Four Roads Cross (7 page)

“They don't sound bloodthirsty.” Matt lowered his own voice in hope Corbin would match him. Why shout? The rooftop was empty as usual; hells, the whole place was empty this early in the day, with all the office drones at the paper shifting they called work. Every man and woman gathered around the table, Matt and Ray Capistano and Ray's boy and Sandy Sforza and her girl and Corbin and his three daughters, had put in a fuller day than the suited kids who'd taken to renting Quarter rooms in the last few years, the alchemists' assistants and junior accountants, payroll associates and lesser Craftsmen and other sacrificial lambs of the Central Business District, could conceive. A market man's life was hard: rise at three thirty, truck out hours before sunup to meet the farmers and load the wagons. Two hundred pounds of eggs weighed as much as two hundred pounds of anything. Truck back into town in time to meet restaurant buyers and then stand a solid seven hours offering goods for sale. Some men worked harder, sure. Once the construction boys and dockhands clocked out at sunset, dust-caked and sweaty, they'd have earned their beers, but in the meantime Matt and his comrades were emperors of the roof.

And empresses, Sandy would add.

But Corbin raged on. “You don't know from Stone Men, Matt. My dad fought 'em when they went mad back in the Wars. Lost an arm. They'll snap you in half if you blink wrong. And you heard the godsdamn Crier.” Corbin washed down his burger with more beer. His daughters sat beside him, tight, silent. Claire, the oldest at seventeen, carved her chicken into squares and speared the squares with her fork; for her, food was a battle you fought so you could fight other battles later. Ellen, middle child, ate quickly and carefully as a bird, and kept her head down; Hannah, youngest, faked the same attitude, the same downturn, but when her father wasn't looking, her gaze slipped up and left to rest on Ray's son's mouth. Matt wondered often about their lives—Rafferty was a man for drinks and a bar fight in time of need, not one you trusted with your home address. “They're fouling our rooftops. Chasing through our alleys. Flouting laws.”

“And since when have you,” Sandy said as she grabbed a chicken wing, “given a dog's cock for laws flouted or otherwise, Corbin Rafferty? I've heard you say at this very table”—knocking with her fingers on the wood—“that it's this city's laws that ruin us.”

“Once I say a thing, you'll stalk me with it to my grave, Sforza.”

“And stab you through the heart with it to make sure you're dead, and good riddance to the world.” She laughed; Rafferty's girls didn't, and Rafferty himself laughed too loud.

“If we are to sacrifice at all,” he said, “we should be repaid. Monsters on our own rooftops, and the lot of you don't mind?”

“Likely just tall tales,” Matt said. “Crier says they've been here a year. I never seen one.”

“But Matthew,” and that was Ray, leaning back on two legs of his chair, balanced as perfectly as the log cabin of chicken bones on his plate. No one could leave so pleasant a mess as Ray. “Of course you haven't seen them. They come to those who need help, and when was the last time you needed any?”

Matt drank. “Don't see the problem,” he said, after. “Even if they are here. So long as they help people.”

“Maybe someone doesn't want help,” Corbin said. “Maybe what helps you, hurts me.” He tossed a wing bone down as if casting thunderbolts upon a sinner. “If the Stone Men are back, Lord Kos ought to shatter them. We need Blacksuits on every roof.”

Ray snatched a celery stalk and knifed its hollow full of blue cheese. “You haven't been to church often this year, have you, Corbin? Plenty of sermons about coming to terms with old enemies.”

“You mean they're going soft.”

“I mean none of us knows the whole story. Stone Men don't touch my business. Why should I worry about them?”

“A man ought to own his city.”

“In a single question,” Ray said, “I can prove incontrovertibly the Stone Men are no cause of concern for folk like us, who keep our beaks down: Have we ever seen these creatures?”

Matt followed Ray's gaze around the table: Ray's son, face buried in his second burger, shrugged and shook his head and chewed. Sandy Sforza drank her beer and shook her head as well. Sandy's daughter Lil was staring at Ray's boy's barbecue sauce–streaked face with a sickened expression entirely unlike Hannah's, but when she realized the others were watching her, she said, “No.” The gazes slid to Matt, who grunted no, as did Corbin.

“There you go,” Ray said. “If they're in the city or not, what's it matter to us?”

Slow jowly nods around the table. Corbin cracked his knuckles, frowning.

“We've seen,” an unsteady voice began, then stopped. Matt looked over in time to see Claire Rafferty draw her hand back from Ellen's shoulder. Ellen's pale cheeks colored red, and she returned her gaze to at her plate, as if she'd never spoken.

“Girls,” Corbin said in the voice he adopted while trying to sound nice, or at least less angry. It rarely worked. “What have you seen?”

“Nothing,” Claire answered, cold. “Father.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“Ellen's telling stories,” Hannah said.

“I'm not.” The second time Ellen spoke, she sounded less hesitant. Still, she spoke into her plate, afraid, Matt thought, to face the table, and especially her father, who watched her with an expression darkened by the beers he'd drunk. “You saw him, too. You both did.”

Claire took Ellen's wrist.

“Girls.” Corbin's tone changed, and they turned toward him like iron filings when a magnet drew close. “Let Ellen talk.”

Ellen paled, and Matthew wondered not for the first time, and not for the first time stopped himself from wondering, what life was like inside the Rafferty house.

“Tell me,” Rafferty repeated.

“There's a prayer,” Ellen said. “We all know it. We all dreamed it. And I used it.” Rafferty leaned toward his daughter, his brows knit tight, the blade of his jaw unsheathed. “I didn't ask for anything,” she said. “I never would have, but I was scared for you.”

“Ellen.” Claire's voice, sharp, a shutoff. “This isn't the time.”

“Two months back you weren't home, hadn't been since the day before. The second night we decided, all of us, that we should look.”

Sandy laughed, and Ellen fell silent. The glare Corbin shot Sandy was vicious, though not so vicious as the one with which she answered him. Corbin turned back to his daughter. “Go on.”

“We started early and went to the addresses on your matchbooks. No one had seen you. We got lost. The streets kept turning around.” Which meant they'd been in the Pleasure Quarter, Matt thought, though Ellen wouldn't say as much: the Pleasure Quarter, where the city's shattered-glass grid tangled to a briar patch of nameless avenues—the paths of long-dead cows codified by concrete. Playground, the market boys called it, the kids without stall or family who carried and carted for tips: walk in flush with soul, walk out empty save for memories of red light that dulls tears and washes flaws from skin. Matt imagined three Rafferty girls wandering through that maze at night. A sphinx smile darted across Hannah's lips.

But Ellen was still talking: “I said we should try the prayer, ask for help. Hannah and Claire didn't want to. It was my idea.”

Thankful eye flicks from sister to sister, which Matt recognized only because the Adorne household of his boyhood communicated in the same code, five siblings united against the Old Man.

“You prayed,” Matt said, because Corbin would have said worse.

Ellen looked up from her plate. “I cut myself, bled, and prayed. Then the statue came.”

Left and right down the table, all sat in their own silence: sisters scared, Corbin in rage-tinted wonder, Ray eager, Sandy skeptical, Lil awed either by the story or the equally fantastical occasion of the Rafferty girls speaking. Ellen sounded drunk on memory. “He looked like the stories say, with eyes like jewels and wings of stone. He gathered us up. His arms were thin, but he was strong. Not like a person. Strong like an arch.” Those last words broke the spell she had cast upon herself, and her fear returned. She glanced to her father, and back down. “He flew us home. Fast, over the rooftops, and high. They can fly, even here, so they must be right with God, mustn't they? He said if you weren't back by morning we should get the Blacksuits. He said if we were ever in danger, we should call him again. He looked worried for us. Then he left. You came back”—this to her father—“when we were all asleep. You were sick the next day. That's all.”

“Is this true?” Corbin asked. The other two girls had sat very still through the telling.

“It's true,” Claire said at last.

“But—” Hannah started. Claire looked at her but didn't speak. She stopped.

“It's true,” Claire repeated.

“And you all say they're not a problem. They've been under my roof. They've touched my girls.”

“Sounds like they did you a favor.”

“What they've done, Sforza, is beside the point. What they might do, matters. Stone Men are traitors, butchers. So, my daughters can call them. Let's call them to the square tonight. Let's have it out face-to-face. No more shadows, no more tall tales.”

Ray shrugged. “Doubt we'll see anything.”

“You call my girls liars.” Corbin's voice tightened to breaking.

“It sounds like a story, is all. And even if they call, who's to say the Stone Men come? But I'll watch. The boy can make the morning runs tomorrow.”

“Hells, I won't miss this,” his son said around a mouthful of burger.

“Then we'll both be tired on deliveries, and so be it when we crash and suffer grievous death.”

“You're tempting fate,” Sandy said. “This is a damn fool enterprise and I'll not lend it my support.”

“But you'll come if we do it.” Corbin's teeth were thin and white. “Just to watch, of course.”

Matt drank. He realized everyone was looking at him. He crossed his arms and leaned back. “It's their choice.”

“Excuse me?”

“The girls,” Matt said. “We do this only if your girls want to.”

Ellen looked to her father first, then Claire, then nodded. Matt had seen that expression on young soldiers in the Schtumpfeter Museum's God Wars paintings—kids sent to do and die on distant sand. He felt he'd done something wrong, and the tightness around Sandy Sforza's mouth, the sharp lines in her brow, suggested she agreed.

Matt thought he should stop the whole thing then, argue Rafferty into letting his girls alone, convince them all to leave the affairs of Gods and monsters to greater fools who didn't have to work for a living. But he said nothing, and the others planned against the night.

 

9

Twilight in Alt Coulumb summer is a wrestling match, or a bout of violent sex. Sun and moon share the sky, the west blushes with exertion, the first and most aggressive stars pierce the blue to begin their evening's battle with streetlights and office windows. The night's triumph is inevitable as prophecy, but wet air holds the day's heat, sweaty fingers tangled in solar curls. The heat lasts even as the sky fills with stars.

Some parts of the city only live on such an evening. Far to the east, the Pleasure Quarter offers cosmopolitan seductions to sailors fresh ashore, to foreigners from the Old World, from Iskar or the Gleb or from Dread Koschei's realm in Zur, from the Skeld Archipelago with its small gods and sunken cities, from Southern Kath where skeleton kings command indentured zombie hordes to work plantations in blistering heat. Hot Town's something else again: footraces and drug trade, street music on drums and guitar, food carts selling a hundred variations on fried dough with cinnamon and powdered sugar, cheap carnival rides powered by burly mustachioed men, streetwalkers in private practice. This is where Westerling locals come to sweat and eat and shop and drink and sweat some more, as their parents did and their parents before them down the long centuries before Craftsmen stole fire from the gods and made the world weird. The Hot Town opens storefront windows and unrolls rugs of wares onto sidewalks and streets. Turquoise pendants and silver wirework glitter beside dyed silk scarves and shawls and stalls of pirated books and obscene unlicensed street theater.

So fixed were the people milling about their business of pleasure that they missed the broad-winged shadow that flitted overhead, gray against the darkening blue, as night wrestled day to the ground and kissed him so hard their teeth clicked.

Aev knew the scene below of old, had watched the street fair for centuries since her first kindling within a stone egg perched atop Alt Coulumb's highest tower. The vices did not change so much as the clothes in which the practitioners wrapped themselves. She'd suffered forty years of exile in the Geistwood, hemmed in by trees, robbed of stone and familiar streets, but this was home. What matter if it feared her? What matter if these ants below thought her a harbinger of doom, believed Her Lady dead? Peace came with time and effort, and stone was well suited for both.

Aev flew east and south along the Hot Town strip, skyscrapers to her left, brownstones and tenements to her right. Fountains of ghostlight erupted at irregular intervals from gridded streets. The moon hung slivered in the sky, but growing—gravid with uncertain future.

Ahead of her rose the Temple of Kos in the center of the green: an enormous black needle that burned in the vision of the heart.

Once the God's radiance would have been tempered by moonlit silver chill. But the goddess, returned though She might be, swollen from the echo Aev had sheltered in Geistwood shadows, was small set beside Her lover. He was a city and more, grown fat on foreign trade, while She belonged to Her children alone.

Aev sang in flight.