Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  A chair rested beside the bed, and a folded and sealed letter lay on the nightstand, addressed to Umar.

  “Sorry, Umar,” Rafferty mumbled. Nurses must have heard him fall. If they found him, they wouldn’t let him go. Matt would have pressed charges, or Sandy. Or the girls. He couldn’t bear another minute here. The silence came again, and went. Lightning cracked the sky, without thunder to match.

  Umar’s eyes were open.

  Rafferty cried and lurched back. Blue wheels spun within Umar’s brown irises.

  Umar sat up. His movements were inhumanly precise. His neck moved independent of his torso. Shoulders and jaw popped, but he did not seem to notice. He stared at Rafferty.

  Corbin raised his hands, but Umar moved faster. One hand caught Corbin’s throat and squeezed. Corbin went kitten limp, but Umar kept squeezing, as if he didn’t plan to stop until his fingers reached bone.

  Then the hand loosened—barely.

  “She’s touched you.” If Umar’s movements were wrong, his voice was worse, deep and resonant with bass, with another voice underneath or inside, a woman’s if glass spoke like a woman. Transparent tendrils writhed between the man’s teeth. “I can taste her.”

  Corbin could almost breathe. There was no doubt which she he meant. “Yes,” he said. “Seril.” The name stung his lips. Damn her moon that burned in his mind, damn her sea that rose to drown him, damn her stone that cased his arms and legs. “Cursed me. Turned my own against me.”

  “Aid me,” Umar said. “I will give you vengeance. You will help slay her.”

  Was vengeance even possible? “She’s a goddess. We can’t.” Babbling, humbled, terrified, Corbin felt strangely unashamed. Umar’s wrist was as thick as Corbin’s neck. Bantamweight Corbin Rafferty had fought men three times his size to prove he could, got the shit kicked out of him and laughed. It was—comfortable?—to face a man he could not fight.

  Umar’s grip tightened again. Corbin pried at the man’s fingers without success.

  Corbin might die here. Die here, at the hands of this man who had offered him revenge. “Yes,” he croaked. “Yes, dammit.”

  Steel-clamp fingers released Corbin’s throat. He fell to his knees, panting, rubbing his neck. He’d have a bruise for a collar. Umar reviewed the room’s contents. He did not seem to notice the letter on the bedside table. “Let us go.”

  “We can’t just go. We need—”

  “I need nothing.”

  “You need pants.”

  “Follow.” Umar walked toward the door. Rafferty looked away from the open back of the man’s gown. Somehow he found his feet and balance and followed. Revenge. Was it possible, to kill a goddess? To break her hold on him, and on his girls? To cast off his own humiliation, to reclaim his life from the lies the moon-dreams spun?

  Orderlies wheeled a convulsing patient down the hall. Umar turned in the opposite direction, toward the stairs. A gray-uniformed guard emerged from the stairwell door, saw Umar and Rafferty. “Get back in your rooms. There’s an emergency. We need—”

  Umar did not let the guard finish. Corbin didn’t see what Umar did, but the guard fell and lay still; Umar knelt, pulled off the man’s shoes, and removed his pants. Then he shed his gown, pulled on the guard’s slacks, and buttoned them. “Pants,” Umar said.

  “You just—” The guard groaned. “Hey!”

  Umar turned back to Corbin; another guard ran out from the stair behind him. That guard’s mouth opened when he saw his fallen comrade; he reached for the truncheon at his belt, but Umar caught him by the neck and slammed him into the wall. A peal of silence ate the thud of the guard’s skull against plaster. The guard fell, and plaster flakes drifted down onto him. Umar knelt, placed his fingers precisely to either side of the guard’s jugular, and pressed. The man squirmed like a caught snake, kicked twice, then rag-dolled. Umar pointed to the body—still breathing—stood, and walked away.

  Corbin pried off the guard’s shoes, pulled down his pants, and started to unbutton the shirt. Umar had already vanished through the stairwell door. Corbin tore the rest of the buttons from the guard’s shirt and followed, hopping into pant legs. “How are we going to do it?” he shouted to Umar. “How can we hurt her?”

  The ground floor was a mob of running orderlies, shouted commands, cries of pain and need. Ghostlights flickered. Periodic silences shattered the noise to nonsense. Umar broke the crowd like a tugboat’s prow broke waves—poorly, with a lot of froth and commotion. When they reached the fire exit, Corbin tensed, ready to run, but Umar touched the alarm box, said words another silence ate, and opened the door.

  The alarm did not protest their exit into the alley.

  They were free.

  Corbin looked up.

  He was a simple man. He bought vegetables from farmers, and sold them. He worked with simple men who prayed for blessings on their crop, who plowed with oxen and fertilized with cow shit and sweat. Not for him the death-tainted fields of Central Kath, zombie workers and demon-haunted scythe machines and alchemical poisons. Corbin Rafferty, and his girls, avoided all that. They kept the soulstuff they earned in the same altar his great-grandfather carved from the heartwood of a tree he felled. Corbin drank—who didn’t?—but he never touched dreamdust. The last few days were easily the strangest of his life.

  So he had no words for what he saw overhead.

  A silver wheel burned in the center of the sky—its exact center, no matter where he looked, as if the city he inhabited was only a reflection of some deeper city to which the wheel belonged. A seamless curtain of fire stretched from the wheel, burning in all the colors fire really was but people never said: purple and green and black as a week-old wound. Needles of light pierced the fire. But the needles were also enormous worms, eating the fire with mouths of crystal teeth. And in the center of the wheel he saw another wheel, in which a star of black and a star of white danced, moving so fast they left tracks in air. When the tracks met, the world turned, and the silent thunder pealed—and in that emptiness he heard words that made no sense yet were more real than the air he breathed.

  —as maintained in the quarterly report, which if Your Honor will be so kind as to—

  Somewhere a hammer struck a wooden table and made no sound because the sound it made was silence.

  He knelt. He could not look at that sky. And worst of all was the chattering inside him, that if he just looked up long enough he could understand everything, why June left and why he hurt and what he should have said—

  A hand caught his shoulder. There was no tenderness in the touch.

  “Follow,” Umar said.

  Corbin wept. “I can’t.” He gestured openhanded at the sky. “Look at that. It’s so big.”

  Umar did not look. “I do not need you,” he said. “But you can aid me. And in return I will let you hurt her. No god is so great that small weapons cannot bring her low. I will make you mistletoe. Without me, you will rail for eons outside her temple and end trapped in nightmares. Be of use to me, or surrender yourself to her.”

  Needs warred in him: safety, revenge, control.

  Corbin would have done anything to turn from that bleeding, burning sky. If Umar, or the thing that rode him, told Corbin to tear his eyes from their sockets, he would have hooked his thumbs and gouged.

  But this was better. This way, the moon would die, and he would own himself again.

  Corbin followed Umar through empty streets. Concrete tore his bare soles.

  60

  Tara woke in an army-green fog. Two blinks, three, focused the world, added edges and depth and form to color. Words came next: tent, cot, sun. Shale. Once she worked past monosyllables: mission.

  She sat up fast, blinking blood-motes away.

  “Here,” someone said. She reached for the voice, found a glass of water, and drank until the water froze to ice and clicked against her teeth. Frost feathered from her grip on the glass.

  She heard a man laugh, and swung round on the cot to face him. She was clothed
—shirt untucked, slacks torn and wrinkled, and unshod, but dressed enough for modesty if not for armor. She set down the glass and glared across the tent at Altemoc. “What’s so funny?”

  He sat in a folding chair, ankle crossed over knee, cane propped against his hip. His fingers trailed over the frog crouched on a silver globe that served for his cane’s handle. “You reminded me of someone,” he said. “How’s your head?”

  “Outside of the tap-dancing elephants, I’m fine.” Exploring, her fingers found a scabbed cut beneath her hair. She asked the question she’d been dreading: “What day is it?”

  “You’ve been asleep two hours.”

  “I grayed out. I shouldn’t be up for days. If ever.”

  “I gave you soulstuff. You’re fine.”

  “What was the contract? What did you offer? What did you ask me for?”

  “Nothing.” He raised his hand. Green fire danced down his scars and faded. “That’s not how we work.”

  “You offer services free of charge.”

  “Not exactly,” he said, and spun the cane. “Our beneficiaries aren’t the ones who pay. A Deathless Queen on a throne of melted swords asks us to heal a War-made plague in a border village. The plague poses her no threat, but she doesn’t want the people of that village dead.”

  “Out of the goodness of her heart?”

  “I used to think that,” he said, “but that’s a village of potential customers. Hard to rule if your instrument of rule breaks the land it touches. Craftwork destroys the world, so it must learn to heal.”

  She did not rise to the bait.

  Only three hours lost. Somewhere in Alt Coulumb, the case began. There had to be some way to salvage this. For Shale, locked under a mountain in a goddess’s mind. For Seril. For Alt Coulumb, besieged. “How much do you remember?” she asked.

  “Most of it. I was alive, inside her. Her will was mine, but not. Like I was part of something bigger.”

  Tara knew the feeling. She did not shiver. “You know my name. You know why I’ve come.”

  “You’re Tara Abernathy. And you need something from me. I have little enough to give.”

  The ice in her glass melted. She tried to stand, and swayed, and settled back onto the cot. “Last year, the King in Red gave you some unreal estate—specifically, Alt Coulumb’s sky.”

  “He did.”

  “Do you know why he was so generous?”

  Altemoc trapped the spinning frog between his fingers and spun it again. The movement was tight, practiced, obsessive. She remembered a friend from the Hidden Schools, Daphne’s ex, a sometime gambler; he kept a stack of poker chips on his desk to rifle as he read. “He likes our work.”

  “He gave them up because they weren’t his to give. He took them from the corpse of Seril Undying, Lady of the Moon—he thought. Deathless Kings accept the right of salvage; the King in Red used his rights to Alt Coulumb airspace as collateral, even if he couldn’t exploit them directly due to Kos Everburning’s competing claim. Back in the Wars, when people thought all gods would be dead by the century’s end, those rights were worth millions of souls.”

  Altemoc whistled.

  “With those funds, the King in Red rebuilt Dresediel Lex and made himself a peer of the world. Without them he would have had to accept more outside investment in RKC, which would have reduced his control over your city. Ancient history. The King’s salvage rights depend on Seril’s death, but she wasn’t really dead. She returned last year. Her survival negates the King in Red’s claim. Theft is more optically uncomfortable than salvage. Modern banks do a lot of business with Old World sovereign churches, which don’t like reminders of the bad old days.”

  Spin. Trap. Spin. Trap. “He gave us the sky.”

  “I imagine he wrote it off as a tithe on his foreign income filings, since your Concern looks a lot like a clerical aid bureau.”

  “He’s a donor,” Altemoc said, as if that explained everything.

  Here’s the critical part, Ms. Abernathy. Take care. “Seril sent me to ask you to return Her sky.”

  He stopped spinning the cane. Bad tell, that. “You’re offering a trade?”

  “No. Seril is under attack. She’s too weak to defend Herself, let alone pay market value for something so enormous.”

  “You’re talking about two years of operating budget. We could rebuild cities with that power. Heal people.”

  “If the Goddess had anything to offer in trade, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “I wish I could help you,” he said.

  That was it. The flat no.

  She heard gods die a long way off, and did not like the sound.

  “Mr. Altemoc.”

  “Caleb.” His voice was flat and a little sad, as if his first name were the greatest concession he could offer.

  “Caleb. I studied your Concern on our trip here from Dresediel Lex. A bridge between gods and men, that’s your slogan.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s Alt Coulumb. The city’s not perfect, but its gods are trying, and so’s the church. For forty years Kos ruled alone, complacent. With Seril back, He’s worked more to help His city. If She goes, He’ll collapse.”

  “I have to care for my people.” She heard the thorn twisting in his voice. “What would I tell the board?”

  “Tell them you spent their donations to save a city. To heal a wound made long ago, in the Wars.” She shifted forward on the bed and laced her fingers. “I’m not a hired gun. I have friends in Alt Coulumb. I left them to fight a losing battle on the chance you could help us. Shale, who took your place, he’s under that mountain wrestling a demon-goddess from the dawn of time so we can have this conversation. I am breaking every rule of negotiation: I have no leverage to exploit, and no alternative. You don’t know me well enough to know how hard that is. But here I am. What would you do, if these were your friends?”

  He had an even, unreadable expression.

  Gambler, for certain—and knowing that, she knew illegibility was a mask he wore to hide.

  His eyes were darker than hers, but a gold halo surrounded the pupils, like a false-colored picture of a collapsing star.

  “Save them,” he said.

  She waited.

  “The board will kill me.”

  She wouldn’t fault them if they did, but she didn’t say that. Nor could she say any of the other preprogrammed words: you’ve made the right decision, or, pleasure doing businesses, or let’s talk details. She managed “thank you,” and hoped it was enough.

  He touched a bruise on his cheek. “Now I know why you hit me so hard.”

  “You have a punchable face.”

  “That explains a lot.” He held out his hand. The scars there took fire. “Good luck, Ms. Abernathy.”

  “Tara,” she said. Small concession for a small concession.

  “Tara.”

  They shook, as did the world.

  61

  Corbin followed Umar down empty Ember Street. He did not look up at the impossible sky, but could not escape it by looking down. Weird lights cast weird shadows. Twisting reflections shimmered from shop windows, from parked carriages, from skyscrapers, from the muscles of Umar’s back.

  Corbin rarely ventured this far into the Business District, domain of witches and madmen in jackets that should have been straight. But he knew it was not supposed to be like this: streets and sidewalks bare, workers huddled in offices or homes. Several blocks away a Blacksuit shouted Remain calm. The danger will pass.

  The danger did not look like it would pass to Corbin. He could not tell how much time had elapsed since he left the hospital. There was no sun, or else the sun was everywhere.

  Umar did not seem bothered by the sky, by the emptiness, or by his bare feet. Corbin’s soles were dirt crusted now, his steps ginger. “Where are we going?”

  “Here.” Umar pointed as they turned left. Corbin felt a chill that had nothing to do with the atmosphere.

  A white marble colonnade supported a peaked ro
of. White steps descended from double doors to the street. A robed statue of a blindfolded woman stood atop the steps, one arm raised, holding scales.

  “There should be paint,” Umar said. “Many colors. The white is a mistake.”

  “Why are we going to the Temple of Justice? Will it help us against”—he still could not think of the moon without cringing—“her?”

  “I need a weapon,” he said.

  “You can’t break into a temple.”

  Umar pointed to the sky. Corbin did not look. “Justice is busy.”

  “There are three Blacksuits on those stairs.”

  “We will not use the front door,” Umar said. “Follow me. Or not.”

  He did.

  Umar led him down an alley to an office building stitched by skyways to the temple and surrounded by a tall fence. Umar vaulted the fence and somehow severed the barbed wire at its top. Corbin climbed after him, landed harder than he’d hoped on the other side, and hopped after Umar, brushing gravel from the pads of his feet. He knew better than to speak, though he also should have known better than to follow.

  Still. Revenge.

  Umar broke the chain off a loading dock door with the heel of his hand. Behind the door, steps led into a darkness made deeper by dim light. Umar climbed down.

  Corbin looked up out of habit, to search the sky for guidance. At that moment, the world’s colors inverted, reddened, and failed; everything became matte black with edges suggested by thin lines like those a razor left through paint. The illusion, if illusion it was, could not have lasted a second, but when it ended he had a sense it had endured much longer—that something had gone out of the reasserted world, some note stilled he’d been hearing so long he no longer knew how silence sounded.

  He ran into the basement and pulled the doors shut to close away that sky.

  The basement was not built to reassure. Bare pipes dripped onto bare concrete floors. Piled boxes closed him in, their cardboard stamped with serial numbers and bar-code glyphs. No Umar. A door in the far wall stood open.

  He slid through the door into a hallway broad enough for four men abreast. Voices carried around a corner. “Freeze!” He heard bare feet, running.