Four Roads Cross (46 page)

The Cardinal, Abelard realized, was scared. Abelard had no reassurance to offer.

So he was surprised when he found himself saying, “They'll be disappointed.”

“Do you think so?”

He hadn't before he spoke, but he remembered Slaughter's Fell, the depth of faith in that young girl as he marked her forehead with ash above her glasses. Even the church's smell seemed golden. “I believe in this city. I believe in Tara. I believe in our Lord, and His Lady.”

Bede's head declined, and rose again. “Thank you.” He squeezed Abelard's shoulder and went to kneel with the other Cardinals.

And thank you,
Abelard prayed. The words had been his, and the urge to speak—but a greater power calmed his fear to let them pass his lips.

He felt the fire beneath Alt Coulumb and within its people.

He turned to the altar. Craftsmen would fight the external battle. Theirs was the inner war.

Nestor stood before them. For once the old man did not clear his throat before he spoke. “Let us pray.”

Kneeling, Abelard joined himself to God.

*   *   *

Madeline Ramp and Daphne Mains stood on air. A city lay at their feet and a host at their backs.

“Pleasant morning,” Ramp said.

Beautiful, in fact. The air sweet with coming triumph. Pleasure climbed Daphne's backbone and nestled behind her heart. “Yes, ma'am.”

“Are you ready?”

“I am.” She hadn't realized it until asked.

A silver circle surrounded them, and beyond it stood the Judge, clothed in the shadows of her office. She burned too black to bear.

Daphne squinted and turned away; Ms. Ramp's second eyelids closed.

“I call these proceedings to order,” the Judge said in a voice that should have broken the ground and let devils spew forth. “We consider the matter of Associated Creditors and Shareholders against Kos Everburning of Alt Coulumb, and Seril Undying of the same.”

“For which our thanks,” Ms. Ramp replied. “We are prepared, once opposing counsel show themselves.”

“Oh,” said a new voice, scalpel cold and similarly curved, from across the circle, “we're here.”

The voice's owner wore a white three-piece suit, immaculate. A silver mask covered half a face Telomeri artists would have given their tongues to paint. The eye beneath that mask was red; its mate, still human, the blue Daphne had seen in glacial fissures. One skeletal hand closed around a cane.

Two associates in charcoal gray flanked Ashleigh Wakefield. They might have been Wakefield's shadows, or afterimages.

“A pleasure as always,” Ramp said with a sharp slight smile. “Your clients have willfully misrepresented their God in market filings. Kos Everburning is a greater investment risk than his priesthood claims. In specific we allege that the God and His church are exposed through their off-books relationship with the renegade Goddess known as Seril Undying.”

Wakefield's head edged to one side, like a cat considering a mouse that, rather than cowering, had performed a backflip. “Unfounded accusations. Kos's filings were correct, his exposure is managed, and his relationship with Seril Undying founded on mutual collaboration rather than strict liability as you claim. The nature of Kos's bond with Seril does not subject investors and creditors to undisclosed risk.”

“You'll forgive us if we don't take your word for it.”

“Why else would we be here?” Wakefield said. “Surely you would not waste Her Honor's time.”

“You're dangerously close,” the Judge said. “Present arms, Counsel, or get out of my sky.”

Ramp raised her hands, a staged surrender. “Of course, Your Honor. By all means, let us reach the point. We begin with the portion of our complaint directly addressing Kos's personal vulnerability, and that of his church. Permit me to introduce to the court my associate, Ms. Mains.”

With those words, the cold behind Daphne's heart turned. She thrilled to the sensation of herself unlocking, of long-dormant glyphs drawing light from the sky and power from the army arrayed behind her. The tight-wound trap of her mind sprung.

Somewhere in the unfolding, a girl screamed with her voice.

She ignored the scream.

Wakefield's human eye widened slightly, but the being who was still, basically, Daphne noticed.

She smiled with sharp teeth and moved to the circle's center. “Thank you, Ms. Ramp. Now, let us begin.”

She raised her hands, long fingered and strange, and made the world go mad.

*   *   *

Tara and Altemoc and the bone-borne bodies landed on the dry ground of the miners' camp as the tunnel collapsed behind them. Dust choked the sky, but sharp morning sunlight shafted through. Tara stared into the sky's bright face as the dust settled, and knew despair.

They'd spent too long wandering in the Keeper's twisted time. Human shapes approached through dust, shambling over unsteady ground; they seized her arms and bore her from the tumbling rock. She choked on polluted air. She had not realized how tired she'd become, how little soul remained to her.

The sky blued as they carried her from the dust. Altemoc ran to the Quechal woman who had met Tara on her arrival at camp. His rhythm was off, or Tara's was, the clock of her heart erratic. The woman hugged him, fierce, stepped back and shouted words Tara couldn't sort from one another. Altemoc pointed at the mountain in stutter-step motion, slow and too fast at once.

Gray chewed the edges of her vision, and her colors bled. The ground was not where she expected it to be, the force vector into her ankle a crucial few degrees off just. She fell hard on her knee, felt trousers, stocking, and skin tear.

Human speech was wind through a flapping aperture of meat. Altemoc ran three-legged toward her, mouth producing more dumb meat-sounds. The fields back home looked like this in the hours before dawn, hueless and achromatic. But the home wind tasted of earth and dew and waking things. Where was that taste now? Had she lost it?

He caught her, and his scars burned green.

The sun rose.

 

59

Corbin Rafferty heard a thunderclap of silence.

That was new.

The screams weren't. There were always screams inside his head these days.

But he had never heard (or not-heard) silence like this. It fell like a ten-ton sandbag and broke as suddenly. The cries and hospital noise, metronome ticks and cart wheels and doctors' footsteps, returned as if never interrupted, until the silence struck again.

The silent bell peals were hands that squeezed his heart, lungs, stomach.

Am I dying? Is this how death feels?

His arms did not tingle; he felt no pain in his head. He
heard,
but there was nothing to hear.

The moon had dragged him through so many nightmare memories, his life seen from outside as if a stranger lived it. He did not like this stranger. But this silence was not of the moon: always in those dreams he heard the crash of surf on the beach where he'd wept when she left.

He opened his eyes. He could not do that in the dreams, which was part of their torture: he felt his body as an inmate felt prison walls. But he opened his eyes, and closed them at the brilliance of the day. No, not of day: of fire in the sky, of fire that was the sky.

He howled in panic and the sky
clenched.
Silence pealed through him, broke his cry in half. When he could hear again, he closed his mouth.

He was awake. Some cataclysm had struck the city, and in the chaos he'd wormed free of the moon's grip.

He sat up in the narrow bed. A tile floor lay cool beneath his bare feet. He looked down at himself. Twiggy limbs jutted from the hospital gown. How long had he been out? Days. His stomach turned when he remembered the Paupers' Quarter market, remembered his fury at the world, at his daughters, remembered his hand raising the cane, remembered blood on Sandy's face and Matt's—

He doubled over, choking stiff, wet sobs the waves of silence made staccato. He clawed his sheets.

Anger filled him. Fury. At Matt for his betrayal. At Sandy Sforza. And above all towered his rage at the Stone Men and their wicked moon, the laughing white face, the cruel gentle hands that made him watch his own life mad and broken in a dark mirror.

He wanted to vomit, but there was nothing in his stomach to cast out.

He had to leave this place, these scraping sheets, this disinfectant stink.

Corbin stood, fell, stood again with his hand on the mattress for balance. His knees wiggled. A curtain hung beside his bed. If he clung to that, he could reach the wall, and then the door.

He gripped the curtain, trusted it with his weight—

And fell. Curtain rings tore free of the frame and he stumbled into the neighboring bed, occupied by a mountainous man, dark, bearded, with close-cropped hair.

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.