightning. Hells burned to ash in his eyes.

  Run/ she said through him.

  They did.

  58

  Abelard kept dawn vigil on the morning of the war. Bede and Nestor and Aldis and the rest of the Council of Cardinals gathered in the sanctum to kneel, knees permitting, before the flame. Their chant swelled. Stars pinpricked the gray-blue sky. Eastward past the docks, a pale pink glow heralded the sun.

  Crystal palaces flew south through the Business District, wreathed in sparks and rainbows. Their edges bled starlight. They should not be here, not in Alt Coulumb, free city of gods and men. Even the Hidden Schools had breache
d the city’s airspace only once, while his Lord was dead.

  These skyspires were not scavengers or opportunists. They came to kill.

  No. That wasn’t quite true.

  The spires were weapons built to break cities, but even the fiercest weapons were only tools. About the spires, before them—so small they should have been invisible at this distance but were not, were instead singular points radiating darkness—hovered Craftsmen. Their fingers rested on rune-marked triggers.

  Abelard blinked. He lacked training in the Craft, but God let him see its traces. He was glad he lacked training. Were his sorcerous vision more acute, he would have been blinded by the burn.

  Hellfire webbed the black. Bonds of power tied the invaders—the opposing counsel—together. And two shapes hovered at the center of that infernal rose: a spider of crystal and thorn, and something else, a roil of worms and teeth.

  Daphne Mains and Madeline Ramp, vanguard of the opposition.

  “Impressive, aren’t they?” Cardinal Evangelist Bede stood by his side. He squeezed his hands as if working dough. “Each member of Ramp’s commission has sent observers to watch us fall. All this because I did not sign their deal.”

  The Cardinal, Abelard realized, was scared. Abelard had no reassurance to offer.

  So he was surprised when he found himself saying, “They’ll be disappointed.”

  “Do you think so?”

  He hadn’t before he spoke, but he remembered Slaughter’s Fell, the depth of faith in that young girl as he marked her forehead with ash above her glasses. Even the church’s smell seemed golden. “I believe in this city. I believe in Tara. I believe in our Lord, and His Lady.”

  Bede’s head declined, and rose again. “Thank you.” He squeezed Abelard’s shoulder and went to kneel with the other Cardinals.

  And thank you, Abelard prayed. The words had been his, and the urge to speak—but a greater power calmed his fear to let them pass his lips.

  He felt the fire beneath Alt Coulumb and within its people.

  He turned to the altar. Craftsmen would fight the external battle. Theirs was the inner war.

  Nestor stood before them. For once the old man did not clear his throat before he spoke. “Let us pray.”

  Kneeling, Abelard joined himself to God.

  * * *

  Madeline Ramp and Daphne Mains stood on air. A city lay at their feet and a host at their backs.

  “Pleasant morning,” Ramp said.

  Beautiful, in fact. The air sweet with coming triumph. Pleasure climbed Daphne’s backbone and nestled behind her heart. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you ready?”

  “I am.” She hadn’t realized it until asked.

  A silver circle surrounded them, and beyond it stood the Judge, clothed in the shadows of her office. She burned too black to bear.

  Daphne squinted and turned away; Ms. Ramp’s second eyelids closed.

  “I call these proceedings to order,” the Judge said in a voice that should have broken the ground and let devils spew forth. “We consider the matter of Associated Creditors and Shareholders against Kos Everburning of Alt Coulumb, and Seril Undying of the same.”

  “For which our thanks,” Ms. Ramp replied. “We are prepared, once opposing counsel show themselves.”

  “Oh,” said a new voice, scalpel cold and similarly curved, from across the circle, “we’re here.”

  The voice’s owner wore a white three-piece suit, immaculate. A silver mask covered half a face Telomeri artists would have given their tongues to paint. The eye beneath that mask was red; its mate, still human, the blue Daphne had seen in glacial fissures. One skeletal hand closed around a cane.

  Two associates in charcoal gray flanked Ashleigh Wakefield. They might have been Wakefield’s shadows, or afterimages.

  “A pleasure as always,” Ramp said with a sharp slight smile. “Your clients have willfully misrepresented their God in market filings. Kos Everburning is a greater investment risk than his priesthood claims. In specific we allege that the God and His church are exposed through their off-books relationship with the renegade Goddess known as Seril Undying.”

  Wakefield’s head edged to one side, like a cat considering a mouse that, rather than cowering, had performed a backflip. “Unfounded accusations. Kos’s filings were correct, his exposure is managed, and his relationship with Seril Undying founded on mutual collaboration rather than strict liability as you claim. The nature of Kos’s bond with Seril does not subject investors and creditors to undisclosed risk.”

  “You’ll forgive us if we don’t take your word for it.”

  “Why else would we be here?” Wakefield said. “Surely you would not waste Her Honor’s time.”

  “You’re dangerously close,” the Judge said. “Present arms, Counsel, or get out of my sky.”

  Ramp raised her hands, a staged surrender. “Of course, Your Honor. By all means, let us reach the point. We begin with the portion of our complaint directly addressing Kos’s personal vulnerability, and that of his church. Permit me to introduce to the court my associate, Ms. Mains.”

  With those words, the cold behind Daphne’s heart turned. She thrilled to the sensation of herself unlocking, of long-dormant glyphs drawing light from the sky and power from the army arrayed behind her. The tight-wound trap of her mind sprung.

  Somewhere in the unfolding, a girl screamed with her voice.

  She ignored the scream.

  Wakefield’s human eye widened slightly, but the being who was still, basically, Daphne noticed.

  She smiled with sharp teeth and moved to the circle’s center. “Thank you, Ms. Ramp. Now, let us begin.”

  She raised her hands, long fingered and strange, and made the world go mad.

  * * *

  Tara and Altemoc and the bone-borne bodies landed on the dry ground of the miners’ camp as the tunnel collapsed behind them. Dust choked the sky, but sharp morning sunlight shafted through. Tara stared into the sky’s bright face as the dust settled, and knew despair.

  They’d spent too long wandering in the Keeper’s twisted time. Human shapes approached through dust, shambling over unsteady ground; they seized her arms and bore her from the tumbling rock. She choked on polluted air. She had not realized how tired she’d become, how little soul remained to her.

  The sky blued as they carried her from the dust. Altemoc ran to the Quechal woman who had met Tara on her arrival at camp. His rhythm was off, or Tara’s was, the clock of her heart erratic. The woman hugged him, fierce, stepped back and shouted words Tara couldn’t sort from one another. Altemoc pointed at the mountain in stutter-step motion, slow and too fast at once.

  Gray chewed the edges of her vision, and her colors bled. The ground was not where she expected it to be, the force vector into her ankle a crucial few degrees off just. She fell hard on her knee, felt trousers, stocking, and skin tear.

  Human speech was wind through a flapping aperture of meat. Altemoc ran three-legged toward her, mouth producing more dumb meat-sounds. The fields back home looked like this in the hours before dawn, hueless and achromatic. But the home wind tasted of earth and dew and waking things. Where was that taste now? Had she lost it?

  He caught her, and his scars burned green.

  The sun rose.

  59

  Corbin Rafferty heard a thunderclap of silence.

  That was new.

  The screams weren’t. There were always screams inside his head these days.

  But he had never heard (or not-heard) silence like this. It fell like a ten-ton sandbag and broke as suddenly. The cries and hospital noise, metronome ticks and cart wheels and doctors’ footsteps, returned as if never interrupted, until the silence struck again.

  The silent bell peals were hands that squeezed his heart, lungs, stomach.

  Am I dying? Is this how death feels?

  His arms did not tingle; he felt no pain in his head. He heard, but there was nothing to hear.

  The moon had dragged him
through so many nightmare memories, his life seen from outside as if a stranger lived it. He did not like this stranger. But this silence was not of the moon: always in those dreams he heard the crash of surf on the beach where he’d wept when she left.

  He opened his eyes. He could not do that in the dreams, which was part of their torture: he felt his body as an inmate felt prison walls. But he opened his eyes, and closed them at the brilliance of the day. No, not of day: of fire in the sky, of fire that was the sky.

  He howled in panic and the sky clenched. Silence pealed through him, broke his cry in half. When he could hear again, he closed his mouth.

  He was awake. Some cataclysm had struck the city, and in the chaos he’d wormed free of the moon’s grip.

  He sat up in the narrow bed. A tile floor lay cool beneath his bare feet. He looked down at himself. Twiggy limbs jutted from the hospital gown. How long had he been out? Days. His stomach turned when he remembered the Paupers’ Quarter market, remembered his fury at the world, at his daughters, remembered his hand raising the cane, remembered blood on Sandy’s face and Matt’s—

  He doubled over, choking stiff, wet sobs the waves of silence made staccato. He clawed his sheets.

  Anger filled him. Fury. At Matt for his betrayal. At Sandy Sforza. And above all towered his rage at the Stone Men and their wicked moon, the laughing white face, the cruel gentle hands that made him watch his own life mad and broken in a dark mirror.

  He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing in his stomach to cast out.

  He had to leave this place, these scraping sheets, this disinfectant stink.

  Corbin stood, fell, stood again with his hand on the mattress for balance. His knees wiggled. A curtain hung beside his bed. If he clung to that, he could reach the wall, and then the door.

  He gripped the curtain, trusted it with his weight—

  And fell. Curtain rings tore free of the frame and he stumbled into the neighboring bed, occupied by a mountainous man, dark, bearded, with close-cropped hair.