Four Roads Cross (41 page)

She did not know until the lightning passed how bright it had been, or loud. Her ears rang. For a long time all she saw was the red that endures when the eye is overwhelmed.

She returned to herself through the silver of Shale's wounds.

Light seeped from him. His stone felt cool as ever, but the light, when it dripped onto her fingers, was warm. He pulled back from her touch, bared his teeth, snarled; her ears had not recovered yet, but she felt the sound in her bones.

“Thank you,” she said.

She heard his voice as if through a pillow: “One second.” His stone twisted, inverted, melted to skin again. “There.” His voice was not so loud as before, but her hearing had recovered to match.

“I didn't know it was that bad,” she said.

His grin would have had a different effect were his teeth still long and curved and sharp. “They don't hurt as much when I'm like this.”

“You should have stayed home. Taken care of yourself.”

“Aev and the others are resting before the battle. I can work in flesh, for a while.”

“How long?”

“Long enough.”

“No macho jerk answers, please. Be honest with me.”

“This stone, unworked as it is, helps a little. I can handle another day. Which is all we need, one way or another.”

She tried her ankle. “Fuck.”

“Lean on me.”

“I'll use the wall.” If she couldn't quite walk, at least she could hop. “Slower than I'd like. Let's move.”

“Down?” As if he hoped she would give up. Not tonight. Not with gods and goddesses and friends counting on her two thousand miles away. Not with so few hours remaining. Her watch lay heavy in her pocket.

“Down,” she said.

 

52

Silverclad Cat splashed through the ocean's skin, plummeting toward a darkness that paled all color: moonlight shafts ended in the shadows below, embedded in the flesh of a beast too large and cold to care.

Cat sank. Bubbles clung to the Suit, and as she kicked they slipped free, tickled up her flanks to form a whirling trail. Justice's song buzzed beneath her conscious thought. She was far from the community of cops. Seril's light followed her, warm inside her mind, a caress she couldn't call a mother's—not her mother's, anyway.

She did not have to breathe while wearing the Suit. Blood rushed in her ears, and the water's pulse twinned her own.

She heard a splash as Raz dove into his element. The speed of his descent slicked back his hair. Naked from the waist up, he joined her as she fell. He swam with beautiful efficiency.

Westward rose the continental shelf, steeper than any cliff could be in air. When Cat was a kid, old Father Clemson at the Quarter parish who owed gambling debts to half his congregation told myths during weekend services. Cat would have beaten up any kid who suspected how much she loved those stories. She had no time for sermons, which were one more way folk told you to sit down and listen, but she liked the strange tales and weird poems, and one line returned to her thoughts as she looked down into the black: something about spirits
brooding on the abyss.

She pointed down and shot Raz a questioning glance. He gave her the thumbs-up. Pointed down. Thumbs-up again.

Great.

She brooded on the abyss like a champ.

Water pressed her in an embrace tighter than the Suit's used to be before Seril came back, and the Suit stiffened to match.

Cat's heart beat faster. Raz kicked into the deep, somersaulted, and waved up at her with a smile.

Pressure at this depth could warp a body from within. The City Aquarium displayed the corpses of dead things divers dredged from the deeps, spiny and toothed, many-clawed, tentacular. Special care had to be taken, the exhibit's brass placards read, in recovering such specimens, due to the pressure difference between ocean floor and surface. If she removed her Suit down here, she'd die.

Her eyes adjusted. No human eyes could have, there wasn't enough light, but human limits did not bind the Suit. Raz's white pants flashed when he kicked.

They passed few fish at this depth, and no vampires she could see. They'd almost reached the bottom. Sharp grim coral towers jutted from the murk below. White flakes of sea snow flitted between the peaks. Could Raz have been mistaken? He'd sounded so sure.

The coral towers moved.

Earthquake
was her first thought, though there were no quakes in Alt Coulumb. The movement's scale was too great for anything else. It could not be a living thing—nothing so large could live, on land.

But they weren't on land anymore.

The towers swelled and reddened as they approached, sharp pitted texture filling out with roseate skin. Blue sparks crackled beneath a translucent surface. High-pitched cries filled the deep. Arms the length of Alt Coulumb's coastline coiled, wreathed by clouds of dust. Currents tossed her as the thing beneath bloomed, the coral forest transformed into a city-sized mantle. The Suit fed liquid beauty through Cat's vein, but chemical confidence was little help. As she grasped and failed and grasped again at the sheer inconceivable
scale
of the thing coming oh gods
toward her,
its displacement current pulled her down, tossing Raz head over heels—

And what she'd taken for wrinkles on the creature's skin were blade-sharp ridges—

She caught Raz and pulled him close as the star kraken crashed into them.

Blade-flesh drew sparks as it scraped her Suit; she tumbled into a canyon-sized wrinkle, bounced off a rubbery wall, pushed herself away—Raz tugged her out of the groove before it snapped closed, mouthlike. She kicked off and down again, and realized they were not alone.

Nearly human creatures slipped through the water around her. She'd taken them for snow at first, decayed dead things fallen to the benthic plane. They swam, long limbed and webbed, skin every color she had seen, jaws distended with curved teeth. Darting about the kraken, they pierced its flesh with spears and carved broad wounds with knives. She saw a slick naked girl unhinge her jaw and sink fangs into punctured kraken flesh. Blue blood leaked from the seal her lips made. The girl swallowed convulsively, released the monster, and howled.

Not all the shapes were human, or humanlike: Cat saw sleek bottle-nosed bodies, fangs curving from their open beaks. Hundreds streaked through the night—tiny beside the kraken, but pale corruption spread where their spears bit, and their teeth, and the kraken shriveled as it rose.

The kraken hit her again. She sprawled on its mantle as a translucent sack of flesh inflated overhead. That bloodred mass held many eyes, their pupils figure eights within which Cat could have stood upright.

Then the mantle collapsed and they fell, propelled down by the kraken's jet. Cat stared up into a beak that could crush mountains, ringed with lightning, and within that gnashing mouth a furnace. The speed of the kraken's retreat slapped its arms and tentacles together, and Cat and Raz and all the hunters tumbled down, down—

To land dust-clouded on a stony plain.

Raz recovered first, which pissed her off. He offered her a hand. She ignored it and stood on her own.

Around them the dust curtain settled, unveiling an ancient city.

What she'd taken for a stone flat was in fact a plaza ringed with column-fronted, wedge-topped buildings. She remembered the style from textbook woodcuts, though those ruins had never been crusted with coral and seashells. Towers rose beyond the temples.

Vampires surrounded them.

They hung in water, red eyed and alien, half-visible at this depth even to her. Were they living, she could have seen their heat. They were not. Coins glistened in wide red watching eyes. She looked up and saw no surface overhead. The hunters returned, blood-wreathed, spears and teeth sharp. Dolphins swam alongside. Sonar clicks played over Cat's skin.

Raz swam into the center of the crowd. His hands moved, not just for swimming. Sign.

A woman emerged from the crowd. She might have been thirty or three thousand. Seaweed trailed her limbs. The signs she addressed to Raz were crisper and more elegant than those he offered in reply. Whatever their language, he spoke it only haltingly.

The conversation continued for tense and quiet minutes. Raz frowned after the woman—the priestess—responded to his third statement with a hook of her finger as if inviting. Their exchanges grew sharp. The priestess bared her teeth. Cat doubted this indicated progress.

Excuse me,
Cat said.

A ripple passed through the crowd. Heads turned toward her.

I'm sorry if we interrupted you,
she said.
I'm—we're—from the surface. My name's Cat; Raz brought me here because he thought you could help.

Silence, full of clicks and curiosity.

My Goddess,
she said,
is in danger. Her enemies want to kill Her. She needs strength to fight them off. Raz hoped you could help us.

The priestess swam toward Cat like a snake would swim. Long braids trailed her. She stopped just beyond Cat's reach. Her feet did not touch the seafloor. The priestess's head cocked to one side, as if she'd been presented with a joke and was deciding whether to laugh.

Do you understand me?

The priestess nodded.

They pushed you down here centuries ago. They're trying to push my lady out now.

The priestess opened her arms and twirled a circle, taking in the city and those who swam around her.

Cat was about to ask what she meant, when she heard the singing.

Water might garble ordinary speech, but song carried.

—What God

—Shall we seek

—Save the Blood?

They laughed.

—Let us see

—Your need

The priestess held out her hand and raised her thin lips to reveal fangs more beautiful than any Cat had ever seen.

Cat reached—

The glamour broke. Raz interposed himself between them in a blur. Through the weight of water, she heard him hiss.

Cat touched him on the shoulder.

Raz. It's fine.

The priestess nodded, once.

Raz looked back at her, scared.

I can do this.

She did not know what to call his expression as he swam aside. Despair, maybe, or hope.

She offered her wrist to the priestess, who accepted, and bent her head.

Her teeth dipped through Suit and skin with equal ease.

A line of incandescent pleasure shot through Cat's heart, spread out and up and so much more dangerously down, to her crotch, through arms and legs, fingertips, toes. Joy rattled the cave of her skull. Her thoughts came to pieces in a single pulse.

Her taste of Raz in the ruined tower had been strange, surreal, exciting, but Cat had felt like this before. She knew to ride the feeling. She did not collapse or go mad. She'd felt weaker versions of this rush in Paupers' Quarter backstreets or on the Business District's rain-slick rooftops.

The priestess was not drawing her, thank gods. Cat felt enormous hunger behind the woman, old and overwhelming, deeper than the ocean. The priestess tasted Cat's soul, that was all, savoring her need, and through her the Suit's, and Seril's.

Cat followed that taste back and in, to a network of which the priestess was but a piece—the blood of all assembled here in the sea's night ran through her, and hers through them, joined to a throbbing heartbeat greater than any one alone and wiser, a mind that shook her to ecstasy with its faintest touch. She could offer herself to that hunger, fall into its perfection, let herself be hollowed out and worn as a glove by God—

No, she told the hunger.

The priestess lifted her fangs from Cat's wrist, and the connection broke.

Cat fell. She tried to gasp, by reflex, and choked when the Suit did not let her.

After timeless time, she calmed.

The priestess's head declined and rose again, in a slow, gentle nod.

The priestess drew a line across her own wrist with her thumbnail. A stream of blood snaked through the water and curled into a cloud rather than dispersing. The priestess took the cloud in her palm, and squeezed. When she opened her hand, she held a smooth oval of red jade that caught the not-light strangely. She offered it to Raz. He drew back at first, as if the sun lay in her palm. Then he looked at Cat, and sagged, and accepted.

It was done.

Cat had wondered how they would return to the surface—Raz could swim on his own, but even the Suit might tire with the strain of bearing its own weight back. Two from the congregation—the girl who drank the star kraken, and a slender man who had been Dhisthran before he became this—bore her skyward.

Rising, she heard the music again: a choir of superhuman voices howling praise in the abyss, their meld an imperfect reflection of the living web she tasted through the priestess. It echoed undersea. No, she realized as they rose, those were not echoes but other songs, the ocean chanting glory and blood through eternal night.

By the time Cat pulled herself back onto the dinghy and let the Suit slip away, the sky was purple with the threat of dawn. Open air felt weak, easy. The sunrise seemed obscene. Raz flopped to the deck.

They lay alone on the water.

When she could bear to move again, she reached for him. Her hand fell heavy on his leg, and squeezed. His did the same a second later, on hers.

“That,” he said when he found words to speak, “was a brave dumb thing you did.”

“At least we were dumb together. And brave.”

He laughed, then coughed—and coughed and laughed harder, until he had to bend over the boat's edge and hack water out of his lungs.

She slapped him on the back. “Let's get to shore before you burn.”

 

53

“It's dangerous for you and your sister to be out alone,” Matt told Claire as they opened the stands. He'd chosen his words in the silence of their morning rounds, which had not been silent at all but full of rocking wagon wheels, plodding golem feet, the leafy shiver of lettuce loose in crates. For the second day in a row, they had not talked on the road. Dark circles undermined Claire's eyes, and she stared over the golem's surging shoulders. She napped when he drove, which she had never done before.