Four Roads Cross (42 page)

While he waited for her answer he unlocked his stand's cupboard, removed the carved wood signs and stepladder, and climbed the one to hang the others from brass hooks. The paint caught dawn's blush. He hung EGGS, and ADORNE, and FRESH between them. “I was worried for you.”

“Worried” was too neat a word. He'd stayed up an hour past bedtime at the kitchen table with Donna, drinking mint tea brewed with leaves from their window garden. Hannah and Jake had abandoned their game of checkers and thunder lizards long before that; Hannah was sweet with the kid. Then again, neither Donna nor Matt was so free as Hannah to pin Jake down until he said sorry.

Waiting, Matt and Donna counted sirens through the open window, and fistfights, and curses, and mating cats' cries. Matt wanted to go look for them, but Donna counseled him to stay. After an hour they switched roles, and after that again.

He slept, expecting to wake and find them still gone. But when he emerged robed after his morning shower, Claire was back, with a pot of coffee strong enough to double as industrial solvent.

He'd asked her a wordless question, which she hadn't answered and still wasn't answering.

“Your sister needs looking after,” he said, “and the city's full of crazy confused people.” He arranged cartons of eggs, and a loose pyramidal pile in their center. Claire hauled a crate of eggplant onto the Rafferty stand's counter and pulled plump dark plants out two by two. She set them down hard enough to bruise the flesh, but he didn't say anything about that because she certainly knew. “What if your sister had another episode?”

“Stop,” was the first word she'd said to him all morning other than “hello.” “Matt.” She leaned against the counter, lowered her head so her blond hair fell across her face, then turned to him. He held one egg in each hand, and felt faintly ridiculous. “You think I don't know?”

“I'm worried,” he repeated, and put down the eggs.

“Yesterday we met a blind old woman who fell, alone, in her house—her son who lives with her was stuck on a double shift dockside—she hurt herself and no one came to her but—” She pointed up, and she was not pointing to the sun. “A five-year-old girl's cat escaped through a window cracked open at night and she chased it out of doors only to lose herself until Seril's children found her. A university student was being”—she shook her head, to clear it—“raped. Until. A single mother lost her job and would have lost her home if not for. Ellen talks to them all. People I couldn't see. You don't let others' pain inside, you know? Not if you have enough already, and everyone always has enough.”

“I don't want you to get hurt.”

“Everything's dangerous in this city, Matt. Especially for women. I'm not a religious person, but Ellen is. Seril's good for her, and for us. You've seen that.”

“Gargoyles can't solve the world's problems.”

“But they can help. They have helped. And Seril needs help now. Ellen wants to get everyone together, everyone who's prayed to the goddess.”

“You can't fight Craftsmen.”

“We can try. This will be over in a day or two, one way or another. For now, my sister needs me.” Lettuce shook as she dropped heads onto the counter. “You saw what happened to Ellen when they hurt Her. I won't let that happen again.”

He finished his pyramid of eggs. Then he built a second.

“Hey,” he said after a while. “I'm sorry.”

Ray Capistano's knife blade struck his butcher's block.

“Donna and I care about you. If we can help, let us.”

When he looked at her, she was looking back.

“As a matter of fact,” she said.

*   *   *

The red lightning struck more often as Tara and Shale descended into the mountain.

Not without warning—always the growl behind them or ahead. When crystal veins in the rock took fire, they ran or hid. Once, they could not run. Tara knelt in the tunnel's center, Crafted a ward, and held Shale close as the fire buckled her shield. If the mind that moved this mountain wanted to crush them, it would.

“Are you certain there's a mind?” Shale asked.

“I hope there isn't, so I'll assume there is.”

They descended for hours. Back on the mythical surface, the Alt Coulumb express winged east. Tunnels turned back on themselves, confounding Tara's stubbornly two-dimensional map. She could see Craftwork woven through the stone, which would help her retrace her steps; finding a way down was harder.

She thought she recognized a triple junction through which they passed. Were they lost? She carved a glyph into the stone above the center passage. When they reached the triple junction again, the glyph was gone. Either she'd been wrong, or the something erased the glyph.

Cave air tasted close and dank.

She had to sleep, after a while. “That or collapse.” One side chamber, hewn to store drill bits and spare equipment, had walls free of crystal, which she hoped meant they'd be safe from the lightning here.

Shale kept first watch. Tara unfolded a sleeping pad from her pack. She hung her jacket on a lantern hook, made a pillow of her knapsack, and slept in a cave silence broken only by Shale's breathing.

Nightmares struck, as hoped: a message from Wakefield, reporting the Alt Coulumb team was ready to defend Kos. Next she saw Abelard, praying alone in an enormous chapel; the altar grew, and the chapel's flames melted his flesh from his bones. She did not know if Abelard sent her that dream, or if she built it for herself. After that, the bad dreams were real.

A hand on her shoulder woke Tara to the tunnel's black. She recoiled from the touch, scraped her knuckles against the wall, cursed, and summoned a light. Shale crouched beside her. “We should go.”

“You kept watch without lights?”

“I thought we should save the hand torches,” he said. “I hear well.”

She smoothed the wrinkles in her suit and adjusted her slept-on hair. A small rodent had crawled into her mouth, died, and rotted. She swished canteen water in her mouth, gargled, and spit in the corner. Checked her watch again—the dawn flight had left already. “Any more lightning?”

“Five clusters passed.”

They returned to the tunnels and the blunt smell of undisturbed stone.

“Do you think the lightning-balls are guards?” Shale asked.

“Bad ones, if so. We're not dead yet.”

“They'd have killed us already if not for you.”

“And the first would have got me if not for you. Good thing we keep each other around.”

“Glad to hear I'm a useful asset.”

“Not an asset,” she said, remembering the dragon's voice.

“What, then?”

“A friend,” she said. “If you like.”

He chuffed, and she thought she saw him smile. “What are they, if not guards?”

“A goddess, maybe. Or god.”

“A goddess is doing all this?”

“She might
be
all this. Remember the myths about this place: the lady and the fire.”

“Myths,” Shale said. “Fingers pointing at the moon.”

“That's an interesting point for you to make, knowing someone who
is
the moon.”

“Our Lady is not ‘someone,'” he said. “And the goddess in the guidebook story lacks even a name. Who believes in her? What life could she possess?”

“Human minds are a good divine substrate,” she said. “But they're not the only one. Goddesses can be trapped with bone thorns and blood-cooled silver and other tools. The traps keep the goddess from fading when her faith is broken. Maybe something similar's at work.”

“Sometimes I forget how evil you can sound.”

“The Craft,” she said, “is not inherently good or bad.”

“Its best efforts notwithstanding.”

“The point is, to trap a goddess, you might build a system much like this: a conductive lattice webbed through a rich deposit of necromantic earths.”

“You're suggesting the mountain is artificial, and alive. And nobody discovered this during the mining operation.”

“Miners bind local spirits before major excavation, but this place is too big, too rooted, for it to even notice normal bindings. All this”—she tapped a crystal vein—“anchors the goddess, puts her on a clock so slow mortals don't register. Excavation must have woken her, made her mad.”

“Hence the zombies.”

“It's a theory.”

They walked for some time in silence.

She folded the map, refolded it, frowned. “We should have found Altemoc's team already. The chart shows a huge chamber that isn't here. And we're running out of time.”

Shale hummed. “You say we're inside a goddess.”

“Maybe. Or something like one.”

“And it is hurt.”

“Wouldn't you be pissed if someone bored holes into you?”

“Not angry,” he said. “Hurt. A person who's hurt guards her wound. The mountain curls around the place where the blade went in. It would explain why we can't find Altemoc—he sought the injury, made it worse, and she's enclosed him.”

Tara stuffed the map into her jacket pocket and turned to Shale in the gloom. “I can't fight something this big.”

“You don't have to fight,” Shale said.

“How else do we make her let us in?”

“Ask,” he said.

“I just did.”

“No. Ask her.”

“You are making no sense.”

He laid his palm against the wall. “You Craftsmen have odd ways of being. You force the world to your will, and you force your wills on one another. Your power's built from bonds and obligations. There are other ways.”

“The world doesn't just … do things because you ask.”

“Have you tried?”

She raised her arms to the ceiling. “Hi! We're here to help. Take us where we need to go!”

Nothing happened.

She fixed Shale with a stare she'd used to curdle milk.

“You could use a less sarcastic tone of voice. And say ‘please.'”

She did not let up the stare for a few seconds.

She closed her eyes. That made it easier.

“Hi,” she tried. “You don't know me, and you don't have reason to trust me. But if you show me where it hurts, I think I can help.”

Silence.

Oh, what the hells. “Please,” she said.

Rock ground rock. A thunderstorm smell stained the air. Strong wind struck her in the chest. She tried to steady herself on the wall—

And failed, because there was no wall beside her anymore.

A tunnel gaped to her right, its black walls covered with enormous painted figures that glowed the same red as the mine's crystal veins.

“Not one word,” she told Shale.

He offered none.

They descended together.

 

54

Cat waited in line for the sunset service at the Church of Sacred Ashes in Slaughter's Fell. The locals had come out in force, heavyset men in pit-stained work shirts and women with worn fingers. A mom in denim slacks caught her youngest by the arm and yanked her back from the street. Cat stuffed her hands in her coat pockets, hurting for a smoke, a drink, a fang, avoiding the blank stares of black windows in whitewashed houses. She watched the houses so she didn't have to watch the people. A scar-cheeked young man beside her offered her a cigarette, which she declined though she wanted to say yes.

It had been a long day after a long night.

Church doors opened and they filed in.

Parishioners packed the pews. As many stood in the back as found a seat. Cat scored one of the last pews, though the benches were so tightly packed she might have rather stood, or popped wings to give the locals a taste of real divine intervention. She squeezed between a bearded man in a golem mechanic's shirt—
CAPISTANO SERVICE
&
REPAIR
, grease stains included—and a dark-skinned girl with bushy hair, thin wrists, and thick glasses, who, after her mother hipped her into the pew beside Cat, slid the prayer book from the wooden pocket, and buried herself in the order of solstice ceremonies, high rite, second version, summer colophon. The evening congregation was a brew of hushed voices, pressure, and too-close bodies' heat. Cat smelled shoe leather and popcorn, oil and engine grease, aftershave, deodorant, perfume, and the bodies all that aftershave, deodorant, and perfume were meant to cover.

The people filled the church floor, but they did not fill the church. Arches made the roof seem taller than the sky.

On tiptoe she could just glimpse the cage-throne for the god's fire on the altar.

“Huh,” she said.

It wasn't burning.

“The altar?” That was the man beside her, the mechanic, Capistano. “They don't keep it lit in Deliquescence. Guess you don't come often.”

“It shows?”

“Safe guess. You think church's this busy any given day? Lot of people scared tonight.”

“I haven't done much churching since I was a kid,” she said.

Moon-whisper, soft and still:
You worship through your work.

“It's easy.” Not the mechanic—the girl to her right, her eyes large and liquid behind glass. She raised the book. “They'll tell you what page to read. You say what it says in italics, like here. If you don't know how to say it, I can help.” Because in this part of the city it wasn't fair to assume everyone who came to church could read. And Cat was wearing Feller drag, jeans and jacket and worn boots, top two buttons of her shirt undone, a tear at her knee and a fray at her cuff. This was how she dressed growing up, how the kids she collared on patrol still dressed. Not much changed in Slaughter's Fell, though what change would look like here she didn't know. Suited uptown kids like those pricing out the locals up near the PQ market wouldn't fix anything, for sure.

“Thanks,” she said, which carried farther than she meant. A hush fell over the assembly.