Four Roads Cross (50 page)

Tonight they flowed from her like water from a faucet.

She had not always been this way.

But she could not remember how she had changed. Other systems forbid her such speculation.

Knives peeled back the night, and the cuts laughed. Gargoyles seethed through the sky. Thorns of lightning lanced them, finding mostly emptiness but sometimes stone. Chips and dust fell. When Daphne's Craft pierced rock skin, she drank moonlight.

The goddess went down sweet and sour, like buttermilk.

The gargoyles could not cross the circle; the court would shelter Daphne so long as she worked to prove the bond between Kos and Seril, and would help her test the Goddess. It would be inelegant to kill Her in the process, but since in the court's view Seril was already dead, Daphne would be guilty of deicide in only the most vague and theoretical sense.

The gargoyles, denied Daphne, struck her weapons. They caught the spears of her will and tore her mind. But Daphne drew strength from their injuries. By the time they freed one comrade from her clutches, the gargoyle she'd struck was already tainted with gray ash.

She trapped them in redoubled space, she spread time, she played elaborate games to spoof their theory of mind. Some they avoided, some resisted. One small Stone Man fell into an airless infinity and emerged howling and mad.

The old tricks were the best.

The Goddess fought, too. Seril changed the world with a fluency even Daphne could not match. The goddess broke Daphne's thorns, slid past her swords, battered her with awe. But Daphne did not fight Seril directly. She could break her through her children.

Good times.

Daphne abandoned temporospatial shenanigans to address the gargoyles' stone. Stone, she argued, cannot move; stone cannot feel. They slowed.

Lightning flew from her fingers and lit eyes that were and were not hers.

The goddess convulsed.

*   *   *

The Sanctum of Kos smelled of incense and priestly sweat. Abelard and the Cardinals chanted. That no longer amazed him—to be here, surrounded by Cardinals, praying.

Glory to Your Flame

Everburning, All-transforming—

Nestor's voice led their prayer from the front altar, the docent's role having shifted around the circle back to him twice so far. Each time, Abelard refused to lead. Vestments flowed like lava from the old man's shoulders.

Priests throughout Alt Coulumb chanted these words, in this time. They entered God's presence. They gave themselves to Kos, felt His pain as the Craftsmen struck and tested Him.

And they felt a different sort of pain as He watched the battle in the air, and did nothing.

The altar fire burned hot, and they knelt and prayed.

*   *   *

My father roars.

He didn't always. There was our mother once. She's gone. (Murmurs, some, throughout the crowd. They knew the story.)

Imagine living with a lion. It prowls great-maned and strong through the house. But when you live with a lion, you see its teeth, and know its voice.

Many days its voice is the only voice you hear, because when a lion speaks, it deafens. You shout back even to hear yourself. There may be girls who can shout louder than a lion. I am not one of them. I was afraid. To shout louder than a lion, you have to scream, and things that scream are food.

Lions work. Lions prowl. Lions thirst, especially when they're sad, and when they thirst they drink, and when they drink they roar louder.

I never felt his teeth. I was, we were, lucky that way. The lion was never hungry when we were near. But you don't have to feel a lion's teeth to fear them. His muzzle was often bloody when he came home. Sometimes the blood was not his; often it was. Tend a lion's wounds as it breathes. Tend wounds around its mouth, in reach of its paws, and smell the kill blood on its breath.

(The sky's war painted Ellen many shades of fire.)

Each of my sisters dealt with the lion in her own way. Hannah was sweet and charming and often gone. She laughed and danced, and did not talk at home. Claire went with the lion in the mornings, and worked with him, sometimes in his place. She grew strong and hard and brave.

I'm none of those things.

One night the lion did not come home. He often stayed out late hunting. But the hours passed. I watched the sand in the glass and knew the later he came back the louder he would roar, the more he would be hurt, the more he would need.

He did not come home that night, or the next morning. That night I waited, too.

I was afraid. So was Hannah. Claire wasn't, but when we went to find him, she came.

We lost ourselves in the Pleasure Quarter. Not even Claire knew the way. I prayed. The Lady sent Her child to me. He led us home.

The lion wept when we returned. I never saw that happen before, though I heard it some nights through the wall. He embraced us. He was bloody, and he was hurt, but more than that he was afraid.

My sisters think that was the first time I prayed to the Lady. But I called to Her then because I knew Her from before.

There was no room for my voice in a house of roaring. I could not talk with my sisters, because when there's a lion in the house all you can talk about is the lion, and who wants to talk about a lion all the time?

I spoke to the night instead.

The night does not fear lions. It knows them. It makes their voices small. The night gives birth to day, and when the sun rises the night waits behind the star. It is big, and it listens. The night's smile turns shadow to velvet and blood to silver.

I prayed to the Lady before She returned. When the dreams came, I honored them. I spoke to Her, because the night hears whispers louder than a roar.

Some people here found Her in terror, in torture. I found Her in the undoing of a knot into which a lion's roar tied me.

She saved me, and transformed me. She was my door to faith.

My father lives. He will roar again. But now I have the night.

*   *   *

Ellen's voice carried through the crowd in defiance of all acoustic principle. The faithful souls were jigsaw puzzle pieces turning in the god-realm's airless dark, and Ellen's words guided them to one. Or they were filings and she the magnet, or they particles in suspension and she the crystal seed, or, or—

Dr. Hasim stood by the stage, haloed with a flickering light as if he stood before a bonfire. Green rivulets overflowed his form and his face, illuminating the head of a long-billed bird around or beneath his own. His companions had other shapes, and bonfires of their own, some dim, some fierce. Their hands, or the hands of the gods who shared their bodies, or both, combed story into story, faith into faith, folded the crowd into Ellen and her into them.

“Pray with me,” Ellen said, and Gavriel Jones did.

Praying, she felt the goddess's pain.

 

66

Sunset veiled the forest beneath the Keeper's mountain. Below, the Two Serpents Group lit lanterns and manned barricades. Its people knew what was coming, because Tara had told them.

From her height, Tara saw the forest move.

Shadows detached from the trees—wolves and bears and hawks. Groundwater contamination hit hardest at the food chain's highest links; squirrels and field mice limped while the wolves ran smooth, faster in death than life. Birds arrowed through the purple sky.

Dead things flowed up the mountain slopes. The Keeper called them home, as she called to ancient sailors' compass needles—the earth stolen from her had seeped into these beasts, and now they returned to rest.

They left trails of rotted flesh, and when they found a niche that fit, they curled there and slept. A wolf pillowed its chin on its paws like a dog beside a fire and wept metal tears that soaked into cracked stone.

A fingernail of shadow took flight from the Drakspine and approached.

No. Tara must have had the distance wrong. It couldn't be that big. There were dragons in the world, of course, but not here.

She caught her breath when she recognized the sweeping wings.

The condor landed above her, settling onto a rocky throne. The bird was twice her size, with pinions long and black and red. Worms turned beneath its crest.

It was beautiful.

The condor looked down, and Tara looked up. The Keeper had called her children home. How much of the goddess lived in each of them? Could Shale hear her through this bird?

“I'll come back for you,” she said.

The condor nodded, or bobbed its head. The sun's last light caught its eyes.

Okay, Tara prayed. Sun's down. Moon's up. Whenever you're ready.

I'm sorry,
the goddess replied.
We're experiencing technical difficulties at the moment.

*   *   *

The gargoyles lasted longer than Daphne expected. Stone did not tire as did flesh. Lacking any well-mannered metabolism, their muscles could not be poisoned by the by-products of their use. Good thing Daphne did not tire, either.

At last a gargoyle slipped—she caught it in a shell of infinite space, held it still, and pierced. The goddess scrambled to free Daphne's prisoner, too late—Daphne snared two more, and then a fourth. The goddess tried to burn Daphne from the world, but the circle blunted that attack. Needles of red light pierced gargoyle throats, and the power she tore from them was sweet.

The fight against Wakefield had been a Craftswoman's struggle: structures of proof and argument falling before Daphne's knife only to re-form in answer to each cut. That work was elegant; this, routine. All she had to do was repeat, again and again, the simple, incontrovertible fact that gargoyles could die.

As could their goddess.

It would not do to yawn before the Judge. So when the machine Daphne had become finally snared the gargoyle queen, when the Stone Men and Women weakened, she pinched her earlobe between thumb and forefinger—a stopgap remedy an herbalist once suggested she try to keep alert.

That cleared things up nicely.

Blood dripped from her earlobe onto her suit. One more bill for dry cleaning.

*   *   *

Fire flared on the sanctum altar. Nestor fell. Bede knelt by his side and cradled the old man's head.

Rage swelled in Abelard. He smelled blood, and Craft, and blasphemy.

He'd spent a day opening his mind to God, and now felt His fury.

Cardinal Aldis groaned. Veins stood out on the backs of her hands, and at her temples. She fought—they all did—to contain God's wrath.

Lord Kos could burn the Craftsmen from the sky—exposing Himself as He protected Seril. To survive, He'd have to kill them all, to press the battle to the world's corners, to fight and win a God War on his own. Impossible.

He might try anyway.

Moans of pain, grinding teeth, shattered prayers, Father forgive, blessed by flame, transfigured into sacred ash—their voices burned with the Godhead, their twiglike fingers clutched to stay a charging boar.

Bede had caught Nestor when the old man fell. No one had yet stepped up to lead the prayer. Cardinals babbled, drunk on vintages of rage grown rich through years of cultivation.

But Abelard was no Lord of the Church. He was younger, and less confirmed in anger.

His knees shook as he stood. Hands reached for him, voices rose to reproach his temerity. He climbed to the altar and turned to face the Cardinals. Their stares fixed him like a butterfly to a board.

Surely it was harder to die and rise again than to lead the Cardinals in prayer.

Surely.

He held out his hands and spoke the words.

Glory to Your Flame—

*   *   *

The machine that was Daphne Mains advanced to the circle's edge. The gargoyle queen strained against her razor web.

“Your Honor,” Daphne said. “Kos's off-books relationship with Seril is doubly insidious. Kos's exposure to her undermines his own operations and poses a serious threat to global thaumaturgy. Even when limited by contract, such off-books dependencies are dangerous. This bond, however, depends not on obligation or performance but on a reasonable facsimile of
sentiment.
Of love.”

She gestured, and Aev floated toward her in the air. The gargoyle reared against her bonds. A crack opened in her left bicep, so deep that moonlight flowed through.

“The Craft recognizes noncontractual relationships between competitors only. As Justice Iron Hand affirmed in the Antitrust Cases, thaumaturgical dynamism requires the existence of free entities in competition. There is no direct competition between Kos and Seril. The equipoise of opposites leads to stagnation. Nor does this theological juxtaposition even qualify as equipoise, for the positions of these opposites are not equal. Kos shelters this moon goddess, this memory of a dead age, in her weakness. He has embroiled his creditors and shareholders in a risk with no demonstrated reward—a risk that might well be infinite, for no matter how Seril is attacked, he will always come to her rescue. And rescue will be required, because she is weak.”

Aev roared.

“Objection,” Wakefield said, “on relevance.”

The Judge frowned. “Counsel. Please decide. Do you stand for Seril, or not?”

“I do not. But as Ms. Mains's argument touches on my client, I believe I am entitled to speak.” With one hand Wakefield indicated the gargoyles, the crystal towers, the broken sky and cringing city. “We hardly seem to have stood on courtroom procedure thus far.”

“Proceed.”

“Ms. Mains has introduced evidence documenting Kos's previous onetime infusions of soul into the moon goddess Seril. But two instances do not establish a pattern.” Wakefield pointed to the snared gargoyles. “These theatrics might have been saved for a juried case. Despite the torment Ms. Mains is inflicting on Seril at the moment, my client has not intervened. I for one would appreciate it if Ms. Mains either arrived at a point, or stopped wasting our time with procedural pretense and cut to the villainous guffaws. If she wishes a mustache to twirl, I imagine the city below contains a costume shop willing to provide one.”