Four Roads Cross (11 page)

His hand stayed limp under hers. “I'll try,” he said, and smiled weakly.

She hoped her disappointment didn't show. “Good.”

She'd reached the ladder down before he spoke again. “We can win this, can't we?”

“Sure,” she said, covering the lie.

 

15

Cat dove from the
Bounty
in the dark.

She never liked swimming. She liked it less in the ocean, and even less at night, but duty and preference were rare bedfellows. Not even bedfellows, she thought as the black water closed over her. They'd had one bitter night when duty and honor were on a break and preference was too drunk to remember she hated duty's smirk and the way he treated waiters.

How could you not like swimming? was one of those questions fellow gym rats asked, with a precious emphasis on the last word. So calming, so rhythmic. Good for your back and blood pressure. Cat didn't like calm, and she distrusted rhythm. More to the point, the Suit sank, an after-effect of its connection to the gargoyles and their goddess: she wasn't made of stone, but the Suit convinced the world she was. Dive Suited and you'd tumble to the seafloor, which admittedly helped when the time came to dredge Alt Coulumb's harbor.

So if you were a Blacksuit and knew how to swim (which Cat did, because, dammit, instinctive hatred for an activity was just the world's way of challenging you to master it), you sometimes ended up doing things like this: swimming un-Suited, read weak, read human, leading a team toward an anchored ship after dark, with—how deep was the water here, a few hundred feet?—anyway
too much
water underneath you, and Lord Kos alone knew what monsters below, star kraken and bloodwhales and saltwater crocs. She surfaced, gulping air.

The ship's swelling sides blocked out the stars. Moonlight glinted off the black paint that named her
Demon's Dream.
Cat turned onto her back to watch the bowsprit figure pass overhead: crystal carved into a woman's shape. The rest of Cat's team followed her, dark V's against dark water.

The ship rocked as she slipped along its starboard side. Waves lapped barnacled boards. Anchor chain links rasped. She stopped near the chain, touched the wet hull, and triggered her climbing bracelets. Her hands burned as if she'd rubbed them hard against rubber, and when she touched the hull, her fingers stuck. She pulled herself out of the water and triggered her anklets; her toes clung to slick planks. Her team followed, smooth and slow. Their wetsuits wept themselves dry as they climbed.

Strange to feel safer clinging by magic to a pirate ship's hull than swimming out of sight beneath.

She paused below the railing, counted footfalls, and timed the operation.

Ten sailors on deck, two more than Raz expected. Varg's delay might well make her XO paranoid. Others would be asleep, many on deck on such a warm night. Good thing Raz's team had done this before.

She heard creaking sheets an instant before the watch called: “Sail approaching off the port bow!” Raz ran dark, not invisible.

Boots drumrolled on deck: eight pairs, she thought, approached the port rail. Even the two that remained starboard turned to watch. Sergeant Lee, beside her, pointed up. She shook her head and waited for the signal.

“Kel's Bounty,”
came Raz's voice, very near. “Raz Pelham here, bearing a message from Captain Varg.”

“She's late.”

“Problems landward. I have a letter from her, sealed. Permission to come aboard?”

“Why run up on us dark like that?”

“You want the coast guard to see us both? Then I'll light my lanterns.”

“Send the letter over.”

Come on, she thought, give the cue. You've made your distraction; we can take it from here.

“Varg told me to deliver it in person.”

“She have anything else to say?”

“Just that.”

“You won't set foot on this ship. Send the message over, if message you have.”

“Get your first mate down here so I can talk this out with him.”

Rustling on deck—sleeping sailors rising. Shit. They'd hoped to take the
Dream
without alarm, in case they had Craftsmen or other emergency precautions. Wake too many of the deck crew and there'd be no way to distract them all. Stop this now.

She triggered the Suit. Ice slammed through her veins, and a silverblack hand seized her heart. In a single pull she vaulted the rail, landed soundless on deck, choked out the first sentry in two heartbeats and the second sentry in two more. The rest of her team landed with a rainfall patter, and six Blacksuits stood aboard the
Dream,
unnoticed—at least, that was the plan.

“Blacksuits!” someone cried.

A man stood on the quarterdeck, pipe in hand, beside a canvas chair. She'd counted boots and hadn't counted him, because he wasn't walking. Stupid. Justice's conclusions rushed back into her along the quicksilver link: Raz's reluctance to give the signal, trying to attract the lookout's—the first mate's—attention. She didn't swear, but wanted to.

Didn't freeze, either. Cat sprinted to the stairs, leapt up, vaulted over, struck the man with the pipe so hard he spun first, then fell. She caught him before he hit the deck, not gently.

Too late, too late; her team charged the men at the port rail—five on eight, trivial for Blacksuits, but the sailors asleep on the forecastle were waking. They rolled to their feet and drew weapons whose edges wept with a sickening enchanted light.

Lee hit the inquisitive watchman first, and hard—threw him over the railing. He screamed when he fell, which didn't help.
Keep it quiet,
thought all the Suits at once, as they took out the remaining sentries. But by this time the forecastle was awake, and cabin doors burst open, disgorging more of the
Dream
's armed and angry crew.

Cat dived into battle. The man in the lead, a tall Iskari with thick braids and a curved cutlass, swung; she blocked his blade with her forearm and was not cut, but nevertheless it stung, and numbness took her arm. Not fast enough. She butted him in the face with her forehead, and he fell.

Another blade swept toward her. She dodged, dancing over the Iskari's fallen body, but stumbled into a third sailor, who tried to grab her arm. He couldn't hold her but slowed her down enough that the next cutlass almost caught her in the side. She swung the man who'd grabbed her around into the second sailor. He hit hard and let her go.

She fought through a mess of bodies and swinging blades that spread numbing haze where they cut. Grapnels arced from
Bounty
's deck to the rails of
Dream,
and Raz's people scuttled across like evil acrobats: skeletons and leeches, a snakeling corkscrewing along steel cable to wreathe a sentry in the cords of its armored body. Where Blacksuits struck, Varg's sailors fell; Raz's people joined the fray, tangling swords with their rib cages, forcing living sailors screaming to the deck. Raz leapt from ship to ship and laid about himself with cutlass and fierce fanged smile, dueling three sailors at once.

On the forecastle, a woman leveled a crossbow at his exposed back.

A year ago, Cat would have been submerged entirely in the Suit, barely conscious, her body a higher power's puppet. No longer. She was herself enough to seize control.

The Suit said no. She was holding down half the forecastle by herself, pinballing from pirate to pirate; she risked letting them regroup, had to trust Raz to evade the shot, or the sailor to miss.

Cat said yes. She forced divinely wrought muscles to obey her, tore free of the scrum, and vaulted into the sailor's line of fire. The quarrel crackled through the air, and Cat caught it in her hand.

Her skin burned even through the Suit. Lightning discharge blanked her. She slammed to deck planks, stunned. Saw Raz turn, shocked—then spin back around as a sword raked his side and blood stained his shirt. Cat, struggling to regain her feet, saw one of the sailors she had been fighting sprint toward the gong at the bow, grab its hammer, and strike.

The gong made no sound.

Nor did anything else. Silence covered the deck.

She tried to rise but could not. An enormous weight pressed her down; her Suit strained and surged, and with tremendous effort she forced herself to stand, every movement trembling at the max-rep edge of her enhanced strength. The gong's silence pealed through her. Raz sunk to one knee. Blacksuits and sailors and skeletons alike lay prone.

The captain's cabin opened, and a figure of knives and wheels emerged. Clawed feet cut into deck wood, and the lenses within its eyes slipped from point to point of focus. Scalpels unfolded from its fingers, and springs turned wheels within the hollow of its chest.

Golem,
Cat thought, though she had never seen a golem like this before—a mouthless work of art, moving delicately despite this weight that pressed upon them all. Maybe it was immune, or so strong it did not feel the pressure. It approached Raz and bent over him. Scalpels clicked into place. Its head turned sideways, considering how best to cut. Internal mechanisms ticked through the artificial quiet, as if she held a watch to her ear. The ships' lanterns glinted off its blades as they slid, so gently, along Raz's jaw.

Then Aev fell out of the sky on top of it.

Knives blunted and thin metal limbs snapped beneath a ton of high-velocity gargoyle. Gears and springs and shattered glass flew out in all directions. The deck stove in beneath her feet. Lightning danced from broken planks, and the strange weight that bound Cat to the wood vanished. She rose, as did the other Blacksuits; Raz and the crew of
Bounty
and
Dream
took longer to recover.

The golem's skull rolled from its shattered body. Aev looked down at it, quizzical, then crushed it to dust with her heel. A shadow rose screaming from the metal husk, and faded on the wind.

What took you so long?
Cat asked.

Aev pointed up with one clawed finger. Cat looked, saw nothing, then heard a whisper of wind. A huge bat-winged creature fell to splash between the two ships. It lay faceup in the water, twitching in its swoon.

“Busy,” Aev said.

They secured the ship in minutes.
Dream
's remaining crew surrendered; Blacksuits moved through their ranks, taking names and faces for prosecution. Raz's crew spidered up the rigging to prepare the
Dream
for sailing into port.

“Do you feel useful now?” she asked Aev after the worst was done.

“I enjoyed this,” the gargoyle replied. “But what was our purpose here? Helping pirates take a merchant ship?”

“Follow me,” Cat said, and led her down below.

The gargoyle could not use the ladder—too heavy—so she jumped into the hold, splintering more timber when she landed. The ship rocked, and Cat steadied herself on the wall. Belowdecks the
Dream
smelled foul, animal stink mixed with tar and pine. She worked fore past wine barrels and bales of cloth and crates marked for Iskar and the Schwarzwald. A black wall closed off the forward hold; the wall had a single door without handle or visible lock save for a shimmering Craft circle.

“We've suspected Varg of zombie trading for a while, but without proof we had no excuse to search the ship.” They'd taken an amulet from Varg's coat that afternoon, and she drew it from her belt pouch now. “But she reached out to a dreamglass supplier in Alt Coulumb this time, and dreamglass is illegal in the city, so.” The seven-pointed star on the amulet's face matched the symbol at the Craft circle's center; she applied the one to the other, twisted, and the door creaked open. Chill wind fogged her breath. “Here you go.”

Aev entered the cold, dark room. Cat could barely see the hold's contents over the swell of her wings and back, which was just as well; it wasn't a good sight. “They're shipping bodies.”

“Those people are still alive, just suspended.” Frost crisped and blued the bodies' skin. Looking at them tightened cords in Cat's chest. She slid past Aev into the hold and touched a sleeping woman's shoulder. The flesh was softer than if she were frozen. A hundred, perhaps, lay on racks. When Cat drew back her hand, it was chilled beyond her blood's power to warm.

“Who would let this happen?”

“Let doesn't have much to do with it,” she said. “They're indentured, people who've mortgaged themselves away, suspended their own wills while the body works to repay their debt. It's cheaper than raising a corpse, if you believe that. Dead stuff decays, you know. These people live without any choice but to do what their contract holder tells them, until the indenture's done.”

“Slaves,” Aev said.

“Zombies. Craftwork isn't supposed to let people become property, but there are ways to treat the one like the other if you're a sick kind of clever, and no one catches you. Which is why people like Varg deal dreamglass: every price is a negotiation, and nothing skews negotiations like addiction. You hook people, then raise the loan rates until indenture's their only option. And if they don't have the resources to hire a good Craftswoman, the indenture deal can be pretty bad.”

“This is allowed?”

“Not in our city,” she said. She didn't say,
but we can only stop it when we find it
or
but who knows how people make the fortunes they invest with us
or
but you won't find one port in the world this business doesn't pass through.
Aev's claws tightened on the doorjamb, leaving deep grooves in the wood. “Come on. Let's get up top.”

Raz met her on deck with a blanket for her shoulders. She accepted it with a nod and stood shivering by the wheel for reasons that had nothing to do with the night air.

“More down there than we thought,” Cat said. “I bet Tara can wake them.”

“We'll figure something out,” he said. And then: “That was a brave dumb thing you did, catching the bolt for me.”