Four Roads Cross

by Max Gladstone

  A crossbow bolt tore down the crosswise hall, leaving a crackle of spent lightning. Corbin peered around the corner in time to see Umar vault a desk at the hallway’s end and punch the guard in his throat. They fell together. Umar’s hand tightened into a fist, then descended with the sound Ray Capistano’s cleaver made when he cut steak.

  Umar stood, holding keys. He tried one key in the lock of the door behind the watchman’s desk, and when it didn’t work he tried another.

  “They’ll hunt you down.”

  “They are busy.”

  “They’ll come for you when it’s done.”

  “If they find me.” Corbin had grown used to Umar’s doubled voice, but that laugh still twisted in his chest.

  The fifth key worked.

  They walked between two wire cages, behind which rested neat arrays of shelves: a library of danger. Corbin did not recognize most of the contents of those shelves, and when he did, he wished he didn’t. A diamond-bladed sword bloomed with purple light, and a paper tag marked its gold hilt. Beside it lay a pipe with a rusty stain at one end, likewise tagged. Bags of powder in many colors. A single six-sided die. A spike-knuckled glove slicked with greenish oil. A deck of playing cards. A pair of red slippers. A sheaf of blasting rods. Tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged, tagged. That was the first floor.

  On the next level down, each shelf held a single object surrounded by a blue Craft circle. Nothing here struck him as unusual in form: a book bound in pale tan leather. A corduroy blazer. A bow tie. A silvery mechanical wand with a green gem at one end. An unadorned ring. A knife with a wooden handle. A clay cup.

  The knife whispered like a woman, not like any woman but like June in bed when they were young together, before everything. The wand sang. The blazer pulsed when he looked at it too long.

  He drew closer to Umar.

  On the third floor each cage held a single item, and he did not look at these.

  The fourth floor held no cages, only doors: three on either side. Ghostlights glowed green above the lintels. Umar walked to the last door on the left, stood in front of it, and placed one hand above the latch.

  Corbin felt cold. Sweat drops studded Umar’s face. His lips curled open, a skeleton’s grin. Shadows deepened in the hollows of his cheeks. Flared nostrils expelled steam. Corbin had seen Umar move through men like wheat, but turning his hand a few degrees clockwise seemed to break him.

  The latch clicked open. The light above the door went red.

  Umar sagged.

  Frost covered the doors and walls. Corbin shivered, not just from the cold. “Open,” Umar told him.

  He should not. Whatever was inside this room, it was bigger than Corbin Rafferty. But he’d come this far when he should have turned back at every step. And he knew no other way to hurt Her.

  He opened the door.

  Inside was more a closet than a room. A single table occupied most of the space, surrounded by a glowing silver circle on the concrete floor. A folded jacket and slacks lay on the table, and worn brown leather shoes. Red suspenders coiled like snakes atop the clothes. Beside them stood a steel box.

  Corbin pointed, mutely, to the circle.

  “It will not hurt you,” Umar said.

  Corbin stepped across, as if diving into the ocean on a winter day. He did not die. He felt nothing, in fact.

  “Bring me the box.”

  “What’s inside?”

  “Bring it to me.”

  Corbin touched the box, found it cool. Lifted the latch. Packing immaterial swathed the inside, viscous and opaque. He reached into the immaterial and felt a pitted surface like dried, bleached wood. His fingertips traced a dome larger than two big fists pressed together, and ridged at the front, with two large holes and a third triangular gap beneath them. Many-voiced incoherent whispers filled his ears.

  Wind whistled through bare grass on a stony moor. Sirens wailed.

  He lifted the skull from the box.

  Silver lines crossed and recrossed the bone, and cut his eyes like knives. They moved as he watched. Turned. Danced.

  The skull weighed nothing in his hand. It grew, filling the closet cell though somehow it still fit in Corbin’s hand. Bone bowed out the concrete walls. Corbin stared into the gulf of its eye socket. At that bottomless pit’s bottom, he saw a glint of fire. He could fall into the skull, burning like priests said rocks burned as they fell from space, to become the fire there himself.

  “Return the skull to the box,” Umar said. “And close the box. Bring both to me.”

  Given the choice between nameless dread and simple obedience, Corbin’s body chose the latter.

  He dropped the skull, or tried. It stuck to his hand. He must have been too afraid to let it go. That had to be the reason. But at last the skull slipped from his palm into the packing shadows, and the box snapped shut. Corbin must have closed it. The evidence locker sub-basement felt too still, too quiet.

  He cradled the box to his chest, carried it back across the circle, and offered it to Umar. “Take the thing.” Cold spread from the metal into his arms.

  “Not now,” Umar said. “Follow.”

  He ran. So did Corbin.

  The sub-basement blurred around them, lockers and cages and unconscious guard, bare-piped basement and concrete steps. Then they were out in the yard, running under a coal-black sky tangled with ropes of green-purple light like sailors said they saw far north. But those were supposed to be soft lights, while these were hard like thorns, and rainbow blood flowed where they stuck. Umar climbed the fence first, held out his hands. Corbin tossed the box to him and followed. Chain links rattled beneath his weight like they hadn’t under Umar’s.

  As he crested the fence, he heard a nightmare voice.

  Stop.

  Shit.

  He fell hard. His ankle twisted. He felt no pain, from his ankle or from his torn soles—he was too scared for pain. Umar sprinted for the alley. Corbin’s legs wouldn’t do as he asked. A Blacksuit chased them. Only one, the rest on patrol or doing gods knew what, but one was enough.

  Corbin ran into the alley, into Umar. Who had stopped.

  “We cannot outrun it,” Umar said, and set the box down.

  Light quaked monochrome again, leaving serrated patches of light and dark. Umar’s face looked like saws fucking.

  Corbin tried to speak but made no sound.

  Experience broke to key frames robbed of movement, like woodcuts in a children’s book. Umar looking up. Corbin turning. The Blacksuit frozen in midleap (it was a woman, under the Suit). Umar, dodging to strike the Suit’s face with his fist. The Suit fell, recovered. Hit Umar in the gut. Knocked him into the wall. Umar hit the Suit in the jaw with the heel of his hand. No effect. Suited fingers reached for his neck. Umar’s mouth snapped open. Glass wires flicked from between his teeth and caught the Suit, and pierced and peeled. The Suit staggered. She fell beside the box, silver pooling reflective from her skin to leave her human.

  Motion returned, and color, the loud bark of those silent seconds’ sound released at once. Umar panted. Cuts around his mouth bled black. Corbin stared at the fallen Blacksuit. She lay still, but breathing.

  Umar lifted the box. “Come.” His voice sounded less human now.

  Corbin hobbled after him. With every turn and every block he expected Blacksuits to descend. Maybe Justice was distracted? Maybe whatever Umar did, or whatever the thing inside Umar did, broke the Suit’s tie to its Lady? But to think such a thing—to attack Justice herself, to fight her messengers and win—was to frame a world gone mad.

  Madder still: to find, after a long run through twisting alleys, an open post office. To follow Umar in, watch him empty the steel chest’s contents into a cardboard box, tape the box shut, and write an address Corbin could not read. A clerk waited behind the desk, cheek puddled around his knuckles, bored, as if the day were sunless due to rain. The clerk looked twice at Umar’s bare chest, but only twice. “Anything fragile, liquid, perishable, or hazardous?”

&nb
sp; “No,” Umar said, and paid what he was asked.

  “What the hells did we just do?” Corbin shouted at him when they were safe in the empty street again, if anywhere beneath that sky could be called safe.

  “We sent the package,” Umar said. “Now, you will lead us.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Seril has touched you.” Umar touched Corbin’s forehead. “We have seen to the weapon. Now we must strike. Some within this city pray to her. She hides herself from me, but you can follow her. Lead me to them, and she will suffer.”

  The words opened Corbin’s mind. He had been lost in the dream of Umar, carried in the big man’s wake. But Corbin heard the prayers Umar meant, the moonlit surf that washed through his nightmares. He heard his girls’ voices in that song. The world was mad. Great powers broke his family apart. Umar would help him stop all that.

  He staggered west, following a distant song.

  62

  Tara climbed the mountain to meet her Goddess.

  She walked steep trails until she found an iron ladder riveted to living stone. The ladder’s rungs chafed her hands. Fortunately she kept her nails short, and wore sensible shoes.

  By three rungs she’d climbed past the treetops. Pines grew tall in these western woods. She’d never been northwest to Regis or the Maw, but people said the trees there were taller than mountains, older than the Imperium, older than most gods: broad, deep, ancient, and invulnerable.

  The higher you climbed, the smaller you felt. The mining camp below might have been a toy for an older child—no one would trust a toddler with parts so tiny.

  She tore her jacket as she pulled herself onto a ledge. If she made it home, she’d look a sight before the court: wrinkled and ripped and bruised, sweat-caked, hadn’t showered in days; one advantage of slacks over skirts was that it wouldn’t be obvious she had not shaved either. Appearance mattered in court. Everything mattered—everything you did, everything you were, told a story to the Judge, to the opposing counsel, to the world.

  She wished there was time to climb back down, make ablutions in camp, fix her suit. But while appearances mattered, court dates mattered more. There was no way for her to fly to Alt Coulumb in time, which left one option she did not like.

  Her briefcase floated up and settled beside her. Its weight crushed chalky gravel to powder. The deal lay within, a few printed pages bearing her signature and Altemoc’s.

  She removed her shoes. Crossed her legs. Tried to still her mind, and failed.

  Back on the east coast, the team of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao must have spent the day wrestling with Daphne, and with Ramp, defending Kos. Abelard and the church would marshal faith, liturgy, and song in their support. Blacksuits patrolled in case of riots or opportunistic crime. They held. She hoped.

  She would know if Seril was dead.

  She breathed out.

  She’d worked for the goddess since last year. But that was a clear relationship, services rendered for a salary. What she was about to do transcended contract.

  She remembered sprinting, ten years old, through cornfields in a rainstorm as deadly winds spun overhead, her arms outstretched, her body thrown so far forward she was less running than catching her falling self with every step—flying, only with feet between her and the ground. She chased the joy of power, the glory of taking without asking, of forcing the world to dance. She knit her will into the world. There was no drug sweeter than control. Few orgasms compared.

  You do not love what you cannot use.

  And while she hated Alexander Denovo, while she had dreamed of killing him only to make him wake and die again, sometimes in dark nights she wondered what had been the greater horror: to have her will subverted, or her dream of control turned against her?

  Not that it mattered.

  She was not trained for prayer, but prayer was needed now.

  Wind swayed trees. The writer Gefjon spent summers in a mountain retreat watching forests for fires. Gefjon’s woods might have looked like this from a height. She was in the right country, more or less.

  Tara’s mind spun. Power let the mental loop close too soon: desire collapsed into reality and freed itself to seek further satisfaction. She had chased the freedom power offered from Edgemont cornfields to the Hidden Schools and Alt Coulumb. She’d freed herself from everything but her need.

  She had asked Altemoc—Caleb—to help. She had no leverage over him, no carrot to offer, no stick to force compliance. She asked, and he gave it to her.

  She focused on the forest, but it was too big to see all at once. On the trees. On one tree. On a branch of the tallest trunk, waving in a stiff breeze.

  Shale lay entombed beneath her. She sat atop him, as when they flew through Alt Coulumb’s skies.

  When she touched the stone, it felt like his skin.

  All stone was stone, a doorway for the Goddess.

  She asked for Her by name, and felt the answer through her flesh.

  Took you long enough.

  The situation here was more complicated than I thought. Shale—

  We will come back for him.

  If any of us live that long. I have the contract, but I can’t get to Alt Coulumb in time.

  Tara, the Goddess said, and touched her cheek from the inside.

  You could take me by the moon roads.

  The moon is one everywhere.

  When there’s a moon.

  When it rises, we’ll bring you through.

  There’s three hours’ time difference between the west coast and Alt Coulumb. Ramp will attack at moonrise on your end. Can you last that long?

  A pause ensued, of wind in high places. I think so.

  Then Tara truly began to pray.

  * * *

  The crowd in Market Square had grown.

  Jones assembled tables, Jones unrolled carpets, Jones heated water for tea, Jones ran to a corner chemist’s for medicine, but most of all Jones took notes. She moved among the faithful and spoke with those willing to speak. An Aokane Holdings desk clerk had come because her daughter told her about the gathering. Two men who kept shop in Hot Town visited around noon to crowd-watch and stayed to tend fires and distribute food. A woman in a wheelchair, wearing Iskari medals and a service jacket and old enough—just—to be a God Wars vet, rolled herself into the market, to the front of the crowd by the Crier’s Dais.

  No one watched the sky.

  Jones had seen all this before, back in Dresediel Lex, as the gods woke in the Skittersill Rising. She’d walked among the crowd before the riots started; later, she watched from afar as the fire fell. She wanted to run. She stayed.

  “These people aren’t safe,” she told Ellen, when she caught the girl carrying a jug of water to people huddled on blankets at the crowd’s rear. “Do you see what’s up there?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “They could kill us all without breaking a sweat.”

  Water sloshed over the jug’s lip and wet Ellen’s hand. Her arms were thin, but they did not shake from the work. She looked very young to Jones. “She needs everything we can give.”

  “I’m here to report,” she said. “To write your story and sing it later.”

  “You’ve met Her children.”

  “The gargoyles.” She remembered Aev’s rumbling voice, the certainty with which she spoke before her Goddess’s wrecked throne. “Yes.”

  “You talked with them—and with Her. You’ve heard Her voice, written songs to praise Her, and worked miracles in Her aid. You’re part of us. It’s okay to be afraid.”

  The girl’s face was very pale.

  Jones remembered the smell of burning flesh and singed hair in a square much larger than this one, a long time ago. She looked away.

  “I have to go,” Ellen said, and lifted the jug.

  63

  The sun set over Alt Coulumb.

  Though the sky was burned, though Craft imposed its own schedules on the world, the sun still set and unveiled the stars
. Craftworkers welcomed stars, after all. From these they took their food.

  The court hung in midair, ringed by crystal towers, overseen by the Judge, above a layer-cake world: the physical city, and beneath it the argument-city of planes and burning wires where plaintiff’s and defendant’s Craft mixed, and beneath even that the raw noumenal Truth. Probes and accusations peeled back layers and stitched shut wounds. Fire wreathed Alt Coulumb, but the city was not consumed.

  Of course not. This was war in a purely spiritual sense, war against gods as the God Wars should have been, no mucking about with civilian casualties. Clean. Fierce. Contained.

  Not war at all.

  This was surgery, with stars the operating theater lights.

  Daphne watched moonrise—or, a piece of Daphne did. She was built of shells within shells, like the city. The moon rose fat and sweet as a ripe apple. She could taste the apple’s juice on her tongue. Saliva wet her mouth, and she swallowed acid.

  Innermost observer-Daphne, walled off from body and endocrine emotion, wondered how this trial would appear from the ground. The shell surrounding that innermost watcher was not Daphne Mains at all, but a substitute made of tense strong worm-flesh and gnawing teeth. One layer closer to the surface, there was another piece of Daphne again, screaming.

  She had been screaming for a long time.

  She was built of shells, and shells, and shells, and around all these a final sheath of skin containing a thing that was and was not Daphne Mains. Her teeth were sharp. Soot smeared her face, and blood. Her jacket was torn, her skin burned and cracked. Worms wriggled through her flesh, around bones that were not bones. She extended many arms, and breathed, though she did not need to.

  Wakefield stood on empty air across the circle, wearing an expression mixed from smirk and smile and dead skull’s grin. The immaculate suit was maculate now. Wakefield’s discarded mask rested upon the unfloor. Blood dripped from many wounds and dried under manicured nails.

  “At this point,” Madeline Ramp said, “we believe Kos Everburning’s weaknesses have been adequately explored. It is time to turn our attention to the moon goddess, Seril Undying.”